Hack The Algorithm

Driving down to Salida yesterday to catch the 8 a.m Absolute Bikes shuttle to Monarch Pass – the first shuttle of the season for that big, beautiful, alpine epic – I was trying to contain my jittery excitement by listening to NPR. Hidden Brain was on, and the episode was based around sociologist Robb Willer and his realization that being a star on the debate team did not in any way help him when it came to trying to change the minds of people who didn’t already share his point of view.

The episode followed Robb’s personal journey through his attempts to navigate differing perspectives, his realization of self-bias, and how he struggled to succeed at conflict resolution. In a one-on-one disagreement, two people of opposed viewpoints can sometimes amicably reach a place of mutual understanding, if not necessarily agreement. But getting there takes empathy, a nuanced understanding of one’s own stance, genuine consideration of the other person’s perspective, and some willingness to compromise. None of this really matters in a formal debate, but then again, formal debates don’t really work in the real world. Taking the debate-as-echo-chamber concept into the modern realm of communication, when one’s voice is filtered into the distortive megaphone of social media, any potential for discourse collapses into amplified discord – which is also, unsurprisingly, totally ineffective at getting people to change their ways. It was a good listen, and I highly recommend it. Win Hearts Then Minds

(No small irony that the episode is underwritten by Meta AI…)

This got me to thinking. Not so much about entrenched opinions but about patterns and how most of us seek them out. There is comfort in the familiar. Whether we are talking about a hot lap of the local trail or the familiar drawl of a regional accent or the repeated narrative of a shared belief, it takes less mental effort to stick with what we know. For some, this can result in restlessness and dissatisfaction, the itch to break out of the rut and go somewhere new, do something different, seek out the excitement of the unfamiliar. But for the meaty part of the bell curve – most of us, most of the time – we want to be surrounded by “the known world”. More often than not, we follow scripts.

Hence my excitement about driving to Salida to go ride the Crest. For much of the past year, I have been riding from my front door. This was a novel and much needed departure from the previous decade, when almost every bike ride started with a drive to somewhere. I fully cop to the whole pattern behavior thing, though. When I find a groove that I like, I will ride that rut with a predictability that would make a metronome jealous. Once I moved to a place where I could hit trails a couple blocks from home, driving to go for a ride suddenly seemed like a monumental hassle. I began really settling into that groove. And while the local trails that I can hit in a two to three hour pedaling radius from here can get to feeling a little repetitive by the blown out peak of summer, they are still varied enough and plentiful enough that it is difficult to get legitimately stir crazy bored by them. The Crest, meanwhile, is a whole different kind of beast. It deserves a story of its own, which it will get, because it is that good. Just not today. For today, the thing about Monarch Crest is that I was breaking out of my rut. And that had me feeling first day of school nervous.

Instead of riding out my front door, I was going somewhere new-ish. Instead of following the ritual script of preparation for a two- to three- hour ride (no rain gear, bare minimum of tools stashed in bib pockets, two bottles at the most on the bike), I had to shift my mind into the five- to six-hour, 12,000’ above sea level way of thinking. Backpack, rain gear, food, a whole lot more water and go-juice; a mental checklist and physical ritual that was once well rehearsed to the point of being reflexive but these days I feel rusty and unsure about.

It wasn’t a massive paradigm shift, and I wasn’t riding off the map into some place I had never been, but I realized as I packed my gear for the ride that I was no longer as fluent in this language as I once was.

One of the things I loved most about mountain biking when I first got into it was how EVERYTHING was unfamiliar. It was all exciting. There was so much to learn: How to ride. How to work on bikes. How to eat and drink. How to avoid hypothermia. Like everything, though, at some point we develop a familiarity that then leads to ritual. We know the drill, so to speak. This is no longer our first rodeo. And what I find happens (speaking purely for myself here) is that when I latch onto a formula that works, I tend to stick with it. I memorize that script. I follow that well-worn pattern. This, in turn, can lead to an inflexibility in my thinking when it comes to contemplating new things.

When I was new to mountain biking, mountain biking itself was still relatively new. There was a dazzling experimental sense of adventure to everything. I ate it all up enthusiastically, and suffered some pretty spectacular cases of technological indigestion as a result. Concurrently, I slammed so hard into my own reflexive and proprioceptive limitations so often that I developed some healthy as well as some unhealthy habits of self-preservation. I explored the limits of what my body could do, and tried to develop some framework of understanding gleaned from those countless sunburns and dehydrations and total hunger bonks. And in so doing, I developed rituals and ruts. I followed patterns, and obeyed the scripts I had written into my own head.

A line from that episode of The Hidden Brain: “Our perspective is just our perspective, not the only perspective.”

As much as I find comfort in my patterns, in following my scripts, I also do not trust them. I rarely believe that my way of doing things is the “right” way. I am not sure if this is because I suffer an eternal case of Imposter Syndrome, or because I lean more toward empath than sociopath. Whatever the reason, I strongly believe that we owe it to ourselves to question our own scripts, to challenge our own patterns. Again, this is just my perspective, and it is very likely informed by all the stupid shit I have said and done from a position of deeply held conviction or entrenched self-righteousness.

The image at the top of this column is of Steve Smith and Robert Ives at the Sea Otter somewhere back around 1999 (snapped by Duncan Bartlett - ride in peace). Robert rode a 16” wheel kids bike the entire distance of the 32 or so mile pro/expert cross country race at a surprising pace, and in so doing indelibly changed the notion of what constitutes sanity and what constitutes toughness for hundreds of people. He tore up a script.

I have been incredibly fortunate to count people like Robert and Stevil as friends. They are part of a free-thinking cadre of thinly disguised lunatics and dreamers who have for the past few decades inspired me, informed me, challenged me to look outside my own perspective, and called me on my own bullshit. My distrust of my own convictions is owed in large part to the unpredictable creativity and beautiful wildness of my friends. They help me tear up my own scripts, and they push me out of my ruts whenever those start to get a little too comfortable.

We are increasingly being fed information that is algorithmically tailored to suit our appetites. From our Netflix queues to our individual newsfeeds, our clicks and swipes are being counted alongside the seconds that our eyes remain fixed on text and images, as well as the rate at which we scroll. Because we are, by and large, creatures of habit, we are also easy marks for algorithms. As such, our ruts are being dug deeper and reinforced without our active participation. Call me an alarmist, but I worry that the consequences of this are a general hardening of our biases, an entrenching of our viewpoints.

Whenever I feel a little too comfortable, I try to get a whiff of Robert Ives as he bounds like some wild orange jumpsuit clad spirit animal through my dreams. I shake up my routines, upend my patterns. Ride road bikes on rough trails. Ride fat bikes in the summer dust. Opt for the heat of the day instead of the sensible time. Follow the trail that looks untraveled even if it is almost guaranteed to turn shitty. Purposefully choose the questionable line.

I have spent an entire adulthood conflating bike riding with moving through life. So, this is my roundabout conflation: With riding, as with life, stay loose. Embrace unpredictability. Surprise yourself. Steer out of the ruts. Select inappropriate tools for the job at hand. At every possible opportunity, hack the algorithm. Don’t let it know your heart.