＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
1．Congratulatory speech by Professor Emeritus Chizuko Ueno at the entrance ceremony
Professor Emeritus Chizuko Ueno’s congratulatory address at the 2019 University of Tokyo entrance ceremony was very well received for its excellence.
I was not so much interested in the first half of the speech, which talked about “schools are a society of tatemae equality,” “there is discrimination against women even at the University of Tokyo,” and “a society that does not fairly reward people for their hard work,” since these are things we know as common sense, but I was very intrigued by the “meta knowledge” at the end of the speech.
What awaits you is a world full of questions with no right answers.
I am convinced that the value of studying at a university is not to acquire knowledge that already exists, but to acquire the knowledge to create knowledge that no one has ever seen before. Knowledge that produces knowledge is called meta-knowledge. The mission of universities is to help students acquire this meta-knowledge.
Indeed, until high school, study tended to be “ki-mon-no-gaku,” or simply reading and memorizing books, and competing to get the correct answers to exam questions. This is a phrase from the “Raiki,” which says, “Ki-Mon-Gaku is not enough to be one’s teacher.
I agree with Professor Emeritus Chizuko Ueno’s opinion that universities are places to acquire “meta-knowledge.
2．”Metacognition” and ‘metadata’ and ”metaknowledge.”
（1）metacognition
Metacognition is “to objectively grasp and control what one perceives,” i.e., to recognize what one is perceiving.
Socrates (469 B.C.? ~399 B.C.)’s “knowledge of ignorance” is this.
They [the so called “wise men”] are like me. They do not know what is the most important thing, what is the truth. But they think they know when they don’t. I don’t think I know. That’s the difference.”
Confucius (552 B.C. – 479 B.C.) also left the following words to the same effect in his “Analects”.
“Recognize that you know what you know, and recognize that you do not know what you do not know. This is the true meaning of knowing.”
The concept of “metacognition,” defined by American psychologist John H. Flavell, has been used in “cognitive psychology,” but recently it has come to attract attention as an important ability in education, human resource development, management, and other fields.
Meta” means ‘higher,’ and ‘metacognition’ means ”to try to objectively perceive and recognize what one perceives, such as memories, thoughts, and what one has learned, from a higher perspective.
In simple terms, it is “the ability of one’s other self to adjust or harmonize one’s active words and actions from an objective standpoint.
Specific examples of “cognitive activity” and “metacognitive activity” are as follows.
Memorizing English sentences by repeating them as hard as possible is a “cognitive activity.
“Metacognitive activity” is ‘thinking that it would be easier to memorize a sentence after fully understanding it,’ ‘deciding that it would be just right for me to memorize a sentence in three days at my own pace,’ and ‘checking my learning method ‘.
（2）metadata
Metadata is “data about data” and “data describing attributes and related information that represent the data.
For example, for document data, it is “title, author name, creation date, etc.” and for audio data containing music, it is “song title, recording medium, composer, lyricist, performer, release (release) date, etc.”.
（3）metaknowledge
Meta-knowledge is “knowledge about knowledge. To be more precise, it is “knowledge about object knowledge (knowledge about objects). It is knowledge that is independent of the knowledge or domain of a systematic problem and can be applied to various areas of activity.
Meta-knowledge is a fundamental concept in disciplines that deal with knowledge, such as “knowledge engineering” and “knowledge management.
There are the following types of meta-knowledge
① “Knowledge to maintain consistency” of object knowledge
② “Knowledge for efficient use” of object knowledge
③ “Knowledge to control the priority of inference” when inferring new object knowledge from object knowledge
④ “Knowledge to enable automatic learning” of object knowledge
Meta-knowledge is “tacit knowledge” like “secret know-how” in various fields, so not everyone knows about it. Even those who have it in their heads may not be able to organize it properly.
The way to make this kind of knowledge come to the surface in an organized form is the “thinking method,” and there are a variety of thinking methods.
The DAP Thinking Process is a method of consciously following the three steps of defining goals and objectives, analyzing issues and measures, and formulating a concrete plan of action.
Logical Thinking” includes ‘Deduction,’ ‘Induction,’ and ”Dialectic.
Mathematical thinking methods include the Quality Control (QC) method, which uses tools such as Pareto charts, histograms, scatter plots, stratification, and control charts, as well as Fermi estimation.
When I was young, I read two books, “The Art of Intellectual Production” by Tadao Umesao and “Methods of Intellectual Life” by Shoichi Watanabe. I don’t remember the contents well now, but I think they were also about “meta-knowledge” and “ways of thinking.
As a side note, one of the thinking methods I was taught in the company’s training program for new employees was the “KJ method” devised by Jiro Kawakita. This is a method to obtain new ideas and inspiration by organizing the various ideas that were generated by many people through “brainstorming” from a holistic viewpoint.
3．Fermi estimation
The “Fermi Estimation” mentioned above is not a familiar term, but it is “a logical deduction based on a few clues to approximate in a short time an elusive quantity that would be difficult to investigate in practice. It is a convenient way to derive a number that is “not far off the mark.”
This is the “approximate estimation method” that Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), an Italian physicist and Nobel Prize winner in physics, specialized in. Here are some specific examples given by Fermi himself.
Estimate how many piano tuners there are in Chicago, USA.”
First, assume the following data
① The population of Chicago is assumed to be 3 million.
② The number of people per household in Chicago is assumed to be 3
③ Assume that 1 in 10 households owns a piano
④ One piano is assumed to be tuned once a year
⑤ A piano tuner tunes three pianos per day.
⑥ Assume that the piano tuner works 250 days per year, with two days off per week.
Then, based on these assumptions, the following inferences are made.
① The number of households in Chicago is 3 million ÷ 3 = 1 million households
② The total number of pianos in Chicago is 1,000,000 ÷ 10 = 100,000
③ 100,000 pianos are tuned annually
④ The number of pianos tuned by one piano tuner is 250 days x 3 = 750 pianos
⑤ Therefore, the number of piano tuners is 100,000 pianos ÷ 750 pianos = 130
This inference is one of the valid approximate estimation methods, although the conclusion will naturally differ considerably depending on the “assumed data.
4．President Okochi’s Congratulatory Address at the Graduation Ceremony
As an aside, I would like to introduce another famous congratulatory address at the University of Tokyo.
In 1964, President Kazuo Okochi of the University of Tokyo made a speech at the graduation ceremony in which he said, “Be a lean Socrates rather than a fat pig,” which was reported in the mass media and became very popular.
This phrase is not original to President Okochi, but is borrowed from a phrase from J. S. Mill’s “Utilitarianism”. Moreover, the original text is “It is better to be an unsatisfied man than a satisfied pig. It is better to be an unsatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool. This is a far cry from the meaning of the original text. Moreover, this phrase was in the “manuscript” of the congratulatory address, but was skipped in the actual congratulatory address. In other words, a “phantom congratulatory address” was widely reported by the media.
This fact is a good example of what I have always believed: “There are many fabrications and lies in the media reports, so we must be careful not to believe them.