thinkfetti

I don’t know the original source for these, but I must say they are great answers:

Geometry

Algebra

(Thanks, Sarah!)

The quote, “insanity : doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” has been attributed to Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin, among others, but it was probably written by Rita Mae Brown (Sudden Death, Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68). [1, 2]

But let’s say you’re sending out resumes, hoping to get a job. If each resume had a 1% chance of succeeding (a 1-in-100 chance), and if you managed to send out 100 resumes, you’d have about a 63% chance of landing a job. (The percentage chance of success in this idealized case is (1 - (0.99^100))*100 for reasons I won’t go into here…)

That’s a better than even chance, after doing the same, crummy thing over and over.

Or…

You decide you want to learn to draw. You sit down for an hour, try to draw a realistic picture of something on the desk in front of you, and it doesn’t come out.

(more…)

I have many dangerous thoughts. Furious, critical, deeply questioning. But I haven’t been posting them here.

Insofar as time exists, or seems to, beyond a fundamental Buddhist idea of the all-pervading present, there is no such thing as “going back.” And regardless of which version of time I am holding, it’s healthy and stress reducing to think that even if I return to a place I have been before, it must be a “going forward.”

Anxiety comes and is hard. It is a comfort, though soft-spoken, that all movement is forward, that there is change.

Recently I was a guest lecturer in a Philosophy of Science course, an occasional offering at our university taught by an extremely well-read senior professor. I focused on a book chapter that called into question “external” factors influencing scientific theory-making, from quantum mechanics in the early part of the 20th century to more contemporary chaos, complexity, and superstring theories.

The most interesting “external” factor the author considered was beauty; he asserted that the quest for this elusive (and difficult, if not impossible, to define) factor called beauty was undermining the exercise of the scientific method and corrupting scientists, who ended up formulating misanthropic theories. The author considered chaos and complexity theories to be misanthropic, because they removed humans from the top of the evolutionary ladder, suggesting that humans might be examples of larger trends, rather than the ones in control. The idea that chaos and complexity theory amounted to a collective throwing up of the hands, insofar as they would represent an admission that a comprehensive, precise “theory of everything” would be a misguided goal, stood as a betrayal of the birthright of human reason to the author.

In one portion of the guest lecture, I asked students to discuss in groups the following four questions:

1. When is science used?
2. When is the scientific method used?
3. When not?
4. What does beauty have to do with it?

Admittedly, this was a lot for 10 minutes, especially in a group. But afterwards, when I asked each group to write on the board one of their findings, the answers surprised me.

One group wrote that science dealt with quantitative questions only; qualitative questions were outside its purview.

Another wrote that people generally employ the scientific method in their daily lives, even if they don’t refer to it as such. For example, we avoid hitting our heads into walls, because of informal experimentation we’ve done and observation. (This, of course, is rather contradictory to the previous statement.)

A third group wrote that “everything is subjective. I think.” Part of this response was motivated by the fact that the small group couldn’t agree on any answers to the questions I posed (or on approaches to the questions). Still, I found this quite a surprising response, coming from undergraduates at a science and engineering university…

I think the reluctance or inexperience of the students to analyze an argument rhetorically (be it the author’s argument, or just the way I led the discussion) left them in a bit of a bind, when it came to moving ahead confidently in their thoughts.

There are many demonstrably smart people whose intelligence is overrated.

I’ve complained about “stupid smart people” for years: people with apparently “high IQ’s” (whatever IQ is — and measurements of general intelligence should be the subject for another rant) who are generally highly successful in their technical areas, but who are unable to relate well to people outside of their areas, who are skilled at employing logical reasoning but unable to operate in the region outside of logic where much of living happens.

We suffer greatly under experts. When we benefit from expertise (which we frequently do — I don’t contest that), the expert is usually a specialist in a narrow domain. The problem is when such a specialist believes (assumes?) his (why do I write ‘his’? Hmmm…) expertise transcends that narrow domain.

Expertism is the ill-placed confidence in experts who think their expertise extends beyond its actual boundaries. Hubris.

Sometimes, this ‘ill-placed confidence’ is placed by the experts onto themselves, and then it just rubs off on credulous people around them. You may be able to think of examples.

Lin Yutang, in The Importance of Living, has a little to say that puts the lie to these wayward experts:

[T]o proceed from the knowledge of books to the knowledge of life, mere thinking or cogitation is not enough; one has to feel one’s way about — to sense things as they are and to get a correct impression of the myriad things in human life and human nature not as unrelated parts, but as a whole.

In this matter of feeling about life and of gaining experience, all our senses cooperate, and it is through the cooperation of the senses, and of the heart with the head, that we can have intellectual warmth.

Intellectual warmth, after all, is the thing, for it is the sign of life, like the color of green in a plant. We detect life in one’s thought by its presence or absence of warmth, as we detect life in a half dried-up tree struggling after some unfortunate accident, by noting the greenness of its leaves and the moisture and healthy texture of its fiber. (139)

“Intellectual warmth” “Life in one’s thought” — I imagine there are many people who would consider such formulations besides the point, irrelevant, not worth regarding. I find them life-saving.