Author Archives: Raymond Yee

True Enough for Training Trust?

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Recently borrowed from the Berkeley Public Library is  Farhad Manjoo's  True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.  (Wiley, 2008),  which seduced me with the promising subtitle  "learning to live in a post-fact society."  I think a lot about how to  understand what's actually happening, how to grasp the truth, if you will.  Almost everything I believe about the world came from sources beyond my own immediate experience; even direct experience is hardly an infallible source of knowledge.  And though I could critically examine any given assertion for its  veracity, most things I have to take on trust.  I have to build upon so many other cognitive pieces that I've already accepted (for the time being at least) to be true that most of the time I'm working more on faith and trust than on naked reason.

From looking at True Enough's  table of contents, I surmise that most of the book is about why people believe so many divergent things,  based on different universes of "facts."  What I'd really like to know is how not get trapped in the ruts of our well-worn ideological frames -- and secondarily, how to help others do the same.    I couldn't resist turning to the last page of the narrative to find "Choosing means trusting some people and distrusting the rest.  Choose wisely."  OK, Mr. Manjoo:  teach me how to "choose wisely" or at least how to learn how to choose wisely.

When I taught high school students in  my course The Nexus of Newton and Nietzsche, I  placed a lot of emphasis on looking for areas of disagreement as a way of sorting through complicated matters.  Focus your energies on getting to the bottom of what people fight over, and you'll get some real insight.  Now, I wonder whether I had put too emphasis on disagreement.  We should look hard also at what everyone seems to agree upon, asking ourselves:  "just because everyone seems to say it's so, is it really so?"

An immediate objection is "certainly, overthrowing commonly held assumption is the stuff of revolutionary science, but will it help me with daily life?" When you add up what people disgree about and what they seem to agree about, well, that's a lot of stuff to examine.   I'm still needing to define a practical methodology about where to spend my energies.

As I mulled over Manjoo's book, I kept thinking of a popular article in The NY Times from late last year: Barbara Strauch's  "How to Train the Aging Brain" (Dec 29, 2009)  The essential point of the piece is that people with middle aged brains  (40s to late 60s) should focus their learning on not so much accumulating more facts but challenging, stretching, and enriching what we already have learned.  Here's some key quotes from the article, which is worth reading in full:

If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

[...]
Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

[....]
...continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different.

[...]
...get out of the comfort zone to push and nourish your brain. Do anything from learning a foreign language to taking a different route to work.

[....]
Jack Mezirow, a professor emeritus at Columbia Teachers College, has proposed that adults learn best if presented with what he calls a “disorienting dilemma,” or something that “helps you critically reflect on the assumptions you’ve acquired.”

These observations seem right to me as someone in my early 40s. But I wonder whether they apply to younger adults, say in their 20s -- the age of most of my graduate students. (A question for the Berkeley teach-net list, methinks.)

Reflecting on those lonely days

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Many years ago, I came across a famous quote of Albert Einstein's that has since stuck in my mind:

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a "lone traveler" and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude.

From my earliest days to well into my thirties, I often felt achingly lonely, an oddball.  Einstein was my childhood idol.  It was his life story that inspired me to start down the road of becoming a physicist.  His self-description as a "lone traveler" was  solace for me.  I used to hope that one day I'd grow up to be as special and singular a figure as Einstein.  (No lack of ambition there, eh?)

Part of growing up for me is to accept that I am no Einstein (nor even a journeyman physicist for that matter).  A side effect of  self-acceptance:  I no longer feel so lonely.   I am really like the people around me. I'm also so blessed to have the love of family and friends who accept me for who I am, in spite of  my unrealized ambitions.

Heavy rain as the semester starts

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With forecasts of massive storms for the next week or two, it behooves me to concoct ways to stay cheerful in the face of gray skies and heavy rains.  At least it's not snow, I say to myself.   Rain speaks to the limitations of life in the Bay Area, whereas sunny days  inspire in me the prospects of unlimited opportunity.  OK:  slight exaggeration -- but I'm already looking forward to the first sunny day after the storms.

CACM’s “Mightier Than The Pen”

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Because the Communications of the ACM has so much surprisingly good writing, it has become one of my favorite periodicals.  (I say surprisingly because CACM is a technical journal.)  Though the journal is aimed primarily at computer scientists, much of the content is accessible to a wider audience.  Take, for example,  “Mightier than the pen.” Communications of the ACM 52, no. 12 (12, 2009): 112.  [closed access, alas], Joe Haldeman's essay on how the complex relationship he has as a writer with both the computer and pen and paper.   I got such a kick out of the essay that I was moved to submit the following comment to the piece:

I identify very much with Joe Haldeman's "collaboration between pen and computer".  I had to think twice about whether I'd make the same hard decision of computer over pen if one had to choose one and concluded that yes, I'd do the same.  I would have wanted to read more about what Mr. Haldeman thinks a world of computers without "a fountain pen [writing] into a bound blank book" would be like.  It was only after a family member gave me my first Moleskine journal that I rediscovered what I had lost when I wrote almost exclusively on a computer.

Was Reading: Symmetry

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I never finished writing this blog piece on a book I was reading, but the pieces are coherent enough to push out....

Sautoy, Marcus Du. Symmetry: A Journey into the Patterns of Nature. Harper, 2008.

Fun stuff so far. One big revelation has been the parallel between simple groups and prime numbers. I'm still a bit unclear on the concepts -- so I will struggle to explain them properly and clearly.

Classification of finite simple groups - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The classification of the finite simple groups, also called the enormous theorem, is believed to classify all finite simple groups. These groups can be seen as the basic building blocks of all finite groups, in much the same way as the prime numbers are the basic building blocks of the natural numbers. The Jordan-Hölder theorem is a more precise way of stating this fact about finite groups.

List of finite simple groups lists the 26 simple finite groups, including the famous Monster group.

Reading the book has made me look at the bathroom tiles, to notice that all the tiles are of one type -- and that you just need to rotate them.  What symmetry group is embodied by the tiles?  Is the vast majority of commerical household tiles of the same group?

When did people start making tiles?

What is quasi-periodicity?

How does symmetry show up in textiles? I'm working through understanding List of planar symmetry groups - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Morning pages and remembering my dreams: spreadsheets on steroids

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For almost every morning over the last couple of months, I've been writing about three pages in my journal first thing in the morning, in n an exercise known to many as morning pages.  One of the side benefits of this exercise is how it helps me to remember dreams from the previous night.  Last night I dreamt about being at a talk by two shaggy hair guys,   Who had invented a new type of spreadsheet tha  for some reason had only two sheets but which could also handle millions of users and billions of variables because the  spreadsheet somehow exploited the fact that all these numbers were not independent of each other.  Great idea but I've no idea of how to implement such a spreadsheet, or how useful such a spreadsheet would actually be in real life.  Nonetheless, dreams are a reminder of how wacky our brains really are.

Is Jon Stewart’s “Trickle Up” Economics proposal being taken seriously?

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I was intrigued by Jon Stewart's "trickle up" proposal in yesterday's interview with Lawrence Lindsey: instead of bailing out the banks, help individuals get free from their consumer and mortgage debts (by, for instance, enabling people to refinance mortgages at a lower rate, one that presumably will keep people in their homes.)  Is this approach being seriously considered?  It seems to make sense to a layperson like me -- so what's the problem with this approach?

I want the money back — and where’s our apology?

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As much as I'd like to see the bankers who pillaged our economy return every cent they stole from the system, it seems that there are few ways to actually recover their shameful bonuses. If that's true, then I'm at least with Alan Binder, who wrote the following Economic View - Six Errors on the Path to the Financial Crisis - NYTimes.com:

For this litany of errors, many people in authority owe millions of Americans an apology. Richard A. Clarke, former national security adviser, set a good example when he told the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks that he wanted victims’ families “to know why we failed and what I think we need to do to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again.” I’m waiting for similar words from our financial leaders, both public and private. [emphasis mine]