Be Well Tuned: Q&A

Why is it called "tuning"?

The go-to metaphor here is tuning a car engine:
- The purpose of tuning is to allow optimal performance within the original design. It is definitely not to rebuild parts from scratch, or reinvent what they can be used for.
- Tuning is performed on an artifact made of clearly defined parts. If all of the parts work well, the whole does too (predictably).
- As you approach a "well tuned" configuration, you need only make smaller and smaller tweaks to the system, while continuing to see large gains in output performance.

To see is to change.
- Struggling to control something is a very short-term and fragile strategy. To really fix problems you need to first understand their structure with sufficient clarity.
- Counterintuitively, this often means acting as if you didn't care about the results, but only wanted to see everything better.
Thoughts are inputs.
- From the perspective of your conscious attention, thoughts, emotions, and everything else that can be sensed is simply information. The only choice that is left to you is whether you make good use of that information or not.
Awareness is a muscle.
- Putting attention on something often brings short-term benefits, but far more importantly it slowly rewires your brain to be better able to perceive that class of things.
- This applies to both mental objects and various aspects of the external world.

Figuring things out is a whole-person enterprise. I'm always on the look out for ways to improve my generalized ability to think and act, and apply them to everything I do.
- This means I mostly cannot give publicly defensible sources, references, or even reasons for doing things in a certain way.
There's a lot of original and experimental thinking that goes into BWT, and this is arguably why it's worth reading in the first place. I reserve the right to be embarrassingly wrong about everything.