Ken’s Blog

I love watching romantic comedies. They are highly formulaic, but the best ones do wonders with the formula.

One of my favorite kinds of RomCom is the redemption story. This is where one of the two lovers — generally the main character — has a serious character flaw.

This character is, at the start of the film, fundamentally unlikeable. But we know that he or she can be saved! All that is required is the love of the right person.

And sure enough, that person shows up. And eventually the inevitable happens. Love conquers all, our hero / heroine becomes a better person, and we all go home feeling better about ourselves and the world.

What I particularly like about a good RedCom is that it has all of the shamelessly pleasurable traits of a good RomCom, but in heightened form. It’s a fairy tale set in modern times.

And like all RomComs it is based loosely on reality. But in particular, it is based on the version of reality that our innermost selves are secretly wishing for.

Sometimes I think of life as a series of doors. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Wherever you are in life, there are various doors you can choose to try going through. That is, whenever you feel ready.

Some doors will turn out to be locked. Others won’t be doors at all — just parts of the wall cleverly painted to look like a door.

But others will open just fine. You can turn the knob, open the door a bit, and peek through to see what’s on the other side. And when you are ready, you go for it.

Sometimes you end up choosing the right door, and sometimes you don’t. But in any case, you now find yourself in a different room.

And not surprisingly, you find a whole new set of doors to try.

There is a certain ritual to sharing a bottle of wine. The opening of the bottle, the pouring of the wine, the clinking together of glasses.

And then there is the aroma, and the flavor itself. Every bottle of wine is slightly different, and to share a bottle is to exist uniquely in the world at a certain moment in time.

All of which,bin a way, makes it a prime candidate for a remote social experience. When, if ever, will we be able to replicate that feeling while being in two separate geographic locations?

I know that it is a difficult question, but the process of asking it already tells us a lot about the nature of human connection.

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.