Fearless Institute

Dear Fellow Alumni class of 2020

Congratulations!!

This is my graduation speech, which took me days and plenty of thinking, finally. Since it's virtual I might as well share with all graduates of 2020 all over the world.

It is difficult enough to make that final push to graduate under normal circumstances, but we have done it in the middle of a nightmarish doomsday scenario – Well done! We have demonstrated that we have what it takes to think clearly under pressure.

Our families need us, our friends need us, our communities need us, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the world needs us. We have demonstrated some skill at reasoning about uncertainty, at a time when fearful men and women are anxious about walking out their front doors. They want bright-line rules for how to avoid the virus, and they want absolute certainty that they will be safe. “If I wear a mask will I be protected? If a stay six feet apart does that mean everything will be OK? How about three feet? Well then, can I get my toenails done?”

The role of the leader is to help people cope with the irreducible uncertainty in the world. Irreducible uncertainty – say that phrase to yourself. Let it roll around in your head, but don’t let it scare you. You know that even when you have data that you believe in, data that you have cleaned and curated yourself; when you know something about the application you are working on and you have good reasons to use an informative prior – even then there is uncertainty. There is no way to escape the bias-variance trade-off – no way to be absolutely certain.

You have acquired a probabilistic mindset that should help you to help others: to help them navigate the narrow path flanked by despair on one side and magical thinking on the other. When you look at the news, you can see how the nuanced explanations of the health care experts get authoritative-sounding watered down into oversimplified statements that are mostly misleading. It is now an everyday thing to see some authoritative-sounding news person or public official show a forecast with enormous error bands and just ignore them. You are now in the group with some responsibility to stand up and say: “Whoa! Hold on here!

Alright, so there’s one minor problem – the world, your community, your prospective employers may not yet know that they need you. The only way to help them to see the light in you is for you to be the person you want to be. If you want to be a leader or a fearless influencer, start to be one right away. Pick a problem, get the data, visualize it, analyze it, write about it. Above all pray about it. Talk about it to everyone who will listen.

You don’t have to want to be a leader let's say in politics, but you do have to want to grow in some direction. Listen to yourself, trust yourself. Decide what it will take for you to flourish and go for it. Choose your friends carefully, and get involved in some cause bigger than yourself. Go for it. And wherever you go, walk with humility, but lead the way. Use your hard-earned skills to navigate the random and the unpredictable. Take some reasonable risks, but consider the consequences for others.

You can do it! Good luck to us all. Stay safe and prosper.

And, because a graduation event is a good time to remember one’s own lecturers, I would like to express my gratitude to; P Muriithi Wanjau, P Milton Jumba, P Aggie, and the entire team who stood with us. From countless zooms and sending videos and assignment notes on time, It hasn't been an easy year but we finished smiling and happy. Virtual learning is not bad after all...

We did it, God is great. Fearless influencers of society.