5 Thoughts — August 29, 2021

We like babies and dogs because their intention is not clear. To make something automatic, work tirelessly at it manually. A smart civilization should fear smarter ones. The pace of technological innovation cannot continue. The study of education is less than 100 years old.

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5 Daily Thoughts

4 min readAug 30, 2021

We like babies and dogs because their intention is not clear.

Humans like to solve mysteries. Our brains are constantly assessing what a situation might resolve into and what preceded it. The basis for all stereotypes and cognitive biases is the human need to connect dots even when no lines need to exist. Babies and dogs are amazing precisely because they act in ways that are often unpredictable and the challenge of figuring out what they mean continues to engage our psyche. This is why, I believe, there’s an unbreakable draw to them. They force us to work for resolution in ways that more predictable members do not. Consider an elderly person that repeats the same things each time you meet him or her. Predicting his or her next work is easy and requires minimal engagement from us.

To make something automatic, work tirelessly at it manually

You might try to develop a new habit and immediately find ways to improve your actions. But I think optimizing new habits doesn’t lead to them sticking around. In my case, I am trying to increase my water intake. To that end, I’m logging each time to drink in an app. A friend told me to simply log whenever I finish a certain amount to avoid the annoyance to having to log multiple times an hour. But I think that the logging is what will help make the habit stick (hopefully). The repeated, inefficient, manual process that I know I could do better will keep me engaged for longer than if I optimized it right away.

A smart civilization should fear smarter ones

The so-called “Fermi Paradox” posits just how large the universe is and the possibility of intelligent life out there against the fact that we have no evidence of such life. My solution is by no means unique, but I do think that intelligent races should do their best to stay under the radar of smarter races to avoid any unintended negative consequences. A planet that started just a few hundred thousand year before ours could have an incredible advantage over us technologically, societally, etc. and therefore we should fear it. On our own planets, entire continents of humans were decimated and subjugated at the hands of technologically advanced humans. On an interstellar scale, it seems entirely possible that the results would be far worse.

The pace of technological innovation cannot continue

It’s difficult to measure at what “pace” technology grows. Every improvement to every thing is technology, but I mean at a broader scale. Human history is punctuated with various milestones and it seems that the time between the milestones is shrinking and the impact of each milestone is growing. When humans first discovered hand tools, it seems several millennia (or centuries at least) saw steady improvement in the quality and use of various tools, and the impact of each new tool grew steadily. Hunting and farming became higher yield, lower effort activities. Tools could be used to make other tools, achieving a more significant impact. But today, from electricity to aviation to silicon transistors to personal computers to networked devices to wireless technology, the time between each is shorter and shorter. But the impact of wireless technology, as an example, is much larger within a decade of it’s roll out compared to that of the steam engine. There must simultaneously be an upper limit on impact and a lower limit on time between innovations.

The study of education is less than 100 years old

I will ask for some hyperbolic license here and my dates may be off. But the “hard sciences,” like physics, astronomy, mathematics, etc. have been studied for several millennia. We continue to refine and iterate the theories and discoveries, but it really is a “standing on the shoulders of giants” type thing. Whereas eduction, as a field of higher academic study, seems relatively new. Less than 100 years, or at most, not much past that. Theories on what does and doesn’t work are changing almost annually. Curricula are being revised based on anecdotal evidence and statistical norms taken from other fields (the infamous “p-value”). I think that learning to learn is probably one of the most important endeavors that humans undertake, and it’s shocking how new it is as a serious field of study.