NAVIGATING MISTAKES

January 25th, 2021

There’s an ideal and a hope that mistakes can be crept up on, tip-toed around, and altogether avoided if only the right degree of caution is exercised.  For some things, very larger things, this sort of ideal is a necessity.  It would be an irreversible mistake if we had recklessly stumbled into nuclear war, as it seems we’ve come very close to several times over the years.  Many AI researchers also believe that Artificial Intelligence is also an area that poses great potential harm, meriting a need to move slowly and carefully along the path of progress.  But on an individual level, the risk and downside of making a mistake is rarely if ever of such a magnitude, even relatively speaking.  

The majority of our hesitation and fear of mistakes probably arises from a school system which was singularly focused on mistakes which detracted from a perfect score.  The straight-A student is essentially a student who made no mistakes, no missteps.  

As impressive as that feat might be in the eye of say - college admission bureaucrats, there is very little real world utility in the perfect score.  The most capable and successful are those who can squeeze every last bit of insight from a mistake - not success.  The ability to reapply with a more nuanced understanding is the key to a great deal of progress and personal success.

A large concern with avoiding mistakes likely just generates a kind of procrastination.  It’s an excuse bred by a hammered-in notion of preparing for the test, but outside of school, the best things we can accomplish are additive: they are things we build, be it companies, a piece of writing, a house, a friendship, a career, a reputation or any variety of project.

Life is much more like the blank page as opposed to the test with predesigned answers.  The mistakes made while adding to the blank page contain the real jewels of learning, because a mistake  encapsulates a blindspot - an area where our idea of the world is flawed.  The mistake in real time is an opportunity to zero in on this flaw and fix it, making our measure of the world a bit richer, a bit more nuanced.

Navigating mistakes isn’t so much about avoiding them at all costs but using them as places to pivot, like sign posts that point towards a better direction.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: PATIENT PILGRIM

January 24th, 2021

The pilgrims filtered one by one through the narrow passage into the cave.  The attendant who lead them walked up to Lucilius’s side who opened his eyes and smiled at the attendant.

“These students have journeyed from very far to learn from you,” the attendant said.

Lucilius nodded at the group that had assembled before him.

“They say,” said the attendant, “that one of their group reached enlightenment under the guidance of the last master they trained under.”

Lucilius looked at the group curiously, then turned to his attendant.  “Which one?” He asked.

The attendant translated Lucilius’ request and in a moment it was clear, the group turning to look at a young man sitting among them.

“Ask this enlightened one for me,” Lucilius said,  “what is enlightenment like?”

The attendant translated and the whole group listened as the enlightened student spoke.  Lucilius looked to the attendant when he was finished.

“He says that he’s had no thoughts since his enlightenment some weeks ago.”

Lucilius grew more curious, smiling with some delighted amusement.  There did seem to be a particularly serene air around this one individual in the group, and clearly the rest of the group held this person in a bit of awe, reverence.  

“No thoughts…really?” Lucilius said mostly to himself.  “Well,” he continued.  “We are all a patient bunch of people, being interested in meditation…”

The attendant translated as Lucilius paused with his points.

“We have no issue waiting.  So we will wait for your next thought,” Lucilius said nodding toward the student.

The attendant finished translating, and the smile upon the enlightened student remained - for a moment.  But as slivers of time began piling up, a lace of doubt seemed to thread into the face of that enlightened student.  The serene smile seemed to relax to a more neutral pose, and the glow in his eyes seemed to sober and clear.

“Oh…” the student said.  He said something more, and Lucilius looked to the attendant for aide.

“He thinks he may have just had a thought,” the attendant said.

The two, along with everyone else continued to watch the enlightened student until he said something else.

“Yes, he seems to be thinking now,” the attendant said.

Lucilius nodded gravely.

“Well,” he said, “now that that’s out of the way, shall we begin our practice?”  

FEED THE WRITER

January 23rd, 2021

A desire to write doesn’t always come with an idea.  How many countless hours have been spent agonizing over the blank page and blinking cursor?  Like any system that creates, it requires an input.  We do not magically generate inspiration from no where.  All ideas come from some kind of connection between two or more parts outside of ourselves.  And the best input for the writing mind is, reading.

This is perhaps the most obvious but under-utilized hack for getting the words to start flowing on the page.  The short version of the hack is to just read until you find yourself disagreeing with the author, and then to simply write down why and what.

A second version of this hack is to literally copy out the words of another, and then just branch off once the flow is there.  Hunter S. Thompson supposedly typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald just so that he could know what it was like to write a great novel.  But the exercise likely had more benefit than he planned.

Most often though, reading reminds of other things, and remembering isn’t simply a reminder but a connection: between the text at hand and something else.  It’s that connection that often hides the kernel of an idea to be explored, written about.

It’s perhaps funny to think that staring at a blank page perpetuates much of the same.  Reading nothing means, writing nothing.

ADDITIVE LEARNING

January 22nd, 2021

Can a grade become an identity?  The quintessential cocktail party question hints at an answer.  What is the question that arises without fail between two strangers making chit chat?  What do you do?  

More than a name, or a family, or a history, we define one another primarily by what we do.  Putting the virtues and folly of this habit aside, it’s worthy to examine how this habit effects the young, as encapsulated by this question:

How did you do on the test?

If a child does poorly on a test, what effect does that have on that kid’s sense of identity?  Attaching one’s self to an identity is certainly a poor idea, but during youth it’s an anxious consideration, and perhaps even a temporary necessity.  The straight A student is commonly introduced as such to extended family and friends, but what about the student struggling with D’s and C’s?  He spends time with his friends and likes the drums. 

We are all painfully aware of the hierarchical frameworks with which we class people.  Grades are an enormously misplaced part of these frameworks - this isn’t a new thought.  Even many straight-A students sense something wrong with this grading system.  But few can explain why, and how it’s such a bad system.

The answer hinges on two important concepts.  The first is that practice is a self-reinforcing system.  We tend to think of practice as a regular action that improves something.  But think of a practice in terms of eating.  Everyone eats every day.  As a quick aside, the word practice comes from the Latin practizare meaning merely ‘perform’ or ‘carry out’.  This is what we do with eating everyday, we perform an act of consumption, we carry out a diet either by design or whim.  Does the practice here mean that we are all improving our diets steadily by default of simply eating?  No not at all.  But the practice does reinforce itself.  Poor food choices perpetuate, and it’s not unlikely that such choices perpetuate in a worse direction through.. practice.  It doesn’t take much practice before we have an epidemic of obesity.

If this concept of self-reinforcing practice is imported into the world of education, and eating is swapped out for test-taking, what sort of conclusions suddenly become apparent for the kid who regularly tests poorly?  Is such a practice likely to change and improve?

The second important concept necessary to understand the enormous flaw of tests is as simple as the comparison between subtraction and addition.  Tests are all about subtraction.  Any test has a perfect score, and with each misstep, some percentage is subtracted from this perfect score.  Our concentration on the student, from the perspective of the teacher, the parents, society, and even the student is all about how they mess up.  Grades are defined by how much they miss the perfect score, not by how many good answers have added up to this deficit.

The dismal ramifications of this perspective are heartbreakingly easy to point out:  we come to think that we should be perfectly prepared for what happens tomorrow, or next week, as though each action is part of a test.  So we overthink, trying to see all the places where we might misstep as opposed to just getting started and figuring it out along the way.  

The reality is that mistakes and missteps are where the real jewels of learning exist, but the industrial education system teaches us to avoid such mistakes and mistakes like death itself, and so learning on a large scale - especially self-directed learning - is impeded by a massive psychological gridlock.

If we grade a deep sea angler on the same metrics that we would a bird like a hawk, then it’s clear the angler is an absolute failure of a bird.  But of course this misses the fact that it’s a fish.  And unlike the bird, it’s learned how to hunt in pitch dark miles below the surface of the water.

The differences are eye-rollingly obvious, of course, but grading a fish like a bird is much what the industrial grading system does to some people.  There’s a certain knack to test taking, and those who strike upon it just end up being able to game the system for their benefit.  The point of education certainly isn’t to get all kids to clue into this knack: that’d be just as much of a waste of time and effort.  No, the resolution of these dismal and constipated practices has to do with that other operation of arithmetic: not subtraction, but addition.

Society and civilization is something we’ve built.  It’s an additive result of countless generations working hard to literally put things together.  Society has not emerged by the result of some kind of test that matches our ability against some sort of perfect grade - some sort of utopia that we falsely imagine might be a perfect grade.  No, society was constructed through exploration and tinkering.  By putting things and systems and people together and seeing what happens.  And look at what this practice has yielded.  We now have smartphones, vaccines that can be literally printed, that is put together in a weekend.  We have so many varieties of connecting it even seems to be backfiring.  But of course this is part of the process.  We try something and watch the effects.  And the whole thing ratchets ever upward as a result.

This sort of volley between effort and result is completely absent in the realm of test-taking.  You get one shot.  It doesn’t matter how you’d react to the result of your effort, that’s it, the grade is stamped, and the machine rolls onward.

It seems that it’d go without saying that the point of education is to produce better learners. But few if any seem to be saying this, let alone concentrating on how to make it happen.  If we were producing better learners than by the end of the absurdly long educational process, most all students would have learned to figure out the knack of test taking, but of course that isn’t happening: each student is practicing their trend, knack or not.

This focus on additive versus subtractive is one of the keys to redesigning education to work.  It’s quite strange and frankly sad to realize that building a company has more in common with playing with LEGO as a kid than it has anything to do with school.  

Lego is an excellent visual example.  When a kid builds something on their own, of their own creation, we do not see what it could have been, we only see what was actually achieved, and it’s likely something to celebrate, even if merely for the effort.  But school is all about what a student has failed to achieve by measure of a somewhat arbitrary design.  The vast difference between concentrating on negative space versus positive form cannot be over emphasized.  How can we ever expect students to have the courage to start companies and build new things if we’ve had them focused almost exclusively on what they might get wrong?  It’s a bit of a miracle that anyone does make it through with a sense of wonder, curiosity and a drive to build intact.

Imagine a different classroom, with a different agenda.  Imagine sitting down for the first class of the semester and the teacher says: this year, you are going to launch a business, and this classroom is your resource, to ask questions and explore together what each of your businesses might look like and how to make the finances work.  As part of the state’s economic growth initiative, you are each being allocated $1,000 to bootstrap your ideas so that the community can have a chance to explore your creativity and ingenuity.  

The teacher could be the one who signs off on the appropriateness of each business idea, which releases the funds which the teacher further verifies is spent in the designed methods.

Business is just one area that presents a comprehensive example of additive learning: it requires integrating a variety of perspectives, learning a diverse set of skills and most importantly, it requires creativity.

And most importantly, the difference between a failed business idea and a failing grade on a test couldn’t be more pronounced.  The failed test automatically ranks someone against everyone else who did better, whereas, no one can really tell if a business idea is going to work or not, and when it fails, it’s much easier to take that failure as feedback instead of adopting it as an identity.  Even a failed business effort is usually full of lessons to learn that can then be applied to a new attempt, whereas with a failed test, there’s nothing to learn because the chance to apply it has already passed.

REAL DIFFERENCE

January 21st, 2021

Think different - it’s one of the catchiest, most effective marketing phrases ever. It’s at once inspiring and easy - easy because there’s no real need to prove that we are thinking different.  Merely the sense and desire to do so is enough of a pleasure that the real thing need not even be bothered with.

How does different thinking make itself known?  There is of course the ubiquitous evidence of people who don’t think alike, trumpeting their point of view at the opposition like a gunner behind a canon.  But the opposition does pretty much the same: trumpeting their own point of view with the same force and much the same method.  What, if anything is really different between the two?

Despite what difference in word choice might be at play, the two groups in such arguments are acting identically.  This the modern state of discourse and debate.

What’s interesting is that most people have a deep and genuine interest in opposing points of view, but only when such points of view are presented in a respectful and kind manner.  Surprise surprise.  What’s really different in this case?  The point of view?  Or the method?  Well both, but one has no hope of being effective without the other.

Dialogue and discourse aside, the true evidence of thinking different isn’t thought at all, but action.  We all generate and entertain a huge variety of thoughts each day, the large majority of which we don’t ever act upon, for better or worse.  In fact, most of our behaviour functions without thought, by virtue of the well oiled gears of habit.  

For much of the day even, our behaviour can be quite out of touch with thought, and which matters more in the long run?  Behavior has real consequences, especially if that behavior is compounded repeatedly.  Whereas a great thought which is only ever thought and eventually forgotten has all the effect of something that never even happened.

Truly different thinking results in different behavior - new actions which ride on a fresh logic.  Unfortunately, many, most, and perhaps all of us are quite guilty of coming across better ideas and doing nothing.  We are all aware of ways in which our life could improve if only we acted upon the ideas which describe the change of those ways.  But like a good idea never written down nor acted upon and lost, uncultured by memory we sail on as though ignorant of a better course.

Perhaps there’s room for an argument that we don’t take thoughts seriously enough, or rather, we have a very poor sense of which thoughts to weigh as more significant than others.  That thought about chocolate cake weighs heavier than the countless memories of how it feels after binge eating.  It’s a battle of two thoughts, and the choice of one over the other results in a different behavior.  The two, that is thought and behaviour have this strange relationship, sometimes tightly bound sometimes as loose as if the two have never met.  Automatic behavior rarely gets the second thought that it should and great ideas often doesn’t get the attention in the form of action that they most certainly merit.