Near the end, though, he makes this observation, which has been sitting with me: “If you are going to hire, marry, befriend, manage or coach people, shouldn’t you know their core affect, the emotional base line they carry through life? Shouldn’t you know their emotional profile, the distinctive way they construct emotions in diverse circumstances? Shouldn’t you know how good they are at discerning, labeling and expressing their emotions?”

The answer to that rhetorical question is plainly yes, but the hard part is “How?”.

In the article, he talks about how rare it is for people to understand the physical signals that trigger different kinds of emotion in themselves and points at a method for how to do this (Mark Brackett’s book Permission to Feel). But how does one learn this about someone as an outsider?

You can’t just ask them, at least not directly, if they don’t know themselves. Observation is surely a factor – seeing how someone responds in various circumstances – but this isn’t that practical. I’m curious about what sorts of questions one might ask to learn this. Perhaps there are questions that help someone understand themselves, modeled on Brackett’s method, or maybe there are things that are easier for an outsider to see that can be probed. I’m not sure, but this is something I’d like to try to be better at.

It’s more complicated than that, of course, but you’ll have to ask me about details in person. Suffice to say that I valued the opportunity and the things I learned along the way, I enjoyed getting to know everyone on the team, and will miss all the good times we had working and hanging out together.

Jeff, Michael, Kate, Juri, Akanksha and Jay – it’s been a pleasure – I hope we get to hang out some more soon!

So. What’s next, then?

For a start, I’m going to take some time to write and get my head in the game. Then, I’ll be getting my LinkedIn profile and résumé in order and launching into the job hunt. It’s daunting, as it always is, but I have some ideas on how I’m going to approach things that are a bit unconventional and which I’ll share here later. I’m also really relishing the idea of having a bit more time to build some things for myself, take some courses, and learn some new stuff.

For now, though, I’m going to go spend some quality time with Siggy and maybe read a book or two.

The challenge is that while it’s relatively easy for groups to define ethical principles that they plan to operate by, it’s much harder to actually put these principles into practice in new applications and at an organizational scale. There’s a need for reviews or some other type of deliberate activity that seeks to spot problems so that something can be done about them, and of course this is not easy.

The video offers the metaphor of bird-spotting, which I quite like – we encounter birds (ethical issues) all the time, but most of the time we just gloss over them and don’t recognize them. Maybe if we saw a bright red parrot we’d react, but most birds (ethical issues) are small, brown, and easy to ignore. With training and effort, however, we can learn where they might be hidden, how to tell them apart, and where different varieties are more likely to exist. 

Where the metaphor breaks down, of course, is that bird-watchers want the birds they spot to survive, whereas issue spotters are looking for ethical issues in order to quash or resolve them. 

Another perspective mentioned that I quite appreciate is the idea of lenses, that by deliberately looking at a situation from a series of different perspectives and using a series of different cognitive frameworks, we can train ourselves to do a much better job of looking for birds (issues) than just staring at the trees for hours. I was inspired to this way of thinking years ago by Jesse Schell’s Game Design (a Book of Lenses), and it’s amazing how broadly applicable this approach is.

Anyway – the video is only a few minutes long and it’s important stuff, so I strongly recommend checking it out.

(NB – if you want to go deeper, it’s part of a longer course about responsible AI available from Google’s QwikLabs). Ask me if you want more info!

Svanaug Sørheim Nilsen

My mother’s memorial came immediately as I recovered from a bout of Covid, and so I did not prepare a written eulogy. Rather, I let me sister take the lead and made some notes from which I spoke off the cuff on the day. You can view her memorial below; the eulogies start from about 7:45.

Alan Ronald Nilsen

For my father’s memorial service, I was in a better place to be prepared. I was stressed and sad, of course, but the day before the service, when I sat down to make some notes, the words just flowed. The eulogy as delivered was a little different, of course, but the substance was the same. I have a recording of this service, but unfortunately, the audio has some problems, so it will be a while before I’m able to post it.

Here’s the text I wrote:

I never thought my father would die from cancer. He was always such an active person that I assumed he’d take one risk too many and either fall out of a 20m macrocarpa tree, or jump from the front of his dinghy to the nine-pin rocks in Kaikoura to gather mussels on a day too stormy to be out on the water and miss. So, to see him succumb to cancer was in one way particularly hard, because it meant he’d lost the ability to be so active, but it was also a blessing, because it meant that he lived a full long life and never did take that fall.

As a child, he was Pappa, and later Pop, or even just “old man”. When I was small, we played back yard cricket together and went on walks in the hills or around the Kaikoura peninsula. He would pick up pieces of wood, or lost fishing buoys, or bits of rope. Mum would always complain, but he’d take them home and find a use for them. Eventually. We went on many adventures together, gathering pupu sea snails, exploring the Kaikoura reef, building dams on the Puhi Puhi river, and marveling at his relationship with piwakawaka. Good times.

To others, he was known for his woodworking, his fruit trees, and, before he retired from that job, the towel racks and shelf brackets he made and shared from his workshop at Shirley Intermediate. There was nothing he liked more than to make a thing and see that thing appreciated in someone’s hands. Before his illness made clear that he wouldn’t make it that far, he pushed me to delay our visit as late as possible so that Siggy could be here late in the season so they could eat plums and strawberries from his garden together. I think that realizing that he wouldn’t be there for that was one of the saddest things for him at the end.

Through his life and actions, he offered several important values and lessons that I would like to share:

First, that learning is a lifelong thing. As long as I remember, he was taking one course or another at Ara, then the Christchurch Polytech. On Saturday mornings he’d take us to visit their library. And when, at around age 60, he left his teaching position at Shirley Intermediate, he didn’t consider retirement; he went straight back to school and got certified to do do carpentry, which work he continued for another decade or so.

Second, that hard work is its own reward. I don’t know if he ever articulated this, but he demonstrated that work, when chosen voluntarily and being towards a goal set by oneself, is a joyous thing that gives one purpose and furthermore, yields fruit both literal and metaphorical that can be shared with those around you.

Third, the value of tenacity. Never let it be said that my father would take no for answer once he got it into his head that a thing should be done. He was determined and completely shameless in asking for things to reach his goals. As children, he would take us to Lyttelton harbour and talk sailors into letting him bring his small children on board to look around. Once, we formed a friendship with the crew of a Soviet fishing vessel that resulted in gifts on their return some time later and in us dining on borscht with them in the ship’s mess.

Last, he inspired me with his adventurousness. As a young man in the late sixties, he left home in search of opportunity and adventure, joining the crew of a merchant sea vessel. I lose track of the specifics of his journeys, but he spent time in South Africa, Trinidad, and Egypt, as well as in northern Europe where eventually he met Mum. I was always curious about this time of his life, and one of my greatest regrets is having never been able to get him to write these stories down and having not been more persistent in my attempts to collect oral history from him as he neared the end. In the pain and frustration of his decline this past year, it was very difficult to find him in a storytelling mood, and in my own sadness it was very hard to push him into it. I wish I had done more of this, but we at least had many short conversations, many of which I recorded. I will probably never be as adventurous as he was, but he showed me that there is virtue in deciding to do something and then just doing it for no other reason than because you want to and it seems like it might be interesting.

A memorial is an opportunity to commemorate and celebrate a life. But it is also an opportunity for reflection. While it is important to remember the times we spent together and the things he did, perhaps the best memorial I can offer is to try more to live and learn from some of his life and values, particularly those of service, tenacity and adventurousness. I hope that his life can serve as an example to us all in this way. We were never as intellectually or emotionally close as I hope to be with Siggy, but I was always so proud of having him as my father. I wish I’d been able to do a better job of letting him know this. Thank you.

It’s been a rough time. That’s not to say that good things haven’t happened. I’ve met new people, spent a lot of good times watching my son learn about the world, and gotten involved in a promising new startup which, while the source of a lot of emotional ups and downs, shows a lot of promise and offers the possibility of achieving some personal dreams of mine. The point of this post is more about achieving some catharthis through sharing and being vulnerable around the difficulties I’ve faced and continue to struggle and learn from the impact of.

My Mother’s Illness

My mother’s illness was diagnosed in mid-2022. The timing of this news was particularly unfortunate as I had recently chosen to leave a job and team that I loved due to reasons that I won’t go into here but which were very upsetting and stressful, and was in the middle of discovering that the job and company I’d gone to were not what they appeared to be when I made the move. Coupled with this, the news gave me the feeling that the life I’d built was toppling down around me, a feeling which is ongoing.

Her diagnosis was pilocytic astrocytoma, a cancer of the brain that normally occurs in children and only very rarely in adults, making it hard for the neurologist to predict how it would behave. In her case, it was in the cerebellum, leading to a number of uncomfortable side-effects such as nausea and vertigo that had a substantial impact on her enjoyment of life. There’s more to this story, but the short version I’ll share here is that she received radiotherapy in October 2022 that seemed to be helping, but then in late January 2023, she developed aphasia and had a significant decrease in her ability to move and look after herself. After a few weeks in hospital, she relocated to WindsorCare, a hospital-level assisted living facility. Bridget, Siggy and I were fortunate to spend time with her from December 2022 through February 2023, and the time she had to get to know Siggy was incredibly meaningful to me. Bridget’s visa and an obligation I had to teach a course starting in March 2023 meant that we weren’t able to stay in NZ much after her transfer, but we got frequent updates about her condition from my father and sister as things progressed. Then, in late April, I got a call that she was heading downhill and that I should make plans to come. That call came on a Friday, and I was on a plane the following Tuesday. Sadly, that wasn’t fast enough, and she passed away early in the morning that Thursday, just as I was landing in Auckland. I have immense regrets about this – I had chosen to fly on Tuesday rather than on the weekend as there was a significant difference in the cost of flights and because this would give me more time to arrange someone to cover my teaching obligations. We thought she was stable enough to last until I got there, but that turned out to be wrong, and I missed the opportunity to say goodbye in person.

Her memorial service at her church, St Paul’s Lutheran, was beautiful, but my trip was on the whole awful, as somewhere along the way, I caught Covid and spent much of my time in bed with that. Worse, I gave it to my father, though thankfully we were able to get him on Paxlovid right away and his experience of it was quite mild. Mine was not severe but was nonetheless highly uncomfortable and disruptive, and the time I’d hoped to spend with family and friends was compressed into a brief 48 hours near the end of my trip.

My Father’s Illness

On Christmas Eve 2022, we noticed that my father was getting crankier and crankier, in a way that seemed abnormal. Without going into details, it turned out that he had been experiencing discomfort and later increasingly intense pain throughout the day, eventually resulting in a long night at urgent care where he was treated with a catheter that greatly improved his level of comfort and mood. He later received prostate surgery, and was diagnosed at that time with prostate cancer. I learned of this in March or April of 2023. Scans conducted at that time indicated that the cancer had not spread significantly and so the prognosis was good. Slightly more alarming, however, were some abnormalities in his liver that the doctors were puzzled by, as they were not consistent with prostate cancer and were unclear in the imaging. Subsequent rounds of imaging were unclear and inconclusive, but showed no immediate signs of progression. As the year progressed, however, my father began to experience pain in his hips and later his back. He received treatment to reduce the pain, but unbeknowst to him (though suspected by my sister), this pain was related to the liver abnormalities and, in hindsight, we now know was part of the same cancer. In October sometime, he woke up and was unable to get out of bed himself. He made use of his medical alarm and was taken to hospital. At this point, suddenly diagnostic and medical work became much faster, and it was determined that he was suffering from a mystery cancer whose primary could not be identified. His prostate cancer showed signs of being well under control, and the best guess at this point is that he was suffering from an aggressive re-emergence of one of the other forms of cancer he’d fought (and apparently overcome) back in 2016. In early November, he was transferred to WindsorCare, two doors down from the room where my mother spent her final months. Sadly, his time there was to be much shorter, and less than two weeks later we got a call from the nurse suggesting that his time was limited. By then he had lost an immense amount of weight and was almost permanently unconscious. My sister and I stayed with him in shifts for about 48 hours, when midway through a conversation we were having, he suddenly stopped breathing. I’m not really ready to talk about my emotions related to this vigil, but I’m very grateful to have been able to have been there. It was surreal and horrific, but also peaceful and good to experience.

His memorial was conducted at the same place as my mother’s, St Paul’s Lutheran Church. My father was not a particularly religious man, even at the end, but the church had been a part of our lives since before I was born, and it just made sense to host it there. The Pastor, Mark, was very supportive throughout, and I’m very grateful to him for his compassion and support throughout. My father was a good gardener, a wood turner, a builder, a grower of fruiter trees and collector of nuts, and an old man of the sea, and so attendees of the funeral were offered bags of walnuts or small wooden items he’d made as mementoes. It felt very right. I read a poem, which I knew going in I would be unable to get through with breaking down in tears, and so I did exactly that. I also gave a eulogy, as did my sister, and her husband, Dave, gave a wonderful sermon drawing on my father’s life.

Other things

In the face of the above events, the other challenges I’ve faced this year and continue to grapple with all seem small and insignificant. If I can hold myself together through my parents’ fights with cancer and eventual deaths, surely I can cope with everything else that’s going on.

On the face of it, and from the most objective perspective I’m able to take, surely that’s true. I have my health, my mind, and my skills. I have financial resources that give me time to make choices and consider my options. I have a loving and supportive wife, a wonderful and inspiring son, and good friends. I have a robust set of philosophical and practical tools to let me cope with life. But, the reality is, I’m exhausted by this all. It seems like very few decisions I’ve made in the last 18 months have led to positive outcomes, and that I’m surviving on the momentum of resources I built up long ago.

I’m emotionally drained and struggle to find enduring joy in things. I’m grateful that I can still enjoy certain things in the moment, particularly walks in the hills, learning and reading, working on projects, and games with friends, but the context against which everything is happening feels very bleak, so it’s very hard to feel positive for long, and the time I spend learning and working seems much less justified and worthwhile, even though I know intellectually that I enjoy it. This is a difficult place to be in general, and is profoundly unsettling one in which to face the risk and uncertainty involved in entrepreneurial life. It makes me question everything. I know from my own stubbornness and the reason that I’m able to grasp at when I’m feeling objective that I will get through this, and I know from what I’ve read and the experience of others that I’ll get through it all, but right now, everything is just a bit gray, bleak, and sad.

Conclusion

I wrote the above largely for posterity and for my own edification, but if you’ve gotten this far, thanks for your time. If you’d like to help, I think the things I need right now are things that anchor me and make me feel like I’m still grounded in a life that’s positive and well-rounded. In a way, I need to feel like none of this ever happened, while also becoming better able to acknowledge that it did, that I learned from it, and that while it’s big and hard, it’s also just part of my story and something not to be burdened by. So, I’m looking for things to participate in that make me feel normal. Reminders that people are out there who want to include me and that I’m not alone. I figure that while enduring happiness seems to be out of my grasp at the moment, it can only be the case that moments and short periods of joy will lead me in that direction. I probably need that sense of normality more than I need condolences or reminders that I’ll get through this. I know that, intellectually – the problem is feeling that and getting past all of the emotions and parts of mind that are unable to accept it.

Aside from explaining a complex technical object in a clear and easy to understand way, the article stands out by its use of small interactive 3D scenes to demonstrate the physics and interactions between various elements of the mechanism.

Definitely worth a look for anyone interested in 3D visualization or technical education. Also, watches.

Plus, the author has a variety of other articles on subjects such as GPS, ship design, lenses & cameras, and engines. All written in the same detailed way. Very cool.

https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

For those who haven’t played with it yet, go to https://www.craiyon.com/ and type in something fun (or horrifying). The AI will then attempt to create an image of your idea.

It’s absurd, but the metaphor of giving each person a space to call their own and letting them be themselves within it really isn’t too bad as a recipe for keeping humans happy.

I don’t want to comment on current affairs and specific events because I don’t know enough and my analytical nature isn’t welcome when emotions are raw.

I’ll just say this: I stand in solidarity with the fight for justice and with anyone who is pursuing it in a peaceful or otherwise appropriate way.

Be strong. Take care.

I intended it as a quick note of support for the people I see standing up for justice around me while also indicating why I wasn’t saying more or getting into the conversation.

It stuck with me for a bit, though, and I began to feel dissatisfied, mostly because saying “I don’t know enough” in the face of facts that are clearly unjust is inaccurate and, if taken seriously rather than as the error it was, is an abdication of both reason and responsibility.

So, I felt the need to clarify with the following:

I’m feeling slightly dissatisfied with my above statement with respect to the George Floyd murder and the ongoing racial violence and protests in response to it around the US.

It’s not that I don’t know enough to hold strong opinions about police violence in the US. I have those in spades.

It’s that I don’t know enough about the history, the way it has affected communities (both black and white), and all of the underlying causes and injustices in order to be able to participate meaningfully in the discussion. Furthermore, with my non-American perspective and analytical nature combined with my coming from a place of not knowing, I would need / want to ask a lot of questions in order to participate, which experience suggests is not the sort of conversation people are looking to have right now.

I wanted to just leave that aside and say “hey, the high-minded theoretical stuff I care about isn’t important right now, but I stand with you” to folks who need to feel support right now.

But that’s not enough. I think I ought to also state some things that I do know.

– George Floyd was, at a minimum, the victim of voluntary manslaughter. Murder’s a bit harder to argue as it requires intent to kill, but regardless, this was a criminal act and should be treated as such.

– Police violence is just as wrong as any other kind of violence. There are some exceptions for it (notably using violence to explicitly prevent violence and protect others), but police in the US (and to a lesser extent elsewhere) also seem to think that violence is OK if it makes things more convenient for them. That’s disgusting.

– Police culture in many places is diseased and broken. I know there are many conscientious, ethical, and good police officers out there, but it’s clear that there are also many negligent, aggressive, or downright cruel officers too. I think society works best when it’s regulated with policing by consent and something like the Peelian principles, but modern policing just seems to be drifting further and further away from those. I find this depressing.

– I’m deeply troubled by the violence that’s going on inside some of these protests, particularly by the fact that outside groups are using them as cover for looting and extremism. The Boogaloo boys, for example, are repugnant children. I have much anger about the tacit consent to untruth that much of society gives and which allows these movements to grow and flourish, but that’s not something I want to go into here.

– I know that I don’t know enough about how this country works, and I’m scared, disgusted and depressed by it. This is not a new thing – I’ve never had a particularly high opinion of American culture overall, and is why when Trump was elected I was not outraged or surprised but just resigned as I saw it as just another stage in the decline and decay that I already saw around me. To be clear, I’m talking about American society and culture here, not American individuals. I know many fantastic individual Americans from all over the spectrum, and the difference in how I feel about them and how I feel about American society is jarring to me.

– I need to internalize the fact that I can never be a normal participant in the conversation about racism in the US – I will always be an outsider. That won’t stop me wanting to learn or talk, of course, but I need to get used to the idea that what I say will often not be heard in the way I intend it and that a lot of the time the best thing I can do is just listen and be supportive. I just exist in a different context, and that barrier will probably never go away. I feel instead compelled to learn more about my own country and to learn more about the troubles and history in its culture, as there I can at least feel like I’m a part of it.

So, that’s a fuller explanation of my original intent. I don’t feel prepared or adequate to add to the conversation about race in the US at this time, but I don’t want to abdicate my reason and just say “I don’t know enough”.

Because I do know enough to recognize injustice when I see it, and right now, I see it everywhere.

Kia kaha, American friends.

Is that even a moral question to contemplate?

Like it or not, it’s something we have to think about now.

The classic approach is to come up with a Value of Statistical Life figure, basically the amount that society would be willing to spend to save a single life. In NZ it’s around $4.4 million; most other developed nations have a roughly similar figure.

Tim Harford (basically my favorite economist) did a column a week or so ago in the Financial Times that outlines an alternative approach. Instead of balancing expenditure with actual death, balance it with risk.

This turns out to be much easier to do and is also more intuitive for handling situations where a lot of people take on a small risk as a result of some policy (rather than thinking of whether we should save one nonspecific person). In particular, we can look at people’s actual behavior to see how much they’re willing to spend to manage risk in their own lives.

Anyway, Tim’s a better writer than me, so read the article.