Imagine 10,000 years in the future. Two archaeologists are digging a site, and they find the remains of human bones. They take those remains to the lab, perform tests on them, and try to reconstruct the habits and lifestyle of that human. Say those bones belong to me. They are trying to find out my story, how I lived, what I ate, where I traveled, etc. Once they find all the info they need, they toss it into a museum where they store all other such ancient human remains they find. I was essentially one data point to them in trying to understand how humanity evolved over time. Or I can also call myself a “datum”, the singular form of data, literally one piece of information to solve a bigger puzzle.
Honestly, I don’t need 10,000 years to become a datum. I am already a part of several datasets people use these days to study many things. So for that objective learner, I am already a datum. Now let me get to how I got the dumb part of it. I have had an interesting and eventful life so far. I was a civil engineering student, somehow got a job in IT, worked on some serious stuff like SAP, Data Science, AI, etc. But do you see how I describe my life so far only in terms of my career? Because it is the truth I grew up with. Studying hard and building a career is the only way to get out of that small town in India and build a good life. As a 27-year-old, now that the frontal lobe in my brain has finished developing, I realized that the truth I grew up with was not actually the complete truth. I learned how limited I was.
I was taught that every bit of information I learned had an agenda. Either to pass the exams, or to land a job, or to impress a girl. I don’t think I ever learned anything in my life just for learning’s sake, just because I was curious. Or maybe I did, but my brain has been programmed to not really pay attention to it. This agenda-oriented learning meant I always tossed aside all those lessons once they served the purpose. And learning was never a fun thing. It got stressful real quick. Because if I didn’t completely grasp the nature of electrons, it meant I was going to flunk the chemistry test the next day, and it was never an ideal situation. It was never “let us think this step by step” or “search for more sources to fill those gaps in my understanding”, but always “why is this difficult for me to understand?”. Little did I know all interesting things in life are complicated and require real effort to learn them. So as an adult, I grew up to be more dumb and anxious.
One of my favorite concepts from statistics is the normal curve of distribution. When you are learning it for the first time, you see this bell-shaped curve which has a majestic peak in the middle, and this peak seems like something important and significant (or why else would there be a peak?). But it is the misleading part. The peak in a bell curve represents average. As you go to the right of the peak, you hit above average. But when you go to the left, you are in the below-average zone. I am in the below-average zone too when the bell curve is related to knowledge, wisdom, curiosity, and life experiences. This realization is behind the name dumb datum.
Honestly, I would be lying if I said I thought about all this while naming my blog. The best way to put it is that this name randomly showed up on my tongue, similar to how complex math formulae landed on Ramanujan’s tongue. But as time goes by now, this name makes more and more sense to me. And it also shows me my life’s purpose at the moment, to hike to the peak of the bell-curve-shaped mountain from my current position on the left. I am trying to live interesting experiences and be more curious about the world these days, and it is my way of taking a step on that steep uphill climb.
Comments
Post a Comment