Aposematism

From Wikipedia:

Aposematism (from Greek ἀπό apo away, σ̑ημα sema sign) was a new term coined by Edward Bagnall Poulton for Alfred Russel Wallace's concept of warning coloration. It describes a family of antipredator adaptations in which a warning signal is associated with the unprofitability of a prey item to potential predators. Aposematism always involves an advertising signal. The warning signal may take the form of conspicuous animal coloration, sounds, odours or other perceivable characteristics. Aposematic signals are beneficial for both the predator and prey, since both avoid potential harm.
 

Aposematism is exploited in Müllerian mimicry, where species with strong defences evolve to resemble one another. By mimicking similarly coloured species, the warning signal to predators is shared, causing them to learn more quickly at less of a cost to each of the species.
 

Warning signals do not necessarily require that a species actually possesses chemical or physical defences to deter predators. Mimics such as the nonvenomous California mountain kingsnake (Lampropeltis zonata), which has yellow, red, and black bands similar to those of highly venomous coral snake species, have essentially piggybacked on the successful aposematism of the model. The evolution of a warning signal by a mimicking species that resembles a species that possesses strong defences is known as Batesian mimicry.
 

Some wonderful terms in there like aposematism, Müllerian mimicry, Batesian mimicry. I recently wrote about the value of using rhetoric to encode one's ideas. German is gloriously efficient in its compression, with single words like schadenfreude for phenomenon that require many more words in English, but fields like science, philosophy, psychology, and sociology offer their own concise gems of language.

The rest of the entry is a good read on why aposematism might have come to be despite seeming to be an evolutionary paradox, and just what Müllerian and Batesian mimicry refer to.

What intrigues me about aposematism is how it functions as a really overt form of signaling. I find myself reaching for the framework of signaling theory often these days, perhaps because once you've lived a certain number of years, you've had a chance to see the relative effectiveness or futility of past signals, but you're not yet old enough to be at the point where your remaining days are so few or your status in the world so static that signals no longer matter.

When time stretches eon and eon

One of my favorite movies from Sundance this past January was David Lowery's A Ghost Story, which remains one of the better movies in what has been a weak year at the cinema. One reason it is so moving is a stretch of the film which decides to take a super long view of time. We're talking centuries long, as in a time lapse that bounds across years and decades in mere seconds.

[The movie also spends five minutes on one much discussed, uncut shot of Rooney Mara eating a pie, so it is a film that plays with time dilation in both directions, one of its several interesting formal tactics.]

Sometimes we can only get true perspective on life by looking at it through binoculars turned backwards. It all sounds a bit vague and hand-wavy except we have evidence that a 10,000 foot view really can alter one's mind. The overview effect is a phenomenon in which astronauts who have seen Earth floating in the vast emptiness of space return to the planet with an intense global perspective, having moved beyond the petty concerns of individual nations or communities. We humans are susceptible to perceptual hacking, but that makes us a fun kit to tinker with.

Perhaps growing older has increased my fondness for art that folds time in on itself so densely. What do we accumulate as we age as reliably as perspective? I really enjoyed the stunning graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire, every page of which takes place in the same living room in the same house, but across hundreds of thousands of years. It is a Cubist story where every frame on the page is a shard of story from a different time in that spot on Earth.

One of my favorite movies of this century, and ever, is Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, which, more than any other film I can recall, grapples with the existential mystery of the universe. It begins after the Big Bang, sweeps through the age of dinosaurs, stops in a childhood story inspired by Malick's own life, and dreams of what the afterlife might hold. And in every frame, you sense the director grappling with the question of why? Why this? Why everything? Why anything?

This genre of time compressing art needs a name. Some label for its own section at the video store or bookstore. For now I take to calling it eonic art, but some reader may come up with something better, or perhaps it already has a name I'm not aware of. It need not cover the history of the universe, but it generally has to traverse at least several centuries, or at a minimum, two generations of mankind. The Three Body Trilogy comes to mind from works I've read in the past few years, as does Cloud Atlas, which I have not read but saw once on an international flight. A.I., for its coda.

I know I'm missing plenty. What are your favorite works in this genre?

The rhythm of writing

Tony Zhou's Every Frame A Painting video essay series has a devoted following online, and for good reason. His pieces are one of the few things you can honestly say couldn't work in any form other than video.

That isn't the case for most content. It's trendy to bash media outlets for pivoting to video, but like many, I can't stand receiving a link to a video without a transcript because most of the time video is the least efficient way to consume the information within. Like many infovores, I can read and scan faster than I can listen to someone talk (which is why I listen to podcasts at 2X speed, sometimes even faster depending on who's talking). Video scanning and seeking is notoriously inefficient, and if the internet has done anything it's turned us into screen scanners with even shorter attention spans than before (as anyone who has looked at data from any eye-tracking study can attest).

Back to Every Frame A Painting. The series works well as video in part because Zhou has a deep understanding of film's visual grammar, but don't underestimate the patience needed to rip discs and scan through video. Someday, that may be easier to do, but for now, it's a long time suck, involving ripping Blu-Rays and DVDs with MakeMKV and then transcoding them with Handbrake into a format editable in Premiere or Final Cut, then watching over and over to assemble the clips, then writing a script and recording the voiceover, then fine-tuning. Writing an essay isn't easy, but compared to producing a video essay it's trivial. Christian Marclay's The Clock is a remarkable piece, but a moment of silence for all the assistant editors and interns who had to rip and label all the video from which it was assembled.

The Zhou essay on Kurosawa titled Composing on Moment reminded me of something about writing that has become more salient to me over time: rhythm. Zhou's essay is about shot structure, movement, and length, but many of the lessons he discusses apply to writing.

Each shot in a movie is a sentence. One of the simplest ways to improve one's prose and to keep a reader's attention is simply to vary sentence length. I don't love editing my own writing, it's so easy to overlook errors when your mind knows what it was trying to say; it tends to fill in the blanks instead of processing what's actually on the page.

However, I don't really have any other option, so I am my own editor. To protect against my familiarity, I usually set aside anything I've written for a long time, sometimes months, until I've forgotten it completely, before revisiting it to revise and edit. Once you're estranged from your own work you can see it anew. Also, sometimes the work doesn't survive the test of time and can be tossed.

The most effective way I've found to edit myself is to read the text out loud (using my inner voice, that is). Reading the text out loud does two things. One, it slows me down. Speed readers largely increase their velocity by training themselves to not read aloud. When I started editing myself, I had to un-train myself in speed reading techniques like word block scanning.

The other benefit of reading out loud is to render the rhythm of your writing audible. Where in a block of text can you pause to take a breath, and where do you go breathless? The cadence of breathing and speaking tends to mimic the frequency of the brain's ability to process words and sentences..

Think of your reader as someone with as a limited amount of RAM. They can only hold so much of a thought in their head at once. The longer your sentence, the more structure it needs if you're hoping the reader will remember it.

There are exceptions, as there are to any rule.

Here's an opening line from Cormac McCarthy:

They crested out on the bluff in the late afternoon sun with their shadows long on the sawgrass and burnt sedge, moving single file and slowly high above the river and with something of its own implacability, pausing and grouping for a moment and going on again strung out in silhouette against the sun and then dropping under the crest of the hill into a fold of blue shadows with light touching them about the head in spurious sanctity until they had gone on for such a time as saw the sun down altogether and they moved in shadow altogether which suited them very well.
 

That's from Outer Dark.

There are other authors known for an occasional colossus of a sentence, and some who seem to rely on it as the base unit for entire novels, like Joyce or Proust. The film equivalent is something like the nearly 3-minute continuous shot that opens Boogie Nights by Paul Thomas Anderson. or the famous Copacabana Steadicam shot from Goodfellas.

[If you plot the Copacabana shot spatially you realize that Ray Liotta takes a purposefully circuitous route through the kitchen to lengthen the shot, for no apparent reason other than to lengthen the shot. But it's such a great moment, and it has such a purpose in the film at that moment, that you forgive it the indulgence. Ray Liotta is trying to impress Lorraine Bracco, and the lack of a cut allows him to draw out the performance in one unbroken, escalating build. It works. No one who watches the movie ever notices the circuitous route because the shot itself is so dazzling, which is how magicians pull off many a sleight of hand.]

In both text and video, such a flourish is overtly showy, like magician wearing a tuxedo with tails, conjuring one dove after another from his breast pocket, his sleeve, his collar, back to his sleeve, and oh! here's three doves at once. Or a sporting event employing flame throwers during introductions, or a concert beginning with the artist rising from beneath the stage through billowing florets of smoke. 

As anyone who builds such an elaborate apparatus knows, such displays inevitably attract accusations of grandstanding. As soon as any film auteur releases a long unbroken shot in a film, an argument will erupt online over whether the shot is justified and breathtaking or just self-indulgent, rent-seeking on the viewer's attention. Generally it's both, and where you settle is a matter of taste.

I find my novelty-seeking sloping upwards at this point in my life, so I appreciate the occasional grasp at the sublime. Not every sentence needs to be in the unadorned prose style of The New Yorker (Tom Wolfe once described their house style it as "leisurely meandering understatement") and not every film needs to be a series of back and forth over-the-shoulder shots while two people talk, like is common in a network TV drama which must brute-force its way through a 24 episode full season order.

In my spare time, I've dabbled with creating my own writing app, a common fantasy among those who write, since no one is ever perfectly satisfied with their word processor.

[Processor, incidentally, is a terrible name for an application. "Word processor" is bad, and so is "food processor." Is there any craft that can retain the slightest bit of romance and dignity when its primary tool is named a processor? There's a reason we don't call Tinder and other dating apps mating processors, though many might argue that online dating deserves exactly such a name. Processing is a word that should be reserved for bureaucratic procedures; it feels appropriate that so many government institutions have FAQs about processing times.]

Among the many odd features I'd include in my theoretical writing app (whose goal would not just be to make it more enjoyable to write, but to write better, and which would likely make for a terrible business), one would be an editing view which would transform the rhythm of the text into a more scannable form. It might be color coding each sentence according to its word length, or turning a block of text into a graphic like a line graph, with sentence length as the y-axis. You might be able to calculate the variance of sentence length mathematically, though I suspect such a figure would be too reductive to be useful.

The longer the text, the more sentence length variation is desirable, so regardless of methodology, the goal would be the same, to make monotonous stretches of similar sentence lengths more visible to the writer. Readers can't handle being bludgeoned with sentences of the same length in perpetuity. Occasionally they need a breather.

A pause.

The next time you edit something you've written, look for places where a sentence or two needs trimming or splitting, or where a longer sentence might find an opportune moment in which to wander languidly. We may not all be poets, but even a million monkeys at a million typewriters can churn out the occasional line of Shakespeare, more so if they know what to look for.

The age of distributed truth

Apparently, for years, Nora Ephron, who was once married to Carl Bernstein, would openly tell people that Deep Throat was FBI Associate Director Mark Felt. It wasn't that Bernstein told her; she deduced it from clues and shared it with many people around her. It seems no one believed her, so when Felt finally came clean in 2005 it was treated as a big reveal.

Explosive truths that hide in plain sight are especially unusual in this age of the internet, especially with outlets like Deadspin so eager to share every rumor. How is it that incriminating stories can be floating out there for years and not spread like viral memes when headline writers everywhere are weaponizing even the most mundane of news? 

For years, many people in Hollywood knew that Bill Cosby was a sexual criminal, yet it wasn't until 2014 when Hannibal Buress called Bill Cosby a rapist during a stand-up set that suddenly everything began to turn. I've written before that how a message is encoded really matters. Buress took a dark story and turned it into viral video form, and no matter how many hung juries will let Cosby off the hook, his career is effectively over, his reputation forever tarnished beyond repair.

"I've done this bit on stage and people think I'm making it up.... when you leave here, Google 'Bill Cosby rape.' That sh** has more results than 'Hannibal Buress.'"

[I just did, and actually "Hannibal Buress" has now passed "Bill Cosby rape" in Google results. Glass half full?]

Until a week ago, I had never heard of Justin Caldbeck or Binary Capital. In the wake of the revelation that Caldbeck had been sexually harassing women coming to his firm for funding, suddenly multiple stories came to the forefront. Apparently Caldbeck had been well known for his perverse behavior among a subset of people in the tech community. Now, everyone knows him thanks to a story broken by Reed Albergotti in The Information. It's sometimes said that all PR is good PR, but like most such sayings, the qualifier is "except when it isn't."

With Caldbeck having resigned, maybe to never work in this town again, and Binary Capital likely headed for extinction, its brand now toxic, it's worth examining what feels like a distinctly modern ritual, the tipping point when highly localized common knowledge goes wide. It has happened over and over in this internet age, and it's going to happen again.

***

In Rational Ritual, the concise, readable, and seminal text on the subject of common knowledge, it is described this way:

...knowledge of the message is not enough; what is also required is knowledge of others’ knowledge, knowledge of others’ knowledge of others’ knowledge, and so on — that is, “common knowledge.”
 

Before Justin Caldbeck's behavior might have best been described as mutual knowledge: something that lots of people know, but after the story broke in the Information, and once Caldbeck and Binary Capital finally finally acknowledged the issue, his disturbing pattern or harassment became common knowledge, something that not only does everyone in tech know, they also now know that everyone else in tech knows.

In sharing their news on the record with the Information, the brave women Niniane Wang, Susan Ho, and Leiti Hsu created a new world in which you cannot pretend to be ignorant of Caldbeck's behavior. Everyone around him, from his investors to his partners and coworkers to the tech community at large had to choose how to handle the news. Feigning ignorance now is to be explicitly complicit.

Rational Ritual focuses on the role of public ceremony and ritual in creating common knowledge among the public; “rituals and ceremonies are not just “texts” but also publishing processes.”

What we've seen recently in Silicon Valley is the power of the written word to serve as its own form of ritual to create common knowledge in the community. Albergotti's story was one example, but an even more salient example was Susan Fowler's blog post "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber."

There had been plenty of rumors and stories about the toxic Uber culture before, but many were about the win at all costs nature of the company, and that will always be spun as the inevitable side effect of dogged entrepreneurs doing what's necessary to break through in a market with privileged incumbents and regulatory capture. But as soon as Fowler hit publish on her blog post, as as soon as the story went viral among the tech press, then the mainstream press, spreading around Twitter with the what seemed to approach the speed of light, the entire tech community had a new source of common knowledge with which to grapple. Uber was a company that, from the top on down, forgave sexual harassment and discrimination.

As Kara Swisher notes of Fowler's post:

But post-Fowler, you could not ignore it, because she pulled off what poet Louise Gluck wrote about in her poem, “Circe’s Power”: “I never turned anyone into a pig. Some people are pigs; I make them look like pigs.”
 

Which is to say that Fowler did everyone in tech a public service by doing nothing more than making pigs look like pigs.
 

Fowler wasn't just brave, she was also incredibly wise. With every right to take an indignant tone, she instead maintains a measured, reportorial tone from the start, beginning with the very demure title. Can you imagine what any modern headline writer would've titled her post? Thank god she was able to retain control of her tone and voice from title on down.

In calmly reciting point after point with heroic, reserved prose, she checkmated the company, doing something that countless angry screeds from tech journalists could not do, all of those opening themselves to accusations of partisan naysaying. Fowler simply told her story, and told it straight.

It doesn't take long. In her third paragraph, she writes:

After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
 

"Things started getting weird." That's one way to put it, but think of how many other ways she could have said it. It almost sounds naive, but it's clear she knows what's happening, and how in this high stakes game of poker, she has to be the coolest player at the table, lest she, like so many women before her, be labeled some hysteric. Her post is a masterpiece of tone and rhetorical control, and it had to be. No resorting to snark or irony or any number of tricks of the clever; she bore her own witness, and no better witness could an attorney have imagined.

It's also worth noting that she did what every employee training course I've ever taken says you should do, which is to report such incidents to HR. I've met many a kind HR person in my career, but let's be honest about what bad advice this is for employees. It's not just that Uber's HR department let Fowler down; in every company I've ever been at, HR reports into the CEO, and their job is to protect the company. I hope my readers will provide me with examples of HR protecting employee's interests in such cases, but from what I've seen and read, the moment you report an incident to HR they start building a dossier on you and a case to defend the company in court. Their work will be in that courtroom with you, but it will be on the desk of the company's attorneys, not yours. As many an employment lawyer has told me, before you talk to HR, you should talk to one of them. Until we have some independent, ombudsman-like HR group looking out for employees in the tech world, that would be my advice, too.

HR failed Fowler, but she took matters into her own hand. Her post said, “This happened. This happened. Look on the works of these mighty, and despair.”

Those in power are not stupid. They know the power of common knowledge in solving the coordination problem among those who'd oppose them. The first thing oppressive regimes facing rebels at the gates will do is cut off public communication channels like television, radio, and social media. If the opposition cannot communicate with each other, they do not know how many others will stand with them if they march on those in power, weakening their resolve.

The tech equivalent is the non-disparagement agreement. Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake had reported to Lightspeed Venture Partners years ago that she'd been harassed by Caldbeck, and in response the VC firm had Lake sign a non-disparagement agreement, a copy of which is now online. Lightspeed could have blocked a Benchmark investment in her company, and so she signed it.

While such agreements can cut both ways, in almost every case, preserving information asymmetry is a tactic for those in power to stay there. There's a reason that airlines have rules trying to prohibit passengers from filming personnel and other passengers on flights.

I have no idea whether Fowler had to sign a non-disparagement clause when she joined Uber, and it may be that United Airlines policies prohibited the type of video that passengers shot of security guards dragging an elderly man off a flight like a sack of produce, but even if so, the history of the world is testament that justice sometimes requires a bit of civil disobedience. Or, as the kids these days call it, a bit of disruption.

***

In many stories that have been written since the original story about Justin Caldbeck broke, it seems that his behavior wasn't exactly a well-kept secret, but the fact that it hadn't seemed to have hurt him until last week is another reason Wang, Ho, and Hsu had to show real courage in going on the record. When such behavior seems to be generally forgiven among a community, one can't be certain of what the punishment for speaking out will be. It's not just the structural leverage of VC's over entrepreneurs, it's the chilling sense of feeling like an outsider trapped in enemy territory, playing a game that has been rigged against you, only you're not sure who is in on it. If you start a war, from which there is no return, who will stand with you?

This is the type of coordination problem that common knowledge is supposed to solve, but one only need study the historical treatment of women who speak out against those who harass them on Twitter or those who've sexually assaulted them to understand why so many are reluctant to do so. The personal cost, and victory is far from assured.

Ask the black community, who have actual video of police gunning them down for no reason other than prejudicial fear, how that's worked out with them. I wrote that in the wake of the Philando Castile case that soon black drivers would have dash cams turned in towards their vehicles, recording every traffic stop in full. Only a short while later the actual dash cam footage from the police vehicle involved in the Castile case was released publicly. Combined with the Facebook Live video, the evidence seemed as strong as it could be.

We need look no further than the highest office in the land to see that common knowledge often isn't enough. When the audio of Billy Bush and Donald Trump laughing it up on the bus broke, I thought for sure that would be the incident to sink him. For once, Trump had been caught on tape, when the press and public weren't in the room to serve as an explicit audience. The tape could be entered into evidence as common knowledge for the public. Then there was video of Trump mocking a disabled reporter.

And on and on and on. Trump has laid so much rope by which the public could have hung him that his feet ended up back on the ground. He is the troll who thumbs his nose at the two intellectually neutered political parties, realizing they have neither the will nor the ideas to do anything as he and his family laugh their way to the bank. In literature, the court jester is often the wisest fool in the room, but sometimes an idiot is just an idiot. If the gloves do not fit, you must acquit. Who will ever forget? What's depressing about Trump is how he seems to be an exemplar of the variant: the gloves do fit, but you can't do shit.

Still, that Trump's personal failings could be common knowledge and yet not disqualify him from consideration from the Presidency is not an indictment of common knowledge but instead speaks to just how dire the economic situation is for too many in this country. Listen to most Trump supporters and they'll acknowledge his faults. That fact that the Caldbeck case sunk a VC firm and the Susan Fowler post kicked one of the most powerful companies in tech into choppy water give hope that internet has created a new form of public ritual by which to establish common knowledge of injustice. The pen can be mightier than the sword.

I'm no expert on blockchain technology, but one of its more elegant properties is that the truth, the common knowledge, if you will, is distributed, not owned by any one entity. When the accusations against Caldbeck went public, he and Binary Capital both denied the allegations in the strongest terms.

In the blockchain, computational algorithms ensure that the truth wins out and is irreversible. Like a sort of human blockchain, Niniane Wang, Susan Ho, Leiti Hsu, and three other women came out all at once, in solidarity, backed by the reporting of The Information, and neutered the predictable Caldbeck and Binary Capital denials as the reflexive bullshit that they were. In the public ledger, the word of these women became the truth.

The internet gave everyone a megaphone, and these days that can feel like that Chinese proverb, you know the one. Perhaps the truth was better kept in the hands of a limited set of responsible stewards, but that age of the expert has passed, and that system had its own issues. As every Death Star reminds us each time they're blown up, concentrating power in a small area has its own unique vulnerability.

We live in the age of distributed truth, and it's an environment in which fake news can spread like mold when in viral form. But the same applies to the truth, and if there's one lesson on how to do your part in an age of distributed truth, it's to speak the truth and to support those who do. It may be exhausting work—is it really necessary to point out the emperor is buck naked?—but it's the best we can do for now. In this age, the silent majority is no majority at all.

The greatest sports achievement in my lifetime?

Football players seem even more like gladiators when they play in short sleeves in a winter storm, and baseball players who don't wear batting gloves feel like throwbacks to a more rough and tumble era. What category of admiration should we reserve, then, for someone who ascends a sheer rock face of 3,000 feet using only a pair of climbing shoes and a bag of chalk?

We debate whether Lebron James or Clayton Kershaw or Tom Brady might be the best ever to play their positions, and credible arguments can be made for them all, yet we're all alive during the career of someone who is unequivocally the greatest at his sport, and until a week ago most of the world didn't know his name.

A week ago, Alex Honnold free climbed El Capitan. With no ropes or climbing gear besides his shoes and chalk, Honnold became the first person to free climb what is universally acknowledged, among the climbing world, as the most daunting challenge in what most people consider to be less sport than a perverse game of Russian roulette with fate.

Like most people, my heart races just looking at videos and photos of Honnold on the wall, imagining myself in his place, trapped with no margin of error, feeling the ever present tug of gravity. It only takes a second of panic for the feedback loop of biological responses to kick in, and the moment your fight and flight response switches on, it's over. The adrenaline courses through your body, your muscles start to clench, and most deadly of all, your hands start to sweat. That fight or flight response evolved over hundreds of thousands of year, but it evolved when man had his feet on the ground, in response to predators and threats similarly earthbound. It could not have imagined a scenario in which it would serve a person who'd be hanging by a few pieces of contact between man and rock, a few toes pressing through the material of the climbing shoes, and a few finger tips dusted with chalk.

View fullsize

No ropes, NBD.

Icarus, at some point, having soared too high, may have felt a sudden dip, a moment of turbulence, and then glanced to his side to see, with a sudden horror, that the wax securing the feathers to his wing had begun to melt from the heat of the sun. How long did he have to ponder the fact that it was too late, that sometimes the point of no return is literally that?

That's the rub, isn't it? The greatness of humans comes from its ability to imagine, more than any other creature on earth, that which has not been yet but might be. And that is precisely the quality of the human mind that works against someone free climbing a rock. It's been said that the fear of heights stems from a person's ability to imagine themselves jumping. I don't know if it's true but sounds credible. It takes someone physically gifted, with thousands of hours of practice behind them, to even imagine a successful free climb up El Capitan, but anyone can imagine falling to their death with a sickening crunch on the ground below.

There may be more technically gifted climbers (Tommy Caldwell, I've read, is just that). But what makes a free climb of El Capitan perhaps the greatest sports achievement of my lifetime is the mental challenge of entering a flow state for four hours straight. People marvel at a basketball player entering the zone and hitting shot after shot, but Honnold had to enter a new level of zone in which he could not miss a single shot or the game would end forever.

Caldwell knows better than most what Honnold accomplished. He and partner Kevin Jorgeson completed a free ascent of the Dawn Wall in 2015, with ropes used only as backup for those moments when they missed a hold and fell. Says Caldwell:

“If you don’t have your body position exactly right, you can easily slip and fall,” Caldwell told me. “And if you’re at all nervous, there’s a downward spiral where you pull harder with your hands and lean in closer and your feet shoot out, so it takes incredible confidence.”
 

Free climbing El Capitan has been called unthinkable, and literally so. To think about it is to shrink from it. As you might suspect, several of the only people who could even contemplate such an undertaking didn't even live to attempt it.

Climbers have been speculating for years about a possible free solo of El Capitan, but there have only been two other people who have publicly said they seriously considered it. One was Michael Reardon, a free soloist who drowned in 2007 after being swept from a ledge below a sea cliff in Ireland. The other was Dean Potter, who died in a base jumping accident in Yosemite in 2015.
 

John Bachar, the greatest free soloist of the 1970s, who died while climbing un-roped in 2009 at age 52, never considered it. When Bachar was in his prime, El Capitan had still never been free climbed. Peter Croft, 58, who completed the landmark free solo of the 1980s—Yosemite’s 1,000-foot Astroman—never seriously contemplated El Capitan, but he knew somebody would eventually do it.
 

It's difficult to avoid using the world literally when discussing Honnold's achievement because metaphors we typically ascribe to sports analysis like survivorship bias take on a different meaning in free climbing.

View fullsize

Even when I see him a rope, as in this photo, my palms get sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy

It's not as if Honnold is utterly immune to normal human self-doubt. In this earlier video of another free climb, around 3:00, after several hours of free climbing, he feels doubt creep into his mind, and he recalls, "I kind of stalled out and then I started to doubt if I was doing it right, if I had the right holds, why am I even here, do I want to do this."

He stops on a narrow shelf of rock, one maybe one foot length in size, and stares out at the abyss.

"Just come back if you're not feeling it," a voice says to him from off screen.

"Well, that's the thing, I'm like..." Honnold replies. And then he keeps going, and you know the rest.

Despite what he claims are moments of doubt, Honnold is also wired differently than most. You'd think he had completed many rope assisted free climbs of his route before attempting it free solo.

Nope:

The overwhelming majority of “free” ascents of El Capitan involve many falls along the way. El Capitan also has remarkably few proper ledges; almost all “free” ascents, as a result, involve quite a lot of resting on ropes and hardware between upward pushes. Nobody keeps reliable records of these things, but Honnold’s best guess as to the number of prior ascents with zero falls and zero resting on ropes was perhaps one or two, including his own final practice run with Caldwell. Virtually nobody, in other words, had ever climbed El Capitan without dangling from the safety net, which helps to explain why El Capitan was for so long the final word in free-solo hypotheticals, as in, “Do you think it’s even possible? Will anybody ever free-solo the Big Stone?” The doubt that drove those questions was skepticism that a human mind could maintain such focus — and drive such fierce physical perfection — for so unbearably long.

Many argue that climbing, with its very high risk of death, is so unsafe as to be irresponsible. Even those who admire Honnold and the sport of free climbing must grapple with the ethics of tempting fate so willingly.

Honnold’s sang froid on big cliffs is also so peculiar that even the world-class climbers who consider him a dear friend struggle to believe that it really is just sang froid and confidence, and not borderline-suicidal recklessness or at least a missing screw. Last fall, Caldwell had a nightmare that Honnold appeared at his front door bloodied and broken from a fall.
 

Jimmy Chin, himself a world-class big-wall climber and another mutual friend of Honnold’s and mine, spent much of the last year making a documentary film about Honnold, during Honnold’s preparation for El Capitan. Chin told me that he felt terrible inner conflict over his involvement in the project, at least at the beginning: What if the presence of cameras encouraged Honnold to do something he would not otherwise have done?
 

It turns out Honnold really is wired differently.

I have heard other filmmakers say similar things about Honnold in the past, and still other friends of Honnold’s joke that when Alex was a baby his mother must have stepped on his amygdala — the brain region that controls fear. Last year, fMRI testing at the Medical University of South Carolina tilted the scales toward precisely that explanation — an underactive amygdala, not a negligent mother — by confirming that Honnold’s fear circuitry really does fire with less vigor than most.
 

People have genetic gifts that favor them in all sports. An under-active amygdala, when it comes to extreme sports, may be the most distinctive and valuable gift of all, a relative superpower in any reasonable sense of the word.

Jimmy Chin, the filmmaker behind climbing documentary Meru, filmed Honnold's historic climb. I can't wait to see it.

***

In most major sports, the ones I watch the most, improvements are slight and often take decades to manifest. The reason we can still have reasonable debates around whether Michael Jordan or Lebron James is the greatest player of all time is that they are not separated by much more than a decade, and while the sport of basketball has a come a long way since the 1960's, it took a half century to evolve to what it is today.

[As a Chicago kid, I'm more than a bit biased, but given today's rules, I think Jordan could easily average 45 or maybe even 50 points a game for a season if he focused on it, though I'm not sure how watchable it would be as much of it would involve him at the free throw line.]

This gradual pace of improvement isn't that surprising. Most such sports operate at the limits of human capability, and so advances in nutrition and training and technique make incremental gains that take long periods to manifest.

We can detect this more easily in sports like track and field, the closest we have to humans using nothing but the abilities of their own human bodies, alone, with no team interaction or environmental effects, and where measured performance is highly precise.

But out of the watchful eye of the mainstream sports audience, athletes in adventure and extreme sports are achieving leaps and bounds in performance that would be unfathomable in our most popular sports. Honnold's ability to achieve flow state may have much to say about how that is possible, and what that entire group of athletes is accomplishing may be one of the great unsung advances in human performance that everyone debating whether the Warriors are the GOAT are missing because of our national obsession over the sports which have dominated American pop culture for the past century (baseball, football, basketball).

It's the subject of The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance, a book that Marc Andreessen tweeted he was reading recently and which I just started reading. I'll share more thoughts on it once I've gotten more than just a few pages in.