The Better Letter: Order of Operations
Math has an agreed consensus about how common problems are to be solved. By convention, operations are to be performed in a specific order.
Life isn’t like that.
In this week’s TBL, I propose a specific order of operations for life. I don’t claim it should be universal. But I think it’s a good general rule of thumb. Please let me know whether or not you agree.
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Order of Operations
Social media is filled with a variety of quizzes and brainteasers designed to hold our attention — to keep us engaged and on the site for just a bit longer. Among my favorites are those like the equation below.
7 - 24 ÷ 8 x 4 + 6
If you remember your pre-algebra – my much-better-half teaches a unit on these types of problems to her fifth graders – you’ll recognize the embedded order of operations question. You solve the equation not by simply going left-to-right, but by using a given collection of rules that reflect conventions about which procedures to perform in which order to evaluate the mathematical expression.
In the U.S., the acronym PEMDAS has been commonly used for this convention. It stands for Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication/Division (left-to-right), Addition/Subtraction (left-to-right). PEMDAS has often been expanded to a mnemonic: “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally,” for easier recall. More recently, the “P” is often changed to a “G,” for “Grouping.” I don’t have a good mnemonic for that.
Anyway, the expression above is solved as follows.
7 - 24 ÷ 8 x 4 + 6
= 7 – 3 x 4 + 6
= 7 – 12 + 6
= (-5) + 6
= 1
The order in which you deal with the component parts of the problem determines the outcome – a different order can provide a very different result.
That concept applies in life, too. I propose a different order there, if only as a heuristic, to improve your life. Your mileage may vary, but I doubt it.
Multiplication
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function,” the physicist Albert Bartlett used to say. Compound interest is one great example of the exponential function (ongoing multiplication) at work.
Investing just $100 per month ($1,200 per year) over 10 years at the rate of historical return for the S&P 500 would yield more than $20,000. Over 20 years, you’d end up with more than $75,000. Over 30 years, you’d have roughly $230,000. If you could keep it up over 40 years, you’d have nearly $650,000.
As Tolstoy postulated and experience confirms, “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
Like compound interest, success is sequential. It takes time for good choices to add up before exploding exponentially. All the best things in our lives provide benefits that compound. Our financial investments do that, and so do our personal and family investments. Generosity and service compound. So do healthy living and education.
Love is the most powerful compounder of all.
Focus your life and your purposes here, first.
Subtraction
“Perfection is achieved,” according to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Important new research from a University of Virginia team vindicated that idea, finding that we are systematically biased toward adding rather than subtracting: “people systematically default to searching for additive transformations, and consequently overlook subtractive transformations.” As Annie Duke says, we’re built for false positives.
We tend to look for proof positive when “proof negative” (disconfirmation) is what science is built on. Accordingly, we should focus on eliminating mistakes, automating what we can (to make fewer decisions), eliminating noise, and keeping our options open.
When we seek to change objects, ideas, and situations, we routinely add incentives and fail to consider what barriers we might remove. Addition by subtraction is perhaps the greatest possible inversion.
When seeking improvement, our natural inclination is to add stuff (more tasks, more content, more objects). We routinely overlook solutions that involve subtraction – doing or having less.
Try moving subtraction up in our life order of operation.
Addition
When we want to fix something, or improve something, or just do something, our inclination is additive. Add a new part, a new process, or a new paradigm. That’s fine. It isn’t bad. But look to remove barriers first.
Division
America is wildly divided.
Politics and social media are a toxic brew. They are devouring families. We aren’t too far from competing conservative and liberal weather reports.
Meanwhile, 8 in 10 Republicans believe the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists while 8 in 10 Democrats believe the Republican Party has been taken over by racists.
Nearly 80 percent of Americans now have “just a few” or no friends at all across the political aisle, with the differences between the sides cast in increasingly moral terms. “It made me sick,” one representative political combatant explained. “If this is his core ethics, I don't want that kind of person in my life.”
“Democrats are a little bit more likely to say they'd end a friendship” over politics, Jocelyn Kiley of the Pew Research Center noted. “But Republicans may be less likely to say they have friends on the other side. So, it may not be all that differential.” In an increasingly secular world, politics is elevated to the status of religion.
According to Tania Israel, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a little more listening to understand, a little less trying to convince, and a lot more intellectual humility would do everyone a world of good. “The only useful comment that you can make on somebody's social media post is ‘Can we find a time to talk about this? I’m interested in hearing more,’” she said.
Troll less. Smile more. Sort of.
It seems likely that my inability to understand those I oppose is more a failure of my imagination than of their stupidity. As the great Matt Labash said, “if you only find the other guy’s side to be full of con artists, chiselers, and demagogues, you’re not paying close enough attention to your own.”
So, save division for last. And try to avoid it if you can.
Beyond all this (at least in life, anyway), pay special attention to things that can’t be measured, things that matter, and things that last. Not everything can be measured. In fact, the more important something is — think love, learning, wisdom, imagination — the less it can be measured at all, and the more disastrous any attempt to do so tends to be. We often try to measure, classify, and organize our lives as if they were a collection of compartmentalized to-do lists. By doing so, we end up applying mechanical principles to things that are fundamentally messy, intertwined, and unpredictable … yet still beautiful.
George Herbert, the 17th Century poet and priest, wrote a lovely little poem, Bitter-Sweet, which includes the following stanza.
I will complain, yet praise; | I will bewail, approve: | and all my sowre sweet dayes | I will lament, and love.
There is a real honesty to it. We all both complain and praise. Yet, whatever our preferred orders of operation may be, there is comfort, after the lament, in love getting the last word.
Totally Worth It
The Dude and I don’t disagree on a lot (we totally agree about Creedence, for example), but we disagree about Eagles.
My much-better-half took me to their Hotel California Tour performance in Los Angeles last weekend for my birthday and it was terrific. Again.
Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Don’t forget to subscribe and share.
This is the best thing I saw or read this week. The most disgusting. The most important. The most insightful. The most instructive. The most powerful. The most poignant. The most wrongheaded. The silliest. The most surprising. The most insightful (read together with this). The most disgusting. The funniest. The wittiest. The oddest. The scariest. The best commercial. Huh? Yikes. One thousand years ago. Not The Onion. Yowza.
Of course, the easiest way to share TBL is simply to forward it to a few dozen of your closest friends.
Somebody must have read last week’s TBL.
Please send me your nominees for this space to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or via Twitter (@rpseawright). Funny is especially good.
Benediction
Bruce Cockburn playing in a worship band isn’t something I’d expect, but it’s true. This week’s benediction is a wonderful new song from Bruce. It wouldn’t be out of place in worship. At all.
Check it out here, stating at 3:48 (the video can’t be embedded).
The just the merciful the cruel | The stumbling well-intentioned fool | The deft the oaf the witless pawn | The golden one life smiles upon | The squalling infant in mid-squall | The neighbors fighting down the hall | The list is long; as I recall | Our orders said to love them all
The cynic and the crooked priest | The woman wise the sullen beast | The enemy outside the gate | The friend who leaves it all to fate | The drunk who tags the bathroom stall | Proud Boy rushing to his fall, | The list is long; as I recall | Our orders said to love them all
The pastor preaching shades of hate | The self-inflating head of state | The black the blue the starved for bread | The dread the red the better dead | The sweet the vile the small the tall | The one who rises to the call | The list is long but as I recall | Our orders said to love them all
The one who lets his demons win | The one we think we’re better than | A challenge great — but as I recall | Our orders said to love them all
The Spotify play list of TBL benedictions and more now includes more than 180 songs and about 13 hours of great music. I urge you to listen … and turn the volume up. Way up.
To those of us prone to wander, to those who are broken, to those who flee and fight in fear – which is every last lost one of us – there is a faith that provides grace and offers hope. May love have the last word. Now and forever. Amen.
Issue 85 (October 22, 2021)
Terrific insights, as usual.
Until... The "listen more to idiots" trope.
No question that everyone has been wound up to 11 these days. But the ole "listen more to understand" is a losing game when it's assymetrical. If the "other side" is unreasonable, either because they will never spend as much effort for you as you do for them, or has an irrational position from ad hominem attacks or plain stupid allegations, then spending any resources on trying to "understand their position" or "meeting them halfway" is a category error of unrequited projection.
Spending time on stupid is stupid. It simply validates bad behavior and wastes your resources.
The way I frame any attempt at having a conversation is to think about what it would be like if two people held their conversation in couples therapy. What would a neutral third party think of the symmetry of the exchange and the willingness on each side to participate in a productive conversation?
A good couples therapist would insist on basic ground rules of reality, good-faith interest in learning, and symmetry. A good therapist wouldn't hold a session if those terms weren't met by both sides because it wouldn't be productive nor fair without them. (ask me how I know....)
In that light, Godot, you can see a whole lot of wasted time expecting something that isn't going to happen.
Unfortunately, the world has gotten would up pretty good. And many people are now simply conversational bullies (by inculation.) Where does one begin with the many flavors of Stop the Steal? Or the Pelosi or AOC is the devil carps. These are people who voted for a president without a platform.... As Dostoyevsky says in the House of the Dead, "once a man gets a taste of the power of being a bully, it is almost impossible to change him."
Kumbaya is aspirational, not rational.