Wrestling Blogs - Mike Tamillow

I’m done with classes. Completely finally done with every class I’ll ever have to take. Grad-school, haha. I finished my last test today and I can say I made up the rules on how the world works. I was actually in a huge rush getting all my stuff together and taking care of all the last few things I needed do, so I didn’t get to study at all. Also I had been sick lately with a severe case of Senioritis . SO needless to say I couldn’t study at all (and hardly could make class, since my case of senioritis started a while ago) I just had to sift through the notes and then try to imagine how the world works. Then make assumptions based on the multiple choice answers, decide an appropriate naming system, and then try to describe my newly created theory with enough clarity that perhaps someone already developed the same theory. Ahh, the scientific method at work, haha.

Before going on I would like to mention something about cavemen. I think all of you have the wrong idea about us. From what I understand people have the impression that cavemen are slow and unintelligible. But if you look at finger fluting you will realize under Zipf’s analysis that cavemen developed a type of written language as well. The law proves that some type of successful communication was taking place. And if you look at cultures on the other side of the world you will realize that this was happening naturally too among the Native Americans. Since the times of cavemen we have not really evolved into anything more intelligent. Communication, the wheel, the theory of relativity all could have and were developed by people today. And in all honesty at the rate of increase in computer technology , we will have a system for calculating the whole genetic code very soon. And with this it will only be a matter of time before we determine that we can evolve ourselves. We have already genetically mutated animals to be bigger and more delicious, although it’s too much of a crapshoot to do with humans at this point. Even if it takes a thousand years for everything to be perfected and accepted (my guess is closer to a hundred), this is significantly less then the millions of years evolution takes, and our own evolution will be much greater and far less random than any natural evolution – that is if we don’t destroy ourselves first, which is quite a possibility if you are creating a race of super humans. Ok haha, nice rant right.

Now, my rants are over. School is over. I might as well tell you something I actually learned in school (before I got sick with a case of senioritis). My major was ‘Learning and Organizational Change’; the kids in my major would jokingly call our classes kindergarten classes because they were all about group discussion and activity. The building and rooms were designed without a front and center. We would have discussions that almost never came to any solution. That being said, it was basically a bouncing room for philosophical ideas that sometimes appeared as if no learning was actually taking place. (I’ve probably discussed ‘what is culture?’ for 8 hours in classes without ever fully answering it – frustrating) But the important part is we were learning how to learn (I think) and the number one rule to that is the same as the number one rule to philosophy – what is truth? You cannot learn if you think the truth is some objective reality set in stone. If this is what you believe, then you accept what is given to you at face value and what is not given to you is clearly unable to be understood (because no one else understands it yet.)

This being said one of the coolest classes I took had six people and two teachers. It was a programming class, but it wasn’t a programming class that you might be thinking about. I didn’t learn how to create websites or design a business tool such as power point (which by the way is one of the most popular computer tools that totally sucks, glad I’ll never deal with it again.) This was a class where we created models using individual actors in environment acting according to certain rules. Because of this they would form some type of pattern as a whole. This is the general concept behind Adam Smith’s Invisible hand theory If all actors act in a self interested manner then the result is some type of order. This is amazing because it is coming from a rule that appears chaotic, it’s even more amazing because with a computer generated simulation we can actually perceive what this order looks like and it’s effect. This is a necessity in large business because it can save a ton of money by running a simulation to see if the anticipated effect actually occurs. One of the articles I read for the class demonstrated how this computer-generated simulation was run to determine how changing the ticker price of a stock to a smaller increment would affect the market. One would assume that a smaller increment would allow money to travel more easily to new enterprises. The effect was the opposite. It actually showed that this would have severe negative affects on the market, and therefore should not be pursued. Before making any major decision, the effects should be calculated or at least estimated, an important rule laid out in The Art of War . (It is under I; 26, If you’ve never read this before, do so. It’s one of the shortest deepest books ever written)

The computer tool we used in class came with a whole bunch of models to toy around with. I made a presentation on my favorite one. It was a model of cooperation versus greed. The model consists of red cows and blue cows. Every tick (which is every designated time period) a cow has to determine how far she is going to move, whether to reproduce or not, and whether to eat the grass under her feet. And every tick the grass grows a little. A red cow is cooperative and a blue cow is greedy. The only difference is that a red cow will not eat the grass until it has reached a certain length, a blue cow will greedily eat the grass every chance it grows. There is an advantage to letting the grass grow long; it provides the cow with much more energy. When a cow has enough energy she can reproduce and therefore expand. If a cow has no energy, she will die. And the last rule is that a cow loses energy each turn. Notice that I have avoided pluralizing the cows because each cow acts completely independently based upon the rules laid out. There is only one variation between these rules and that is cooperation and greed. There are a series of sliders – these are continuums where I can set a variable at a given number and run the program.

As in any study, the results are the real important part. The process to get these results is just a complicated matter that most people are better off not knowing. Playing around with the sliders a little bit I found when each cooperation and greediness are effective. Greedy cows kill off cooperative cows, however greedy cows also kill off one another and because of destroying their environment, and in effect themselves. Cooperative cows look to thrive and not only to survive. They die under competition with greedy cows but maximize their environment.

This brings me to two conclusions.

The first is about school. Can someone please tell me who came up with this terrible idea? Ok let’s find a resource that should be maximized and freely transferred - that is knowledge and learning. You can go into a library and get a ton of information. The best way to learn is to talk to someone smarter (I learn a ton from Dustin Fox). And then let’s do the obviously stupid thing and make kids compete for grades…? Did anyone think this over? If a teacher really grades on a bell curve (like my high school teachers thought was a good idea) then the there is a large incentive not to help out your classmates, to in fact sabotage them. The best way to increase knowledge and learning is to act like the cooperative cow, to try to maximize all the important learning you have done by transferring it to others and to have the same response from them. In actuality it would make more sense to grade students on two things – how much they have discovered and advanced learning on their own, and how much they have effectively advanced their peers learning process. The reality of the situation is that grades are detrimental for learning. They create competition in a situation where maximizing your resources is the most effective strategy. Learning should not be instigated by grades; instead more subtle tactics that promote cooperation and discovery should instigate it. At some point learning just becomes something everyone does for it’s own sake and we expand our resources instead of competing for current resources.

Since I haven’t even touched on wrestling clearly this is my second conclusion. It’s nationals. Back in Saint Louie where it started. I wasn’t here to wrestle three years ago. And for me there is a limited resource. There’s only one national title. The only way to get it is to be greedy, even if it means destroying all my opponents and crushing everyone else’s dreams. I’ve done the work; I’ve maximized my resources; I’ve reached a point I clearly was nowhere near three years ago. It’s time to be a blue cow. Back in Saint Louie ready to kill and prepared to die for a title.