To Add Value
If only the shtick
weren’t so hackneyed, but I go on.
As you perhaps already know, I say,
one day, rather than doctor, cloud
consultant, equity fundamentals data
analyst, immunoassay prober, systems
mogul, all the dream jobs, everyone realises
the only thing worth being is poet. Probably
you won’t realise this until between, say,
the age of 27 and death, assuming
they run in that order. I speak in what
educationalists call a knowledge-rich tone,
handing out the handout, which is
‘Dover Beach,’ of all things. With perfect
rationality, now, one highly verbal child asks
what, in that case, I am doing here
a teacher. Later, I ask my mentor
is there such a thing as begging the question
in reverse, but since the majority
are 11 or 12 years old, adeptly
misrecognising the moment, I twinkle off
some remark about analogy. No,
the truth is I do not. I draw a graph
showing a simple Gaussian distribution
of ages when people realise X
(that is, the only thing worth being &c.).
No fewer than 3 claim already to be outliers.
To ironise the sudden ripple of life
passing across the room at head-height
is natural, in that ‘biological agents like animals
or brains resist a tendency to disorder’.
To dignify, then, must be to disorder.
Bottom-up prediction errors interact reciprocally
with top-down predictions to optimise expectation.
A handful of eyes flicker to the clock.