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Archive for September, 2009

The Metropolis

Monday, September 21st, 2009

Last weekend my friend and I sat on a rooftop of a building in New York City. I marveled at the sights and even took a picture with my bad camera (when are you going to get better, oh iPhone camera?) so I wouldn’t forget those few hours I spent pondering the future of mankind…

Picture taken from a rooftop of a Midtown West residential building

There are some skyscrapers, but surprisingly the view was dominated by relatively short (six- or seven-story) buildings. The picture doesn’t do it justice at all, of course, but you can see some of them in the foreground. My friend called these structures “ugly” and continued looking at the skyscrapers. Then it dawned on me that those very “ugly” buildings represent a dying era; and the skyscraper, spread in a gridlike fashion, omnipresent, dominating, commanding, looking down on you, is a harbinger of a new age. The age of the Metropolis.

What’s the difference, you’ll ask. The differences are subtle, but that’s how changes happen, through a deluge of subtleties. I could imagine–I nearly saw it unravel in front of me–how in the near future, the skyscraper will be everywhere. Wherever you look, you’ll see a wall. It won’t matter that you’re in a high-rise building, because all the buildings around you will also be high-rise. Being on the fiftieth floor will be indistinguishable from being on the second. The rooftop, perhaps the last standing symbol of the old days, will cease to exist as increased security and–quite frankly–unremarkable sights discourage landlords from opening it to the public.

The differences are even more apparent if you close your eyes. The late-twentieth Century City (let’s settle on such a name for the passing era) is alive. You can hear everything that’s happening in the City while sitting right there on the rooftop. The sirens of emergency vehicles dozens of blocks away get transformed as they bounce off the irregular structures; the sound interferes with itself as it diffracts off the buildings. What reaches your ear is a remarkable narrative compression of the inner workings of the City, a true symphony. I encourage you to try the same — go somewhere high enough so the noise of the city starts blending into music.

What will replace this symphony in the new era? Silence. The new era has no need for noise. Everything is hermetic, sealed off from the world. You can’t even make out what is behind that tinted glass. The emergency vehicles will cease to exist as well: in a well-engineered Metropolis, all emergencies are taken care of locally (plus, it would be impossible for emergency vehicles to get anywhere in the Metropolis). Maybe they will be kept around to appease the tourists who will walk through a Times Square and want to experience the thrill of an emergency, a sudden rush of blood as an ambulance passes by. How will schoolchildren learn about the Doppler effect?

The 1927 movie “Metropolis” comes to mind. At first glance it may seem obsolete–that’s not that the future looks like!. But if you watch it more closely, you’ll see that it’s closer to what the future will bring than you think. If we simplify things and assume there are discrete eras in the evolution of Man, and that we’re living in era n, we’ll notice that era n+1 is heavily influenced by the current era (which was heavily influenced by era n-1). The Skyscraper, for example, is really an invention of the twentieth Century. What the movie “Metropolis” (which was arguably made in era n-2) does is describes era n+2, an era which we cannot even begin to comprehend, a City that’s distant, remote, un-human. It’s a City that we don’t want to be part of. Finally, it’s a totally silent City.

I was saddened by the thought that my friend, who today calls the artifacts of the near-bygone era “ugly”, will in just a few decades struggle to convey the magic and mystery of the late-twentieth Century City to his children. No wonder though–the new age will maximize the probability of its success, even if it means vilifying, banishing, destroying the old one before its time comes. And looking at my friend–a covert (though he doesn’t know it) agent of the new age–the probability of its success is high indeed.

Posted in retrospective | No Comments »

The “Poof!” Street Lamps

Sunday, September 20th, 2009

It’s happened to me a lot and I can’t really figure out the reason for this mystery. I’m in an alley, walking late at night (or running alongside a road). The road is lit up with street lamps, spread out conveniently so that it doesn’t feel too dark “between” each consecutive lamps. Suddenly, as I’m about to walk up close to one of the lamps, poof! it turns off. What’s going on?

I don’t know if it stops working or if it automatically shuts off — I’ve stuck around for a while and haven’t noticed it coming back up, but it doesn’t necessarily prove anything. I don’t know if it happens when I drive on the street; I don’t think so but I may be biasing myself (since when I’m driving, it takes me much less time to pass any single lamp).

The whole thing may be a survival bias thing — it could have happened a few times for totally random reasons, but I’ll remember those most obscure cases of the street lamps seemingly spiting me. It could even be a regular broken light, and of course we only notice if we walk past it (when a tree falls and there’s nobody around…)

Still, my sense of badness tells me that it’s likely something to do with how these lights operate. Some strange kind of motion sensor perhaps?

Posted in The Daily Badness | 2 Comments »

Crowdsourcing Art

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

Inspired by this guy I thought of something that might be fun: to have the community generate a small image collaboratively by having everyone be able to paint a few pixels of it. In a way, I wanted to crowdsource the generation of a computer graphic. This became my miniproject for the past weekend, and also a good way to announce the Grand Opening of this site (until now nobody really knew about it).

The idea is quite simple: consider a 67×67 pixel image. It’s pretty small, but sufficient to capture quite a lot of detail, e.g.

A lot of detail can fit in a 67x67 image

The image starts fully transparent. I then give away tokens to people I know; each token gives the owner the right to put a small number of pixels (say, 15) on the image. Everyone is free to pick what colors each of the pixels should be, and which pixels to set. If I give away enough tokens, and if people want to participate, interesting results can be generated (all without my involvement at all!)

I’m going to make this a little more fun by introducing two rules:

You can “draw” over other people’s pixels but that’s going to cost you more (2 pixels instead of 1) — this is to imitate what artists do, often painting over sections of their image multiple times
You are rewarded for collaborating with others. If two people get together, they can “merge” two tokens into one, and, just like a two-liter Cola costs a little less than two one-liter Colas, such combined token allows you to draw more pixels than what the original tokens allowed. (Similarly, splitting a token into two pieces is allowed, but the resulting two pixel “allowances” will add up to a little less than the original).

The second rule is, in my view, very interesting and I expect some fascinating results. Since one person needs both tokens to get the combined one, you must put some trust in whoever you’re giving your token to. You can, of course, just give up your rights to drawing pixels and give your token to somebody else. Perhaps you can work out some kind of deal with your friend (I don’t know how much a pixel is “worth”; the whole idea is to encourage collaborative creativity and not make somebody rich but, as I said, I don’t want to control what will happen).

The first rule is interesting, too, as the image fills up and people decide to paint over other people’s work. Perhaps there are parts of the image that don’t fit aesthetically with the rest. Perhaps someone went all personal on somebody else (what’s the least number of pixels to draw a Polish joke?). Or, the canvas is full but people still have tokens left.

To make it a fun and lasting exercise I’ll be giving tokens to people going forward (not just in the initial batch), perhaps for commenting on this blog? (ah yes, brownie points for participation…)

You can check out the work in progress here. Unfortunately, I can’t spend a lot of time trying to make the site work well in all browsers, so I had to focus on those that are standards-compliant (biggest bang for the buck). Consequently, this page won’t work if you’re using IE6. I’m not sure about IE7 or IE8. I have tested it on Safari and Firefox.

If I haven’t sent you an email with a token, let me know (me at elevenseconds dot-you-know-what) and I’ll throw something in.

Posted in art, code, miniproject | 2 Comments »

A large group trying to go somewhere

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Very frequently I’ve been in a fairly large group of people (5 or more) and we were all trying to go somewhere, say, a movie theater. I noticed that the amount of time it took us to actually get going increased pretty rapidly with the size of the group. This fact by itself should be no surprise to anybody; I have a feeling, though, that the amount of time is superlinear with the number of people, and perhaps it’s even superpolynomial. Let’s see if we can derive this relationship. We’ll make some simplifying assumptions but the gist of the problem should be captured.

Suppose you have n people in a group. Every person is mostly ready to leave, with the exception of a small number of tasks the person has to do (or can do, given enough time) — you know, the “If we’re not going to leave in the next five minutes, I’m just going to quickly go to the restroom” sort. Assume that each person experiences some distribution of such “events” which derail the effort of leaving. The duration of such events is also a random variable. The group can’t leave if at least one of its members is currently occupied with an event. Let’s say that the probability at any given time that a person is not occupied with an event is p (p, therefore, is the measure of “readiness”; of course, if p=0, the group will never leave; if p=1, the group will leave at time t=0).

Assume it takes n people time t to leave. Now add a new person to the group. The group will leave at the expected time t only if the new person happens to be free at that time (with probability p). If not, the group will have to wait; assuming the events are independent, this will take another time t (at the end of which the new person may or may not be free). The expected time is therefore

tp + 2t(1-p)*p + 3t(1-p)(1-p)*p + 4t(1-p)(1-p)*p + … = tp(1 + 2(1-p) + 3(1-p)²) + …)

Let

S=1+2a+3a²+4a³+…

Then

S = (1+a+a²+a³+…) + (a + 2a² + 3a³+…) = 1/(1-a) + aS

Hence

S = 1/(1-a)²

So the above becomes

tp*1/(1-(1-p))² = tp/p² = t/p

Suppose p=0.5. The expected time is 2t: an additional person doubles the amount of time it takes for the group to leave. The amount of time is therefore not only superlinear in the number of people, it’s actually exponential!

Posted in The Daily Badness, paramathematics | No Comments »

Do you buy lottery tickets? No? Think again.

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Some of us are appalled at the idea of buying lottery tickets. The chances of winning, you might say, are so slim (not mentioning negative expected value) that I’d much rather buy a beer to boost my utility. And it might be quite rightly so — the lottery benefits mostly from people who don’t know basic probability theory, find it difficult to internalize really large or really small numbers, or are simply risk-loving.

But if you swear you would never willingly participate in a lottery, think again. I will reveal a secret to you. Granted, this is somewhat of a simplification, I’ll admit, but one that has some merit nonetheless.

The chances are, you have been to a doctor. Any doctor, say, a dentist. You may even have complained at the amount of money you had to pay for service. When you consider what goes into the money you pay, you start separating out the doctor’s honorarium, the cost of the supporting staff (the ladies in the reception that know your name when you enter the office), the cost of the office itself (and the magazine subscriptions); more indirectly, the cost of the bureaucracy required to sustain the insurance program you’re subscribed to (and yes, the cost of these statements you get in the mail), and so on. One of these myriad hidden costs struck me as very surprising — it’s the cost of a lottery ticket!

How so? We live in a culture of litigation. People love to sue other people, perhaps in a modern manifestation of bullying (which really is in the human nature), perhaps as a gamble (many people I’m sure think they can “cheat” the system), perhaps out of some conception of social justice using as its medium the one truly universal, fully transferrable, comparable and quantitative measure of your fit as a member of the society — money.

We most often sue medical practitioners, probably because we go to various kinds of doctors a lot, because the doctors perform work closest to what we hold the most dear (our bodies), or because our bodies are enough of enigmas to allow us to stand our argument in court (it’s not like an expect can measure how much it hurts in some truly universal, fully transferrable, comparable and quantitative measure — ironically, however, we do believe that we can measure the compensation we should get in the very same unit). It’s just a fact of life.

Doctors know this, and they know that those lawsuits are a kind of an act of randomness. It’s never clear what circumstances may cause a patient to decide to sue (to be fair, I’m not exonerating medical practitioners — it’s quite possible that the lawsuit is due to a legitimate error, malpractice, or gross negligence!). To ease their life, doctors buy legal insurance — it’s just like life insurance, but it allows the doctors to protect themselves from the costs of lawsuits for a low monthly fee. This is smart — it reduces the risk as seen by the doctor, given that lawsuits do happen.

Now the punchline — guess who’s paying for this low monthly fee! Great lottery you’re part of…

Posted in reductions | No Comments »

On the cyclical nature of things

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

I’ve been meaning to write about this for quite some time because I think it’s one of the more fundamental concepts I’ve come across, if not the most fundamental. I think it’s also pretty obvious to people but this fact has implications which are incredibly useful to think about (because they may not be intuitive).

It has become quite clear to me that as many things around us, the decisions we make in our life follow a sort of circular pattern: at times we decide on something, only later to revert the decision. The strangest thing about this is that each individual decision seems like it was made deliberately, rationally, and with a careful consideration of all the pros and cons. If that is the case, why on Earth would the decisions we make change so fundamentally? Do our values and philosophies change as fundamentally as well?

Let me give you an example that I think illustrates this best. Over the past three years that I owned a car, I would frequently (at least once a week, sometimes twice or more) go to New York City to meet up with my friends. Each time I was faced with a choice: I could drive to the City, or I could take the train. Over those three years, I must have reversed on my decisions three, maybe four times. I found it difficult to believe — each time it seems natural to me to do A; I know I didn’t use to do A but that’s because I didn’t know better; now it definitely makes sense to do A. Only to, a few months later, think it obvious that I should do B.

What is going on here? I believe that the system that connects our philosophies (and the system of our values–so the most fundamental building blocks of our reasoning) to the decisions we make every day is a chaotic one, that is, small changes in our philosophy may lead to large changes in the ultimate decisions. Our philosophies change slightly, but as a result we may end up turning our life upside down — in my case, I may decide that the only reasonable thing is to take the car even though two weeks ago I thought it obvious to take the train. Such “reversals” may happen multiple times, in fact — in my case, I’d switch between taking the train and driving several times over the three years. Specifically, if you’re interested, here is an abbreviated version of the reasoning I would go through:

9/06: Take the train. I don’t like driving to the City, it’s stressful. And parking is expensive. Since it takes about the same amount of time, I’ll just take the train
11/06: Drive. Well, actually driving is kind of exhilarating. And parking is $15; if you include the cost of the train ticket, it pretty much ends up being a very similar amount. And if I drive, I have the benefit of staying in the City much longer — I’m not bound by the schedule of the train
3/07: Take the train. I can’t drink if I have to drive, and if I happen to miss the last train, I can always crash at my friend’s place until the first train in the morning, which is at 5am, which is usually around the time I’m done for the night
6/07: Drive. First of all, I can find free street parking. I still have to drive to the train station so the drinking immobilizes me pretty much regardless of the method I use. If I drive, I’m not bound by when the train leaves — I don’t have to rush at all to make the train into the City
5/08: Take the train. I can read a book when I’m on the train, or even use my computer, and don’t waste 45 minutes each way
12/08: Drive. I’m usually tired anyway so I don’t get anything done on the train. And when I drive I can listen to audiobooks.
5/09: Take the train. I like sleeping in my own bed, and leaving with the last train will give me the much needed discipline.

I think the nature of changes is, strictly speaking, more like an outward spiral rather than a circle, because with each new decision, we have the benefit of the decisions we made in the past, so even if the decision may seem like one we already made, it was made by incorporating all the prior reasoning. It’s not the outcome (the specific decision) that defines your reasoning, it’s the entire baggage of reasoning you have acquired over time leading up to your decision.

In retrospect, what happened to me with the whole car v. train debate is very interesting. For one, all the arguments were true from the very beginning, I just chose to include some and not the others. The weight I attached to some (usually one) arguments was much higher than before, and it’s this difference in weights that caused the balance to shift from one decision (take the train) to an entirely opposite one (drive, i.e. don’t take the train).

The reason why these differences were so frequent is that as I later found out, most of these arguments boil down to “it doesn’t really matter”. In fact, there is a workaround for every one (Stuck to train schedule? Crash at your friend’s place. 45 minutes driving feels like a waste of time? Listen to audiobooks). I think the cost one was the most obvious instance of this — it seemed that one way was “overwhelmingly” better than the other until I included some other hidden cost — at first it was parking garages being expensive; then I found cheaper garages (thanks to nycgarages.com). Then it was all the tolls and gas; then I realized that I’m paying for parking at the train station.

With arguments that are easily fixable, and decision that is highly sensitive to those arguments, it’s no surprise that my mindset at the time (which is a combination of the ever-so-slightly changing factors in my life philosophy) would make the decisions downstream oscillate like this, even if I happened to make the exact opposite decision in the past. And as the arguments are found to be moot, we tend to pick out subtler and subtler ones to guide us.

Another example from my life is fairly recent: what should I listen to when I run? Should I listen to music or podcasts/audiobooks? For the longest time I’d listen to songs because I liked that. Then I switched to audiobooks because listening to the same songs seemed wasteful; surely I could utilize the time better if I listened to a book. I recently switched back to music for two subtle reasons: for one, music strangely motivates me to work out better; it has something to do with the beats or the symmetry. Secondly (and this one really is subtle), listening to music (as opposed to audiobooks) actually allows me to think about things. In a way, I can multitask better because the resources I need to think (high level) are different than the resources I need to enjoy music (low level).

This rapidly changing set of outcomes brings me to an important principle which I’ll call “the answer is somewhere in the middle”. The principle helps us make decision in the face of uncertainty and says that the right answer is likely to be in between the two extremes so so long as you are by and large in the ballpark, you’re optimizing your use case. For example, take the problem of finding your purpose in life. One extreme says that you have to expose yourself to as much in life as possible: go climb mountains, pick rice in China, hang-glide, go to missions in Africa. Only then will you be able to figure out your purpose in life. Another one says that it’s all random — you could be doing nothing and the purpose could just randomly come to you; and hence, it really doesn’t matter what you do — you may just as well relax and do less. People have many philosophical wars about which one of the two is the “right” answer. The principle which I’m evoking says that the answer is somewhere in the middle (in other words, there is no “right” answer) and you’ll maximize your chances of finding your life’s purpose if you do a little bit of both — explore and experience some, but not too much — give yourself some time for serendipity.

I like this principle because it’s very close to the philosophy of “there is no right answer” that I talked about before. Of course the extremists will believe that being in the middle is a bad idea — if you’re doing something, you should do it fully rather than half-assing it — so they are likely to dislike this principle as well (since they often think there is a right answer). There’s no point arguing with them because of the feedback problem: if they believe there is a right answer, they will not let you convince them that a “there is no right answer” philosophy is just as good as “there is a right answer” one because that would contradict their belief!

I recently realized that instead of being frustrated by the ever-changing decisions I should embrace them. The outcomes as not nearly as important as the path I took to arrive at all of them (even if they seem circular — which is also why I prefer to think about this process as an “outward spiral” to show the same outcome — the phase — but a different point in space — due to the increasing radius). My philosophy will change, there is no point to spend a lot of time on making decisions because they are bound to change in the future. Instead, delay the making of decisions to a later day (when you know more) and pick something in the middle to minimize the probability of investing too much in a decision that won’t be that instrumental to your future life.

This eliminates many frustrations from my life (in fact, I do feel that the purpose in everyone’s life should be to reduce the frustrations one feels in life — if you reduce them to zero, you have succeeded in life!). Some Eastern philosophies probably agree with this to some extent…

The knowledge that most arguments can be tweaked to tell whatever story you want can also be liberating. I used to think that I can no longer stay up at night working on small projects — I must be getting older. Until I stayed up all night two nights ago. Then I realized that recently I just haven’t worked on an exciting enough project, and that there is nothing wrong with me being able to stay up all night (however, I should avoid doing this often…). As a consequence, I strongly believe that we’re all capable of changing regardless of age and the phenomenon of older people being relatively fixed in their likes and habits is simply an artifact of them liking a particular set of outcomes and deciding to stop analyzing the decisions.

Finally, it’s simply good to see that some of the approaches I took in the past are valid today. For example, early in my childhood I was taught the value of humility. This continued until I started working with a bunch of alpha males. Humility no longer seemed like such a virtue. Recently, though, I’ve been realizing that being humble is a good thing (and others–yes, those alpha males–are realizing it, too). I happened to be right but, again, the outcome doesn’t matter as much as the approach–I have a much broader understanding of humility now that I’ve gone through a few cycles of it. Besides, this may all change again soon…

Posted in principles, retrospective | 1 Comment »

How personal to make this blog?

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I struggled with defining the boundaries of this blog. The way I see it, there is a spectrum of how personal I can make the blog and I can identify at least three discrete stages on that spectrum:

One extreme is an entirely impersonal blog — I state facts and perhaps some observations, and try to avoid making opinions or revealing any information about myself
Relaxing this constraint, I can have a semi-personal blog — I state my opinions with the reasoning for them. The audience gets to learn things about me by following my posts. As time goes on, the audience knows more and more
On the other extreme, I make this blog entirely personal — I talk about things that have happened in my life. In a way, this is going back to reporting facts and not as much my opinions

I think so far I’ve been oscillating somewhere between the second and the third. I don’t want it to be either extreme — I think the former is naive as to make the blog interesting, I have to state opinions, and whether I like it or not, information about me flows from the opinions I voice. You can and will get to know me through my posts. The latter is, in my view, self-indulging: it doesn’t serve a useful purpose for anyone other than me. The “sweet spot” is the middle, where I get to present my opinions, and have people critique them, without unnaturally coloring them with facts about my life, or artificially extracting all context from them.

In fact, I think I’ve managed to slip more than I would at first have thought. Just by reading these posts, and looking at the pictures I took, you can learn a lot about me. You know more or less where I live and maybe what I do; if you have good attention to detail you may even know what I look like (extra credit!). I think it’s fine but I do want to focus on my opinions. This is sometimes tricky — do I post about movies I’ve seen, saying which one I liked (and why)? Do I reveal information about my friends and people I talked to? These are tricky issues.

Posted in meta | No Comments »

Thinking about Purpose (take 2)

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I know that personal gain is not a goal in my life (what makes me happiest in life is only weakly correlated with my wealth, and there is a large number of diverse source of happiness so what is correlated with wealth is easily substitutable), or family (it seems fundamentally inefficient to put the energy of your life into sustaining a few individuals (children); and unless I find a great relationship (and there are an incredibly small number of these out there), I don’t think that my utility, short-term or long-term, is correlated with devotion to one person). Of course, a caveat here is that my ultimate goal may require wealth (which I can direct to fulfill my goal) but it will not be an end to itself.

I feel that I should make an impact. It’s unclear to me what it should be an impact on, but it seems that I should be able to substantially affect some non-local outcome. I don’t think I want fame (although I haven’t introspected into it yet).

I think that if I take the all-unifying and fundamental-seeking approach to finding my life’s purpose, I will determine that I should aid in the destruction of the universe. While this may sound funny, it’s not an “evil” thing per se; in fact, it can lead to what it commonly believed to be very “good” outcomes. For example, one corollary of this fact is that I should strive to enable mankind to progress on a large scale, where progress is defined as the ability to control (affect) an ever-increasing amount of space, and with it, energy.

I believe that there are two fundamental ways to enable such progress. We can discover a new way of harnessing, storing and transporting energy; or we can create conditions for someone else to do this for us. The latter can be achieved, for example, by producing machine intelligence, devoid of the biological constraints (of speed, capacity, and bootstrapping).

Some of the principles that can lead me:

Your life has to include a large amount of consumption. Take in information, experience new things, let your senses develop
On the other hand, you have to look within. Process information, unify concepts, draw conclusions
You have to learn how to create something lasting, since your life’s purpose will most definitely require such a thing
You also have to learn how to strive for something (follow through on goals). The best way to do this is to start small and gather inner strength through small successes, as well as improve on weaknesses through feedback on failures
Remember that your philosophy may change over time. Instead of fighting this motion, embrace it. Prepare yourself for making decisions late. Be flexible. Refactoring is cheap

My immediate goal is to infer from within (by consolidating information, reaching out to fundamentals, logic and first principles) and from without (by observing the Universe that surrounds me) my purpose in life and its consequences. There are several factors to this:

Feed your senses (to observe better)
- Cherish your friendships
- Read books
- Broaden my horizons of knowledge
- Do things from my bucket list
Think more (introspect better)
- Have the time to think more (cleaner separation of work and life — and set aside time to just think)
- Keep yourself honest about thinking (maintain a blog with your thoughts — this allows others to provide feedback, and clarifies your thoughts)
- Improve the quality of thought — lead a healthy life, free of anxiety and waste
Make something lasting and be creative
Improve my follow-through by focusing on something and achieving it well.
- Be in a great physical condition
- Present yourself better
- Lead, design and execute better
- Do weekend miniprojects
Figure out your purpose

Posted in principles, purpose, retrospective | 1 Comment »

Good relationships, great relationships

Monday, September 14th, 2009

A friend of mine T.B. and I talked about relationships the other day. I realized that there are good relationships, and there are great relationships.

You may have been lucky to be in a good relationship. I think that these can be characterized with an absence of guilt. I’ve been in relationships that have been marked by embedded guilt (even if it’s implicit, “because you don’t want to hurt the other person”) and in those that have not and the difference is enormous.

Most, if not all guilt comes about because we are fundamentally insecure creatures. We don’t like to be criticized, we are cautious by nature, we like to stand on firm ground that nobody questions and wear a thin skin that nobody pinches. In relationships, this is particularly important because we are by definition sharing something with another person; insecurity only stands in the way of this. This is what makes us want to present ourselves in a better light; as a result, we’re not ourselves — we are what we think others would like us to be if they were us. In many relationships, this facade is kept up for a long time (again, not always deliberately, and often implicitly) but the tension remains (because it’s still just a facade). This tensions causes those relationships to collapse. So if you’ve been privileged to be in a good relationship, this would not have been a problem.

Great relationships are very few and far between. A lot of people may think they’ve been in great relationship but that’s naive. I think great relationships are marked by our willingness (not just “being OK”) to relinquish control and comfort with sharing everything with the other person. T.B. told me he thought he had a great relationship but later it turned out that he would never want his significant other to get access to his email archive. Why not–if you’re relinquishing control and comfortable with sharing everything with the other person? Well, T.B. said, he may have said something about himself, or that significant other, that he wouldn’t like the significant other to know. Why not? In a truly great relationship, the significant other would understand.

What are great relationships? Why are they better than living alone? And why are they so special? I think the only thing that’s better than being comfortable with yourself is being able to share this comfort with another human being. There’s something about human interactions that makes us go a little crazy if we have to keep too much to ourselves. As my friend G.B. said, so much is happening in his head that he is constantly wondering if he’s the crazy one (surrounded by normal people). Obviously, though, everyone thinks they are crazy and everyone else is sane, so we can sleep at night, but the paradox remains: with so little feedback we suffer.

And since in a great relationship, you have the opportunity to share with another human being, there is no need to cheat (what for? to share something different with a different other human being?). There is no need to lie (unless in circumstances when you would lie to yourself). In a way, the only danger in a great relationship is the danger of losing your significant other due to death.

Don’t get me wrong — there’s nothing wrong with good relationships. I believe that for many (if not most) people, being in a good relationship is better than being alone. But I think that many of us think they are in a great relationship because they feel good in it, while it’s nothing of the sort. Feeling good is contextual (and often prone to a confirmation bias) so we shouldn’t draw many conclusions from that.

I do think we should all strive to find the great relationship in our lives, but the truth be told, they are very rare. Once we do, we can consider ourselves very lucky as we keep our significant other close to us. The good thing is that since this is a great relationship, we don’t have to put much effort in it–it just happens naturally. It’s a little bit like playing an instrument — the greatest virtuoso who must put a lot of effort in rendering the music perfectly well with an astonishing accuracy still fades in comparison with a musician who can feel the music.

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Life Hack #21: Use disk images

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

I keep my sensitive information on an encrypted disk image on my computer (Disk Utility can create sparse disk image with encryption). I simply mount the disk when I need to access the information (ensuring that I don’t save the password in my Keychain!).

Nite that since Time Machine does file-based backup for every file that has changed, you should keep these disk images small since every time you change it, the entire file will need to be written to the backup device.

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