mathbabe

There’s been lots of talk lately about how people are not having sufficient clarity of thought to be really creative any more; the argument is that they’re constantly interrupting themselves by reading tweets or their email, or of course crappy blogs, and never think about the big picture like they used to.

First, doesn’t it seem like every generation thinks that the kids of today are lazy? Doesn’t it just make us old fuddy-duddies to say stuff like this? Just because it’s a cliche doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Instead of complaining about young people, how’s this: a new way of having ideas is emerging, which is less individualistic and is therefore less recognizable to people who like to worship at the feet of “great thinkers.” There are more ad hoc communities being formed to explore ideas (like the Linux movement) and fewer larger-than-life personalities, but innovation and creativity are definitely taking place.

Okay, now that I’ve given those lazy-asses their due, I can complain about the obvious kinds of brain rot going on, mostly versions of lack of discipline and patience. I’m going to focus on a nerdy kind: the capacity for old-school reckoning (note how I’m even inserting fuddy-duddiness into the name).

Here’s the thing. It’s just too easy to google something when you don’t know it off the top of your head. There’s even some amount of feeling virtuous for bothering to scan wikipedia for, say, the population of the world or the prevalence of religions by number of worshipers. However, my claim is that it is better to delay the googling for at least half an hour.

Yes, I’m that guy who closes people’s laptops on their fingers and says, “hey let’s figure it out! Let’s not google it!!” Perhaps this explains why people don’t come to my house very often (please come back, you guys!). So yes, it’s come down to this: I torture my kids.

When my family has dinner, we have a rule that nobody can ‘use electricity,’ which includes watching TV or computers. We are also (obviously) super nerdy so we end up having pretty cool conversations (at least I think so!) in which we reckon.

Our reckoning skills, and our kids’ reckoning skills, have been getting honed this summer with the introduction of the daily ‘bonus question,’ which was our attempt to keep our kids’ brains from completely rotting over the summer while keeping things fun.

At first we would give them puzzles but later on they started asking us questions too. If the questions end up interesting enough (judged essentially by whether we all got genuinely into the discussion) then the kids win the prize of getting to watch TV after dinner until bedtime (don’t tell them but they’d get to watch TV anyway; and yes, they actually watch Netflix).

Turns out it is really fun to reckon with kids. For example one question our nine-year-old asked us is how thick a cylinder would be if it had to reach from the earth to the sun and was the same mass and density as the earth. We ended up googling something for that, I think the distance to the sun, but then again you can’t be crazy rigid!

The whole point is to realize you know more than you think, and you can figure out more than you thought you could based on estimates and a few facts. That, and to see how your biases steer you wrong. For example, when we were trying to figure out the number of people in each religion, we WAY overestimated the number of Jewish people. Then again, we live in New York.

One question I asked them which I thought was pretty cool, because they had such different and interesting answers to it, was how they could build the lightest bridge from our apartment to their school. There was no correct answer and that made it even neater, and it didn’t keep it from being a classic reckoning conversation.

So here’s my challenge: wait half an hour before googling something, and see how much you can figure out about the answer before you find it.