Understanding Nothing

After my difficulties last week with Californian hotels, today I had similar problems confirming a booking reference by telephone in Estonia. Again, there was considerable confusion as every time I said ‘N’, they heard ‘M’. Then, when I got them to understand ‘N’, they thought I was offering that as the next character. We tried to use the phonetic alphabet to untangle this, but I got stuck really quickly as the next character was ‘Y’ and I couldn’t think what that was.

After the call I went to look it up, and discovered lots of interesting things in passing:

• Pre-WWII a different alphabet was used, consisting of place names: Amsterdam Baltimore Casablanca Denmark Edison Florida Gallipoli, etc.
• The version we use now mostly came into being in 1941, but in 1956 5 letters were changed: Coca, Metro, Nectar, Union, and eXtra.
• German also has Ärger, Öse, and Übel, and Denmark adds Ægir, Ødis, and Åse
• US Airports sometimes use Dixie for D, as it’s a little confusing with Delta being a major airline
• In Indonesia they use London for L, as ‘lima’ is Indonesian for the number 5
• in Japan, B is often Baker as Bravo is difficult to say

When I mentioned my problem to Karen, she couldn’t remember what Y was either, so suggested YouTube. Phonetic Alphabet 2.0, anyone?

Tony Learning

Danny Ayers points to an online Mensa test where you have to expand all the phrases (”24 H in a D” = “24 Hours in a Day”, etc).

They claim that scoring 19+ (out of 33) is “genius” level. So I felt pretty good about getting 29 correct in 10 minutes. But then I noticed that they also claim that the average score is only up to 5, which I very much doubt. Maybe my mind is just wired to be able to do this sort of thing, but 5 seems way too low.

I’m actually quite annoyed I didn’t score higher. One of the ones I missed was really easy, and I’d like to think that if I’d spent a while longer I would have got it too. Two of the others I was never going to get no matter how long I tried (not without cheating, anyhow). The final one is interesting. Danny mentioned it in his post, and set me off down completely the wrong line of thinking, from which I never recovered.

Anyway, it’s a fun test, and I suspect that almost all of the readers of this blog will also swiftly be classed as geniuses…

Tony Learning

As well as posting about things I do, I’m also going to be posting about things I’ve learned.

I’ve ranted here before about the deficiencies in my education, and much as I keep promising myself that I’ll do an A-level in History or Literature or Art History or some such, I just never get around to it. But I can force myself to investigate one topic a day on Wikipedia and fill in a lot of the gaps.

Today’s investigation, prompted by a little note at the end of Paul Graham’s recent essay on essays, was into the Battle of Hastings. This is one of those things that everyone growing up in the UK should know something about. But until a couple of years ago my knowledge didn’t really stretch much beyond the image from the the Bayeaux Tapestry of King Harold with an arrow in his eye. Then I saw a TV program on the invasion from the North just beforehand. I discovered that one of the main reasons for the victory at Hastings was that Harold had just marched the remains of his troops hundreds of miles south from the Battle of Stamford Bridge, where he’d successfully warded off a Viking invasion from Norway.

Today I learned several other important facts about this.

Firstly, I discovered that the Normans were also really Vikings (North Men), who had invaded France at the end of the 9th Century, and after besieging France had been given Normandy in exchange for protecting the country from pirates. So Harold had really been fighting off Viking forces from both ends of the country.

Then I also discovered that neither invasion was really just another “let’s go invade England lads” attack. When King Edward the Confessor died earlied in 1066 he had left no children, and there was a power vacuum and great debate of who should succeed him to the throne. Harold, who at this stage was the Earl of Wessex, East Anglia and Hereford, and thus had been the second most powerful man in England, persuaded the Witenagemot (the predecessor to Parliament) to vote to appoint him as King.

Meanwhile, Harald III of Norway, backed by Harold’s brother Tostig, claimed that several generations of intermarriage gave him the right to the English throne, and came to claim it, only for both to be killed at the aforementioned Battle of Stamford Bridge.

Simultaneously, William The Bastard, the Duke of Normandy, decided that he should be heir, as not only had King Edward been his cousin, but that Edward had promised him the throne years earlier. For good measure he also claimed that when Harold had been shipwrecked in Normandy a few years earlier he had promised to support William’s claim to the throne upon Edward’s death.

And, just to complete the triangle, it seems that Harold’s brother Tostig was married to Judith of Flanders, who was William’s wife’s aunt.

It seems that this whole area is much more complex and deeply intertwined than I knew!

Tony Learning

There are many sites on the internet carrying the lyrics to Lou Reed and John Cale’s “Song for Drella” album. Interestingly it seems that the vast majority of them are wrong.

There’s a wonderful couplet in “Faces in Names”: People who want to meet the name I have / Are always disappointed in me. But almost every site that carries the lyrics has this as “… always disappointed when they meet me”.

Similarly there seem to be many sites that carry the text of the Robert Frost poem “The Road Less Traveled”. Of course, there’s no such poem (that phrase doesn’t even exist in it); the title is actually “The Road Not Taken”.

There’s always a temptation to believe that the better attested to something is, the more likelihood it is to be true. Truth is never that simple.

Tony Learning

This morning we were flicking through some 1923 issues of The Magnet, marvelling at their “Wireless Dictionary for Boys”, and all the ads for stopping blushing and stammering, curing baldness and growing two to five inches.

We were also rather perturbed to discover a ad for postage stamps offering example stamps from several countries we’d never heard of: notably Polish Silesia, Haute Volta, and Travancore, Schlezvig (along with a slight doubletake at Belgian Germany).

A little googling revealed that Silesia has been split both as Upper and Lower Silesia, and also as Polish and Czech Silesia, and has been reapportioned numerous time – notably after the two World Wars.

Haute Volta was another name for Upper Volta, which became independent in 1960, and changed its name to Burkina Faso in 1984.

Travancore (aka British India), was a princely state in southwest India, until Indian independence, when it was merged with Cochin and areas of the former Madras state to form a new state, Kerala.

Schlezvig, is a little more difficult to find information about. It may be something to do with Demark, but it’s hard to tell, as most of the information about it seems to be in German…

Tony Learning

Students from the University of Plymouth managed to get a grant of £2000 from the Arts Council to test the hypothesis that an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of time could reproduce the works of Shakespeare.

However, they seemed to lack the resources to attain an infinite supply of monkeys, and with a lack of patience to wait for an infinite amount of time, they instead had to make do with six monkeys for a month. Unfortunately the monkeys “failed to come up with anything that remotely resembled a word”.

The “scientific officer” at the zoo, has somehow decided that this manages “to show that the ‘infinite monkey’ theory is flawed.”

Tony Learning

I’ve recently starting playing Boggle semi-regularly. I’ve always enjoyed it, but now I’m playing it with people who are much more competitive.

While I was in Boston, I also read Word Freak, a rather scary insight into the world of professional Scrabble.

The combination of these two paragraphs have led me to need to know that an ‘aba’ is a fabric woven from goat and camel hair, that ‘abb’ is a yarn used in weaving, that to ‘aby’ is to make amends, or atone, for something, that an ‘ait’ is a small island, and that an ala (pl. alae) is an insect’s wing.

Tony Learning

I should mention that, for the first time in my life, I managed to go into the Ladies bathroom to relieve myself. You see, of all the words I looked up and learned before I set foot here, I forgot “Man” and “Woman”. I now know that Damen is not German for “men”.

What Casey neglects to mention in this post is that, when relating the story to us, he explained it as “I went to the wrong bathroom, because I needed to lick a German”.

He later claimed that he actually said “because I didn’t know a lick of German”, but he also tried to claim that “know a lick of” was a very Irish (or Ooirish?) phrase, so I’m not sure I believe him.

Tony Learning

Stupid educationists have invented for the educational process the profoundly inadequate term “knowledge transfer”, suggesting a uni-directional stream of knowledge towards an accumulating recipient, who becomes monotonically more knowledgeable. I consider it a caricature at best. The trouble is that it may have stuck in some of your minds, thereby creating an extra barrier for the unlearning process. It makes some people totally unprepared for the recognition that among what they have acquired so far is possibly a lot of junk that is more a burden than an asset and that they should be happier without. One cannot be cautious enough with the choice of one’s past.

— Introducing a course on mathematical methodology, Edsger W. Dijkstra

Brian and Stephen are having a discussion on whether the role of education should be to teach you information, or teach you to think.

It is impossible to know how to think, without having enough accompanying knowledge to which this can be applied. However, it is possible, and all too common, to have the knowledge without knowing how to think about it.

The question, then, is when the ‘thinking’ should be taught. In my educational history, I think there was an undercurrent of acceptance of the distinction between the two concepts, but it was too often muddled.

For example, when I studied English Literature for O-Level, it was never made clear what I was actually meant to know or do or write about. I suspect that I may have found the subject a lot more interesting, and also done much better at it, if it had been taught (and examined) more as “the study of the history of interpretation of English Literature”.

Then we could have seen how literary criticism actually worked, and how it evolved, and how it was applied to the sorts of works we were reading. And the best pupils, those who were likely to continue the subject to A-Level or University Level, would have been the ones who were able to add their own thoughts and ideas onto the top of this. Whereas the rest of us, who were only doing the course because it compulsory, would have at least learnt something about the area, and have gained enough knowledge to be able to achieve a decent grade, even if we weren’t able to contribute anything interesting ourselves.

However, it seems that we were only really expected to contribute our own thoughts, without any knowledge of how to do so. For example, we “studied” Animal Farm (for some definition of “studied”). We weren’t taught anything at all about the normal analysis of it – we weren’t even taught that it was a political satire! To us it was just a fable of human nature. No matter what approach you take to education, this surely cannot be it.

Although this is the extreme case, much of my education was similar. You were taught a viewpoint, but not told that it was only that. It was if everyone in the world agreed on a certain interpretation of Macbeth, or of the Industrial Revolution, or of whatever the things were that we were supposed to have learnt in Geography that have long since faded from mind. And we were expected to be able to work out, from first principles, what this interpretation was. (I could never do this, and so was steered down the path of Mathematics, Languages, and the Sciences, where your answers were clearly right or wrong.)

If this is the school system trying to teach thinking, it’s completely back to front. Being able to critically analyse something from first principles is a highly advanced skill, only really available to experts in the field. But because it’s the approach we’re taught, everyone thinks they can do it. At an abstract academic level, this is bad enough. But in the commercial world, it’s recipe for disaster.

Confronted with a new idea, most people either accept it (usually in a modified form, filtered through layers of experience and an often invisible belief system) and work with it, or reject it. Few attempt to research it, or see what the state of knowlege in this area actually is.

Only the very best can become giants in any area. But there’s no excuse for even the smallest dwarf to see further by standing on the shoulders of the many giants who have come before.

Tony Learning

Brian, a long-time friend, collaborator, housemate, and provoker of many interesting ideas and crazy schemes, with whom I have unfortunately lost touch recently, has started a blog.

Today he raises the question about whether a Jack-of-all-Trades is forever doomed to be master of none.

Brian places the issue squarely at the door of ‘drive’: I’m a great teacher … but it bores me now.

Most people just aren’t driven to be great at the things they do. Many aren’t even driven to be anything more than adequate. Once you reach an acceptable level of something, the rewards for getting better start diminishing. As Brian goes on to say, this time about programming: I’m sitting comfortably at the top of the steep part of the learning curve, with no desire to go further.

In many ways however, how you view this curve depends on where you set your sights. When I was at school, I played a lot of chess. Within the school, I was the best: I captained the chess team, and ran the chess club. I also played at BB level, where, again I became the number 1 player on the team, and for several years in a row we were the best team in Ireland. I also won the individual tournament three years in a row.

In both these circles I would have been seen as ‘great’. It didn’t take me to venture too far outside these though to start losing on a regular basis. Our school chess team didn’t usually fare to well in the league, and whilst I won a reasonable percentage of my games, I was far from invincible. When the BB team travelled to the UK finals as Irish champions, we always lost.

I started playing tournament and league chess in Belfast, and again lost frequently. Over time I got better, and got to the point where even in these circles I could be considered ‘good’. But I lost the drive to get better. I used to think it was down to the fact that I had finally beaten both my mentors after years of trying, and had no immediate achievable goals left. But this couldn’t be true. There was much further I could have gone, with obvious feedback as to whether or not I was succeeding. I now think it was because I had realised that I had gone about as far as I could go on natural talent. My mentors had been trying to get me to read chess books for years, but I never liked them (other than the excellent How To Cheat At Chess and its sequel Soft Pawn).

As far as I could see, it was precisely because I didn’t know all the standard openings that I was able to beat the players who thought that all they had to do was learn them off, and didn’t know how to play against all my unorthodox openings.

I had worked out that I was better than most of my peers because I understood how chess worked. Most players at school level tried to work out who was leading in a game by counting the value of the pieces on the board (pawn = 1 point, knight = 3, rook = 5 etc.) The better ones knew that you had to score passed pawns differently than doubled pawns, or that in the endgame bishops of the same colour were different from bishops of opposite colour. But they never really knew why. Or how to tell who had the better position in general, regardless of the numerical strength of the pieces.

It took me years to realise that although my understanding usually trumped someone’s rote learning, someone else’s understanding plus learning would usually trump my understanding.

My teachers at school had tried to point this out to me in an academic setting: my school reports were full of comments like “Tony could do much better at this subject if he stopped relying so heavily on natural ability”. But I never understood this. Most of the time this sort of comment was beside an ‘A’ grade. If I could get an A with virtually no work, why would I ever want to actually put effort in?!

These teachers failed to demonstrate what the payback would be for that effort. I read their statements as saying I would get better marks – but I was already getting good enough marks, so I couldn’t see the point. They missed the chance to teach me about the joys of mastery of a craft. They failed to imbue me with the desire to always set my sights higher, to realise that good enough is never good enough.

It has often been said that the more you know of something, the more you realise how much you don’t know. True mastery is always that next step further away. But you don’t even need to actively pursue that mastery. It has also been said that whilst there is always an excuse for not coming up with a great idea, there is no excuse for not copying it as quickly as possible. In practice my chess experience rarely holds. Basic competence coupled with the ability to learn from, and steal from, as many sources as possible, will usually trump basic understanding. In the age of the Internet, this ability is available to us more than ever before.

And in computer programming, this is probably even truer than most areas. A Perl programmer, for example, who has a deep knowledge of what’s available on the CPAN and who has the basic competence to write the glue code that ties together 5 or 6 different modules will, for 90% of the projects in which Perl is used, be at least 10 times more productive, and produce much more maintainable and accurate code, than an ‘expert’ Perl programmer who knows enough to write all this himself (and so does so).

I’d always be wary now of hiring someone who doesn’t read widely in their field. I read somewhere recently that 80% of computer programming professionals haven’t read a related book since they graduated. Even more scarily, I believe this was including reference books. That probably only leaves about 5% who actively read books with the abstract notion of “getting better at my trade”. I think I’d rather hire those people, and work with them on collectively always getting better, than hire someone with outstanding natural talent, who’s probably going to reach a pinnacle, and find it difficult to get any further.

Brian finishes by querying whether he is able to “build the discipline, patience or ambition to become really good at something”. I’d challenge him to go pick one of the areas in which he’s “good enough” and explore that next part of the learning curve. It only looks flat. And whilst the immediate rewards aren’t as obvious, looking back they’re always worthwhile.

Tony Learning