Always End On A High Note

The Peak-End Rule: The peak and end of an experience is how we judge an experience.
[Image Credit: Michael Johnston]

In numerous studies, it has been shown that we tend to prefer what ends well. Instead of citing a whole bunch of studies (a lot of them by Dr. Khaneman), let's just focus on one.

In this study, a bunch of students were asked to do two parts of a test. In the one part, they had to do 20 very difficult questions. In the other part, they had to do 20 very difficult questions and in addition to that, 15 easier ones subsequent to the 20 difficult ones.

When asked which part they preferred, most students indicated the longer one. The relatively less discomfort of the 15 ending questions made the students prefer the longer section instead of the shorter one, even though total discomfort is objectively higher.

That's why it is important that we do a "wind-down" when we finish a long bout of studying or an arduous task. It's also very beneficial to reward yourself and get that ice cream from McDonald's at four in the morning.

What Learning to Draw Feels Like

Official Website - Amazon Link

Recently, I took it upon myself to start learning to draw. I should first go ahead and mention that I have always been atrocious with my artistic skills and my drawing skills have remained at the elementary school level up through adult-hood. I am currently working through the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and it's been absolutely fantastic so far. The whole idea is predicated on neuroplasticity and the lateralization of brain function. You have to believe that your brain can change.

Engineers and lawyers tend often to be very L-mode oriented (previously known as left-brain), while drawing requires an R-mode state of mind. I can say that within a couple hours of the first exercise in the book, I have already begun to realize what it was like to draw. By day three, it begins to feel like I have a foggy vision, just almost able to grasp what it really means to know how to perceive things as an artist does. I will continue with this book because it is truly life-enriching.

Here are some before-after examples of what improvements people have made 5 days:

More Examples Here

The Only Productivity Trick You Need

This is all you need for success in anything.

This Lifehack article talks about the only 2 tricks you need for maximum productivity. And what it proposes is something that I believe is akin to all successful endeavours. Essentially what it comes down to is planning and evaluation. Everything we want to achieve requires a plan to get there. And we require constant evaluation to make sure that we iterate our approach in order to reach our goals as efficiently as possible.

After every single time you finish any kind of task, you should be looking back to see what you did well and what didn't go so well. Write this down somewhere and file it. The next time you start any kind of task, go back and look at your library of prior tasks and type out the things you should do and the things you should avoid with this new task. This is necessary and must be detailed because almost everybody will say to themselves: "I'll start and finish earlier this time!" but the thought never lasts and it is also not specific enough.

During the planning phase for each task, prior evaluations and experience must always be consulted. Indeed, this is the only way to improvement.

Thinking About Trends

What are the odds?

Since 2008, a share of RIM (the creators of the BlackBerry phones) dropped from a high of over $140 to what is now less than $20. Every single one of these years, I have heard people say to me that I should buy RIM now because there was no way it was going to get lower. They said it when it was at $100, $80, $50, etc. The question you should ask in these circumstances is:

Is it more likely that:

A) You have guessed exactly when the trend is going to end;

B) Or that the trend should continue like it has in the past?

Similarly, education has been evolving and changing all throughout history. Why would we settle with what we have right now? Why are we satisfied with what we do day by day? I propose that, in all aspects of our lives, we should continue to evolve and learn just as human kind has in the past. Follow the trend of improvement.

As an aside, this article from Quora has some insight on why RIM's stock price collapsed so fast.

Never Read Anything More Than Once

Reading more than once means you are not reading effectively.

Do you often read a paragraph and not know what happened? Subsequently, you had to read it again to understand what you just read. A friend of mine strongly objected to my previous post that compared reading speed with listening speed in terms of efficient learning. According to him, full comprehension often requires him to re-read material more than once. I concede, my previous comparison rests upon the assumption that you will be able to have equivalent comprehension of both methods of learning.

But if you are reading anything more than once, the chances are you are not in the right mindset. When you read, you should be speeding up and slowing down and creating comments in your head as you go; there should be a type of mental clarity and active learning. If you are not feeling this, then stop and take a break (either nap or go eat). If that doesn't work, you can try what I did for the LSAT for every single reading comprehension passage:

1. Close your eyes
2. Inhale slowly for 3 seconds
3. Hold your breath for 1 second
4. Exhale slowly for 3 seconds
5. Hold your breath for 1 second
6. Repeat steps 2 to 5, two more times
7. Open your eyes and immediately start reading (do not do anything else)

This sounds a little far-fetched, but try it out. It works because it primes your brain to focus on the reading, and once you have enough practice with it, you'll never have to read anything more than once ever again.

Why Banks Chain Their Pens

"Why do banks chain their pens to the desk? if I trust you with my money, you should trust me with your pen."

This quote has been floating around the internet for some time now, and I think it's worth using it as an example of how most people neglect to think about things from a more macroscopic perspective. It identifies how we as a society tend to focus on how we as individuals are affected by our surroundings rather than seeking an explanation from a larger framework.

The pen on a chain issue stems from the fact that people inadvertently take pens with them after signing things. It's not that people intend to do it, but often times, you forget to put the pen back down. Each time this happens, the major cost to the bank is not the pen, but the man hours wasted and the unnecessary increase of serving time at the teller. This may not seem like much to the regular customer who frequents the bank occasionally for 10 minutes or so, but if we consider the scale of these operations you'll start to see why it makes sense to retain the pens.

Thinking About Thinking

Most people don't see the point in thinking about thinking.

One of the key themes I try to get across with this blog is the importance of metacognition. Simply defined, metacognition essentially means thinking about thinking or knowing about knowing. Everything that has to do with personal improvement rests on the belief that you can think about the way you think, to be able to learn from that process, and eventually to change it to your advantage.

A lot of people recognize "smart" people as people who are simply innately geared towards easily understanding complex concepts. However, in my experience, this is not the case. The malleability of characteristics which help people learn has long been underestimated. The relatively recent discovery of neuroplasticity tells us that the structure of the brain is, in a lot of ways, extremely malleable even in late-adult life. An interesting tangent to this is this Economist podcast about an author who investigated how to change certain attributes of children.

Why You Should Skip Class: Group Conformity

“I took the other road, all right, but only because it was the easy road for me, the way I wanted to go. If I've encountered some unnecessary resistance that's because most of the traffic is going the other way.” ― Edward Abbey

When I was young, I'd always listen to what adults told me to do because I had a strong belief that they knew best. But as I grew up, I learned about the people who changed the world and more often than not, they were those who would take risks and challenge the status quo. The way we do a lot of things in society is usually built upon the prior experience of those before us, and no doubt, there is an obvious merit to this. But is the status quo really the best way? Should we blindly settle with what worked fine in the past?

In thinking about learning, we need to put these questions into perspective. Sure, we can do what our institutions tell us and go to class, do the readings, and be a "good" student. But who's to say that we've reached the best methodology? Education has always been evolving, and one thing that hold us back is group conformity. The Asch Experiment is an illustration of how easy it is for us to settle down with what people tell us is the "right" way of doing things even if we might know otherwise.

Why You Should Skip Class: Active Learning

We tend to retain more information when we exert more mental effort. [1]

When we are in class and listening to the lecturer speak, we are trying to follow his thought processes and his pace. But when we sit down with a textbook and try to study for an exam, we try to understand the concept at our own pace. You'll notice that when you study by yourself, you slow down, speed up, pause, skim, and sometimes repeat different parts of the text. That's because not everything in a book or a paragraph will have the exact same importance to you. And if that doesn't describe you when you study, then you probably notice that you often read entire paragraphs without knowing what you just read.

This jumping around the text is that extra step your brain is taking to isolate the parts you don't know so well and really commit the material to memory. Think about all those times you've skipped many weeks of classes but in the end you cram like crazy and still end up with a decent score. That intense day or two before the exam is when you perform your most active learning. So think about that the next time you're dozing off in class.

[1] C. Diemand-Yauman (2011). "Fortune favors the bold (and the Italicized): effects of disfluency on educational outcomes". Cognition.

Dealing With Difficult People: Repeat & Label

Angry people are hard to deal with.

The following is a post by someone else (artsci10, not me) from LawStudents.ca that talks about dealing with difficult people:

I deal with adult temper tantrums the same way I deal with children's temper tantrums - a system called repeat and label.

It follows like this:
Angry man in the grocery store: This line isn't moving at all because that fucking cashier doesn't know the prices!!
Me (repeating): She doesn't know the prices?
Angry man: She doesn't.
Me (labeling): That's frustrating.

OR

Cyclist whose just been cut off: That driver almost ran me over!! I'm going to go key his car!
Me (repeating): He almost ran you over?
Cyclist: Ya, just now.
Me (labeling): Drivers need to be more careful.

Works every time.

Why You Should Skip Class: The Data Stream Argument

Stay home or go to school?

Throughout years of school, I've always sought the most efficient way to study. And I decided that my ability to learn from the textbook was good enough such that I have to weigh the utility of going to class against my self-learning abilities. Eventually, I realized that it was almost always more efficient to study alone with the book rather than to attend lecture (with some exceptions). One justification for this is the data stream argument based on a measure of words per minute.

The Wikipedia page on Words Per Minute (WPM) gives us a few well-sourced metrics. Audio books are typically around 150-160 WPM. We can assume this is representative of optimal comprehension speed while listening because that's what audio books are for; slide presentations are typically slower than this. 

Contrast this with reading where the average adult reads at 250 to 300 WPM, while proofreading at around 180-200 WPM. If we factor in the commuting time it takes to go to school and all the miscellaneous questions and pauses that occur in lecture, the answer is clear. As long as the content in lecture is reflected well enough in a book, you should probably skip class.

Update: Some have mentioned that they often have issues of comprehension when reading. And when this happens, they often have to re-read things. Two subsequent posts attempt to answer this concern: Never Read Anything More Than Once and Active Learning.

Don't forget to smell the roses

stop and smell the roses

I was looking through some of my old posts on LawStudents.ca and found the following:

I think it's important to realize that it never really hurts for you to take some time to slow down and smell the roses. The extra year in undergrad that I took was invaluable in landing me an amazing job upon graduation. Some of the people that I met in that year have become close friends and our relationships are priceless and will continue to be. After I graduated, I had to take a year off and work before I can attend law school (because I didn't do my LSAT during my undergrad). I took this extra time to learn about industry, the market, personal investment, and how to set up the rest of my adult life. This knowledge allowed me to build bridges and communicate with people from all walks of life. Some of these people are amazing people who will guide me and build me up as my life continues.

Life is a journey not a race, so don't forget to slow down, smell the roses, and just enjoy being alive.

Taking Charge of Learning (cont'd)

"The standard pace is for chumps" - Kimo

Entrepreneur Derek Sivers wrote about his own story when talking about taking charge of learning. At an early age, he figured out that institutionalized education was catered to the average person. There is no reason why you have to learn at the exact pace that people tell you to. As Derek says, "the system is designed so anyone can keep up." So why waste all that time surfing Facebook in class when you know that you can do so much more?

I'm keeping today's post short because I really hope you will click the above link and read Derek's story. Even to this day, it is still one of the few lessons that I keep reminding myself of each day. It allows me to push myself and not waste time on things that I will regret on later in life.

Taking Charge of Learning

Learners have more incentive to learn when they have control
over not only how they learn but also what they learn. [1]

When I try to decide whether I should skip or attend a class, I always ask, "how much learning will I get out of this?" In university, because most of the professors are not instructed on proper pedagogical (teaching) techniques, the lectures vary drastically in quality. In some classes, the concepts were so complicated that all we could do was take notes and try to figure out what it all meant on our own time. In other classes, the professor would slow down the class in order to make sure the slowest person would not get left behind. I found this to be pretty frustrating as it takes away my control of my learning.

This made me think. Who made these rules about how we should learn? Who says that they are the best? Even if they work for most people, who's to say that it works the best for me? In answering these questions, I think it's important to note that all throughout history, most people have done things the way they were taught simply because they were afraid of authority. I think it's important that we take a step back and take charge of our learning.

[1] J. Scott Armstrong (2012). "Natural Learning in Higher Education". Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning.

Studying is Cheating

What is school really for?

All the way up through high school, I was known for saying the phrase "studying is cheating". It seemed to me that if the major occupation of our time as kids was to spend time in the classroom, then we should make the most of it. Exams, I thought, were all about evaluating long-term knowledge and skills. So what seemed strange to me was that all of my peers would go home and review/study/cram all the knowledge relating to a particular subject before a test.

This seemed absolutely absurd to me, because I always thought that school was for learning and home was for rest and play. And if people were always cramming last minute before an evaluation, then can we really say that the evaluation is a fair representation of meaningful long-term knowledge?

What I found was that most people (including many university students) often rely on rote learning rather than a full understanding of a subject matter. No doubt, this is helpful when you need to memorize some dates for a history test, but it can also remove the necessary mental component of critical thinking. So I had to ask, is school really a place of learning?

If it looks like a duck...

Is it a duck or a cat?

The following is a short essay I wrote last year, I thought it would be good filler for this blog.

"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” This phrase is an expression often used in the English vernacular in order to demonstrate inductive reasoning. Often times, this is one of the most effective counters against those who argue against you by stating the existence of unknown and unspecified information. In the following discussion, I will attempt to show the practical implications of this expression and, more specifically, the use of inductive reasoning to nullify those who wield the unknown as a means to denounce the conclusions of your own observations. Occam’s razor shall also make an appearance while we are at it.

Consider a situation in which you observe a friend of yours who is involved in a romantic relationship with his significant other. Before this friend had begun the relationship, you have known him for several years and he had always had an optimistic outlook on life along with plenty of energy whenever you see him. Suddenly, not long after this relationship began, you begin to realize that he frequently appears to wallow in a dejected mood. He is visibly tired and although he tries to reassure you that everything is fine, everyone around him also notices his change in behaviour. At around the same time, while you and your friend is at gatherings with mutual friends, you begin to notice that he often steps out of the room to use his cellphone whenever his significant other calls. These calls sometimes last 30 minutes at a time and he frequently returns visibly exhausted. Despite repeated attempts at inquiring about his problematic mood lately, he will always vehemently refuse to place his relationship as a cause. When a friend suggests that perhaps the relationship might be a probable cause of his problems, he will often turn angry and reply saying that there are many things in which the inquirer is not aware of and thus his suggestion is invalid.

The aforementioned situation is one in which I am sure many can relate to. In fact, I have personally encountered this very same situation with my father’s previous marriage. Now of course I do not expect anecdotal evidence to take the place of statistical or logically complete evidence, but let us objectively analyze the problem we have worked out in front of us. Objectively, we can intuitively observe that all the signs of a bad relationship is present, and it features itself as one of the most probable causes of this friend’s bad mood. However, his abstruse argument insists that there are certain things that, we the observers, will not understand and therefore our conclusion should be invalid. This is a logical fallacy. Put another way, this friend can be described as having “poisoned the well”. Poisoning the well, a special case of the ad hominem logical fallacy, is a rhetorical device that essentially nullifies any other response you have because of a certain condition that they preemptively state. In this case, the friend is saying that whatever your conclusions may be, they must be false because there are simply certain things that you do not understand. While it is possible that our conclusion may be false due to the fact that we simply do not know all the information, it is certainly not logically sound to conclude that our conclusion is definitely false because of that. Rather, we would counter with the so-called “duck test” to infer that if a situation has all the signs of a certain well-conceived condition, it is likely to be the case (although we cannot be completely sure).

It is at this point that I would like to invoke Occam’s razor. Occam’s razor, also known as the law of parsimony, essentially states that an explanation with the fewest assumptions is most likely to be the correct one. Going back to the original statement, if you observe an animal that looks, acts, and sounds like a duck, what would you consider that animal to be? Is it more likely that this is some exotic species that you have never heard of nor seen? Or perhaps it is one of the many ducks you have seen, heard of, and learned about in the many years of your life?

In answering these questions, I hope you come to your own conclusions about what is most logically sound and probable. A more sensible response by our friend in the story above would be one in which he recognizes the probability (or at least possibility) of it and his own biased nature regarding the topic. He needs to realize that although we may be wrong, it is undoubtedly one of the more likely causes of his troubles. And for that, he would have kept an open mind and avoided a much too often used logical fallacy. Perhaps if we are more observant about our daily conversations, we will also find ourselves committing such logical mistakes. I cannot claim to be perfectly logical and rational at all times, and having written this article I find myself to be much more prepared to spot my own mistakes in order to make sure that I keep an open mind as well. I hope this has been an interesting read and I welcome any comments you may have.

A Beginning

I'll also try to hone my drawing skills on MS Paint on this blog

When I was really young, I used to think that I was the only conscious and sentient person in the world and that all of reality around me was a show run essentially by robots. I later found out that this was called solipsism, the idea that only I had the ability to think and feel. And of course, it was before I learned about the theory of mind, the idea that other people could have sophisticated mental states just like my own.

For me, that was the beginning of my need to separate myself from everyone else. I always felt that I needed to be different, to feel like I knew a bit more than everyone else because I didn't want to become just another robot. Of course, this brought along with it a lot of narcissism which I'm still recovering from, but nonetheless it is an essential part of who I am.

As we shall see, this is the drive that has constantly allowed me to experiment, evolve, and try new methods of accomplishing tasks. In the coming days, I will talk about how this was and still is a cornerstone of who I am today.

Journey to the Pole

Amundsen and his team at the South Pole

One night in my first year of law school, I read this article from the Art of Manliness. I learned about 
Roald Amundsen, who set about becoming the first to reach the South Pole and he did it in a way in which steady and consistent progress coupled with meticulous planning ultimately led him to his success. I then thought about a lot of my failed endeavours and realized that the reason why I failed was not due to a lack of ability, but a lack of consistency and persistence.

Amundsen set about his goal by planning to march a fixed distance every single day regardless of the conditions they were under. Robert Falcon Scott, Amundsen's rival, in contrast chose to march in accordance with the weather. On good days Scott would push his team to walk many extra miles, while on bad days, the team might make no progress at all. Scott would ultimately fail to reach the Pole first and also tragically perished on his way back.

When I first created Course-Select to help University of Toronto students to pick out courses which fit their schedule, I had rushed to complete it before the course selection date of that year so that students can make good use of the tool. At the time, I had lots of ideas I still wanted to implement even after the basic functionality was complete. Unfortunately, after I had finally opened the site to hundreds of users, the lack of external motivation led me to abandon the site completely. As a result, what is left is a poorly-written tool which works and had lots of promise but no follow-through in terms of improvement.

Looking back on this, I decided that I should set out to do something with the same kind of consistency and persistence that Amundsen had in his journey to the South Pole. I decided that I would write a blog posting for every single working day with a word-count between 100 to 200 words. These are hard constraints that I plan to adhere to for at least six months. After that trial period, I will re-evaluate and possibly increase that number.

The theme I have chosen is something that has become my identity over the years. Growing up, and even up to this day, I have always been called a slacker. I have no patience for the obedience of institutionalized education, and I have always chosen to make my own way instead. Hopefully, throughout this new commitment to writing, I will be able to reveal and discover within myself some of the reasons why and how I have slacked my way through school.