#38 Ali Almossawi: Thinking in Algorithms

My guest for this short episode of The Knowledge Project is a man who wears many hats. Ali Almossawi is a San Francisco-based author of books on critical thinking and computer science education, and the creator of An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. He is also a principal engineer at Apple and was formerly employed as a data visualization engineer by Mozilla. His books have been read by 3 million readers, translated into 20 languages, and have sold over a quarter million copies in print. This interview is only 20 minutes along, but there was a lot I wanted to cover, so we move pretty fast. Specifically, we cover: The unique format Ali chooses when writing a book to help people understand the concepts more deeply The place for empathy in algorithmic thinking and how we can be more empathetic in our daily interactions with each other Ali’s note taking process and how he tracks the ideas and topics he’d like to explore Ali’s daily routine and the “algorithms” he uses to make the most of his day The single habit that has the most profound impact on Ali’s day to day The cost/benefit of sharing on social media and the impact it has on society as a whole And more. If you’ve ever wanted to improve the way you process information, think more clearly and make better decisions, you won’t want to miss this interview. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Shane Parrish?

  Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish and this is The Knowledge Project, the show that explores the ideas, methods, and mental models that help you expand your mind, discover your curiosity, and master the best of what other people have already figured out. Today's episode is a bit different than what we normally do. We're in the middle of summer, so I thought I'd experiment with a short version of our podcast. Normally, our podcast ranges from anywhere 45 minutes all the way up into two hours. Today's show is going to be a bit different. We're going to cut it down to 15 minutes. A full, unedited version is available for members of our learning community. If you're not a member, you can sign up at fs.blog/tribe. Today's guest is Ali Almossawi, the San Francisco-based

• 0:49Shane Parrish?

  author of An Illustrated Guide to Bad Arguments and Bad Choices. He's going to help us better understand our logical fallacies. Okay, let's dive in.

• 1:10Shane Parrish?

  What ideas would you say you've changed your mind on in the last few years that you maybe used to believe and you've updated, or you've significantly changed your algorithm for how you approach them?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  You know, when I first got into publishing, I fell into it because I'd produced this, put together this website, Bad Arguments, and then we talked about how it might work as a book. And then I went ahead and printed it as a book. And I didn't realize that by shifting the medium from a website to a book, that the audience would change for that project, and the expectations would change. And all of a sudden, the connections with people were different. It's much more active when there's a book in between you and somebody else. So that's something I didn't quite know a lot about four years ago, and I've

• 2:04Speaker 01

  come to appreciate and really enjoy over the past few years. I didn't realize that publishing, or I should say more generally, that the medium plays such a huge... It's so important to how you approach a problem, but also how you explain something and how you interact with various people. So that's something I've grown, you know, I appreciate, I've grown more appreciative of.

• 2:32Shane Parrish?

  I'm super curious, can you expand on some of the things that changes maybe with the expectation or with the audience? How did the audience change?

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so with the website, I mean, especially if you're coming from, say, an open source background, with a website, you put something out there and it's more often than not free. And then someone comes across it and if they like it, they like it, they might share it. And if they don't like it, you know, one of two things can happen, either they don't do anything or they might submit, you know, a contribution to you. They'll say, I came across this particular thing that I, that is not quite working or is not accurate and you should fix it. Or better yet, here is the fix. So there is that kind of dynamic between the creator and the audience. Whereas with, so, and crucially, there is, it's the the pro, the artifact is always a work in progress. Whereas I came to learn that with

• 3:22Speaker 01

  a book, there is this perception that a book is the culmination of, you know, of an effort. And maybe rightfully so for historical reasons, that's, that's how it's always been. But, but with, with bad arguments, for instance, I tried to break that model a bit by maintaining the open source project. So there's the book in print and then there's the book online. And it was interesting to see kind of how, you know, how that dynamic shifted and changed. Even the publisher who picked up the book in the beginning weren't too sure that it was going to work, having these two projects, you know, side by side. But slowly, you know, there were people buying the book. And then at the same time, there were people contributing

• 4:03Speaker 01

  to the book and, you know, trying to improve it and so on. So, so even when I think of the second book on, on algorithms, I like to think of it as kind of one of several iterations that have occurred over the past few years. And it just so happens that this is one that was commercialized. But there's no stopping, you know, others coming after it, you know, either by myself or by others and kind of building up on that idea.

• 4:27Shane Parrish?

  Do you think about going back and editing and revising it? Or do you continually think about moving on to the next project? I guess books are harder to go back.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think with this one, I might have reached the end of the road because I've spent three years on it. I was a bit pigheaded to begin with. I, I tried something that didn't work. I tried something else. I think I spent like $15,000 on it, didn't quite work. I tried something else. So I think I've, I've spent about three years, or I had spent about three years on this project. And, and I feel there's, you know, there is a point where you get diminishing returns. And I think that's kind of the point that I'm at right now. So I, I am looking, I'm kind of currently working on another project that I'm hoping to spend about six months on and then maybe have it in draft form by the end of the year.

• 5:14Shane Parrish?

  What's that project? Can you talk about that?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's still very nascent, so I don't have it. It's not really developed or materialized or anything, but the, the general concept is, or the theme is empathy. You know, how can we explain, how can we, yeah, how do you convey empathy in a way that's not been done before? So you find attempts at, at doing that in various children's books. There are, you know, various people have done research on the topic and have, in some cases, published books. So I thought of just taking all that material and seeing if there's some, something else that could be done with that.

• 5:48Shane Parrish?

  It's interesting, kind of the dichotomy between algorithmic thinking and empathy, you know, because we don't presume that algorithms have any empathy and it's just kind of raw, rational horsepower versus considering more angles or the other person's perspectives like we would with an empathetic point of view.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, that's a great connection. And also, I mean, you see it in other places as well, in, in design, in coding. Anytime you're thinking about the audience, right? Or considering where the audience might be, or whether this particular control that you've designed on screen is something that somebody could use without much struggle. You know, that's, that's a manifestation of empathy. So I think you see, it's not only the obvious definition of, you know, somebody not bullying somebody else or kind of, you know, giving someone their lunch money or so on, but also I think you see it in all other kinds of fields as well.

• 6:41Shane Parrish?

  How would you define empathy as a, as a broad category?

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I think I would say, again, it's, it all depends on your vantage and your circumstances and where you're coming from, but I think one way is to, is to, is to recognize people. I think, so, so one idea I had for this project that I don't think is going to work, but it's something I had early on, was to have a book where the character of interest is not the protagonist, but is somebody else in the background. So you, you follow the story to the very end and then you, and then you find out at the end that this, that the story is actually about the secondary character that you can only barely see in the background. So I think that's part of empathy, is kind of recognizing people and things that are not always easily recognizable or seen or acknowledged.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  But, yeah, doing that and also not being too focused on, on the obvious, kind of having more heart when looking at the world. And, yeah, those are all factors that I think play, play into it.

• 7:41Shane Parrish?

  I wish you well with that mission. How would you kind of go about teaching empathy to people?

• 7:46Speaker 02

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• 7:48Shane Parrish?

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• 8:16Speaker 03

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• 8:41Speaker 01

  I like this category of books where it looks like it's for a, you know, it looks like the book is for a child, but actually it's for an adult. So that's kind of the approach that I've taken with the previous two or three projects. And I think I would like to kind of stay in that category and see if we can do something within the same framework with this, with this new idea. And I think it's very effective when you combine illustrations and prose and kind of the, the physical packaging of the product. It's, it's, it's not only been enjoyable for me to kind of work with, with those various components, but I think they also, they also are very effective. It's, it's a good way to reach various people and people still go to bookshops. So that's, that's good.

• 9:25Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, for now, hopefully it continues that way. Would, would you describe yourself as a very habitual person?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  As in I have routines, daily routines and so on?

• 9:35Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, almost like an algorithm for life.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  You know, it depends with some things I am, I'm very respective of time. I try to be very, I try to have my, my time planned out, planned out. And if, if I'm meeting with someone, I'm, I'm there on the dot. If I am, if I want to get something done, I'll impose deadlines on myself. But then with other things, not so much. So if I'm going out for a walk, I'll just go out for a walk and it could be, it could be half an hour, it could be an hour and a half. So it depends, I say on, it depends.

• 10:10Shane Parrish?

  What would you say the smallest habit that you have that has the biggest leverage or most positively impacts your life?

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Well, I would say again, time, respect for time is hugely important because once you, I mean, it's, it's a finite resource and we don't realize it sometimes until it's too late, right? Either we fall sick and then we, we realize it or something changes in our life or we switch jobs or we, you know, something happens with family. But I think just, just time, being, being cognizant of time, how much time there is in the day, you know, how many hours you've spent on various things, that helps a lot. At least it's been useful for me.

• 10:46Shane Parrish?

  Can we geek out on that for a second? Like, how does that manifest itself in how you live your life?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  So for me, for instance, you know, again, I get up in the morning, I get on the train, it's about an hour to the office. And, you know, what do you do in that hour? You could just watch YouTube videos, you could do nothing, you could listen to an audiobook. These are all decisions that you have to make. And it could be the case that sometimes the audiobook is the most effective thing for that day, or it could be the case that just looking out the window is the most effective thing. And that's been the case for me sometimes. Or maybe just, you know, just listening to what everybody else is talking about in the cabin. So I think, yeah, so you have that one hour, then you have, you make a decision about what you do in that one hour, and how is it affecting everything else that

• 11:36Speaker 01

  might come in that day. So for me, for instance, I have this side project about empathy that's top of mind. And so when I'm sitting on the train, that's, that's the only thing that I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about what can I do right now that will bring me closer to that draft that I would like to have ready in six months' time. And, and again, it could be something obvious, like sketching a scene on a piece of paper, or the back of, you know, my notebook or something, or it could be just, you know, looking at people and seeing how they interact with each other, how people get off the train, how they get on the train, how they sit next to each other, what kind of small talk goes on between them when they're doing that. Just various things, but the, I try to keep, keep all those observations

• 12:20Speaker 01

  and my thinking focused on whatever the short term goal is.

• 12:24Shane Parrish?

  Do you have a notebook that you carry around with you? Like, how do you keep track of all these thoughts?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  I do, yeah. I do have a notebook. I much, I prefer writing in a notebook than on a computer.

• 12:33Shane Parrish?

  And do you review the notebook, or do you just write your thoughts and then kind of go back to it if you're triggered? Or like, how does that process work? How does it get from your, your brain to your notebook into your writing, or your thinking, or updating your algorithms?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do. I go through my notebook all the time and it's always nice going through older notes because often you find that you wrote down a lot of things that didn't make sense at the time, but now, you know, because of a change in context or different circumstances, all of a sudden that idea that you had three years ago, you know, takes on a different form. So I do go through my notes, I don't know, I mean regularly, but I don't know how frequently, but there is this constant going back and seeing what I wrote before, how applicable it is to what I'm doing right now.

• 13:16Shane Parrish?

  How would your thinking change if you listened to a piece of music and you found out afterwards it was constructed by an algorithm just for you?

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Well, the first question I would ask is, you know, what are the inputs to that algorithm? And how did it get access to those inputs? Because, because obviously when you're trying to create a summary of a profile, which is me in this case, you can't rely on all the inputs that are available. You kind of pick and choose. So I'd be interested in kind of knowing what are the things that summarize me? Because I still don't know who I am and I don't think anyone does. I mean, but you kind of know various facets of yourself. So I'd be interested in knowing how the algorithm picked those facets, or if somebody picked them, what the basis for that was. And then also, I think there is a kind of a softer

• 14:10Speaker 01

  kind of thing that I would consider, and that is, you know, do I like the piece of music? And if I do, what does that say about me or the algorithm? But yeah, I'd be, I can't quite remember right now, but I think I've come across someone or somebody or some group of people working on something like that. So it's, yeah.

• 14:30Shane Parrish?

  It doesn't seem too far fetched to think that, you know, the world in some not-so-distant future will take the same kind of base and tailor it to things that we like or dislike based on our past history of liking and disliking to give us more of what the algorithm, I guess, thinks that we want. And in that, I mean, we lose some sort of serendipity and we lose, there's costs, I guess, to that sort of approach. Do you worry about how much data we're leaving online and what that says about us, or what companies will think that it says about us and how that will change the future?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  I mean, absolutely. I mean, that's that's the problem. I remember I used to work for a company where where their their their kind of their slogan was that we care about the user's privacy. And that's and they they valued privacy over everything else, including, you know, features and the ability to acquire data and so on. And then they discovered after, you know, many, many years that the user, the user doesn't care a lot about privacy. You know, we live in a in a time where we post stuff on Instagram, we post stuff on Facebook, a lot of it is personal stuff and photos. So there's been a shift in how we we we view things that were in the past, super private, right? You'd never share a picture of your, say, of yourself with with with friends, maybe, or with family members.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Or or maybe there was some other stuff that you would never put online, but now it's it's all fair game. I mean, you're putting it out there on your LinkedIn profile, on Facebook, on on Twitter, on Instagram. And Twitter is the worst because you have this constant stream of updates that people are sharing. And sometimes you don't recognize how much you're revealing

• 16:08Speaker 01

  in those places. But at the same time, you are benefiting from those from sharing those, and that's why people do them, right? You get likes and that makes you feel good. And you get retweets, you you get connections to various people that you would have otherwise, you know, come across. So there is, there is a cost, as you say, and and I think the the question should be, is that cost worth it? And for some people, they decide that it's not worth it, so they're not on any of those platforms. And for some people, they decide that there is, there is no cost, so they they go all out on those platforms. And then I think for for a lot of people, they're somewhere in between where they they caught, you know, they consciously decide what to post on these various platforms. And and yeah, and I think it depends on the depends on the person.

• 16:49Shane Parrish?

  Where on that continuum do you fall?

• 16:52Speaker 01

  You know, I'm fairly, I'm fairly introverted. I'm not very, I'm not not particularly active when it comes to sharing stuff. So I think if, yeah, I I I usually post things that have to do with projects rather than with me. So on on on Twitter, Instagram, I think there are some photos that I've taken on the road on Instagram. But otherwise, it's mostly to do with any output that I have that I think is of interesting. But I have to say, even even for me, I've not quite cracked those those platforms, and maybe I'm not the the target audience for them because I don't, I don't quite. I'm not quite excited by, I'm not really excited by the thought of sharing things and and kind of being always in the, under the spotlight. I much prefer, you know, spending

• 17:35Speaker 01

  a year working on something in the dark and then kind of presenting it after that and then seeing how it's perceived and how we can improve it and then going back for another year and then working on something else and then coming back. So, so for that type of person, I think social media is a bit challenging. But again, you know, there are a few people I follow who are brilliant at kind of, you know, sharing information and being very, you know, useful and interesting. And it all depends on, on your personality, I suppose.

• 18:05Shane Parrish?

  I like that. It sounds like you're more professional, less personal, and that maps to how you are as a person. I want to end with a philosophical question, which is if you could have everybody in the world have a topic that they discussed over dinner on any given day, say, Sunday, what would that topic be? And what would the question, the leading question or the first question that you think everybody should start with?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  That's a tough one. Yeah, I think the question that you, the question that you asked me earlier is, is one that, that gave me, you know, some pause. I think it would be useful to ask, and that's, what's one thing that you changed your, your mind about today or this past week? It's, it's not easy to change, to change your mind, it turns out, because for various reasons, we kind of, it becomes part of our identity sometimes, our thoughts. So it's separating ourselves from our thoughts is not always that easy. So I would ask, what is one thing that you, over the past week, maybe you, that you changed your, that you changed your mind on?

• 19:08Shane Parrish?

  I agree with that. I mean, I asked the question, too. I think it's a great question. Ali, listen, this has been, this has been a great interview, great conversation. I want to thank you for your time and thanks for coming on the show.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

• 19:28Shane Parrish?

  Hey guys, this is Shane again. Just a few more things before we wrap up. You can find show notes at farnamstreetblog.com/podcast. That's F-A-R-N-A-M-S-T-R-E-E-T-B-L-O-G.com/podcast. You can also find information there on how to get a transcript. And if you'd like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food, go to farnamstreetblog.com/newsletter. This is all the good stuff I've found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends, books I'm reading, and so much more. Thank you for listening.