Brian Keng

  • Reading and Remembering

    There’s something I need to admit: I read a lot and don’t remember most of what I read!  Thankfully, that’s how it’s supposed to be.  Let me elaborate.

    I’m a huge fan of reading as a means to learning.  There’s so much knowledge that has been discovered by generations of the past that it’s just not possible to learn everything through one’s own experiences.  Hence, learning vicariously through reading.  I think most people intuitively agree with this basic premise.  People who read quite a bit also know that they forget most of what they’ve read!  How can you possibly learn anything if you can’t remember it in the first place?

    The answer is quite simple: remembering is not the same thing as learning (despite what every educational institute you’ve ever been to says).  Remembering is what you do when you study for a test [1].  It involves mostly facts with the occasional brush with actual thinking.  That probably sums up 95% of the tests you have ever taken, so it’s natural to equate this fact-based drudgery with learning.  However, remembering is such a small part of learning.  Learning (at least how I define it) is about acquiring knowledge as to be useful in some way, shape, or form.  Decidedly not the same as rote memorization.  Just ask anyone who has ever done any real work.  They’ll tell you that they use maybe 5% of what they have learned in school, and that’s if they actually went to a good school [2].  So what then is the point of going to school — and by extension reading — if we don’t remember or use what we have “learned”?

    This has been a huge question lingering in the back of my mind for quite some time (probably since I started reading on my own to learn).  On the one hand, I knew in my gut that reading — regardless of how much I remembered — is incredibly useful.  On the other hand, I just couldn’t express exactly why.  And then I read an essay by Paul Graham that really articulated what I knew intuitively:

    “Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you’ve lost the source of. It works, but you don’t know why.”
    How You Know, Paul Graham

    Reading is about training your mind on how to think — not on what it remembers [3].  It’s the “latticework of mental models” that Charlie Munger is always espousing.  Reading trains your brain to gain a greater depth and breadth of mental models to adapt to and solve the myriad of non-trivial problems you may encounter in the real world.  And training is the right word here because it takes time for you mind to learn a mental model to the point where it’s useful.  Watching a TED talk on a subject doesn’t mean learned anything useful; it just means that might have remembered what the speaker said.  Reading is different because it forces your brain to think about an idea multiple times over an extended period.  Exactly what you need if you’re trying to change how your brain thinks and approaches problems.

    But maybe I’m just being a grey beard here.  Who’s to say that that the new generation and they’re fancy interwebs and social mediums aren’t changing the way we learn for the better.  I mean look at what it has brought us: 140-char. tweets, funny cat videos, and tinder.  Who’s to say this isn’t raising the level of discourse and changing the way we think for the better? [4]

    1. For most tests anyways.  A really good test will test you on how you think, not on what facts you know.  The reason why most tests don’t do this is because it’s incredibly difficult.  Trying to determine how well you think in only a couple of hours is quite a challenge.[↩]
    2. Good in the sense that they made an effort to teach you things that will be useful to you later on — not necessarily in the traditional prestige sense.[↩]
    3. Admittedly, facts are important.  For example, not remembering the multiplication table would make solving many different types of problems much more difficult.  I’m just trying to emphasize the point that it’s just a very small part of actual learning.[↩]
    4. I am.  It’s not and it’s an anathema on young budding minds everywhere.  Want to read more about it?  Checkout Nicholas Carr’s book, The Shallows.[↩]

  • Scott Adams’ Financial Advice

    Most people my age I talk to don’t have much of a clue about how to deal with personal finances.  We come out of school with almost no money then suddenly have all this cash (on a relative basis) and don’t know what to do about it.  All the while, the education system never thought it would be important to tell us how to manage this newly found wealth wisely.  Well here is probably 80% of what you need to know courtesy of Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame), which I read on Matt Cutts blog.  (I’ve annotated the list a bit with some important ideas.)

    • Make a will.
    • Pay off your credit card balance.
      (bkeng: Compound interest is only good if it’s working for you.)
    • Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.
    • Fund your company 401K to the maximum.
      (bkeng: RRSPs for us Canadians.)
    • Fund your IRA to the maximum.
      (bkeng: TSFAs for us Canadians.)
    • Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
      (bkeng: Here’s a tip: Think of a house as a place to live and not as an investment – you’ll be much happier during the next real estate crash.)
    • Put six months’ expenses in a money market account.
      (bkeng: The future is uncertain; everyone needs a rainy day fund.)
    • Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement.
      (bkeng: Great advice for 95% of people unless you are willing to dedicate a lot of time (and even then it’s still incredibly hard to do better).)
    • If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.
      (bkeng: Incentives, incentives, incentives.  Money managers who make money based on a percentage of your portfolio have almost no incentive to give great results (which is really hard).  They’d much rather just get you average results (which you can do in an index) and spend time bringing in more clients to increase their pay (much easier).  All the while, you’re paying them 1-3% of your assets.)

     

  • On Being Lost and Learning

    They say technology is making us smarter.  I disagree.  If you’ve ever seen some idiot slowly driving into a lamppost because their eyes were glued to the GPS, you know what I am talking about.  But it’s not because of the minor accident that they’re stupid, it’s because they’re not getting lost.  Let me explain.

    One of the big “benefits” with technology is that we no longer have to think.  I mean, why would you every want to know how to do spell a word, do arithmetic, or learn how to navigate to the grocery store? [1]  We have solutions for each one of them, they’re called spell-check, calculators, and GPS.  The fact that we have technologies to solve these problems doesn’t automatically turn off our brains, it just has a tendency to do so.  The natural tendency of the human brain is to use what’s easily available, not what maximizes what we learn (which usually tends to be difficult).  So for the prototypical GPS driver, not getting lost basically equates to not learning how to get there (without a GPS).  If you’ve ever been lost, I think you’ll realize the universality of this logic: getting lost helps you learn to find your way.

    What’s really interesting about this idea is not that it’ll help you become a human navigator but rather how much this generalizes to other areas of learning.  Getting lost is really a metaphor for making mistakes and figuring out why you made that mistake (i.e. learning).  I contest that if you’re not in position to make mistakes (e.g. a test, a competition, a peer-reviewed paper, a job) then you’re not really going to learn much.  This goes back to the theory of the lazy brain: it does what’s easy (rightly so), not what’s necessarily beneficial.

    One of the big tricks that excellent researchers (read: people who are good at learning) know, either explicitly or implicitly, is that it’s important to get lost — that’s how you learn!  A blog post I came across titled “Mathematicians are chronically lost and confused (and that’s how it’s supposed to be)” really resonated with me on this point.  In the article, it mentions an excellent quote by Andrew Wiles (a renowned mathematician) about research:

    You enter the first room of the mansion and it’s completely dark. You stumble around bumping into the furniture but gradually you learn where each piece of furniture is. Finally, after six months or so, you find the light switch, you turn it on, and suddenly it’s all illuminated. You can see exactly where you were. Then you move into the next room and spend another six months in the dark. So each of these breakthroughs, while sometimes they’re momentary, sometimes over a period of a day or two, they are the culmination of, and couldn’t exist without, the many months of stumbling around in the dark that precede them.

    The author goes on to extend Andrew Wiles’ analogy:

    We all have to build up our insights over time, and it’s an often slow and arduous process. In Andrew Wiles’s analogy, my friend is still in the dark room, but she’s feeling some object precisely enough to understand that it’s a vase. She still has no idea where the light switch is, and the vase might give her no indication as to where to look next. But if piece by piece she can construct a clear enough picture of the room in her mind, then she will find the switch. What keeps her going is that she knows enough little insights will lead her to a breakthrough worth having.

    Although in the article the metaphor is directed more towards mathematics/research, it’s equally applicable in other areas of learning.  Learning to cook, play the guitar, or speaking another language, it’s all about getting lost (and making mistakes), learning the pieces bit by bit and finally piecing together the bits into a flash of insight.  It’s slow, requires patience and necessitates hard work but that’s what it takes for meaningful learning.  And really that’s the only way.  N.B. I could be wrong here, I did just hear that there’s an app for that…

    1. I can think of some answers to this question, can you? If not, try this: stop Googling for it and think.[↩]

  • The Sex Cash Theory

    “The Sex & Cash Theory: The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended.”
    Hugh MacLeod

    Hugh sums the idea a bit more succinctly as “keep your day job”.  There’s something simply captivating about dropping your dumb boring day job on a whim and chasing that dream you’ve been thinking about your whole life.  So captivating in fact, that it happens to be the plot of dozens of Hollywood films.  Besides being incredibly entertaining, it’s just not the way the world works.  In real life, it takes more than a montage and some cool sounding music to have a happy ending.  Think more along the lines of you’re half way up climbing Everest with your oxygen running low, three of your digits with frost bite, wishing you never left the comfortable confines of suburbia — that’s more like real life.  (Although it sounds like a terrible situation, the movie version would probably be a very action packed 110 minutes!)  What’s sexy may not be what works best (all the time).

    As with most things, it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition.  You can do the boring stuff while chasing your dream — in fact that’s what probably works best.  Someone has to pay the bills.  In fact, I’m a big fan of doing all things incrementally from coding to learning guitar to writing this blog post!  Incremental long-term progress trumps one-time fast sprints every time.  And the Sex-Cash Theory backs this up.  You might only have a bit of the sex to start but if you work at it, you’ll be having more sex than you know what to do with! (metaphorically speaking of course =) )

    If you didn’t happen to click the link to Hugh’s site, I’ll leave you with some more of his wisdom:

    As soon as you accept this, I mean really accept this, for some reason your career starts moving ahead faster. I don’t know why this happens. It’s the people who refuse to cleave their lives this way – who just want to start Day One by quitting their current crappy day job and moving straight on over to best-selling author… Well, they never make it.

  • Evolution, Gambling and Life

    Imagine yourself as a small single-celled creature called an amoeba.  You are among millions of other nearly identical single-celled organisms vying to stay alive long enough to live another generation with one exception — your finger-like projections of protoplasm extend ever so slightly further than your competition.  Not a huge advantage, but enough of an advantage to grab more food and survive long enough to reproduce.  Now your progeny (because you divided in two to produce them), also have that advantage and they collect food fast as well.  Soon your grand children, each slightly different from each other, also have this advantage, some even with longer protoplasm than you (it’s what every amoeba parent hopes for)!  The grandchildren with slightly longer protoplasm thrive, out-competing even their siblings.  Soon your lineage contains hundreds of thousands of single cell organisms with exaggerated finger-like protoplasm projections that dominate this tiny little ecosystem in which your grew up.  Who would’ve thought that this small little evolutionary edge, increasing every generation, would turn into such a gigantic advantage?

    Next, take a seat at your favorite race track.  You can bet on any horse but you’re not as careless as the other folk who come by for a thrill, you do your research.  You look at the past performance of the horse, the jockey’s fitness, and even consider the weather details and how different combinations of rider and horse are affected.  Every detail is analyzed so you can inch ever so slightly ahead of the parimutuel betting odds.  But research isn’t everything for you,  you also know how to gamble properly (if there ever was such a thing) by using the mathematics of the Kelly Criterion.  Each bet, although not always a winner and sometimes for longs streaks of time, increases your bank roll — on average.  And slowly but surely you increase your bankroll from $1,000, to $10,000, from 10,000 to $100,000, and again from $100,000 to $1 million (Of course, it wasn’t a direct route, one time you were even down to your last $100!).  Like the small little creature, every bet, every generation, you have a slight edge that eventually gets you to that seven figure bankroll.

    Small steps add up over time.  Replace longer protoplasm or gambler’s edge with decisions one is confronted in life, and you have a surprisingly simple model of how we all got to where we are.  The seemingly random choices we make everyday have slightly different outcome, some good, some bad, some pointing in one direction, others pointing in another.  A bias in a series of seemingly random decisions you make edge you towards your eventual destination (no, no, not six feet under!).  It pulls like a gravity towards whatever bias you might have.  Herbert Simon [1] gives a better description:

    “For most of us — those of us who have not won million-dollar lotteries, or suffered sudden crippling accidents — life is much like the chess game.  We make hundreds of choices among the alternative paths that lie before us and, as a result of those choices, find ourselves pursuing particular, perhaps highly specialized, careers, married to particular spouses, and living in particular towns.  Even if we point to a single event as the ’cause’ of one of these outcomes, closer scrutiny of the path we have trod would reveal prefatory or preparatory events and choices that made the occurrence of the critical event possible.”
    pp. 113, Models of My Life, Herbert A. Simon

    Although life seems like a random walk, we do have one tool to make sure we end up in the right place — bias.  We — knowingly or not — bias each and every decision we make inching towards one path or another.  Hopefully that will take us where we want to go over time (although rarely in a straight line).

    This large dependence on randomness disturbs some people, but not me.  It’s because I know for sure where I’m going to eventually end up: six feet under!

    1. Whose biography, Models of My Life, inspired this blog post.  I highly recommend reading it.  It’s a candid and witty autobiography looking at his distinguished multi-disciplinary career filled with tidbits of incredibly valuable wisdom throughout.[↩]

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