Why so Serious?

I was on the New York City subway, and I was sitting as usual.

Then these kids came in. They were super happy! They started climbing on the poles, poking and chasing each other, and laughing. Smiles did not disappear from their faces. There really wasn’t that much to smile about! After all, all they had was a pole and they were in the New York City Subway…

Across them, there were 3 adults with this blank, tired, expressionless faces. The contrast was so stark that it left an impression on me.

Kids have this playfulness, energy, and they laugh easily. Most adults are not like that. But I’m sure we used to be. What happened to us?! Can we get back to that sense of playfulness, and smile by default attitude?

Grand Uncle's Advice

I went on a run across the Brooklyn waterfront and it was really nice. The quality of the air was fantastic, and I loved the sun gently skimming pass by skin and soft waves gently touching the shore.

I have a favorite spot where I glaze at the Statue of Liberty. I relax my eyes staring at it from the water(staring at objects far away is supposed to relax your eyes - try it!). I drown out the noise in my head and listen to the whispers of the heart. I know it sounds stupid…

All this brought back a flurry of emotions and thoughts about my grand uncle from Korea. I met him when I went to Korea in August. He gave me a deep warm hug when he saw me. During my time in Korea, he took me across his home providence of Gochang and we had a nice drive across the shores of Youngwang. During my time there, he gave me a lot of sage advice.

Here’s what I wrote in my journal in August last year from my grand uncle:

• Kindness(친절함) and Humility(겸손함). “The two most important principles in life are being kind to others and being humble. Don’t ever forget that.”
• Consistency is the key to success. You have to start this today, and do what you’re supposed to be doing right now. Today becomes tomorrow, tomorrow becomes 2 days from now, 3 days from now, until it becomes an entire year. You got to start today.
• If you want to become the 10%, you gotta put in the work and effort. There is no easy path. You have to work your ass off, or do something different, whether that be thinking or hard work relative to other people. Not everyone can be well off. It’s not how the universe works.
• People cannot see long term. If you give 100k to everyone today, not everyone will have it by the end of next year.

• Don’t think too deeply. He had a conversation with my dad. It went something like this in Korean:

  삼촌: (아빠 이름)아 넌 너무 깊이 생각해. 어떨땐 그게 좋으지만, 너무 깊이 생각하면 안좋은 점도 충분이 많아. 좀 덜 생각하면 좋지 안을가?

  Grand Uncle: (To my dad) You think too much. Sometimes it’s good, but there are plenty of bad points as well. Wouldn’t it be good if you thought a little less?

  Thinking deeply is useful for solving problems, and preparing meetings. At work, the way he does this is he looks up every single possible term that could be used during a meeting, and he prepares for every counterattack. He pretty much treats every teller and representative as an enemy, and prepares for the utmost for any situation.

  I reflected a lot about this today, which that itself is hypocritical and thinking too much. Funny enough, a friend told me the exact same thing that my grand uncle told my dad - you think too much. Whatever it is, me, my dad, and my brother just get way too absorbed into the simplest things and just go down a vicious cycle of thought holes and think excessively. Must run in the family.

  Sometimes we need to drag ourselves out and do a reboot.

• Long term thinking. Think long term.
• Children > wealth. People don’t really care about your wealth, but they consider how well your children are doing.

• Start small, learn from mistakes, then scale as you acquire knowledge. He warned me that one of the biggest mistakes you can do is building complex systems without taking little steps. He gave the example of raising cattle. You don’t want to build a big cattle ranch, then buy the cattle. You want to acquire one cattle, iterate and learn the fine details of raising just one. Then scale to two. Then two to four. And so on.

  Unrelated - if I were to raise kids or teach, I would just let them make a ton of mistakes while they’re growing up. Then they learn from the mistakes and scale. It’s so much better that way than make high stakes mistakes when they’re a full blown adult.

• If you want the scale, you need details.
• Passing of time. I had to come to Korea because my grandmother passed away. His thoughts: “Don’t be too sad about grandma dying, as it is a passage of time. It is moving from one person to another, and it’s the natural way of things.”
• Be wary of too good to be true. Usually the scammers that come to his company seem to have everything figured out and look perfect. Watch out for that.
• Travel a lot while you’re young. “When Korean guys meet up for reunion, all they talk about is their two year mandatory stints in the army. Why do they always talk about this? Because that’s the most interesting thing they’ve done in their lives. Make sure you travel as much as you can while you’re young.”

What’s on my thoughts as of Tuesday, May 7th, 2019.

• What I want to next. Do I get another job and play it safe? Or should I try to build something? Can I even build something?
• Should I stay in New York City? I love how there’s always something to do here, the diverse group of people to learn from, but it’s noisy and some people are complicated. It’s just so tightly packed, cramped, and the air sucks. Public transportation is nice though.

• Reflecting on my dumb mistakes I made and missed opportunities in the past few months. Well, it would have been nice if I knew a key piece of information or didn’t assume that information. If I knew that piece of information I may have changed my entire approach in dealing with something in the past few months.

  I also thought too much about the people’s intentions. But basically, it boils down to this: the intent could be anything. Spending too much time trying to think about things from another points of view or if any actions make any sense with a hypothesis. I heard it’s helpful in poker though. Again, this is overthinking. Ugh.

Nicky Case Talk Summary

This is my notes from a talk that I attended by https://ncase.me/. in March. I took notes on the lecture, as well as some prompted questions I got during her talk.

• Why do we lose that sense of learning as an adult? It would be great if everyone was learning new things, but at one point did we settle for cheap thrills. The best things to do is to go for activities that have dual purpose, or kill two birds with one stone.
• For novice learners, passive is better than active. Advanced learners - > active is better than passive. Expertise reversal. This makes sense, but I don’t know if the boundary between expert learner and passive learner is clear. For example, let’s say that you’re a programmer. But if you programmed before and you want to pick up a functional programming language, should you just hack away, or get your fundamentals down? I think you should do both at the same time and reinforce as you go.
• Working memory is the bottleneck. 4+-1 chunks. Make sense. Similar to CPU/computer caching. Why do we have this 4+-1 chunks? What is the explanation for this number?
• Memory is determined by patterns and summarizing.
• Advanced learner already has the nets and the foundations to create new learning. This is true.
• Weak learners working memory becomes overwhelmed.
• Look into cognitive load theory
• How can we apply all this theory to programming/coding? You don’t really read a lot of code on a daily basis.
• Pair the right content load with the right brain. This also depends on the resting status of your brain.
• I liked building a ship inside a bottle picture. There’s definitely something deep about this, which I may explore a bit later.
• You should build one neural connection at a time strategy. The ideal gap for a learner is one connection away.
• All learning must require connection to things already known. Do not build from scratch.
• Effective learning requires a reasonable difficulty level set. You can’t just throw the learner into the far deep end out of nowhere.

I’m very interested in the learning process in general. One of the biggest things that we should work on is allowing students to make tons of mistakes, as many of them as possible without fear. I think we learn from making mistakes. For me, I remember the times I’ve screwed up more than my major successes. It’s NOT because I always screw up.

Other books to look into:

Why students like school? Daniel Willingham

Marvin Minsky Society of Minds

Flights are Insane

I made a trip to South Korea last August, and I was on a plane for 14 hours.

It is insane if you think about it. Everything. How large the plane is. The fact that you can travel half way across the world in 14 hours. How you fly through so high that you can only see clouds. How the wings on the airplane just flap back and forth to control the air zipping. How the airplane cuts through the sky. Thirty-thousand feet in the air at speeds no human can dare to ever achieve. Sometimes I think it’s bullshit. How many of the humans in existence ever got to be that high up in the air? How many would kill for the experience?

I’m still in awe of the technology. How there probably so many damn pieces that must all fit together for this airplane to function without error. Every single part and component. Every fundamental discovery on how the electron operates, and how current travels from point A to point B comes to use. Thousands and thousands of capacitors, resistors, and transistors placed by hundreds of engineers. Late hours into the night where the frontiers buckled down and explored uncharted intellectual territories. Countless hours soldering into the night and probably some zaps as well.

When I’m on thee airplane, I thought about how many people that have rode on an airplane before me, and how many will use this technology after me. How much impact technology will have on people’s lives. It will allow, for people like me, to see loved ones that are separated by thousands of miles apart.

I also get scared every time on airplanes. I know that probability wise, it’s highly unlikely I’ll get killed on a plane. The probability is crazy low. But don’t you think that everyone that got killed on a plane thought that way? Or everyone who ever died in a major accident?

“Ah it’s nothing. I’ll be fine. The chances of me dying on an airplane is super-low. Not gonna happen.”

Then bam. Dead.

<To-be-continued, because I don’t have energy =(.>

Economics, delays - probability of a delay? How no one can actually do anything if flights get delayed. Time taken to go somewhere. Energy comparison and consumption on all modes of transportation as a visual, and how much every we’d need for warm holes on plot.

The cheapness of flights. What are the margins per flight ride. How the airline company balance sheets look like.

Why People Don't Ask Questions

I read this great post from Jon Gjengset(https://thesquareplanet.com/blog/why-dont-people-ask-questions/) on the topic of asking questions. It made me reflect a bit on questions and why I didn’t ask more questions during my time in school. The reasons were many, but I was usually the type to go up to the Professor after class because I was afraid I’d waste everyone else’s time. For certain topics I was interested in, go to office hours instead. But yes, I wasn’t an active participant in the class many of the time.

There are couple of reasons why people don’t want to ask questions:

1. People don’t want to look dumb. If you’re asking a question, you’re revealing to the entire group of people that you didn’t understand X. Sometimes, this could be good, sometimes this can be bad. There’s a certain sense of humility involved in asking questions, and not giving a crap about what other people think about you. People judge about what kind of questions you ask - “Ah how can this person not know this?” To blatantly ask questions without a filter, you need a huge amount of self-confidence and to some degree honesty. My take on this is that - you should just ask. People don’t even remember what they had for breakfast. They won’t remember your stupid questions. And sometimes even dumbest questions are often insightful.
2. **** You’re afraid that you tuned out for a couple of minutes, and the lecturer already discussed what you are going to ask.**** I had this happen a lot of the times. For whatever reason, my mind likes to wonder. But maybe.. it’s just not me. Doesn’t everyone’s mind do this? Our brains are huge filters, and parallel processors. I find it hard to believe that our brains can remain concentrated on one thing for the entirety of 45 minutes of the class.
3. People don’t care about the material. They want to pass the class and get out. This is sad, but on the other hand, I can relate. There were a couple of classes in my life where I tuned out because I just didn’t have interest. This tended to happen a lot with politics and history classes because it was a regurgitation of facts and the reasoning for why the facts came to be were not thoroughly explained nor engaging. No matter how much I tried, I just didn’t have the natural curiosity to be actively engaged.

4. They don’t want to slow down the Prof. This is a legitimate reason. Doesn’t this underline the flaws of our education system? Why do we have to watch a lecture and participate passively for an hour? Ideally, the class should be flipped so that we don’t learn the material during lecture, but discuss the underlying assumptions and topics that we want clarified. This is also known as a flipped classroom. I had a class like this, where we would watch the Professor’s lectures during our own time, come to class one day work on an assessment, and on the following class form groups and discuss our questions with the Professor and TAs going around answering questions. At the end of the class, we would submit it to the Professor for grading and feedback. I didn’t find this particularly effective, mainly because of the free-loader problem and the tradeoff you make with this approach is that the Professor has to repeat information to multiple groups, and the interaction with the Professor is minimal.

   Hmm.. maybe one way is to have the students learn the things on their own, have them take a daily quiz to check their understanding, and have a re-take at the end of the class to correct their mistakes. Whatever it is, we need more feedback - that’s the main concept that corrects mistakes and steers learners towards the correct path.

I think asking questions is a fundamental skill that we should foster in our society. Only by asking questions, can we find new doors, prune out and deeply understand the assumptions that go in building systems, and find gaps in our understanding.

Anyhow, maybe we should do something to incentive students to ask questions and participate. Maybe extra credit for good questions. Or use technology during the lecture, so that students can anonymously ask questions in real-time! Perhaps the way we teach is all wrong - possibly the reason why we don’t have active participation in our classes is due to resource constraints. Or even psychological safety. Maybe, maybe if we have extremely groups of 4 - 5 balanced students teaching each other, won’t that improve our ability to ask questions and have very meaningful discussions? How can we design education systems so that the incentives all align so that we can maximize learning and growth?