Ray Woodcock’s Current Thoughts

One way of planning for possible outcomes is to assign a percentage to each outcome.  If you think flipping a coin gives you a 50% chance of heads and a 50% chance of tails, and if you’re going to get $100 for flipping heads, then you average it out and you find that your average expected outcome is $50.

By that logic, let’s suppose flipping heads would give you, not $100, but $100 million.  Average it out and you get $50 million.  But that’s not realistic.  The choices are either $100 million or zero.  That’s all the difference in the world.

So what we have here is, basically, a “shit happens” factor (SHF).  Whatever you’re planning or imagining, there’s some tiny chance that quantum mechanics will do its magic and you’ll suddenly be transformed into a pretzel.  You don’t assign a percentage likelihood to that sort of thing; you basically disregard it and carry on as though weird things never happened.  You can’t plan for life as a pretzel, so there really is no alternative but to simply tell yourself that shit happens, but not to you.

Or maybe that’s not quite right.  You can’t plan for life as a pretzel, but you can plan for the end of life as you know it.  And maybe you should.  Get a bit of insurance, tell your loved ones that you love them, look at the flowers like you may never see them again.  No telling when a chunk of satellite will come flying out of the sky and hit you on the head.

There have been people, a lot of them, who got up in the morning and thought this was just going to be another day, and then it turned out not to be.  They got in a car accident, or their spouse called at noon to say they wanted a divorce, or an earthquake hit.  And then, suddenly, there was never a chance to go back and finish that crossword puzzle, or make that phone call, or get invited to join the varsity team.  Suddenly you were living in a tent, or they had put you on a bus to the juvenile detention facility, or whatever — and the rest is history.

SHF-informed planning does not just allow a bit of an adjustment in case of crisis.  SHF-informed planning asks what the hell we are doing here and now, when something in our hearts tells us that we are really supposed to be somewhere else.  To make SHF-compliant preparations for your life, it is advisable not merely to have your ducks in a row, but to be getting rid of ducks so you don’t have to worry about their proper arrangement.  No matter what some people may try to tell you, life is more than just ducks.

I see a BusinessWeek article about virtual workplaces in the classroom. The concept is that business school students are now able to try their hand at solving real-world business problems in a virtual reality context.

Eventually, someone may decide to permit students from multiple business schools to address the same problems at the same time. Suddenly, it would not matter whether you were attending business school at Harvard or at some lowly state university: you would have equal access and equal opportunity to demonstrate your capabilities.

What can be done at business school can be done elsewhere. It should be possible for political science students to address real-world political problems. And what can be done in a virtual context can also be done in a real context. Those business problems and political problems need not be something that a professor dreams up. They can be posted by real people, growing rice in Southeast Asia or handling a civil war in Africa.

It is not that students at Harvard or other elite universities would not continue to shine. I’m sure they would. Some of them, anyway. Some surely would not. The real point is that those who never made it to Harvard — who, ultimately, may not be enrolled in any university at all — may have an opportunity not merely to earn brownie points, but actually to build their resumes by racking up a string of suggested solutions, some of which might be implemented, achieve success, and receive kudos from the grateful poser of the original problem.

It depends.
Sometimes.
Check with X.
To a certain extent.
Eventually.
I know it used to be that … but nowadays …
One can hope.
I’m not sure.

[Send to classmates after an exam in statistics]

I am sure it was not the bar exam.  I am familiar with the bar exam.

The bar exam is an exam that continues for hours on end, that poses difficult and indeterminate questions, that leaves you wondering how badly you screwed up.

But that’s not why this was not the bar exam.

The bar exam is written by people who have enormous knowledge of things so surpassingly tedious that you cannot imagine yourself ever reaching their depths of exactitude.  The bar exam explores your ability to parse utterly precise nuances — to such a point that, if you do begin to master them, you may even take a perverse pride in your insight into things that will almost never matter, to almost anyone you will ever know.

Again, however, that’s not why this was not the bar exam.

The bar exam is the last major hurdle before you proceed into a highly lucrative profession — one in which your familiarity with the truth, or your ability to inquire into the true state of affairs, will not be remotely as important as your skill in making reality appear to be whatever your client needs it to be.

That’s why I’m sure this was not the bar exam.

Summer came at an odd time for me this year. It arrived on August 12 or thereabouts. That’s when I started to feel that I was finally getting out from under an overly ambitious load of things to do.

I knew I was expecting too much of my summer, back in May, but I didn’t know what to do about it. The ad hoc solution was to just throw my to-do list into the mix and see what happened. So of course I got tied up in random trivia and felt like I wasted a good chunk of the summer. But not so much after August 12.

Summer hasn’t ended yet, even though school has started. That’s partly because it’s still a hundred degrees outside, and partly because I have a shamefully light class load this semester. I haven’t even come indoors. I’m working at a desk in my garage, having become so acclimated that I don’t even mind it’s a hundred. I actually kind of prefer it.