Launch of Insights for Impact YouTube Project

Hey everyone! I’ve co-founded Insights for Impact, a YouTube channel that aims to bring the most impactful research findings to the forefront, with the goal of inspiring positive change in the world.

During the twentieth century, scientists tried to stop nuclear proliferation, but ultimately failed. In our first video, How Science Misunderstands Power, I examine a research paper from Bismarck Analysis that explores the challenges of controlling powerful technology. We see how even the most brilliant of people may struggle to steer the use of their work in the face of complex power dynamics.

Want more videos that focus on big picture issues? Subscribe to stay updated on future video releases. We can’t wait to share more insights with you!

Three Tiers of Information Gathering

Epistemic Status: A personal reflection on my journey toward effective learning.

I enjoy the process of seeking out information and improving my knowledge. It is fun to “go down the rabbit hole” on any given topic, and I agree with Richard Feynman when he said that things become more interesting the more you learn about them. This is a consequence of having the trait of curiosity. I have met a few hundred people in my life, and while that gives me some sense as to how different people’s perspectives are, I admit that I find it hard to imagine what it would be like to live without curiosity. Would it just be a matter of unquestioningly accepting how the universe is? For people without curiosity, did they experience wonder as kids, only to have it crushed out of them by the tragic events of their lives?

I don’t know the answers to the above questions, and while my curiosity might lead me to want to investigate their answers, learning information is hard — and historically I haven’t done much with the information I currently know.

I want to propose a simple, three-tiered framework for how my journey to better process new information has changed over time:

Tier 1. Seeking Information
Tier 2. Taking Smart Notes
Tier 3. Learning Through Writing

Let’s discuss the first tier:

Tier 1. Seeking Information: Locating sources, passively reading them, and updating my worldview — holding everything in memory

This is the obvious strategy. I knew that if I wanted more information, I had to find it, and I reasoned that the more information I had, the better my overall picture of the world would be.

This sounds great.

But the world is very complicated. It is full of divergent opinions. People have cognitive biases, they misrepresent data (intentionally or otherwise), and their questionable motives often lead to intentionally misleading information being published. Critical thinking and reasoning skills are a must when navigating this polluted information landscape. There are various resources which aim to improve these skills: LessWrong is a great start, and Julia Galef’s excellent book, The Scout Mindset, is another.

I only recently encountered these resources. Before that, I was driven by my interest (and later education) in Science, because it is unparalleled in its effectiveness at cutting through the darkness of uncertainty. Science produces results. Although bias can exist, time and peer review typically (but not always) snuffs it out. Overall, the idea of testing our ideas against Nature is a powerful one —  possibly Humanity’s most powerful. This makes information gained through good science very interesting to me. It is a ready-made treasure trove of ideas waiting for me to explore.

However, today I am not arguing for or against Science being valuable. Instead, I am interested in exploring how my method of learning effectively has changed.

At some point I realized that blindly following interesting threads of information to see where they lead is inefficient. There may be a more effective use of my limited time.

This leads us to…

Tier 2. Taking Smart Notes using a Knowledge Management Engine

Passively reading a text might be fun, but to recall information usefully, you have to take notes. However, like most people, I had to learn that I had been taking notes wrong my whole life. Luckily, there was a better way. 

My friends mentioned the book How To Take Smart Notes, and how it was pivotal to their lives. I found the book so compelling that I even gave a speech about it at one of my Toastmasters clubs. From there, I learned about Obsidian.md, which is a software tool for managing notes. Using this tool, I started my first “Personal Knowledge Engine”, using the Zettelkasten Method (German for ‘slip box’).

Ali Abdaal’s video does a great job of summarizing the key ideas of Taking Smart Notes. Here are a few key excerpts:

1. Capture Ideas Immediately, because “brains are for having ideas, not storing them.” – Ali Abdaal
2. Connect concepts by relation, not by categories. Your brain is a neural network — a web — and we can mimic its structure in our notes.
3. Instead of thinking in terms of “fields” of study, think in terms of ideas. It’s better to make a note about a raw idea, and link to it inside of other notes.

Here is what my note collection looked like after several months:

Above: Obsidian’s graph view does a great job of showing the relation between ideas. Grouping ideas in this way helps generate new insights by allowing you to follow the threads of thought that logically connect each idea. The coloured nodes are notes, and they are linked to each other like a Wiki.

Taking notes using this method has drastically improved my ability to recall information. For the first time, I am actually able to remember what I read for longer than a month, and use it to generate new insights. The system works well, and it creates a natural kind of spaced repetition. I rediscover useful concepts as I create new notes, which helps my information recall even when physically away from my references.

In the past, when I read books, I’d at least try and take useful notes. Over time, this mindfulness improved my ability to sift through text for meaning. Because books are filled with argumentation, analysis, and sourcing, they are great for exploring all angles of an issue. However, this means that it takes longer to extract their key ideas. By creating smart notes, extracting pure ideas became my primary reason for reading; summarizing has slowly become a practiced skill.

We have explored seeking information and taking good notes, but there is a further tier to reach. If I want to improve my recall, information parsing, and the usefulness of the entire enterprise, I would have to eventually turn my notes into something public.

Tier 3: “Ideas unshared are worthless”: Information has to be published in order to be useful to others.

Recently, I realized that although I was making notes, I wasn’t publishing anything. Information that felt obvious to me might still be to useful to others, especially if I wanted people to understand my thoughts. Therefore, my attention finally shifted toward how I could create something useful from what I was discovering.

Today, I discovered Holden Karnofsky’s brilliant post Learning by Writing. It advocates investigating new ideas through briefly researching them, then writing a tentative worldview on the topic, then updating it as new information is learned. Instead of trying to search an entire topic before creating a work, and thus never writing anything, you write an initial hypothesis based on available information. This hypothesis is then scrutinized in an attempt to refute or modify it. As the author’s thought process is transparent, the reader benefits from seeing how ideas are updated incrementally. This is a more realistic picture of how knowledge is refined, and lets the author start writing right away.

This seems to solve the problem of endlessly seeking in a Tier 1 pattern, without having anything to show for it. It also focuses the search toward finding information to answer specific questions, allowing the notes generated in Tier 2 to be employed as part of the writing process. Writing specifically to answer key questions requires obtaining a holistic picture of a topic, focusing on arguments for and against something. It mandates staying focused and seeking only relevant information.

What strikes me is that the method could be useful right away. Part of the reason I haven’t written many posts is because I have ideas sitting around as drafts, but I don’t feel they’re good enough yet to publish. On the other hand, done is better than perfect. It certainly didn’t occur to me that I could publish what I knew about something so far, while publicly acknowledging that my views were likely to update with more information — and that doing this was okay! Rather than holding myself to some unrealistic standard of perfection, I’ll learn more quickly by trying out Holden’s method.

Let this post mark my desire to switch into Tier 3. This post itself is me “writing my stream of consciousness, however imperfect”, rather than aiming for perfection. I’d like to update this blog more often, and have it reflect the growth of my ideas and knowledge over time. I want to share what I learn, and there is no better time to start than now.

Acknowledgement to M. Stockdale and Krystal Anderson-Gosselin for editing assistance.

On Multipotentialism

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It was the middle of the Canadian winter, my car would not start, and I was going to be late.

At -25oC, mechanical failure was the motif of the last week. This morning was no different. I had uselessly shovelled my way to the dead car, and not wanting to waste any more time, I ran the remaining 2 km to my lab through the snow.

It is difficult to arrive at a job you hate in good spirits, especially after almost falling through a snowbank next to a highway. As I aired out my wet socks in the breakroom, I began to question my career choices. Before, my research had purpose. In comparison, industry benchwork felt hollow and mundane.

I left that job shortly after and plunged into career uncertainty.

A period followed of unabashed exploration into new areas I hadn’t considered before. I dove into public speaking. I created perfumes for a First Nations art project. I joined the local library and exposed myself to customer service. I taught myself programming and IT, and then spent two years as a computer service technician. I even landed a paid gig playing piano at a local café.

Through these experiences, I developed a range of skills. But the longer it went on, the more I felt I was betraying my roots. My formerly clear path became tangled and the future shrouded itself in a fog of uncertainty.

It’s Time to Choose

"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

Emilie Wapnick poses this familiar question in her TED Talk. She identified our societal trope of the “one true calling”, that if we just find our specialty — some established job that we are uniquely equipped to do — that our life plan will materialize before our eyes. For those who are unhappy in their career, it would mean they have not identified their true calling. But could another possibility exist? Could some people find the model of one career — coupled with side hobbies — unsatisfactory? Wapnick’s speech spoke to me. It identified a pattern of behaviour that I have seen in myself: that of obsessive interest in and deep research into a new endeavor, followed by a period of disillusionment, before repeating with an unrelated topic.

Wapnick coined the term multipotentialite: someone with many — often unrelated — interests and skills. On Puttylike.com, Wapnick notes that multipotentialites struggle with:

  • Finding work that incorporates their diverse skillset,
  • Defining themselves by one role, due to its incomplete description of their abilities,
  • Their need to explore being at odds with a clear career direction.

I felt these describe me.

Throughout my life, my interests are strongest when I am the one to choose them. As a child, my favourite books were encyclopedias. I enjoyed turning to a random page and riding the curiosity train wherever it led. My teenage years included interest in video games, drawing and painting, taking fixed-wing aircraft and piano lessons, along with teaching myself basic Parkour. After completing a certification in group fitness instruction in my early twenties, I decided to complete my science degree. I gave up volunteering in the local emergency services to make time for my studies, yet another avenue for skill building. I still continue to work casually at the local library, and recently have picked up modelling in Blender.

I realize that while I do centralize around several core interests, fitting myself into any one career or lifestyle box is scary. But why is that scary? At its core, the difficulty could be a mismatch between what we want out of life and the feeling that we must be what others want us to be. Is the uncertainty of this unorthodox path worth it?

There is good news for people like us. Multipotentialites have what David Epstein calls range. In his book, he outlines case studies that demonstrate how an individual’s cognitive flexibility is a key factor in their success. Wapnick and Epstein both agree that a generalist is uniquely suited for idea generation, adaptability and original insight. In the dynamic modern world, this interdomain skillset gives them an edge over the specialist.

Coming to Terms

The moment of silence before a presentation. The hum of a projector. Two classes in one room.

It was 2017, and my industrial chemistry class’s final project was an inter-departmental collaboration. For the past two months, I had consulted with a team of business students, combining a chemical technology proposal with a business plan. It was my turn to give the science part of the presentation. Science undergraduates, not yet in the throes of graduate school, might not be expected to have a confident presentation style. I was different: I was also a Toastmaster. Thanks to that outside public speaking experience, I fit right in alongside my business student colleagues. We ended the presentation to vigorous celebration, our point clearly communicated. The room had bought our idea.

Looking back now, this moment was a great example of the power of professional overlap. Technological feasibility aside, an idea is only worth as much as its implementation. If those with resources cannot be convinced of its potential, it won’t happen. The class project was a theoretical exercise in collaboration, but it was a good lesson in the value of interdisciplinary sales.

These days, having seen Wapnick’s speech and read Range, I have the mindset that every new experience will aid my overall adaptability. Having seen the inside of multiple industries, I have observed that those within every industry believe that theirs has some difficulty not present in others. Sure, the specific day-to-day parameters may change, but the skill ceiling within any industry is infinite. With that in mind, whatever new skill, career change or exercise scares you, don’t be afraid of it. Just learn what you need to know to break into it.

Over the years, I have seen both straight shooters and meanderers who are unhappy with their positions. For every multipotentialite worried that they don’t have a clear job history, there seems an equal number of people who wish they chose something else.

The multipotentialite’s value is adaptability. Knowing there is a community who does not fit into the traditional career makes me less inclined to believe there is something wrong with me. In a society that stresses specialization, let us be aware that there are alternatives. As Marcus Aurelius said, “Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight”.

Acknowledgement to my friend Krystal Anderson-Gosselin for her contributions to this piece.

A Taste of Chemical Research – Macrocylic Ligands for Imaging Inflammation (2016)

Chemistry is the one with the shapes. That one that everyone seems to hate in high school. I’m not sure why people claim to dislike it though.  In chemistry, you get to bend nature to your will, designing new substances, materials and applying physics in a practical sense. It’s pretty cool that I’m starting to get close to the point in which I actually get to be a real scientist, doing research! It’s amazing how far I’ve come since I was a kid. As part of this journey, I recently had the opportunity to work with a real scientist on his research project.

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1. The research lab in which we work.

As an undergraduate, it is very important to try and get research experience. Graduates who have such experience generally have an advantage when it comes to looking for work. In the last two weeks, I have been very fortunate to come under the mentoring of Dean, a PhD student in Chemistry. He noticed that I was trying to determine the city water’s lead concentration by myself in a lab one day, and invited me to help him with his research. Now I am lucky enough to have one on one experience with him, which I will document as part of this website.

He is trying to develop more effective ways to visualize inflammation within the human body. Right now, methods to do this are specific to different types of inflammation. Ideally, the end result might be a solution you can inject into a patient that will image a greater range of inflammation sources than we currently have.

Currently, we attach one or more carrier molecules (ligand complexes) to a radioactive metal isotope and inject the ligand-metal complexes into the body, where they interact with and accumulate at sites of inflammation. The isotope emits positrons, which annihilate with electrons within the body, producing gamma rays which we can detect with a gamma camera. This forms an image of the inflammation site.

This research will be important in improving the amount of inflammation that can be visualized. The part where I come in is to help synthesize the ligands so we can test them. Where will this be done? In a STEMIST laboratory of course.

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2. My notebook, detailing the reagents (chemicals) involved, the conditions, risk assessment and the procedure to follow.

Organic chemistry is basically molecular architecture. Once you have reached the point where you understand that all normal matter is made of atoms, you can rearrange them to make new substances. How do we do this? We take collections of atoms, either elemental substances (just one type of atom) or compounds (mixtures of atoms bound together in specific ways) and rearrange their structures. We can add them together, separate them, and exchange pieces of these compounds around to make new ones, and hence, new substances. In practice, this usually means mixing compounds and elements in specific proportions, and subjecting them to heating, cooling, stirring, pressure or electricity. Chemists, really, are engineers of matter itself.

When I got to the lab, we first had to develop a plan for what we should work on. We decided to start at the beginning and build a target ligand using starting materials. The whole synthesis will probably take a few weeks, so this post is detailing the first step of the process.

We searched up an example of the reaction we wanted to do on SciFinder, and looked over the procedure. I wrote the basic outline of the given procedure in my notebook to use as a reference. The starting material for this reaction is pyridine-2,6-dicarboxylic acid, a molecule that has a number of hazards associated with it. So, as per protocol in chemistry, a risk assessment must be completed.

I like to joke that chemistry is one of the few majors that can kill you. After all, to my knowledge, no one has ever died due to math overdose! However, all experiments are quite safe as long as the risks associated are managed with correct containment, personal protective equipment (PPE) and training.

After the risk assessment and plan were completed, I started the experiment. The first thing to do was to weigh out the required mass in grams of pyridine-2,6-dicarboxylic acid. Dean showed me a useful trick in using paper to create a small funnel to protect the rim of the round bottom flask. You want minimize any losses of mass, and also prevent potentially corrosive substances from connecting to other flasks at their joints. We joked that things like this are never mentioned in lab manuals in undergraduate classes, and are things you pick up with experience. It’s great to be working with an experienced chemist!

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3. On the left, a top-pan balance for general weighing. On the right, a more accurate analytical balance used for weighing masses down to approximately a ten thousandth of a gram.

With the weighing completed, the starting material was poured into a 250 mL round bottom flask and taken to a fume hood. The fume hood directs airflow into itself and acts as blast shield and spill container to protect the worker — in this case, mainly me. I suspended the flask above a hotplate and oil bath for heating. Following this, I added methanol (MeOH, 100 mL) and H2SO4 (5 mL) to the flask, as well as a stir bar. Then a condenser (a tube with water flowing through it to cool reaction gasses, turning them to liquid again and returning them to the solution) was placed on top. This reaction contraption was to complete my reaction over 2 days by itself, once the heating and stirring was turned on and stabilized.

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4. My reaction is on the left, Dean’s is on the right. Thermometers help monitor the actual temperature of the reaction.

With the reaction heated to 80 degrees Celsius (353.15 K), the molecules in the flask would have enough kinetic energy to smash together, exchanging electrons, breaking and forming new bonds. The reaction was then left for 45 hours. Following this, the heat was turned off. Once the flask had cooled to more or less room temperature, the solvent was evaporated off using a rotary evaporator. This machine creates a low pressure atmosphere, also heating and rotating the mixture. The lower the pressure, the less temperature is required to boil substance a substance (boiling is when a substance’s vapor pressure equals atmospheric pressure). As organic solvents have a low boiling point, this is achieved at the low temperatures of a warm water bath.

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5. The rotary evaporator in the lab. The green clip secured my reaction flask containing product (on the right) to the rotating chamber. Solvent is condensed and collects in the flask on the left.

With the solvent gone, we have a mixture that contains mostly product (what we are trying to synthesize during the reaction), but also a number of unreacted starting reagents. To remove these, we need to do what chemists call an extraction. I took the flask to my bench and set up the required apparatus.

Basically, we can exploit the Earth’s gravitational field to assist with separating mixtures. By adding another solvent, dichloromethane (DCM), we dissolve our organic product, making a solution of DCM and organics. There are also water soluble contaminants that we don’t want, so we can add water to dissolve those. DCM, containing our product, is denser than water, so gravity makes it sink to the bottom. Therefore, the water layer sits on top. To make sure the product is as much in the DCM layer as we can make it be, we shake the flask, making sure to vent out the pressure buildup. Dean taught me a good method of doing this. He analogized that you must “shake it like a baby”. You want it to mix as much as possible, but you don’t want an emulsion to form, so you have to also be slightly gentle. One on one instruction like this is definitely superior to group lab sessions.

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6. Separatory funnel containing the opaque DCM layer with the product on the bottom, and the clear water layer on the top.

The DCM layer was removed into a conical flask. The remaining water layer still might have some product and DCM in it, so the extraction with water was repeated 2 more times. NaOH, a base, was also added to neutralize any remaining acid from the beginning of the reaction.

We’ve almost got a pure product! After the extractions were completed, the DCM layers (separate washings) need to be “dried” with solid sodium sulphate (Na2SO4). The Na2SO4 is physically added to the solution to absorb any water present into itself. This solid is hydroscopic, meaning that water is attracted to it. Once the solid is filtered out through a filter paper + funnel combination, we should have a largely pure product contained within water-free DCM. Now we just put each flask back on the rotary evaporator (also known as “rotor vapping” it) to remove the DCM, leaving us with pure product!

Now, how do we know the mass of the product alone, without the flask, if the flask must be weighed as well? Well, at the start of the experiment the clean round bottom flask was weighed, so we just subtract its weight from our totals. The masses of the products collected in each washing were added together, giving a final mass of product of 6.0265 g. This is a yield of 94.05% of what we expected to get given the mass we started with! The SciFinder literature says their yield was 96%. So I did excellent!

Now what must be done is characterize the product. We can use different analytical techniques to confirm that we indeed have the product we wanted. I’ve definitely learned more small tricks in the last week than I would in any typical lab practical in class. I’ll be going back into the lab tomorrow to characterize the product, making sure it is indeed what we are after. Stay tuned!

IMG_20160721_134554    7. The final product, dimethyl 2,6-pyridinedicarboxylate (6.03 g, 94% yield).

 

 

Cemetery Watercourse Microorganisms – part 1

Nearby my Australian town cemetery is a small watercourse. It’s a flowing mass of water molecules and colloids, propelled along the surface of the planet by gravitational force. This churning tends to move useful ions around the environment, making a nice heterogeneous soup of liquid, dissolved gasses and ions. More simply, a lot of water tends to result in a great habitat for life!

Cemetery watercourse 1
Above: Cemetery watercourse. A large amount of vegetation is present.

Given my interest in aquatic microorganisms, I collected a couple of water samples here for the purpose of observation. The location is — according to Wikipedia — a highland subtropical climate, so we’d expect to see common microorganisms that are ubiquitous to freshwater worldwide.

At the sampling site, freshwater algae was visible as green strands of biomass, later identified as masses of filamentous green algae. The samples were both collected from the southern bank via disposable pipettes and dispensed into sample containers and labelled. The first sample contained some of the algae that was visible to the naked eye, while the other contained some of the silt from the bank.

Cemetary Samples

The sample on the left (sample 1) contains a small amount of the algal filaments, and was taken from the water directly next to the bank. The sample on the right (sample 2) contains evidence of silt and muddy water. I expect there to be lots of photosynthetic organisms in the sunlit waters of sample 1. Usually I can find lots of small protists swimming around the cover of larger organisms and plants.

Sample 1 contains what appears to be cyanobacteria — prokaryotic organisms that are capable of using solar radiation to produce energy. It is of interest to me that organisms like this produce most of the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen.

Above: Cyanobacteria at 400x. The individual cells form long chains.
Above: Cyanobacteria at 400x magnification. The individual cells form long chains. There is also a single-celled eukaryotic algae species visible, which also is capable of photosynthesis.

The cyanobacteria form long collections of individual cells. These filaments easily bundle up into enormous swaths of biomass. Within each cell are thylakoid compartments, which contain the biochemical machinery required to produce ATP. This process uses green-pigmented chlorophyll molecules, which absorb photons emitted from the sun to provide the energy required to do this. Now, all this is assuming that these cells are indeed a species of cyanobacteria. However, given their green and segmented appearance, it is probable that this is the case. There exists several different biochemical tests that could confirm this, such as API ID strips, if we really wanted to be sure.

Very similar to the cyanobacteria are the large filamentous algae. They also form long chains of cells, but are much larger, and each cell has membrane-bound organelles. The filaments tend to bunch up in large collections of biomass that are visible to the naked eye.

Above: Filamentous algae at 400x magnification. These cells are much larger and more complex than the cyanobacteria.
Above: Filamentous algae at 400x magnification. These cells are much larger and more complex than the cyanobacteria.

In addition to the above organisms, I also spotted a large number of volvox, which are microorganisms that form colonies of cells. Their flagella face outward, and the overall structure has some level of motility. In other words, it can move around. Below is an image I recorded several months ago that illustrates a volvox colony.

Above: A species of volvox at 100x magnification. Many algal cells live connected together.
Above: A species of volvox at 100x magnification. Many algal cells live connected together.

All these organisms exist on a scale that seems alien and different from our experience. However, we ourselves are familiar with reality on the scale of common measurements such as the metre, the kilogram, and others. It is interesting to think about how consciousness might understand the universe if we ourselves were on the scale of microscopic organisms.

This is part 1. Part 2 will contain more observations and pictures of organisms not described here. Stay tuned for more!

 

 

 

Microbiology

Microscopy is the use of a microscope for the observation of samples. For my observations I use a Luminoptic Binocular Digital Compound Microscope, which has an inbuilt camera which connects to a computer via a USB cable. This allows me to take both pictures and videos, as well as use the conventional optics for ease of viewing. This microscope also has a maximum magnification of 1000x with oil immersion. I generally collect my samples in plastic sample jars, and use slides and cover slips.

— Christian