Learning – Page 2 – Peter Oshkai photography

June 9, 2017

Creating disfluency

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“The best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information “
— Charles Duhigg “Smarter Faster Better“

One of my favorite jokes is about a teacher, who complains about how incapable of learning his students are: “I explained it once,” he said, “- they didn’t understand. I explained twice – they still did not understand. I explained for the third time – I finally understood it, but they still didn’t!”

This week, I tried to recreate this effect for myself. I taught a short PhD course at my host university here in Milan, and, being a visiting professor, I had a lot of freedom in choosing the content and the format of the course.

Generally, I believe that academic teaching and research are best done with some synergy between them. In other words, one can benefit the other. In practice, though, I think that usually my research experience positively influences my teaching, but the opposite feedback is indirect at best.

This time, I wanted to take advantage of the fact there were only a few graduate students in the class, who were already well on their way to becoming capable researchers. So I decided to completely re-work the way I usually present the fundamental concepts in my research area (which is aeroacouctics – I study how fluid flows generate sound). The course preparation took a lot of time, but in retrospect, forcing myself to manipulate the information that I was already familiar with helped me crystallize the image of the state-of-the-art, not only for the students, but for myself too, and define the “adjacent possible” – the area just beyond the cutting edge of the research field, where we will focus our next efforts.

The reason for this is that deliberately re-arranging the information makes it disfluent – more difficult to deal with initially (e.g. I cannot jump straight to conclusions, because I am familiar with the field.) It has been shown in various fields that engaging with information, manipulating it, makes it “sticky” in the long term. It transforms information into knowledge.

I think that is why practice is so important in any field, from research to kendo to photography. It is not enough to have read about integration by parts or suriage waza or motion blur. We need to do the techniques time and time again to understand them and “make them our own”.

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May 23, 2017

A new orbit

I have overheard an expression regarding a sphere of someone’s interests: “being pulled into a new orbit,” which I think is a near-perfect analogy of how our children expand our horizons. It resonated with my own experience, and I was compelled to draw this cartoon to illustrate it.

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The analogy goes like this: when you don’t have children, you have a familiar sphere of interests, which develops under various influences throughout your life. If you were a planet, this would be your personal orbit, shaped by your parents, friends, teachers, and other “celestial bodies”.

Then, a major cosmic event occurs, and you have a child. Paraphrasing Neil Armstrong, it might be a small step for mankind, but a giant leap for a man (or a woman).

At first, this child is like your satellite. Her life revolves around yours. But as she grows, her interests and inclinations shape what you are interested in as well. You are being pulled out of your orbit. This implies a certain level of instability, so it can feel unnerving and uncomfortable. But even if you don’t settle into a new (wider and more exciting) orbit and instead get slingshot into the space, think about the alternative – going around and around along a familiar path year after year. So have no worries and enjoy the ride. Maybe that is the reason we have kids – so they can shake our universe apart.

Orbit

Here is my personal example. I studied art as a child, and have been painting occasionally in my adult years, in addition to doing photography. I think that might have affected my daughter’s early interest in art. Now, next to her, my own sphere of artistic interests is expanding. We now sketch and paint together regularly, and I even took a sculpture class last fall – my first art class since the high-school years. Isn’t it wild? I think it is.

March 5, 2017March 5, 2017

Sketching as memory training

One of the nice things of being on sabbatical is that I can try new things and new ways of doing old things without the fear of missing out on productivity. My rationalization is that since I am operating in a new environment anyway, it makes sense to let go of the daily routines, on which I typically depend.

A new thing that I am experimenting with now, while leaving in Milan, is sketching. This is not an entirely new activity for me, because I have been drawing and painting various things on and off for the past few years and I studied art during my school years.

This time, I am doing it in a more deliberate way. To be more precise, what I am doing is purposeful practice, in Anders Ericsson’s sense of the term. Deliberate practice would have included feedback from a teacher, whom I don’t have. Specifically, I am working on sharpening my observational skills, both in terms of the speed of capturing the salient features of the subject and in terms of the depth of observation.

Not to compare myself to Leonardo da Vinci, but Milan once was his stomping ground. He even put “draw Milan” in his now-famous to-do list. Also, Leonardo was arguably the most keen observer, who has ever lived. So I thought it would be a shame not to use the opportunity to follow in his footsteps.

First, I started sketching by using my photographs as references. My goal was to focus on a particular aspect of the photo and to capture the mood of the scene. I’ve done this type of drawing before, both digitally and using physical media, so I my goal was just to get into the habit of drawing regularly.

Last Sunday, I tried something different. I took my sketchbook to the park, where my daughter went to play on a sunny afternoon. At the park, I sat on the bench and sketched the parents, who were watching their children, talking on their phones, chatting to each other, etc. I wanted to capture the gestures, without focussing on the proportions, lighting, composition, etc. I found that it was quite easy to sketch people, who were just standing and sitting around, even though they periodically changed their poses. On the other hand, I had a hard time sketching people, who were walking by or cycling past me. There was just not enough time to capture the essential elements of their poses, before they were gone.

I think the speed of gathering the essential visual information is a trainable skill, though. My hypothesis is that the challenge is related to the limited capacity of our short-term memory. A visual image of a human figure, particularly in motion, contains a lot of information: proportions (e.g. width to height) of the body, relative angles of the shoulders, ribcage, pelvis, positions of the hands and feet, silhouette (including elements of clothing), lighting/shadows, etc. We can capture all of this information in one glance (probably, in less than two seconds), but cannot recall it when we need to reference it during actual drawing. On the other hand, the capacity of human long-term memory is nearly unlimited. In any case, it is certainly trainable. The limitation is that information cannot be committed to the long-term memory quickly. In my particular case of sketching passer-bys, my subjects were leaving the scene before I could memorize their poses.

So, my plan of improving the speed of observation is to follow a particular pattern when looking at the subjects:
1. Width-to-height ratio of the body.
2. Body angle.
3. Position of the limbs.
4. Silhouette.
5. Shadows.

Then, when sketching, I would follow the same pattern to recall this information.

Hopefully, with some training, I would be able to scan through the elements 1 – 5 more than once. This should enable me to account for the changing scene, lighting and poses. Actually, cycling through a pre-defined sequence of elements of the scene is an established attention-aid technique. It is used in teaching defensive driving by continuously going through a sequence of actions abbreviated as a mnemonic “SIPDE” – Scan, Identify, Predict, Decide and Execute.

August 17, 2016

Capturing everything

“…survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention.”
Julia Cameron “The Artist’s Way“

The idea of taking notes to capture the events of our lives is controversial from the standpoint of present moment awareness. On the one hand, the vary act of note taking can be distracting from the experience itself. On the other hand, it can serve as a focusing tool.

In a recent interview, a comedian Mike Birbiglia said that an advice that he would give to his younger self was to write everything down in a journal “because it’s all so fleeting”. Basically, I think that the value of journaling boils down to cultivating the skills of observation. Julia Cameron in “The Artist’s Way” makes a case that paying attention is a key skill in any creative endeavour. Perhaps, it is a key in everything: relationships, work, memory, creativity, etc.

Last year, I went to the Leonardo3 exhibit in Milan, where Da Vinci’s notebooks were displayed. Those were e-copies; the real ones were displayed at the Santa Maria delle Grazie, which is also the cite of “The Last Supper”. My most prominent impression was of Leonardo’s incredible ability to observe nature and to learn from it. If I think about it a bit more, it becomes apparent that he must have been very generous with his time. He must have had sufficient patience to just look at things (e.g. turbulent water flow under a bridge or frogs swimming in a puddle) and figure out why they look and work the way they are. After all, Leonardo did all his work before computers and productivity tools. Yet undeniably, he had been tremendously productive. I think that perhaps, it was a conjunction of two key factors: patiently paying attention and diligent capturing of his experiences and observations.

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February 14, 2016February 14, 2016

Being a tactful nonconformist

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“Inwardly, we ought to be different in all respects, but our exterior should conform to society.”

— Seneca the Younger, “Moral letters to Lucilius”

Following our own way while not offending others (which, I think is a good thing in majority of everyday circumstances, not when fundamental principles are at stake) is a tricky business. I think it was Seth Godin, who expressed this idea very eloquently: we need a compass and a place to go to, but the road there does not have to be a straight line.

Emulating others, particularly those that work at the cutting edge of our fields is a powerful technique. In fact, Seneca, whom I quoted earlier, also said that “best ideas are common property”, not to encourage plagiarism, I suppose, but to warn us not to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of not following in someone else’s footsteps. The challenge then is not to lose sight of the big picture and to keep thinking independently.

My four-year-old daughter is very much into playing LEGO, and I find that it is a good illustration of the balance between following instructions and letting your imagination run wild. You need to accumulate some basic techniques and understanding of principles but building a few sets “by the book”, but the most fun happens when you set the manual aside and build something uniquely yours.

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February 11, 2016

Claiming an idea

“Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.”
— Seneca the Younger, “Moral letters to Lucilius”

I have been listening to Seneca’s letters, recently published by Tim Ferriss in an audiobook form. Naturally, a book that survived such a long test of time is full of gems that are universally applicable. For example, the issue of the balance between depth and breadth on one’s studies is something that comes up in my personal experience in academic research, photography and kendo.

Seneca points out that there are too many books out there for a single person to be able to read. Instead of chasing after every new author, he advises to “fall back upon those whom you read before”. The goal is to engage with the classic ideas, to understand them deeply in order to be able to reliably apply them in daily life. By the way, it is interesting to note that in Seneca’s time philosophy was, apparently, an applied discipline.

I think that Seneca’s approach is a useful guideline for information consumption in the modern world, where we are bombarded with much more data than we can hope to process: learn something new every day to stay current in your field of study, but claim one idea per day as your own. In other words, become so deeply familiar with the idea that you can not only explain and defend it, but also to know its range of applicability.

January 2, 2016

Substance vs. method

“The Chairman said, “What is your substantive field?”
Phaedrus said, “English composition.”
The Chairman bellowed, “That’s a methodological field!”
— Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“

We tend to define ourselves by what we do for living. This is particularly true in North America, where the stereotype is that people live for work. Perhaps, this is how North Americans like to think about themselves more than how they actually live, but apparently, Europeans are a bit more relaxed in this regard. One way or another, this relationship with work surfaces in many forms, including the dilemma of whether to specialize in a narrow field or to strive to be a polymath.

Robert Pirsig’s brilliant “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” has an interesting insight into the root of this issue – a discussion of the difference between the substance and the method of work. He says, “Substance doesn’t change. Method contains no permanence.” Perhaps, there is hint there, that we should not let the methods that we use define the substance of what we do. Also, no matter how much we work on diversifying our arsenal of skills and techniques, this doesn’t automatically mean that the underlying direction of the work has to change.

December 31, 2015

Deliberate study vs. intuitive experience

Continuing reading Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”, I realized that most points that resonate with me are the ones that I have come across before, sometimes several times, but that have fallen off my radar (not forgotten exactly, but I stopped being actively aware of them). This reinforces the idea to keep notes of the main points from the books I read.

One of these good/interesting points in the Newport’s book is the notion that not only the quantity of practice matters (e.g. the 10,000-hour rule popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers”), but also it’s quality. Of course this is a bit of a truism, and more than that, it has been specifically brought up by Hayashi-sensei (kendo 8th dan hanshi) at a seminar a few years ago. As most kendo-related teachings, it applies not only to kendo to nearly everything else in life. Newport is being a bit more specific by introducing a classification of practice into serious study (“deliberate practice” in Anders Ericsson’s terms) and intuitive practice.

Since time is a non-renewable resource, everyone who wants to develop a skill faces a dilemma – to do a serious study “for the sole purpose of improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance” or to practice intuitively by applying whatever skills one has at his/her current level of development. Newport’s example is related to chess: studying the books with a teacher vs. playing in tournaments. This is a true dilemma (i.e. there is no single right answer), but the studies across various fields apparently show that serious study is necessary (although maybe not sufficient) for becoming a “grand master”.

The problem with intuitive experience is that in real-life, applied situations such as chess or kendo tournaments, routine photo shoots, academic research, etc., the challenge is either decidedly above or decidedly below your current ability. In both situations “skill improvement is likely to be minimized”. In deliberate study, on the other hand, there is an opportunity to choose a challenge that is appropriate for the skill level (incidentally, this is typically a teacher’s job).

August 29, 2015August 29, 2015

On reading

“To read with diligence; not to rest satisfied with light and superficial knowledge,..”
– Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, “Meditations“

It is commonly argued that in reading, as in any kind of studying and almost any kind of activity, the Pareto principle dictates that 80% of the results (e.g. knowledge) can be obtained during the first 20% of the time (or 20% of the total possible effort) spent on the activity. After the initial 20%, the returns are progressively diminished, so that larger amounts of time spent reading provide only incremental increase in knowledge.

While tis is probably true, I believe, or at least would like to believe, that striving for deep, fundamental knowledge is what separates true experts from lay people. Of course, the question of whether it is wise to focus on obtaining expertise in a narrow field (i.e. “niching down” in photography) remains open. However, if this niche is learning itself, and the skill that we are mastering is our ability to learn new skills, the rules start to change. Learning, according to Naval Ravikant, among others, is a wild card, a joker, in a sense that learning can be traded for any skill that is needed at any given point in life. From this perspective, it is easy to agree with Stoics, who taught that “Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live;..” (Seneca, “On the Shortness of Life”).

August 28, 2015

Journalling

Journalling has many benefits, as has been pointed out many times by various illustrious writers. Blogging, which is very different from journalling in that it is a public expression of thought, while journalling is private, is also very useful. It provides an opportunity to practice formulating and publicly expressing an opinion with the full understanding that this opinion will be permanently recorded somewhere in the proverbial cloud.

Another way of journalling, which is somewhere in between between private journalling and public blogging, is keeping a diary as a record-keeping activity. Today, I heard an interview of Robert Rodriguez, who made a strong case for this habit. Having a daily record of the significant events of every day makes a powerful tool for parenting, personal development, work, etc.

I think that taking family photos on a regular basis (ideally daily) serves the same purpose. In my personal case, I find that having a large, easily-accessible database of images that commemorate the significant events in our family’s life is very valuable. Looking through these photos with my four-year-old daughter (I have the images from my Flickr photo stream scroll as a screensaver on the TV in our living room) shows that I tent to over-estimate both my daughter’s and my own memory span an ability to recall small details and events that seemed significant at the time they were happening, but vanished from our minds just a few weeks (not to mention, months and years) later.

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