Weekend Brain Dump: IG Live, Lies and Models, and Sumo!
A bit of a grab bag
First up, I’ll be doing Live with the Maverick (Actuary) on Tuesday at noon ET:
We will be talking about: Actuaries in Writing.
You will be able to see it at The Maverick Actuary on Instagram streaming (free!) on Tuesday, and a recording will be available afterward.
Lies and Models
While prepping for the session (and no, I’m not going to be talking about the following, which is why I’m dropping it here), I was put to mind by a few incidents from my youth, and my different reactions.
Let me start with the oddest reaction: as per the usual approach in science education, in middle school chemistry, I learned the planetary model of the atom. It made sense to me: a nucleus with a positive charge in the middle, and the negatively-charged electrons orbiting around it similar to the solar system.
Nice and tidy and makes for cool logos.
Then I got to high school chemistry and discovered… I HAD BEEN LIED TO! The truth was far weirder, with probability clouds of electron orbitals, and much more complicated systems. Quite a bit messier.
You should have heard me in my indignance to the teacher — why didn’t they teach us the truth in the first place? I was so angry.
But I had a different reaction when I learned the truth about the tooth fairy, which I figured out on my own due to inflation.
"Why did Amy get a quarter and I only ever got dimes?" I demanded
….
"You're the Tooth Fairy, aren't y'all?" I asked simply, for I was no longer angry and I really didn't care one way or another. I just wanted to know.
They admitted they were.
After a moment of considering this, I made the obvious deduction, "I guess that means there's no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny either."
….
I've heard that for some people, finding out that these childhood gift-givers didn't really exist was a loss of innocence, that the truth killed the realness of fantasies, imaginary friends, fairy tales. Holidays lose their sparkle because there's no pixie dust intervening between the store and opening of the presents. Some people say that it made them lose faith in their parents. Realizing that one's parents would lie to one can be harsh to some, starting a little tear that rips a huge rift through adolescence. No such dagger blow was driven in my heart.
I became smug. I didn't tell Amy or Carey about my discovery, this information was _mine_. If being oldest was going to count for anything, it had to stay mine. So I boosted these little white lies of my parents more than I ever did when I naively believed them.
I was about 8 years old when that particular scene went down.
For what it’s worth, when I got to high school physics and had to deal with the transition from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics, I didn’t have so much trouble, because the teacher went through the historical development of how physicists realized there were gaps in current physical theory and what needed explaining.
As my actuarial friend Carol Marler used to quote, “All models are wrong. Some models are useful.”
All these explanations are essentially models of reality, and we try to get closer to covering all situations. And I forgive the middle school teacher for teaching us the planetary model of the atom, but they could have told us that it was just a simplification and we would learn a more complicated version later which would be closer to true.
I have been happy to see the CDC correct its unreported deaths model, I have ignored models that have been less-than-useful during the pandemic, and I continue to seek to get closer to the truth.
And while I try to cut down on the smugness, I do have a fun time telling stories when it doesn’t matter if one tells the truth (or you want to win the poker hand).
Sumo!
The Fall Tournament finished last Sunday, and the well-deserving Tamawashi won. The also-deserving Takayasu came in second. They’re both good men.
I’ve been listening to the very enjoyable SumoKaboom podcast - two sisters from Texas providing their commentary and giving color and background to sumo for an English-speaking audience.
And here’s Hiro Morita’s Sumo Prime Time wrap-up:
I hope you join me for the November tournament, which starts on November 13.
Enjoy the weekend!