#15 💭 Thought Maps | Engineering magic | Cyclical Dance of Civilisations | Fifty Shades of Beings | Intellectual Humility | Interesting Life
Engineering is nothing but magic.
What is now proven was only once imagined.
I read this quote a few weeks earlier. And I have been pondering about this ever since. I first came across this in Joi Ito’s book titled Whiplash. And that got me thinking.
Imagine you go centuries back and whisper into the passerbys ears that you would have a glass slab which you could use to talk to someone thousand miles away.
Not just that, you could just swipe right on this slab to find your dating partner and even watch films or play games on it.
They might have outright dismissed you. What a nutcrack.
If we put ourselves in their shoes, we might have thought about the smartphone the same way.
The magic we have in our pant-pockets.
Engineering is the closest thing we have when it comes to magic. It’s is the engine that pulls humanity forward, which eventually becomes technology, which becomes various designs in application.
What is now an engineered product was just speculation or quackery decades back.
Civilisations progress, and the testament of progress comes with this saying —
What is now proven was only once imagined.
The Cyclical Dance of Civilisations
Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series of five paintings consists of a composite showing the story of a culture in five parts. From the origin to chaos.
This painting composite made me ponder upon the cyclical nature of any civilisation. Is everything in this world cyclical in nature?
Well, Fashion could be cyclical. The trends rise and fall, earlier trends again emerge as retro, which then again becomes the new hip and hot.
What about mathematics? Is it cyclical?
Surprisingly, mathematics has always seen a constant progress throughout the rise and decay of various civilisations. You start from 1+1 and build algebra and calculus and before you know it, you have landed on the moon with this logic.
Be it the Babylonian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek or even the Indus Valley civilisations. Mathematics has shown an upward trend of progression. Almost like smaller LEGO blocks combining together to make a giant behemoth of a structure.
Mathematics remains the language of the universe, impervious to the creation and destruction of civilisations.
As I pondered upon the beautiful composites of Thomas Cole, these thoughts emerged.
It’s indeed fascinating how such a painting could trigger such thoughts almost akin to a visual tingling of your neurons. After all, 70 percent of your brain are mere visual neurons.
And art could bring forth such thoughts and emotions.
After all, as Marshall McLuhann puts it, Medium is the message.
Fifty Shades of Human Beings
Thoughts from this piece titled Complicating the Narratives by Amanda Ripley is still fresh in my mind. I’ve noticed this behaviour myself on how it becomes so difficult to come to a different standpoint at the end of a conversation when it comes to polarising topics. The crux of this essay is about how it has become ever-so difficult to come to a consensus among polar opposites of the political spectrum and it indeed struck a resonant chord with my thinking.
“Over time, people grow increasingly certain of the obvious rightness of their views and increasingly baffled by what seems like unreasonable, malicious, extreme or crazy beliefs and actions of others”
I was nodding my head. I was one amongst them. It was as if the essay was addressed to me. I felt that the more I discussed with others on my spiky viewpoints, the more it was getting reinforced. And the vicious cycle of conformation bias that was kicking in.
And I realised that all these were becoming antithetical to the whole aspect of engaging in a conversation in the first place.
And this was not just me. In America, the partisan antipathy has risen to drastically high numbers. The differences between the left and right go beyond politics at this moment. It becomes a personal clash.
And in this personal clash, we claim that the battleground is that of reason. We value reason, or atleast, we believe that we value reason.
But in a debate why do our personal opinions get more reinforced?
“Anyone who values truth,” social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind, “should stop worshipping reason.” At the end of the debate, the audiences should be willing to come out of their foxholes and consider new and inconvenient truths. And in this tryst, various tools from the pockets of psychology could be used.
One of these pocket psychology tools which I found useful is to trick your mind into a sort of anti-conformation bias. Which is a mindset which is constantly looking at ways to prove yourself wrong (instead of proving yourself right). This idea was inspired by Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile in which he mentions the absurd french protest that was intended with a sole purpose of expressing the right to contradict oneself ! The right to prove ourself wrong, reform our opinions, and break the shackles of our previous versions of ourselves.
Which brings us back to the topic of how to engage in a civilised discourse without being entrapped by the political echo-chambers and the tribalism that engulfs them?
Amanda Ripley in this essay mentions various approaches to combat this issue. What intrigued me the most is the viewpoint on adopting complexity as an approach which is highlighted in the following paragraphs from the essay —
Was there a way to cultivate better conversations? To find out, the researchers started giving the participants something to read before they met — a short article on another polarizing issue. One version of the article laid out both sides of a given controversy, similar to a traditional news story — arguing the case in favor of gun rights, for example, followed by the case for gun control.
The alternate version contained all the same information — written in a different way. That article emphasized the complexity of the gun debate, rather than describing it as a binary issue. So the author explained many different points of view, with more nuance and compassion. It read less like a lawyer’s opening statement and more like an anthropologist’s field notes.
After reading the article, the two participants met to discuss Middle East peace — or another unrelated controversy. It turns out that the pre-conversation reading mattered: in the difficult conversations that followed, people who had read the more simplistic article tended to get stuck in negativity. But those who had read the more complex articles did not.
As issues become more and more complex, we are at a junction where we have to address difficult conversations. The idea is to revive complexity in a time of false simplicity. “The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue but that they are incomplete,” novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her mesmerizing TED Talk — A Single Story.
Reality is not so black and white as we imagine it to be. Black and white are easier ways of narrating or explaining our surroundings, but it need not be the most accurate.
In reality, we are all different shades of grey, as human beings.
Everything has a nuance.
At the end of this essay, I have begun to appreciate the value of nuance in any spiky topic, be it the Israel-Palestine conflict, India-Pakistan border conflict or even the Presidency of Donald Trump for that matter.
There is a nuance in these topics which we ignore, and hence miss.
Complexity leads to a fuller more complete story. A more accurate story of reality.
In a world where even a flap of a butterfly can lead to a tornado, painting a broader, more holistic picture can help resolve conflicts, and even conversations.
I don’t know, I am not sure.
I was watching Joe Rogan’s Podcast with Sir Roger Penrose. Here you have a Nobel Laureate credited with the discovery of the black hole answering questions with — I don’t know. I am not sure. I was truly amazed by his humility despite having achieved so much credence through his scientific work.
Anyone with his accreditations could basically talk anything and we might just be nodding our heads. But he chose not to.
It requires a certain intellectual valour to say those words — I dont know.
And I am more amazed by the answers he doesn’t know than the answers he does.
His anti-knowledge.
You must live an interesting life
Are there any essays which you re-read? Do you meditate on an essay, or a proverb, or a paragraph everyday?
Ryan Holliday’s You must live an interesting life has been that for me. And I read it at a very critical junction. I had just completed my Masters in Industrial Design from TU Delft, Netherlands and was contemplating on a major career choice for two-three months extending into a limbo when I came across this essay.
It helped me refine my thought process. To chose a path which leads to a more interesting and dangerously exciting life.
For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors as long as you cannot be rulers and possessors, you seekers of knowledge! — Nietzsche
In the essay, he talks about how, or why is Seneca so wise? How has his philosophy been able to reach through the centuries and still grab readers by the throat? It’s because he had a wide swath of experiences to draw on, he had lived in such a way that he understood life.
Seneca was tutored by a controversial tutor named Attalus who was later exiled.
Seneca started his legal career at an early age.
Seneca got tuberculosis, spent 10 years in Egypt and had a terrible shipwreck while returning back to Rome and lost everything.
Seneca then started investing and became wealthy.
Seneca managed scientific experiements.
Seneca attended philosophy classes and gladiator games.
Of course Seneca was wise, look at all his experiences!
After all, you are nothing but the summum bonum of your experiences.
Choosing a pathway which is more interesting is a better heuristic, atleast for me, in such critical life decisions.
Obstacle is not an Obstacle in the Way.
Obstacle is the Way.
If you enjoyed this essay by Ryan Holliday, you could top this up with the Autobiography of Cellini, the famous Renaissance sculptor. Benvenuto Cellini truly lived an interesting life. At the end of this book, I was truly not able to believe my own eyes. It’s a primary source of his life story, and is quite action packed and enthralling. I was inspired by his autobiography, even so much as to make a sketch of him at his bust displayed at the central squares of Florence a while back.
What an interesting person, and an interesting life.