Reverse fishbone diagram & opportunity cost

[AnalyticalEngine]

Is there a good way to capture opportunity cost when making these? I'm realizing one of the main negatives I keep assigning to activities like work are "opportunity cost" or "consumes mental energy," etc. But also, opportunity cost is a sort of abstract concept because it depends on what you'd be doing without that thing consuming your time, and because it's so generalized/applies to anything, I feel like I'm doing something wrong when I add it to diagrams.

[AxelHeyst]

In my experience you can note 'takes time' on a per-activity/goal basis, but it's not very helpful until you zoom out further. I think you *start* to perceive opportunity cost in a useful way at step 4, plus or minus one:

1. Draw a reverse fishbone.
2. Draw a lot of reverse fishbones.
3. Start noticing implicated/subtle relationships between the fishbones, themes, patterns, trends.
4. Start sketching/connecting/indicating the relationships between the fishbones (yields and flows, 6+). Start being able to look at the neg effects of a fishbone and think/sense/feel "not perfect but this is fine" or "ugh."
5. Start drawing things that are more like WoGs than reverse fishbones.
6. Start to notice 'superordinate telos' (singular or plural) of your WoG / heap of connected fishbones. Start being able to look at nodes that pass the singular reverse fishbone test and have mild/no negatives and have a thought/sense/feel that "yep, this is good" or "this doesn't actually fit, does it. Where are my nodeScissors." (Also the flip: see nodes that have negative effects but for some reason/sense or other it fits the superordinate telos, so it stays.)

[jacob]

Costs are [heterotelic] vectors in the opposite direction of gains. To diagram "opportunity" whether positive or negative requires adding a time dimension. A good way to compress the time dimension into 2D-paper is marking each potential FUTURE link with a (+) or a (-) as in the particular outcome of this goal will be good (+) or bad (-) in the future. Instead of +/- you can also mark probabilities.

However, WOGs are an illustration of vision-logic(*) and fishbones are one way towards it. It's not a quick solution. It's a different way of thinking.

Once you get it, you're unlikely to want to write it down/out.

(*) What is vision-logic anyway?! I'd say it's the ability to make intuitive conclusions based on far more experience and studying on what is right/how the world works than most. Vision-logic comes down to "reality-informed wisdom" however it's sliced and diced. There's no shortcut by the way. Humanity might not be up for it. It's uncommonly-informed-sense.

[AxelHeyst]

I've been doing a lot of practice with reverse fishbones and WoGs lately. The above list points at one of my main takeaways, which is that there are multiple steps in between reverse fishboning and WoG sketching/thinking. Cool stuff started happening for me at step 2, when I got a big sheet of paper and quickly sketched a dozen or so reverse fishbones on it, not being overly precious or analytical about it. Singles > piles > heaps > *new thing*/emergent properties. For me, jumping from rev. fishbone to WoG was too great a leap.

On a per-node basis, noting opportunity cost doesn't tell you anything about what opportunities you're missing out on, or what purpose you are/are not devoting attention to. You can't *do* anything with the knowledge of opportunity cost until you can see the rest of it.

(And, to echo what we say all the time, it's not that you stare at your scribblings and go 'aha, yes I see', it's not like this stuff is math notation, it's more like the activity of sketching all this stuff out trains neural pathways etc and you start to be able to sense/feel it while *not* looking at the sketches. I think making multiple piles of reverse fishbones through time is worthwhile effort. At least, that's been my experience.)

[AnalyticalEngine]

Thanks for the clarification. I think where I was getting confused was I keep trying to drag too many abstract or emotional things into the reverse fish bone when the reverse fish bones are better when kept more concrete and prioritized. And also because there are infinitely many potential 1st and 2nd order effects, staying contained and concrete with the reverse fish bone makes it easier to model.

An example: my job consumes a lot of cognitive and emotional energy, which means I'm too drained to do anything else but recover on weekends sometimes. Cognitive energy in this case may be better thought of as a flow or a scare resource rather than an outcome of the job. It's something I innately have that job node is consuming, which means I'm not spending it on other things I want to do (write fiction, learn a language, etc). This is useful but it's more a web of goals thing and less the reverse fish bone. The job fish bone is probably better off being more concrete and then this additional analysis comes later, because really it's implicit any task a reverse fish bone models might consume time and energy.

Am I understanding this correctly?

Btw @AH, but what is a "telo"?

[mooretrees]

I think I would put lack of energy/cognitive bandwidth as a negative in your reverse fish bone. That doesn’t seem too abstract for it to capture imo.

[ertyu]

Right: keep it at the level of "consumes energy" rather than "hurts my ability to write. and my ability to learn russian. and my ability to do extra course ABC. and.."

[AxelHeyst]

I agree. If I had a job I wasn't psyched on I'd put "Is soulsucking" and "wtactualf" as negative effects. Putting abstract and/or emotional effects seems relevant to me. Yes, it's implicit that any activity consumes energy and time, but it's relevant to note it explicitly when it is a lot, when the sum of all the other energy consumers in your life is less than this one node.

It seems to me that if you drew a bunch of reverse fishbones on a sheet of paper but sized the sketches proportional to how much time and energy you put into them and the size of the effects, the Job node would be huge. So image you've got a bunch of sketches and maybe some little nodes here and there have "takes time" in pt8 font greyscale, and then right in the middle at font size 143 written in pigs blood and double underlined in charcoal swiped from a burned down church is JOB with SUCKS THE LIFE OUT OF MY ETERNAL SOUL EVERY DAY as a negative effect. I mean, sure, that sounds a bit much to actually draw a reverse fishbone like that... but is it incorrect?

(This goes back to my point that these exercises aren't math, it's more like useful art - a form of creative expression used to communicate to ourselves things that are true about our lives and things that we want to be true about our lives.)

[ertyu]

Btw @AH, but what is a "telo"?

not ah but i know this one. it's telos, end in greek. so, christianity for example is said to be a teleological religion bc all builds up to achieving "the end": jesus will come again etcetera. Marxism is said to be a teleological ideology bc all is seen to move towards the idealized end of communism where all own the means of production jointly and it's from each according to his ability etcetera. homo-telic: working towards the same end. hetero-telic: working towards different, contradictory ends. Superordinate telos, as ah uses it: higher level end goal (good relationships, world peace, etc.)

[7Wannabe5]

Emotional effects are concrete/material effects at the level of neurobiology. The prefrontal cortex burns a shit ton of energy and if you use up your material ability to over-ride made available through the mechanisms of this part of the brain, it is not available for other functions. For example, very difficult (actually "difficult" might be better replaced with "unlikely" for those of us who have now abandoned the archaic concept of "free will") to stick to your diet and deal with highly technical work unless one of the two has already been rendered automatic through conditioning. And all of this is represented by very real material structures and chemical concentrations in your brain. It's actually a lot like controlling the flow of water through the creation of a complex swale and gate system in a permaculture project, except MUCH more complex.

Anyways, we are amongst the lucky, because purely through happenstance our brains have already developed and been conditioned to the extent that in our current environment we can begin to comprehend (integrate materially in our brains) the concepts related to brain development and conditioning It should even be possible for some of us to consider what simultaneous pursuit of heterotelic vs homeotelic goals might look like at the level of neurobiology/neurochemistry. IOW, why/how would a brain do that sort of thing? One part of the answer might be that as you think about various futures, your brain actually previews your future emotional state in these various futures and materially develops in bias towards future which is pre-viewed as more in alignment with positive emotions. Humans who have damage to the part of the brain vmPFC which emotionally rehearses potential futures have difficulty with making decisions and adjusting to new circumstances. Depression can have a similar effect.

[AnalyticalEngine]

Thanks everyone, that all makes sense. I suppose really there are a number of ways to model any given activity, so drawing these out is itself an act of potentially reframing the problem.

On the topic of depression, one of the symptoms is getting stuck in the same loop of emotional reasoning such that you get stuck there and are unable to see alternatives. I've actually found the reverse fish bones very helpful with this because what usually happens is I draw the first pass with largely emotional outcomes, then step back and rethink it, then try to draw it with more physical/objective outcomes. Seeing the contrast between the two has been helpful in seeing where my thinking may be incorrect.

For example, work generates "feeling bad" and then "bad" fuels various addictive behaviors (sugar, internet, whatever). When I actually draw this out in a reverse fish bone, it's easier to see the behavior has few upsides and should be cut out, but in a way that doesn't moralize the problem and also generate more "feels bad."

Also the work reverse fish bone got way too huge so I'm trying to see if I can break this one up into smaller pieces. That might also be useful for changing the things that aren't working in the work node while finding a way to keep those things that do work outside of a structures career.