A Wednesday : Gothic fog, spicy-tolerance, quantum 20 questions, false dichotomies, Latin, why playing catch is an integral life skill.

Philosophy :

I intended to discuss Descartes, but like Shakespeare (see below), we never got around. And so it goes.

Books and reading

We had planned to start Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale today, but time slipped along quickly.

Art

“I’d like to either have someone play Candyland with me or I can draw in Procreate. And I’ll need an Apple Pencil please.”

- a 5-year old

More books

Fog Island by Tomi Ungerer (2013)

Quotes & interchanges

“This is my brother,” he said over and over this morning, grabbing his bro, three years his senior, with his 2-year old arms. “This is my brother.”

Outdoors

We wait outside in the gothic night, shrouded in swirling white gray sheets of haze sedately reposed in the trees, and finally Becca’s headlights burst through, and we burst upon her at the top of the driveway, as we do. As we do, always, except for the nine times in 14 years I haven’t.

Quotes and interchanges, part II

There was a big battle at lunch between boys. An 11-year old prides himself on his extreme tolerance for spicy foods; a condition he has awarded himself with as “The Most Spicy-Tolerant Person in the Family.”

His five-year bro and disciple is insistent that he is every bit equally spicy-tolerant, so there was a bit of a sensationalist event culminating in my five-year old son eating a tablespoon of Cholula Hot Sauce; a choice that was his, though pushed into. He did so with aplomb and a pointed rejection of my offer to provide him a glass of almond milk.

“I don’t need any milk,” he said, his eyes watering. “I’m spicy-tolerant.”

And so it went.

Other, part II

How did multiple things get away from us today? There’s a multiplicity of reasons, but there were two big ones, and they weren’t bad. This is one of them:

The simplest way to think of it is as a version of Twenty Questions. I gathered the Olders around and told them to figure out what I was thinking of. Forty-five minutes later, they finally did. In between, they chased many rabbit holes, false leads, and self-perpetuated dead ends as they interrogated me.

No, it’s not abstract. No, it’s not something you can hold. Yes, it’s something you can experience, as well as others, either simultaneously or together, here or anywhere, with the right equipment. No, it’s not a character trait or chemical compound or period in history.

Eventually, the answer was Raising Dion, season 2. This might seem silly. It is, in fact, silly. They watched the first season over a summer together, and I knew they would eventually alight on this (note: it was just released on Netflix today).

I like to think of the process as a sort of surreal quantum version of Twenty Questions, where they are forced to:

Pay attention to their questions and the specificity of the answers provided.
Not only summarize the information they gather, but learn to synthesize it as they pay attention to the nuances of language and phrasing. For example, one of them asked if it was Man-made, and I requested that they rephrase the question. They did so and eventually I said Yes, what I am thinking of is Human-created, which led to a deconstruction of the difference between inventing or making something and creating something.
Pay close attention to connecting the dots of gathering information and choosing what avenues to pursue as you get close and which ones are taking you away.
How do you start with nothing and find a path somewhere?

I believe one of the religions of our time, perhaps the great one, is Information. We worship information, but yet we don’t know what to do with it. So learning to process Information and know what to pursue, what to filter, what to pay attention to and what to ignore, what to focus in on…I think these are some of the great ways we can help prepare our children to spend lives as intellectually-nimble, questioning, critically-thinking, creatively-solving, compassionate trailblazers and truth seekers.

Reason & Rhetoric / Logical Fallacies : Argument from Authority, False Dichotomy

Argument from Authority

This is a tricky one. Easy on the one hand - in other words, if someone has experience, authority, a history of credibility within a field, then they deserve some level of deference and respect…as it pertains to the scope of their field.

We talked about Dr. Anthony Fauci, and how he is a reliable source as it relates to topics within his scope of authority and experience, including infectious diseases. If I had a physics-related question, Dr. Fauci might have an interesting opinion, and he might even have a valid position or point in response that question, but he would be speaking outside his area of expertise, so I wouldn’t consider him a particularly valid or expert source on that matter.

The tricky part is that even when a source has a history of reliability, whether it’s an individual or an institution, the important thing to consider in the final analysis is the quality of the facts themselves, not simply accepting that what’s being said is accurate simply because it’s from a reliable source…

…but, that being said, we also have all chosen to accept a certain amount of confidence in the shared positions of experts within different fields, and no one has the ability to constantly doubt and question the positions that are largely agreed upon by authorities within a particular field.

This is probably one of the toughest fallacies for me to deal with right now, because it’s so simple on the one hand, and because I have at this point in history, come to highly value sources that have a high degree of transparency, credibility, ownership, and competence in their histories.

We agreed that we can defer to authorities within a field, as long as there’s a history of honesty and accuracy within the scope of their field, as long as we remember the importance of not elevating the source itself over the facts themselves.

False Dichotomy

This common logical fallacy is when people try to distill choices down to the binary: there’s only two choices. My 11-year old son came up with a great example: “…it’s kind of like how people will say, ‘Oh, since you’re not Pro-Trump, you must be a Democrat.’”

Good example. I hold my right intact to have positions on a continuum. As should we all.

Latin

Jacio / jactum : to throw
Note: the J is pronounce as a Y
Examples:
eject (e, ex = out)
interject (inter = between)
object (ob = against)
project (pro = forward)
reject (re = again, back)

Phrase review
Didn’t get to it

Poetry : Dylan Thomas Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

This has been a tough one to memorize. Finally up to the third stanza
Reviewed No Man Is An Island, Richard Cory, and Hope Is the Thing With Feathers. And Hickory Dickory Dock.

Other

A 5-year old fixated on the board game Candyland.

Last big thing

We played catch. Indoors. For almost 40 minutes. Why?

I don’t remember how it started. I got irritated about something, which happens sometimes everyday, and so I grabbed a ball and made everybody sit down in the living room and listen to me monologue about the importance of learning the life skill of throwing and catching.

Why learning to throw and catch a ball is such an important life skill:

There is a difference between throwing a ball at someone and throwing a ball to someone. In the former, you’re their opponent. In the latter, you’re their teammate.
What does that mean? It means that you have to want them to succeed, and you have to do what you can to enable them to succeed. It all comes down to that. You throw the ball well enough that you make it easy for the other person to catch.
You care about the success of others.
I told them they could watch an episode of something on PBS Kids after we all successfully tossed the ball around 20 consecutive times.
That meant the littlest, at two years old, had to pull his weight.
Multiple times, we got to 17, 18, 19, and then…drop.
It got intense.
But we kept going. We kept throwing. And catching. And cheering on. And groaning.
And practicing not blaming or pointing fingers when somebody messed up with an errant throw or a bad drop.
We practiced active encouragement and throwing the ball to someone in a manner that gave them the greatest opportunity for success.
There was heartbreak and discouragement and a shared sense of futility.
But in the end, finally, finally, we did it. The final throw, number 20, was successfully caught by the littlest man. We cheered, a remote was grabbed, and I headed off to make curry for a Wednesday night supper.