Lost in the Meritocracy

Posted on July 12, 2010 by g_cm

BERJAYAWe all go though periods where we feel like our efforts are lost in the white noise of mediocrity, and we are just coasting along with nothing to show for our time.  For Walter Kirn, that was college. His book, Lost in the Meritocracy, tells of his experiences at Princeton University, at the pinnacle of American higher education.  Through anecdotes involving drugs, sex, exams, intellectual discussions, and dining halls, he depicts the upper echelon of academia as not really being what it is cracked up to be.

The story starts with Kirn escaping a small no-name town in Minnesota, destined for some higher purpose in life.  He feels that Princeton is the answer to all the great questions in life, and that it will prepare him to seize his future.  Upon getting there and experiencing the people, places, and traditions (or sometimes bad habits) that go along with the university, he realizes that the academic mystique is really just a front – the smoke and mirrors of educated diction and circular arguments that cover up a disappointing amount of actual insight.

For those of us that have experience in a university setting, this is likely a familiar notion.  I know that in my experience, even at points in high school, people become so wrapped up in the words and phrasing of a concept that it begins to deteriorate the actual content of what is being said.  The idea is not what is important anymore, but how it is being said and how someone sounds when saying it.  It is as if people thrive on the perception of intelligence instead of the actual existence of it.

I think this is largely a testament to the increased amount of pressure put on students in this day and age.  Because of the ever-intensifying competitiveness of the job market, college degrees, prestigious universities, extra-curricular internships, and post-graduate education are becoming an expectation of the educated world.  With this escalation comes a focus on getting an edge over your peers in order to make yourself more marketable.  A good example of this is the magnitude of books with titles along the lines of “Mastering the College Essay/SAT/Job Interview/GRE.”  It feels like people are spending more time preparing for the entry requirements than preparing themselves as people for the job itself.  In one sense, this is a logical strategy – before you can have the job or position you have to get it, and doing so requires that you jump through the right hoops.  However, those hoops should not be the focus of one’s education.

The main takeaway from this book is that going through the motions does not yield the same results, though it may get you where you want to go.  Higher education should be sought after because of a desire to learn more about the world around us, and to prepare for the world ahead of us.  The completion of tasks necessary to achieve success is the result of those experiences, not the aim.  Go into any educational experience with an open mind to learn for your own fulfillment.  The rest will work itself out.

I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in going into college or higher education, but especially to college students themselves.  A lot of what is discussed hits pretty close to home for those of us that have experienced the college process (especially admissions) recently, and offers a good reminder to keep the focus on what is really important about education – an open and inquisitive mind.

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The Drunkard’s Walk

Posted on July 6, 2010 by g_cm
BERJAYAEver since I was a little kid (granted, not too long ago), I have been bothered by the concept of randomness or chance.  I never had that phase where I really enjoyed games like War or Go Fish in which one’s success is based largely on luck.  Even though I acknowledged and understood the element of chance, I was discomforted by the fact that my skill or strategy had little to no impact on the game’s outcome.
Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk, discusses this very concept: how human beings are creatures of order and systemization, and how we as a species have a tough time dealing with the concept of randomness.  Through many diverse examples in current events, scientific exploration, healthcare, and other fields, he explains how chance has a way of dictating the outcomes of more aspects of our lives than we will admit.  I would liken this book to something Malcolm Gladwell would write – a discussion that brings a scientific or mathematical concept to the casual reader through its applications to everyday life.

Through the majority of the book, Mlodinow cites our ineptitude at understanding the principles of probability as evidence of our lack of understanding of the broader concept of uncertainty.  One example that left a particular impression on me was Mlodinow’s section on the prosecutor’s fallacy.  This is an error in reasoning in which conditional probability is implemented incorrectly, sometimes producing conclusions that are way off the actual probability of a certain set of events occurring.

The main example Mlodinow uses to explore this concept (an example actually from his own personal experiences) is false positives in clinical tests.  He creates an example in which 10,000 men are tested for a given condition.  The false positive rate for the test is 1/100 and 1/1,000 men actually have the condition.  If you were to test positive for that condition, it would be tempting to say that there is a 1/100 chance that your test is actually a false positive.  If you were to conclude that, you would fall victim to the prosecutor’s fallacy.  In reality, of the 10,000 men, 100 of them (one of every hundred) will test positive while not having the condition, while 10 of them (one of every thousand) will test positive and actually have the condition.  So if you test positive, you are in a group of 110 positive tests, only 10 of those actually being correct, meaning the actual chance of you having the condition, given a positive test, is 9%.

Another noteworthy example was Mlodinow’s application of chance to sports, more specifically to sports playoff series.  He shows how even if a team is favored by a reasonable margin to win a game, a series would have to have a huge number of games in it to yield the “correct” winner within a comfortable margin of error.  This goes to show how randomness oftentimes wins over reason and certainty in the real world.

If you enjoy reading that brings a sometimes dull topic to life, this is your book.  I have always found probability to be one of the less interesting topics in mathematics, and not one of my strong suits, but I was interested in and enlightened by this book.  It is one of those books that challenges you to view the world in a different way, and start to question the certainty with which we approach every day.

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On Being Wrong

Posted on June 26, 2010 by g_cm

For the past few weeks, through my daily surfing of the web I have come across numerous articles on the concept of “being wrong.” Upon closer inspection, I realized that almost all of these articles track back to the book Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz.  Though I haven’t read the book myself, I can gather a lot about the contents from various articles, reviews, and commentaries.

Schulz’s argument is that in our current society, it is such an embarrassment to be called out on being wrong that we try to downplay the very existence of error.  Being afraid of ridicule or even consequences, we try to cover up our mistakes and highlight the mistakes of others.  In fact, in this article from the Weekly Standard, Epstein points out that we get a sort of sadistic satisfaction from discovering the errors of others.  But back to Schulz, she says that human error is actually a testament to the complexity of our brain functions.  The brain uses inductive reasoning, conceptual thinking, and emotional responses – all things that current artificial intelligence fail to do with any success.  With this sort of processing that is rooted in abstract concepts comes systematic and inevitable error.  Schulz argues that these errors are completely normal and acceptable, and that we as a society should begin to accept these as such.  In fact, she and others argue that by accepting error as part of the learning and perfection of a skill, we are actually advancing the process and making progress, increasing efficiency along the way.

I think this is an interesting point, and in some ways what Schulz is referencing here is statistical distribution.  With any process, be it foul shots or court cases , there will be an unavoidable range of success levels over a period of time.  With a certain number of successes comes a statistically inevitable number of failures.  These failures are unavoidable, and should not be viewed as unacceptable or indicative of long-term failure.  But the same can be said about your successes.  Oftentimes, a job or roster slot or acting role is obtained because of one particular success or good day.  These successes are just the same – a small subset of one’s actual performance.  So just as we should accept failures as an inevitable consequence of human imperfection, we should not view short-term success as indicative of long-term improvement.  The best thing to do is to take these outliers and learn what you can about them – what to avoid in your failures and what to try to replicate in success.  Over time, ideally, this leads to an overall increased productivity.

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Anonymity on the web

Posted on June 24, 2010 by g_cm

An article in the Boston Globe discusses the implications of news websites offering anonymous forum posts as reaction to articles:

News websites from across the country struggle to maintain civility in their online comments forums. But given their anonymous nature and anything-goes ethos, these forums can sometimes feel as ungovernable as the tribal lands of Pakistan.

BERJAYA

from PR Mama

This is an interesting issue, and one that poses elemental questions about our interpretation of what the First Amendment actually means.  I think we can all agree that, under First Amendment freedom of speech rights, every citizen has the right to voice their opinion in print or otherwise regarding current events.  If I want to call Barrack Obama’s mother a “foreign free-loader” for being in the country as an illegal immigrant (example from the article, not my words), I am within my rights as an American to do so.  But in most cases, this involves a certain level of transparency for the person offering their opinion, and along with it an equal opportunity for others to offer their own opinions of my conduct.  The way I see it, this acts as a kind of “checks and balances” for what should and should not be said.  Just as the saying tells you to “speak like you would if your grandmother were in the room,” I think that if you would not be prepared to voice your opinion with the subjects present, it is probably not something that is appropriate to say.

As such, an outlet such as an anonymous forum is not really operating in the spirit of the First Amendment.  By having a shroud of anonymity when writing feedback and opinions on current topics, you are freeing the commenter of all implications of that comment, thereby giving them motivation to say recklessly what they would normally consider with care.  Though some may argue that this leads to a more truthful discussion of the topic at hand without it being placed in a personal context, the examples offered show otherwise.  Instead of a healthy debate occurring, there ensues a worthless banter of name-calling.  Any worthwhile dialog that goes on through an anonymous forum would be just as effectively done through a medium in which people took ownership of their opinions.

One particular exception I have had experience with is anonymous feedback in a classroom setting.  By giving students the opportunity to opine on class structure and content, it allows students to offer honest opinions of the class without feeling like their feedback will alter the professor’s perception of them, which would be a potential concern for any student.  The difference here is that there is no potential for escalation of a conflict.  If there is a particularly nasty post to a professor’s feedback, that is viewed only by the professor and it is a one-directional system.  The professor can ignore the comment and move on.  However, in an open forum like the ones discussed above, scathing comments lead to even nastier responses and the conversation fades from worthwhile into meaningless and petty.

I am not saying that an anonymous form of communication would never work – in fact, this blog is itself an anonymous source (at least for the moment).  The key is relevance.  There is no worth in anonymous comments that are aimed at provoking the retaliation of other anonymous posters; we all have better things to do with our time.  If people feel are as passionate and knowledgeable as they appear (if only to themselves)  in these anonymous forms of media, their efforts would be better spent working to change the world.

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World Cup meets graph theory

Posted on June 23, 2010 by g_cm

For one month every four years, American citizens become die-hard soccer fans.  All of a sudden, people start using terms like pitch, football match, and side. I’m talking about the World Cup, and I like most people have all of a sudden become an avid follower of the game.   I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the fact that soccer becomes the focal point of the American sports scene during the World Cup, and is then dismissed just as quickly.  It makes the whole hype of the event that much more exciting, because not only is it the pinnacle of the sport, but it is a sport that many of us are unfamiliar with at a professional level.

And as good upstanding American sports fans, we all have a thirst for a sense of order – who is the best?  what stats make them the best?  who is going to be the best in the next game?  We are accustomed to sports like football and baseball where there are a great number of quantitative statistics that can determine, with a good deal of objectivity, who the “best” is, and we are now attempting to apply this quantitative analysis to soccer.  The problem is, what are the metrics of success?

Is it goals?  That wouldn’t make sense; with (maybe) one goal per side per game, a lot of the actual scoring is a result of simply being in the right place at the right time.  Or even more convincingly, it is the result of the hard work of your teammates that have set up the shot for you.  How about touches?  I think it would be tough for us to justify rating success simply by touching the ball, with no weight placed on the success of those touches.  Well, in an article on io9, the writers discuss a convincing method of determining the ranking of players and teams based on an application of graph theory.  In the process, the researchers treated each player as a node, as well as an additional node for a missed shot and a shot that scored.  Then connections are placed between players and the goal based on the play of the match, highlighting two essential statistics for each player and the team – shooting accuracy and passing accuracy.

Using this method of rating players and teams, the team found that their “rating” of teams based on the graphing results held true to the actual results of the match in a great number of cases.  Overall, the team that had a better flow rating had 3:1 odds of winning the match.  They also found that stars of teams were among the highest rated players on the team, making it no surprise that they are favorites in the first place.

So the question is: does this method provide an accurate representation of the game of soccer, and does it add to one’s knowledge of the game?  There is no question that these statistics are telling.  The research provided shows that their method is a fairly accurate way to tell which team or player is better.  But in my opinion, this kind of analysis doesn’t really have a place in the game.  As Americans following the World Cup, most of us are guests to the game of soccer.  And with that comes an adoption of soccer traditions and tendencies.  Just because we put every pitch of every major league game through the great number cruncher in the sky doesn’t mean that we should do the same with soccer.  Part of the beauty of soccer is that it is one of the purest games out there – just kick the ball in the goal.  And people treat it that way.  No over-analysis.  No frills.  Just watching and enjoying the game.  Why are some players seen as playing at a different level than the rest of the field?  Well, if we are really watching the game, we just know.  And we should be comforted by the fact that we don’t need a graph or a spreadsheet to tell us that.

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Summer Reading: A Justification

Posted on June 17, 2010 by g_cm

The summer before entering our first year in the engineering school, my classmates and I were required to read America, 1908: The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole, the Invention of the Model T and the Making of a Modern Nation.  Although entering into a curriculum where arts and literature were to be drowned out by equations, the scientific process, and mathematical precision, we were still expected to show a general level of aptitude in reading and understanding a book that was to be both enjoyable and informative.  This book turned out to be a mediocre account of the era in which many of today’s most prominent technological innovations emerged in the US.  I found it interesting in spurts, but containing long-winded anecdotes and descriptions that left one wondering what the takeaways should have been.  But regardless, I found the assignment to require an appropriate amount of effort and intellectual content for a pre-enrollment requirement.

Many of my classmates disagreed with me.  A good number of people felt that in a science and technology program, they should not be required to do reading assignments over the summer, let alone an assignment that may or may not have had any relevance to their field of study.  This, combined with Leon Botstein’s article on the incoming freshmen’s reading assignments at Bard College, got me to thinking about the role of literature (both classics and contemporary work) in one’s life as a college student and continuing on as a member of society.

I have always felt that there should be more of an emphasis placed on classics and renowned literature in school.  Through an International Baccalaureate program, I did a good amount of analysis of literature on a wide variety of genres and literary figures.  But through the entire process, we read very few books that would be considered classics.  I figure this is partially due to the fact that our English curriculum was based around individual analysis, and reading classics (which have already been picked over) gives you less of an opportunity to form a unique opinion and argument.  However, these books are not considered classics for no reason.  They have survived from publication until the present day, outlasting wars, technological innovation, and large-scale political reform.  Furthermore, they are forever ingrained in the references and idiomatic language with which the educated world interacts.  Shakespeare coined hundreds of words that are now in common use today, but I’m not holding my breath waiting to catch the Annie Dillard reference made at the dinner table.

Another good point made in the Bard College article is that their particular choice of books forces students to step outside the box and think in a way that is not emphasized during the stereotypical high school education.  They cite Franz Kafka as a particularly good example of a book that would cause students to potentially change their view of the world.  Having myself had to read Kafka in high school, I think something along those lines would be a really interesting addition to any college reading list.  We are going to spend the rest of our lives in the 495 rat race, doing our part and coloring inside the lines; college is an opportunity to push the boundaries of our perception of the world.  These colleges should be pushing us to do so.

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Music and Memory: Construction, Record-Keeping, and Prototyping

Posted on May 14, 2010 by g_cm

In This Is Your Brain On Music, Levitin uses music to explore the very different yet overlapping ways cognitive scientists have explained the creation of memories in the brain.  As has been argued, memory makes a world of difference in music.  The entire musical experience is based on remembering notes that have been played and preparing for the notes to come – this affects the establishment of a key, major/minor, timbre transitions, and the creation and release of tension.

Memory also has a great deal to do with humans’ ability to recognize songs.  People have an incredible ability to recognize songs they know even if the song is played in a different key, with a different tempo, different instruments, or even if the note intervals are changed.  One would think that any (and especially all) of these changes would make the song a different song in the mind’s eye.  But the listener still remembers.  This ability suggests that when listening to music, the listener remembers a certain referential pattern among the relative intervals of the notes that signifies the actual essence of the piece.  This is what cognitive scientists would call a constructionist interpretation of music, as it builds the music up from the ground level.

An interesting contrast to this phenomenon is the ability of non-musically trained people to reproduce songs they know.  When asked, a vast majority of people could reproduce the pitch, tempo, and even timbre of their favorite songs on command, without being prompted with a reference tone.  This suggests a musical memory more along the lines of a tape recorder, where the listener remembers minute details of the piece.  A fascinating observation was made in a study in which brain function was measured when listening to music, and then playing back that music in one’s mind.  In fact, the brain activity recorded in each activity was almost identical.  In a similar study, a great number of people could recognize popular songs when only hearing a single note of a recording, again showing how detail and timbre are equally as important in identifying a piece.

Thought of as one cohesive entity, these two conceptualizations of musical memory show how when one interprets music (and other cognition) there are many layers of processing and memory creation going on.  Both the details of the piece are remembered (record-keeping) as well as the overall essence of the piece (constructionist) as well as the relationships the piece builds with other songs already heard (prototyping).  Furthermore, the simple acts of listening and recalling music can be boiled down to the same core brain functions – a good explanation for songs getting stuck in one’s head.  The simple act of experiencing music or cognition cannot be separated from the act of processing that cognition and committing it to memory.

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This Is Your Brain On Music

Posted on March 18, 2010 by g_cm

BERJAYA The discussion about the brain and music is a complicated one.  We assume that there is going to be some distinct line between frequencies, tones, and neural firings – the physical medium through which one listens to music – and the emotional and intellectual response one gets from actually listening to music.  This does not at all prove to be the case.  There is a lot of haze about where processing ends and interpretation and understanding begins.  And most likely, they happen in parallel, just as everything else occurs in the brain.  But in some way, the emotional response we get from listening to a Verdi opera (or a Metallica concert for that matter) is created by the simple vibrations of the eardrum caused by soundwaves.

One of the most interesting takeaways from this book thus far is the experiment about tone reconstruction.  When an instrument plays a note, that sound is comprised of a number of tones.  The “primary frequency” is the tone from which we get the actual pitch of the note.  There are then a series of harmonics at integer multiples of the primary frequency.  These make up the timbre, or the overall sound, of the instrument.  An experiment was done to test what would occur in the brain if the primary tone were removed from the sound and then played to a listener.  Interestingly enough, one of the neural pathways through which the sound “data” passes in its processing is frequency specific – the brain segments a sound into its constituent pitches and processes them separately, allowing scientists to observe how the brain is processing a sound in the frequency domain.  We have known for some time that when the primary frequency is removed from a tone, the brain still processes it as the same note, realizing that the intervals between the harmonics dictate a different primary frequency than the lowest frequency present.  However, we did not realize the extent to which this is the case.  When observing the brain’s output of frequency values following these trials, it was found that the brain physically reconstructs the missing frequency and synthesizes it internally, placing it where it should be.  This means that by the time one gets to  a higer level of processing, it is as if there were never a loss in the first place.

This leads one to consider the brain more as a piece of hardware than software.  It would be the methodology of a software specialist to process the raw data, and then just add in the missing pieces at the end to come up with the correct output.  However, the brain is actually creating new neural states (almost as if it were circuitry) before passing the data into the “processor.”  The modifications are done at a low level.

More thoughts on this to come, but this opened my eyes to the intense complexity of processing sound into what we know and love as music.

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The Penal Colony

Posted on March 15, 2010 by g_cm

BERJAYA

Today while reading the 50 Most Interesting Articles on Wikipedia (actually, it was in the second list of 50), I came across a page about “The Kafka Machine.” It described a Franz Kafka story, The Penal Colony, and I was so intrigued by the description that I had to pick it up at the library and read it. It is a short story, barely 30 pages.  The first thing that jumped out at me about the story is that it contains no names of any of the characters. It tells the story of a society in which there is an execution device that does its job by carving the words of the crime of the condemned into his skin. This is repeated over the course of 12 hours, eventually covering the entire body with script from head to toe, until the prisoner bleeds out and dies. I was drawn to this story by sheer curiosity; I have always been fascinated by criminal psychology, and just love reading about what makes people do the unthinkable under a certain set of circumstances. This story sheds some light on how society can sometimes dull the senses and make us lose touch with rationality, and more so, reality itself.

The driving force in the plot is the character referred to as The Officer. It is his job to maintain and operate this execution device, which has been in use for some time. His overseer, The Commandant, is not a fan of this archaic device, and would have had it done away with had it not been for the officer clinging to his old ways. He is looking for The Traveller, an onlooker to the execution of the day, to offer his support for the device, thus helping to keep it from being discarded. He has a tenacity with which he tries to gain the support of the traveller and is the main character representing the misguided nature of human nature itself. The officer is so enraptured by this device that he cannot begin to comprehend the inhumanity of it.

The key act in this entire theatrical ordeal of execution is in “the twelfth hour.” Up until this point, the condemned has no knowledge of his crime or of the verdict (a fair trial is nonexistent in this society), and cannot make out the words being etched into his skin. As he weakens, he begins to lose consciousness and the senses begin to dull. In the twelfth hour, on the verge of death, the man becomes so oblivious to the pain and so detached from his senses that he is able to “read” the words as they are carved into his flesh, and obtains enlightenment and understanding. The onlookers await the point at which the man’s facial expression shifts from panic and despair to the cohesive thought and understanding the man gets right before death.

The entire system examined in this book can be viewed as a commentary on life and society, much like Kafka’s more famous work, The Metamorphosis. He sheds light on many of the same aspects of humanity depicted in that story. The first is a fundamental resistance to change. The officer refuses to accept the more modern Commandant’s views on execution, just as Gregor’s family is not able to cope with the change to the family dynamics. While the example of the officer has more moral undertones (I mean, who would be ok with accepting a giant beetle into the family?), the two are similar arguments: man clings to what he is most comfortable with. The second important point examined in these works is the time of enlightenment right before death. As Gregor is hit with the apple in The Metamorphosis, he finally realizes that he cannot be accepted , and the degree to which he has been alienated by his family. Up until that point, he was living a lie, feeling like his sister could effectively act as a link to his family and the outside world. Similarly, there is a prolonged period of confusion and agony for the condemned before the final awakening to the truth of the situation, and death is not far behind it.

Kafka’s work is so rich with symbolism and significant minute details that it would take a book longer than the story itself to examine it in justice. But the overarching commentaries on humanity are clear: resistance to change, and a blindness to reason and rationality until the ultimate point of enlightenment, shortly before death.

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Founding Brothers

Posted on March 15, 2010 by g_cm

BERJAYA

As an interested reader of Revolutionary War literature, I came to this book very eager to see what was in store.  I find historical anecdotes particularly interesting, as a good writer can portray these stories and tales (sometimes not completely factual) in a certain light so that the situation becomes a smaller representation of the bigger picture.  Joseph Ellis promised to do just that.  By describing 6 particular events of the era in detail – the duel between Hamilton and Burr, a dinner at Jefferson’s Monticello, Congressional battle over slavery, Washington’s farewell address, the partnership between John and Abigail Adams, and the friendship of Jefferson and Adams – he aimed to shed light on the nature of the bigger event, the coming and passing of the American Revolution.  What one gets is a vivid picture, though sometimes drawn-out, of the great minds of the era and their role in the creation of the nation.

George Washington

Washington was the embodiment of the United States in one man. Though he lacked the oratorical fervor of Adams and the literary genius of Jefferson, he commanded the attention of all those who came into political contact with him, and often had the final say in legislative matters, both before and during his term as president. He was not an exceptionally attractive man; he had a pockmarked face and unhealthy teeth. But his great size alone (about 6’4″ and over 200 pounds) earned him respect. There was a flare for theatrics in many of Washington’s actions. And more importantly (possibly most importantly) he never let ideology, literature, academia, or any other shroud lay in the way of prudence and getting things done. He succeeded where others could not; Jefferson often had his head in the philosophical clouds, while Adams was too tied to non-partisan ideals and a firm, objective federal hand. Washington seemed to know the right time and place to impose his executive power, as well as when to let the party system dictate action.

John Adams

Adams was a principled man. During the Constitutional Convention, he took to heart the concept that the country’s leader should exist outside the bipartisan system, thus being a third party judge of the true needs of the country. For the most part, he went about this by trying to mimic the ideals of Washington, a man that did not hesitate to pass legislation without public approval. While keeping with some of the Federalist ideals from Washington’s term, Adams also took steps to establishing a more truly neutral stance with respect to the European competition between England and France. This involved signing a peace treaty with France to counter Jay’s Treaty that was made with England during Washington’s term. His political tact with France pinpoints a key facet to one of John Adams’ biggest positive traits: realism.

While Adams did not mean to go against Washington’s plea for isolationism in his Farewell Address, he realized that an America truly disconnected from the European powers was unfeasible. America was a new nation, and was fairly young and vulnerable to be thrown into the great wide world unprotected. Washington realized this, which led him to push for Jay’s Treaty in the first place. He saw it as biding time for the country to grow economically and politically, before becoming vulnerable to world conflict. Adams attempted to take this one step further with his treaty with France. He realized that to forge parallel treaties with both France and England was somewhat different than the intentions of Washington (he was fairly pro-England), but that it would also appeal a bit more to his Republican opposition. It acted as a middle ground between Federalism and Republicanism, which put Adams’ mind at ease, as he differentiated himself from partisan relations entirely.

One of the more salient points touched on in this section was Adams’ views on religion. With both Adams and Jefferson nearing death, they had several correspondences on the subject, and light-hearted conversations about meeting their fellow Framers in the afterlife. Adams admitted that he thought the belief in life after death was much more important than the truth itself. Both he and Jefferson were not entirely sold on Heaven in the first place, and Adams claimed that the benefits of religion would be much greater in the present life anyways.

Thomas Jefferson

If Adams can be seen as a pillar of realism and objective morality in the Revolutionary Era, Thomas Jefferson was the polar opposite. While the stance of Adams changed very little before, during, and after his presidency, Jefferson’s ideas were much more fluid, changing (sometimes drastically) with the times and circumstances. A key example of this is his opinion on France at different stages of his life. During the presidencies of his predecessors, Jefferson’s big argument against isolationism was that the American Revolution was simply the first step towards global liberation and republic. He saw the system of aristocracy on its way out, and saw America as a spearhead to that world revolution. As such, he felt it was imprudent to isolate the country from France (in its own revolution at the time) and not aid its fellow revolutionary comrades. However, towards the end of his life, Jefferson’s views on the subject changed radically. With the fall of Napoleon, he realized that his ideological dreams of a worldwide liberation were far-fetched, and conceded to Adams that it would have been unwise to support France in their fight for independence.

Conclusion

Overall, this book made for an interesting read – instead of simply recounting the events and giving the play-by-play, he tries to get into the minds of each person and disect their actions.  These inferences about motivations following the Revolution were my favorite points of each section, as it was often unclear (and thus up for interpretation) who really wanted different things to come about as a result of the new United States.  Though this book rarely kept you on the edge of your seat, it offered a fresh perspective on the great thinkers that led the nation through its maiden years.

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