Goines On: For the whiz-kids

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A not-so-simple formula…

Even after Goines realized that he had been drawing figures and assembling tables of yearly cyclical calendar patterns only to satisfy some obsession or compulsion within his own self, he continued working at it. But when he got done – or done enough, because more could be done – he decided to set that aside and be done with it. He’d wrap it all up by specifying the steps that a computer program could take to find the day of the week for any given date within the period covered by the Gregorian Calendar.

Think fast, or think slowly?

Daniel Kahneman (b. 1934)

Sometimes we know intuitively exactly the right thing to do.
    When a lot rides on our response, and we have time to reflect, we might be advised to examine more closely what our intuitions tell us. The statement below, from psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision-making with Amos Tversky (1937-1996), was elicited by the following question from Sam Harris (as reported on Harris's blog): "Much of your work focuses on the limitations of human intuition. Do you have any advice about when people should be especially hesitant to trust their intuitions?"
    Daniel Kahneman replied:

[People should be especially hesitant to trust their intuitions] when the stakes are high. We have no reason to expect the quality of intuition to improve with the importance of the problem. Perhaps the contrary: High-stake problems are likely to involve powerful emotions and strong impulses to action. If there is no time to reflect, then intuitively guided action may be better than freezing or paralysis, especially for the experienced decision maker. If there is time to reflect, slowing down is likely to be a good idea. The effort invested in “getting it right” should be commensurate with the importance of the decision.

    Failure to heed this advice (or failure to be hesitant without having heard it) led to the folk wisdom, "Act in haste, repent at leisure." There are, of course, a number of variations, to suit the purpose: "Sin in haste, repent at leisure," "Marry in haste, repent at leisure,"¹ even "Regulate in haste, repent at leisure"....
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1. 

   William Cowper
   by Lemuel Francis Abbott

   From William Congreve's comedy of manners, The Old Batchelour, 1693:

   Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure:
   Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.

Only in small things?

I wrote yesterday that the single tiny scrap of paper I found in the library's copy of Changing Places marked the very page from which I wanted to extract my first quote.

Wednesday night, at a barbecue for university administrative staff, I somehow got into a conversation on such occurrences with my friend Jeff. He told me how one time someone who was stuffing envelopes at work asked him to get seventy-three more envelopes out of the box, and Jeff just pulled out a bunch seemingly at random and handed them over. A few minutes later, the person said, "Hey! You gave me exactly seventy-three. I bet you can't do that again." Jeff reached in and handed over seventy-three more, exactly.

"But," Jeff told me, "this always only happens in small things."

I told him I knew what he meant. "I have this idea," I said, "that when I fall asleep listening to a book on tape, my spirit self is still fully awake and knows how far back I need to rewind the tape. When I rewind later, I try to sense where my spirit self tells me to stop the tape."

Jeff looked at me to go on. "It works sometimes," I said.

A little later at the barbecue I got into a conversation with the bartender. He said he was a "rising senior" and would graduate next year with a baccalaureate degree in political science. I asked whether he planned to continue on for a graduate degree. He said, maybe later. He was interested in international politics and first wanted to travel, maybe work in an Asian country. He spoke well and with confidence. He seemed to me to have high aspirations and wanted to make a difference.

I wished him good luck. He said, "I don't know. There'll be lots of roadblocks along the way."

And I said, "Well, after listening to you, I have a sense that you'll surmount every difficulty that might present itself."

I wondered whether my sense of the young man's "destiny" was accurate. Or whether such a sense works only in small things....

Good on you, oh my reader!

Your sincere travail will not go unrewarded. Some recent critical references to “institutional education” on another blog made me realize that I very much cherish my own such education. I learned to form clear letters from dear Mrs. Zelpha Bennett, my nuturing third-grade teacher, learned to cherish ancient learning from Mr. Morris Knudsen, my cosmopolitan high-school Latin teacher, was introduced to “The Great Books” by Mr. Charles Albert King, my visionary high-school history teacher, read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and novels by Thomas Hardy and others for Miss Lois Thompson, my devoted high-school English teacher, acquired a love mathematics and proofs from Mr. Loren Court, my passionate math instructor, majored in philosophy at Yale University (which Mr. Court recommended I apply to), where I immersed myself in Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other philosophers, read a smattering of the world's religion texts, and discovered the work of Sigmund Freud, Leon Festinger, and a number of others. I feel richly blessed by my institutional education and its book learning. A friend shared with me today that he and his wife went through a phase with their homeschooled son in which he would do nothing but read for hours on end. His wife told the local principal, “I don't know what to do. He won't do any of his workbooks. He just reads.” “He reads?” said the principal. “Don't do anything!” I also feel richly blessed by my intuitive learning, which often “overcomes me” out in the garden—while I'm raking leaves, mowing grass, digging holes to plant, moving rocks to line paths. Life and learning are glorious, and institutional and life learning can come together in a beautiful, mutually supportive mosaic. At least, I feel that my own learning experiences have done so. Perhaps I am unusually blessed, but I can hardly credit that conceit. Good on you all, to overrunning cup!