Sterling Lynch

Sounding the Tongue (1994 – 2001)

four four through it all.

look it’s there to be hard

so what if it is that there is no place to break so smooth or run ragged over it all

so more to it than forever sum equals parts in irregular equations

soon too so lay it here one plus one plus capriciously covered in folds of mourning lace

for causes seen untold and forgotten

liken it to the replay of the loss of sense

shed it all in the repeti…

Episode IV: A Green Hope

When I moved to Toronto in early 2019, I had the notion that I would get more involved in politics. 

My analysis of society always circles back to the same conclusion. We know the problems. We know the solutions. We just need to do the hard work of motivating people to assume the short-term costs of the solutions for the sake of their long-term benefits. The problems persist, I think, because of…

The tenor of our age: nihilism born of egoism

When I die, my ability to experience will die with me. How I lived, how long I lived, and how I am remembered won’t make any difference to me because I won’t be able to experience it. From the perspective of experience, death voids everything. Unfortunately, from that very same perspective, living is not that much different.

Living is a series of loosely connected experiences of now, each of…

Why aren’t more teams outside of sport playing Moneyball? Because they’re human, stupid.

After reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, I asked myself: why hasn’t this data-driven approach to the evaluation and recruitment of talent been embraced by more teams and organizations outside of professional sports? Why, after all of these years and with the very tangible success of professional sports to look to as an example, why are we still evaluating and recruiting talent like we always have? 

Writing: what I’ve learned

In the beginning, writing was a fun school assignment. It was a way to compete with my friends. It helped to wean me off my toys, offering an age-appropriate medium for the expression of my imaginative impulses.  

Then, when I was sixteen, going on seventeen, while hiking across a glacier in the Rockies, I experienced something I couldn’t quite make sense of. In response to the experience, I…

Within the mirror of COVID-19: a vision of a better society.

Many years ago, during my PhD research, I audited a lively political theory seminar. As you’d expect, at some point, we discussed the ethics of health care.

From the outset, the conversation was framed by the assumption that health care resources are necessarilyscarce. Society, it was assumed, would be crippled by the costs of health care, unless they were carefully rationed. The notion that we…

I have no symptoms. I have not travelled recently. As far as I know, I have not been in direct contact with anyone who has travelled recently. The risk that I have COVID-19 is very low — almost nil. I have, nevertheless, by my own choice, locked myself down. I have not left my apartment since Monday evening. 

Why is that? 

The short answer: I want to be certain that I am not spreading the disease…

Some time ago, I discovered that Desmond Morton, a highly esteemed Canadian historian, wrote an article about my maternal great grand father, Frank (Francois-Xavier) Maheux. The article is based on the letters Frank wrote to my great grand mother, Angélique, after he enlisted to serve in the First World War. The letters, along with some other materials, were donated by my great aunt to theLibrary…

Data, analytics, and the human condition: life lessons from baseball’s data-driven revolution

The history of professional baseball is, I think, the story of talented, skilled and experienced individuals relinquishing some of their decision-making autonomy to better coordinate their actions with others for the overall benefit of the group. In recent years, data, analytics and the people who effectively evaluate them have played a key role in this coordination effort. As a result,…

Between the wake of living and the insensibility of death: the experience of now

It’s an old and familiar trope; as a young man, it would enrage me.

Picture it: an old person, who is tired of living, decides that they are ready to die. Then, they close their eyes and die, as if the matter was decided in that moment — probably after some important milestone had passed and some important wisdom had been imparted.

The decision itself to die is not, I think, the key issue. Death…

Losing my religion: the unknowable self and the myth of a well-order society

I suspect that you and I don’t really know anything.

Today, thanks to a lot of trial and error, we humans have a pretty good understanding of what we need to do to distinguish between plausible and implausible beliefs. If we run controlled double-blind and repeatable experiments that generate a sufficient amount of data of sufficient quality, we can use statistical methods to confidently identify…

Who died and made content king? Survival bias, confirmation bias, and a farcical aquatic ceremony.

When I first started using social media, thirty Helens agreed: “content is king!” 

And, at the time, it certainly felt that way. Perfectly crafted tweets seemed to be retweeted again and again; insightful blogs seemed to lead to comment after comment; great articles were always bookmarked. 

I suspect, however, that content looked kingly only because we content creators looked at tiny samples of…

My answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything: four four through it all

If the mystery of the human condition can be characterized as a kind of puzzle or riddle, the answer and/or punchline can be aphorized, I think, through four banal facts and four mollifying delusions.

I can’t say that anyone will necessarily gain anything by knowing and understanding these facts; nor can I say that they will gain anything by ridding themselves of the delusions.

If anything, I am…

The spade has turned: from weltschmerz to mono no aware and back again.

After many years of digging, I am pretty sure I have hit bedrock.

The spade has turned.

Human behaviour and all the products of human behaviour are best understood as expressions of the human tendency to allocate resources according to status.

Practically-speaking, a person’s survival depends on their membership in a group and their status in it. Additionally, success — however it is defined over…

The iconoclasm to end all of my inconclasms: making the word flesh once and for all

After many many years of reading, writing and thinking, I have arrived at the rather unremarkable conclusion that reading, writing and thinking are neither important nor unimportant in and of themselves.

They are human activities like any other and, as such, their value is ultimately determined by other humans. They can influence others — if they influence at all — only because of the values…

The rise and fall of social media: a swift and familiar tale

The rise and fall of social media has been so swift and so familiar that the story of its rise and fall probably says more about us than it does about the tools themselves.

In the early days, social media seemed revolutionary and, at times, it was. Unfortunately, like all revolutionaries who win, social media has come to mirror the status quo it had initially challenged.

Twitter, Facebook,…

Avoid stony indifference: prime your audiences directly

When it comes to communications planning, organizations of every ilk seem to spend a lot of time fussing about messages, tactics and products.

Communication, however — the very thing we are hoping to facilitate with this planning — only happens between people who are already connected and attending to each other — giving and sharing their attention.

In other words, a well-crafted…