I am thrilled and excited to welcome Susie into our home!

Susie is a rich brown Bengal kitten, born on May 10^th of this year. She quickly figured out what’s what, zoomed around to explore all the nooks and crannies (she’s quite a blur), and most importantly kept Hobbes at bay by hissing and snarling at him, even as he persisted in chasing after her (very cautiously) trying to make her feel welcome.

Susie is named after Calvin’s nemesis — but Hobbes knows they secretly like each other.

Woodland Park Zoo was a good place to be yesterday, with Seth Meyers performing his standup comedy show in an open-air setting. I like Seth Meyers — his comedy is light-hearted and fun, in this case focusing on his family and what it’s like to be a New Yorker, a husband, and a dad with three young kids.

Next time we do something like this, we should remember to carry our own chairs — it’s more comfortable than sitting on the grass.

We saw a bunch of flamingos on the way out.

P. S. It’s pretty cool that Woodland Park Zoo has the “zoo.org” domain…

In a previous post, I talked about false choices, situations where one is persuaded to pick from one of several sub-optimal options like A versus B when better ones exist outside the realm of consideration. I would like to highlight the other side of the problem, arguably a bigger deal for many people, which is this: it is usually not obvious how to classify a problem at hand into an A versus B situation in the first place.

Here’s an example: we have the well-known explore-exploit tradeoff that recognizes the dilemma we face between choosing the best option from what we know versus continuing to look for better options (at the cost of potentially losing what we already have in hand). In Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian points out that the best approach for such a problem is to dedicate the first 37% of your time in explore mode and the rest in exploit mode, that is, picking the next available “best” option¹. Here’s the kicker though: for someone who isn’t aware of this tradeoff in the first place and doesn’t realize that their actions could be classified into exploratory or exploitative ones, how are they to even know to look for a solution? And besides, it seems like we pulled this explore-exploit tradeoff out of thin air — what other dimensions are we missing?

Here are a few more:

There are undoubtedly many more that could be added to this list. I would offer the following observation: Category B is never enough — one must spend a good chunk of their time in Category A, maybe even up to 80% for some of them. I think it has something to do with how rapidly the environment is evolving, and how well-suited we are to adapt when our world shifts around us.

So much of our lives are affected by false choices. By ‘false choice’, I mean a decision where two options are presented to us and we make a choice without seeking out additional alternatives. Want Iced Latte or Melted Chocolate ice cream? Maybe the answer should be: Sea Salt & Caramel — but you have to know to ask!

Perhaps this is all a magic trick that we play upon on our own minds. It is my untested hypothesis that making the choices more detailed and intricate drives people to start focusing on its details and become less curious about alternatives — vanilla options, like Vanilla versus Chocolate, are more likely to be questioned than something exotic, like Iced Latte versus Melted Chocolate.

Within a group, the options being highly detailed can fool people into believing that they’ve been thought through deeply (by someone else). Some people have learned to invert the filter, and treat excess detail as a sign of shallow synthesis. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, and so this leads us to another type of false choice — options being considered mutually exclusive when they can very well co-exist, and implying a polarization when one really ought to speak of degrees within a spectrum.

Whenever I am presented with options, say A versus B, I usually start by seeking to understand how they came up with these options, and whether there were other options that got filtered out, based on unspoken assumptions or constraints. Then I check to see what they are optimizing for, and pick options that work, often going for a mix and match approach. The trick here is to never rule out options but simply put a pin in it saying, “This option works only if constraints X, Y and Z are broken…”

By the way, since you forgot to ask, the right answer to the ice cream conundrum is to have half Raspberry, half Chocolate, with some Candied Hazelnut as a topping.

Yesterday, Anu and I were out with friends in the vicinity of Seattle downtown, and we discovered this excellent pizza restaurant called MOTO Pizza. It’s a hidden gem to be sure, not easy to find when you’re walking by. Great Detroit-style deep dish pizza (with many vegetarian options), along with a cool ambiance.

From what I can tell from their website, they only started operations post-2020 (The Great Pandemic of the 21st century) beginning with their West Seattle location, and now have 5 stores with 2 more “coming soon”. That sounds great — they even have a Bellevue Square store — but I sometimes worry about cafes and restaurants, especially the good ones, expanding too fast, then discovering that they can’t carry the risk of inflation, economic slowdown, or any cooling of customer interest.