I have come across many books, articles, and videos that claim to have a certain number of rules for success. These rules often have a catchy number, such as the top 10 rules for a successful life, a healthy life, or personal finance. But none of them have made a lasting impression on me. If you google the top 10 rules on any topic, from finance and health to success and relationships, you will find countless best-selling books and even celebrities endorsing such ideas. Here is an example of what Google search shows for the top 10 rules of success:
One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)
Saturday, July 8, 2023
The one rule that never fails me in any situation
Thursday, July 6, 2023
The illogical fear of Artificial Intelligence
In the previous article, I argued that notions of “AI will end humanity” or “AI will end human civilization” boldly cross the nonsensical fear territory with hypersonic speed, and land directly into the mysterious lands of bullshits (Pardon my language, please!). Before I get paralyzed by the fear of the unknown and speculate about a future that has not yet happened, I prefer to look back and see how the “paradigm shift” kind of technologies have affected humanity and human civilization. Among the many tools that humans have invented, let’s focus on the “cognitive-aid tools” such as AI. Since generative AI consists of large language models - sets of machine learning algorithms - trained or applied to vast data [1] produced by humans as well as machines, we can trace the origins of AI as far back as cave art. It took humanity more than 64000 years from cave art to AI-generated imageries and texts. In 64000 years, humanity has seen the rises and declines of many civilizations but none is associated with the innovation of “cognitive-aid tools”.
The image is produced by Bing AI |
Cognitive aid tools as accelerators of human civilizations:
Cave art is the oldest known form of human expression (a form of data produced by humans). Some of the oldest examples of cave art, such as the paintings in Maltravieso cave in Caceres, Spain, date back to 64,000 years ago [2]. Writing, on the other hand, emerged much later in human history. Some of the oldest records of writing, preserved in the form of Sumerian clay tablets, are only 3,400 years old [3]. These tablets were used for record-keeping by a number of independent city-states that formed the Sumerian civilization [4]. There is no evidence that the transition from painting to writing had any negative impact on any civilization. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that writing helped the city-states expand into empires that fostered the development of human civilizations. Even people like Graham Hancock [5], who believe that human civilization is much older and use the “Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis” [6] to support their claims, do not argue that the supposed ancient civilization was destroyed by any innovation of cognitive-aid tools such as painting, writing or printing machines. However, it is worth mentioning here that Hancock’s claims of a much older civilization have been debunked by others [7].
The image is generated by Bing AI |
No matter what your position is in this debate, one thing is clear: the invention of writing as a more efficient form of communication and record-keeping than painting did not harm human civilization but boosted its growth and expansion. Writing enabled humans to record laws, history, recipes, medicine, science, philosophy, and many other aspects of human knowledge and culture. Further evidence comes from the invention of printing machines. The printing machines did not make writers and painters obsolete but rather created new opportunities for them to flourish. The printing machines also facilitated the education of the masses, which was essential for the industrial revolution. Moreover, they allowed writers to reach millions of new customers who could afford cheaper mass-produced books. As a result, a lot of works were produced that challenged or offended the prevailing cultures, societies, and authorities, and sometimes even sparked wars, revolutions [8, 9], and mass killings [10]. However, without the printing machines, the Renaissance and modern scientific and technological innovations would not have been possible. Fast forward to our time, the innovation of computers and the internet that enabled humans to communicate live by typing on keyboards and touchscreens, in addition to talking and gesturing, accelerated social, educational, and economic growth to unprecedented levels. In the large economies that make up 70% of global GDP, the Internet contributes more than agriculture [11]. Let that sink in for a minute. This is a huge leap in human history compared to painting and writing.
The illogical fear of AI debunked
The image is generated by Bing AI |
Many people have a strange fear that AI will end human independence in decision-making, or take over human thinking and creativity. This phobia is illogical when we think about the relationship of AI with humanity rationally. What AI is doing to humans is not something unprecedented. It has happened many times. It happened when humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer tribes to agricultural societies. It also happened when humans transitioned from agricultural to industrial-dominated societies, and from industrial to digital/service-dominated societies. In all these transitions, the nature of work and human lifestyles changed. With AI, a new wave of personal assistants is on the way that will transform the fields of education, healthcare, politics, law, communication, finance, and more. During this transition (as in previous transitions), there will be a massive transfer of wealth, power, and decision-making abilities, and a significant shift in worldviews and behaviors of people that will exacerbate some of the dominant conflicts and fault lines, and bring about societal changes at an accelerated pace (I will leave these predictions/extrapolations for a future blog post). However, based on past transitions, I strongly believe that with AI assistance becoming part of our lives, the transfer of wealth, power, and societal changes will benefit most people (not just the 1% wealthy and the 10% credentialed elites).
References
[1] What is Generative Ai?. C3 AI. (2023, May 11). https://shorturl.at/HJLPU
[2] The Archaeologist. (2022, December 18). Ten oldest known cave paintings in the world. The Archaeologist. https://shorturl.at/fiFG4
[3] Brown, S. (n.d.). Where did writing come from?. Getty. https://shorturl.at/dgmvL
[4] Wikipedia contributors. (2023, June 21). Sumer. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:06, June 21, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sumer&oldid=1161256256
[5] Wikipedia contributors. (2023, June 1). Graham Hancock. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:31, June 21, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Graham_Hancock&oldid=1157970488
[6] Martin B. Sweatman, The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis: Review of the impact evidence,
Earth-Science Reviews, Volume 218, 2021, 103677, ISSN 0012-8252, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earscirev.2021.103677.
[7] Shermer, M. (2017, June 1). No, there wasn’t an advanced civilization 12,000 years ago. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-there-wasnt-an-advanced-civilization-12-000-years-ago/
[8] Wikipedia contributors. (2023, June 26). Russian Revolution. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:48, July 6, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Russian_Revolution&oldid=116196932
[9] Wikipedia contributors. (2023, June 19). Chinese Communist Revolution. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:51, July 6, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chinese_Communist_Revolution&oldid=1160842672
[10] Wikipedia contributors. (2023, July 4). The Holocaust. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:10, July 6, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Holocaust&oldid=1163441526
[11] James Manyika and Charles Roxburgh (2001) The great transformer: The impact of the Internet on economic growth and prosperity, McKinsey Global Institute, https://shorturl.at/AJNV9
Tuesday, June 6, 2023
The Artificial Intelligence bullshit
Friday, May 19, 2023
Schools are enablers but not the makers of great humans
Is education limited to a timeline?
Schools, as we all know, follow a timeline. As soon as a student begins school, a race against time and comparison with other students starts. The students who move fast in this timeline or perform much better than his/her peers are considered bright students. And of course, every class has one or two bright students. I have no doubt that the majority of these bright students do well in their personal lives or make good and rewarding careers. To do well in life or career one needs to follow the existing systems. The question is how many of these bright students become great humans by creating a new system that becomes mainstream and changes humanity’s direction?
The image is generated by Bing image generator |
With a quick glance at what we learn in school, one realizes that learning a system is fast but creating a new system requires an intellectual “Superman” or “Supergirl” if you like. For instance, children learn abstract ideas like alphabets and numerals in the first two years of schooling. It took humanity more than 6 million years to invent these abstract systems. Why did it take humanity so long to come up with systems that children learn in a few years of mentored learning? We can find some clues in the difference between learning a language and writing. Children learn language with ease, and when they enter the school, they are already equipped with the spoken language. Learning writing, requires immense effort from the student, and his/her mentors, simultaneously. Let’s put it another way. It is very likely that humans in the stone age spoke complex languages comparable to modern languages. In 1930, Michael Leahy, an Australian Gold prospector came across the native people in the central mountains of New Guinea - the second largest island in the world - that he thought spoke in a “jabbering” language [1]. By 1960, it was learned that the native people spoke 800 different languages. The island was isolated from the rest of humanity for 40,000 years, and the languages that evolved were distinct to this island. In comparison, humans invented writing 5000 years ago. It is common knowledge that both alphabets and numerals evolved slowly in the last 5000 years. For instance, ancient Egyptians could write in hieroglyphics, and ancient Romans didn’t have the concept of zero. Noam Chomsky has an answer for the differences between language acquisition and writing skills. He proposes that all humans have an innate capacity for language and all languages follow a universal grammar [2]. The innate ability for language, even the partial innate ability explains well, why cavemen could have complex languages, and children learn language at ease even in isolated tribes.
Once students learn how to read and write, they are implicitly told that to become good at something they have to practice a lot. Phrases like, “practice makes perfect” are often quoted in a variety of ways. In recent years, round numbers such as 10,000 or 1,000,000 have become popular. It is so appealing to learn that if one spends “10,000” hours at anything, he or she can become very good at it. It is known as a 10,000 rule [3]. It takes 3-4 years of disciplined commitment to accomplish the 10,000 rule. Let’s do some simple calculations. If one spends 8 hours a day with no breaks for 3.4 years on a single task such as writing, he or she can accomplish the 10,000 hours rule. Besides, the 10,000-hour rule, there is a million-word rule [4] for becoming a good writer which agrees on the amount of time with the 10,000 rule. If a person makes a commitment to writing 1000 words every day, it will take him or her 3 years to complete the task of writing 1 million words.
In school, students spend lots of time reading and writing. If the 10,000 hours or a million hours rule is true, why do we not see a mass of good writers and speakers among high school graduates? By the time a student graduates from high school, he or she has spent more than 10,000 hours in school learning the basics of human knowledge. The 10,000 hours number comes from OECD [5] which says that a student in the U.S. spends 8,884 hours over 9 years in primary and lower secondary schools. If we add 4 more years that a student spends in high school to this number considering that the student spends 180 days per year or 1260 hours per year in school, a high school graduate has spent 13924 hours in school.
When I googled famous authors with high school education, 14 names showed up including Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, George Orwell, David Hume, Robert Frost, Jackie Collins, Michael Morpurgo, Frank McCourt, Roald Dahl, Dana Goldstein, Anne Ruggles Gere, and Juana Ines de la Cruz. What these famous writers had or done that millions of other high school graduates did not do? A quote attributed to Pablo Picasso may shed some light on this problem, “It took me 4 years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Picasso’s four years also agrees with the 10,000 hours or a million words rule but it adds another dimension to the debate, and that’s the personal calling. Since the 10,000 rule is a general rule, we may argue that by spending 10000 hours one can acquire the competency needed to write well or paint well, but to write something or paint something that changes the way people think or see things requires something personal - something that allows people see things beyond learned frames of thinking or organizing things, in case of Picasso seeing things like children, for instance. Just as Picasso learned to paint like Raphael, if he kept painting in that style, he wouldn’t be the Picasso we know. He had to come up with something totally different from all previous artists, something very close to the cave artists.
Do genetic and environmental variations explain the difference between good and great?
Physical performances like athletic performances are greatly influenced by genetic variations -30 to 80 percent [6]. The muscle composition like slow-twitch muscle fiber and fast-twitch muscle fiber determines the endurance versus speed of the athletes, aerobic capacity - the maximum amount of oxygen that the body can provide to muscles, and other obvious physical determinants like height and muscle mass are mostly predetermined by the genetic inheritance. Besides physical fields, genetics also have a great influence on the intellectual performances of individuals. It is no brainer to see the link between one’s ability to behave, regulate one’s emotions, and form social bonds or attachments will determine one’s performance in school, work, relationships, and quality of life, in general. These three qualities are attributed to one’s temper, and it has been shown that temper is influenced by genetic inheritance [7]. In addition to genetics, environmental influences play an enormous role in both the physical and intellectual performances of a person. There is a critical period for the acquisition of a new language or language. A child exposed to multiple languages at the age of 1 to 5 years can effortlessly become multilingual. Recent studies extended the critical period for the acquisition of new languages to 17-18 years of age [8]. Another important aspect of the environment is the development of the attachment style that a baby develops in the first year of life [9] depending on the relationship of the baby to the caregiver which will highly influence the child’s future relationship when he or she enters into adulthood.
Based on the variations in genetics and also the environment, it becomes obvious that there will be great variations among individuals just by following the 10,000 hours rule. It is also evident from the results of high school graduates. As mentioned before, students spend around 14000 hours in school to graduate high school, but only 60 to 70% of the students enrolled in colleges from 1993 to 2021 [10]. Besides, time, genetics, and environment are other factors to consider when we think about becoming good at something. Considering the accelerating rates of progress in every field, it seems a sufficient number of individuals become good at something. Considering the global talent pool at Silicon Valley that has come from gene pools across the globe and from a variety of educational institutions, one can argue that deliberate practice for around 10,000 hours may override most of the genetic and environmental variations among individuals. Becoming good enough at something is universal for most abled men and women. My argument is about going from good to great. Considering very few great men and women in each generation, I am inclined to think that going from good to great is something personal.
So, What makes someone go from good to great?
I began this article by comparing language versus writing and numerals and argued that writing and numerals were hard to invent because, unlike language, they are based on systems. Numerals as a system of thinking are still in progress. What makes an individual great is not mere time spent practicing but time spent tweaking a system to improve or change it enough that it allows the rest of humanity to see the reality whether natural or constructed with a new perspective. Most people learn -mostly from schools - the systems but very few try to change it for the better.
References
[1] Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language. Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2007.
[2] Tool Module: Chomsky's Universal Grammar, https://tinyurl.com/yjjm57mr
[3] Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, 2019.
[4] Fortier-Dubois, Étienne. “How Many Words Have You Ever Written?”, Atlas of Wonders and Monsters, 30 Dec. 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2unpd3x4
[5] “United States: Read Online.” Oecd, https://tinyurl.com/ykbd53ev
[6] “Is Athletic Performance Determined by Genetics?: Medlineplus Genetics.” MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://tinyurl.com/2p82uk4b
[7] Cloninger, C.R., Cloninger, K.M., Zwir, I. et al. The complex genetics and biology of human temperament: a review of traditional concepts in relation to new molecular findings. Transl Psychiatry 9, 290 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-019-0621-4
[8] “Cognitive Scientists Define Critical Period for Learning Language.” MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1 May 2018, https://tinyurl.com/mpzdrufb
[9] Li, Pamela. “Bowlby & Ainsworth Attachment Theory – How Does It Work?” Parenting for Brain, 17 Jan. 2023, www.parentingforbrain.com/attachment-theory.
[10] 61.8 Percent Of Recent High School Graduates Enrolled In College In October 2021 : The Economics Daily: U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics. 23 May 2022,https://tinyurl.com/3pk448ha
So, the original is a hybrid? Not an angel or a devil?
I thought two kinds of originals existed that were recognized by humanity from time immemorial, an angel and a devil. The humans weren’t originals. They had to choose to become either an angel or a devil or if they did not have the guts of becoming either, they had to ask for help from an angel to save them or worship a devil to grant them the power to dominate others. But Adam Grant suggests that all who believe in these two well-defined groupings are conformists and to be an original, you have to be non-conformist. What the hell is a non-conformist? See, I am being a nonconformist here. The professor asked to summarize the video talk in 125 words, maximum. I watched the video. In the video, Adam Grant sells the idea that nonconformists are originals, and guess what? While watching the video, the “power of suggestion” starts rewiring the synapses (neuron connections) in my brain, and my brain instructs me to be an original by changing the format of writing. It instructs me to write the essay like an opening scene of a movie - show a scene that promises something is going to happen. Before I go back to the story of hybrids, read the summary of the video;
The image is generated by the Bing generator |
Summary
In his TED talk titled, “The surprising habits of original thinkers”, Adam Grants notes three common habits of the people he considers “originals. The first habit is being “slow to get off the ground”, the second is doubting an idea instead of doubting one's ability, and third, generating lots of ideas until stumbling on an original idea.
Response
While Adam Grants are successful in selling the three habits, and it is possible that most of the people who came up with an original idea and popularized those ideas through their works somewhat share percentages of these habits, I am not convinced of the implied definition of the “original” for several reasons, chief among them is the improving an existing idea. Another important reason is producing lots of ideas in the hope of stumbling upon an original idea. I am not saying that it doesn’t work. But I am inclined to the notion of the data analysts who believe in the concept of “garbage in, garbage out”. The quality of results or predictions depends on the quality of data, and that is the reason data scientists or scientists in general spend most of their time generating and sorting quality data before analyzing it. I think the same is true in the arts, creating movies, writing novels, establishing a business …etc.
Originality is a personal culture. If one has developed a culture of originality then he or she can benefit from Adam Grant's ideas the most. I believe the culture of “originality” comes from the realization that there is no finished work and there is nothing perfect, not even in Nature. It is all processes that we experience. The wider culture of the society usually kills the realization of processes by the rules, costumes, traditions, procedures… etc. An original person develops a culture and skills strong enough to make his or her rule-breaking work acceptable to the wider culture. Picasso describes originality beautifully, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Adam Grant’s three habits enrich the personal cultures of an original person by informing him how these habits helped other original thinkers. I am inclined to think that one has not developed a personal culture of originality, he or she might enjoy the talk but those habits might not stick with him or her, and he/she might forget them when he/she finds another enjoyable video or video.