Month: February 2024

Monday, 8.05pm

Sheffield, U.K.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being. – Franz Kafka

The question in the picture that accompanies this post is from a book by Po Bronson.

Is there any question that is more important for you?

As long as you have food, that is.

Let’s pull these strands together.

I mentioned Doug Lisle in a previous post because I’ve been watching his videos and like the way he uses drawings to explain his ideas.

He’s a psychologist for the McDougall program.

I didn’t really think too much about that.

I’ve also been wondering about food.

I grew up in India and went to boarding school. I ate a lot of food, everything that was served, and was pretty skinny. I never really thought about it at all.

The first time I noticed packaged food was when I was 17 or 18 and went into the real world – stuff like Coke and crisps. I went to town on those salty and sugary things and put on quite a lot of weight. When I realised that, I exercised, and it came back down again.

But it’s been up and down since then. 10-15 years of commuting and quick food didn’t help.

Cooking seems to complicated. There are all these ingredients and instructions and I don’t really understand it all.

One of the things I learned in school was to reason from first principles – do I did that.

We have four tastes, I had learned: salty, sweet, bitter and sour. So I thought – how would I cook with these? A lot of food that I remember seems to use combinations of salty and sour food, and I liked those. And sweet. Everyone likes that. Bitter, not so much.

So that’s all we really need to make food that tastes nice – salt and sugar. Maybe sour. What about bitter?

I was experimenting with these recipes when I finally looked at this McDougall program thing and realised that it was actually about eating choices. It made the same points I was thinking: we’re designed to seek out salt and sweet foods. Bitter and sour are warnings – they tell us things might be poisonous.

Salt is a mineral.

And sweet comes from plants, especially starchy ones.

Now, suddenly my diet – the traditional ones – made sense. They’re based on starches, with combinations that make food taste good by combining salt, sugar, sour and even bitter. We even have a vegetable called a bitter gourd. I didn’t like it.

So, if that is the food that is traditional why are people in India having such high rates of heart disease?

That’s a combination of many things – the pollution and the lack of exercise among them.

But the biggest problem is the added fat in our diets – oils and ghee used in cooking.

Fats are the problem. Fats from meat and dairy and poultry and it’s the fat that is making us sick.

Fat is incredibly expensive to make. You have to work at it to make oil from plants. You have to feed animals until they’re fat enough to eat. It’s bad for the environment.

But there’s more money in that, I expect, than there is in selling you potatoes and rice.

I’m interested in making better decisions – and using drawing and writing as a way to help me do that.

If you want to do something with your life you first have to be healthy.

That means getting your food right.

And I don’t think we have it right around the world – something is wrong. What we’re told to eat and what we have in the market is making us fat and sick.

Maybe before we ask the big questions about what we want out of life we need to ask the little ones first.

Like what’s on our plate?

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Sunday, 8.37pm

Sheffield, U.K.

‘Say Hello’ was inspired by optimism. – Nancy Wilson

When you start learning a new programming language the first thing you do is get it to say “Hello World!”

If you learn Go it now teaches you do to that in Chinese.

The intention of this instruction is that you get on and do something, something very simple, like printing a line to the output.

But you do it.

There are many people who never take this step.

They observe and analyse and read and try to understand.

They do this with AI – it’s something people talk about and they’re watching it.

They do it with markets – someone is talking about trading in a certain way.

Here’s the problem.

Life is so complex these days that it’s almost impossible to understand something from the outside.

At the same time it’s simpler than ever to actually understand things.

And this leads to a situation where people don’t know enough to know that they don’t know something.

So they make decisions believing that they know what they’re doing when they don’t.

But their knowledge is just not equal to the situation.

And the answer isn’t in studying more or reading more.

It’s in getting involved, in taking action.

Taking the very simplest first step.

Printing “Hello World!” to the screen.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 10.41pm

Sheffield, U.K.

You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead. – Stan Laurel

Some people know exactly what they want to do and what they want to be and have a plan to get them there.

I’m not one of those people.

I meander, go down wrong pathways, look around, turn back, get lost, go somewhere else.

When you don’t know what the goal is then any path will do.

And that’s interesting, all on its own.

Take learning to draw, for example.

This blog is about using drawing to help one think more clearly.

I don’t really have much to say in terms of instructions – how to draw, for example.

I also don’t have much to say about thinking.

I simply use drawing and writing as a way to explore my thinking.

Which I fear is the wrong way to do it – I have the words of authors like Naipaul running through my head as they rail against people who try and understand their inner world rather than the outside one.

Narcissism, they shout.

But how can you understand others if you don’t first understand yourself?

Every once in a while, it’s worth starting again, trying something different.

If that works, then great. If you return to your old ways, that’s ok too.

Intentional practice – that thing about doing something again and again until you get it right only works when the something is simple and unambiguous.

It works if you want to play the violin or play a sport at a world class level.

When it comes to just being you… I’m not sure it’s as simple as that.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Friday, 10.39pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Sharing is good, and with digital technology, sharing is easy. – Richard Stallman

I used ChatGPT a lot a few months ago and then I used it a bit less, and then I used it a little. And now I use it every once in a while.

I know – it can write stuff really fast – and sometimes that’s all you need. For those situations where no one cares it’s fine, it’ll do.

You can put the thing out there and it will do whatever it is you want.

But it’s not really that satisfying.

Perhaps this kind of stuff is going to become the Atkins diet for the mind. A little bit of meat may not kill you but a lot definitely will.

Anyway, I saw on a post that Facebook is open sourcing its AI code because Zuckerberg thinks that it will make hackers and programmers like it more and be more likely to engage and use it.

I think he is right.

I’d rather learn how to use LLaMA than be dependent on a closed system.

I’d sleep much happier knowing that there is infrastructure that can be accessed by everyone.

But really, I’d much rather pick up a book and learn that way.

But perhaps that’s just hopelessly old fashioned.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 6.33pm

Sheffield, U.K.

The teacher must adopt the role of facilitator not content provider. – Lev S. Vygotsky

In case you don’t know what I do you’re in good company – I don’t really either.

But what I’m interested in is in using drawing and writing to help me understand things.

I’ve used this in different ways – to take notes in class, to plan outlines for books (that I should really write sometime), to take notes during meetings, to listen better to people who have to operate in complex situations.

And recently, I’ve spent more time facilitating.

That’s something I never thought I would be that interested in.

My one experience of facilitation was a nightmare. I was asked to sit in a group and talk about my feelings. And that didn’t work – I didn’t want to do that and everyone else sounded like they were whining.

I’m a little more tolerant now.

But I’m still a little conflicted about icebreakers and team building and all that kind of stuff.

When I say conflicted, I mean I hate the idea of doing any of that.

Why can’t we just get on with work?

Now, I’m probably wrong. I also open minded. Except about most things.

So I listened to a facilitation podcast, the Facilitation Lab Podcast, if you want the details.

In one of the episodes they talked about the difference between being interested and interesting.

Being interested is about listening and asking questions.

Being interesting is about performing, taking the stage.

I suppose you need a balance between the two, perhaps more towards being interested as a facilitator and letting the participants take the stage.

And I am interested in things, in people and how they operate, how things work or don’t, and what could be done to make things better.

Crap. I might be turning into a facilitator.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh