I couldn’t think of a koan-y question, but here is a discussion prompt.
Let’s make a Worksheet!
Let’s come up with some practice examples of the 2x2 matrix (such as the “Being Lost or Not” example in the OP), that people can fill out. The examples should be short (single paragraph) everyday type problems that people can relate to. Submit examples in the comments. I’ll take the best and put them in a worksheet in Google docs, and link to it here.
That way, when people in the future come and read this post, they have an activity to help them practice it. Also, people can use them at meetups if they want. Worksheets, of course, aren’t the BEST way to learn, but they’re better than nothing.
You’re at work, and you find yourself wanting very badly to make a certain, particularly funny-but-possibly-taken-as-offensive remark to your boss. The comment feels particularly witty, quick-minded and insightful.
(trying to think of stuff that’s fairly common and happens relatively often in everyday life)
You are leaving your home in the morning, to return in the evening; your day will involve quite a bit of walking and public transport. It is now warm and sunny, but you know that a temperature drop with heavy rains is forecasted for the afternoon. Looking out at the window and thinking of the walk in the sun and the crowded bus, you don’t feel like carrying around a coat and umbrella. You start thinking maybe the forecast is wrong...
Yes, that is clearly the optimal solution. I was assuming you don’t own those two items, or that you don’t have a handbag the right size or don’t want to use it—more plausible for a man that for a woman, I guess.
Carrying around a handbag in the first place happens to be something that I find annoying and risky. I’m prone to leaving it in easy-to-notice, easy-to-steal places or outright forgetting it in some public location.
Now that I think about that, that happened to me exactly once (as far as I can remember) with a handbag, though it happens to me very often¹ with other items such as keys, jackets, sweatshirts and sometimes my iPod. (I usually² eventually manage to recover them, but not always.) I guess that’s because I’m more likely to immediately notice that I’m missing my bag than that I’m missing my keys.
You are knitting a fitted garment. Let’s say it’s a sweater. You’ve been knitting for awhile, and you″re starting to get concerned it won’t fit the intended recipient. You can’t tell for sure, because your needle is too short to fully stretch it out, but you just have this feeling. This feeling you hope is wrong, because you don’t want to rip out and re-do all the ribbing you’ve just knit...
You are an ex-smoker overcome with a sudden craving after a particularly bad day, and your helpful friend offers you a cigarette “have just this one smoke!” to relieve tension. You know that anything less than a complete abstinence has a chance of kickstarting the habit.
If a stressful day is enough to give you a craving difficult to resist, I think that saying “anything less than complete abstinence has a chance of kickstarting the habit” is a misleading statement of how it works. It might be more accurate to say that every cigarette you have is one cigarette closer to having a habit you need to kick. It seems, in fact, that there’s sort of a gradient of average craving from abstinence all the way up to two packs a day, with variances around those averages. It seems a bit obfuscatory to suggest that “complete abstinence” is the deciding factor, especially when considering the question “When does complete abstinence start? Why doesn’t it start after the next cigarette?” After all, the “real” complete abstinence has already failed, if you had to quit smoking in the first place.
. . . but that’s kind of off the topic of the worksheet example.
I couldn’t think of a koan-y question, but here is a discussion prompt.
Let’s make a Worksheet!
Let’s come up with some practice examples of the 2x2 matrix (such as the “Being Lost or Not” example in the OP), that people can fill out. The examples should be short (single paragraph) everyday type problems that people can relate to. Submit examples in the comments. I’ll take the best and put them in a worksheet in Google docs, and link to it here.
That way, when people in the future come and read this post, they have an activity to help them practice it. Also, people can use them at meetups if they want. Worksheets, of course, aren’t the BEST way to learn, but they’re better than nothing.
You’re at work, and you find yourself wanting very badly to make a certain, particularly funny-but-possibly-taken-as-offensive remark to your boss. The comment feels particularly witty, quick-minded and insightful.
(trying to think of stuff that’s fairly common and happens relatively often in everyday life)
You are leaving your home in the morning, to return in the evening; your day will involve quite a bit of walking and public transport. It is now warm and sunny, but you know that a temperature drop with heavy rains is forecasted for the afternoon. Looking out at the window and thinking of the walk in the sun and the crowded bus, you don’t feel like carrying around a coat and umbrella. You start thinking maybe the forecast is wrong...
I put a pocket umbrella and/or a foldable raincoat into my handbag. Duh.
Yes, that is clearly the optimal solution. I was assuming you don’t own those two items, or that you don’t have a handbag the right size or don’t want to use it—more plausible for a man that for a woman, I guess.
Carrying around a handbag in the first place happens to be something that I find annoying and risky. I’m prone to leaving it in easy-to-notice, easy-to-steal places or outright forgetting it in some public location.
Now that I think about that, that happened to me exactly once (as far as I can remember) with a handbag, though it happens to me very often¹ with other items such as keys, jackets, sweatshirts and sometimes my iPod. (I usually² eventually manage to recover them, but not always.) I guess that’s because I’m more likely to immediately notice that I’m missing my bag than that I’m missing my keys.
Around once per month in average.
Around 90% of the times.
What immediately comes to mind for me:
You are knitting a fitted garment. Let’s say it’s a sweater. You’ve been knitting for awhile, and you″re starting to get concerned it won’t fit the intended recipient. You can’t tell for sure, because your needle is too short to fully stretch it out, but you just have this feeling. This feeling you hope is wrong, because you don’t want to rip out and re-do all the ribbing you’ve just knit...
That’s time for a new set of knitting needles, and empiricisim. I have 60in cables.
You are an ex-smoker overcome with a sudden craving after a particularly bad day, and your helpful friend offers you a cigarette “have just this one smoke!” to relieve tension. You know that anything less than a complete abstinence has a chance of kickstarting the habit.
If a stressful day is enough to give you a craving difficult to resist, I think that saying “anything less than complete abstinence has a chance of kickstarting the habit” is a misleading statement of how it works. It might be more accurate to say that every cigarette you have is one cigarette closer to having a habit you need to kick. It seems, in fact, that there’s sort of a gradient of average craving from abstinence all the way up to two packs a day, with variances around those averages. It seems a bit obfuscatory to suggest that “complete abstinence” is the deciding factor, especially when considering the question “When does complete abstinence start? Why doesn’t it start after the next cigarette?” After all, the “real” complete abstinence has already failed, if you had to quit smoking in the first place.
. . . but that’s kind of off the topic of the worksheet example.