S-P-A-M #4 - Question of Evidence, Italian Xmas & Pessimism

Seeking Passion And Mastery 🦊

Jan 03, 2024

Hello again and hope you’ve enjoyed the holidays! I’ll refrain from adding to your tally of HNYs in keeping with the spirit of this amusing letter from Hemingway to his mother in 1920:

Well Merry Christmas to you old dear–won’t wish you Happy New Year because New Year is just one lurch nearer the grave and nothing to be happy over.

No photo description available. — *Nathan W. Pyle’s superb Strange Planet*

💡 Critical Thinking

The Question of Evidence

In the previous issue we looked into how evidence works and said that evidence doesn't confirm theories with absolute certainty; it can only tell you whether a theory is more or less likely to be true, compared to how true you thought it was before.

To determine the relative strength of a piece of evidence, we ask must ourselves the Question of Evidence:

"How much more likely am I to encounter this evidence
if my theory is true than if it’s false?"

Since evidence exists on a spectrum, your answer to the Question of Evidence will fall on a spectrum too:

We can apply this question to the example in the previous issue about running in the morning and having a productive day as such:

“How much more likely am I to encounter this evidence (higher productivity) if my theory (morning runs boost productivity) is true than it is false?”

You could reasonably say that the improvement in productivity is more likely to occur if morning runs do help rather than if they don’t. So the higher productivity during that day can be taken as evidence that supports (≠ proves) your theory.

Of course if it was just one day then you can only say it weakly supports it. For the support to be stronger, there shouldn’t be any other changes in your life (so we measure only 1 variable) and it should be done on a long enough timescale.

For example, if everything else is the same (diet, sleep habits, etc.) but after a while of running in the mornings you see that productivity is not consistently higher (or maybe sometimes it’s even lower), then in this case the evidence is contradicting the theory.

We’ll go over the QoE with more exciting examples in the next issues.

🕳 Random Rabbit Hole

I decided to be Italian this Christmas and so I did the most Italian Xmas thing ever…

I watched Trading Places.1

Yes, in the land of the Pope, watching this Eddie Murphy flick2 is what millions of Italians will tell you they’ll be doing on Jesus’s birthday. 😂

Naturally I wondered how this came to be…

It seems that while it did just alright when it arrived in Italian cinemas, it was aired by Italia 1 TV station on Christmas Day in 1989, and then since it was cheaper to just air repeats of films they already had the rights for (instead of buying new ones), the movie has been screened on Christmas every year since 1997 and has become a mainstay of the festive season.

🎶 Music

This catchy Hi-NRG3 track is playing in the house party scene of Trading Places.4 🕺

What song(s) did you discover during the holidays? Let me know! 😃

📊 Data Visualisation

Did you know that at least 8% of men in Europe suffer from some Red-Green colour distortion? 🟢👓🔴

So how do you create charts and highlight good/bad performance when they can’t tell the colours apart?

I wrote about a simple solution here.

💭 Philosophy

Pessimism

On the penultimate day of the year, I was glued to this brilliantly insightful, and humorous, speech from author Alain de Botton about the value of pessimism, which I think can be beneficial to anyone, especially now that we’re starting a new year. 🙂

Here’s an excerpt from the beginning where he depicts our flawed view of the world and a feeling so many of us are familiar with:

“… many of us respond to these troubles times with a feeling of injured self-pity, as though something that was supposed to have gone right has gone wrong. I’d like to reverse the equation: nothing was entirely supposed to go right and so nothing has particularly gone wrong. We’ve simply returned to a state of crisis, which is the norm in human history.
It’s sometimes the principle of newspapers that murder, disease, crisis… is the exception - it makes the news. But in fact this is all that ever happens… existence is almost a continuous series of crisis.”

He then draws on teachings from the likes of Seneca (anger stems from optimism) and Nietzsche (suffering is necessary) to explain the many damaging effects of optimism and related flawed ideas such as true meritocracy.5

There are simply too many eloquent phrases in this video to highlight here, but I think his closing remarks are a nice way to finish up this issue:

“Pessimism is a feature of life. It’s a feature of life we often try to run away from. By running away from it too quickly, we cut ourselves off from the opportunity to embrace this darkness and to embrace the lessons it often brings. And we often also cut ourselves off from the deepest kind of relationships which we can have with other human beings, relationships based around a confession of suffering. And I think that essentially all good friendships are about confessions, one sort or another. Confessions of things that the rest of the world thinks of as unacceptable, but are in fact part of human life.”

😈 Devil’s Word of the Week

Pessimism, n. –
A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile.

Don’t hesitate to let me know what you found interesting today, or other things you’d like me to write about.

S-P-A-M