Monday, May 25, 2020
I am recovering from a trip to the doctor (not for Covid-19); and faster than I thought I would. As part of this hospital visit, they had to do a blood test, and it turned out that my hemoglobin was a little low, near the minimum healthy level for a male. That surprised me, as I have been pretty attentive to my diet and excerise lately (I've lost a lot of weight), and my hemoglobin levels were fine just a few months ago. I think it has to do with the fact that I'm not getting enough vegetables, as I did before the Covid-19 lockdowns. So, I have tried to ramp that up, and have been taking iron and copper pills. Hopefully my blood will return to normal soon.
My low hemoglobin levels might explain my general tiredness over the past month. I tend to sleep more; and, recently, with my recovery, I've slept even more -- but I'm *trying* to get back to normal; and, as I said, recovery has been faster than expected.
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On a completely unrelated note, some commentary on blogs and email: I long for the days, about 10 years ago, when the amount of email I received was manageable, and where the number of blog posts and internet gossip I was expected to keep up with was also manageable. Since that time, the amount of information has *exploded*; and it's increasingly hard to keep up.
Now, some people probably *thrive* in such an environment; but it happens to make *me* a little agitated -- and, actually, causes delays, as I don't like making decisions until I've thought through what can go wrong. The more decisions I'm asked to make, the more the delays pile up. Some people are good at playing "whack-a-mole", and knock down one task after another without giving much thought to them; but, me... I always worry about getting something wrong (and sometimes do, which makes me less likely to give a speedy response the next time).
And many of my colleagues seem to even play whack-a-mole after hours, when they are home away from school. They take work home with them, pretty much all the time. How do I know? Because, for example, if I'm on a committee, I might get sent an email at 9:00pm the previous night, containing an urgent plea that I read over some anodyne, instutitonal boiler-plate text and make a decision about whether it's acceptable, or make a split-decision about hiring, or whom to admit to graduate school, and then respond within 24 hours. A few times, I've even gotten such a message on Friday, with the expectation that I finish it by Sunday. Needless to say, there is often a little pang of worry in the bottom of my stomach when I sign off from email for the weekend -- e.g. that I might have gotten some scary email about some horrible thing that went wrong because I didn't respond right away; or some other email about, "Ernie, we are waiting for your resonse on this. Are you alive? Why haven't you responded?"
To prevent the last thing from happening, I sometimes give certain committee members some of my other email addresses that I read more frequently, and that have less traffic, so that their requests won't get buried.
And now let me switch gears a little and talk about another thing I don't like about all the email, and also "blog posts": there's a curious phenomenon explained by Malcolm Gladwell in this Google Zeigeist video, related to something called "Relative Deprivation":
Gladwell YouTube video
The basic idea is: you take some "smart-but-not-the-smartest" math people (as determined by standardized tests), and put them in an environment where everybody is very smart -- and, what you'll discover is that the smart-but-not-the-smartest people will tend to drop out more and not continue on in math. Yet, if you put the very same people in a *general* environment, where they are far, far above average -- near the very top -- they will thrive, and continue on in math, or math-related field.
Gladwell often gets criticized for getting things wrong; but he's right about this -- the numbers don't lie. What's going on is that the smart-but-not-the-smartest feel that they don't measure up; and that saps their motivation, and makes them not want to continue. Sounds selfish, right? Unfortunately, that's just how the human brain works -- we can't change it; and so, we better accept it!
Now, what getting a blizzard of emails about all the latest advancements people are making around the world in a field, and also all the blog posts one is expected to read, do, is that it replicates the "elite institution" experience everywhere. The prototypical example of someone who would thrive in such an environment is the master-class multitasker, who also happens to be an IMO champion. If you're that kind of person, the connections are probably a wondrous experience -- everything you ever hoped for from the internet. But if you are not that kind of person, who takes a long time to test out your fringe ideas, and then you're suddenly blasted with what the rest of the world is doing, it's like blowing out a candle.
Another thing I wonder about, which I have much less evidence for, is the degree to which the recent hyper-connected research community discourages "original ideas". I have one data-point: a few years ago, I traveled to a developing-world country (I'll not say which one), and got the chance to see some of the talks by some of the local mathematicians. One of the things I remembered they talked about was class-number formulae and L-functions. I had seen several variations on the "classical approahces" to these questions; but was completely mesmerized by the highly original one I saw in those talks -- I had never imagined you could approach the problems the way these people did. What had happened was that they weren't plugged-in to the global research community in the same way that I was, and didn't read the same books that I had read. They had kind of a parallel education and approach, and that led to a completely novel way of looking at the problems.
Let me close by saying that I don't want you to take away a strawman from what I've written, that I'm advocating elimination of email and the internet for science communication. I recognize that both have led to enormous improvements to people's access to knowledge, that previously was locked away in elite institutions. However, I think this might be a case of "too much of a good thing" -- when there is *too much* email, and *too much* broadcasting of information, these start to play on human weaknesses, diminishing self-esteem and originality.