It was a great pleasure to collaborate with Brian Johnson on the balloon project. He and I had been roomates our freshman year of college, but having pursued separate paths after school hadn't gotten to work together much. Because I'm independent and tend to be interested in doing random and wacky things, I find myself trying to do them by myself a lot, which hasn't worked very well. This project reminded me how much easier it is to accomplish things with a co-conspirator - someone to bounce ideas off of, to take over when your energy flags, to see the holes in your designs. The open-source notion that "to enough eyes, all bugs are transparent" applies much more broadly than the field of programming.

This particularly matters as I am someone who cares a lot about rationality and finding objective truth, yet have many psychological aspects which make these hard to achieve. I get overenthusiastic and attached to ideas, defensive when they are challenged, optimistic about things I want to have happen or be true, and biased about evidence. In short, I'm a human. The most elegant solution to this, and the one I had previously seen as the best, was to focus on self-improvement, on clarifying my thought and increasing my objectivity. I still think this is valuable - but perhaps it is unreasonable to think that significant change in a person is possible. An alternate strategy, less dependent on optimistic assumptions about the human capacity for change, now presents itself.

Use other intelligent humans to refine your ideas. Be biased about your viewpoints and critical of theirs, as your nature impels you, and take enthusiastic turns as the attacker and defender. But at the end of the session, stop and give full credence to their arguments. Recognize yourself as biased, and evaluate the evidence with that in mind, giving significant weight to your collaborators opinions. Its hard to be objective all the time, so take turns being a partial participant and an unbiased moderator.

One of my beliefs abould self-improvement is that as we become older, we do not so much transform our irrationalities as learn to recognize and compensate for them. We admit that we cannot control our hunger for sweets in the kitchen, so we control it in the grocery store. We realize that we won't exercise if we don't have to, so we create an artificial committment like signing up for a triathalon. The above strategy fits nicely into this meta-method. Do I like it because of that bias, or have I hit upon something valid? I've taken one side, and so I leave it to you, my collaborators, to argue the other, and aid me in finding some objective truth.

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