About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
email me if you have any questions or comments.
Using WordPress
2.2
Re-reading my searching for continuity post, I find it somewhat amusing how easy it was for me to construct a story that fits my previous patterns of behavior. The story of our self is always miraculously consistent, no matter how our motivations shifted and changed along the way. It reminds me of the comic book fan practice of retconning.
Retcon is an abbreviation for retroactive continuity. It comes up a lot in comic books, where the writers on a given series will change, and then write something that is clearly inconsistent with what was written by an earlier writer. The diehard fans would notice the inconsistency and complain. So Marvel started giving No Prizes to fans who could make up a creative explanation for the apparent inconsistency, retroactively making the gaffe consistent with the known history. Hence, retroactive continuity. It’s basically a geekier way of saying 20/20 hindsight.
What’s interesting to me is that in my previous post, I was retconning my life. There is no real theme in the things I was interested in, no “prime directive” that was motivating me. I was trying to retroactively create a thread that tied all of my different interests together, rather than just admit I am a dabbler. And it basically worked. By only choosing the details that supported the point I was trying to make, and ignoring other inconsistencies, I created a story that unified my life. Sort of.
This is yet another example of how our mind fills in the blanks, which is a topic I’ve been meaning to get back to for months. There are so many degrees of freedom that I could come up with many different stories, all of which fit the stated events of my life. Which is oddly liberating. There is no One True Me. There are a multiplicity of me’s, waiting to be called into being by my actions. The actions I take moving forward define the story I want to tell about myself, and I can find a way to fit all of my previous actions into that story through the power of retconning. Of course, it’s also terrifying, because it means I can be anybody. Who do I want to be?
Previous: Ultimate culture | Next: Getting to Yes, by Fisher and Ury
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
US poet (1819 - 1892)
I haven’t ever read Whitman, but this quote will drive me to break down and read him someday.
That’s a good way to explain it. I think it’s also the key reason why Popperian science just *doesn’t* exist: science also works retroactively. You do your experiment with the aim of finding out about something — and maybe, indeed, you do prove some hypothesis — but often you fill back in later on what the hypothesis you proved happened to be, and it’s often not what you intended.
[…] Retconning life […]
[…] This post was triggered by a comment that Jofish made where he made the claim that “Popperian science just *doesn’t* exist”. I understand where he’s coming from (especially in light of that post, where I was describing how things are often re-interpreted after the fact), but I believe that Karl Popper’s principle of falsifiability is relevant to explaining what is good science. […]
[…] When I’m talking to friends, I’m not just reciting the events of my life. I’m struggling to put them into context, figuring out the narrative that ties them together, making sense of the chain of events so that I can understand what happened. In other words, I’m constructing my self-story. By telling it to somebody else, I’m explaining it to myself, but at the same time, the feedback that I get may encourage me to modify my understanding. For instance, if I’m talking about an interaction I had with a coworker, and I explain what they did and why I thought they did it, my friends will offer alternative explanations that may better explain the events. And I modify and retcon my story to incorporate that new interpretation. […]
[…] I think that as cultural norms shift, we’re going to see a lot more openness to treating jobs more like ordering from a menu - “I tried this, but it didn’t really work for me - I’ll try that next time.” More people are trying alternative career paths, either doing their own startup or job-hopping through several jobs to figure out what they want. That is making it more acceptable to realize that a job is just a job, not an identity, so there won’t be anything wrong with quitting a job after six months because it’s not working for you. We’ll be able to retcon our lives to frame our job history in a way that helps us get the next job. […]
[…] I’ll be able to look back and say “Oh, I see how it all fits together now” in a nice retcon. Again, by the time somebody can justify what they’re doing in terms of mainstream values, […]
[…] The terrifying thought for a Gen-X-er is the idea of locking into a path (or a vision) and then finding out a few years later that it’s the wrong one, and all that time and effort was wasted. One thing I need to remember is that doing something is better than doing nothing - a year of experience doing the “wrong” thing is still better than a year spent dithering about what to do. And I have also learned that even when I change my life’s direction, the time spent on the original vision/goal is not wasted - I can apply the previously learned lessons to my new direction. When I finally gave up my dreams of becoming a physicist, it was a really hard decision for me, as it felt like I was throwing away the ten years of my life which had been devoted to physics. However, much of what I learned as a physicist has continued to be useful throughout my career, including the approach to problem solving, the data analysis capabilities, and the instrumentation experience I used when working on CellKey. One of the ingenious parts of the human brain is that it always finds a way to retroactively harmonize one’s previous experience with one’s current direction. […]