Effective Learning Is Supposed to Be Frustrating
Or, why traditional school education is still very archaic
👋 Hey, Abhishek here! Welcome to The Sunday Wisdom. Each week I tackle fundamental questions about decision making, clear thinking, and anything else that’s stressing you out in the business of life. If you’re seeing this newsletter for the first time, please consider subscribing.
Q: What is it that traditional education is generally lacking?
Children find studies boring because they don’t have skin in the game. They split light beams in the lab only to confirm an already proven experiment, not to try to question it, or study the conditions when an experiment fails. They do maths only to find a known answer, not to discover better ways to solve a problem.
But children love playing cricket because there’s risk and uncertainty. Unlike studies and school exams, there are no pre-set rules to follow that would ensure a win. Instead, there are strategies to tinker with. There are popular ideas to tweak and modify. No two games are ever alike. Unlike school studies, there’s plenty of experimentation involved in cricket. No wonder they are perpetually bored in schools.
I find the same is true for workouts, meditation, and eating right. There’s no uncertainty involved. Just a set of rules to follow. Too boring! I’m of the (unpopular) opinion that we do most of the things we do just because they are generally recommended. Not because we enjoy them.
As a kid, I found reading books to be an excruciatingly boring activity. I found activities like exercising and running (just for the sake of them) displeasing as well. Unless I was running so that I didn’t lose my breath in a football game, I didn’t see the point in it. Unless I was working out so that I didn’t get knocked out in a classroom brawl, I didn’t see the point in it. Unless I was reading a book to question its content, or challenge the author’s notions, I didn’t see the point in it.
I still don’t see the point of doing something just for the sake of it. Unless there’s an obvious downside of not doing something, I would rather not do it. Sometimes, being short-sighted helps.
In his book Skin in The Game, Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about the enterprising attitude of drug addicts—how they would conjure up ingenious and unthinkable tricks when it comes to procure drugs. Had they spent even half of their mental capacity in making money instead of procuring drugs, all of them would have become millionaires.
“Where there was risk on the line, suddenly a second brain in me manifested itself, and the probabilities of intricate sequence became suddenly effortless to analyse and map. When there is fire, you will run faster than in any competition. When you ski downhill some movements become effortless.”
Addicts are smart because they have skin in the game. Taleb also mentions that his knowledge of risk and probability wasn’t derived from reading books, but from actually taking risk in the markets.
Having your skin in the game is the idea of incurring a certain amount of risk of having a downside when things don’t go your way. The captain of the football team has skin in the game. The founder of a company has skin in the game. A person who advices people on how to handle their finances doesn’t have skin in the game, unless he is taking his own advice.
Painful experiences are good teachers. But we cannot wait for adversity to strike every time we want to learn something new, especially when there is a lot of downside involved. Therefore, a better way to learn is through thrills and pleasure.
Doing experiments to find faults in the laws and doing mathematics to find errors in the theorems makes studying a whole new game. Eating right while trying to find the rationale and the faults behind a particular diet makes nutrition more interesting. Racing others or running while playing football provides thrill and pleasure.
When it comes to learning, it’s hard not to mention Richard Feynman. Most of his pursuits have been to satisfy his own (mischievous) curiosities. Feynman was of the opinion that one should not do experiments to follow a process, but to understand the process; not to confirm the result, but to rediscover it, question it, and if possible, falsify it. Most importantly, one should do experiments to play with the subject for their own entertainment.
“When I was in high school, I’d see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn’t have to do it; it wasn’t important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn’t make any difference: I’d invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.”
Anything devoid of thrill and pleasure can become boring soon. Life’s too short to do boring stuff, no matter how important they are. All things worth doing should involve some uncertainty, some risk, and complete ownership. Let’s flip the narrative to introduce thrill and pleasure in our everyday activities. Especially in the activities of children.
If you have skin in the game, boring tasks like reading financial statements can become pretty interesting, because rather than accepting the data at face value, you are trying to read between the lines. Often, you are also trying to find out if there’s any foul play.
Thus, doing a business is more thrilling than doing an MBA. Doing physics in the lab is far more interesting that studying physics from a book. Similarly, making decisions is far better than studying decision making.
Change the game. Introduce some chaos. Have fun with it.
Little Bit of Wisdom
Most people know what is good for them. They know what will make them feel better: exercise, pursuing goals, hobbies, time with those they care about, etc. They do not avoid these things because of ignorance, but because they are no longer “motivated” to do them. They are waiting until they feel better all by themselves, without really doing anything. Frequently, it’s a long wait.
Good Reads
The Evolution of HEY — “It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: inventing a new product from scratch is one hell of a challenge. It’s the toughest thing you’ll ever do as a product team. There are a million reasons why it won’t work, and zero guarantees that it will, so the whole project is a massive gamble. You just have to buckle up and trust that you’ll figure things out.”
What’s Wrong With WhatsApp — “A conspiracy theory about the rollout of 5G, which originated long before COVID-19 had appeared, now claimed that mobile phone masts were responsible for the disease. Across the UK, people began setting fire to 5G masts, with 20 arson attacks over the Easter weekend alone.”
A Short History Of The Office — “For centuries people have been getting up, joining a daily commute or retreating to a room, to work. The office has become inseparable from work. Its history illustrates not only how our work has changed but also how work’s physical spaces respond to cultural, technological and social forces.”
The list of all the articles I’ve written can be found here. And the past three editions of Sunday Wisdom are here: 45, 44, and 43.
An Interesting Find
I was watching the second season of Dark when I came to know about a concept called the “Causal Loop” which I found very interesting. It’s referred to as the “Bootstrap Paradox” in the series.
A causal loop is a sequence of events (e1, e2, e3, …en). Each event in the loop is one of the causes of the next event. But the last event (en) is one of the causes of the first event e1, made possible due to time travel.
A (hypothetical) example of a causal loop is a billiard ball striking its past self. Say, a billiard ball is moving in a certain direction. Suddenly the future self of the billiard ball emerges from a time machine and hits this ball, altering the its path, thereby causing it to enter a time machine (at an angle that would cause its future self to strike its past self the very glancing blow that altered its path). In this sequence of events, the change in the ball’s path is its own cause, which is paradoxical.
It’s also called “Retrocausality” or backwards causation. It is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect precedes its cause in time and so a later event affects an earlier one. Now take a moment to wrap your mind around this.
I Enjoyed Watching
Music & Clowns — “My brother, Jamie, has a profound learning disability. Despite being close to nonverbal, he demonstrates charisma, a sharp sense of humour, and emotional sensitivity. I team up with my parents to discuss what it is like caring for someone with Down syndrome.”
The Man Bigger Than The Meme — “Most of us know the meme “Wood Sitting on a Bed” or, at least, we’ve been tricked into seeing the explicit photo of a mysterious man sitting on a bed with his genitals exposed. But there’s much more behind the meme and the man in the photo.”
Why THE FAR SIDE is a Masterclass in Storytelling — “The Far Side by Gary Larson is one of the best and most praised cartoons in history. But what makes The Far Side so good? What is the legacy of Gary Larson? And most importantly: what can we learn from The Far Side?”
Quote to Note
A man who committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it, is committing another mistake.
— Confucius
Unpopular Opinion
One of the most persistent fallacies is the association of wealth with wisdom. Another is the association between intelligence and good decisions.
They are two separate things. In fact sometimes high intelligence can prevent people from making better decisions. Because when you’re blessed with intelligence you’re also cursed with the ability to concoct intricate (and often false) stories about why certain things have happened. Intelligence increases the ability to fool yourself with believable reasons. In other words, intelligent people constantly fall in love with their own BS.
Intelligent people who think they know too much also have a habit of cramming the real world into theories they’ve learnt from books. They use books and theories to make sense of the world instead of the other way round.
Average people, who don’t have many preconceived notions, are better at accepting the real world at face value. Better be shrewd yet average rather than intellectual yet dumb.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋