Minimalism

Starting from the basic, build upon it, I found that's the Zen of minimalism. Of course, minimalism is not perfect. It might miss a lot. But if you start from the minimal, you are more likely on your way to perfection.
There are millions of layers in every field, from designing a website to learning to cook. Calmly starting from the basic layer, don't be pressured to do everything right at the first time. Nature would be on your side when you take off and fly.
Trying to control and do everything "good enough" is no better than doing a few things "great". Because sometimes the thing we are about to accomplish is too complicated to be build on one cycle. Information overload, too much to care about at the same time...why don't we start from the most essential parts? Why don't we understand that GREAT things need to be built through a long process. Windows Vista comes into mind, Google Chrome comes into mind.

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devolution of a reading mind

I am never a person who "loves" to read, and it is getting worse.

Maybe McLuhan is right. The new literacy is the new media. I do not need the old literacy of reading. But new media means short message, short attention span, high entertainment level, and low knowledge density. I feel like I am walking on a path I've walked before. I am heading to information overload, and at some point the marginal happiness of an extra information would turn negative and I will start the fast for information sometime again.

Unless the book is NOT textbook that is assigned to me, my reading speed is about 2 pages every 10 minutes. Because my mind wonders away whenever I stumble upon some words that might fire up some of my random thought. This feels like when I am on the net, random desires for seeking information would come up constantly and be satisfied only to fire up again. But when I am reading a textbook, random thoughts come up, and my eyes went blank and the information coming through from my vision system is no longer being processed and I started my thought experiment just like I started to google on the net.

That is not good. I need to be biliteral at least. The web is NOT making me a dumb reader.

Of course, I could still read-as long as the book is interesting for me. But I seems lost the ability to read less interesting text. But as I am a grad student. One part of my responsibility is to read boring text. I want it back. I want my attention span be longer.

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Random thinking about random knowledge

Where I born, what're my parents like, the hobbies do I have, the friends I make might be randomness that's beyond of my control, it's like Jesus's parable of seeds. When I was watching a video from Santa Fe Institute about complexity theory on iTunes today, I realized that information is constrained by locality--I am sure this is not new, but still, to me, it is a refreshing perspective.

Richard Florida have this idea of creative people like to concentrate on few cities. Looking it the other way around, I could also say the knowledge and the information attract people to the cities. In other words, information and knowledge is constrained by locality, like I said, no surprising here.

But when looking into it, knowledge is also constrained by organizations, universities, academic societies, journals, languages, special interests groups, like SFI or TED conference... I started to think about there must be some place/context/networks where knowledge is more abundant and valuable. Then it seems rational for one to swim to this kind of context to receive more valuable information.

By simply be in some university, you are more likely to learn new knowledge. By randomly born in a country, you are less likely to get a Nobel Prize in physics -- because you can't read Einstein in English when you are 10 even you want to.

It must be interesting to see where are all the knowledge reside. The Internet is helping deliver high value knowledge to average people- at least I can listen to the most brilliant mind from TED or SFI. Randomness might not play such a big role as it used to be, because I know have more choices.

But people is also governed by their emotions and preferences. People won't do things that's not enjoyable to themselves automatically, sometimes because they don't understand the power of knowledge, even they know, they might still not invest time and energy to learn the knowledge. Yes, we don't have infinite rationality and intelligence. Even we have infinite rationality but not infinite intelligence, we might still constrained by the amount of knowledge we invented/collected and making mistakes "rationally". If we have both, we are all gods or we might commit mass suicide. :)

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Exploitation vs. exploration in learning and education

Why did Sony lose it's lead in video game market to Nintendo and Microsoft is losing in its OS, browser, handheld devices, and many other markets? This article about innovation and change has a lot to say about the change and strategies used by companies to adapt to change.

In both the above cases, the companies are facing an exploitation vs. exploration choice. The optimal strategy of both company would be using old design principles or even old products(in Microsoft's case) to make maximum profit-provided the market is stable. But the environment is destined to be unstable and is constantly changing: disruptive change came into being(Wii remote, ipod, iphone), new competition entered(leopard, firefox, google chrome). So the old way of exploitation isn't the optimal strategy anymore and the companies have to explore for the optimal ways of doing things as a result.

There is a simple yet complex problem related to this dilemma: "Multi-armed bandit" problem. Although there might be a few suggested optimal solutions for this kind of problem. When it comes to real world, the problem is becoming so complex that it's almost impossible to find the optimal solution-especially as human beings, with limited information processing power, limited working memory, limited experience and time...For example, we might face the delayed vs. immediate reward problem: should we delay the pleasure of hanging out before the exam and study or should we have fun and dismiss the exam(apparently, this strategy was more appropriate in Mark Zukerberg's case)? Should we be optimistic about the future and never stop trying new cooking recipes or should we just learn the recipes passed down from the family and make it better? Should we make the decision early to find the "perfect" way of remembering vocabulary in our second language learning or should we try out every strategies and use every tools that we could find? Back to the bandit dilemma: why don't we just watch other people play first? And jump in at the optimal time?

Apparently, none of these questions has simple universal answers. Nonetheless, all of these problems have a lot of implications for our thinking about exploitation vs. exploration. We could now say that sticking to the same strategy is seldom the optimal strategy, especially when the environment is changing faster and faster. We know that a company should deploy some of it's resources to research-not only practical research with specific purpose, but also far-reaching research might be used in the future-the more unstable market, the more resources should be deployed on exploration. And we could definitely say that diversity of strategy and perspective is always better than uniform homogeneous perspectives.

The implication for myself? I decided not stick too much about traditional educational psychology theories-which is getting boring to me anyway, and continue my search and learning about new things. The marginal benefit of exploitation is always declining, but so is the exploration-I don't want to try out every field and every trade. I better start some deep learning at the same time.

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Stumble upon peacefulness

I found that there are a million people who are constantly trying to distract my attention, worst of all, the biggest conspirator is myself.

Few days ago, I found that my favorite browser -Google Chrome have beautiful themes. I browsed through its gallery and was intrigued by these themes designed by these artists. Then I found my "past favorite browser"-firefox actually have this same function even earlier, called Persona-way more beautiful than its old skins and customizations. So I was again browsing through the Persona gallery and installing and trying out new themes. Perfect! Now I have perfect beautiful browsers that represent my taste and styles, and I also have my perfectly beautiful desktop images that I collected during the years. Ironically, I didn't create any of these objects that's gonna represent my identity.

OK, now my computer looks beautiful, and I could actually stare into it-my desktop pictures and my browser themes for hours-which of course in Internet time is just minutes.

Then I realized that I need my computer to do real things. For example, I need to read webpages, extract information from the web, process it, maybe create something in my mind or publish it back to the web. The desktop just happen to be the place where all these process happens.

Let's focus on the desktop issue first: what is the perfect desktop? We like beautiful things as human beings. So a desktop has the perfect reason to be beautiful.

Let's then focus on the email problem: what is the perfect email? We like to know what's next as human beings. So an email notifier would be the perfect answer.

If considering these problems one by one in isolation, we could make each of these little things perfect. Yet sadly enough, we missed the ultimate goal of all these things summed up.

What is the ultimate goal then? I don't know. Maybe just process information more efficiently?

But the other annoying thing which also happens a lot is that there is another million people who is doing such a bad job of making things. Like designing a system as ugly as IE. Sometimes, these ugly things also disturb our attention and waste our energy.

Anyways, I've stopped trying out browser themes, hid my dock, and changed my desktop to pure color-which might be changed back few days later. May peace be with me for a while.

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Diversity, complexity, faith

This article seems relate to connectivism theory of diversity of networks. I am also taking his course on complexity theory, which is also great. It is interesting to notice that I tend to pick up this kind of information that relates to my prior knowledge and interests. And I found that I am more and more disturbed by the idea that educational psychology, which is my major, tend to study complex system in a simple paradigm. This makes me somewhat uneasy.

(the complexity of life)

I am also taking a bible studies in the hope of finding myself a faith. I found the knowledge in this bible lesson hard to reconcile with my prior knowledge. It seems explainable after some understanding of complex system. Knowledge in our brain exist interdependently-that's why clustering occur and why there is the difference between liberal and conservative.

All my knowledge about complex system, self-organize system, evolution, and positive psychology has been building a small world in my neuron network. I found it hard to accept many of the bible teaching right now. But I will keep on trying to reconcile faith/passion and science.

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