A Little Measure Theory

I really liked "How Will You Measure Your Life". I'm so glad that Alvin recommended it. I'll give some of my own thoughts on what I found meaningful in the book, but first I'll try to answer a few of Alvin's questions.

(Q) What are you hiring this blog to do?
(A) I often feel stifled when I try to discuss the sorts of issues we talk about on this blog with other people. Never in my life have I found a group of people with whom I can have such a good discussion (excepting Cami, who isn't really a group anyway). I hired this blog because I felt the need in my life for those enriching discussions.

(Q) How can we increase the motivators?
(A) Unfortunately, despite my recognition of the need for these enriching discussions, I find it terrifically hard to actually engage in them. It's so much easier to simply throw a movie or tv show up, or bury myself in a book. I don't know that there's some motivational magic that can be worked to incentivize me to post more often; it's more a matter of my fundamental lack of self-discipline to do things I know will bring me happiness, but which require effort on my part.

(Q) What was the take home message for you? What were you inspired to do better?
(A) Without fail, I found the suggestions made in the book both trenchant and insightful. If I had to choose one lesson, it might be the one under the title 'sending your children off in Thesus' ship'. The idea being that eventually your children will leave your immediate control, and that the social norms you have endowed them with while they were in your home are what will protect them throughout their lives. Those norms form a family culture, on that can only be developed through repetition and routine. So now when I question whether we can skip family scripture study today, or family prayer, I have this vision of my children leaving on the ship without my having instilled the reflexive need for those things. I still struggle with frequently trying to be 98% obedient rather than 100% obedient (another lesson from the book), but it was a good reminder of what these little daily decisions add up to.

(Q) Is your career deliberate or emergent?
(A) Probably a bit of both. My intention for quite some time has been to become a Professor. I am not a Professor. In that sense, my current research job was not what I'd planned. However, that Professor job still seems on my horizon, I still hold on to the possibility of getting it someday, and so the choices I've made have, to a significant degree, been calculated to achieve that. So it's deliberate. My chosen field is something I've always found interesting and which I've felt good at, so my chosing it was deliberate. However, when I came to BYU as a Freshman I was undecided between a couple of majors, both of which I enjoyed and thought I could do well at. In the end, I chose engineering because of the free internet access through the CAEDM lab (as I recall, otherwise you had to pay $3/month for access at the dinky Route Y terminals). So in that sense it was emergent. I think it's pretty inevitable that you're future is shaped both by plans and by chance or fate.

(Q) How will I measure my life?
(A) Abstractly, I would say the amount of love I create in my family, the strength of the bonds that unite us. That's a lousy measure, though, because it's not one that can be easily taken. A more pragmatic answer would be the number of hours I spend directly working on my family relationships.

I think I covered a lot of what I had to say in these answers, which probably means that Alvin did a good job of coming up with interesting questions. As a closing thought, I wanted to write a little (without knowing exactly where it's going) about Measure Theory.

I took a class in Measure Theory a few years ago, and I think one of the most valuable lessons I learned was that there is room for style, taste and judgement in the formulation of measures. In my opinion, the best measures are those that lead to increased light and knowledge, that manage to take abstract objects and generate order. A good example might be Google's invention of a measure for webpages. By creating something that matched so well our intuitive sense of what was important and what was not, Google not only made its founders loads of money, it dramatically increased the ability of people around the world to function at a higher level.

I'm not sure what lesson that lends to taking the measure of a man. I guess it's two-fold: (1) don't be afraid to let personality influence how you choose to measure; it's inherent, objectivity is unachievable, so just accept your biases and let them be reflected in your measure, but (2) you should strive to find that measure compatible with your values that best brings further illumination to you and those you share it with.

On the PVS reunion, I'm all for it. I don't know about holding it in Provo, though. We could rent out a beach house somewhere, or a cabin in the woods, or take a cruise together. It would require a bit higher level of commitment, but I think it would really increase the value we got from it.