THE KNOWLEDGE ILLUSION

 

Cognitive science is the study of human intelligence, the search for the magic ingredients that allow people to perceive. Steven Sloman focuses on the impact of community and society in the creation or enforcement of knowledge or illusion of knowledge. Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the “illusion of explanatory depth”: People believe that they know way more than they actually do. Best exemplified by how little we understand everyday devices, like toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks.

This book has three central themes: ignorance, the illusion of understanding, and the community of knowledge. We have no illusion that the lessons we can draw from our discussion are simple. Those lessons are decidedly not to reduce ignorance, live happily within your community, and dispel all illusions. On the contrary, ignorance is inevitable, happiness is often in the eye of the beholder, and illusions have their place. The point of this book is not that people are ignorant. It's that people are more ignorant than they think they are. We all suffer, to a greater or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meagre.

We are living in a complex sophisticated world. Our life is facilitated by a community of people having expertise in specific domains. As an individual, we can only scratch the surface of the true complexity of the world. We rely heavily on others. This reliance on a complex sophisticated system has resulted in greater ignorance of our knowledge and understanding.

People generally have a habit of overestimating their understanding of how things work. We all suffer, to a greater extent or lesser extent, from an illusion of understanding, an illusion that we understand how things work when in fact our understanding is meagre. The illusion of explanatory depth gets created as a result of our dependence on others & overestimation of our understanding.

Before trying to explain something, people feel they have a reasonable level of understanding, after explaining, they don’t. Storing details is often unnecessary to act effectively, a broad picture is generally all we need. Storing details or going for too many details can be counterproductive.

It's remarkable how easy it is to disabuse people of their illusion; you merely have to ask them for an explanation...We have also found that people experience the illusion not only with everyday objects but with just about everything: People overestimate their understanding of political issues like tax policy and foreign relations, of hot-button scientific topics like GMOs and climate change, and even of their own finances.

We rely on abstract knowledge, vague and unanalysed. We’ve all seen the exceptions—people who cherish detail and love to talk about it at great length, sometimes in fascinating ways. And we all have domains in which we are experts,

Donald Rumsfeld was the U.S. secretary of Defence under both Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush. One of his claims to fame was to distinguish different kinds of not knowing:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Known unknowns can be handled. It might be hard, but at least it is clear what to prepare for.

So people know less than everything (surprise, surprise). In fact, we know a lot less. We know just enough to get by. Because our knowledge is limited, our understanding of how things change is correspondingly limited

The Two Causal Reasoners Inside Us :
Intuition and Deliberation are different approaches or responses toward a specific task, challenge or issue. Intuitions are personal, they reside in our heads. Deliberation involves conscious reflection.

This distinction between two different kinds of thought can be found throughout classical and modern philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. Daniel Kahneman celebrated the distinction in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. This is a distinction thousands of years old; it goes by a variety of names in cognitive science. For example, the two systems of reasoning have been referred to as associative versus rule-based thinking or simply as System 1 versus System 2. We’ll refer to it as the distinction between intuition and deliberation. Intuition leads to one conclusion, but deliberation makes us hesitate.

The knowledge illusion occurs because we live in a community of knowledge and we fail to distinguish the knowledge that is in our heads from the knowledge outside of it. We think the knowledge we have about how things work sits inside our skulls when in fact we’re drawing a lot of it from the environment and from other people.

The knowledge illusion is the flip side of what economists call the curse of knowledge. When we know about something, we find it hard to imagine that someone else doesn’t know it. If we tap out a tune, we’re sometimes shocked that others don’t recognise it. It seems so obvious; after all, we can hear it in our heads. Because we live inside a hive mind, relying heavily on others and the environment to store our knowledge, most of what is in our heads are quite superficial. We can get away with that superficiality most of the time because other people don’t expect us to know more; after all, their knowledge is superficial too. We get by because a division of cognitive labour exists that divides responsibility for different aspects of knowledge across a community.

The Braided River (Brhamaputra)

 

The common Hindi boast "Ghat ghat ka pani piya hai" (I have drunk the water of many ghats) now has some basis thanks to the author Samrat Choudhury, who set out on a journey to follow the Brahmaputra, drank the water of its tributaries and of the river itself, and took a dip in its water.

The Brahmaputra is also known as the braided river due to the multiple tributaries and vast channels that run parallel to this great river. The river changes its name and sex once it enters Bangladesh, From Barhamaputra (masculine) to Jamuna (feminine), merges with the Ganges, then becomes Padma, and finally plunges into the Bay of Bengal with the name Meghna.

Hydrologists call it a braided river. The term starts to make sense when you see the Brahmaputra, not from a bank, but from somewhere in the middle. Braids of water run into one another. Sometimes a channel seems to flow in a direction opposite to the channel next to it. The dance of creation and destruction is visible in the play between sand and water. The fine, silvery white river sand accumulates over time to form sandbars, which turn into lite islands. Then some subtle balance in the forces at work may shift the island. from one side to another. The water may start to nibble away, and it is possible that the island may disappear. Or it may not.

The Brahmaputra, it is older than the Himalays:

In the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, a sea called Tethys existed between the Tibetan and Indian land masses... which was later uplifted by a geological upheaval into the Himalayan mountain range. A corollary to this hypothesis is that in the prehistoric past the Tsangpo had actually flowed from east to west. The Brahmaputra is called an antecedent river, and a paleo-Brahmaputra is generally accepted by experts to have flowed in what is now the Tibetan plateau before the Himalayas rose. The tributaries of the Tsangpo, even today, allow east to west, which is opposite to the Tsangpo's current flow. The Cretaceous period lasted from approximately 145.5 million years ago to 65.5 million years ago. It followed the Jurassic period. Dinosaurs still roamed the earth; their extinction is believed to have occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period around the time when an asteroid hit the earth in the Yucatan peninsula in what is now Mexico, though it is not certain if the asteroid caused the extinction. The Himalayas had not yet formed at that time. The mountains are estimated to have started forming around 20 million years ago. Geologists estimate they achieved their great heights less than a million years ago. Before they rose, a river flowing south of the watershed that became the Himalayas may have 'captured' a stream flowing to its north - the ancestor of the Tsangpo - thus giving rise to the Brahmaputra. In Dibru Saikhowa, this is where the rivers Siang, Lohit and Dibang merge in the area around the massive river island, roughly 35 km long and 10 km wide, on which the park is located. The untidy tassels of water they together form is the Brahmaputra.

To think only the main channel is the river is folly; in fact, the whole combination of channels and sandbanks constitutes the river. The Dibru, too, is a part of it. So is the river channel we had seen on our first day out in Dibrugarh.The river is the sum of its parts, and much more. It has come to be that the Siang, which is the longest and strongest of its three formative tributaries, is seen as the Brahmaputra; but the part is not the whole. In terms of water volume, the Siang is at best about a third the size of the Brahmaputra. The Lohit, which meets the Siang on the northern shore of Dibru Saikhowa, is no minnow. And the Dibang in monsoon carries a surprisingly large volume of water, more than the Lohit. It is almost as big as the Siang in the rainy season. Many other tributaries that are great, powerful rivers in themselves, such as the Subansiri, Manas, Teesta and Kopili flow into the Brahmaputra, making it the phenomenon of nature that it is.

Let's review the actual route of the river from its Source to its destination :

The river that is bright and clear on the map, a somewhat tasselled ribbon of blue winding its way down from... well, somewhere around Dibru Saikhowa in Assam where three other ribbons of blue, representing the Siang (also known as Dihang), Lohit and Dibang, meet untidily to become the Brahmaputra. Its origins, according to all authorities, lie in Tibet, near Mount Kailash, at an altitude of around 5,150 m, where it starts life as the Yarlung Tsangpo. From there, it flows from west to east before making a U-turn (The Great Bend) and entering Arunachal Pradesh. There its name changes to Siang. The Siang then gathers more streams and flows down through the Arunachal hills towards the plains of Assam. At the foothills, it meets the Lohit and Dibang. Downstream of this confluence, it is the Brahmaputra. The Brahmaputra in turn flows through Assam, gathering yet more streams, before entering Bangladesh. Upon entering that country it undergoes one more change in nomenclature, this time accompanied by a sex change - the 'male Brahmaputra, for some reason, becomes the 'female Jamuna. The Brahmaputra as Jamuna makes its way towards an eventual confluence with the Ganga, known in Bangladesh as the Padma. This great river of many great rivers finally flows into the Bay of Bengal, after undergoing yet another change of name the Meghna. Its whole length is 2,880 km.

A river is not a canal. It is a living, organic entity. It changes with the seasons. It ebbs and flows. The word for the river's rise is 'jwar', and its fall is called 'bhata, and these words are inscribed into the geographies and cultures of the riverine lands. Its ebb and flow are the life pulsating through the land. In the rains, up in the green forested hills of Northeast India, the earth rejoices in songs of water. Its gurgling, splashing sounds, as it makes its way down towards the Brahmaputra, soft but insistent, are everywhere - and in every little trickle, there is, in a sense, the Brahmaputra. It is a time of rejuvenation and rebirth - a time etched into the human geography of the land as fertility rites, such as the Ambabuchi Mela at Kamakhya celebrates the menstruation of the goddess.

Fluidity is the very essence of water. It is the nature of the river to be fluid; it has no fixed name, no address, no unchanging course. You can call it the Tsangpo in Tibet and the Siang in the hills of Arunachal, the Dihang in the plains, the Brahmaputra after, the Jamuna in Bangladesh, the Padma after it merges with the Ganga, and the Meghna at the end before it loses itself in the Bay of Bengal. You can call it what you will - because those are but mere local names, and they have no fixity. I can show you a Yamuna in north India too, that was once a river like the Jamuna in Bangladesh. They are names on maps, a human invention that came into being scant centuries ago after the river that is older than the Himalayas had lived, in one form or another, for a few million years.

At the birth of the river more than 1000 km upstream where the braids of the Siang meet those of the Dibang and Lohit. The place where the Brahmaputra is formed is inexact. It had not been easy to find the river itself, gigantic though it is, because I had been looking for a reality that reflected the neatness and order of lines on a map. I was looking for three streams of water called Siang, Lohit and Dibang meeting at one point, after which there would be one big stream, Siang plus Lohit plus Dibang, called the Brahmaputra. It was of course stupidity. There is no such point. The Brahmaputra is not a single big stream made up of three smaller streams.

The map is never the territory. Somewhere in the vague recesses of my memory, there is a story, perhaps read ages ago, of a man who wants to draw the greatest map of all time, the most detailed ever. He eventually draws a map as large as the earth itself. Even that map would be inexact, for it would be in two dimensions, not three. To accurately model the earth in all its detail would need another earth. "This is China,' we say, and this is India, and downriver from here is Bangladesh.' The river doesn't know, and it doesn't care. When an earthquake causes a landslide to muddy the waters of the Tsangpo in eastern Tibet, the fishermen in Goalpara lament their falling fish catch. When China and India plan dams and river diversion or interlinking projects, farmers and fisherfolk in Bangladesh anticipate devastation.

The devastation of flood visits the riverine lands every year. There are floods in the floodplains of the Brahmaputra in Assam and further downriver in Bangladesh. A company called The East India Company, naturally interested, like all companies, in maximizing revenues, had marked some of these lands near the river as wastelands and eventually put them to use for paddy and jute cultivation. It was great for the economy, but the river doesn't know or care that there are now permanent human settlements on the lands that are part of its annual monsoon home. Of course, we are powerful, we can dam the river. We just don't fully know what harm that will eventually do to the cycle of life in the lands through which it flows, and to the ocean into which it flows.

To see the river in its entirety is to see the connectedness of nature and love the intricate workings of the cycle of life - that cycle which pulses with the seasons, and the movement of water from sea to mountain and back to sea. We may dam the river on land, but if we wish to survive as organic beings, we cannot dam the great river in the sky that flows with the monsoon clouds. From the Himalaya to the Bay of Bengal, it is all one unity, and the smallest fish that spawns in a wetland of the Kaziranga in the Brahmaputra's seasonal floods is as much a part of it as the largest elephants that head up the Karbi Hills to escape the rising waters. The Brahmaputra is not a canal. It does not flow between two neat banks. Its untidy braids, channels of history and commerce, witness to the ebb and flow of empires, are the architects of the surrounding landscape of nature and of humans.

Waters, peoples, languages and cultures have flowed into one another along the entire length of the river for thousands of years. Many streams of humanity have flowed in to become braids in the cultural mainstreams of the riverine lands by the Siang, Brahmaputra and Jamuna. Industries that shaped the economy have emerged from global interactions along its banks; Assam tea became Assam tea with the contributions of forgotten Singpho chieftains, Chinese growers, British planters, men and women of the tea tribes, and Calcutta merchants. Time and movement have added variety even to the river itself. Take the water hyacinth, for example. No sight is more emblematic of the river's flow than a clump of this plant bobbing downriver with the current. It seems an ageless sight, a part of the Brahmaputra's landscape. It is a plant from South America that came to India with ships in the British colonial period, and survived all attempts to exterminate it. Like its South American cousin, the potato, and the chilli plant from Mexico, it has flowed in, across space and over time, and become ancient in its new home.

"Mahabahu Brahmaputra' is, as Bhupen Hazarika sang, the pilgrimage of great confluences. You cannot know the river without knowing flow.

Skin In The Game

 

The basic premise of the book is that one should not believe the opinions or forecasts of others unless they have some "skin in the game." Results are all that count—opinions and talk are worthless. It is so easy for people to utter nonsense, so unless they could potentially suffer the consequences of being wrong, you should ignore them. This is especially true for intellectuals in academia. However, "hard" science seems immune to this problem because of the redeeming nature of falsification, while "scientism—the excessive belief in science—is worthless.

As always both accessible and iconoclastic, Taleb challenges long-held beliefs about the values of those who spearhead military interventions, make financial investments, and propagate religious faiths. Among his insights:

• For social justice, focus on symmetry and risk sharing. You cannot make profits and transfer the risks to others, as bankers and large corporations do. You cannot get rich without owning your own risk and paying for your own losses. Forcing skin in the game corrects this asymmetry better than thousands of laws and regulations.
• Ethical rules aren’t universal. You’re part of a group larger than you, but it’s still smaller than humanity in general.
• Minorities, not majorities, run the world. The world is not run by consensus but by stubborn minorities imposing their tastes and ethics on others.
• You can be an intellectual yet still be an idiot. “Educated philistines” have been wrong on everything from Stalinism to Iraq to low-carb diets.
• Beware of complicated solutions (that someone was paid to find). A simple barbell can build muscle better than expensive new machines.
• True religion is commitment, not just faith. How much you believe in something is manifested only by what you’re willing to risk for it.

The phrase “skin in the game” is one we have often heard but rarely stopped to truly dissect. It is the backbone of risk management, but it’s also an astonishingly rich worldview that, as Taleb shows in this book, applies to all aspects of our lives. As Taleb says, “The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice, and the ultimate BS-buster,” and “Never trust anyone who doesn’t have skin in the game. Without it, fools and crooks will benefit, and their mistakes will never come back to haunt them.”

You can't chew with somebody else's teeth, and your fingernails can best scratch your itch, and there is nothing without skin in the game.

The author has beautifully summarised the book with a long maxim. 

No muscles without strength, 

friendship without trust, 

opinion without consequence, 

change without aesthetics, 

age without values, 

life without effort, 

water without thirst, 

food without nourishment, 

love without sacrifice, 

power without fairness, 

facts without rigor, 

statistics without logic, 

mathematics without proof, 

teaching without experience, 

politeness without warmth, 

values without embodiment, 

degrees without erudition, 

militarism without fortitude, 

progress without civilization, 

friendship without investment, 

virtue without risk, 

probability without ergodicity, 

wealth without exposure, 

complication without depth, 

fluency without content, 

decision without asymmetry, 

science without skepticism, 

religion without tolerance, 

and, most of all: 

nothing without skin in the game.

Cubbon Park

 

Cubbon Park is still untarnished by Bangalore's extreme urbanisation and excessive development pace. A park that gives you a touch of cool breeze, the sound of trees swaying, and birds chirping. It's so rightly stated in the book: The eight gates of Cubbon Park: "Every gate is a window into the city."

I got to know so many anecdotes and facts about Cubbon that I didn't know about it so far. It has given me a different perspective on the park, which has so much history attached to it and is one of the two lungs of Bangalore City (the other being Lalbagh). It is not an ordinary park. This historic landmark, 152 years old, resides in every Bangalorean's heart, a welcome buffer zone under an open sky. As the author mentioned, the park has always been a space that carries within itself the very DNA of the city that Kempegowda built. This book is as much about its people as it is about the park.

Originally created in 1870 under Major General Richard Sankey, then British Chief Engineer of Mysore State, it was Sankey who designed the swathe of land that rose behind it, towards Cubbon's house, and the extensive 100-acre park that would go on to become one of the city's most beloved green spaces.

It was first named Meade’s Park after Sir John Meade, the acting Commissioner of Mysuru, in 1870, and subsequently renamed Cubbon Park. The park was again renamed Sri. Chamarajendra Park; different people along the way would try to give it different names, but one and only one would stick: Cubbon Park.

The book has touched upon the history of a variety of statutes and buildings, including those depicting King Edward, Queen Victoria, Sri. Chamarajendra Wodeyar, Major General Sir Mark Cubbon, and the Statue of Sir K. Sheshadri Iyer that one comes across amidst the confines of the park.

Exercised

 

In Exercised, Harvard professor of evolutionary biology Daniel Lieberman explains that to truly understand exercise science, you must first understand something about human evolution and anthropology and how the body evolved to handle exercise. The mantra of this book is that nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology.

 

That avoidance of exercise makes sense because exercise is a fundamentally strange and unusual behaviour from an evolutionary perspective. When all is said and done, exercise, despite its manifold benefits, requires overriding deep, natural instincts. So instead of shaming and blaming people who avoid exertion, we should help each other choose to exercise. But as the last few decades have shown, we won't succeed solely by medicalizing and commodifying exercise; instead, we should treat exercise the way we treat education by making it fun, social, emotionally worthwhile, and something that we willingly commit ourselves to do.

 

As Lieberman wrote, "nothing about the biology of exercise makes sense except in the light of evolution, and nothing about exercise as a behavior makes sense except in the light of anthropology." Using this evolutionary/anthropological framework, Lieberman sets out to explain how the body works when at rest (sitting and sleeping), when active (walking, running, lifting, fighting, dancing), and what this means for establishing effective exercise habits in the modern world. Along the way, he explains many of the myths associated with exercise and health. The word "myth" probably explains his take on these. Among some of the exaggerations are: is sitting as bad as smoking, do we need 8 hours of sleep each night, is the wear and tear of running bad for the knees, is a glass of red wine really as good as spending an hour at the Gym, is exercise useless for losing weight, and others.

 

 

The author used evolutionary and anthropological perspectives to explore and rethink dozens of myths about physical inactivity, activity, and exercise. Are we born to exercise? Is sitting the new smoking? Is it bad to slouch? Do you need eight hours of sleep? Are humans comparatively slow and weak?Is walking ineffective for losing weight? Does running ruin your knees? Is it normal to exercise less as we age? What is the best way to persuade people to exercise? Is there an optimal kind and amount of exercise? How much does exercise affect our vulnerability to cancer? 

 

The first thing to understand is that humans spent most of their 200,000-year evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers, with the invention of agriculture occurring only around 10,000 years ago and the modern industrial revolution beginning only about 200 years ago. The key to understanding our relationship to exercise, therefore, is found in the study of these hunter-gatherer groups.

 

Three useful definitions:

Physical activity (noun): any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that expends energy.

Exercise (noun): voluntary physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and undertaken to sustain or improve health and fitness.

Exercised (adjective): to be vexed, anxious, worried, or harassed.

 

Below are some points that I jotted down that I found interesting while reading this book.

• It behooves us, however, to remember that exercise is a truly odd sort of medicine. It is largely medicinal because the absence of physical activity is unhealthy. Further, exercise not only is an abnormal behavior from an evolutionary perspective but also never evolved to be therapeutic. Instead, we evolved to spend energy

• Make exercise necessary and fun. Do mostly cardio, but also some weights. Some is better than none. Keep it up as you age

• Eating sensibly and exercising don't guarantee long life and good health; they just decrease the risk of getting sick

• Exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

• We evolved to be physically active as we age, and in turn being active helps us age well. Further, the longer we stay active, the greater the benefit and it is almost never too late to benefit from getting fit

• "Everyone knows they should exercise, but few things are more irritating than being told to exercise, how much, and in what way. Exhorting us to "Just Do It" is about as helpful as telling a drug addict to "Just Say No."

• You use more than thirty pounds of ATP during a one-hour walk and more than your entire body weight of ATP over the course of a typical day—an obviously impossible amount to lug around in reserve.15 Consequently, the human body stores in toto only about a hundred grams of ATPs at any given moment.

• How Much and What Kind of Exercise Are Best? This one is easy: cardio is better than weights for obesity. As we will see later, weights help counteract some of the metabolic consequences of obesity, but cardio is better for preventing and reversing excess weight.

• Aging is inexorable, but senescence, the deterioration of function associated with advancing years, correlates much less strongly with age. Instead, senescence is also influenced strongly by environmental factors like diet, physical activity, or radiation, and thus can be slowed, sometimes prevented, and even partly reversed. The distinction between aging and senescence may seem obvious, but the two processes are frequently confused.

 

 The bottom line is:

We didn’t evolve to run marathons, play tennis, go jogging etc. Nor did we evolve to sit around all day.

Move often. Eat fresh food. The cardio is good. Cardio with some strength training is better. Just pumping weights is not as good as cardio. Walk sometimes. Jog sometimes. Go hard sometimes. You don’t stop moving because you get old. You get old because you stop moving.

The body keeps the score

 

The Body Keeps the Score.

The Body Keeps the Score is a non-fiction book about how the body stores trauma and what you can do about it.

My most distressing takeaway from this book was how common trauma is. Author Bessel van der Kolk discusses how people from all walks of life suffer from trauma.

I finally wrote a review on this book, a bit longer than expected, but I think it’s worth reading if you haven’t already read it.

Discussions of PTSD still tend to focus on recently returned soldiers, victims of terrorist bombings, or survivors of terrible accidents. But trauma remains a much larger public health issue, arguably the greatest threat to any country’s national health, and it’s a hidden pandemic.

One can see the awareness programmes on diseases like cancer, AIDS, etc. But we seem too embarrassed or discouraged to mount a massive effort to help children and adults learn to deal with the fear, rage, and collapse—the predictable consequences of having been traumatised.

In today’s world, your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People’s income, family, structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only the risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to help address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, and the widespread availability of guns are breeding grounds for trauma.

Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people. 

We are fundamentally social creatures; our brains are wired to foster working and playing together. Trauma devastates the social engagement system and interferes with cooperation, nurturing, and the ability to function as productive members of a clan.

In this book, I have learned how many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behaviour, start off as attempts to cope with emotions that became unbearable because of a lack of adequate human contact and support.

People can learn to control and change their behaviour, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. 

The body keeps the score: if trauma is encoded in heartbreak and wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of flight or fight states, re-organise their perception of danger, and manage relationships. Where traumatised children are concerned, we should place more focus on the chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play, or other forms of joyful engagement.

All of us, but especially children, need the kind of confidence that others affirm and cherish. Without that, we can’t develop a sense of agency that will enable us to assert: "That is what I believe in; that is what I stand for; that is what I will devote myself to." As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains, cross deserts, and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinions they value.

But if you feel abandoned, worthless, or invisible, nothing seems to matter. Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. There can be no growth without curiosity, and no adaptability without being able to explore through trial and error.

Resilience is the product of agency—knowing that what you can do can make a difference. Many of us remember what playing team sports, singing in the school choir, or playing in the marching band meant to us, especially if we had coaches who believed in us, pushed us to excel, and taught us we could be better than we thought was possible.

Trauma constantly confronts us with our fragility and with man’s inhumanity to man but also with our extraordinary resilience.

He also has an entire chapter on alternative therapies such as mindfulness, meditation, breathing exercises, and yoga. He stresses the importance of becoming aware of one’s own body, and not just in the sense of noticing when you are hyperventilating or your heart is jumping out of your chest—although these are good things to notice too—but also where memories feel like they are stored in your body. You know where it is uncomfortable to be touched or, in yoga, which positions make you feel vulnerable and why that might be.

 When people think about trauma, they generally think of it as a historical event that happened some time ago. Trauma is actually the residue of the past as it settles into your body. It’s located inside your own skin. When people are traumatised, they become afraid of their physical sensations; their breathing becomes shallow; and they become uptight and frightened about what they’re feeling inside. When you slow down your breathing with yoga, you can increase your heart rate variability, and that decreases stress. Yoga opens you up to feeling every aspect of your body’s sensations. It’s a gentle, safe way for people to befriend their bodies, where the trauma of the past is stored. Studies show that yoga is equally as beneficial—or more beneficial—than the best possible medications in alleviating traumatic stress symptoms.

And last, but not least, most great instigators of social change have intimate personal knowledge of trauma. That brings to mind Maya, Angelou, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King.

More than just O-rings.

 

More than just O-rings. 

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch on 28th Jan 1986, killing all the seven people onboard, a Presidential Commission was formed to investigate the disaster, it was headed Neil Armstrong, Sally Ride (The first woman in space), and none other than Richard Feynman (Nobel prize winner physicist).

The Challenger exploded because of a leak from one of the solid rocket boosters. Each weighed around 500 tonnes, used metal as fuel: they burned aluminum.

Once the fuel was spent at an altitude of over 40 kilometers, boosters got jettisoned by the shuttle and eventually deployed a parachute so they would splash down the Atlantic Ocean. Re-use was the name of the shuttle game, So NASA would send boats out to collect the boosters and take them off to be reconditioned and refueled for the next take-off. 

As the booster slammed into the ocean, the boosters were basically empty tubes. They were built with a perfectly CIRCULAR cross-section, but the impact could distort them slightly and added stress during the transportation. They were dismantled into four sections, checked to see how distorted they were, reshaped into perfect circles, and put back together. Rubber gaskets called O-rings were placed between the sections to provide a tight seal (we have the same gaskets in LPG cylinders).

It was these O-rings that failed during the launch of Challenger, allowing hot gases to escape from the boosters and start the chain of events that lead to that disaster. 

Famously, during the investigation, Richard Feynman demonstrated how the O-rings lost their elasticity at low temperatures. But Feynman also uncovered a second problem with the seals between the booster sections. Checking if a cross-section of a cylinder is still circular is not that easy. For the boosters, the procedure for doing this was to measure the diameter in three different places and make sure that all three were equal. But Feynman realized that this was not sufficient. 

Feynman recalled as a child seeing in a museum ‘non-circular, funny-looking, crazy-shaped gears’ which remained at the same height as they rotated. Despite not being circles, they always have the same-sized diameter from any direction you wish to measure it. You could make thousands of diametric measurements of a shape of constant widths, such as a Reuleaux triangle, they would all come out exactly the same, despite the shape being very much not circular.

So, if a booster had been distorted into a Reuleaux triangle cross-section, then the engineers would have been able to spot this easily, it might not be visible to the naked eye but still, be enough of distortion to change the shape of the seal. 

The final report bears that performance of the rubber O-rings was definitely the primary cause of the accident. But there was a recommendation and 'finding #5': by investigating the team for how the NASA engineering and management team missed a ‘Significant out-of-round conditions existed between the two segments’. 

NASA undone by simple geometry. 

Feynman's shape with three identical diameters next to a shape of infinitely many identical diameters. Both are obviously not circles.

Kennedy Space Center, Florida - Space Shuttle Challenger launches from launchpad.
Pic courtesy - Wikipeida.org.

Space Shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after take-off.

Pic courtesy - Wikipeida.org.

This blog is written based on a chapter from the book "Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors

Book by Matt Parker"

Book's link - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39074550-humble-pi