I couldn’t for a long time reconcile having children with having a life’s purpose — the former seems like a very time-consuming way to go about one’s life (putting all this effort into shaping one individual’s life, instead of a large group of people or even the entire planet).
Now I think that having children may be a way to extend the chance to make an impact, a kind of high-cost but perhaps higher-probability Plan B.
Consider a much more abstract idea of what a hierarchy of job responsibilities may entail. Imagine that in a highly conceptualized “workplace”, all “employees” are arranged in a tree, a perfect hierarchy. Each one of them makes decisions which they pass on to their subordinates, which we can simplify to answering “yes” or “no” to questions that their subordinates ask them. The higher up you are in the hierarchy, the more impact your answer makes (and so your value added is calculating what answer has a higher probability of making the impact you desire).
Sometimes your subordinates may come to you and say “we’re implemented your answer, and it didn’t yield the desired results”. This will happen often, because the universe, after all, is probabilistic (either it actually is — i.e. you can’t precisely answer questions about it — or it is, effectively — you don’t have the apparatus sophisticated enough to precisely answer these questions). You provide a different answer, which gets implemented yielding — supposedly — the desired result.
It’s possible that neither answer yields the desired result. In such a case, you escalate to your superior (who will in turn have to change his or her answer).
It’s incredibly rare, though not impossible, for the person at the top of this hierarchy, to be wrong. This could be a very costly mistake (we could liken it to the company taking a wrong strategic move following a mistaken direction from its CEO), but after all the person at the top simply changes his or her answer.
What if that person has no more possible answers to give? Who does he or she escalate to? Fortunately there is an emergency decision maker, brought in in exceptional circumstances such as this one. The emergency decision maker provides an answer that is unconventional, seemingly impossible, requires a remarkable amount of creativity, usually breaks all sorts of conventions and pulls all sorts of strings deemed unpullable.
What is that person runs out of ideas? Of course by now, dear Reader, you must have expanded this “job” concept to laws of physics (that work like a very efficiently-run organization) governing our Universe (with “decisions” being instances when a particular law in a hierarchy of laws applies and “escalations” simply being events of increasing entropy), and if you’ve done that, you know the answer to your own question: if the top law ceases to apply, the Universe ceases to exist.
I see this over and over again… the ability to think in a structured way provides a lot of value, yet it is incredibly rare.
At first I was shocked at how people at work made poor decisions all the time. They weren’t important decisions, ones that had to go through layers of double-verification and those that had good justification behind them. I mean about decisions one usually makes in a flash, such as what to name this file or this wiki page, or how to plan one’s vacation. I realized that people don’t think in terms of categories or hierarchies of ideas; everything is flat in their heads.
The problem with the lack of structure is that human brains can only store so much unstructured information (in my experience between ten and one-hundred items… for me it’s closer to 10), and, of course, unstructured information is not exportable. Which means that while it may be easier to call the file Template, the next person will have no idea what it means because they have no context. If you call it Finance.ReimbursementTemplate, nobody will be confused (namespaces, or naming things by ever-so-specialized sets of prefixes, are one of the most incredible ways to ensure structure).
But structured thinking goes much further than some file naming conventions. I realized that I tend to use my structured thinking approach in conversations (In fact, I think it’s become visceral at this point): I would start with a high level discussion, and then progress to lower levels when necessary.
Personally I found structured thinking to be a great way to address my weakness of poor information retention. I can’t keep too many things in my scratchpad memory so I structure my thought to minimize the amount of information I need to memorize (as opposed to the information I can deduce from the right structure). Structured thinking also prevents one of the most common reasons of unsuccessful meetings — revisiting old points and going in circles: if you start with the right taxonomy, you will ensure that you talk about higher levels of things before you jump to the details. You can prune the tree significantly that way.
The world was very different three thousand years ago. Yet there are some things that never change, no matter how advanced we are. Of course, the local view of history theory helps us a lot because it says that a lot of things are simply cyclical (for example, one could argue that the Roman civilization right before its collapse was very similar to the American culture right now — hung up on instant gratification. It’s almost as if some properties governing our lives increased in frequency until the frequency is so high that it begins to interfere with the stability of the system!), but even without that, there are some things we can point out that will always be around in a pretty much just as complex a form as they have always been.
It may sound corny, but one such property is love. Relationships have been complicated thousands of years ago, they are complicated now and they will be in the future. This is, presumably, why the best timeless stories have to do about love, and why good science fiction touches on the concept of love (2046 is a good example).
Death (not taxes) is also a good concept. A large component of the human culture, but also civilization, revolves around the beautiful truth that we will never know what happens to us after death. A lot of money was made out of that truth (Catholic church in the mediaeval times, just to point out one example). Hell, the whole idea behind the American nation (pursuit of happiness — why? — because no matter what your belief is, life after death is still just a possibility) is based on the uncertainty around death.
Another concept that’s inherent to civilization is one of hierarchy. Civilization implies specialization, which implies exclusivity, which implies hierarchy. The notion of hierarchy creates a kind of “brownie point” system which keeps people motivated — together with the expectation of upward social mobility, it is probably the reason why the American society is so stable — 90% of people think they can ultimately be in the top 10% of wealth in the country. This can only be beat by the notion that happiness is this impossible to define quality that can’t be quantified and has interesting properties, such as apparent zero correlation to any measure we can think of (which means that, say, rich or powerful people can get away with being rich or powerful because, as it is common knowledge, wealth or power does not make you happy!).
I think that there is a pattern to revolutions.
I like to explain this process as a superposition of two probability functions: one is the intensity of the mutual understanding — over time it grows and declines. The other is the ability for the specific individuals to push the group over the boundary. Revolutions then happen with a probability that is a compounding of those two effects. If a particularly strong individual comes around, the revolution is simply more likely to happen.
There are times when there is a disagreement over what time a particular event will happen and people want to turn the different in opinions into money. It is common to place “over-under” bets — if the event happens before time T, Andrew gets the money, otherwise Bob gets it. Usually the further the event is from T, the more money exchange hands.
I don’t like this style of betting because it’s simply not expressive enough. Instead, I prefer to bet by specifying my probability distribution of the timing of the event, and then using these distributions to determine payouts. My friend and I made this bet once and it was a fun activity, despite the math involved behind-the-scenes, not that frustrating and requiring very little mathematics to actually place the bet.
Essentially, each party draws a probability distribution of the timing of the event — a histogram with the time on the horizontal axis and the probability density function on the vertical axis. The latter can simply be intuited as “the relative probability that the event will happen around the time specified on the horizontal axis”. So if the histogram is twice as tall around 8pm than around 7pm, the event is twice as likely to happen around 8pm than around 7pm.
That’s all each person really needs to do. No need to worry about the area of the histogram summing up to 1 since the vertical axis can be scaled up appropriately. The two people should also agree on how money they are willing to bet — say k dollars each.
When the event actually occurs at time T, the two people compare the value of the probability density function (the height of the bar) at time T on their graphs (the height will be scaled appropriately so that the area adds up to 1–so of course you can’t cheat by making your graph taller) and pay up based on the difference in these values.
Executing such bets is a little difficult since it involves calculating areas under the graph which may be very irregular. Those who are mathematically masochistic can constrain themselves to piecewise linear functions, or, in the extremely, easily integrable functions; otherwise the graph can be scaned and a simple graphics editing application (like Photoshop) can be used to determine the area under the graph (using the flood fill and histogram tools).
It’s my favorite question. I could talk about this to anybody (from any background, of any age and level of intelligence) for hours.
Assume you met an Oracle, an entity capable of answering any question with factual correctness. What question would you ask it?
There are a couple of things worth nothing before we get to the answer. An Oracle does not have an opinion although it knows, for example, what opinions you have on everything so it can tell what you would like and dislike. Some questions may be undecidable — we live, after all (we think), in a world that’s nondeterministic at a micro scale (try asking the Oracle if the cat is dead), and thus probably also a macro scale.
Dealing with an Oracle isn’t as simple as one may think. On one hand, it’s unclear, once you have all the answers, what your goal should be (which is why I think people don’t really know their goals in life and why everyone should have a purpose in life). Is it to make a lot of money? Or do something good for the society?
Ah, the age-old notion of good. What does it mean to do something good? It’s easy to assess the merit of actions on a local scale, but what is good in a short-term may be disastrous in a long-term (like this charity that donates malaria nets to families in Africa — seemingly a good thing — that ended up driving a lot of local net manufacturers out of business).
Taking this to the very extreme (oh boy, I’m going to make some enemies now), what if Hitler’s contribution to mankind was net positive? Let me explain. Assuming that we consider the metric of “goodness” to be survival of mankind — a highly utilitarian view. What if, without Hitler and all of the atrocities committed by him, mankind had never been scarred and hadn’t put guardrails in place to avoid a similar disaster in the future; and as a result another insane dictator had come to power and caused a much greater devastation? Of course this does not at all excuse Hitler, but what would the Oracle say if you asked, all else being equal, if Hitler was a net positive? (or, to put it differently–not equivalently, if the hypothetical above was true, would you kill Hitler before he came to power?).
A lot of people fail to realize that for a large set of questions, we would probably be unable to understand the answer. A lot people would like to know (presumably out of curiosity and nothing else–nothing wrong with it, let’s just call a spade a spade), say, why the universe was created (or even how). The Oracle may have an answer but it’s possible that our brains are unable to grasp it, just like the brains of Homo Neanderthalus were probably unable to grasp quantum mechanism, even with a lifetime of education.
There are some variations on the Oracle question that in my view make for an interesting conversation. What if you forgot your encounter with the Oracle after you met it (that’s a cruel one)? Or what if you forgot everything but you could take away one letter-sized sheet of paper with stuff written on it (that’s my personal favorite).
In case you’re curious–he is what I would ask the Oracle:
Fill out this piece of paper with the most obvious things we humans haven’t discovered yet.
(By “obvious” I mean the things that when you hear them, you say “Of course! Why didn’t anybody think about it yet”). I would ask the Oracle to order them by obviousness (or the shock value to all of mankind when they find out). Why would I ask for that, specifically? I think it’s an elegant way to take advantage of an all-knowing entity in a way that doesn’t get me trapped in the difficulties described above.
If I could fill up another page, I would ask for the Oracle to explain how we can harness energy in a renewable (read: by harnessing the power of the Sun) and efficient way. Or maybe that would be the first thing I ask.
Scope creep — the phenomenon of an ever-expanding surface area that your product needs to cover — happens when you don’t convey a vision, and don’t collect requirements correctly.
My variation on “the customer is always right” is a — in my view — more accurate “the product should always be right for your customer, but the customer never knows what this means”.
If you don’t collect requirements correctly, you will end up with a product that is not right for the customer, and this will lead to scope creep (if you don’t want to lose the customer you will have to implement the delta between what the product ended up doing and what the customer wants it to do). The customer won’t know that — a common beginner’s error is in assuming that the customer knows what they are talking about when they tell you what they want — so it’s your responsibility to make the need tangible and coherent. Poor business analysts simply listen to what the customer says and write down what they hear. Good BAs understand the requirements (which often means truly understanding the needs, and with them, the habits, behind the product). Great BAs drive the requirements, providing to the customer something he or she never knew he or she needed.
“But it’s hard to do,” you’ll probably remark. Of course it’s hard to do, and this is why good BAs are hard to come by! Don’t confine yourself to conventional methods of doing requirements analysis — i.e. talking to the customer and writing down notes. Mock something up for, or — even better — with your customer, come up prepared with theories for what the customer might actually need, or start with the anti-requirements.
Much more important — especially for a product past its infancy — is the vision you set for the product. It defines the universe of needs that the product will address, and, consequently, the universe of features the product will contain. The vision is what allows your product to be unique and remembered; the vision creates the brand. It also makes the product easier to develop for the majority of its lifecycle — you know which customers to talk to, you know what skills you’ll require your engineers and marketers to have, your product is easier to implement because all features have something in common.
The vision for all products is fluid — it has to respond to the Zeitgeist, new information, other products — and the features in your product will change based on that vision. However, vision brings about a certain inertia — it gets harder to add features if the vision changes — and this is why all products die. So just get used to it: don’t be afraid to kill products, knowing that you can bring new ones to life.
To part with, an anecdote. Imagine (in a weird future-in-the-past universe) that a group of Dutch settlers came to you and said “we want you to encode a map for our new city”. You ask, “what will the streets look like?”. “Oh, it’s a very simple system; we’ll pretty much have a grid, streets going east to west, and avenues going north to south”. “Trivial!,” you exclaim and encode every intersection as a set of two coordinates (x, y). For example, an intersection of 23rd Street and 5th Avenue would be encoded as (23, 5).
A little later you realize that there are avenues which aren’t numbered and fall in between numbered avenues. You scratch your head — your elegant system doesn’t quite capture this — but you realize that you can just map these names to non-integral coordinates. For example, (42, 3.5) would be the intersection of 42nd Street and a street that falls between the Third and Fourth avenues (which the settlers decided to call, oh I don’t know, say, Lexington Avenue). You also need non-positive coordinates because there are avenues to the West of First Avenue (which the settlers called Avenues A, B, C, …)
Then you realize that there is a special avenue that is diagonal, i.e. it intersects other avenues! Your elegant system certain does not capture all those intersections, so you implement a special set of coordinates (x, D) where x is the street that avenue intersects, and (D, y), where y is the avenue, knowing that that diagonal avenue — which the settlers called Broadway — can be represented as a piecewise curve of four straight lines, and with some clever mathematics you can still compute distances, and so on.
Then a large park is built in the center of the city, which removes some intersections but adds another irregular street. You’re visibly frustrated now, but with an additional mapping of which intersections don’t actually exist, and with an additional “special” road that connects two ends of the block taken up by the park, your system still supports the use cases. Of course, it’s pretty complicated now and it’s getting difficult to add features to it.
Finally the settlers tell you that actually, south of the 1st Street, there is a completely irregular grid of streets that are named, not numbered. That’s when you quit.
If only you had gathered requirements well in the first place…
The current iteration of the U.S. Flag has been designed by a high school student
A lot of people enjoy sarcasm as means of humor. Understandably so — humor in essence is the departure from the expected, and sarcasm — saying the opposite of what one means to convey — is a good way to achieve that. However, I disagree with those who believe that sarcasm is superior to other forms of humor, most notably direct humor.
Why do I like direct humor so much? There is no better feeling brought about from humor than that achieved with a rich, hearty laughter, directly from your gut. It’s a very fundamental kind of feeling, one that is rare (I may have literally “laughed out loud” maybe five times in my life) but incredibly satisfying. This kind of laughter comes not from sarcasm, which is intellectual in nature, but from natural humor — a punt that isn’t forced, or deliberated upon. In a way, what makes sarcasm so appealing to a lot of people — its complexity and sophistication — is its weakness when it comes to the real feeling of momentary happiness, blinding, paralyzing, disarming (all in a good way!) happiness stemming from direct humor.
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