sharing class notes

Sharing (or worse selling) class notes online is either ethically questionable or educationally destructive:

- If those notes are simply dictations of what is communicated by the teacher, then they are the property of the teacher and can not be shared or sold by the student without the teacher's consent.

- If those notes are a student's own synthesis of what is communicated by the teacher, then the student does harm to his peers by sharing the notes with them, for the following two reasons:

1. His synthesis may contain wrong assumptions or deductions. 
2. Learning happens exactly when new material gets synthesised into the body of already known material. In other words, synthesis is the entire goal of education. This is a painful process that needs to be individually conducted. It is not a social exercise. Each student's past cognitive endowment is different and therefore each end result of synthesis will be different.

machine-to-human communication

Black box models make us feel uneasy. We want to have an intuitive grasp of how a computer reaches a certain conclusion. (For legal considerations, this is actually a must-have feature, not just a nice-to-have one.)

However, to exhibit such a capacity, a computer needs to be able to

1. model its thought processes and,
2. communicate the resulting model in a human understandable way.

Let us recall the correspondence between physical phenomena and cognitive models from the previous blog post on domains of cognition:

• Environment <-> Perceptions
• Body <-> Emotions
• Brain <-> Consciousness

Hence, the first step of a model being able to model itself is akin to it having some sort of consciousness. Tough problem indeed!

The second step of turning the (quantitative) model of a model into something (qualitatively) communicable amounts to formation or adoption of a language which chunks the world into equivalence classes. (We call these equivalence classes "words".)

Qualitative communication of fundamentally quantitative phenomena is bound to be lossy because at each successive modelling information gets lost. 

• That is essentially why writing good poetry is so hard. Words are like primitive modelling tools.
• Good visual artists bypass this problem by directly constructing perceptions to convey perceptions. That is why conceptual art can feel so tasteless and backward. Art that needs explanation is not art. It is something else. 
• Similarly, good companions can peer into each others' consciousnesses without speaking a word. 

Instead of expecting machines to make a discontinuous jump to language formation, we should first endow them with bodies that allow them to sense the world which they can then chunk into equivalence classes.

momentum of growing up

We grow into our roles, not the other way around. You need to fake it until you make it as they say. This is more or less a mathematical necessity since titles are discretely compartmentalised while self-improvement is a continuous process. In other words, a healthy, developing ego is always in a state of pretension. (While rational ones draw confidence from past establishments and competencies, delusional ones draw hope straight from religion and astrology.)

All the great figures of history were to a certain extent self-delusional. They either constantly underestimated their capacity for achieving great things, or thought they were above everyone else. A spring oscillates only when it is pulled in either one of the directions. People who are negatively self-delusional tell themselves "I need to do better than this." People who are positively self-delusional tell themselves "I can do better than this." In either case there is some momentum. A person who is fully aware of his limitations will be utterly incapable of taking the necessary steps to improve himself. He will never have a chance to discover the fact that his limitations are partly dependent on how much he is daring push them.

There is also the issue of building a momentum. Say your top potential is X. You will reach X faster if you aim for 2X rather than X. In other words, it can be optimal to overshoot a little more to gain speed. Of course, this can easily turn into a dangerous exercise and steer you into the territory of delusions.

P.S. You may also enjoy reading the old blog post Momentum of Aging.