As a child, I once came upon a documentary on the development of the Bell X-1, the first supersonic plane. Honestly, I don’t remember much from it. I don’t even remember what the plane looked like. The underlying and pervasive theme centered around breaking the sound barrier, most of the observed behavior about flight are transformed as your plane approaches the sound barrier. They needed to build the plane to function differently than other planes of the era.
However, the speed of sound (767 mph) is a natural barrier. Sonic booms don’t arbitrarily occur; it’s not as if we sweet talk the atmosphere to behave that way for show. Engineers and pilots navigated and overcame the challenges to building and operating the Bell X-1. As an engineer, I acknowledge it as a great human achievement, but I also understand that it overcame a natural barrier, not an artificial one.
We rarely distinguish between natural barriers and artificial ones. As competitive humans, we merely think about how to improve and set a milestone. At times, we are driven by another person; other times a particular milestone drives us. In some cases, it’s both, like the 1998 homerun race by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
Building a better mousetrap
As a computer programmer, one of the classic problems about optimization is how to sort items faster. When we first start, professors assign us homework on how to implement algorithms that sort lists. They start with simple ones that are easy to understand and implement but grow progressively more complex and difficult to build.
There’s even theory behind what makes one method better than the next. Computer scientists observed long ago that the most computationally expensive part of sorting is comparison, that is “Does ‘abduction’ go before ‘adduction’?” Therefore, the fastest sorting algorithms are the ones that minimize the number of comparisons, and this is precisely what we analyze. Programmers generally accept that the fastest sorting algorithm is Quicksort.
However, here’s what I find truly fascinating. There’s nothing to say that someone won’t come up with a sorting algorithm that is even more efficient than Quicksort, one that, in the general case, uses fewer comparisons. There’s nothing that definitively proves that Quicksort is the fastest; we just haven’t imagined faster. Most programmers simply accept that this is figurative the ‘best mousetrap’ and avoid trying to ‘build a better mousetrap’.
The magical four-minute mile
I don’t remember precisely when I first learned about the runner’s fascination with the four-minute mile, which is to run a full mile in four minutes. The oversimplification, you must maintain 15 mph over four minutes. To date, over 1700 athletes have achieved this. However, I’ll let you in on a little secret, this achievement is both arbitrary and artificial. In some ways, it is meaningless.
For instance, if running a mile in less than four minutes is noteworthy, enough so that Roger Bannister is in the history books. Then surely the runner who broke 3:59 should similarly be remembered. They are not.
Allow me to frame it this way, this milestone may also be accurately named “The 240-second 1609 meters”. The units of time and distance are arbitrary, right? It doesn’t sound nearly as romantic though.
Before it was broken, the ‘four-minute mile’ became a romanticized milestone. First, it inspired athletes to reach it. Second, for other athletes, it also became a mental barrier, unlike ‘the 240-second 1609 meters’ would. Much like the old joke, “I wouldn’t want to be part of a club that’d have me as a member.”
In many ways, once someone achieved this milestone, it dispelled the mysticism behind it. For other athletes, it was no longer impossible. Bannister did it.
Unexpected source of inspiration
Years ago, as I watched the inauguration of Joe Biden as our 46th President, I listened intently to the words by Amanda Gorman as she recited her poem, The Hill We Climb. In high school, reading moved me to the extent that I aspired to become a writer. However, this was limited to prose, not poetry. I always looked upon poetry as gimmicky, even cutesy. Yet, I listened to this young woman recite her words, and in those mere moments, poetry was transformed for me. She was simply remarkable. The words that bounced around in my head:
There is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
I think about how many times Roger Bannister tried to achieve this milestone before he finally did. In a way, breaking the barriers to that mystical four-minute mile, to be followed by over 1700 athletes. I only imagine that upon seeing it, they ended up being it.
I can only wonder if a computer scientist will someday implement a faster algorithm than Quicksort. And once they do, others will understand it, and it’ll elevate the entire field.
Why diversity matters
I got into an animated discussion on Twitter about the value of a diverse workforce. We exchanged messages back and forth, some of which sounded like downright miscommunication. And then it abruptly hit me; he read ‘diverse hire’ as ‘unqualified hire merely for the purpose of meeting a minority quota’. That’s not what we mean by diversity.
When employers look to fill a position, they often wait for multiple qualified candidates before deciding to extend an offer. Simply treat their minority standing like any other qualification, like the ability to speak Spanish. Given a list of qualified candidates, allow this to be the tiebreaker. Similarly, don’t hold up extending an offer if none of your qualified candidates is a protected class. You may think that having diverse skin tones in your work force can’t improve your product, but you’d be wrong. You may have caught something like this; someone with fair skin could not.
Some still push back and shout the word ‘meritocracy’. They argue that the job should go to the ‘most qualified candidate’. Naïvely, they’ll assert that a candidate’s qualifications may be expressed by a single statistic (like batting average). They don’t take into account nuances like, while Edgar Martinez was an exceptional hitter, whenever the Mariners played in National League parks without a DH, he became a defensive liability.
The very notion of meritocracy implies that there is a single metric by which we can evaluate people. There isn’t. They fail to see that a candidate’s diversity is part of their qualifications.
If you can see it, you can be it
I marvel at the profession of engineering. I literally create things that have never existed before. Sure, there are elements of it that are familiar and even repetitive, but in a very real way, it’s new every time. Our job is to imagine it. Still, there are instances (like Quicksort) where we simply concede that we can’t improve upon it and don’t try.
The flip side of that assertion is that “if you don’t see it, you can’t be it.” Much like the Luke Skywalker lifting the X-wing with Yoda; he didn’t believe he could lift it, and that’s why he failed. While Star Wars is indeed fiction, the fact remains… If we don’t believe it is possible, we won’t really try. I reflect on those words of Amanda Gorman:
We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny Black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president, only to find herself reciting for one.
Or dare a young black girl dream of becoming a Supreme Court justice, until she sees Ketanji Brown Jackson? When we ask, “why to choose the diverse candidate among the list of fully qualified candidates?”, the simple answer is imagination. Once we observe a black woman as a Supreme Court justice, we imagine more possibilities. Our world opens; we elevate everyone.
Much like Roger Bannister’s first inspired many others to achieve by demonstrating that it’s indeed possible, seeing someone like me as The President or a Supreme Court justice will inspire people like me.
In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers might’ve picked a second baseman like all other baseball teams did, but instead they picked Jackie Robinson. Now, on every year in mid-April, we celebrate this diversity hire. It was more than just baseball.