Amy Hua will be giving a talk and workshop piece about the power of assessing our own perspectives as a way of transforming our own lives. Using thematic lessons that repeat themselves across multiple disciplines, including philosophy, scientific history, architecture, and clinical psychology, we’ll explore the concept of paradigms as famously expressed by Thomas Kuhn in his groundbreaking publication, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and later adopted by personal development author Stephen Covey in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

We’ll be using mental maps as a useful analogy to talk about everything from the black swan effect to the nature of shifting paradigms, empirical findings on regret and growing old, how major changes become the new normal, and how times when we experience “model anomalies” and feel lost on our mental maps are in fact the seeds of our personal progress.

For the workshop piece, we will be adapting lessons from cognitive behavioral therapy to explore a belief you hold. We’ll attempt to determine and examine the evidence you use to hold that belief. Then, through the lens of paradigms, attempt an exercise of having more effectively conversations with people of differing paradigms that leads to more understanding.

Amy Hua herself has been a regular salon attender and currently works as a product architect / former lead frontend software engineer for local search and place-mapping startup, Live. She has a B.S. in math from UChicago and is otherwise just another person on earth.