Clearly, a good economy is, among other things, diverse.
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Monday, August 3, 2015
Light and Heavy
I've been thinking about two things that commonly have the adjectives "Light" and "heavy" attached to them. Specifically, rail, and industry.
While light and heavy rail have disputes on the border between these two, both are transportation systems involving a track, and a train that rides upon them. The light rail systems typically involve fewer cars, are more passenger oriented, and stop more frequently. The heavy systems are more cargo-oriented, have many more cars, and stop less frequently.
Industry, meanwhile, comes from the Latin word industria, meaning "productivity." Light industry tends to be companies that require less capital to start up, produce more consumer goods than industrial ones, and use the results of heavy industry as its primary feedstock. Heavy industry tends to be more expensive to set up, starts with raw ores, and produces primarily industrial goods. As examples, steel is heavy industry, whereas soap dispensers made of steel are light industry.
A national economy requires all four of these things. A lack of heavy rail means that all goods transportation are made with relatively inefficient means, be it muscle-based transportation (by humans in the poorest of economies, by animals in slightly richer ones), or by massive trucks that cause massive smog. A lack of light rail hinders the movement of human beings. Even the car-based transportation in my part of the world is inefficient, as the downtown region inevitably clogs on a daily basis, resulting in transport taking an extra hour, or in particular aggravating times, two. A lack of heavy industry means that all goods are based on things you can farm or import. A lack of light industry took down the communist economies, as at first, the nearly starving peasants were happy to be working at all, but eventually, the inability to buy things other than food and shelter started to grate on people. The economy resorted to military keynesian policies, meaning that lots of people were making tanks, who then had basically nothing they could buy with those wages.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
History of the Chicken
Which came first, the chicken or the egg, asks a famous riddle. After all, the primary source of chicken eggs are chickens, and the primary source of chickens are those same eggs. To a casual observer, this would seem to be an endless regress, hence the question. The egg came first, and was first laid in India.
In the jungles of Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma lives an animal called the Red Junglefowl. It is a tree dwelling bird, distantly related to the Pheasants that European aristocracy hunted for sport. Animal traders brought captured birds to India, where it was hybridized with the Grey Junglefowl, producing the modern chicken. The ancient Indian birdkeepers noted that the birds were easily cared for, enjoyed eating insects (and so were very useful to farmers), and were delicious with the right spices. Over time, Indians lost interest in eating the eggs, but those not prohibited from eating meat for religious reasons continue to enjoy eating the chickens themselves.
Over the years, the chicken was spread by trade through Persia, eventually reaching Greece and Europe. The ancient Greeks and even Romans thought of the chicken as a very exotic bird, as their only supply was through the Persians, and relations between the Greek city-states and the Persian empire were often frosty. However, centuries of trade quickly populated the bird throughout Europe.
Colonists to "The new world" of North and South America often brought domestic animals with them, and the expansion of the chicken eventually reached the Pacific Islands in the 1800s. Chickens are now found worldwide except Antarctica (where they occasionally arrive dead in the form of food).
In the jungles of Thailand, Cambodia, and Burma lives an animal called the Red Junglefowl. It is a tree dwelling bird, distantly related to the Pheasants that European aristocracy hunted for sport. Animal traders brought captured birds to India, where it was hybridized with the Grey Junglefowl, producing the modern chicken. The ancient Indian birdkeepers noted that the birds were easily cared for, enjoyed eating insects (and so were very useful to farmers), and were delicious with the right spices. Over time, Indians lost interest in eating the eggs, but those not prohibited from eating meat for religious reasons continue to enjoy eating the chickens themselves.
Over the years, the chicken was spread by trade through Persia, eventually reaching Greece and Europe. The ancient Greeks and even Romans thought of the chicken as a very exotic bird, as their only supply was through the Persians, and relations between the Greek city-states and the Persian empire were often frosty. However, centuries of trade quickly populated the bird throughout Europe.
Colonists to "The new world" of North and South America often brought domestic animals with them, and the expansion of the chicken eventually reached the Pacific Islands in the 1800s. Chickens are now found worldwide except Antarctica (where they occasionally arrive dead in the form of food).
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
More on Emulating the Brain
Timothy Blee has a lot more to say about Robin Hanson's thesis of simulated people. Namely, Mr. Blee asserts that it is not possible.
Brains work in a very different manner than silicon chips. Silicon chips have a central processor, that can store data on temporary storage, like RAM, or permanent storage like hard drives. It cycles very very quickly. I recently bought a 3.2 GhZ processor. It cycles 3.2 billion times per second.
Brains, however, are a massive network of neurons that signal each other They cycle slowly, only 30 times per second, and can connect to many other neurons at any given time, and are always reconfiguring each other.
Mr. Blee then points out that emulation works in computers works because we know how both the target and host computer operate, and by Dr. Turing's theorem can restructure the directives to match the host computer's operation. We at this point have only a fuzzy idea of how the bran works, and our theories on it are constantly being proven wrong.
I think that it's hypothetically possible to emulate the brain -- but it may require radically different hardware. A massive memristor mesh would be a closer approximation than the machine on your desk (or lap). The hardest part is that the brain literally rewires itself as you learn things, and so far no hardware we have ever built does that.
I thought of this because of Mr. Hanson's previous rants about emulated people, and thinking how an emulated version of me could be handy at work. While I'm stressing and frazzled, I could pass messages to him and he could help me. (Which would probably even be easy for him...the world would move quite slowly from his perspective.)
Brains work in a very different manner than silicon chips. Silicon chips have a central processor, that can store data on temporary storage, like RAM, or permanent storage like hard drives. It cycles very very quickly. I recently bought a 3.2 GhZ processor. It cycles 3.2 billion times per second.
Brains, however, are a massive network of neurons that signal each other They cycle slowly, only 30 times per second, and can connect to many other neurons at any given time, and are always reconfiguring each other.
Mr. Blee then points out that emulation works in computers works because we know how both the target and host computer operate, and by Dr. Turing's theorem can restructure the directives to match the host computer's operation. We at this point have only a fuzzy idea of how the bran works, and our theories on it are constantly being proven wrong.
I think that it's hypothetically possible to emulate the brain -- but it may require radically different hardware. A massive memristor mesh would be a closer approximation than the machine on your desk (or lap). The hardest part is that the brain literally rewires itself as you learn things, and so far no hardware we have ever built does that.
I thought of this because of Mr. Hanson's previous rants about emulated people, and thinking how an emulated version of me could be handy at work. While I'm stressing and frazzled, I could pass messages to him and he could help me. (Which would probably even be easy for him...the world would move quite slowly from his perspective.)
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Chinese Room
Imagine that there is a room with a man, a device that can stop time outside the room, and a huge book. The huge book describes lists and lists of Chinese characters, and a good response to being shown particular sets of them. The man does not speak Chinese, nor can he grasp any meanings from their writings, but is otherwise reasonably intelligent and literate in whatever his native language is. The room also has a slot that can move letters in and out.
I take a friend who speaks one of the many Chinese languages (They're unified only by their form of writing), and I tell him, "Hey check out my Chinese-writing room. It totally understands Chinese." He doesn't believe me, but writes a message on a slip of paper. A minute later, the paper comes back out of the slot with a response. He reads the response -- it matches exactly what a reasonably intelligent Chinese-writing person would have written in response to what he wrote. "Huh, I guess your room does. Neat."
Now this is an abstraction of AI. Even if we do write AI, it will essentially work by having responses to stimuli that it applies deterministically. The program is the book, and the computer is the man. Many philosophers therefore argue that all AI can only provide the illusion of consciousness. After all, the computer (the man) doesn't understand what he's writing, but only writes what the book tells him. The book doesn't have any consciousness -- it's a thing. And the room doesn't have any consciousness, as it is a shaped chunk of plaster, wood, and metal. But I can make the argument that the system of the room, the man, and the book amounts to consciousness.
Consciousness after all is very mysterious, and we can only really observe our own. One philosopher said that it was like the only way we could know about beetles is if we each had a box, and were told that what was in the box was a beetle, and we somehow couldn't look in each other's boxes. There's a distinct possibility that different people could have different things in their boxes. Or that some boxes could even be empty.
I take a friend who speaks one of the many Chinese languages (They're unified only by their form of writing), and I tell him, "Hey check out my Chinese-writing room. It totally understands Chinese." He doesn't believe me, but writes a message on a slip of paper. A minute later, the paper comes back out of the slot with a response. He reads the response -- it matches exactly what a reasonably intelligent Chinese-writing person would have written in response to what he wrote. "Huh, I guess your room does. Neat."
Now this is an abstraction of AI. Even if we do write AI, it will essentially work by having responses to stimuli that it applies deterministically. The program is the book, and the computer is the man. Many philosophers therefore argue that all AI can only provide the illusion of consciousness. After all, the computer (the man) doesn't understand what he's writing, but only writes what the book tells him. The book doesn't have any consciousness -- it's a thing. And the room doesn't have any consciousness, as it is a shaped chunk of plaster, wood, and metal. But I can make the argument that the system of the room, the man, and the book amounts to consciousness.
Consciousness after all is very mysterious, and we can only really observe our own. One philosopher said that it was like the only way we could know about beetles is if we each had a box, and were told that what was in the box was a beetle, and we somehow couldn't look in each other's boxes. There's a distinct possibility that different people could have different things in their boxes. Or that some boxes could even be empty.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Existentialism
Traditionally, most philosophers taught that to be is to do. Your actions are determined by your innermost nature, bolstered by your experience, and what you have become from that, you continue into the future with your actions. From this innermost being, everything was implied: preferences, morality, potential. Then, suddenly, everything got flipped on its head.
Existentialist philosophers like Sarte and Camus taught that to do is to be. Your inner nature has more to do with the sum of the choices you made. If you act differently, then eventually it leads you to becoming a different person altogether. You can be the change you want to see in the world, and watch it bend slowly. And on the flip side, your entire life is as pointless as Sisyphus, and not even killing yourself will give it meaning. Oh shi-
On the flip side of this, since to do is to be, if you give your life a meaning of your own, it will be more meaningful than if this meaning was imposed upon you from outside. We were free to invent the best of natures for ourselves, because we had no nature. You're free.
Now, there are a lot of people worldwide who don't like the idea of freedom. With freedom comes responsibility. When things go wrong around free people, it's their own fault. A lot of people want to be protected, and damn the cost.
And yet, as a free person, your meaning came from you alone. You'll never have a crisis of faith. And no one can make you feel inferior without your definite consent.
Existentialist philosophers like Sarte and Camus taught that to do is to be. Your inner nature has more to do with the sum of the choices you made. If you act differently, then eventually it leads you to becoming a different person altogether. You can be the change you want to see in the world, and watch it bend slowly. And on the flip side, your entire life is as pointless as Sisyphus, and not even killing yourself will give it meaning. Oh shi-
On the flip side of this, since to do is to be, if you give your life a meaning of your own, it will be more meaningful than if this meaning was imposed upon you from outside. We were free to invent the best of natures for ourselves, because we had no nature. You're free.
Now, there are a lot of people worldwide who don't like the idea of freedom. With freedom comes responsibility. When things go wrong around free people, it's their own fault. A lot of people want to be protected, and damn the cost.
And yet, as a free person, your meaning came from you alone. You'll never have a crisis of faith. And no one can make you feel inferior without your definite consent.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Solipism
Solipsism is a philosophy that the only thing that you can be sure exists is your own mind, because you experience it. Everything else, like other people, the world, and even your own physical body, may be an elaborate fraud that you dreamed up because you got bored. You cannot be sure that other people aren't philosophical zombies, you cannot be sure that other people even exist. Even the world and your body may be a dream. It comes from the latin solo ipse, meaning, "Only Self."
Solipsism is non-falsifiable. Anything I could demonstrate to show you that I'm conscious could be dismissed, as you don't directly experience my mind. In fact, anything I point your attention to could very well be imagined on your part. That rock I dropped on your foot? It's possible that neither the rock nor your foot really existed in the first place. The pain you feel may just be leftover guilt from something you forgot. Or remember.
Since it's non-falsifiable, and leads to some very bizarre conclusions, most philosophers reject solipsism. Even if it was true, you could draw no useful conclusions from it. If you're really a brain in a jar, imagining that you're reading this post...well, could you stop? Recreate the world to suit your own needs? Escape from what seems to be danger? Since you don't seem to be able to stop, you may as well assume it's real.
One of my favorite quotes says: "Reality is that which doesn't go away when we ignore it." Solipsism amounts to plugging our ears and asserting that we can anyway.
Solipsism is non-falsifiable. Anything I could demonstrate to show you that I'm conscious could be dismissed, as you don't directly experience my mind. In fact, anything I point your attention to could very well be imagined on your part. That rock I dropped on your foot? It's possible that neither the rock nor your foot really existed in the first place. The pain you feel may just be leftover guilt from something you forgot. Or remember.
Since it's non-falsifiable, and leads to some very bizarre conclusions, most philosophers reject solipsism. Even if it was true, you could draw no useful conclusions from it. If you're really a brain in a jar, imagining that you're reading this post...well, could you stop? Recreate the world to suit your own needs? Escape from what seems to be danger? Since you don't seem to be able to stop, you may as well assume it's real.
One of my favorite quotes says: "Reality is that which doesn't go away when we ignore it." Solipsism amounts to plugging our ears and asserting that we can anyway.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Free Will
Advocates of Philosophical Free Will report that all people are deciding agents, who make decisions without interference from the universe at large, and that people are responsible for the implications of their decisions. If you decide to have ice cream, then this was entirely your decision, and the resulting pleasure (and weight gain) are both your own responsibility, and one cannot blame anyone else for chosing the way that you did.
Debates rage about how this fits in with the idea of Determinism, in which things have logical consequences and necessary requirements to have happened in the first place. Under hard determinism, everything that ever happened in the universe, and everything that will happen in the future, was pre-determined from the beginning and there is no other way that it could have happened. Some people argue that determinism is mostly soft, and it is compatible with the idea of free will, but others argue that determinism and free will are incompatible and that only one could possibly apply. These are further split by those that argue that there is free will and no determinism, and those that argue that there is perfect determinism and no free will.
I dislike the idea of determinism, at least in the absolute sense, because I think it undermines the idea of responsibility. If you promise not to get wildly drunk at the weekend party, and then screw up and get wildly drunk...well, then it was inevitable from the formation of the universe that it would happen that way. It seems to encourage a lackadaisical attitude, things are inevitable and don't really matter. Why try?
I also think that absolute free will results in equally silly ideas. We are not omnipotent and omniscient. Sometimes we make bad decisions because we don't have enough information to make a good one. Sometimes we have to follow sub-optimal things because we don't have the resources available to us to optimize. People are bullied into making bad choices, or tricked. Under pure free will, it's your fault when a bad product you made bankrupts the company, even if your boss ordered you to make it or be fired. This seems less than fair. Worrying about things out of your control just seems so...neurotic.
I know scientifically, that some things are deterministic. My computer, given the same instructions, will behave the same way every time. Engineering, chemistry, physics, and electronics relies on consistent reactions and would be impossible without them. And I would also like to believe that humans have at least some free will, and have some responsibility over things that they choose.
Free will also butts heads with religion. Deities, be they a pantheon of gods or one supreme one, are often described as being omniscient and knowing the future. However, if we humans have free will, then the future cannot be known until we make our decisions, as what we decide changes the future. If I decide to work in a research lab, then the future will be different than if I decided to work as a librarian instead. So if God or gods know about what I chose before I chose it, then was my choice really free? Knowing about what hasn't happened yet smacks of hard determinism. The best loophole I can think of is that gods or God know what I'm thinking now, know what the consequences of every choice are, and have some fuzzy-math confidence in which option I will take. (God is 73% confident that I will have a ham sandwich for lunch, and 82% confident that I will go to the bank today instead of Friday.) This is less than satisfying to theologins who proclaim absolute omniscience, and probably has a few loopholes in it, but it's the best I can think of for now for resolving the claims.
I would encourage my philosophical readers to write back with their own opinions on determinism versus free will.
Debates rage about how this fits in with the idea of Determinism, in which things have logical consequences and necessary requirements to have happened in the first place. Under hard determinism, everything that ever happened in the universe, and everything that will happen in the future, was pre-determined from the beginning and there is no other way that it could have happened. Some people argue that determinism is mostly soft, and it is compatible with the idea of free will, but others argue that determinism and free will are incompatible and that only one could possibly apply. These are further split by those that argue that there is free will and no determinism, and those that argue that there is perfect determinism and no free will.
I dislike the idea of determinism, at least in the absolute sense, because I think it undermines the idea of responsibility. If you promise not to get wildly drunk at the weekend party, and then screw up and get wildly drunk...well, then it was inevitable from the formation of the universe that it would happen that way. It seems to encourage a lackadaisical attitude, things are inevitable and don't really matter. Why try?
I also think that absolute free will results in equally silly ideas. We are not omnipotent and omniscient. Sometimes we make bad decisions because we don't have enough information to make a good one. Sometimes we have to follow sub-optimal things because we don't have the resources available to us to optimize. People are bullied into making bad choices, or tricked. Under pure free will, it's your fault when a bad product you made bankrupts the company, even if your boss ordered you to make it or be fired. This seems less than fair. Worrying about things out of your control just seems so...neurotic.
I know scientifically, that some things are deterministic. My computer, given the same instructions, will behave the same way every time. Engineering, chemistry, physics, and electronics relies on consistent reactions and would be impossible without them. And I would also like to believe that humans have at least some free will, and have some responsibility over things that they choose.
Free will also butts heads with religion. Deities, be they a pantheon of gods or one supreme one, are often described as being omniscient and knowing the future. However, if we humans have free will, then the future cannot be known until we make our decisions, as what we decide changes the future. If I decide to work in a research lab, then the future will be different than if I decided to work as a librarian instead. So if God or gods know about what I chose before I chose it, then was my choice really free? Knowing about what hasn't happened yet smacks of hard determinism. The best loophole I can think of is that gods or God know what I'm thinking now, know what the consequences of every choice are, and have some fuzzy-math confidence in which option I will take. (God is 73% confident that I will have a ham sandwich for lunch, and 82% confident that I will go to the bank today instead of Friday.) This is less than satisfying to theologins who proclaim absolute omniscience, and probably has a few loopholes in it, but it's the best I can think of for now for resolving the claims.
I would encourage my philosophical readers to write back with their own opinions on determinism versus free will.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Philosophical Zombies
I think the idea of a philosophical zombie is incoherent, and therefore wrong. Allow me to explain.
A "philosophical zombie" is the idea of a person who, while indistinguishable from everyone else, is not conscious. They experience no qualia, and have no internal mind, but still act like people hat do. Philosophers and cognitive scientists often debate the implication of such a thing happening. So this is a person who, when poked with a needle, automatically recoils, makes a noise like "Ouch," and takes actions to protect themselves from further poking, but does not actually experience pain. Because they're not really a thinking person, but more like an automatic device.
Consciousness is a strange thing. We can only really be sure of our own, because we experience it. A philosopher once compared it to if we all had boxes, and the only way to know what a "beetle" was, was to look into your box. You couldn't look into other people's boxes, somehow. In fact, people might have completely different things in their boxes, and some people's boxes might even be empty. Hence ideas like solipsism where you only know that your mind exists, other people are illusionary, and even the whole physical world might be an elaborate fraud that you dreamed up because you got bored.
So like most people, I reason by analogy that most people do have minds like my own. They experience certain sensations when exposed to certain stimulation. Not always the same sensation for the same stimulation! (Take color blind people. Shown a "red" brick and a "green" brick, I'll see them as having different colors, but the color blind person will see them as being the same color.) They like pleasurable sensations and dislike painful ones. They have preferences that they seek out. They have abhorred things that they avoid.
However, at the beginning, I said that the very idea was incoherent. Let me get more into that. Human behavior, as psychologists and sociologists are aware, is extremely complex. People have myriad responses to things that come up in their lives, and many of these responses are unusual. Even irrational. While I suppose it is technically possible to have an automated system doing these kinds of responses, such a program would be unmanageably large. It would have to have trillions of responses ready to any given stimulation, and chose kind of consistently among them according to past behavior. This is beyond the capability of supercomputers whose parts fill an entire skyscraper, and you expect me to believe that somehow this is all done in our 3-pound, wet and squishy brain?
More likely, the complex behavior of human beings is because they have minds, which model past events and future expectations, and try to bring their human being to the best possible options. Minds give people personal preferences, like favorite foods, and favorite colors, and also fears of things that they suspect will harm them.
William of Occam was a scholarly monk in the middle ages, who came up with the famous "Occam's Razor." Basically, the model that requires the least number of assumptions to back it is probably the correct one. "Everyone has minds" proves less assumption riddled than "Some people have no minds, only the appearence of having one." Having the appearance of a mind without a real mind is more complex than everyone just having minds in the first place, so almost assuredly every person has a mind.
A "philosophical zombie" is the idea of a person who, while indistinguishable from everyone else, is not conscious. They experience no qualia, and have no internal mind, but still act like people hat do. Philosophers and cognitive scientists often debate the implication of such a thing happening. So this is a person who, when poked with a needle, automatically recoils, makes a noise like "Ouch," and takes actions to protect themselves from further poking, but does not actually experience pain. Because they're not really a thinking person, but more like an automatic device.
Consciousness is a strange thing. We can only really be sure of our own, because we experience it. A philosopher once compared it to if we all had boxes, and the only way to know what a "beetle" was, was to look into your box. You couldn't look into other people's boxes, somehow. In fact, people might have completely different things in their boxes, and some people's boxes might even be empty. Hence ideas like solipsism where you only know that your mind exists, other people are illusionary, and even the whole physical world might be an elaborate fraud that you dreamed up because you got bored.
So like most people, I reason by analogy that most people do have minds like my own. They experience certain sensations when exposed to certain stimulation. Not always the same sensation for the same stimulation! (Take color blind people. Shown a "red" brick and a "green" brick, I'll see them as having different colors, but the color blind person will see them as being the same color.) They like pleasurable sensations and dislike painful ones. They have preferences that they seek out. They have abhorred things that they avoid.
However, at the beginning, I said that the very idea was incoherent. Let me get more into that. Human behavior, as psychologists and sociologists are aware, is extremely complex. People have myriad responses to things that come up in their lives, and many of these responses are unusual. Even irrational. While I suppose it is technically possible to have an automated system doing these kinds of responses, such a program would be unmanageably large. It would have to have trillions of responses ready to any given stimulation, and chose kind of consistently among them according to past behavior. This is beyond the capability of supercomputers whose parts fill an entire skyscraper, and you expect me to believe that somehow this is all done in our 3-pound, wet and squishy brain?
More likely, the complex behavior of human beings is because they have minds, which model past events and future expectations, and try to bring their human being to the best possible options. Minds give people personal preferences, like favorite foods, and favorite colors, and also fears of things that they suspect will harm them.
William of Occam was a scholarly monk in the middle ages, who came up with the famous "Occam's Razor." Basically, the model that requires the least number of assumptions to back it is probably the correct one. "Everyone has minds" proves less assumption riddled than "Some people have no minds, only the appearence of having one." Having the appearance of a mind without a real mind is more complex than everyone just having minds in the first place, so almost assuredly every person has a mind.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Sharpen the Saw
Productivity experts advise other people, and me too if I ever asked, to "sharpen the saw." It is a metaphor.
Now in literal terms, I don't know how to sharpen a saw. I know how to sharpen a knife, or other smooth-bladed implement. A saw is probably similar, but I don't know that for sure.
The metaphor is essentially that when you have a large task, represented by the tree, you have to do things that seem to be unrelated (the saw sharpening) in order to cut down the tree. The saw works well as a metaphor because a dull saw WILL cut down a tree, but a sharp one will cut down the tree faster and with less effort on the lumberjack's part.
As an example, for homecare. Let's say you have a washing machine. It's kind of old, so it breaks down. You now face a choice. You can spend three hours fixing it. Or, alternatively, you can wash your clothes in the bathtub, taking 30 minutes per time. (Whereas before you needed maybe 2.) The productivity experts are urging you to fix the washing machine as soon as possible, because there will always be emergencies, and the extra 28 minutes add up pretty quickly.
This doesn't, however, mean that you can avoid tasks you need to do. Not washing the laundry at all in my previous metaphor could probably last a while if you have a big wardrobe, but while you're not washing, you have less and less to wear and more and more sweaty-old clothing, and if you ignore it enough, it does become an emergency. (If for no other reason than you either have nothing clean to wear, or because the massive pile of laundry now blocks access to what you need.)
I now wonder: In your trade or field, how can you "sharpen" your "saw"?
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six sharpening my axe. - Abraham LincolnIn other words, you need to spend time on things that make the other things you do more efficient. And you need to do this even while other emergencies are constantly creeping up. The deadline is approaching, but you still have to do the things that let you do the things...faster.
Now in literal terms, I don't know how to sharpen a saw. I know how to sharpen a knife, or other smooth-bladed implement. A saw is probably similar, but I don't know that for sure.
The metaphor is essentially that when you have a large task, represented by the tree, you have to do things that seem to be unrelated (the saw sharpening) in order to cut down the tree. The saw works well as a metaphor because a dull saw WILL cut down a tree, but a sharp one will cut down the tree faster and with less effort on the lumberjack's part.
As an example, for homecare. Let's say you have a washing machine. It's kind of old, so it breaks down. You now face a choice. You can spend three hours fixing it. Or, alternatively, you can wash your clothes in the bathtub, taking 30 minutes per time. (Whereas before you needed maybe 2.) The productivity experts are urging you to fix the washing machine as soon as possible, because there will always be emergencies, and the extra 28 minutes add up pretty quickly.
This doesn't, however, mean that you can avoid tasks you need to do. Not washing the laundry at all in my previous metaphor could probably last a while if you have a big wardrobe, but while you're not washing, you have less and less to wear and more and more sweaty-old clothing, and if you ignore it enough, it does become an emergency. (If for no other reason than you either have nothing clean to wear, or because the massive pile of laundry now blocks access to what you need.)
I now wonder: In your trade or field, how can you "sharpen" your "saw"?
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Categorical Imperative
Emmanuel Kant was a German philosopher primarily interested in ethics. Ethics is the philosophy of how to be a good person, and conduct your life in the best possible way. He proposed a series of ideas called the Categorical Imperative, which had three parts.
First, the principle of Universality, which proclaimed that one should only undertake an action if you'd be okay with everyone doing it all the time. So while one could technically get away with taking a $10 tip off a restaurant table while no one was looking, one should not do that unless you'd be okay with people stealing everything not nailed down. (Since most people wouldn't want that, you should not take the money.) I like this idea. (There are other ideas of why not to take the money, from divine command theory, to value theory that proclaims that taking the money would make you a worthless person, to empathy, social contracts, and so on.)
Second, he proposes that other people should be an end, not a means to an end. While these words mean something quite different to philosophers, it's not terribly complex in meaning. Primarily, you cannot ever manipulate people, even for the greater good. No using people, and no lying.
Thirdly, morality is logical in nature, and being evil is irrational. It may be tempting to do evil things, but it will hurt you sooner rather than later, if for no other reason than the reduction of society encourages other people to victimize you. And strength doesn't protect you, because everyone has to sleep sometime. The best implication of this is that morality is empirical, and could be determined by experiment. The most moral behavior would be self-evident when measured.
This comes to some strange combinations, but Kant stuck to his guns in the face of some extremely odd conclusions. He was certain that everyone following his rules would lead to a better universe.
In the face of a number of the crisises occurring now, quite a few of them would not have happened if people had better ethics. It therefore profits us to analyze as many theories as possible.
First, the principle of Universality, which proclaimed that one should only undertake an action if you'd be okay with everyone doing it all the time. So while one could technically get away with taking a $10 tip off a restaurant table while no one was looking, one should not do that unless you'd be okay with people stealing everything not nailed down. (Since most people wouldn't want that, you should not take the money.) I like this idea. (There are other ideas of why not to take the money, from divine command theory, to value theory that proclaims that taking the money would make you a worthless person, to empathy, social contracts, and so on.)
Second, he proposes that other people should be an end, not a means to an end. While these words mean something quite different to philosophers, it's not terribly complex in meaning. Primarily, you cannot ever manipulate people, even for the greater good. No using people, and no lying.
Thirdly, morality is logical in nature, and being evil is irrational. It may be tempting to do evil things, but it will hurt you sooner rather than later, if for no other reason than the reduction of society encourages other people to victimize you. And strength doesn't protect you, because everyone has to sleep sometime. The best implication of this is that morality is empirical, and could be determined by experiment. The most moral behavior would be self-evident when measured.
This comes to some strange combinations, but Kant stuck to his guns in the face of some extremely odd conclusions. He was certain that everyone following his rules would lead to a better universe.
In the face of a number of the crisises occurring now, quite a few of them would not have happened if people had better ethics. It therefore profits us to analyze as many theories as possible.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Time
Physics has very little knowledge about time. There definitely is time -- otherwise everything would happen at once. Time also clearly has direction. More entropy, less useful energy, is always later. But there's no clear rules about why time goes the way it does. In fact, there's no obvious rule disallowing time travel to the past, other than it blows all our ideas about causality to hell. Also, because of time and entropy, aging is inevitable.
We also know that time is sort of limited in that more than about 13.7 billion years ago, there were no possible differences between one moment and another, and therefore no time. (Although time also theoretically existed even back then in the extent that if you could somehow import something to back then, that thing would have changes and hence time.)
Time is also blocky. Physicist Max Planck determined that there's a very small interval of time and any intervals smaller than that make no physical sense. Hence, this period of time is called Planck time after him. The same exists for space, with a smallest possible unit and any lower makes no physical sense, and this is called Planck distance. Curiously enough, 1 planck distance divided by 1 planck time equals exactly c, the constant of the speed of light in a vacuum and the maximum possible speed in the universe. (I can imagine faster, with something somehow traveling 2 planck distance units in 1 planck time, but it has all kinds of insane implications, including using more energy than exists in the universe, weighing more than the universe, and being so compressed in time that time goes backwards. So...not happening.)
So physicists describe time as a unit of change, essentially. Change with direction, from orderly to disorderly, from useful energy to useless energy. Time is relative, as we are aware from experiments in special relativity, which verified it, and yet going backwards somehow never happens. So time is not exactly a dimension.
The big problem with time travel is the immense paradox. Let's say I go back to the 1800s, and save a man's life. He ends up having a daughter, who proves more attractive to my great-grandfather than my historical great-grandmother was, and so he marries this lady instead. As a result, my grandfather and his entire line, down to me, never existed in the first place, which undoes the entire change. (And yet if I don't exist to save the man's life in the first place, then the man died and the daughter was never born and so I end up existing.) This is the "grandfather paradox." Similar paradoxes can be imagined, where a rolling ball on a desk is struck by its future self, thereby causing it to not travel back in time, which undoes the entire chain of events. Take that, causality. Another paradox is the information origin paradox. I bring Shakespeare his famous plays, which means that he plagiarized them, which means that no one ever wrote them, which is unspeakably insane. (Or, in the technology field, I bring Charles Babbage my desktop computer, he "invents" it despite it relying on technologial principles that only exist because of researched piled on research that Mr. Babbage has now never done.) Faced with So the usual resolution is to proclaim the entire thing impossible in the first place, full stop.
So...how do we best investigate the nature of time? And what kind of bizarre truth waits for us when we do investigate?
We also know that time is sort of limited in that more than about 13.7 billion years ago, there were no possible differences between one moment and another, and therefore no time. (Although time also theoretically existed even back then in the extent that if you could somehow import something to back then, that thing would have changes and hence time.)
Time is also blocky. Physicist Max Planck determined that there's a very small interval of time and any intervals smaller than that make no physical sense. Hence, this period of time is called Planck time after him. The same exists for space, with a smallest possible unit and any lower makes no physical sense, and this is called Planck distance. Curiously enough, 1 planck distance divided by 1 planck time equals exactly c, the constant of the speed of light in a vacuum and the maximum possible speed in the universe. (I can imagine faster, with something somehow traveling 2 planck distance units in 1 planck time, but it has all kinds of insane implications, including using more energy than exists in the universe, weighing more than the universe, and being so compressed in time that time goes backwards. So...not happening.)
So physicists describe time as a unit of change, essentially. Change with direction, from orderly to disorderly, from useful energy to useless energy. Time is relative, as we are aware from experiments in special relativity, which verified it, and yet going backwards somehow never happens. So time is not exactly a dimension.
The big problem with time travel is the immense paradox. Let's say I go back to the 1800s, and save a man's life. He ends up having a daughter, who proves more attractive to my great-grandfather than my historical great-grandmother was, and so he marries this lady instead. As a result, my grandfather and his entire line, down to me, never existed in the first place, which undoes the entire change. (And yet if I don't exist to save the man's life in the first place, then the man died and the daughter was never born and so I end up existing.) This is the "grandfather paradox." Similar paradoxes can be imagined, where a rolling ball on a desk is struck by its future self, thereby causing it to not travel back in time, which undoes the entire chain of events. Take that, causality. Another paradox is the information origin paradox. I bring Shakespeare his famous plays, which means that he plagiarized them, which means that no one ever wrote them, which is unspeakably insane. (Or, in the technology field, I bring Charles Babbage my desktop computer, he "invents" it despite it relying on technologial principles that only exist because of researched piled on research that Mr. Babbage has now never done.) Faced with So the usual resolution is to proclaim the entire thing impossible in the first place, full stop.
So...how do we best investigate the nature of time? And what kind of bizarre truth waits for us when we do investigate?
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Corporations
"Are corporations a materialist or idealist entity?" asks one of my rather confused readers. Neither. Corporations are a matter of law, not philosophy. Allow me to explain.
In physical terms, I could destroy even the mightiest corporations with my bare hands. This is because they are a paper filed in a law-office somewhere. Even the richest and most powerful corporations are just a stack of papers and could be destroyed easily.
But to actually get to that paper, one would have to commit multiple crimes, not limited to breaking and entering, multiple counts of vandalism, and probably assault from the angry humans wishing to prevent this sort of thing. Most of these humans are lawyers, and I'm expecting them to be in a vindictive mood.
A 12th century legal case granted in UK law, and the US law that inherited it, all legal rights and duties of person-hood to corporations when the very slick lawyer attempted to argue that his firm, not being a person, was exempt from the statue in question. The court ruled that his firm was an "artificial person" with all that that entailed, human rights included.
However, unlike human people, corporations can easily be neutralized against any particular agenda. Buy their shares until you control 50% or more of the company, and at the next board election, fire the board, fire the CEO, and replace them with people loyal to you. The corporation now follows your agenda.
Now philosophy wise, corporations are idealist in that everything substancial about them are ideas and legal filings. The physical part of a corporation is a piece of paper on which is printed a charter. It's the abstract legal part that gives them the power that they have.
In physical terms, I could destroy even the mightiest corporations with my bare hands. This is because they are a paper filed in a law-office somewhere. Even the richest and most powerful corporations are just a stack of papers and could be destroyed easily.
But to actually get to that paper, one would have to commit multiple crimes, not limited to breaking and entering, multiple counts of vandalism, and probably assault from the angry humans wishing to prevent this sort of thing. Most of these humans are lawyers, and I'm expecting them to be in a vindictive mood.
A 12th century legal case granted in UK law, and the US law that inherited it, all legal rights and duties of person-hood to corporations when the very slick lawyer attempted to argue that his firm, not being a person, was exempt from the statue in question. The court ruled that his firm was an "artificial person" with all that that entailed, human rights included.
However, unlike human people, corporations can easily be neutralized against any particular agenda. Buy their shares until you control 50% or more of the company, and at the next board election, fire the board, fire the CEO, and replace them with people loyal to you. The corporation now follows your agenda.
Now philosophy wise, corporations are idealist in that everything substancial about them are ideas and legal filings. The physical part of a corporation is a piece of paper on which is printed a charter. It's the abstract legal part that gives them the power that they have.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Argument from Authority
Today I'm going to tell you about the Argument from Authority fallacy, what it is, how to recognize it, and why it's a fallacy.
Authority is a useful shortcut in arguing, because it's a cogent sign of expertise, and implies correctness. When a nuclear physicist tells me that all atoms of the same type and isotope-ness have the same weight, I can trust him on this being true, because his expertise has assured me that he has studied about this and isn't just making things up. Even if I don't believe him, verification will only take me tons and tons of time.
However, the fallacy occurs when experts attempt to argue outside of their domain. The nuclear physicist from my example above is no more an expert on, say, Economics, than I am, and if he argues that he is, he's hoping that people will assume that his one area of expertise applies to everything, which it doesn't, or that his expertise proves that he's smart and therefore right about everything, even things he hasn't studied. One may have to be smart to understand nuclear physics, but it doesn't automatically teach you about, in my example, economics.
Or, in some fields, there is no absolute expertise. No one agrees about philosophy, or morality. I would not accept the Ayatollah's ideas about morality, and he would not accept mine. Our beliefs are just too different, and there's no objective way to prove that one is absolutely better. (Watch as I receive three tons of hate mail from the Ayatollah's friends and enemies for saying that.)
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm back to trying not to flunk out of school.
Authority is a useful shortcut in arguing, because it's a cogent sign of expertise, and implies correctness. When a nuclear physicist tells me that all atoms of the same type and isotope-ness have the same weight, I can trust him on this being true, because his expertise has assured me that he has studied about this and isn't just making things up. Even if I don't believe him, verification will only take me tons and tons of time.
However, the fallacy occurs when experts attempt to argue outside of their domain. The nuclear physicist from my example above is no more an expert on, say, Economics, than I am, and if he argues that he is, he's hoping that people will assume that his one area of expertise applies to everything, which it doesn't, or that his expertise proves that he's smart and therefore right about everything, even things he hasn't studied. One may have to be smart to understand nuclear physics, but it doesn't automatically teach you about, in my example, economics.
Or, in some fields, there is no absolute expertise. No one agrees about philosophy, or morality. I would not accept the Ayatollah's ideas about morality, and he would not accept mine. Our beliefs are just too different, and there's no objective way to prove that one is absolutely better. (Watch as I receive three tons of hate mail from the Ayatollah's friends and enemies for saying that.)
And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm back to trying not to flunk out of school.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Wealth
What is wealth?
Is the money I have wealth? Not really. Most of my money is stored in the form of a database entry at my bank, with the occasional bit of green-colored paper in my wallet. It's only useful to me only because I can trade it for what I really need.
Are gadgets wealth? To some degree, but I'm not going to appreciate a stereo much if I can't afford food. Or rent.
Is food wealth? Kinda. Some amount of food I need to sustain my body, but the excess tends to rot without some expensive treatment. I literally can only eat so much.
Is gold wealth? Hell no. I can trade gold for things, I'm sure, but most grocery stores aren't willing to trade a small fleck of gold for the food I need. I'd have to go through intermediaries, selling the gold ingots, then spending the resulting money.
So what is wealth?
Is the knowledge that I'm gaining by attending a university wealth? I could answer either way. It will help me earn money in the future, but it's not going to help me until I have the entire body of knowledge. And in the meantime, I'm kind of poor. Tuition and books and lost time.
Wealth is having your needs and desires met. Basically, a combination of all those things.
I want to increase the amount of wealth worldwide. Probably the best way to do this is labor. Pay people to do things that increase utility for other people.
There's an article out about the beliefs of Adam Smith, the English economist who is cited as the father of modern capitalism. Turns out that he didn't believe what he is attributed to have said. He argued that regulation is necessary for the best possible economies.
How come? When you own a business, the best possible position for you is a monopoly, in which you are the sole source of a need. When you're the sole source, you can demand basically any price you want for it. This is the worst possible position for the rest of us, who are now beholden to you. So a society with anti-monopoly rules, and with it definite competition in all fields, is better off than one with monopolies. Your money buys more when businesses have to compete against each other, either by more quality, or by lower prices. Now, this is not saying that business is inherently evil. Ideally business is win-win, earning money in exchange for something that people want more than money. (In my case, food and shelter to survive and then machines for fun and convenience.) However, allowing them to do anything they please is probably a bad idea, because what they want is to take over the field.
Take the health care issue. Health insurance is wealth -- knowing that a serious medical emergency is already paid for. But universal health care would be more wealth. It would mean care even if I became indigent. (In such troubled times, such a prospect seems almost likely.) The government's interest would be my continued health and well being, because healthy citizens work more, pay more taxes, and are more likely to serve in the armed forces. (I may be a lifelong civilian, but I may have children, and they might join up.) Insurance company's interests are to get me to pay and pay, and then not have to pay for a doctor. I would become unprofitable to them if I lost the ability to pay, or if I required something expensive.
There are two big theories on wealth. One is that wealth is like a pie, and one person having more inherently means another having less, as suggested by rules like entropy, conservation of energy and matter, and the like. The other is that wealth can be created, as operated by entrepreneurs worldwide.
That wealth can be created as can be demonstrated by the computer I'm using being worth considerably more than the sand, metal, and plastic that went into it. However, bad actions can also destroy wealth. If the country sinks in to anarchy, people will need to pay for security guards to prevent violence from the chaos, and trade will collapse. This is a definite major loss of wealth (order is one kind, for sure), and one we should strive hard to avoid.
Is the money I have wealth? Not really. Most of my money is stored in the form of a database entry at my bank, with the occasional bit of green-colored paper in my wallet. It's only useful to me only because I can trade it for what I really need.
Are gadgets wealth? To some degree, but I'm not going to appreciate a stereo much if I can't afford food. Or rent.
Is food wealth? Kinda. Some amount of food I need to sustain my body, but the excess tends to rot without some expensive treatment. I literally can only eat so much.
Is gold wealth? Hell no. I can trade gold for things, I'm sure, but most grocery stores aren't willing to trade a small fleck of gold for the food I need. I'd have to go through intermediaries, selling the gold ingots, then spending the resulting money.
So what is wealth?
Is the knowledge that I'm gaining by attending a university wealth? I could answer either way. It will help me earn money in the future, but it's not going to help me until I have the entire body of knowledge. And in the meantime, I'm kind of poor. Tuition and books and lost time.
Wealth is having your needs and desires met. Basically, a combination of all those things.
I want to increase the amount of wealth worldwide. Probably the best way to do this is labor. Pay people to do things that increase utility for other people.
There's an article out about the beliefs of Adam Smith, the English economist who is cited as the father of modern capitalism. Turns out that he didn't believe what he is attributed to have said. He argued that regulation is necessary for the best possible economies.
How come? When you own a business, the best possible position for you is a monopoly, in which you are the sole source of a need. When you're the sole source, you can demand basically any price you want for it. This is the worst possible position for the rest of us, who are now beholden to you. So a society with anti-monopoly rules, and with it definite competition in all fields, is better off than one with monopolies. Your money buys more when businesses have to compete against each other, either by more quality, or by lower prices. Now, this is not saying that business is inherently evil. Ideally business is win-win, earning money in exchange for something that people want more than money. (In my case, food and shelter to survive and then machines for fun and convenience.) However, allowing them to do anything they please is probably a bad idea, because what they want is to take over the field.
Take the health care issue. Health insurance is wealth -- knowing that a serious medical emergency is already paid for. But universal health care would be more wealth. It would mean care even if I became indigent. (In such troubled times, such a prospect seems almost likely.) The government's interest would be my continued health and well being, because healthy citizens work more, pay more taxes, and are more likely to serve in the armed forces. (I may be a lifelong civilian, but I may have children, and they might join up.) Insurance company's interests are to get me to pay and pay, and then not have to pay for a doctor. I would become unprofitable to them if I lost the ability to pay, or if I required something expensive.
There are two big theories on wealth. One is that wealth is like a pie, and one person having more inherently means another having less, as suggested by rules like entropy, conservation of energy and matter, and the like. The other is that wealth can be created, as operated by entrepreneurs worldwide.
That wealth can be created as can be demonstrated by the computer I'm using being worth considerably more than the sand, metal, and plastic that went into it. However, bad actions can also destroy wealth. If the country sinks in to anarchy, people will need to pay for security guards to prevent violence from the chaos, and trade will collapse. This is a definite major loss of wealth (order is one kind, for sure), and one we should strive hard to avoid.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Trolling Box
Ever since the invention of motors, switches, and actuators, a common for-fun invention has been a machine they call the "leave me alone box." It's a box with a switch, and the main purpose of the machine is to turn itself off. Here's a video:
I thought of an improvement to the machine that I dub "The Trolling Box." Like the "leave me alone" box, it would, when turned on, turn itself off. However, the simple field-programmable gate array would be replaced with a more sophisticated computer, one that could track how often the switch was flipped, and as the frequency increases, going from slowly and silently flipping the switch, to making annoyed comments via a speaker as it flips the switch, to cursing the switch flipper (generically though, the box doesn't even know so much as the gender of the switch flipper) culminating with a five-minute rant with language that would make George Carlin blush. Flipping the switch one more time results in the switch retracting into the box and a metal cover preventing its retreval. The box would after a period of about two hours reset itself. If the switch was retracted, the resetting would bring the switch back to the surface. In essence, the box gets "annoyed" when you flip the switch.
I predict this box would be popular among a certain crowd, who would enjoy taunting it until the switch retracted. Unfortunately, this suggests a Hobbesian view of human nature, that all people were created assholish trolls, requiring a strong authority to force them to behave like decent human beings. (Therefore, a country like America is doomed.) I hope Hobbes is wrong.
I thought of an improvement to the machine that I dub "The Trolling Box." Like the "leave me alone" box, it would, when turned on, turn itself off. However, the simple field-programmable gate array would be replaced with a more sophisticated computer, one that could track how often the switch was flipped, and as the frequency increases, going from slowly and silently flipping the switch, to making annoyed comments via a speaker as it flips the switch, to cursing the switch flipper (generically though, the box doesn't even know so much as the gender of the switch flipper) culminating with a five-minute rant with language that would make George Carlin blush. Flipping the switch one more time results in the switch retracting into the box and a metal cover preventing its retreval. The box would after a period of about two hours reset itself. If the switch was retracted, the resetting would bring the switch back to the surface. In essence, the box gets "annoyed" when you flip the switch.
I predict this box would be popular among a certain crowd, who would enjoy taunting it until the switch retracted. Unfortunately, this suggests a Hobbesian view of human nature, that all people were created assholish trolls, requiring a strong authority to force them to behave like decent human beings. (Therefore, a country like America is doomed.) I hope Hobbes is wrong.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Materialism vs. Idealism
Materialism and Idealism are two competing schools of philosophy with opposite premises. Materialism teaches that only the physical universe exists, and that if you can't hypothetically touch it, it's not real. Idealism teaches that the physical universe is not real (but instead some kind of elaborate fraud, or dream) and that non-tangible ideas are what's real.
Now, these are not the only two big ideas, and many philosophies exist between the two, such as Cartesian Dualism that teaches that both physical and idea things are real, and have some degree of interaction with each other. However, many other schools of philosophy are strongly connected to one or the other, which is why I bring them up.
See, science, the primary motivation I have for writing this, is strongly materialist, because idealist science would make no sense. In science, one makes a hypothesis, makes observations and experiments, then compares the hypothesis with the observations. If the hypothesis fails to conform to the observations, then it's wrong and needs to be discarded. If science were idealist, one would make a hypothesis, and then flail around helplessly with it because you'd have no way of verifying it other than your own thoughts and the thoughts of others. (Oh, and some of those thoughts would be wrong, but good luck figuring out which ones.)
So what's the big mover of idealism, then? Surely an unsupported idealism would have gone extinct? No, it has a very very large backer: religion. Most religions I can name at least strongly lean idealist (like Christianity), and a few are the very avatar of idealism (such as Buddhism). Believers are given a mental framework that gives them purpose, meaning, an explanation of the physical world, and a goal. Under a more materialist framework, they would be denied most of those things. The materialist universe has no clear purpose, and answers as to its nature will not be handed down on high, but one must work to understand them. If idealism was Wikipedia, materialism would be a dusty and long forgotten tome buried in the library that the librarian kinda half remembers putting there about 30 years ago.
I am not as materialist as I would like to be. As a computer science major, I already work several layers of indirection from the actual operation of a computer: I enter programming as text on a keyboard, it's translated several times before becoming the final machine code which I only loosely understand, and it's stored as a complex series of magnetic fields before being translated into the series of electrical impulses that actually do the work. The electrical impulses aren't very helpful to understanding what the computer is doing. So I think about programming in high level language.
Now, these are not the only two big ideas, and many philosophies exist between the two, such as Cartesian Dualism that teaches that both physical and idea things are real, and have some degree of interaction with each other. However, many other schools of philosophy are strongly connected to one or the other, which is why I bring them up.
See, science, the primary motivation I have for writing this, is strongly materialist, because idealist science would make no sense. In science, one makes a hypothesis, makes observations and experiments, then compares the hypothesis with the observations. If the hypothesis fails to conform to the observations, then it's wrong and needs to be discarded. If science were idealist, one would make a hypothesis, and then flail around helplessly with it because you'd have no way of verifying it other than your own thoughts and the thoughts of others. (Oh, and some of those thoughts would be wrong, but good luck figuring out which ones.)
So what's the big mover of idealism, then? Surely an unsupported idealism would have gone extinct? No, it has a very very large backer: religion. Most religions I can name at least strongly lean idealist (like Christianity), and a few are the very avatar of idealism (such as Buddhism). Believers are given a mental framework that gives them purpose, meaning, an explanation of the physical world, and a goal. Under a more materialist framework, they would be denied most of those things. The materialist universe has no clear purpose, and answers as to its nature will not be handed down on high, but one must work to understand them. If idealism was Wikipedia, materialism would be a dusty and long forgotten tome buried in the library that the librarian kinda half remembers putting there about 30 years ago.
I am not as materialist as I would like to be. As a computer science major, I already work several layers of indirection from the actual operation of a computer: I enter programming as text on a keyboard, it's translated several times before becoming the final machine code which I only loosely understand, and it's stored as a complex series of magnetic fields before being translated into the series of electrical impulses that actually do the work. The electrical impulses aren't very helpful to understanding what the computer is doing. So I think about programming in high level language.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Blog ethics
Now that blogs are popular, they're also gaining some unwanted attention. The FTC has taken a special interest in bloggers endorsing products or services, since for a while this was seen as free PR by the companies selling them, and the bloggers enjoyed the pay and free booty. The FTC, however, sees this as advertising, and insists on establishing the usual standards. Although bloggers dislike the end of a free ride, I do think this is an important piece of evidence in the shift of blogging from being simple online diaries to important opinion and journalism writings. This is a sign that blogging is now serious business. Bloggers have wanted to be serious business for years, and one can't have it both ways.
Also in the news, a supermodel working for Vogue,a Ms. Cohen, is outraged that a blog called her a skank. She's suing the blog in question, "Skanks in NYC," (or rather, the anonymous owner, since it's people who get sued, not things) for libel. So far, this is understandable, and the owner of "Skanks in NYC" is unlikely to win that case. However, bloggers are very nervous that she's also demanding that the identity of the blog's owner be publicly revealed, beyond what is required to collect. They're nervous because people can and have been fired for blogging, with varying degrees of justification. A term has been made, "Dooced," after the owner of Dooce.com who was fired for mentioning her workplace in her blog. (In the most justifiable firings, workers blog under their own name, and publicly badmouth their employer, thereby biting the hand that feeds them. In the least, they're under a pseudonym, avoid mentioning work, but are outed and fired anyway on the grounds that they might turn into the first category, or that the company doesn't like what they said, like if a blogger makes pro-Democrat comments when the company owner is a Republican. Or, rarely, just on the principle of "internet=bad")
I can only hope that as a society, we come to a sane definition of what blogs are, what rules apply to them, and what the responsibilities of a blogger are.
BREAKING NEWS: Since this writing, "Skanks in NYC" has disbanded.
Also in the news, a supermodel working for Vogue,a Ms. Cohen, is outraged that a blog called her a skank. She's suing the blog in question, "Skanks in NYC," (or rather, the anonymous owner, since it's people who get sued, not things) for libel. So far, this is understandable, and the owner of "Skanks in NYC" is unlikely to win that case. However, bloggers are very nervous that she's also demanding that the identity of the blog's owner be publicly revealed, beyond what is required to collect. They're nervous because people can and have been fired for blogging, with varying degrees of justification. A term has been made, "Dooced," after the owner of Dooce.com who was fired for mentioning her workplace in her blog. (In the most justifiable firings, workers blog under their own name, and publicly badmouth their employer, thereby biting the hand that feeds them. In the least, they're under a pseudonym, avoid mentioning work, but are outed and fired anyway on the grounds that they might turn into the first category, or that the company doesn't like what they said, like if a blogger makes pro-Democrat comments when the company owner is a Republican. Or, rarely, just on the principle of "internet=bad")
I can only hope that as a society, we come to a sane definition of what blogs are, what rules apply to them, and what the responsibilities of a blogger are.
BREAKING NEWS: Since this writing, "Skanks in NYC" has disbanded.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Doping League
All the news about Caster Semenya has got me thinking. In sports, the use of chemical alterations to players is banned for just about every sport. It's seen as unfair to boost yourself chemically when other people get their prowess by difficult and demanding training. In short, drugs or hormonal treatments are cheating, k'thanks-for-playing.
I'm thinking, what if there was another league, where 'doping' was permitted? The records would probably be higher, but would it be interesting to watch? What is the true limit of human athletic performance? The 'Doping' league would consists of teams that were permitted to use such substances, which would be banned from the existing leagues, which by retronym are now the 'natural' leagues.
The league would also do medical research on the forensics of doping, so as to enable to natural leagues to better detect it.
The only objection I can think of is ethical. Steroid use does have a negative effect on the athlete's health. While athletes who dope do so of their own free will, I can definitely understand the position of needing to protect them from their own selves -- that victory is not worth ruining one's health. I shall read up on medical ethics.
I'm thinking, what if there was another league, where 'doping' was permitted? The records would probably be higher, but would it be interesting to watch? What is the true limit of human athletic performance? The 'Doping' league would consists of teams that were permitted to use such substances, which would be banned from the existing leagues, which by retronym are now the 'natural' leagues.
The league would also do medical research on the forensics of doping, so as to enable to natural leagues to better detect it.
The only objection I can think of is ethical. Steroid use does have a negative effect on the athlete's health. While athletes who dope do so of their own free will, I can definitely understand the position of needing to protect them from their own selves -- that victory is not worth ruining one's health. I shall read up on medical ethics.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
The Power of Libraries
When the United States became independent from the UK, there was a massive surge in scientific progress. Why? Because many libraries were built, and the new US refused to recognize UK Copyright. This gave the US a flood of cheap books, and free reading in the library. People had a glut of information available to them, and they put it to great use.
Things have changed since then. The US is now very into international copyright, and many libraries find themselves too short on cash to expand their collection of books, and their funding gets cut over and over. The big source of information is now the internet.
The Internet has more flaws than the library system, even if it does provide information faster. One is that the information on the internet is often very low utility. For a good example of this, see articles on WikiGroaning, in which people note how much useless trivia has accumulated in Wikipedia simply because the contributors like it. Likewise, the internet has loads of funny pictures like LOLcats which contribute little to people's development or understanding.
For another, much of the information on the internet is increasingly wrong. As in, incorrect. Many people get their news from blogs such as this one. While this isn't a problem by itself, blog writers have no inherent qualification. Some have been known to fabricate things, which later get repeated as true. (Sometimes they do this as a prank, other times it is a pious fraud on their part, and other motivations also exist.) Many serious news organizations have repeated stories from satirical papers like The Onion, because they didn't know that everything in The Onion is a spoof. All the information in the world is useless if it's incorrect.
The increasing loss of information to trivial and wrong information threatens the further development of humankind. We have only so many hours per day, and the more distracted and suspicious we wind up, the less productive we can be.
Things have changed since then. The US is now very into international copyright, and many libraries find themselves too short on cash to expand their collection of books, and their funding gets cut over and over. The big source of information is now the internet.
The Internet has more flaws than the library system, even if it does provide information faster. One is that the information on the internet is often very low utility. For a good example of this, see articles on WikiGroaning, in which people note how much useless trivia has accumulated in Wikipedia simply because the contributors like it. Likewise, the internet has loads of funny pictures like LOLcats which contribute little to people's development or understanding.
For another, much of the information on the internet is increasingly wrong. As in, incorrect. Many people get their news from blogs such as this one. While this isn't a problem by itself, blog writers have no inherent qualification. Some have been known to fabricate things, which later get repeated as true. (Sometimes they do this as a prank, other times it is a pious fraud on their part, and other motivations also exist.) Many serious news organizations have repeated stories from satirical papers like The Onion, because they didn't know that everything in The Onion is a spoof. All the information in the world is useless if it's incorrect.
The increasing loss of information to trivial and wrong information threatens the further development of humankind. We have only so many hours per day, and the more distracted and suspicious we wind up, the less productive we can be.
Friday, July 17, 2009
If It's All Simulated
What if, asks philosophy students everywhere, the real world isn't actually real? If it's a dream, a simulation, or otherwise entirely imagined? What consequences should this have? How would it affect your lives?
Well, this completely destroys the very concept of consequences. Any mess of any kind I leave behind can be deleted from the situation, declared invalid, or forgotten until it ceases to exist. Cleaning? Why bother, leave the area and it gets done for you when the simulation or dream forgets it existed. Insult someone? It can be erased from their memories, or otherwise deus-ex-machina'd out of existence. Or, if you control the simulation, the very person can be removed. And if you don't, avoid them until whatever's controlling the simulation forgets that they should be mad at you.
As a simulated person, your goal is to entertain whatever's operating the simulation. You should do things that are interesting to it as often as possible, so as not to be ... stopped. All simulations have a cost, computer simulations have a processing-power requirement, dreams need brain and time, and other simulations, too, require resources. Whatever's paying the bills had better be satisfied with your behavior, or everything you know ends abruptly.
Of course, if you're wrong about this, this means that you'll behaving like an insufferable bastard for no good reason, and while amusing to watch from a distance, will enrage your entire family and friends and suffer numerous consequences in the name of comedy.
Although many philosophers speculate that it is quite likely that we live in a simulation now, on the grounds that computing power is continuing to increase all the time, and simulations of past events are becoming increasingly common, therefore it is likely that you are actually a simulation, run thousands of years in the future for historical purposes.
However, as a counterpart to this, I note that I "live in the future" as it were (my computer would have been thought of as massively impossible even 100 years ago), and I do not bother to simulate the lives of my medieval ancestors. Just because I have the power to, doesn't mean I necessarily do it. I'm more likely to simulate something that never was, or even never could be, than the actual factual past.
Since I believe that the amount of computing power to simulate my life exactly won't exist until 2500 at least, and because I think 1980 - 2009 will not be the most interesting set of years from now until then, I sincerely doubt that my life is simulated. So no wild goofball behavior for me.
Well, this completely destroys the very concept of consequences. Any mess of any kind I leave behind can be deleted from the situation, declared invalid, or forgotten until it ceases to exist. Cleaning? Why bother, leave the area and it gets done for you when the simulation or dream forgets it existed. Insult someone? It can be erased from their memories, or otherwise deus-ex-machina'd out of existence. Or, if you control the simulation, the very person can be removed. And if you don't, avoid them until whatever's controlling the simulation forgets that they should be mad at you.
As a simulated person, your goal is to entertain whatever's operating the simulation. You should do things that are interesting to it as often as possible, so as not to be ... stopped. All simulations have a cost, computer simulations have a processing-power requirement, dreams need brain and time, and other simulations, too, require resources. Whatever's paying the bills had better be satisfied with your behavior, or everything you know ends abruptly.
Of course, if you're wrong about this, this means that you'll behaving like an insufferable bastard for no good reason, and while amusing to watch from a distance, will enrage your entire family and friends and suffer numerous consequences in the name of comedy.
Although many philosophers speculate that it is quite likely that we live in a simulation now, on the grounds that computing power is continuing to increase all the time, and simulations of past events are becoming increasingly common, therefore it is likely that you are actually a simulation, run thousands of years in the future for historical purposes.
However, as a counterpart to this, I note that I "live in the future" as it were (my computer would have been thought of as massively impossible even 100 years ago), and I do not bother to simulate the lives of my medieval ancestors. Just because I have the power to, doesn't mean I necessarily do it. I'm more likely to simulate something that never was, or even never could be, than the actual factual past.
Since I believe that the amount of computing power to simulate my life exactly won't exist until 2500 at least, and because I think 1980 - 2009 will not be the most interesting set of years from now until then, I sincerely doubt that my life is simulated. So no wild goofball behavior for me.
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