A relatively new friend of mine (an old friend of some of my MIT friends) posted a link on his blog to a web site designed around a book with cutesy graphs containing life-affirming messages. Here's the one that caught David's eye:
This is a cute way to describe the very true concept in life (or science) that it's good to keep your eyes open for interesting experiences (or observations) that are unrelated to your initial purpose (or hypothesis).
I browsed a few more pictures on the site, but stopped after being disturbed by this one:
My inner nerd prevented me from deriving any pleasure from the cute drawings after this bungled Venn diagram. The different Venn circles are supposed to represent sets of some description, and the items that belong to both encircled sets are contained in the overlapping intersection. What, I ask you, is the set of "Where you are" supposed to contain? Maybe each of the cells in my body is considered individually? That would make sense if my body is transitioning from one place to another. Perhaps the "Where I want to be" set contains each cubic millimeter of a swimming pool. Then as I put my big toe into the water, the cells in my big toe count both as "Where I am" and "Where I want to be" and thus appear in the intersection of the Venn diagram. But why, then, is "Lots & lots of work" ascribed to my big toe? It's the muscles in my contralateral leg that are doing most of the work. The big toe is just hanging out and waiting for the rest of the cells to follow.
What the artist is trying to describe is that it takes lots of work to get from where you are to where you want to be. But there's no progression like this in a Venn diagram. The different spaces in a Venn diagram are not panels of a cartoon! Bah.
This is a cute way to describe the very true concept in life (or science) that it's good to keep your eyes open for interesting experiences (or observations) that are unrelated to your initial purpose (or hypothesis).I browsed a few more pictures on the site, but stopped after being disturbed by this one:
My inner nerd prevented me from deriving any pleasure from the cute drawings after this bungled Venn diagram. The different Venn circles are supposed to represent sets of some description, and the items that belong to both encircled sets are contained in the overlapping intersection. What, I ask you, is the set of "Where you are" supposed to contain? Maybe each of the cells in my body is considered individually? That would make sense if my body is transitioning from one place to another. Perhaps the "Where I want to be" set contains each cubic millimeter of a swimming pool. Then as I put my big toe into the water, the cells in my big toe count both as "Where I am" and "Where I want to be" and thus appear in the intersection of the Venn diagram. But why, then, is "Lots & lots of work" ascribed to my big toe? It's the muscles in my contralateral leg that are doing most of the work. The big toe is just hanging out and waiting for the rest of the cells to follow.What the artist is trying to describe is that it takes lots of work to get from where you are to where you want to be. But there's no progression like this in a Venn diagram. The different spaces in a Venn diagram are not panels of a cartoon! Bah.
I interpret "Where you are" as perhaps "the set of all your current beliefs and experiences", and similarly for the other. I don't have a problem with Venn-ing this in principle, it's with the labeling of the intersection. For those current experiences of yours that line up with desired experiences, there's no effort involved at all!
ReplyDeleteMore logical would be
"Lots & lots of work" = "Where you want to be" - "Where you are".
Actually, I have a problem with the first diagram, as there appears to be no intersection between what I'm looking for and what I find, implying that no matter how hard I try, I will never find what I'm looking for.
ReplyDeleteI agree, Craig, that the hard work would be moving things from the outer ring into the intersection. I would also wonder if a person can recognize that a "belief" is wrong currently but that a better one awaits in "where I want to be." It seems to me that much prescience would allow me to adopt the new belief immediately. Not so with experiences, of course.
ReplyDeleteAs for the first diagram, Grant, I think that it's a pie chart and not a Venn diagram. The pie would represent all things of interest I have encountered in my life, showing what a small percentage of them were things I actually set out at some point to look for. You have a point, though, in that presumably some things are both looked for and found. So actually a Venn diagram would be more appropriate there! I guess I just presumed a hierarchy, where the larger slice is actually "things you find without having looked for them."
ReplyDelete