Monday morning / Friday afternoon thought inspiring blog

What is the difference between a teacher and a student? Answer: a teacher is someone who has finished learning. Of course this is not strictly and generally true, but I do believe there is some merit to this thesis. Teachers should feel confident with the material they are teaching and thus feel no incentive for further study, at least not for the material they are teaching. Teachers have a rounded message and a clear vision of the field in question, whereas students do not want to impose their view on others but want to know the view of others. Exploring the views of others is an essential part of the learning process. Furthermore, a teacher must be convinced that his teachings are worth the effort to bring them across. Generally it takes far less time to absorb clearly presented ideas then it takes to present ideas clearly. That is why I currently still feel myself being more of a student than a teacher: though I like to help people understand ideas that I have mastered, I prefer learning new ideas of others. When people explicitly show interest I am very willing to explain them what I know about the subject, but teaching more at less at random seems to be a waste of energy considering that I could have gained far more by learning something new myself. This is why I doubt the future consistence in updating and even existence itself of this blog: it takes a lot of effort to put ideas into words and when it is more or less randomly directed there is very little pay-of for the effort. As long as I feel far more a student than a teacher, I believe this blog stands little chance of long term survival.

I do not think that many people actively belief in absolute happiness, but nontheless we might not always be concious of the fact that happiness and knowning how to value certain priviliges –closely related to experiencing happiness– are derived by our minds by comparing. To make this more explicit I sometimes say: ‘If it was not for the vallies, we could not see the hills’.

As a consequence, people who do not know what war means, that is how nasty it is, they also do not know peace and hence its value. Of course everyone knows what war and peace are, but we all do on different levels of detail and abstraction. Some of us have lived during the way, others were born close to it, either in time or proximity, and thus have gotten to know the adverse effects through the people that did live in the way and yet others learn about in school or on the television. Paradoxically, those who have the least knowledge of war and the atrocities that it brings, seem to hold the least value for peace and the corresponding priviliges and rights that are necessary to maintain peace.

In a society where nobody ever gets ill, nobody values their health. A similar statement applies to experiencing happiness. It is hard to be happy when you always get what you want or –even worse– when you do not know what it means to be denied something. This is why we should actually value, at least partly, even the nastier things that happen to us, because they teach us how to appreciate all the rest.

Playing is the best way to learn. Okay, maybe it is not the very best way, but it certainly ranks among the best. People who want to learn something should find an approach that they enjoy and, if possible, is even addictive to a certain degree. The way I learned some basics of the Japanese alfabets and characters, was through the RPG game Project LRNJ. I forgot most of it, since I have not practiced in years now, but I’m confident that I would pick it up pretty quickly if I were ever to start again.

I taught myself some Spanish and still actively try to maintain and improve that knowledge, applying the principle of enjoying the learning. That is by reading books, starting with translated works that I was confident to be interested in, and watching the Spanish news, movies and animated series dubbed in Spanish (Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy) and eventually real Spanish programs, such as Los Serrano. Of course not everybody enjoys these things and it can be hard to get to the point, where you can actually enjoy it, so you do have to be persistent and have faith that your knowledge will improve to the level that you need to have fun with it.

So the next time you seriously want to learn something, you might want to try and actively seek a method that improves the chance that you will enjoy (part of) the learning process. Be creative with it!

Google confirms it: playing beats winning. That is to say, playing is more important than winning. I think that most people know this at least subconsciously and behave accordingly. The essence of playing, I believe, is winning from yourself, improving your previous efforts, applying new tactics or strategy and feeling more accomplished than the last time you played. Sometimes this personal improvement can be measured directly by beating some opponent, but never comes the satisfaction from the mere act of winning, at least normally it should not. How meaningful is a win if the opponent never really was a match to begin with or if it was accomplished by ‘bending the rules’? The few rare people that actually enjoy winning, just for winning-sake are no fun to play with. Luckily this group of people is actually very small and I’m not sure I really know people who are like that.

I thus conclude, that to get real satisfaction from playing the risk of losing once in a while is an integral part of the equation. So it turns out that playing is not only about winning, but also about losing.

People do not like paying money, in particular to abstract causes that they do not feel connected to. This week I received two taxations, one on behalf of the city Den Haag because I own a home and one from Het Waterschap (they take care of all water-management related issues in my area. It is not that I mind paying taxes, but when there is no way to avoid a particular tax I’d rather not receive the money in the first place and have my employer transfer the money to them.

I think the psychology holds for most people, that they do not mind receiving less or paying more, as long as they are not aware of it. VAT (value-added tax) is a great example, that most people do not mind paying, but if they were to receive a bill at the end of the year to tax all the goods and services they purchased I bet they would be complaining at lot more than they are now. Of course this is not an easy thing to accomplish, but I think we should strive to have absolutely unavoidable bills automatically paid. People should never see the money for their insurances or mortage payments; It does nothing but psychological damage and leads to missed payments and debts because people do not have a clear picture of how much ‘spendable money‘ they really earn. I realise that this idea is not very likely to be broadly implemented in the near future, not in the last place because there are a lot of practical problems to be solved before it can work effectively. Nonetheless I feel that we would be a much happier society with less problems with such an adaption of the system.

Have you ever thought about our perception of the world? Most people think that they are seeing reality, but in reality they perceive sensory input on a small window of the electromagnetic spectrum. We are not seeing ‘everthing there is to be seen‘, but only a portion of it. Furthermore the result is interpreted, so we must be careful with the assumption that what we experience actually exists in a single, unique state that is identical for anyone who perceives it.

Most of us have heard of the various types of colour blindness. Those people experience the same world as we do, but yet different. On the other hand exists the phenomenon of tetrachromacy, a condition that some people, in particular females, have that makes them experience the world in four colours, instead of the usual three. That means that they see (subtle) differences between colours that you as a trichromat experience as identical. And according to this artical on colour vision, pigeons even trump that, being pentachromats and thus discerning five base colours.

Relatively near St. Helena, the island of Napoleon Bonaparte’s second exile, lies Ascension island. Famous scientist Charles Darwin passed the island on one of his journies and described it as barren with very few plants. Today, less then two centuries later, part of the island has become covered with a tropical rainforest through various ad-hoc planting efforts and scientist have been surprised by the speed at which this complex ecological system has developed. Even though the flora and fauna are now richer than before, not everyone agrees that this has been an unequivocal positive transformation; at least four native species have become extinct and others have become endangered.

Most people probably feel that the complex forrest is an improvement over the previous sparse vegetation. This touches once again upon the question whether we should actively try to control and change our environment or to leave everything unchanged as much as possible. And what part of the latter goal of leaving everything unchanged have we already missed by going from a population of 2 million to one of over 6 billion? I think that the lesson to be learnt from Ascension is that change will favor some life and it will kill others. As human beings we should be prudent to strive for change, in particular when we do not fully understand all the factors involved, since at every turning point there is the chance of us ‘becoming out of favor‘.