Antoni

The Year of Fukuyama

Let’s face it: the current global is the least to say concerning. From all around the world we hear negative events like war, economic crisis, pandemic, energy crisis and many more. Regular people around us start to be more vocal about the problems, inflation is discussed on daily basis, especially in the context of ever rising prices. In upcoming months we will be able to feel it on our own skin, literally, winter is coming is no longer just a citation from popular TV series, energy saving policies will hit many public buildings like universities which will be closed earlier and optimized to waste less energy.

In this environment one should feel pessimistic about the future and such thoughts indeed happen to reside in my mind but not to the very great extent. Surprisingly I feel calm lately when looking at the broader scope with realistic eye. We are indeed in an unfavorable situation currently and have been for the last few years. But also every time we manage to somehow handle the situation and end up smarter than before. As though our civilization is evolving in front of our eyes through new language, behaviors, jokes and many others. Among all those events it is important to notice that we still have the space for individuality and creativeness, have never been pushed beyond our safe limits. Like the little kid learning to ride a bike with additional wheels attached to the back - very new and unpleasant environment but at the same time safe enough to prevent damage and enabling us to experiment in our own subjective flow of consciousness.

And that is the idea that I got out of this blog post, liberal democracy is like riding a bike with additional wheels. Many time we argue that it is slow, too fragmented and very often missing this shorter feedback loops for decisions, but at the same time offers us more or less steady ride on the bumpy road, easing out potential catastrophes. Other competing systems: Chinese and Russian start to uncover its fallacies under stress. Societies driven without those additional wheels tend to go faster or take corners more aggressively but offer a very, very dangerous trait, the ability the fall from the bike.

For the need of our mental experiment imagine falling from the bike, yeah it ain’t that much in many cases, especially if you are just a little kid learning to ride. But our ride in my opinion looks a bit differently: we are indeed learning to ride a bike and going very slow but what differs is the amount of people riding this bike. The potential of us ever falling down is unimaginable and getting back on the bike will not equal to dusting off our pants, it will hurt and take long rehab before the next ride.

Systems with more hardcore way of riding this bike will start to shake, how many people being able to stop it are still there, did not they left in fear before this or if they are still there to they have enough space for creativity and subjective opinion to try to prevent upcoming fire or are they constantly faced to fight with it.

I really want to believe that currently structured system that I live in is safe from completely falling apart thanks to some overly pessimistic assumptions about possible risks to the system. In other words, we ride with additional wheels, I know it really sucks at many occasions when you see this wide long road just begging you to accelerate but gives us much needed protection during shaky periods.

net enjoyer truly I am and this image was generated using DALL-E 2, my initial thought was to have multiple people on one bike but it was not yet able to generate it, guess there is still a need for me to learn to draw, great.

Brain Training Doesn’t Work

It turns out that playing sudoku will not speed up my mind and the idea of training brain like the muscle is being undermined.

“[W]e find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.”

The very popular Mind-Muscle myth is busted, transferring cognitive skills between even very specific tasks is negligible, needless to say about different domains such as playing Sudoku and logical thinking.

Skills transfer to the extent that the knowledge and procedures used between tasks are the same. If skills rely on different methods or ideas, training in one won’t help with another.

What is the authors take on brain training then? Learning. He presents excelling at certain domain through learning small basic units of knowledge, which combined together give your mind toolbox big enough to handle most cases and become proficient.

A concrete analogy would be language learning. Fluency isn’t a muscle you improve. It results from knowing many words, grammar, and pronunciations and using that knowledge quickly and unhesitatingly. It can be impressive to watch someone at a mastery level converse in a language you struggle with. Still, there is nothing more to it than this—if you knew everything she did, you too would be fluent.