Or, why the hell didn’t anybody warn me?

I’m an older Dad of young boys. Fellow parents, already I feel the warming glow of your empathy. I had thirty-nine blissful, serene, responsibility-free years before my first boy was born. I was forty-two when I had my second.

During those thirty-nine Frittered Years of Unknowing, I never considered what it’d be like as an older dad. I was too busy sleeping past 5.30am and watching live football beyond the first seven minutes. However, with the clarity of hindsight — or as much clarity as a brain of sludgy neurons offers — I’d have liked that wrinkle-free other-me blithely contemplating putting on a movie after 9pm to know the following seven things about bringing up boys as an older dad. To prepare him. Possibly. To panic him. Surely.

1. Thirty-nine is old to become a first time dad.

Maybe thirty-nine is not that old. The oldest dad in the world is a bloke called Ramajit Raghav* and he was ninety-six. Ninety-six. Exactly. That’s about how old I feel. At my third trip to my 3-year-old’s bedroom at four in the morning because he’s scared of the lightbulb’s shadow (we’d taken off the lampshade because he was scared of the lampshade’s shadow), I even look ninety-six.

Other-me, thirty nine is old to be a first-time dad. It’s not too old, but it is old. Don’t get me wrong, there are advantages to being an older dad, we are older, wiser, a bit wealthier and no longer believe life’s apogee is the ability to adequately order a kebab after thirteen pints; but then we were probably all of those things at thirty-two. The intervening seven years have been nothing more than dithering and denial. More fool me.

Prepare now, other-me. Stop drinking, get down the gym, eat healthier. Or, at the very least, sleep like a bear in winter-time. Read the Best Practice Rules of being a parent (all parents know these, we’ve all read the books). You need to be in peak physical and mental condition. Like the condition you were in at thirty-two. Now that’s a good age to be a new dad.

*Note to Ramajit Raghav: look, this isn’t a competition. And if it was, you’ve lost. Because at ninety-six I’ll be in a big chair screaming at my sons to re-spread the butter on my toast, because the way they spread it was not exactly the way mummy spreads it. And, I won’t be changing nappies. I win.

2. It’s hard. And I mean mentally hard.

The theory of Tabula Rasa (“Blank Slate”) is the idea that individuals are born without built-in knowledge, which must be learned through experience or perception. If that’s the case, my eldest had consumed the entirety of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War by the time he was eighteen months. Negotiating with a toddler is like playing chess with a grandmaster. No, worse than that. It’s like playing chess with a grandmaster for who a legitimate move is to kick over the board, ram the queen up his nose and to punch you in the goolies.

These mini-Einsteins probe and probe for weakness. Their memory for detail is photographic. Don’t do the right thing in exactly the right way, show weakness or bend from Best Practice (impossible to stick to for 24 hours, never mind the twenty-five years before freedom) and they pounce.

The knee-high Diablos even leverage their own illnesses. Talk about Machiavellian. Let me give you an example.

After much cajoling, bribery and quasi-Gina Ford dispassion, we’d finally got our little boy to sleep with his lights off. One day he got sick. Not seriously so, but vomiting and high temperature. The type of sickness that the first time it happened had us in A&E quicker than it takes to boil an egg. On the fifteenth such occasion we settled for just having the first two 9s of 999 pressed while otherwise waiting for his temperature to drop. Our son’s only request? To have his little side-light on through the night. How could we refuse him. His eyes so sad, his brow so burning. We couldn’t. Eighteen months later, he still has his side-light on. Me? I reckon he got sick on purpose. The nefarious titch.

3. It’s hard. And I mean physically hard.

Other-me, it’s hard. Damn hard. Like someone clubbed you in the guts hard. You think that 10k in under 45 minutes is hard? Try pushing your 2-year old on a swing for that same 45 minutes on the coldest Sunday morning since records began — and then dashing up a climbing frame moments before he propels himself off the top to certain CryScreamTantrum.

And that’s why it’s so hard. It’s relentless. Utterly relentless.

It starts at the crack of dawn when ordered — muscles rigid as plaster-board — to carry your kid down stairs and over toy-mountains. His youthful limbs, as pliable as Play Doh, seemingly on strike. The day ends with you lugging them out the bath and wrestling into PJs. True, bed time affords you several moments of peace. Right up to the point where, your microwave evening meal part-eaten, a baleful cry graduates to the patter of little feet along the hallway, and has you dashing up the stairs again to, without talking or looking at them (as per Best Practice), carry them kicking and screaming back to their room. The first of many such events throughout the evening. And night.

Next morning, after a night of fitful sleep, wees and scary lightbulb shadows, it all starts again. And the next day, and the next, and the next. Relentless.

I’ve never been particularly out of shape, but when my wife got pregnant with our first child, I decided to get fitter. Running, swimming, cycling: when that baby popped, man was I ready. Was I bollocks. Every day something new hurts. Or drops off. It’s death by a thousand little kicks in the diaphragm.

4. The most important person in your life

Sorry other-me, but your ma is no longer the most important person in your life. It’s not your friends (who within six months have become mates in Facebook-Comments-name only). Neither — I know, hard to believe — is it yourself. Surprisingly, it’s not even your kids. Nope, the most important person in your life, is the kids’ mother. Your beloved partner in this warped escapade. Of course, there are many many reasons for this. She provides sunshine when there is only rain, she provides love and companionship when there is only Peppa Pig. There is no-one more empathetic to your stresses: she is living it too (no, take what you feel and square it, that’s what she’s living), there is no-one with stronger will and eye-to-detail. When the shit hits the fan, the cupboards and the carpet, and you are so panicked you can’t even see anything beyond your wrists, there is no-one more calm, more capable and better with a baby-wipe. And there is no-one your boys love more.

But these are not the chief reasons why she is the most important person in your life. No, the most important reason is this: what happens when she (as she inevitably will) gets ill or is otherwise incapacitated? Well, that means that you have sole responsibility for the kids. You. And not just for a couple of hours down Starbucks while she has lunch with a pal. No, all day. And maybe — god forbid — the next day too. Holy-flippen-horse-shit.

Your boys’ mother is the most important person in your life. Take care of her. Take very very good care of her. Your sanity depends upon it.

5. The single best parenting tip. Part A.

OK, so I’ve cheated. I’ve split the single best parenting tip into Parts A & B. And they aren’t even related. So sue me, I’m skint anyway. Little Kickers, Tumble Tots, Jo Jingles and 6.4 million nappies saw to that.

The single best parenting tip (Part A) is this: Earn The Right To Use “1,2,3"

What does that mean? Remember when your mother counted one, two, two-and-a-half, two-and-two-thirds, two-and-three-quarters, two-and-fifteen-sixteenths, etc, etc. Well it’s that, except without ludicrous denominator-dance.

Simply say: “Do [insert what you want them to do] before I count to three or [insert consequence] will happen. One, Two, Three.”

Then, if they haven’t done the thing by three (no procrastinating), you do the consequence.

So simple. So painfully, agonisingly, heart-wrenchingly, mentally-mangling, physically-pulverising, bloody-impossible, simple.

You have to earn the right to do it. It will take months. You have to — following Best Practice Rules — show your kid that if they don’t do as you ask, you are prepared, come hell, high-water or vomit-inducing-tantrum, you will do the consequence. All with calm, composed, compassionate, confidence. Of course there are subtlties, you have to understand the art of compromise (allow them to do some stuff you’d rather they didn’t without invoking 1,2,3) and the consequence has to actually be do-able. For example. A consequence that overly restricts their use of the iPad is not do-able. You need that beautiful little machine. It’s the Lord-Jobs gift to knackered daddys.

Once you’ve earned it, it does work. At least up to the age of four anyway.

6. The single best parenting tip. Part B.

Disney’s 2013 animated film: “Frozen”. Yes, even (especially?) for boys. Fellow parents are cry-laughing in that exhausted-hysterical-bitter fashion common to this decimated race that you’ve yet to hear of Frozen. But you will. Need an hour and a half to clear out the dishwasher while eating an entire cheese sandwich by yourself? Stick Frozen on. It’s like injecting benzodiazepine directly into their eyeballs.

7. So maybe you shouldn’t become a dad at all?

Of course you should.

Imagine you’ve had a big night out, lots to drink but not so you’re insensible. You’ve felt attractive to women — one of them may even have kissed you — and you’ve managed to get through the night without losing either phone or a fight. You sit serene on a sofa, half-consumed curry in hand, watching through open curtain as night lightens to fledgling dawn-grey. Birds titter and twitter. From your belly there is a wash of contentedness that floods your canals. You feel happy, happier than you’ve ever felt before.

But all you want to do is go to sleep.

That’s what is like being a Dad.

The Dad’s Club is the best club in the whole world. Hurry up and join it.

‘New?’ he asks, his voice a competent bass, the sort that is fearless in its opinion. I nod. He continues: ‘You an inmate too?’’

A true story from the nut house

I’m early, I’m always early. The only other early person is a middle-aged guy with a heavy belly.
‘Hello,’ he says, surprising me with his jovial tone.
‘Hello,’ I say, surprising myself with my jovial tone.
‘New?’ he asks, his voice a competent bass, the sort that is fearless in its opinion. I nod. He continues: ‘You an inmate too?’’
I assume an “inmate” is an in-patient, rather than a day patient.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Came in yesterday.’
‘Welcome to the nut-house,’ he says.
I smile. He doesn’t look or sound like a nut, and I know I’m not a nut. But then we are both waiting for a group therapy session in one of London’s best psychiatric hospitals.
The man offers me his hand, ‘Jonathan,’ he says. I shake his hand. ‘And we are not all nutters.’
‘Thank God,’ I say, yes he does seem mighty level-headed, but I suspect that’s just the influence of his barrister-baritone vocals.
‘Mind,’ he says. ‘I heard some bloke was admitted who was allergic to making a cup of tea!’
I laugh for the half-second it takes to realise he’s talking about me. But the laugh is useful, it defuses my response: ‘That’s me,’ I say.
‘Oops,’ he says, and now he’s laughing — although it’s not an explicitly nervous laugh. He’s embarrassed, but he’s hiding it. I guess he’s a long-time pro at hiding his embarrassments.
‘Shit,’ I say. ‘I’m not only in the nut-house but I’m the story in the nut-house.’

On 7 September 2009 (my brother’s 39th birthday) I attended my first therapy session as an in-patient at a London Psychiatric hospital. I’d been diagnosed by a Harley Street psychiatrist as suffering from a ‘severe anxiety disorder with depressive episodes’.

In the months before my admission I had retreated further and further into myself. I was reluctant to leave my bed, never mind my bedroom, I certainly couldn’t leave my house. I suffered from a peculiar crushing dizziness when I did anything other than lie in a foetal ball, and that included reading, writing, watching TV and even making a cup of tea. And as the dizziness worsened, so too my mood.

The day I was admitted to hospital I’d left two cups containing tea-bags with only one half-filled with water sitting on the kitchen top. I’d been unable to finish the job.

I told my girlfriend that if this was what my life was going to be like, then I didn’t want life.

And yet, only a few months or so prior, you would never have guessed that the normal guy in a successful relationship with a good job and happily trotting to work could possibly become the guy who was ‘allergic to making a cup of tea’.

Yet, it happened.

It was, in all realistic respects, a total bolt from the black.

One day on my walk to work my lung collapsed, and despite incredibly painful lung drains and other remedial work it collapsed a further twice in quick succession and I had to have an emergency operation to solve the problem. But people have emergency operations all the time, and they don’t all end up mentally ill.

Why it happened to me, why it was that - although I was physically well within just six weeks - walking outside felt like walking on a trampoline, and regardless of the weather it always felt crushingly oppressive. Why I collapsed in floods of tears three times in one short walk with my girlfriend. Why I had to get a taxi after a few hundred yards because I felt I couldn’t walk back. Why all that happened to me? Therapy and eventually my own research gave me possible reasons. But none of them were obvious. And none of them were so explicit that the illness could have been foreseen.

It was, in all realistic respects, a total bolt from the black.

And so, as my mood finally collapsed and my retreat to an embryonic existence complete, one saturday morning — the single worst day of my life — my girlfriend (now wife) felt she had no choice but to put in an emergency call to our psychiatrist — who had me admitted to hospital on the spot. There, day after day for week after week I attended intensive group therapy sessions — and listened to every word. I took Valium, anti-anxiety and anti-depressants, I attended mindfulness sessions, interpersonal therapy sessions, and I forced myself to take on cognitive-behavioural experiments like walking around the block or going on the tube for just one stop.

I did everything in exactly the way I was told to do it. Because, the thing that is sometimes missed when it comes to mental health is that the sufferers will do almost anything it takes just to be normal. They utterly crave it. My god, just to go to work, just to buy a cappuccino, just to care about the football scores. My mantra was: I will do whatever it takes to get my life back.

I remember one morning, I was going to group in a taxi (still couldn’t manage the underground) and I saw a guy selling the Big Issue. He still looked young and fit, but was by definition homeless. I studied that guy, and I thought, right now I’d swap. I’d swap lives with you. You can stand there selling the Big Issue. I can’t even do that. You’re a lucky lucky bastard.

It lasted, on and off, for eighteen months. I thought it had gone after the first seven or so months, but I relapsed within another five and was back in hospital.

It took another six to recover again and it’s been in ‘remission’ now for nearly three years.

Outing myself

So today I out myself as a recovered Mental Illness sufferer. Not cured — never cured, I wasn’t cured of it even before — but I’m 120% stronger.

Not cured, but stronger

Why stronger? Because I’m aware mental illness can not only strike but that it can come back; so I pay close attention.

I studied, and studied hard (helps to be an knowledge-geek): I’ve (probably) increased the grey matter in my pre-frontal cortex and reduced the grey-matter in my amygdala and I’ve probably increased the quality and quantity of the connections between the two. I may even have enhanced the neurogenesis in my hippocampus, and I’ve certainly better stabilised my sympathetic nervous system.

I recognise rumination, anger, frustration, anxiety and can feel adrenaline and cortisol pumping through my veins.

And I know that what I feel can be no more than an uncontrollable, unconscious, primordial and evolutionary driven response that is no longer appropriate — or optimal — in the twenty-first century: and therefore to look upon that response philosophically, and with self-compassion, and wait for clarity to return.

I know to optimise my mental health, I should optimise my physical health, that rest, recuperation, play and targeting stress are as important (but not more so) than productive industry.

And

And

I’m also much much richer for the experience.

For, without it, I wouldn’t have had a journey of self-discovery, understood that my relationship with my wife and family is stronger than graphene, or met some of the most incredible people it is possible to meet.

Even Jonathan (a real person, although not his real name) — a guy who was sectioned after losing himself upon being made redundant, even him — and the many others who are fellow suffers, some in remission, some not.

They are all normal. They just have an illness.

Thanks for reading

Ever struggled with the inter-play of DNA,RNA, genes, amino-acids, proteins and wondered how they all fit together? I’ve created a simple aide-memoire. It is called City of Robots.

The City of Robots

There is a City where almost all critical functions are performed by robots. There are robots that carry stuff, build stuff, take messages from one place to another; they make sure the City’s industry is performed with speed and efficiency; they root out and attack enemies entering the city and they are themselves used as structural components for the various structures within the City.

There are billions of these individual robots, but there are only about 100,000 types of robot.

Robot Types

Type I Robot is a robot that has wheels (so it can move) and a funny shaped bolt (shaped like an octagon) upon which it can attach a transport crate that has an octagon shaped dock that can only fit onto an octagon shaped bolt. Robot I’s wheels are stuck to a track that allows it only move from one side of a yard, through a factory wall (yes through) and then back out into the yard.

Type 2 Robot is a door robot that is sometimes open and sometimes shut. When it is open it stretches out into a very particular shape, when it is closed, the shape disappears. Now, let’s say the shape that Robot 2 makes when it is open is the shape of a Type I Robot carrying its Transport Crate — a very particular shape indeed. The reason why it is so particular is that the only thing that the Type 2 Robot lets through is a Type I Robot carrying a Transport Crate. And lets say that there are 1000 Type 2 Robots allowing only 1000 Type 1 Robots carrying transport crates in and out of the factory.

So you can see how there are many more individual robots (there are two-thousand in this factory alone) yet only two types.

And you can also see that each robot’s function is defined by its shape.

Raw Materials

In the City there is a very special factory. A factory that makes the robots themselves. But there is a problem. In the City there are very few raw materials to work with, in fact there are only twenty materials (say Material 1, Material 2, Material 3… etc) and from these twenty materials all 100,000 robots have to be made. How can that be done?

Well, the City’s strategic geniuses noticed something. They noticed that if they put a material into a special water-based solution it would deform — and that each material deformed in a different way — and that deformity would also depend on the nature of the solution itself — it’s temperature and acidity level etc

So they stacked some of the materials on top of each other to form a ‘stack’ and then put the stack into the special water-based solution. Now, because each material reacted in a different way — some would bend left, some right, some would stay rigid — this would cause the stack to form into a shape. More to the point, if they put the right sequence together the stack would deform into a useful shape for a robot.

For example, they noticed that stacking Material 4 onto Material 5 onto Material 5 again and then onto Material 20 onto Material 2 — and then putting that stack into water, it would deform into Robot 1 — woohoo!

They also worked out that stacking Material 14 to Material 8 to Material 18 to Material 18 to Material 18 to Material 14 to Material 1 — and then putting that stack into water, it would deform into Robot 2 — woohoo again!

Workable Stacks

So they could remember, they now called a stack that made a Robot a ‘Workable Stack’. And they eventually worked out a Workable Stack for each of the 100,000+ robots required to run the City.

What’s more, although the sequence of materials in the Workable Stack required for Robot 1 was only five, for some Robots — like, say, Robot 56,789 the sequence ran for many thousands.

A code

But now they had a problem. They soon realized that the information that they had worked out was both incredibly valuable and incredibly huge. Imagine how much time it would have taken to write down Material 14 to Material 9 to Material 3 to Material 17 to Material 2 and on and on for many thousands. Also, now that they had it all written down, they didn’t want it damaged or altered — because get the wrong material wrong in a sequence and you get a faulty robot.

So they came up with a clever solution.

Firstly they created a simple code. Instead of saying ‘Material x’ they gave it a code name of just three letters. eg ‘Material 5’ became ACT

They also realised that they only needed to use four letters to give each of the twenty Raw Materials a three letter code. And, because their President was called Ebeneezer Gact, they decided to use the president’s surname as the four letters (GACT). So, suddenly they were able to create the code like this:

Material 1 — AAA

Material 2 — AAG

Material 3 — AAT

Material 4 — AGA

Material 5 — ACT

Etc etc

Material 20 — TCT

So, suddenly they could write a very quick short hand code to create the Workable Stack for Robot I of

AGA/ACT/ACT/TCT/AAG

(Which is the same as Material 4 onto Material 5 onto Material 5 onto Material 20 onto Material 2)

That is, a code sequence of five.

Eventually they had code sequences for all 100,000+ Workable Stacks. Where each Workable Stack, once it was put into the water-based solution, became a Robot.

The book of code

As we have already seen, although the code sequence for Robot I was only five, some code sequences ran into the hundreds and thousands. And, soon, the book of codes for all 100k+ of Workable Stacks ran for many many many pages.

Since the City Strategists wanted to protect their code from prying eyes they then threw in a lot of extra — redundant or ‘junk’ — sequences into the book. And the book became very huge indeed.

So they broke it down into 23 different chapters and they put each chapter into a box. However, so they generally knew which code was where, they made each box a different size.

And because the code was the most important thing in the City, the boxes were kept in a bank vault right in the middle of the city — where the code could not be removed, altered or damaged.

Protecting the code

Protecting the code from damage was of paramount importance. Access to the code would be limited only to a very special unit called ‘copiers’. When a robot was required to be made, the particular code for the Workable Stack that made the robot would have to be copied down by ‘copiers’ in the bank vault and the copy taken to a robot making factory where it could be used to make the robot.

The City’s imperial ambitions

The City realized that on its own it wasn’t very powerful, and could easily be invaded and destroyed by invading forces. But, in its vault it had an entire blueprint to build other cities. In fact, the blueprint was so flexible that it allowed for the creation of different robots in different quantities so as to create entirely different cities. It realized that if it surrounded itself with cities — some similar, some different — then the empire, as a whole, would be much stronger: to the benefit of all the individual cities. They could share resources, food, defenses and all manner of things.

A duplicate code

But there was a final problem. If the code was to be used as a blueprint for another city, the code in its entirely would be required. However, the code was too important to take out of the vault and it was simply too huge for copiers to copy it all. So they came up with a simple solution.

The book would be ready-copied — a second duplicate version of the code would exist “zipped’ to the original, so, when a new city was to be formed, the duplicate could be unzipped, removed in its entirety then both the original and the new copy could be re-zipped with new duplicates at leisure — with the original version staying in the vault and the new version eventually ending up in the vault of the new city.

And finally, copies of the are not always accurate…

Sometimes, when the copies are made there are little errors made. The code is mis-read (easy to do given the massive volume of code that is required to be copied) so a material is put in the wrong sequence. Much of the time the impact is immaterial, but sometimes this one little change affords the new city an advantage — a stronger type of robot for making walls or for making more efficient factories. Eventually these cities — and eventually the empires that they form part — become more successful than others. As they are more successful then their code will more likely to be used, copied, replicated than even the original code of the City.

Summary

1. The City is run by millions of robots of only 100,000 types.

2. A robot is only useful if it is in a shape fit for its job. Its shape determines its function, and vice versa.

3. A robot is made up of raw materials stacked on top of each other, where that stack is then placed in a water-based solution so that it deforms into the useful shape it is required to be.

4. The sequence of raw materials that allows for a properly formed robot is called a Workable Stack.

5. To make reading sequences easier to read and copy, each raw material is given a three-letter code using any three of the following four letters: GACT

6. And so a code for workable stack would be a sequence of these three-letter codes. Eg AGA/ACT/ACT/TCT/AAG

7. The book of all these codes — plus a whole load of seemingly random (junk) letters to try to protect against prying eyes — is massive, so is divided into 23 different shaped boxes.

8. It is also so valuable that the book is locked away in a bank vault and cannot be removed.

9. Only certain individuals have access to the code — these are ‘copiers’. These guys copy sections of code relating to a Workable Stack and deliver it to robot-making factories to provide the instruction to make the robots.

10. Cities want to make empires but neither do they want to remove their code. So they ‘zip’ the code with a ready made duplicate. This duplicate can be removed in its entirety to make up the code for a second city.

11. Sometimes the duplicates are mis-copies or are mis-read. That will mean subsequent cities may be slightly different — sometimes even slightly better suited to the environment, and, in general their code will more likely be replicated than even the code for the first City.

Glossary

The City = a cell

A robot = protein

Raw material = amino acid

Workable Stack = gene

The sequence of three letter codes = genetic code

The book of all code = DNA

The zipped duplicate of the code = the double helix

The copiers = RNA

The boxes w/in which the DNA is stored = chromosomes

The robot-making factories = ribosomes

Random code vrs prying eyes = Junk DNA

Bank Vault = nucleus

Second city = daughter cell

Empires = multi-cellular bodies (such as humans)

‘Little errors in copying code’ = mutations

‘Better suited to their environment’ = evolution by natural selection

Note:

I hope you enjoyed the City of Robots. A couple of things you should know.

I am an enthusiastic amateur — not a scientist– the City of Robots is a primarily a bit of fun: a very coarse-grained allegory to assist the amateur learn and/or recall, in general terms, the broad mechanisms it describes. In that, it is neither wholly accurate and misses many finer-grained and nuanced processes. Feel free, in the comments, to correct, direct or expand.

Further, the piece contains a fair bit of artistic license. For example, in the real cell there is no such thing as an executive of strategic geniuses. To repeat, the piece is for fun: it makes no religious, political, social or any other point at all.

Genes, proteins and DNA made very simple. A mnemonic.  was originally published in I. M. H. O. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

To my wife.

I know

I know that Aristotle followed Plato
Who followed the Socrates show
His execution by Hemlock
Because he dared to mock
Democracy
In order to recommend
Meritocracy.

and

I know that Tamerlaine lead the Mongol Horde
After the stallions Kengis and Kublai roared
And that Charlemagne
Was the first Holy Roman Emperor
When leader of the Franks
A Germanic tribe, that became the French
Which probably makes him an Ubermensch.

At least according to Nietzsche
Who was an atheist teacher
And spoke of Zarathustra
A Persian prophet who spake
Of the first mono-theistic take
In the poly-theistic milieu
Of Marduk and Jehovah
And hundreds of others
Many gods for all idolaters.

All these things I know. And more

Like that Pythagoras had a cult
And oxidising free radicals will make you wilt
And the Great Wall of Chin
Was built by the Emporer, Qin
Who could have been the inspiration for Hadrian
And also for the successors to Stalin
In East Berlin.

I know that Freud was a quack
That his results were a hack
Yet despite that, science shows
That most of what we do or know
Goes on beyond the ken of the conscious self
And there’s actually not much need for the upper shelf.

Sobering, no?

I know the difference between special and general
Relativity
Is Gravity
And what the C is in MC Squared
But not all that many cared
Until the E showed its power
By flattening Hiroshima.

I know that the quantum cat is both dead and alive
Leaving it to probability to decide
And that the wave-particle duality
Should move us to pity
The Physicists
Who must sit
With its stringy twists
And lists
And lists
Of non-solutions
To grand unified pollutions.

But…
…oh, and

I know a gene codes for a sequence of amino acids
That makes up a protein
That needs to be folded into
A shape before it is useful
Its form follows function
And as such is a modernist
Where ornament is criminal
Yet mutation
Is evolution
And a cell that was uni-
Becomes multi, and complex, and is no longer free
-verse.

But also, I know

That political, religious and organisational systems
Are not to blame for those who suffer beneath them
Instead that lies at the door of the Shower
Of Shit who use them as tools of power.

All of these things, and more, I know.

However

Yet

But

Do I know the buggery
That is collapsing the baby’s buggy?

Now that
I don’t know.

And, if it is, how can the knowledge help us?

“…the subcallosal cingulate region), which mediates our unconscious and motor responses to emotional stress; the other is the right anterior insula, a region where self-awareness and interpersonal experience come together.
These two regions connect to the hypothalamus, which plays a role in basic functions like sleep, appetite and libido, and to three other important regions of the brain: the amygdala, which evaluates emotional salience; the hippocampus, which is concerned with memory; and the prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of executive function and self-esteem.”

The above is extracted from Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel’s piece in the New York Times: The New Science of Mind. It is about the attempts to quantify what is — to some — unquantifiable: a measure (a biomarker) for mental disorders, in which, it seems, we have made progress.

The exciting vista, perhaps, is the applicability of these biomarkers/methods to the wider public. Mental disorders are, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex class, notches at the far end of a continuum; where ‘stressed’, ‘shy’, ‘emotional’, ‘aggressive’ and even ‘OK’ all lie on the same continuum (by the way, I am painfully aware that these are labels born of 20th century Western psychology, but they make the point). That means that there may be the possibility of biomarkers with more general applicability — and that means we have the opportunity, at some point in the near future, to use them in much the same way as we use scales to measure weight and body-mass-index. If it can be measured, so the saying goes, it can be managed. And who wouldn’t want to be less stressed?

As an example of what I mean, the work of Sara Lazar has interested me for a while, I heard her first on the secular buddhist podcast (I’m not a buddhist but I am interested meditation as a brain exercise technology — and therefore its scientific underpinnings) and watched her Ted Talk. Her work uses fMRI scans to assess the results of meditation on the brain. You can read her paper yourself, but, in the interpretation of the researchers, the results show an ‘increase in grey matter’ in certain areas of the brain, for example,in the hippocampus, which, the study’s extract states, is “known to be important for learning and memory”, and a ‘decrease in grey matter’ in other areas of the brain, specifically the amygdala, which, the extract states, “is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress”.

Let me ask a quick question, given the three sources I have put into the previous paragraph, how likely now are you to consider using meditation versus how likely you were before reading it? And, how likely now would you engage in an 8 week course if — at the end of it — you could see thickened grey matter in your hippocampus?

Powerful, no?

The Big But

But the story doesn’t end there. For the interested observer, there has been a lot of controversy over the use of fMRI, and specifically when it comes to making claims over the ‘location’ of mental processes. The overselling of neuroscience has made Neuroskeptic, Mind Hacks and The Neurocritic essential reading: whenever a high profile neuro-story makes waves — it is to these blogs (and other similar) I go to get the sane view. In fact, the neuro-hyperbole has required a redressing book.

Erik Kandel, in the New York Times piece even starts with a warning:

These days it is easy to get irritated with the exaggerated interpretations of brain imaging — for example, that a single fMRI scan can reveal our innermost feelings — and with inflated claims about our understanding of the biological basis of our higher mental processes.

What’s perhaps worse, is not the blogosphere’s criticism of enthusiastic media interpretations, but inherent and, seemingly endemic, flaws in fMRI methodologies and statistical methods spanning the decades that has had the neuroscientists themselves questioning their relevance.

And none of that even addresses the deeper human sciences point about how we can even say anything about mental processes given metaphors created by those processes to provide a dynamic ‘selfing system’ a coherent (if illusory) conscious narrative. But, I’m taking a pragmatic view — if it works, it works — even if just within a certain frame of reference.

So, where does that leave us? On the one hand we have the promise of brain imaging, biomarkers and encouraging studies and TED talks like that of Sara Lazar’s, on the other we have the barrage of anti-fMRI sentiment. I found it difficult to work out what we did and what we didn’t know. Happy to concede there isn’t a brain area just for dreams that would flag up my desire to buy a new pair of jeans, but equally I’d rather not lose the romance of the amygdala response, or the significance of a bigger hippocampus in a London cabbie.

What, then, was an armchair popsci to do?

The answer

Me, I went to Quora. And I asked this question:

In neuroscience, how accurate is it to say that a brain area (or circuit) ‘mediates’, ‘evaluates’ or is the ‘seat of’ any particular facet of human experience?

And, within 24 hours got an excellent answer from Yohan John a PhD in Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University (and who blogs at Neurologism.com). It’s a long and well thought out answer (with 40-plus (at time of writing) up-votes it’s well worth reading) and the upshot was that brain imaging is not the only game in town, in fact, brain function has been studied using a variety of methods, from lesion studies to neuroanatomy, and that (in particular) certain areas are better studied than others — and therefore have a greater evidential provenance. Yohan says,

So to sum it up, sweeping statements about brain function should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the size of the pinch should be proportional to the newness of the claim. Some ideas about the hypothalamus, for example, have been corroborated by many of the techniques I have mentioned.

Which was good enough for me. Because, I think it left the Lazar study as viable (subject, I suppose, to its methodological rigour). And therefore, offers a real,scientific, evidential underpinning to a stress-reducing technique that can only benefit us all.

Is it to accurate say that a brain area is the 'seat of' any particular experience? was originally published in I. M. H. O. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How tech start-up entrepreneurs and angel investors survive in Extremistan: Applied AntiFragility

Nassim Taleb is a great thinker (Wikipedia describes him as an ‘epistemologist’, which, come my re-incarnation will be next-life’s aim), and an equally great bombast. I remember when I read The Black Swan back in 2007 — I felt like he was repeatedly kicking me in the Gaussians until I understood – no, agreed with — his points. Of course, when one of his Black Swans trampled all over the financial centres in 2008, one couldn’t help a kind of masochistic pleasure in recalling those ‘epistemological’ bruisings, for here, at terrifying scale, was precisely his point.

I recently listened to Taleb on the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lectures podcast, where he was talking about (his new book) AntiFragile. Primarily, Section IV: Optionality, Technology, and the intelligence of Anti-Fragility. And it got me thinking how of what he was saying in that lecture related to a bunch of work I had done at the back end of last year running Monte-Carlo simulations on a probability distribution derived from arguably the biggest data-set of Angel returns (on US start-ups): something which I think is worth sharing.

Extremistan

To give the Anti-Fragile idea a one-sentence elevator (and therefore to do it virtually no credit at all): It is the idea that we can be set up in such a way that we can benefit from randomness, opacity and volatility — specifically in those systems (for which there are many) that contain Black Swans. In Extremistan, these systems dominate. One Black Swan win can crush all losses — or one loss can crush all wins. But we have no (real) idea where that win (loss) comes from. Those with the temerity to make predictions are made to look like fools.

Both Tech entrepreneurs and investors live in Extremistan; Taleb specifically calls out Google and Microsoft as Black Swan companies.

Randomness

This is not the place to go into detail the dissonance that comes with (at least some) knowledge of the ubiquity of randomness but armchair pop-scis have been treated to some excellent recent expositions: Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman’s best seller Thinking Fast & Slow, Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkards Walk and even Taleb’s own Fooled by Randomness – and, suffice to say, we should all be armed with at least a passing appreciation of its power to deceive. Not least – its power to hoodwink into seeing patterns where non-exist. Or, famously, to attribute skill to a VC or fund manager who is just lucky enough to be that VC or Fund that happens to be on the far right of the gains spectrum in a place wholly predicted by the Rules of Randomness: especially in an industry of extreme volatility.

Convex Function of Chaos

Lets go back to our one-sentence elevator of anti-fragile: that we can be set up to benefit from randomness, opacity and volatility within a Black Swan system. What does this mean? Taleb, in his own post on Edge, puts this in simple terms, with the use of a straightforward mathematical function. One that shows an asymmetry of gains/losses under a stochastic process – where gains/losses are dependent upon the determination of some ex ante unknown (set-of) variable(s) (x). What is important here, is that determination of that set is sufficiently, and unremittingly, complex; that even using all of the universe’s atoms as a computing machine we could still not determine x. And working out whether any start-up will be a success is likely to be this complex: Pinterest, Instagram, anyone?

Figure (i) (from Taleb himself) demonstrates one of these asymmetries. Specifically, where the function is convex to chaos (or randomness, or volatility or luck or whatever). It is asymmetrical because the gains from the variable x being at (say) x+10 are different from the losses at (say) x-10. And it is convex because the gains at x+10 are greater than the losses at x-10.

Optionality of Things

AntiFragile is no more or no less complicated that option trading. You have the right but not the obligation to follow a bet, therefore your downside risk is managed (ideally minimized) but you can follow the gains, so your upside is maximised.

Investors, of course, know this well. It is the essence of seed investing.

If fact, Taleb himself has called it the ‘Optionality of Things’: and his post on Edge.org relates it to the optimum method for making gains in Research.

Fragile Swans

Taleb himself holds entrepreneurs up as heroes. And I think there is little doubt that tech start-ups have the opportunity to show Black Swan type returns – but it is far more likely that those start-ups will fail, bringing untold woe to the entrepreneurs (and some-told woe to their investors). Here’s to the risk-takers.

The AntiFragilista embraces the individual failure – or at least he is philosophical about it — for, that failure delivers knowledge, and, they have set themselves up in such a way that the loss (their downside risk) has been minimised. They also know that despite all the losses they suffer, when they hit that Black Swan – that start-up that hits global scale and millions of dollars of value – all those small losses will be swamped.

Which is all very well, but raises an obvious question. Can we use data to work out how likely it is that we can catch the tail. Because, if we had at least a probablistic idea about the regularity of the Black Swan in any particular system, then we can be even more anti-fragile.

In the Edge article, Taleb specifically states:

‘A “1/N’ strategy is almost always best with convex strategies… reducing the cost per attempt, compensate by multiplying the number of trials and allocating 1/N of the potential investment across N investments, and make N as large as possible. This allows us to minimize the probability of missing rather than maximise profits should one have a win… ‘

In other words, he is acknowledging that in the real world there is the real possibility that with finite resources one could run out of resource before a Black Swan swims along.

Which brings us to the relevant question. How many bets – and at what level – should we be making?

Chasing the tail

Following the trail of a Techcrunch article, I first came across the work of Robert Wiltbank – who had, with his graduate students, put together the largest data-set of angel returns, authoring a number papers — and then, via the same Techcrunch article, I managed to reach a very interesting man indeed. His name is Irving Ebert, he is out of Ottawa, is an ex engineer by trade, is a prolific angel investor, is Co-founder of PurpleAngel and founder of ArchAngel Capital. Irving, who, while working at Nortel, worked with Professor Eric von Hippel at MIT (who is best known for his work developing the concept of user innovation – that end-users, rather than manufacturers, are responsible for a large amount of innovation) to see how – even when the web was in its relative infancy — they could tap internet users as a source of product innovation. His is a technical but commercial mind.

Irving, as leader of an angel group, was specifically interested in analysing the potential performance of pooled angel funds such that they are invested on a portfolio basis across a number of investee companies. Given access to Robert’s published and unpublished data, Irving derived a probability distribution function upon which he performed Monte-Carlo simulations of many thousands of cycles to make predictions of returns for fund portfolios of n-companies following his own recommended investment strategy. That investment strategy is proprietary to him, and can’t be revealed here, but Robert – in his Techcrunch article – described Irving’s work as ‘outstanding’ – and so it is.

What was crucial from the data was that it showed that there is tail of ~7% of angel funded (assuming we make a £300k investment) start-ups hit a 20x return. And, what was equally as interesting, is of that 7% it was equally likely that the return would be 100x+ as it would be 20x.

Irving’s general conclusions are under wraps, however, Irving was kind enough to share his methodology with me: and has had me working hard creating my own probability distribution function so I could perform my own Monte-Carlo simulations. He has kindly allowed me to publish some of my results.

Lets do stats – the AntiFragile angel investor

Figure 1 below shows cumulative distribution functions representing results of Monte-Carlo simulations based on the PDF derived from the Wiltbank data for 1, 10 and 40 companies. The vertical (y) axis is multiple return for the fund, and the horizontal (x) axis charts the likelihood of that return. The mean is a constant: the mean return on my PDF (which is rather more coarse grained than Irving’s) is about 5.25x – Irving’s is different, but not by much. So, looking at the n=1 line, it demonstrates that there is a 55% probability of a zero return – which matches what we know about start-up failures.

The really interesting stuff lies further down – and further up – the curves. On the n=40 line, at what probability should we expect a zero return? The answer is – somewhere between 0 and 5%. In fact, there is only a 5% probability that we would get a 1.4x return or less. Or, to put it another way, there is in the order of a 95% probability that we will get at least 140% of our money back.

But, at n = 40 it also predicts a 40% probability of achieving an almost 6x return, in fact there is a 10% chance of getting an almost 9x return. A nine times return over 5 years is an IRR of ~73. All of this with a 95% probability of getting at least 140% of our money back.

This sounds like an antifragile angel investment strategy to me.

The AntiFragile Entrepreneur

But what about those lowly entreprenurs. Unlikely to afford the time, energy or expense to make tens of low-level investments in the hope of catching the Black Swan, are they, in the majority, left only with Taleb’s gratitude and honor in sacrificing themselves at the Great Altar of Extremistan?

I’m not so sure. After all, the Optionality of Things is not just about money (and even if it was, by starting 10 companies you still have a 50% change of getting a 3.36x return). It is also about time, interest, capacity, knowledge, skill: all of which should be allocated on a minimised downside risk basis while we await the Black Swan. Why should the Optionality of Things simply be vertical? Why not horizontal? Remember, the essence of optionality is the option not the obligation to follow any particular stream: to tinker, to bricolage; and to not continue unwavering along any path based on grand narrative and ex ante ‘knowledge’ (by the way, the similarity to the Lean Startup principles has not escaped me). For, as Taleb himself says, Understanding is a Poor Substitute for Convexity.