thinkfetti

I’m taking a Drawing I class this semester. We cover a variety of non-color media. Here’s the score this week:

Charcoal: 7
Doug: 0

Practicing can be fulfilling for its own sake; it can also be the most efficient way to get better at something, if you happen to be practicing correctly. And therein, as the poet wrote, lies the rub.

If we imagine the world of techniques as a two-dimensional landscape, and the success of a particular technique as the elevation above the corresponding spot in the two-dimensional world, we’ll have a version of what is called a “fitness landscape.”

If there’s one best way to do something, then the elevation above the spot corresponding to that best technique will be the highest of the whole terrain, the “top of the mountain,” if you will.

If you imagine yourself as on this fitness terrain, improving means heading uphill. Sometimes, it’s obvious which way is uphill, and sometimes it isn’t. Or the direction that’s uphill where you are now might not be the direction to the top of the mountain.

This metaphor supports a lot more nuance, but even at this level of broad strokes, it should be clear:

To improve, practice may be necessary, but it isn’t (necessarily!) sufficient.

We voted today at the University of New Mexico Student Union Building. A long line, and a festive atmosphere!

I know I don’t have a choice per se, but it feels good to have a vote.

The blending stump is an artist’s tool, used for blending shading lines into smooth shading, or “value.” It’s made of something like paper, sharpened into something like pencil shape, but the end of it is not perfectly sharp or defined, but rather like a small top knot.

Blending with a blending stump is hard (for me, at least). It’s easy to run over the border or contour I’m trying to blend toward, so the distinction between one, smoothly varying shape and the neighboring, also smoothly varying shape is violated, blurred.

Or, being afraid of running over the borderline, I don’t blend close enough to the border contour, and so there’s a region of blended values and then a border of unblended pencil strokes close to the border line itself.

I think of my time as department chair at my university, and of the problems I faced as ombudsman and general, all-around smoother of disagreements and angry people. It’s true: there was always either too much smoothing (real distinctions were “brushed over” in the effort to cool tempers), or not enough smoothing (sometimes, it’s just not practical or even possible to smooth and soothe to the point where everything looks balanced.)

The choice is then whether or not to keep practicing, in spite of the limitations of yourself and your materials.

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.

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A problem that fascinates me (and occasionally infuriates me) is the one of matchmaking: party A needs something that party B can provide, party B wants to provide a service that party A happens to have need of… yet the two cannot find a way to collaborate.

It happens with people looking for personal relationships, and it happens for employers and job seekers. Somehow, a barrier of anxiety (”well, if someone wants to volunteer to help us, they must have something wrong with them, no?”) stands in the way of these otherwise promising matches.

Country A has too much corn, and country B needs corn. Still impossible to work things out.

When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, we had a saying: “if you can’t increase your cross section, increase your flux.” Translated, that means if you are having a low success rate, do something more frequently.

Eventually, theoretically, maybe, it will pay off with the sensible match being made. Even if the hiring/meeting systems are mostly, almost entirely broken, things sometimes work.