Kevin Low

I’ve been bitten by dogs. Not once, and not twice. I did my best not to take offence and indeed; for most part, the dogs were just either mistaking my hand (or leg) for food, or too fearful. Have you been bitten recently? Maybe not by dogs but someone’s views?

If there’s been something that’s chewing us all up, it’s increasing intolerance, and there had been research shown that more educated people actually hold more extreme views. And it is apparently due mainly to the fact that they are able to practice extreme confirmation bias in seeking out the information that confirms their views. And here is when it becomes increasingly important actually that there’s openness to new ideas, and the ability to voice them.

The reason why science, mathematics and mostly academic discourses have for centuries allowed the improvement of these subjects and topics is only because of free and open discussion. And these discussion will of course need to address differences. Being able to address them agreeably is ideal but there will be times to push the envelope without being offensive. Yet people can be offended.

People can feel chewed up. And it is important as a society to learn to cope with being comfortable with the disagreement, and knowing it is not supposed to be personal. We can be better by learning graciousness and not hiding disagreements. And being able to share openly about our ideas and disagreements without fear of persecution is important. On this note, I thought this speech by Rowan Atkinson on the reform section 5 movement years ago was quite funny and moving.

When I’m in a hurry, it is longer.

Seth Godin

Editorial standards have definitely fallen across media in the recent years. It’s not because of constraints but that lack of that. Because when social media proliferate, and news or articles are optimised for share-ability, the standards that are being adhered to are no longer the same. I’ve mentioned before that it matters to societies what makes money because those activity will proliferate.

I digress. I just wanted to make the point that we tend to think that those with the most to say is smart or has thought through things the most. The truth is far from it. Don’t you think?

The problem with the internet and reading general popular science and economics books is that it makes you think you know a lot when you don’t. For a while, I pride on myself in friend circles for knowing a lot of things. Very random things. A trivia about movies or some popular fiction. Or factoids that I picked up from my reading of psychology and economics research pieces.

I picked up the habit of reading through lots of Wikipedia articles when I was uncovering the wonders of quantum mechanics and economics during the ages 15-18. During those years I’d think through my stance on a whole variety of issues in order to sound intelligent in my General Paper writing exams. I realised that when a 17-year old have views on social policies, economy, politics, the methods of scientific inquiry, it really impress people even when these stance are not well thought-through.

And so I guess I kind of hacked that; I systematically went through GP topics and think through the positions I’d take on various different issues. I then read a whole lot of current affairs materials and also the Wikipedia or Cliffs Notes equivalent materials in order to generate examples I could cite in my arguments. All that certainly paid off during exams but it took me longer to appreciate that all that was good only if it did not stifle my curiosity. Where it caused me to think I already know much, it actually causes me to shut out learning new things or deepening my knowledge.

That is also exactly the issue when we are learning just for exams or having our teachers teach to the tests. So are we bringing up people in our mass education to be too self-satisfied with what they already know?

I discovered a lipogrammatic novel named “Ella Minnow Pea”, which I found really fascinating. It really started with me googling ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ because I was reminded of this sentence that contained all letters of the English alphabet – a ‘pangram’.

A Lipogram is a bit of an opposite of a pangram – it is a sentence that is constrained to be formed without the use of at least 1 letter. The novel basically plays on this and progressively has letters dropped out of the English alphabet as part of the story line and thus becomes increasingly constrained, hard to read but brings out the point in the story.

More generally, the concept here is about telling stories under certain constrained conditions. Not just constrain of having to write in words; but also that of the perspective of the people in place, not an all-knowing narrator. Being someone who’s always been really fascinated by manner in which stories are told, this is interesting. And this is the same reason The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes were such beautiful books for me.

As we learn to tell and write our stories, it is important to be able to recognise the constraints ourselves and the readers are subject to and to be able to bring that key message across.

Writing concisely is not easy; and short posts or pieces bringing out complex ideas are challenging to write. On a recent Akimbo podcast episode, Seth Godin shared that getting people to fill in the ______ allows them to learn much better. Because most of the learning takes place when they make the neural connections and not because they can recall some particular knowledge.

As a teacher, that means more efforts in structuring the materials. I recall how when I was in A Levels, our economics lecture notes had blanks in them for students to fill so that they’d pay attention. The unfortunate thing was that whilst the lecture notes were being photocopied in the printing room, the lecturer was changing his/her slides to reword certain things so eventually the students got so confused during the lecture what exactly to fill in those blanks.

When I went to college at LSE, I had a professor whose lecture notes was almost literally just blank (save for axes of graphs, which we have to fill in) and his lecture powerpoint was nothing but just a plain series of graphs. Coupled with his above average speed of talking and the fact his lectures were unrecorded, his lectures were really intense mental and kinesthetic (albeit just the eyes, and fingers) exercises.

We often forget that a conducive learning environment is not one that is effortless; it is one that facilitates activity on part of the learner. It is one that creates tension to force learners to bridge that gap created between what they already know with what they are about to learn or acquire. We can choose to test them that which they acquired (the ‘what’) on the process of resolving the tension (the ‘how-to’) which is harder. The challenge that confronts us is how do we avoid teaching to the test. And to remind ourselves that the test is really just an imperfect way in which we try to measure the progress of learning. How do we trade off the short-term good grades against the longer term learning and development of a kid?

I just finished writing a short book which I’m going to publish as an ebook for free! It covers some fundamentals about looking for a job and/or career which I take my clients through either during our discovery session or first coaching session. Many have found these concepts really helpful in providing clarity and a clean framework to map and put all their thoughts and plans in.

So why do I make it free for all? Because I really enjoy creating that clarity for people. And that is also why I developed my coaching practice. Yet that is something best suited to be tailored to individuals; it requires me to apply my thinking on challenges and issues specifically. Being able to share these more universal concepts allows my clients to sharpen their diagnosis of challenges and frees me to work on deeper issues.

But more importantly, I started my coaching practice to equip the young professionals for life in the future. A future that we want to create, where we overcome challenges. Especially the ones unintentionally created by the previous generations in their striving for a better life.

So watch this site for the launch.

Every moment, every day, even when you are dozing, or half-asleep making your breakfast thinking about how you’re going to be productive, nature is working, and producing. We don’t think much about it, we don’t realise how much work gets done by nature itself – yet when we harness the work, the energy from nature, we credit it to ourselves. Worst still, we frequently undermine nature’s self-corrective work that keeps things in balance.

Gretchen Daily’s work thus fascinates me to no end. It combines 2 of my deep intellectual passions: sustainability, and economics. We need to stop thinking of creating ‘safe havens’ for nature the way we think about gardens by our home. We need to learn to live in the forest, to integrate so many more elements of nature into our economy and integrate them. I thought the philosophy of permaculture is interesting and a potentially important component to a vision of such an economy.

Like I mentioned before, it is not a single material like plastics, or crude oil, or cotton tote bags for that matter that is damaging the earth. It is the mass production and consumption of it beyond what we actually really need for our purposes. It is the wastefulness, supported by a market economy and capitalistic society that places value on things that goes through the cycle of the economy rather than the cycle of the ecosystem. Our ecosystems are circular by nature; but our economy are unidirectional at least until we put more effort into making them circular.

I’ve been carrying around my cotton tote bags – these ‘reusable’ bags are actually worst off for the planet than our disposable plastic bags. Other than the small plastic bags used for foodstuff, I pretty much never ever use plastic bags only once; minimisation of single-use plastic is very important first step to our habits as consumers to reduce the environmental impact of plastics. The trouble with substituting them with cotton tote bags and many other reusable materials is that those products have worse environmental footprint than plastics.

To ensure you justify the environmental impact of these nasty stuff, you need to use the tote bag daily for 54 years. Or something like 20,000 times; which they probably would be able to withstand. The irony is that one of the reason we started using plastics and other sort of polymer material is that cotton is water-intensive to produce and really doesn’t decompose that easily. We basically forgot the original intentions or benefits of plastics in a zeal to just try and eliminate them.

So yes we should ban plastics and perhaps it is really our mismanagement of plastic waste and prolific use of it that is the problem. Just as cotton tote in and of itself is probably not such a big problem until you realise you have about 20 different designs, patterns and colours at home (which probably is a number close to what I found in my home). It is just the mass production, the senseless exploitation of scale economies to the detriment of the planet that is at fault.