Juan David's Newsletter - October 17, 2021
Why The World Defines by Skill, Early Bicycles Model, and “Make a Discovery, and I’ll Exempt You from Final Exam.”
Good morning!
2021 is almost over, which means is time to think about things I haven’t done yet but still want to do. I just looked, and I’m behind in many things.
Let’s get to it!
New to My Newsletter? - Welcome! Really excited to have you! You can read the archive here.
Curiosities, here we go!
Curiosities 🍳🏈🎩
1. The World Defines You by Skill. But Some Can’t.
Why do we need a major in college? Why do we have job titles?
Or why is entrepreneurship on the same coin as academic research?
You can either live the life of a craftsman, someone with a defined and polished skill, or the life of a problem solver, someone like an entrepreneur or researcher who chooses and solves a problem.
But there’s a forgotten option, those defined by their own causes.
Read this excerpt from the best essay I’ve read in a while.
All of these tremendously influential people dedicated their lives to fighting for a particular ideal with a very clear sense of right and wrong. Often really fighting against an authority or mainstream that did not recognize their wrong as being wrong. And today, the world is still very far from any of their ideals and so they still see a world in crisis and they keep fighting. They're always fighting. Now I'm not saying you have to live this way. I'm not saying that you should live this way. What I'm saying is that you can. That this lifestyle is an option that's available to you. And it's not one you're gonna hear about much. Your career counselor is not going to come back to you and say you should start a personal crusade. In a social field, they might, but not in technology. Instead, the world will try to make you define yourself by a skill.
That's why you have a major in college. That's why you have a job title. You are a software engineer. And you'll probably specialize to be a database engineer or a front-end engineer, and you'll be given front-ends and asked to engineer them. And that could be worthwhile and valuable, and if you want to spend your life pursuing excellence and practicing a skill, you can do that. That is the path of a craftsman. That is the most common path.
The only other path you really hear about much is the path of the problem solver. So I see entrepreneurship and academic research as kind of two sides of that coin. There is the field. There's the set of problems in that field, or needs in the market. You go in, you choose one, you work it, you make your contribution there. Maybe later on, you choose another problem, you work it, you make your contribution there. Again, that could be worthwhile and valuable and if that's what you want to do, then you can take that path.
But I don't see Larry Tesler on either of those paths. I wouldn't say that he was contributing to the field of user experience design because there was no such thing. He didn't choose some open problem to solve, he came up with some problem that only existed in his own head, and no one else even recognized. And certainly he did not define himself by his craft, he defined himself by his cause.
By the principle he fought to uphold. And I'm sure if you look at Wikipedia it will say that he's a computer scientist or a user experience something but to me that's like saying Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a community organizer. No, Elizabeth Cady Stanton established the principle of women's suffrage. That's who she was. That was the identity she chose and Larry Tesler established the principle of modelessness. He had this vision, and he brought the world to that vision. So, you can choose this life. Or maybe it will end up choosing you. It might not happen right away. It can take time to find a principle because finding a principle is essentially a form of self-discovery, that you're trying to figure out what your life is supposed to be about. What you want to stand for as a person.
2. How Americans See Problems
But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately.
This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.
From The Triumph and Terror of Wang Huning (also great article to read if you want to understand how China might be seeing the U.S.)
As someone who is somewhat new to this system, I cannot agree more.
I can think of a couple of examples such as lack of focus. Instead of figuring out a way to sit down and study, people get diagnosed with certain conditions and have to take pills for life to “get focus.” And the list goes for mental health, behavior issues, etc.
I don’t agree with everything the article says, especially if you know who they’re referring to but it’s nonetheless a good article with a good perspective.
3. “Make a Discovery, and I’ll Exempt You from Final Exam.”
In 1951, while taking an Information Theory class as a student at MIT, David A. Huffman and his classmates were given a choice by the professor Robert M. Fano: they can either take the final exam, or if they want to opt out of it they need to find the most efficient binary code. Huffman took the road less traveled and the rest they say is history.
Put simply, Huffman encoding takes in a text input and generates a binary code (a string of 0’s and 1’s) that represents that text.
This is a non-obvious way to incentivize smart people to work on interesting problems. I’m not sure if I would ever discover something like that but I would definitely try if that was an option.
Anyways, when I pushed my code to GitHub. I had to try to convince the professor to do the same.
4. Early Bicycles Models
Many designs were tried. That’s for sure.
I’ve been thinking so hard to create a way to move across space and time with little to no apparatus no matter the situation.
I’ve learned a couple of things. Everything that seems to move is either by using wheels, or some version of “legs.” Another option is magnets but that’s less used.
How can I get to classes without a bike, skateboard, buses, or running? I’ll keep thinking.
Thoughths? Reply to this email, and we’ll talk.
5. 🖼🎨
Where’s Waldo? I mean… Lincoln.
Now that I’m halfway through the semester, I can start getting ready to finish off the year strong. Many things are left to do and accomplish. I’m glad I wrote this essay to keep myself accountable.
Until next week,
Juan David Campolargo
I have been wavering to post on my schedule, but I push myself, and the feeling of accomplishment is worth it. Good read, thanks for being accountable!
Ric