OG Agentic

I have been getting into Cate Hall’s book [4], You Can Just Do Things, and I appreciate the discussion on agentic foundation, but it’s just that she means the other agentic than the agentic engineering everyone else is talking about these days.. For Cate, being agentic is from the human perspective about your agency.

There is this song, by this dutch band De Staat, “Make Way For the Passenger”, [1] where the music video is a POV of a motorcyclist, riding alongside a few other motorcycling buddies. Then the music crescendos and we see the POV rider gets t-boned by a truck, and wipes out. Then the video rewinds to the beginning, while the music keeps its original forward orientation. The lyrics now are “live fast, die young. THis ride will ride on. This life will die on.” And now, the video direction goes forwards again, and the crescendo plus crash sequence is replayed right until the impact when the screen goes dark.

I have read here and there, one interpretation might be that often we are passengers to our wreckless sides. And we repeat the same potentially self destructive actions, which is why we see the motorcycle crash happen twice. More broadly, others interpret [3], we are passengers to life itself. So very no-free-will-esque. Of course as you are watching this video, you are a bystander now twice removed.

On the other hand, Cate expounds that there is an alternative to letting life happen to you. Her angle is the “better to ask for forgiveness than permission”, but even more than this, because she notices people will not even ask for things out of awkwardness or embarrassment.

This theme also much reminds me of one of the endings in the game, The Stanley Parable, though perhaps less subtle. The Stanley Parable, can be played through with many different paths, depending on what arbitrary decisions you the cubicle bound knowledge worker Stanley takes, as the narrator so clearly indicates as you make them. (I once used twine to form my own take of the multipath theme [5]). Many of the endings leave you wanting more, but there is one ending that leaves you unburdened yet powerless. You find yourself finally breaking out of the office building, into a green field of grass. The Narrator narrates that Stanley can now finally write his own story, and become happy. But ironically, you discover your keyboard controls have stopped working. And then just as with any other ending, you loop right back to the beginning, staring at your 1990s style CRT display. This is called the freedom ending [6].

I come to this topic and Cate’s book from a practical place. How can you reliably control your narrative and not just be that data mercenary [7] or other mercenary, trading time for money?

Funny recent example of life happening to you, is this dishwasher leak [2] in my apartment. This anecdote reminds me that hindsight is 20/20, but I do wonder that proactively inspecting dishwashers in my building could have saved the owner some cash. (aside, shall we just call this the 20/20 rule, as an ode to Pareto’s 80/20?). As of today, the floor damage is on its way to being repaired. But, I have other neighbors whose dishwashers have caused havoc to their floors too. After the first such case, an investigation could theoretically have been done, to replace leak prone components of residents dishwashers. That would be the proactive thing to do, but it’s more likely that the timeline of dish washer failure has very wide error bars. When you look at its unpredictability, its low prevalence and the multitude of failure modes in an apartment building overall, the proactive strategy is borderline OCD. So being reactive here makes more sense.

But although being reactive wrt risk in an apartment building might make sense, what about your life? There has been a related input over output trend marked by Ali Abdaal’s Feel Good Productivity. I described [8] Ali has an alternative to SMART goals. Actually I wrote about CLEAR, but maybe it was actually NICE goals that he wrote about. So as opposed to SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound), NICE goals are (Near-Term Input-Based Controllable Energizing). To me the distinction is most importantly that one has you looking down, using your compass to navigate, constantly comparing against a fixed heading, whereas behavior control is adaptable, having you looking in front of you, adjusting (responding) to your environment, not necessarily gluing your eyes to a prize.

I suppose both of these are inwardly agentic and both manifest desirable outcomes. And to be clear, the parallels to be drawn to agentic engineering [9] are manifold!

But the Avalanche

The volume of what may be on your plate feels like a denial of service attack. Often the feeling is you can only but make a few dents in the many piles of obligations in front of you. The solace is that many of the important things don’t come with step by step instructions and they are long term efforts without instant gratification at every strike of your mallet.

But the Avalanche#

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But the Avalanche

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