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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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I have over ten years of work experience in healthcare, program management, and data analytics on two continents. So, I know a little about helping you work smarter
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I’ll occasionally make you laugh
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Hi! I'm Shem Opolot, and this is The Friday Fix, my weekly newsletter. If you've received it, you’re either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you. If you fit into the latter (yes, I’m the kind of person who uses words like “latter”) camp and want to subscribe, then click on the shiny button below:
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Otherwise, grab a seat 🪑.
HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 Reuters reported that Meta told its employees in the U.S. that it’s installing mandatory keystroke-tracking software on their computers to help train the company’s AI agents, this week.
Meta’s rationale was that the company’s AI agents still can’t handle simple tasks like choosing from drop-downs. At the risk of radicalizing you, the quiet part not said out loud [by Meta] is the employees are likely training their replacement(s).
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LIFE
Epistemic humility
When I was seven, I swore I’d become a neurosurgeon. We’ll get back to this one later.
Ontological. Deontological. Epistemic.
[This is an intermission for you to look these words up now even though, like me, you’ll forget them soon after.]
There are words I hear often whose meanings elude me, still. Even as I typed those three, I still had to look up “deontological” again. It doesn’t help that it doesn’t mean the undoing of—searches notes—whatever “ontological” means.
I hear these words often in academia. In research manuscripts, or from the back row in lectures, as I camouflage into a montage of head nods. But while prepping for a group presentation, the word “deontological” surfaced in a reading and I, abandoning all pretense, asked my groupmates if they knew what it meant. They collectively burst out laughing.
No one knew what it meant, but just like in the lecture, they had nodded along, afraid to look dumb.
The fear of looking dumb is understandable. As a matter of survival, we’re incentivized to posture. But this fear is self-limiting—self-defeating, even.
If you’ve ever invested time into learning anything, you know that ignorance increases as knowledge increases. Ignorance is like the blackness in space: the more planets and stars and moons and galaxies we find, the greater the scale of nothingness—of shapeless blackness—we also find.
Because of this, I’m often consumed by the idea that I might be horribly wrong…about everything.
Just think:
At some point in history, the go-to medical intervention for treating illnesses was to simply drain the patient’s blood and hope for the best. And you know what? It worked at least often enough to become the standard of care for a time.
Plastic was one of the greatest inventions of the early 20th century. Today, I’ve seen friends fall out because one of them doesn’t recycle.
Women couldn’t vote in most places in the early 20th century. Some women today—so-called trad wives—romanticize the “good old days” as if giving up the right to self-determination was like picking bell-bottoms in the ‘70s.
The computer was supposed to make the secretary redundant, but instead, it turned us all into glorified secretaries, responding to our own emails and sending calendar invites.
In the TV Show Mad Men, the zeitgeist of the times is captured well as you observe the cultural transitions: from the normalcy of sexual harassment in the workplace to the achievement of a modicum of shame. The language the female characters use to describe their plight evolves with each cycle of rolling credits. The treatment of Black people as equals, however, happens—if we can extrapolate from the final scene of the show as the camera pans away from a singing crowd in a field—outside the frame of the television box. In another era, entirely.
What do we believe right now that we are totally wrong about? What do we simply have incomplete information on? What will stand the test of time?
I like the academic peer review process as some sort of flawed prescription for this paradox of wrongness of ours. Now, of course, knowledge and ways of doing things existed before we, as a species, started writing things down. It’s important to state that, because many civilizations hijacked history by hijacking other civilizations and purveying their written word as not only gospel but humanity’s origin story.
When the peer review process works well, it functions as an idea marketplace where good ideas start as tiny dots. As more people test these ideas out—prove them right, and ask more questions—they evolve from tiny dots to large, inflating concentric circles of ideas built on top of ideas, as our knowledge expands.
Underpinning this knowledge expansion—epistemic expansion, if you will—absent the manipulation from research funders and the ruthless ambition of career academics, is curiosity and epistemic humility. A hunger for more knowledge and a willingness—eagerness, even—to admit the limitations of one’s knowledge.
My dad still has the letter containing my sworn oath to be a neurosurgeon. After my first heartbreak, I thought I’d never love again. When I was six and I sat in the chair my late uncle sat in a week before he passed, I thought whatever got him was going to get me. I couldn’t have been more wrong about these things. I’m so glad I was wrong.
What things do you believe so fiercely now? You could be wrong. And you might be glad to be wrong.
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THINGS
A quote
It’s easier—more comfortable, more marketable—to show people finding meaning within the constraints than to question whether the constraints should exist at all.
A picture
Summers in D.C. are for rooftop parties. This particular rooftop is one of the best I’ve ever seen. It had everything: big screens, lounges, kitchen areas, fire pits, epic views, everything.
Also, it’s hard to know what the weather was like by looking at our outfits, but the answer is simple: it was hot earlier in the day and then the temperature dropped significantly in the evening. Some of us had time to go home and change before the party; some of us, ahem, didn’t.
WORK
Here’s another trick
You have data:
In Excel, sometimes you want to calculate the total amount but you get greedy and also want to account for the addition of future rows of data. So some people do this:
You achieve what you want, but you have those awkward trailing zeros, so…at what cost?
You can fix this with a dot (.):
Adding a dot before the higher end of the range removes the trailing zeros.
Instead of G14:G24*H14:H24, you use: G14:.G24*H14:.H24
Tiny but mighty difference.
Of course, all this fuss can be avoided by formatting the data as a special Excel table from the jump.
PRODUCTS
A course
A guide
FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> Play slow motion versions of classic games
> This site shows the opening line of a famous novel every time you visit
> A calendar to track upcoming movie releases (instead of touching grass)
Have a great weekend,
— SO
