The Long Way

You decide to organize a tennis tournament and invite 50 players to attend.  The tournament will be single elimination and you need to decide how many matches to schedule in order to select a final winner.  You could do a simple bracket with 25 matches in the first round, 12 in the second, etc.  Or have 18 matches in the first round and have the winning players meet the remaining 14 unmatched players in a second round and so on.

If I were given this problem I would likely take plenty of time and piles of scratch paper to find my number.  But it's not that hard.  The number of matches equals the number of required losers; with only one winner, that number is 49.  It's right there.

A man walks a mile home from work.  At the exact time he leaves his work, his dog leaves his home and walks to meet him.  When the dog reaches the man, the dog turns around and runs home.  When he reaches home he turns again and runs back to meet the man, repeating this cycle until the man arrives at his door.  The man walks at three miles per hour and the dog at 12 miles per hour.  What is the total distance the dog walks?

This problem looks to be straight off the GMAT.  It gives me a stress cramp simply considering it.  Again I would whip out the scratch paper and pile on complexity of thought and calculations to solve it.  But in the end, both the man and the dog are constantly walking, the dog at four times the speed of the man.  Fixed time + fixed multiple of speed = fixed multiple of distance.  Man walks one mile and dog walks four times this, or four miles.  Simple, out in the open, under our noses.

How does a person think like this?  What are they seeing that I'm not seeing?

I'm waiting to reunite with a book my fiance Chelsea gave me for Christmas.  I don't even remember the title, but I'm itching to dive back into a concept that has stuck to me like glue.  Most of us are bad visual artists not because of poor visual perception, but because of over-perception.  We draw what we think we should see, not what is truly in front of us.  Great art students break these perception biases by sketching things from perspectives and angles they have never before considered.  Why?  Because they need a clean slate, a blank canvas.  They need input, not analysis.  They need to report the news, not provide an opinion.

Don't get me wrong, opinion has its place as well, just ask Picasso.  But in many matters (from accurately sketching a human skeleton to understanding the complexities of a human condition) we must first and foremost accept an inflow of pure reality.  Learn the rules and we can more comfortably break them.  Disregarding the rules in lieu of our own perspective is usually about as successful as jumping off a cliff with only a cape and expecting to reason our way out of gravity before we hit the ground.

And accepting reality is hard work.  We cloud our minds with complexity and live by pre-conceived notions.  What is wrong with this?  For one thing, our notions are based on a fixed system of outcomes.  We can only expect in experience what we can conceptualize.  George Sorros (who I disagree with on most subjects, but agree in this instance) feels no anxiety toward death because he can't conceptualize it.  The one thing he knows for sure is death's reality will differ from his expectations.  In theory he's right.  It is impossible to correctly expect something a person knows nothing about.  Any concern or worry is totally unfounded and therefore a waste of time.  Death is a bridge only to be crossed when we come to it.

And most experience is, to a lesser but similar degree, much the same.  Nothing can be fully anticipated and expected.  The only consistent systems are natural systems.  Place intelligence in the mix and you get uncertainty.  Our Heavenly Father demonstrated that concept early in time by giving his spirit children (organized intelligences) the option to choose a mortal development path.  He lost a third of them before they even made it here.  Many of the rest have been average to pretty poor eggs.  Mankind has required a global flood to cleanse our house; mostly we've done a good job self cleansing and I don't expect we'll change our ways any time soon.

Was this a better outcome than God expected?  A worse outcome?  From what I know of God, it's probably right in line with expectations.  The interesting thought is this?  If he's all powerful, why didn't he just create us a bit better than we are and save himself the disappointment?  The answer to that question is one of the diamonds of restored theology and is simply this: You don't create human intelligence.  You organize it and you let it go, but it has a mind of its own.

If I have any central point, it's this.  We can't put stakes in the ground to mark fixed patterns in the human experience.  They work about as well as trails of bread crumbs dropped near flocks of seagulls.  The goal should rather be what I investigated when I began this entry.  Efficiency of thought.  Utility of action.  The well oiled machine built through trial and error (experience) to keenly and accurately identify changes in the terrain and quickly adjust to meet them.  Evolution, growth, change, adaptation.  This is why we are intelligent in the first place.  Not to follow nature, but to experience it and through experience overcome.  Throw out the rule book.  Expect to go outside a few standard deviations.  Wherever you now find yourself, nobody's been before.  Take good notes and drink in reality. 

JSW