Friday, June 29, 2012

On Intellectual Curiosity and Mental and Physical Exercise

This one is badly written. I'm still working out some very incoherent thoughts, but I want to keep this blog somewhat regular. Also, anyone with interesting brainteasers please send to me because I hate going on Wall Street Oasis. That forum is a cesspool of IB obnoxiousness and ivy-league self-importance.

The head counselor here is a 21 year old former junior hockey player. He spent two years out of high school doing nothing but playing hockey. Now that his junior career is over (junior is under-20), he's gone back to school as a college freshman, while playing NCAA. The way he puts it: not using your brain for a couple years makes you stupid. One day I put out one of the silly brain-teasers that's commonly found in finance interviews. For some reason, that piqued his interest. He's been asking for one a day now. He hasn't actually solved one yet, but he's not going to stop until he does.

The problem is that few of the brain-teasers out there are actually any fun. Most require some knowledge of probability, game theory, algorithms, or competency in mental math. The people here, they're competitive. Most of their lives, they've been competitive in a physical way, but they don't like to lose. And they're not stupid either. They haven't practiced their multiplication tables enough to crunch number at lightning speed; they haven't been exposed to 14.12 or 6.046 to be know what "being rational" and "exponential time" mean in the technical sense. Giving them conditional probability questions seems obnoxious and unproductive. I prefer questions that require a clever trick, or that is easy to solve on a small scale and just need induction to work for case n.


But this post wasn't supposed to be about me and my elitist educated self being all superior and schoolmarmy over a bunch of dumb jocks. It's actually to wonder at what makes a productive wholesome life.


A few days ago, the camp twitter account sent out this observation:
You know you are busy when you go to work, you are on the the property, and don't make it upstairs to your office.
This is the mantra of camp. Every person here is a bundle of physical energy. They work out, they work hard, and then they work out some more. My boss comes into the office, sees us two interns fiddling with video editors, and she cries "what have you accomplished all day?"

To her, an office and a computer are for checking email, also a brief respite from business and real work. For us, real work is what keeps us in the office, our lard-asses stapled to our chairs. For them, work gets them outside, dirty, sweating, and tanned. The couple of weeks I've spent here, I've noticed that you rarely find folks working in their office. They are working in the gym, on the deck, in the shop, almost always on their feet, sometimes on their backs or knees. Work is spraying the deck, washing the car, laying sod. Work is not sitting at a desk scribbling notes to yourself.

Yet their physical life does not make them intellectually indifferent. They are as curious about mental exercises, not the way nerdy math students at MIT are curious, but the way we are curious about foreign cultures: hesitant, fascinated, a little intimidated. Just like I am not indifferent about physical exercise. But I am shy about working out here. My work-outs would not be considered work-outs, and I feel physically stupid next to these fine folks. My  lack of physical confidence makes me physically lazy, and I fall further and further behind; further and further out of shape. It's ok, I tell myself, because the important part of life is intellectual curiosity and mental fortitude. At least that's what's important in my life. At least that's what I tell myself.

I'm sure that's how they feel about my puzzles and the fancy college degrees I've got on my fancy resume. Never mind that next to my fancy friends, my resume suddenly looks average, if not lacking; here, it's most definitely an anomaly. Just like most of these guys here will never whiff a professional career much less an NHL one, but to me they look like beasts in their physical approach to not just exercise, but life. They like to hear my brain-teasers and the solutions the way I like to watch power-plyos, with morbid and bemused fascination, and maybe a sinking realization that I don't have it in me to work that hard to do what they do. (Well, maybe that's just wishful thinking; black hats/white hats don't give quite the same rush as a big sweaty dude flying over a five-foot obstacle.)

Environment, culture, natural aptitude. They forge the kind of paths we will tread, the kind of paths we feel comfortable and confident treading. For a few lucky ones, their lives include both physical and mental fulfillment, both indoors and outdoors curiosities, a truly well-rounded gift-from-the-gods. I am not one of them.

I leave you with a happy picture, because writing this kind of depressed me:

Downtown Nisswa: only about two blocks long, but pretty good shopping indeed. The Chocolate Ox is the Ice-Cream and Candy Shoppe to be at.

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