Learning Narratives

We humans are creators of stories, and learning makes no difference. Everytime I succeed – or fail – I receive some feedback about who I am. That feedback I use, often unconsciously, to create a narrative, or story, about who I am. This can sometimes create problems: too many failures in a row at math and I might create a narrative portraying me as a student, who is bad at math. If I start believing that I’m bad at math and therefore I failed, I’m in the risky area.  The problem is this narrative can become self-fulfilling. For if I failed, because I suck, there seems to be little light regarding future tests. My inability of doing math starts to look like a static quality of myself. You can notice this happening if you hear me saying “oh, I’d so love to ace my next math test, but it’s hopeless - I’m just bad at math”.

But, the critic might argue, doesn’t a bad result show that, in fact, you are bad at math? In a way, it does. But it does not show that I’m permanently hopeless. A horrible result sure proves I didn’t get it all right – but there’s no reason it couldn’t change next time. Maybe I can create a narrative portraying me as bright math student who just wasn’t paying attention, therefore failing a test. Perhaps the next exam is going to be a turnaround leading me to a future where I’m superb at math! Who knows what will happen?

Now, I don’t know if all this made any sense, and frankly, just now I’m too tired for any rewriting. Blame the end of the exam period, if you will. I hope you got something out of it.

Tomorrow: last exam of this semester and then off for some well-earned Christmas holidays. Hopefully I’ll have more time and energy to read something besides exam stuff. Maybe I’ll manage to crunch a post or two on the way.

The career pyramid

The conventional way to think about one’s future career usually is to simulate the career as

1.       Learn basic skills

2.       Specialize

3.       Profit

This is a very intuitive way to think, as everyone agrees that advanced skills are based on more basic skills. Therefore, a career is like building a pyramid – you have to start from the foundations and gradually work your way up. So your career might look like this:

A common implicit derivation from this is that you have to commit to your chosen career in the early stages. After all, you can’t build a pyramid by chance – you have to know what you’re doing! This leads into the idea that the sooner you know what your thing is, the better you’ll be. This is a useful, yet a potentially very dangerous thought. How so?

To look at usefulness first, it is obvious that you need certain skills to succeed in a given profession. If you want to become a physicist, learning proper math skills is highly recommended. On the other hand, wanting to be a cook hardly requires any understanding in the subtleties of Laplace transformations. Building a large enough toolbox – yet one with enough punch per tool – is a necessary requirement for success. It doesn’t matter if you’re the brightest person in the field if you’re missing the necessary tools to solve the problems (although being smart admittedly makes it easier to learn stuff as you need it and make ad hoc solutions on the go). Still, often you simply don’t have the extra three months to learn a new methodology, but you must solve the problem with your hammer and screwdriver – even if a chainsaw was the perfect option. So, it is a rather good idea to think about the tools you’re going to need in the future.

The dangerousness of “the sooner the better” view is that it implicitly assumes that your interests cause the need for tools, and that the relationship never works the other way. This is, according to my experience, simply not true. There are two reasons for this: firstly, we humans have an uncanny ability to increase our interest in whatever we are focusing on. Personally, I’ve often only gotten really into something as I’ve started doing it. Keeping this blog would be a prime example of that effect. Secondly, sometimes you need to master a set of tools before you can even answer why you need them in the first place. Thinking about examples, I believe quantum mechanics would qualify for this (even though I’m not a physicist and possess hardly any knowledge in the quantum field).

In university everybody is taught the basic toolkit for a field. If we never recognize the existence of non-standard career paths most people are just going to aim for the standard track with the standard toolkit. Definitely a good way to suppress innovation! To exaggerate a bit: how are we ever going to think outside the box in other contexts, if we can't do it even in the context of our own career future?

As such, this issue is not really a hard problem. A lot could be done with simple cross-scientific socialization (to realize there are actual people outside one’s own field), mentoring (to exemplify out-of-the-box careers) and other methods that promote the existence of a non-standard toolkit.

So what is the grand realization, in reality? Depending on the person it could be anything from a simple “not every business student works in banking or a consulting” to a good understanding of possible problems outside the basic university skill set, finding them as interesting – or even more! Whatever the exact formulation, it could be characterized as an insight that not every career is like a pyramid. Nor should it be. To sum up graphically, your career pyramid might in the end instead look something like this:

Maybe the specialization helped you discover something even more important than before and you ended up doing something outside the standard track. With life, that’s actually quite likely to happen. I’m looking forward to it.

Note on teaching

I think everybody has heard the following famous quote from Abraham Lincoln:

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

Today I suddenly found myself reflecting on all the different courses and lectures I've been to. The differences are huge: the best lectures have been phenomenal, whereas the worst ones have made me feel like I'd rather be deaf to avoid any similar experiences. I know the lecturers try their best, but teaching is really not that easy. It should be informative, compact and easy to understand. But still, the key ingredient is to not make it boring! So, I thought of an application of Lincoln. Maybe the golden rule of teaching should be instead

You can bore all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot bore all the people all the time.

That's what the lecturer said

Key:

What he said
What he meant


"This subject is very important basic information for anyone looking for a career in business."
"You won't learn anything useful, but it's a mandatory course so you'll just have to sit through it."


”This course will be a lot of work, but it will also be rewarding once you learn all of it.”
"I cannot understand that students have a life outside this classroom.”


”Even though the lecture notes are available on the Web, I still encourage you to read through the course book.”
”Hey, even I haven't read it. But I'll still put a question in the exam regarding one nitpick piece of it, just to force you to read it.”


”I hope you will ask questions and comment as much as possible.”
”I don't really know what I'm talking about so I hope you'll do the teaching for me.”


”I will keep the theory part as short as possible.”
either ”You are idiots and wouldn't understand it anyway.” or
”I don't really understand it myself, so I can't teach it to you.”


”That's a good question, but in the scope of this course we won't go further into that conversation.”
”I don't have a clue how to answer that.”


”I think you have an interesting viewpoint into this.”
”I think you're an idiot.”


”I think we can agree to disagree.”
”I think you're an idiot – besides, I'm right.”


”That question cannot be answered with the knowledge of this course.”
”Hey, I'm the one with the PhD! Who's criticizing who here?”

Clean(s)ing the mind

To my horror, I've actually found this period of cleaning my apartment quite inspiring and refreshing. Throwing away bagfuls of paper and making room for more books (and more papers as well) is somehow symbolic. Like throwing out old "been there, done that" -ideas and replacing them with new ones.

The whole mind-cleansing project is still going strong, albeit with a little less momentum than during summertime. Alas, I still have to take care of my responsibilities regarding my studies, and cannot commit myself to full-time philosophic meditation :D Well, to be honest, I've really liked my autumn courses so far: maths, probability & statistics, German, automation technology and work psychology. I find it a good mixture of different kinds of things, with all their different paradigms.

For example, on mornings I attend math lectures, where everything is determinate, and a result of a certain case is completely derivable from the premises. Whereas in psychology, you can only make statistical guesses, but cannot really make any forecasts on a single case, say, the behaviour of a certain worker, for example.

Outside school, I'm still trying to wade through that book about history of ideas, and also reading a bit on the American food industry. Oh, and for a snack I read Paulo Coelho's Zahir, which I found as inspiring as his books before.

As a final note, I'll encourage you to think about something regarding your own personality:

Name the three subjects, you've hated most at school. Why those? What kind of contact (if any) you've had with those in the past few years? Has your attitude changed in any way? Should it?

I'll reveal my own answers next time :)