January 23

(Me sneaking math into my diary – so I quickly explain this exercise.) The goal was to find the “ranking” of every elephant. A biologist recorded which elephant has a social-connection to which other elephant. To measure how strong the connection from elephant A to B is, you measure, how much effort elephant A spends for elephant B. Then you can plot this in a graph like this one on the right. Given such a graph, you can then calculate the score of each elephant (here I’m obviously simplifying a bit).

Then for the second part of this exercise, we had another model. The difference being: Assume, there was another elephant, with whom every other elephant shares a social-connection. This “other elephant” is the group. And for the strength of the connection to the “group”-elephant, you just measure how much effort an elephant gives for the group. Which I think is quite an interesting approach of modeling a society (or societal structure).

Now another important thing to mention, is that with changing the strength of any bond, all ranks of all elephants are being affected. For example, if elephant 2 suddenly gets a stronger connection to elephant one, this will have an impact on the social-rank of elephant 4. Even though elephant 2 and 4 are not (directly) connected.

So this all got me thinking. How would I model this for humans? Mainly: What is the point of a husband / wife; or best friend given such a model? Now, I haven’t done the math to back this up, (or the social experiment to check if such a model would even hold for humans) but I’m quite sure, if you have a wife/husband/best friend, to whom you have a strong connection, it strengthens your social-status. And I think this is quite interesting to think about.

If you take it one step further: In the elephant example, we had an individual which represented the group, and I think you can even have such “group-elephants” with humans. These would be for example friend groups. Or on a larger scale: cities, countries and basically every social group which you can imagine (as long, as you do something for the group, and get something in return).

To sum this up: I believe, it’s quite interesting to think about this. Especially, that if you get a closer connection with anyone, it basically changes the social status of everyone in the whole group.
(Now, I think this is something you also might refer to as the “butterfly effect” but I still have to do the math, to “measure” how strong this effect really is.)

Enough of elephants – Studying Battle Plan

In the evening I did not really do anything interesting. Some more studying and watching YouTube. But I did have a thought pop up in my head about studying. As you may know, I’m currently studying for some math exams.

A lot of people, who do not study math that often, think, to learn math, you need to know the theory behind it. In some sense that is true. But only if you really really need to understand it¹. A lot of people don’t really know this, but you don’t really need to know, why it works. In the exam you (usually) get asked to use it. So this means, you get an exercise, and then you need to solve it. For that, you don’t actually need to know all the specifics, of why you are allowed to do it, the way you do. But more importantly is, that you can use it.

So I somewhat shifted my focus now. During the semester we had to solve a lot of exercises. (This means like 3-4 exercises a week – which take about 8-10 hours.) Now, in these exercises, you get to (have to) use what they told us in the lecture. That means, if you can solve every exercise, you basically know most of the lectures. Because of that, I’m trying to memorize each and every exercise of the semester – and of course how to solve it.

I wonder how this will turn out. Ah – and speaking of “how this will turn out”. A few days ago, I got my economics exam back. I failed. It was close, but an F none the less. So, I guess I’m not shifting to studying economics… Which is anyway better, since I like what I’m doing now.

That’s all I have to say for today. I’ll see you tomorrow! Until then – Bye-Bye!