A modeling problem with communication

I subscribe to the view that to be a successful thinker you need accurate mental models of the surrounding world. With an accurate modeling apparatus you can predict how the world will react to what you do. This includes other humans.

I believe, perhaps mistakenly, that this is especially true when communicating with fellow human beings. Perhaps that's why I greatly prefer one-to-one chatting over the plenum.

On fostering understanding

For instance, to talk to somebody you need to know which language they speak. You can't speak Italian to many people in Denmark, or vice versa, and expect to be understood. If you're an expert in something, and know the other person is too, you can use technical terms or slang.

This is true to an extremely detailed level.

For instance, my coworkers are software developers, so obviously I can talk about editors and programming languages and libraries of software routines with all of them.

But not all of them are subject experts in the system I mostly work on. I can use terms from that system with those that are, but not someone who is not.

Even further, if I worked on something yesterday with a person, we can talk about that, using concepts we developed yesterday. I can't have that kind of conversation with anyone else in the world.

So in other words, to improve communications you need a better model of others - the root of misunderstandings is that we don't realize what others understand.

But the problem may not be you

Yet I had an epiphany during a sleepless bout this night that I have been missing something important.

It even seems really obvious in retrospect: When I say something, I use my internal modeling to predict whether my conversation partner will understand my intended meaning. When they reply, they use their model of me.

So the problem might not just be my model of them, but also their model of me. If they have the wrong model, we may be in trouble.

Now what kind of trouble?

As long as it is merely a problem of terminology, I can try to infer some meaning or ask follow up questions.

But even though I've been using terminology as an example, succesful communication goes much deeper - sometimes we can't really talk about something without a shared understanding of values.

For example, I have deeply held beliefs about grading being incorrect, that is assigning simple absolute scores to people's performance being essentially a bad practice. I've arrived at those over time, through observation and a developed set of arguments. Yet it is not something I can easily talk about.

Say someone actually loves grading. Perhaps they got good grades in school and are proud of that, or perhaps they enjoy sports - competition is, unfortunately in my opinion, an integral part of many sports, and many of those competitions are basically made by grading, assigning an absolute score for comparison purposes.

This in itself does not mean we can't talk. I don't generally have a problem with people liking something.

But if somebody loves grading, their base model of other people may be that they like grading too - why not? So their model of me may be that I love grading too. Oops.

So as we speak about it, I don't react in the right way. I might nod and signal that I understand, but I might not smile, I might only be slightly sympathetic, to basic appeals to how getting a good grade has felt, because I have tried long ago to separate those feelings from an overall judgement of the systemic view of grading. The person may claim that without grading they would not have had the motivation to do what they achieved, and I might not even nod there, because I would have second-level thoughts about what would have occured under a different motivational regime.

Yet, in the revelation of such deeply hold belief it would not be polite to trod out a long-winded argument of why grading might be incorrect.

As a consequence, what that person sees is that I don't react in the way they would expect from their model of me, for impenetrable reasons. That's annoying! We easily end up in conflict.

The other person's model of you is wrong 

When communicating with other people there's the danger that you assume they are too much like yourself, so you get the model wrong.

But not even that, there's also the danger that they assume you are too much like them, and get their model of you wrong.

You can try to work on yourself to mitigate the former. But how do you mitigate the latter?

I guess you need to figure out some way of efficiently having them arrive at a better model. If they even bother, it may not be important to them.

Or perhaps try to work around their misconception. Pretend, act out the part, and then work from there.

Oh, well, at least my model of others now include the concept of their model of me. Only one recursion level deep at the moment, though.

When six becomes seven

I woke up in the night, really tired, hearing Janne rummaging around. Two weeks before the due date.

If she doesn't go to bed soon, she's probably in labour, I thought. A few seconds later she woke me up with the news that the water had broken.

So I called for help, and we went to the hospital. A few hours later, our fifth child, a daughter, was born.

Janne bled too much at the previous birth, so this time they drugged her immediately, and it did seem to work, so we could go home a few hours later by the bus.

Both are fine. It's been five years since our previous child, so I've almost forgotten how cute they are as small babies. And how quickly they go from looking around to a sour face and a cry. The rest of the children have received her well. Good times.

Tao Te Ching

I've been reading through this translation of Tao Te Ching which I really enjoyed. Like this, on the trouble of inner mud:

The ancient Masters were profound and subtle.

Their wisdom was unfathomable.

There is no way to describe it;

all we can describe is their appearance.

They were careful

as someone crossing an iced-over stream.

Alert as a warrior in enemy territory.

Courteous as a guest.

Fluid as melting ice.

Shapable as a block of wood.

Receptive as a valley.

Clear as a glass of water.

Do you have the patience to wait

till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving

till the right action arises by itself?

The Master doesn't seek fulfillment.

Not seeking, not expecting,

she is present, and can welcome all things.

On problem-based learning in primary school

I watched a passionate TED talk about problem-based learning in primary schools.

The university I went to followed this model religiously. 2/3 of our time was spent on semester-long projects. It works. The average time to complete a comp.sci. master's degree at this university was 5.0 years, where the average in other traditional universities in Denmark was > 8 years when I last looked at the numbers.

Besides the benefits mentioned by the speaker in the above video, there can also be a strong social aspect in being divided into small, tightly-knit groups where people would help, motivate and look after each other - and learn how to forget their egos in the name of making the project work.

Bicycle pedal care

I mostly get around on bicycle. I'm a bicyclist in the sense that it is my primary means of transportation, but I'm definitely not an enthusiastic bicyclist in the sense that I want to spend time on my bicycle. I want my bicycle to be as care-free and as cheap as possible. Yes, these two can easily be at odds, but they can also go together. For instance, some of the low-weight, high-speed bicycle gear is definitely not care-free.

Now when it comes to the pedals, there are a couple of things I've learned from 20 years of maintenance.

Which ones to buy

First, there are two kinds of cheap pedals. There are the ultra cheap ones that claim to be completely sealed, hence needing no maintenance.

This turns out to be a lie. The sealing means that it is really difficult to maintain them, but it does not stop water from leaking in and ruining the oiling of the ball bearings.

It took me some years to understand how, but I think it's simply a basic physical property of the metal that when you apply pressure to it, it will flex just a tiny amount, and that tiny amount is enough to let water in when you're bicycling in wet weather.

So eventually, the drive train starts creaking, and it turns out it's the pedals, and then it is really difficult to get any kind of greasing into them, so you end up having to buy new ones. I thought for some years that this was okay, due to the low price. But for me it's really just cumbersome (buying stuff takes time) and distasteful to have to discard a big lump of metal each year.

And it turns out there is another kind of cheap, just slightly less cheap, pedal which allows you to remove the end cap that faces outwards so you can easily get to the ball bearings. That end cap is not under pressure, so I don't think it makes the pedal more leaky, but it does make it trivial to get the ball bearings re-oiled. So these pedals last a lot longer.

Preventive maintenance

One thing I did learn is that pedals is a wear part. In retrospect that should not be surprising, after all it's the main interface for transferring power from your body to the bicycle. So you need to be able to take pedals off, even if it's just for oiling.

Unfortunately, pedals can get stuck pretty hard on the pedal arms. It probably does not help that many pedal arms are made of aluminium while the cheap pedals are steel, so they tend to grow fond of each other.

So, first, when you screw in pedals, give the thread a bit of oil to try to prevent the metals from exchanging electrons.

Then, and here comes the repetitive part, each time you fix something unrelated on the bicycle, take a wrench, give the pedal a nudge so it is no longer tight, and tighten it up again.

You don't need to tighten it hard. So if you are a strong, independent, fair-skinned, but not pale, okay, perhaps somewhat pale, computer scientist like me, and do this a couple of times a year, it should untighten with a little nudge, no trouble at all. The whole procedure takes 10 seconds per pedal plus two minutes to find the wrench and put it back.

Wrenching pedals

The fun thing about pedals is that they turn around as you pedal. And if you think about it, they don't turn the same way with respect to their axle, since one axle is pointing to the right and the other to the left.

Now someone, and I suspect this happened early in the history of the pedalled bicycle, figured out that the spinning motion is great on the right side as it will tend to tighten in the pedal screw. At least when you pedal forwards, which I think we sort of standardized on.

But on the left side, the spinning motion will tend to unscrew the pedal. So on the left side, the thread is flipped so that it also gets to enjoy this tightening goodness. As a consequence you need to wrench the pedal the opposite direction on the left pedal - it has a links (left) thread, not a right one.

So this is why you don't need to tighten the pedals more than a gentle nudge, despite the forces involved in pedaling.

It also means that left and right pedals are not interchangeable. They are usually marked with L(eft) and R(ight). If you don't pay attention to this, you can easily destroy the thread on a soft aluminium pedal arm.

As for the wrench itself, back in the day, there used to be very little space between the pedal and the pedal arm so people would have special, thin pedal wrenches. Combine that with stuck pedals, and you would be sure to have a sad experience.

But all the cheap pedals I've bought over the past 15 years have had plenty of space for a standard 15 mm wrench/spanner, which I also use for the bolts on the back wheel axle. So no need for special equipment.

Daniel Schmachtenberger and civilization

I recently came across this interview with Daniel Schmachtenberger which I really enjoyed, partly because it concerns something I find myself spending more time thinking about, partly because of the absolutely attractive view of human that he is show casing through his attitude.

There are things in our modern life which we should be proud of, things that have been developed over centuries by us and the people before us. The internet is one example. Another is our governance structures, the refinement of which has prevented much suffering.

But there are also things that are dark. The are things that cause people suffering in new ways. Loss of meaning of life itself, replaced with void or empty consumerism, and loss of even the meaning of work. Corruption of the information that feeds our governance structures. Appraisal of comfort over long-term planning. Self-centered competition over compassion.

Daniel Schmachtenberger has the interesting take that our culture makes a difference to who we are. And even if we find it difficult to control ourselves and our emotions, we can change our culture and our environment.

Consumerism and alienation

Came across this quote, which is really one of the reasons my children are in the Waldorf kindergarten and school system:
“The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment…To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.”

― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

I don't think consumption itself is a problem. The problem is the attitude - if there is no thoughts about production, no consideration at all, then the result is a complete alienation towards the world. It is like existing in a prison, getting everything spoon-fed.