Month: November 2022

Having watched all of Rings of Power, I am struck in particular by the part where they race against a deadline to make those darned rings.

The whole thing seemed an awful lot like what happens in the software business. For corporate reasons that are a little bit beyond your understanding, you need to make a deadline because there is a shipping date.

Of course, it might turn out that whoever is behind product is not who you think they are. Their corporate agenda may not line up with your own personal moral compass. But hey, you’ve got stock options.

I wonder whether Tolkien knew that he was crafting a metaphor for Silicon Valley.

I am fascinated by the liminal space between waking and dreaming. We’ve all been there.

You are having a dream, and you start to wake up, so you become aware that you are dreaming. But still you are obeying dream logic.

Objects might change shape, or you may suddenly find yourself in a different room. People from your life suddenly appear or disappear as companions on your journey.

There is something very beautiful about this space, because it is a space of no judgment. Notably, our ego is turned off, and we are not censoring our thoughts out of a belief that something or other is at stake.

If only we could bring that freedom from judgment into our waking life. Alas, that doesn’t seem to be how life works.

Oh well, one can always dream. 🙂

I’ve noticed that when people don’t completely understand a thing, they make it complicated. You can tell that somebody really understands what they are talking about because they make it sound simple.

Complication is the enemy of clarity, and therefore the enemy of real knowledge. There, that was simple, wasn’t it?

Sometimes I look around at the world and the people in it. And I think, these people are also looking around at the same world and we share a certain sense of reality.

When we are not thinking about it, we all tend to think of that as objective reality. But of course it is human reality, in so many ways. Not only can we only see what human eyes ser and hear what human ears can hear, but we can only think the way human brains can think.

I wonder how different the same world would appear through alien eyes. It would be interesting, even just for a moment, to get a glimpse of that alternate reality. That is, if it didn’t just end up driving us crazy.

This weekend I am preparing to move my office at NYU. The new office has a layout identical to that of my current office, so ideally I would exactly replicate the setup I currently have.

Unfortunately, the real world does not work that way. I have to take things off of shelves, put them in boxes, label everything, and get ready to reassemble it all after the move.

This really is a case where the digital has certain advantages over the physical. Semantically what I am doing is precisely a cut / paste operation. It would be so much easier to do that with bits rather than with atoms!

Suppose you instantly make half the people in a universe disappear, seemingly selected at random. That makes you, essentially, Thanos.

This is true even if you are a billionaire who owns a company that makes electric cars. Am I the only person who has noticed this?

Most textbooks ultimately come down to didactic presentation. The student is told: “If you study these facts and processes, then you will do well on the test.”

Therefore much of the motivation is extrinsic — the desire to succeed. For some fortunate students, who happen to already have an interest in a given subject, there is also the intrinsic motivation to learn more about what they love.

But if a student does not already have that connection to a topic, then assigning them chores will not forge that connection. In fact, it might inspire dread and resentment.

So why not instead present educational material in the form of fictional narratives? That will tap into a motivation that the student already has, on an instinctive biological level — the desire to hear a good story.

Why do we love stories so much? Objectively speaking, it seems counterintuitive. We listen with rapt attention once we know that we are hearing about something that doesn’t exist, and in fact has no literal correspondence with the real world.

I suspect that it has a lot to do with our development as a social species. Our survival as a species is linked with our development of natural language. For early humans, tribal cohesion was greatly enhanced by the ability to sit around together and tell stories, whether of myth or of tribal lore.

It is now likely baked deep into our brain that we feel pleasure when somebody starts telling us a story. If it is a good and well formed story, then we integrate the telling, fictional as the content may be, as a life experience.

This has implications for education. More tomorrow.

I’m thinking about designing a story to write — and then writing it. And so I find myself thinking in terms of the classic hero’s journey.

Fundamentally, you need a hero, a problem and a solution. The rest is all details.

Of course those details matter. For example, it’s not that interesting if the hero doesn’t learn anything. Ultimately it’s not really about what happens, but rather about the character arc.

And of course you need to know who exactly is going on that journey. I remember the first time I saw Ratatouille, and realized that the big character advancement moment was not about Remi.

It was, of all things, about the food critic. That was a character I hadn’t even thought I could like. And yet it was the moment that brought tears to my eyes.

So maybe I shouldn’t assume, going in, that I even know who our hero is. That knowledge might just end up bubbling up from somewhere in my subconscious.

And I am happy to not yet know the answer. Like Yogi Berra said near the end of his life, when his wife asked whether he would prefer to be buried or cremated: “Surprise me.”

I am thinking of spending the month of December writing a complete story on this blog. It’s something I’ve done before, but not recently.

The idea is to start on the first day of the month, and post every day until the story ends on the last day of the month. Given that I will be writing in December, my story will have 31 chapters.

In order to make that work, I’m planning to take some time behind the scenes throughout the month of November to plot out the story structure. I figure that a month for structure followed by a month for actual writing should be about right.

If you count this post, I guess I started the process today. That is, if meta-structure counts as structure.