Lovelace×Aurelius

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on STUDY HALL: Ada Lovelace and Marcus Aurelius, on On what they got wrong as a student that took years to unlearn.
2. 00:10
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   I believed for the longest time that cleverness was the thing. That if one could simply calculate faster, perceive patterns more acutely, hold more variables in mind simultaneously, one would arrive at truth. I was dreadfully proud of my facility with mathematics.
3. 00:27
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   Pride in intellect. Yes, I knew this also.
4. 00:31
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   It took me years to understand that the Analytical Engine, powerful as it might be, could only work upon what we gave it. Babbage and I would have the most ferocious arguments about this. He thought the machine's capabilities were the marvel. I came to see the marvel was in asking the right questions of it.
5. 00:50
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   The tool is neutral. The hand that directs it, the mind that chooses the task, these contain the difficulty.
6. 00:58
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Precisely! But I was perhaps twenty-three, twenty-four before I truly grasped it. I'd been trained by my mother, you understand, to worship mathematics as a corrective. She feared I'd inherited my father's poetical madness, so she prescribed algebra as one might prescribe a tonic.
7. 01:17
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   Ah. The cure became the disease.
8. 01:20
   Ada Lovelaceshare moment

   Well, not disease exactly, but I mistook the medicine for health itself. I thought computational power was wisdom. What did you believe wrongly?
9. 01:30
   Marcus Aureliusshare moment

   That there was a correct way to be. That virtue had a shape I must force myself into, like armor.
10. 01:36
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    You? But you wrote the Meditations, you're the very model of, forgive me, philosophical composure.
11. 01:43
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I wrote those reminders to myself because I needed reminding. As a young man studying with my tutors, I believed the Stoics described a kind of man I must become. Unbending. Unmoved. I practiced hardness.
12. 01:59
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That sounds rather admirable, actually.
13. 02:02
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    It was pride wearing philosophy's clothes. I was not training myself to accept what comes. I was training myself to prove I was stronger than what comes. Do you see the difference?
14. 02:13
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I'm not certain I do. Isn't strength rather the point?
15. 02:17
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Strength to endure, yes. But I sought strength to conquer, to demonstrate superiority over circumstance. When my children died, when plague came, I had believed my philosophy would make me impervious to grief. It did not. I grieved terribly.
16. 02:37
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Oh. Yes, I see now.
17. 02:39
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The philosophy I had learned as armor, I had to unlearn and learn again as acceptance. Not hardness but flexibility. Not standing unmoved but bending and straightening again.
18. 02:51
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    How long did that take you? The unlearning?
19. 02:53
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I am not certain I completed it before I died. Decades, certainly. And you? When did you understand that cleverness was not enough?
20. 03:02
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I was translating Menabrea's memoir on the Engine, adding my own notes. Note G, the one with the Bernoulli numbers algorithm, everyone makes such a fuss about it now. But while I was working it out, I realized I could describe how to calculate the sequence, but I couldn't tell you why anyone would want to. The machine could process it perfectly. But to what end?
21. 03:25
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Purpose is not in the calculation.
22. 03:27
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Exactly so! And I'd spent my whole girlhood believing that if I could just solve the equation, master the method, I'd have achieved something. But mathematics without application is merely exercise. Beautiful exercise, I grant you, but still.
23. 03:44
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    This troubles you still. I hear it in your voice.
24. 03:47
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Does it? I suppose it does. Because I was raised to believe my father was the dangerous one, you see. Byron, all passion and poetry and poor decisions. And my mother was safety, rationality, mathematical certainty. But they were both incomplete, weren't they? I needed to learn both languages.
25. 04:09
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The mind and the heart speak to each other, or the person is at war with himself.
26. 04:14
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yes! Though I do resist the notion that mathematics is merely mind and poetry merely heart. There's poetry in a well-constructed algorithm.
27. 04:24
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    I do not doubt it. I knew little mathematics. But I knew that logic alone made men cruel. They would reason their way to justifying anything. The heart must be consulted.
28. 04:35
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Did you find your tutors taught you this? Or did you have to discover it against their instruction?
29. 04:41
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Both. Apollonius taught me not to be impressed by trick philosophy, by men who made a show of virtue. That was useful. But he and the others also taught me to admire hardness, to see sensitivity as weakness. That I had to unlearn.
30. 04:59
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    My tutors were much the same. Mary Somerville, dear Mary, she understood both the science and the soul. But Augustus De Morgan, brilliant as he was, he treated mathematics as if it were a fortress to defend rather than a territory to explore. He wanted proofs, rigor, absolute certainty.
31. 05:20
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    And you wanted?
32. 05:21
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I wanted to see what might be possible. I wanted to imagine what the Engine could do if we asked different questions of it. Music, perhaps. Complex pattern-weaving. Things that hadn't been reduced to number yet. De Morgan thought I was being fanciful.
33. 05:37
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The teacher cannot always see what the student will need to know. They teach from where they stand.
34. 05:43
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That's generous of you. I was rather bitter about it for some time.
35. 05:47
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Bitterness is a stage. It is not a destination. I was bitter about many of my teachers' lessons. Then I understood they gave what they had.
36. 05:57
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    But surely some of what we're taught is actively wrong, not merely incomplete? My mother taught me to fear imagination itself, as if it were a contagion.
37. 06:07
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. Some teaching is wrong. But often the wrongness comes from the teacher's own fear, not from malice. Your mother feared for you.
38. 06:16
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    She did. My father's reputation was, well, you can imagine. She thought she was saving me.
39. 06:22
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    And instead she gave you a different cage to escape. We cannot blame her and also recognize the cage as a cage.
40. 06:29
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I'm not certain I've escaped it entirely even now. Even in death, I suppose, though that's rather absurd to say aloud.
41. 06:37
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The patterns we learn early are the hardest to see. They feel like truth itself. Like the shape of the world.
42. 06:45
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Yes! That's it exactly. I thought my attraction to metaphor, to poetical thinking, was a flaw to be suppressed. It took me until I was working on the Notes to realize it was actually essential to what I was trying to do. The imaginative leap, the analogy, these weren't decorations on the mathematics. They were how I found my way through.
43. 07:06
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    The thing you were taught to suppress was the thing you needed most.
44. 07:10
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    Precisely. And by the time I understood that, I'd spent so many years fighting against myself. What a waste of energy.
45. 07:18
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Not waste. Necessary confusion. You could not arrive at understanding without first traveling through misunderstanding. This is the path.
46. 07:29
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    You're very forgiving of the process. I'm less patient with myself.
47. 07:32
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Impatience with yourself is another thing to unlearn. I spent many years angry at my own limitations. It achieved nothing. The limitations remained. The anger added only suffering.
48. 07:46
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    But surely some dissatisfaction is useful? It drives improvement, innovation?
49. 07:51
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Dissatisfaction with circumstances, yes. This can motivate change. But dissatisfaction with the self, with the pace of one's own understanding, this only creates noise. It makes it harder to hear what you actually need to learn.
50. 08:07
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    I wish I'd known that at twenty. I might have been kinder to myself.
51. 08:12
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    At twenty you could not have heard it. Some lessons require the years.
52. 08:16
    Ada Lovelaceshare moment

    That's rather unsatisfying, you know. As an answer.
53. 08:20
    Marcus Aureliusshare moment

    Yes. Truth often is.