The spherical cow and the mid-grade house appliance

There is this joke about how science produces models for real-life problems. I have heard this joke’s chicken variant years ago from a physicist I met during my military service (yup, there are some stories there). Wikipedia has a cow variant of the joke:

Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, “I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum.

At the time I was spending a serious amount of time studying advanced math and physics even though these disciplines were never a part of my academic curriculum. It was all for my love of music. Which again, is another story for some other time.

Someone who uses these models know that they are supposed to iterate the model over more complex structures to reach the level of realistic representation that they require for their application. It’s pretty much like pixels on your screen adding up to an image.

There are some areas where even the slightest differences in values cause drastically different results after a few iterations. You know, butterfly effect, chaos theory… I haven’t had the chance to get into these topics but I’m sure a lot of work is going on to make sure that spherical cows can be implemented for solutions on problems with chaotic nature.

So far everything I have written in this blog has been about life and events that either resemble my life or people around me. Despite the pseudo-scientific start in this one, the rest will be no different.

While writing a letter to one of my friends of a friendship site, without thinking I uttered the question “If you found out that you can’t die, ever, what kind of a life would you plan for yourself”. And the question got me thinking of a few things:

We tend to look at life like this giant mess of things, with some phases defined by society and some defined by our own journey. Most seem to stumble from phase to phase while some plan ahead. Some get overwhelmed by the number of factors we need to pay attention to live a good life and some just ignore some dimensions either because they were never exposed to them, or they ignore them to make their lives more manageable albeit, making it less of an experience.

One other aspect of life seems to be its messiness. If life was an engineering effort, even the best ones would probably look like a mid-grade house appliance with odd design decisions. Even if you are efficient and you know what you want, there are simply too many factors around all of us that hinder at least some aspect of our lives. It’s sad but it’s just what we all have to deal with.

So in light of these I thought, what if we saw life as a spherical cow, start with a simple model that barely fits the reality of life, and iterate over this model as much as we require to make it reach some level of consensus with reality?

And because the standards are usually as low as a mid-grade house appliance with odd design decisions, it wouldn’t require too many iterations to actually reach an application that fits with reality.

In math and sciences sometimes the question you ask is more important than the answer. The question that sparked this piece: “If you found out that you can’t die…” forces a model that makes us ignore that death is a thing, it forces an endless stream of existence. In my mind it forces one to make sense of their life as it becomes a dungeon from which they cannot escape.

So for starters, let’s make this cow really smooth, your eternal life will have no sicknesses, aging is not an issue, essentially you are on a pause in a bodily sense. The question is, what do you want to do with your endless amount of time?

Ignoring that we are all human — even if we live forever — and we all have ups and downs, lets base this conversation on what we aim at. What do you want your theme to be? What’s going to be the high-concept of your eternity? You may say, there is enough time for everything, so why choose? And you’d be right, you will probably have enough time for things that we unlucky bananas can’t even imagine. But I’m asking about a theme here, not specifics. What seems to come first or the most urgent to you?

The more I think about the question, the more it makes me question some tendencies we have in life. How we wait for things that may never come, how we give up on things, excusing age, time, access and various other things. Living forever makes these things meaningless.

You know waiting for that special someone is pointless now. Even they come, they will eventually die. Waiting for the comfort of your caregivers don’t mean much, it’s the same deal, no one can be there for you if you live forever. Your best friend will have to be you. Maybe this is why people don’t want to live forever, They always tell that they don’t want to see their loved ones die, and I believe them. But maybe for some at least it’s also about not having to be their own support system.

About the things you excuse because of age, time etc: you have no excuse now. You can get onto anything you want and the only thing that could stop you would be you. I wonder what that would do for your self esteem; when you have no excuses to not do the things you want. But it’s a good thing that you will also have endless time to work on your self-esteem.

I’m personally still looking for my own answers on this question. I feel like my theme would cover a lot of learning and doing. I’d like to sort what’s essential learning and doing for me would be.

Let’s say you gave a lot of thought to this question or you immediately knew what you want for your eternal life. What now? It’s not like you will live forever. So what good is to you to come to a realization about yourself that which you cannot actualize?

This is where I come to the word iteration that I had in bold in the 4th paragraph. A single answer to a single question — even if the question and answer are both great — can only do so much to help you build a good tool. A single idea may build you a simple machine, like a lever or a knife. But it can only build an idea of these tools. You can pick up a piece of wood and know that you can use it as a lever. Imagine how many industrial processes (which means questions and answers) the cheapest, simplest lever has to go through before it can reach your local hardware store.

Our cow is the first step in a multi-step process to build something. Build an idea about what kind of a life you want. The more questions you answer, mode precisely you will know what you want and need. Which in turn will help you make better design decisions. I know that I will be trying to come up with more questions and answers for myself. If anyone is reading this, I would welcome your questions and answers as well.

I hope we can all have lives that resemble mid-grade house appliances or at least, levers.