Category: Education

Evidence, Credibility, and the Homunculus Courtroom

We should think of our beliefs and the evidence we engage with as if we had a little homunculus tv courtroom in our brain adjudicating whether to admit evidence into the record. Obviously, this is incredibly difficult to pull off in real time, but it’s a nice thought experiment to pause and consider the weight of a claim being made.

This idea came to me while watching a YouTube video covering the recent downfall of a famous hustle influencer, where the presenter made an observation that she (the presenter) would normally not take people’s personal lives into consideration when judging their professional work, but the case that the influencer sold conferences and products marketed as relationship coaching courses under the pretenses of having a great marriage was swiftly undermined by her (the influencer) getting a divorce approximately two years later.

I was impressed with this statement by the presenter – she was right! Under normal circumstances, the personal life of a person shouldn’t bear weight on something like this, but given the fact that the evidence under consideration was whether someone was misleading about their personal life and getting others to pay for her “expertise,” it would be grounds to consider this piece of evidence as relevant or bearing weight. My homunculus courtroom judge ruled that the testimony was admissible.

This is a silly thought experiment to anthropomorphize cognitive thought-processes that are otherwise just a black box to me. I suppose it’s a little farfetched to think that we have this much control over our beliefs, but maybe the next time I listen to a claim (or gossip, or something that doesn’t jive with my experience… or claims that I want to be true…), I will remember my homunculus courtroom and think twice about the claim’s believability.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

The Last Person to Know Everything

On a recent CBC podcast episode about Leibniz and Voltaire’s thoughts about evil and God, one of the interviewees referred to Leibniz as “the last man to know everything.” I find this notion utterly fascinating. Upon hearing that title, I jumped online to search for the “best biography on Leibniz” and found a highly acclaimed book detailing an intellectual biography of the 17th-century thinker. Once I clear some books on my current reading list, I’ll dive into this hefty book.

“Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography” by Maria Rosa Antognazz

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered the moniker of “the last person who knew everything.” In fact, that was the title of a biography I read back in late 2018 on Enrico Fermi.

I’ve been drawn to this idea for a long time, probably originating with the first time I saw the 1994 film Renaissance Man starring Danny DeVito. That was where I first learned of the term renaissance man, or more commonly known as a polymath – a person with considerable knowledge and expertise across a wide variety of domains. While I wouldn’t quite call it a goal, this is an aspiration of mine since I was a child.

I suppose as the sciences progress, it becomes increasingly difficult to lay claim to being “the last person who knew everything.” Each field grows increasingly complex as we push the boundaries of the known world, which raises the threshold higher of what counts as expertise.

It would seem we need to seriously consider the observation recently made by Professor Adam Grant on the differences between experience and expertise:

Instead of seeking to always have depth of knowledge, perhaps we should give equal consideration to wisdom and how we can apply our experiences and expertise to solve interesting problems. While more nebulous as a goal, I think it steers us in the right direction. At the very least, it’s a good vision to aspire towards.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

PS – an unexhaustive list of the traits that distinguishes a “last person who knew everything:”

  • Intellectual curiosity
  • Intellectual humility
  • Interests spanning a variety of domains, both sciences and arts
  • A grasp of the methods and tools of science
  • Generating novel insights
  • The ability to see problems in terms of first principles
  • Engaging in idea arbitrage
  • Focus and flow in work – liking what you do

History vs The Past

While listening to a BBC podcast about Heroditus, the panelists described how Heroditus set about his project with the purpose of recording events with some accuracy before the details were lost from memory. Unlike some historians from Greek antiquity, Heroditus was writing about events that were within his lifetime. This created a new kind of writing that set itself apart from others in his genre because it aimed at corroborating stories rather than recording myth.

This is an interesting distinction worth keeping in mind. There is a difference between “history” and “the past.” It can be helpful to think of history as a subset of the past. History is the collection of stories we tell, and as a consequence it is necessarily selective in what gets included and what is left out. This makes sense from a practical standpoint – it is nearly impossible to capture every detail, nor does every fact in the past bear a tangible, causal relationship to the story being told (even if arguably from a systems perspective, many things create ripples of unknown influence that overlap with other events).

The challenge of history is accuracy – capturing events that happened with fidelity and charity. As new facts are discovered, and as new facits of importance enter the discourse, history is revised to (hopefully) move closer to our aim of truth. (For the moment, let’s ignore questions about power and who tells these stories and for what aim).

However, we must not confuse history (the stories we tell) with the past (events that happened prior to the now). Ignoring this distinction places us in danger of imbuing our myths with an illusion of objectivity. The stories we tell ouselves matter, of course, but they also carry power. Who tells the stories, and whose stories get left out, can carry harmful consequences.

We try to learn the lessons from history, but we cannot be so arrogant to think that history is complete.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

My Best Interest

If you want a good newsletter, you should check out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s newsletter. I signed up a few months back and have thoroughly enjoyed each update. I find him such a fascinating and inspiring person, not just from his bodybuilding work, his acting career, or even his time in politics, but above all because he strikes me as a fundamentally decent person.

He made two interrelated observations in the latest issue that stuck out for me. A significant portion of the email dealt with his clarifying and elaborating on his viral “screw your freedoms” moment during an interview talking about why people should get their vaccines. In his expanded comments, he urges his readers to pay attention to the motivations of people trying to give them advice, and discard those opinions which are not in your best interest (including his own). By this, he means fitness influencers and politicians, whose motivations are clicks and ad revenue in the former, as well as outrage, donations, and votes in the latter. When it comes to your health, these people are not giving advice based on your own health and wellbeing.

The second related comment is that if you can’t trust government or social media, who should you trust? To that, he says you should trust your doctor because your doctor took an oath to protect you. Your doctor is paid with only one expectation in return – the promotion of your wellbeing and health.

Talk to your doctor, not people who don’t have your health as their main responsibility. The Instagram and Facebook accounts you follow that give information on vaccines are not concerned about your health. They are concerned with getting more followers and making money.

I have seen way too many stories about people who listened to politicized information about the vaccine instead of their doctors, and then changed their minds when it was too late.

At the end of the day, everyone has to make their own decision about getting vaccinated. But if I can inspire even a few of you or your friends or family to avoid another one of these tragic stories that tore families apart, I want to do it.

He urges us to trust the experts and take wisdom from their experience. When presented with advice, we should ask ourselves what the advice-giver gets in return for our compliance. Do they benefit from our participation? What do we lose by their gain? These are important checks that we should make when deciding what’s in our best interest.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Parenting Lessons One Year On

We recently celebrated our son’s first birthday, so naturally I’ve been reflecting on the last year of being a first-time parent. If I were to summarize the most important lesson (beyond any of the technical skills you need to keep your kid alive), it’s that parenting is the largely an illusion of control. Your child is a chaos engine that you will try to wrangle, understand, and predict, but from moment to moment, day to day, week to week, things change wildly without discernable reason. Things that worked suddenly stop working.

The tighter you try to hold onto control, the more frustrated you’ll be.

As a corollorary, in accepting that your child is pure id, you must also come to terms that your child (at least for the first year) carries little intentionality behind what they do, and so you must not attribute your frustration to them. Instead, recognize that your frustration is a product of your own unrealistic expectations. If you align your expectations to this reality, I find it’s much easier to weather the physically and mentally taxing moments.

This isn’t to say that you won’t feel anger or frustrations directed toward your child. I’ve accepted that I will feel these feelings and there isn’t anything wrong with them so long as you don’t act on those impulses (physically or verbally). As the adult, you are expected to have learned to understand your physiological signals and adjust accordingly. As your child grows, and as they experience new feelings in themselves – feelings that they won’t have the context to understand – it’s your job to guide them through the experience so that they can learn as well.

In sum:

  • You are not in control of anything.
  • The frustration you feel is usually a product of having misaligned expectations for how you think your child ought to act.
  • Your child doesn’t understand the signals their body is giving them. You, having learned to understand your body, will be key to guiding your child through this period of discovery.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

1,111 Days of Practice

I hit a new milestone on Sunday with learning German on Duolingo. I hit 1,111 consecutive days of practice.

I’ve discussed before how I’m a little skeptical of the learning process, especially with how easy it is for me to mindlessly snap off a quick lesson by repeating modules so that I preserve my momentum. Still, I am pleased to hit this milestone after 3 years of consistency. While we can question whether I’m gaining true fluency in the language, we should at least acknowledge when we stick with learning habits.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Beyond the European Default Follow-up (7/4 time)

Last week I shared some thoughts on appreciating musical languages developed beyond the European music theory standard, and how it can be inappropriate to judge musical modalities using the vocabulary and standards of your cultural (musical) heritage. This isn’t to say that viewing art through different lenses can’t bring about interesting discoveries of the artform, but rather using one standard to pass a value-judgement of the merits of an artform can be fraught with problems.

Thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, the recommended videos feed provided some great gems appreciating the original. Through a drum cover, I learned the original was in 7/4 time (whereas I thought it might have been alternating 2/4-2/8 measures; sounds like I missed a 1/8 beat).

And here was another drum cover with some artistic interpretations on the beat.

I was able to learn a bit more about Konnakkol, and how it builds increasing complexity to the music.

And here was a great beatbox cover that got a shoutout from the male performer in the original video, Somashekar Jois.

Finally, I found that Somashekar Jois has a YouTube channel where he teaches lessons in Konnakkol. I was a little nervous about posting this since one of his past videos was an artist’s endorsement for Prime Minister Modi of India, but I still felt it important to provide the link here to learn more about the artform. If possible, I’m trying to focus on the art, rather than the artist (or his whatever his politics happens to be).

Oh, and a recent video from Adam Neely again touched on the problems with passing judgement on musical performance when you don’t critically engage with the sources of your musical taste. At best, you are falsely applying a single standard as a universal judge of taste, and at worst you are using music theory to justify sexist bullying of people just trying to have fun creating.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Beyond the European Default

Tim Ferriss recently shared the following video in his newsletter. From the video’s description, we are treated to a short but wonderful performance “on the most traditional, classical and ancient vocal percussive art form of India; the mother of all percussive languages – Konnakkol.”

I found as I was watching the video, I was trying to discern the time signature being used (I suppose in the hope of finding the cadence to bob my head along with the rhythm). Most of the song sounds like it switches between some sort of 2/4 and 2/8 back to back rhythm, alternating one bar of each. For a brief moment, I was going to push this out to my network to see what my music theory friends would say, since I consider myself an amateur at best.

But then I realized that the folks who I thought would be better equipped to give me an answer were likely trained in classic music theory; that is to say, European music theory. But applying a European music theory framework would be wholly inappropriate for classical Indian music. I don’t mean inappropriate in a politically correct sense (quite the contrary, it would be a fun exercise to apply European music theory as an exercise to see where the similarities and differences are between the two music styles), but instead it would be inappropriate from a practical sense. The two musical styles share the common thread of using percussion and pitches to “tell a story” but the similarities end there. They are two styles with differing underlying grammar and syntax. Applying a different musical theory lens would be inadequate to capture the nuances of the performance, and possibly miss a richer historical context to give the performance more meaning.

It reminds me of a video Adam Neely put out almost a year ago that’s well worth a revisit because he raises important points about what we choose as our defaults – what “counts” as music. If we judge everything based on what’s been given primacy over the last few hundred years, we at best have an impoverished understanding of music and culture, and at worst continue to perpetuate a systemic bias (read: racist) in favour of some kinds of music to the exclusion of others that we deem inferior (coded as foreign, exotic, world, or worse).

This isn’t to say you have to like any one kind of music – let your tastes take you wherever and drink in the art of whomever speaks to you. It’s just important to remember that art extends far beyond the preferences we think of as universal, and that our taste should not be placed at the centre of culture.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Return to Normal

Well, I certainly was optimistic in my last post about when I’d return to normal. The move proved to be a bit more onerous, so I missed last week’s post, as well as this week’s deadline. C’est la vie. We press on.

As we start getting our vaccines rolled out to younger folks in my part of the country, we are beginning to have virtual watercooler chats about what the return to normal will be. The gut-reaction is that our higher education institutions will kowtow to pressure to return to face-to-face delivery as soon as possible – whether it’s students looking for the ol’ college experience, administrators looking to address gaps in the bottom line, or employees desperate to escape working from home.

It’s tempting to think things will return to normal, back to the pre-pandemic status quo. We, as creatures of habit, like to slide back into what’s comfortable and expend the least amount of energy that we need to.

But knowing what I know about people, a “return to normal” is going to smack straight into the loss aversion wall – people don’t like to lose benefits once they have them. It switches to an entitlement mentality. I don’t mean this in a negative sense. Entitlements are good! When we talk about entitlements, it carries a negative connotation of something not earned. But to the contrary, I think “unearned” entitlements are the point of society, culture, and government. Rather than everyone being forced to create everything for themselves, we can leverage divisions in labour, experience, technology, and collective action to ensure that benefits get spread around. The metaphorical tide should raise all ships.

So, what does it mean when we are rushing back to return to normal – what do we think we are missing, and what would a return to normal cost us?

A return to normal means hours of commuting per week, instead of going upstairs to work.

A return to normal means rigid schedules and limited campus space, instead of blending the flexibility of synchronous and asynchronous delivery.

A return to normal means bringing back flu seasons at work.

A return to normal brings back all the issues around inclusion and accessibility for those who don’t fit the “normal” not built for them.

Here at home, a return to normal means less time with our infant son. It would also mean less quality time with my wife.

I haven’t packed a lunch in a year. My office dress clothes have been hanging untouched in my closet. I’ve fueled up as many times as maybe months we’ve been working from home.

Not everyone is as fortunate as I am to still be working from home. Many employees at my institution still have to go on campus to work because they’re essential, so their current normal differs from mine. However, we must question whether we want the consequences of having the rest of us join the essential few. I sincerely doubt it is automatically a return to something better.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan