Solve for X (and Y and Z)

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about philosopher L.A. Paul, who writes about transformative experiences, and the impossibility of making rational choices in the face of them. For example, should you have kids? As she explores in “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting,”  until you do have kids, there’s no way to know how your life would change, or how you’d feel about those changes, if you did. Which, in turn, makes it impossible to rationally evaluate the decision in advance. Or consider a similar thought experiment, from her book Transformative Experience: imagine you have the option to become a vampire. Should you? Problematically, there’s no way to know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, so there’s similarly no way to know what to choose. As she puts it:

When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it — by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.

Most of Paul’s work revolves around choices that transform our lives. But these days, the world itself seems to be transforming around us, regardless of what we choose. Which, similarly, seems to construct a veil of ignorance between us and the future.

I felt that acutely this morning, trying to do some project planning. Normally, I genuinely love to strategize and plan. But, today, I found it hugely frustrating. Sure, all plans are subject to change, expressed intentions that inevitably shift as they confront reality. But good plans are still built around some set of baseline assumptions; in normal times, how life and the world is now is at least more or less how it’s likely to be in the near future, too. In the midst of a pandemic, however, that’s certainly not the case. In January, the idea that the entire country – indeed, most of the world as a whole – would be hiding out at home 24/7 would have seemed unthinkable. Now, it’s hard to imagine when, and how, that’s going to end.

And as I tried to plan, even in the wake of the huge, recent changes, I also found it hard not to continually bias towards normalcy, not to expect a sort of life regression to the mean. I mean, six or nine months from now, how could New Yorkers still be wearing masks full-time and social-distancing everywhere they go? I just can’t imagine them keeping it up. Yet, on the other hand, I’m equally unable to explain a version of the future in which they don’t, without things spiraling into an even more catastrophic COVID surge.

So, facing that all, I’ve been trying to plan in ways that optimize optionality – paths I can push forward on in the here and now that still yield at least incremental progress in the widest array of possible futures. And I think I’m getting somewhere, slowly. But there are so many unknowns – known unknowns and unknown unknowns – that the whole thing feels slippery enough to make my brain hurt.

May 14, 2020

“I Am Waiting”

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

May 13, 2020

It’s Chinatown

One thing I’ll definitely appreciate after this pandemic ends: restaurants. Turns out, it’s awesome to go somewhere, and have somebody who isn’t you cook the food and clean up after. In our neighborhood, there are a slew of restaurants open for pickup and delivery even now. But, out of an abundance of caution, Jess and I have held off, cooking all of our meals at home instead.

To make meal planning easier, we’ve settled onto a rotating thematic schedule: Italian Sunday, Asian Monday, Taco Tuesday, etc. And then, each week, we choose specific dinner dishes to slot in for given days. Sometimes, we’ll opt for relatively straight-forward options. But, recently, as we’ve increasingly missed restaurant favorites, some menus have become increasingly convoluted.

This past Friday, when we were charting out plans for this week, Jess said that she was craving Han Dynasty’s dry pepper style tofu. So I agreed to make that for her, and a chicken version for me. Plus, I hadn’t had dim sum for months, and so I decided I’d make some pot stickers and siu mai and egg rolls.

As they say, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Fortuitously, about two years back, the Korean grocery chain HMart opened an amazing location on the Upper West Side, about twenty blocks up from us. So, yesterday afternoon, I hoofed it up there, to buy the slew of ingredients needed that aren’t available at our local Whole Foods. Sadly, my work for the day had taken longer than expected, so I didn’t head out until late in the afternoon, and therefore didn’t make it back until 6:30pm or so. At which point, I still had to infuse chili oil, marinate chicken, deep-fry tofu, prep the sauce and ingredients and stir-fry it all up, and make the fillings for and hand-form and steam and fry the dim sum.

Which, not surprisingly, wasn’t exactly quick. By the time we ate, it was nearly 11pm. And though it was delicious, and I even managed to freeze a ton of prepped dumplings for future, speedier use, I was exhausted and overwhelmed by the end of the night. Post-dinner, as I had used pretty much every pot and pan and bowl we own in the cooking process, Jess and I only managed to make it through cleaning half of it, before giving up for the night, and picking up again to finish this morning.

All of which is to say, the next time we get the same meal delivered from Han Dynasty, I’ll be unbelievably thrilled to pay them $60 to do all of that for me while we sit watching TV on the couch. After last night, it would still seem cheap at even two or three times the price.

May 12, 2020

Sweating Safely

While shifting to an all-virtual version of Composite has been going better than expected – it’s only sort of a total clusterfuck – I know a bunch of our beta-testers, like me, are looking forward to returning to in-gym, fully-equipped workouts. While we’ve gotten creative, and made do surprisingly well with whatever odds and ends people have on hand (even if that’s, frequently, just their own bodies), it’s just far more effective and efficient to train using barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells, and other purpose-built tools.

That said, in the midst of this pandemic, gyms definitely can’t operate as they did before. And though I’ve seen a bunch of gyms’ prospective sets of post-opening changes and accommodations, I don’t think most go nearly far enough. Or, put another way, I don’t think I’d feel safe working out in those gyms myself in those conditions, much less recommending it to anyone else. Which, frankly, isn’t surprising; given the constraints of existing business models, there’s only so much they can do before they bankrupt out in the process.

So, my team and I are working on a skunkworks project: seeing if, starting from scratch, it’s possible to stand up a solution that works. Though it would be inherently temporary – only operating until the viral risk recedes – we hope it can get us and our clients making progress, safely, in a way that we can’t elsewhere.

It’s definitely still a work in progress. But here a few of the things we think a gym would need to sanely operate in this environment:

Space. Simply put, the now-proverbial ‘six feet’ isn’t nearly far enough, especially in an environment where people are breathing hard. (See, also, also.) Based on our probabilistic modeling, we think people need more like 15 feet of mean separation – or a whopping 225 sqft per exerciser. In other words, you need a ton of space, and a very small number of simultaneous members.

Masks. We’ve seen several gyms put up regulations requiring masks, except when people are ‘exercising vigorously.’ As my father, a pulmonologist at Stanford, put it: that’s a bit like requiring condoms, except for when people are actually having sex. In other words: masks, for everyone, all the time. Additionally, not all masks are created equal. Though there’s a balance between filtration, breathability, comfort, and liquid resistance (especially important when people are sweating up a storm), we think ASTM-2 or ASTM-3 surgical masks strike that balance best, and they’re tested / certified for consistency in a way that most masks aren’t. As people probably can’t round those up on their own, gyms would need to provide them to members coming in the door, for single workout-use.

Ventilation / Filtration. Even after cutting down viral emissions with a mask, and separating people in space, air flow patterns within a space are a huge issue, able to quickly carry particles clear across even large rooms. So, in short, gyms need ventilation modeled after operating rooms: designed to pull air out of the room as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, most AC systems are built with the opposite intention: spreading a body of air throughout an entire the space, rather than sucking it directly out. Minimally, we think a safe gym needs ten air-changes per hour, supplemented with an equally robust HEPA filtration system, to get viral particles out ASAP.

Sterilization: Depending on members to wipe down equipment just isn’t going to cut it. Is someone supposed to wipe down every barbell, plate, collar, dumbbell, bench, etc., etc. that they touch throughout their whole workout? Instead, we think equipment management needs to work more like, say, provided gym towels do currently. After anything is touched, that equipment is set aside as ‘dirty’ until staff can completely sterilize it, and replace it for use by a subsequent member. Doing that at scale probably involves electrostatically disinfecting everything between uses, the same technique used in many hospital ORs.

Managing that all is incredibly tough. To make it work, you probably need about a thousand square feet to handle just three members and a trainer on staff. You probably need three separate, fully-equipped ‘zones,’ one for each of those members, so they can stay entirely in their own zones, just using the stuff around them. You’d need to schedule their workouts, so that after their hour or 75 minutes of working out, there would be 15-30 minutes for someone to sterilize and reset the equipment before the next member came in to use that zone. And you’d need to have ASTM masks (along with temperature scans) waiting at the front door, as well as a constantly-operating ventiliation/filtration system.

So, fiscally speaking, probably not the best model in terms of maximizing profit. But, at the same time, running the numbers, we think it absolutely works. And, at the moment, we don’t see any other safe, sane choice.

May 11, 2020