Things that, while I was in college, I wish I’d had/made more time to learn about: film, psychology, business, economics.

Things that, since college, I’ve found myself learning more and more about, without applying any special focus: film, psychology, business, economics.

Which relates to another note-to-self from a few weeks ago:

Some careers I considered, ages 5-15: archaeologist, carpenter, National Geographic explorer, SWAT team, writer, conductor.

Plus ça change… I would, for the most part, still have interest in certain aspects of these (maybe even the whole thing). Discovery, craft, research, suspense, mastery, performance. And over the past few weeks I’ve spent some time re-reading my journals from previous long hikes and travel. It’s both amusing and a little frustrating that some of the same ideas that consume me now popped up 1, 3, 5, 10 years ago. Or some of the really funny and observant things I wrote could have been written yesterday. As Andy writes:

It’s harder to construct a personal narrative of growth when the sentences showing that you used to be just as sweet remain visible.

Just makes me wonder if I’m really changing that much (do I want to?), or if I’m just becoming more like me. The metaphor that comes to mind is like when you’re downloading a large image file, and it gradually becomes less and less pixelated. Same Mark, more data, more detail.

1. Look for ideas in the world, not in the journals.
2. First make your model as simple as possible, then generalize it.
3. Look at the literature later, not sooner.
4. Model your paper after your seminar.
5. Stop when you’ve made your point.

The opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

After you’ve been in college for a year or so, you’re supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must *not* major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts.

What’s cool about cloze tests is what they can tell you about learning. By comparing how well readers complete the passage vs. how well they answer questions given a complete text, you can find where the optimal difficulty is. It turns out that there is an optimal difficulty level if you’re looking to maximize information gain. Right around a 35-40% cloze success rate is best if you’ve got an instructor available when needed, and around 50-60% if you’re learning independently.

You tend to acquire the most information with texts at those particular difficulty levels. You bring enough context and prior knowledge, but just enough to get a handle on the new stuff. What’s crazy, if I can stretch it a bit, is that the most efficient learning takes place when you’re stumbling roughly 40-60% of the time.

So it kind of woke me up to thinking, if the goal is to learn and grow, how can I pick and choose the best experiences? I don’t mean it in a snobby sense—”that is below me”—but in the sense of growth and challenge—”this is difficult and worth it.” If you’ve got perfectionism issues (like I do sometimes), sometimes you get stuck doing things you’re great at, because you’re great and being great feels good. But there’s no growth there. So the cloze thing comes into play. Try something where you know you’ll only be partially successful. See what happens.

Take a look at his big projects: Portraits, Sleeping by the Mississippi (“the 3rd coast”), Niagara, Fashion Magazine, and Dog Days, Bogot?°.

Here are a few of my favorite photographs, matched with Soth’s words that may or may not have been uttered around the time the slide was up:

• In Europe a lot of the Mississippi photographs are thought of as a critique of America. For him, it was about the excitement of travel and discovery. “For me, it’s Huck Finn’s raft.”
• “I’m not good at photographing a contained thing.”
• “I really aim to be empathetic.”
• “Simple often makes a better picture.”
• “You can’t trust new passion.”

Back in his high school days, Soth was a painter, but “wasn’t comfortable in the studio.” Too antsy, too fidgety. It was a Joel Sternfeld photo in particular that turned him to photography, one that showed the photographer’s own car in the distance as just another part of the scenery. Like Sternfeld, Soth “wanted to be out in the world.” He was painfully shy when he first got started (“I was shaking, sweating”), but yet he was drawn to portraiture. And the portraits aren’t just snapshot candids—they often take some awkward negotiation with a stranger and time to fiddle with gear and set up the shot. So the photo is not only about the person but also about “the space between us.” The irony is that Soth wanted to be out in the world, drawing on the passion and energy and intimacy, but a lot of his work touches on the desire for withdrawal and evasion and anger and disconnection and decline and violence. So there’s this internal artistic tension.

Soth said, “One of the frustrating things when I show my pieces is people searching for little clues.” So he started taking on specific project themes for his work, one of the first of these was the Mississippi project. In a way, the theme serves as another sort of evasive maneuver—it relieves some of the artistic pressure, the self-consciousness. “I don’t always know what I’m doing at the beginning… it evolves over time.”

Some interesting quotes on his craft, out of context:

• “For me, photography is not like storytelling… It’s evocative, you make these connections… That’s the poetic model: people respond in their own way.”
• “A list gets you focused, and then it leads to something else.”
• “Because I’m a stranger, I can ask a question and get an intimate response.”
• “I’m trying to please myself… my audience is me.”

And, lastly, Soth’s three levels of artistic achievement:

1. Entertainment
2. Information
3. When the work causes the audience to reconsider their life