Ruminating Out Loud

An idea that is timely for exploiting the convergence of disciplines of knowledge and synthesizing and making information more relevant to addressing the grand challenges facing humanity.

There is a lot to be learned

at times I get so overwhelmed

by the almost nothing I know

about dark and snow

life and the globe

woven into a web

it makes me feel inconsequential

insignificant and peripheral.

Then came along the Internet

the great equalizer to the rescue

an outlet of expression

pent up and long overdue.

Liberated the mind and imagination

forever freed and seeking

birthing new life

and life to meaning.

.

A series of conversations with the late Prof. Richard Feynman, a genius and thinker we can all aspire to learn from.

I am impressed by those who engage in a thought process about an experience that is being had. This is a great example of that active form of learning; living and learning simultaneously! Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor explains, in a vivid talk given at TED Talks – a reservoir of knowledge, the experience she went through when she “had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one.”

Biography of Dr. Taylor:

One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness …

Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.”

If one is asked to name a hobby, an assortment of physical activities and creative expression is usually listed. One may say I enjoy playing a sport A, B, or C. Another may have inclination more towards absorbing knowledge in all its forms; a time spent by reading and reading passionately. There are those that enjoy the process of writing or partaking in a creative process of self-expression. Then, there are others that take delight in the social interactions arising form communal activities.

I am hit by the sudden realization that there is actually not a defining hobby that I have consistently partook in. That is not to say I do not enjoy the less-than-frequent sport outtings or reading for pleasure or the togetherness and belonging arising from fellowshiping with friends and family around one type of an activity or another. It is the recognition that there has been an absence of a thread connecting through all these activities. It is the discovery that there was not undeterred continuity or periodicity to these activities; a lack of continuum of evolution and growth.

It is in this context that I started pouring in my self-expressions, either by writing about a given topic, drawing, or gathering pieces of information of interest, into these pages. I have previously spoken to the sense of active learning or consumption of information that arises from this process. I have also described the transformation in my thinking about the concept of time. I am learning there is a sense of liberation in the ability to pull in numerous sources of knowledge, digest and store them with remarkable ease of access and connectivity. There is also a sense of joy, and I must say an addictive quality, to the process of seeking for information and learning; a momentary excitement of discovery. It almost feels like a sleeping giant has been awakened and is actively thirsting for knowledge. This, I must say, is a remarkable transformation in my thinking about education.

I have reached this point after having spent decades, from childhood to adulthood, in the world of structured learning environment guided by the immediate need to complete a homework/task or pass an examination. Absent that structure, one is suddenly confronted with the the unbounded nature of knowledge and the lack of framework for absorbing it. I think learning is, fundamentally and at the truest form, a process of absorbing, digesting, and expressing. This medium has provided for engaging in these processes in unison. It is the process of active reading, synthesizing of information, and writing that provides the venue for sustained learning; the framework for organizing thoughts and relevant information. Here, in these pages, I think, a hobby is born. Born to the pent up craving for freelance learning and expression. The mind is awakened and is wanting to absorb. No more puzzlement as to what my hobby is. I have discovered it is learning and, to be exact, blogging.

Paul Graham has an interesting post on the evolution of judging people, specifically as it relates to prediction of future performance. He argues that the change from state where family influence and bribery were of determining factor to one in which academic credential were used as a measuring stick to evaluate the knowledge one has was brought about by the Chinese. He informs about the benefits that this change brought about the and pitfalls of using credentials as a predictor of performance and output. Such pitfalls of the system, are being overcome by another transformation he sees taking place in the way businesses are organized and how the large scale ones are perceived. A passage from his essay is presented below:

…The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next.

It’s hard to beat this phenomenon, because the schools adjust to suit whatever the tests measure. When the tests are narrow and predictable, you get cram schools on the classic model, like those that prepared candidates for Sandhurst (the British West Point) or the classes American students take now to improve their SAT scores. But as the tests get broader, the schools do too. Preparing a candidate for the Chinese imperial civil service exams took years, as prep school does today. But the raison d’etre of all these institutions has been the same: to beat the system…

The obvious way to solve the problem is to make credentials better. If the tests a society uses are currently hackable, we can study the way people beat them and try to plug the holes. You can use the cram schools to show you where most of the holes are. They also tell you when you’re succeeding in fixing them: when cram schools become less popular. Fortunately there’s a better way to prevent the direct transmission of power between generations. Instead of trying to make credentials harder to hack, we can also make them matter less…In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don’t care whether you’ve even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization. The reason credentials have such prestige is that for so long the large organizations in a society tended to be the most powerful. But in the US at least they don’t have the monopoly on power they once did, precisely because they can’t measure (and thus reward) individual performance.

Credentials are a step beyond bribery and influence. But they’re not the final step. There’s an even better way to block the transmission of power between generations: to encourage the trend toward an economy made of more, smaller units. Then you can measure what credentials merely predict.

These observations are precinct and applicable to this day and age and actually have particular relevance as it relates to not only measuring performance, but also ensuring active engagement is made in broadening one’s usefulness to society. In a previous post, I discussed about the difference between passive and active consumer of information. Performance, as measured by credentials and certification, is an indication of past glory and accomplishment. Even if one assumes that these credentials are well tailored and made “unhackable,” I think the degree of relevance of these indicators have in evaluating a person’s knowledge on a given topic or the mental faculty to think and learn diminishes over time. This is mainly due to the pervasive occupation in a passive information consumer state. To overcome this one has to engage in an active, deliberate, and focused effort to continue to learn and develop the ability to absorb, digest, and apply new information. Hence, one has to transform oneself to an active consumer of information.

The danger I see with credentials and certification is that, specifically because they measure past glory, they can lead one into having an inflated sense of self-worth. If one is not actively engaged in learning, hidden behind the stellar indicators of accomplishment may be a brain that had deteriorated in its ability to ensure good performance now. Personally, I would not do away with credentials and the value put in attaining a good form of education as they still are the best ways we have for ensuring, not just that one has some abstract intrinsic amount of knowledge, but also the necessary basic preparedness and discipline it takes to learn. But, steps can be taken to ensure continual improvement, either self-induced or incentivized.

A Google Search for "information" on 12/17/08

 A given individual is at most going to be able to check out information contained in the first few pages of this result. Let us assume that the Google search engine is an all-too-powerful one that scavenges all over the internet and returns all the relevant information for a given search inquiry. Let us also say that that one would have the patience to review and digest information from the first 1000 results, which would be 100 pages of search results. I understand that almost no one does this. But, for the sake of argument, let assume that it happens. If that is the case,  the 1000 search results would be less than 0.00004 % of the overall outcome. The remaining 99.99994% of the information returned is what I would consider to be Null Information. It is not that this astounding amount of content does not have any intrinsic value. It is just that it has not been properly tapped into or made relevant to what is currently being searched for. To put it in perspective, let us consider the population of the U.S. On 12/18/08 at 01:14 GMT the population of the U.S. is projected to be 305,904,346. The equivalent of the search result would be taking ~ 100 people to be representative of what the American people are like. The remaining  305,904,246 people are completely left out of this outcome. All the intricate and unique information about these people is not really accessed or accounted for. This body of knowledge is what is the Null Information. It can be argued that it is possible to come up with 100 Americans that are a good representative of the general population. However, we can agree that whoever decides who gets to be one of the hundred better be really good in order for the outcome to have the most consensus. There are a few ways to ensure that this selection process come as close to being good as possible. One is to go ahead and undertake a massive census of all the people of the country and find out about the characteristic traits of each and every American; if not all as, many as possible. Endowed with this knowledge one can synthesize the data to filter out the most common traits that are shared by the people and select the top 100 people having them. This requires that a centralized entity undertakes such an effort. This would be the equivalent to how search is evolving, where the likes of Google are amassing as much personalized information as possible so that they can customize the delivery of services to the interested party. The other option is to leave it up to the people of the U.S. to decide who get to be their representatives. This would be much like the elections, but with an important twist. The election is not to select a member of the House of Representatives or the Senate, but the equivalent of selecting 100 presidents with as close to a 100% participation rate in the election as possible. Already one can see how messy of a process this can be. If it can be pulled off, this would give a direct platform for the people to make their desires be known. It also provides a direct access to the collective individualized-wants-and-needs of the people, and would truly provide for as an accurate a representation as possible. There are information retrieval approaches developed around this concept. The advent of tagging of information and bookmarking are attempts in creating a platform for democratic expression of interests and desires. Using this gathering of information, entities can then provide services back to the participants that are directly applicable.

The decision as to which method is the most effect is a difficult one to make. On the one hand, the first approach puts all the power of decision making on one entity. Although such an entity can aspire to take into account the ways in which one piece of information is more relevant than the other (in the case of Google the taking in to account not only the content of pages, but also the degree of inter-linking between the other pages and the one in consideration), the final decision remains exclusively with that entity. Reliance on a method of deciphering relevance through a particular approach has its own pitfalls as it gives incentive for other parties to come up with a way to essentially game the system. A very good example of this could be the budding industry in “search engine optimization.” Incidentally, a search for “search engine optimization” by itself returns > 27 million results. On the other hand, the process of allowing participants to express their interest is an involved process that is prone to high level of inefficiency and difficulty in consensus building. If there is not a 100% buy in to the process of selection, then the same problem of few deciding what is best for all is encountered. In the long run, both approaches will likely continue to develop and find ways to stay useful for the masses. Either way, there remains a core problem in tapping into the Null Information. Whether it is for companies to acquire as much personalized data as possible so that when individual X makes an inquiry about Y, (s)he is not inundated with billions of irrelevant data wasting the resources required for storage, retrieval and review of data or the case of building a large-scale platform for as many people as possible to participate in a democratic process of self-expression, there is a lot to be done about the Null Information. There is an astounding need for not only search for information, but also sorting and customizing it. As search technologies become more powerful, this may be accomplished with ease granted that there is an existing data connecting individual with pieces of information. There is also a need for providing venues for expressions of one kind or another. With the rapid rise in content creation and dissemination, it is going to be a battle fought over a long period of time with the aforementioned entities playing catch up with the population at large. Now that is a battle for the ages!

In the electronic age, where accessibility of and access to information has been made dramatically easier, TED Talks is a very good example of a readily accessible and effective reservoir of knowledge. There are many other places where one can find videos of educational materials. But, I would argue that those that have as a high of a signal-to-noise ratio as TED Talks are far and between.