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Archive for the ‘principles’ Category

The Purge

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

My philosophy on what to do in life changes slightly, which leads to fairly big changes in the actual plan. My philosophy for when I was 24 was to live free. This has morphed into a philosophy of experiencing, learning and achieving, and a year later I focused on determining my life’s purpose. A year after that my philosophy became one of five “elements”: purpose, health, understanding and creativity, and doing things so as to decrease my anxiety. I’m now on the verge of yet another transformation, triggered by realizing that doing too much results in very little (and added frustration). Hence the Purge.

The idea of the Purge is simple: shed the superfluous elements of my life and focus on what’s really important. This was informed by a known weakness of mine where it takes me a lot of effort to start something (the threshold for starting a new activity is high), but once I’m into it I will find it very difficult to stop. A good test for this will be to imagine asking myself a year from now what I have achieved and being satisfied with the answer.

Some of the easy things fell off the list pretty quickly. The first one were the blogs I was subscribed to — I used to read about 200 blog posts a day, ranging from what was going on in New York City to a blog dedicated to making stuff. Given that I’m way behind on making stuff, and have enough to do in New York City, I purged the list to the most important 20 a day, mostly from reddit.com

The theory of classifying things

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

One of the most valuable abilities a person can boast, in my view, is the ability to classify. It’s very closely related to the ability to think in terms of layers of abstraction, since categories are just abstractions on top of the objects being classified.

Most people are really bad at any kind of categorization — they either simply don’t do it (just look at people’s desktops on their computers) or come up with very poor categorizations and as a result find it difficult to locate finds in a large set or synthesize properties of sets efficiently (which are the two operations that good classifications make trivial; and the two operations that are actually fairly commonly needed. There is also a lot of money to be made on good categorization systems, for example, in systems that allow customers to search for products to purchase).

A friend of mine W.D. pointed out that taxonomies are dangerous. I will agree with him: to create a classification system for the sake of it is not only wasteful, but also risks inaccurate generalizations being made. But a good classification, supported with the goals of that classification, is invaluable.

Some principles that should guide a good taxonomy are:

  • Unique representation — everything should have a single, deterministic place in the hierarchy
  • Meaningful dimensions — ideally you should be able to express each dimension (or category) in as few words as possible. Arbitrary divisions don’t make it easy to find things and make for a weak hierarchy, even if they allow you to bifurcate your set of objects right down the middle
  • Reasonably sized dimensions — in a perfect classification, each added property halves the number of items in it. This will, of course, never be true but there are good ways to split the set into by-and-large equivalently-sized sets. This balances the categorization (it won’t take a large number of dimensions to describe an object – for a perfect classification, you only need 12 bits of information to classify four thousand objects, which with a good category system, may mean three dimensions that each take one of sixteen values
  • Separable dimensions — ideally each dimension should be fully disjoint from all other — if shouldn’t matter if you apply a condition first or last. Unfortunately, most times, the further dimensions vary depending on the values of the prior dimensions. For a good example, visit Amazon.com and see how the filters change based on what category of items you select. If the dimensions are separable, you can more efficiently find things by picking the relevant dimension first

Discerning Tastes

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Over our lifetime, we get to know ourselves better. Our tastes follow a gradual solidification process (we settle on a some classes of things) but also a gradual migration process (for example, we acquire some tastes). We become more aware of (or discover) concepts and products that align with our tastes more precisely and give us positive utility (I can’t decide whether the marginal utility increases or decreases with age — it may be the former because as we get more sophisticated, the potential for significant utility gets unlocked; or the latter because as we get older, we strive harder and harder for gaining a little bit of additional utility).

It’s interesting to trace that evolution because very often what we settle on isn’t that different from what is the most natural (and may be seen as least sophisticated). Our tastes don’t necessarily follow a linear path. Yes, most of the time we end up purchasing products which are increasingly more expensive (because later in life, we can afford them — or, to put it differently, we get sensitive to comfort and are willing to pay more for it), but there are some interesting cyclical patterns.

For example, as we spend more of our lives cooking, we discover organic food. At first we join the organic food bangwagon, expanding the trend into things like the organic duvet cover (I actually bought one recently!). Soon we realize that supermarket food just doesn’t cut it, and discover CSAs, or start growing food in our own backyards. In our quest to find the best-tasting food, we are willing to forgo the comfort of an all-in-one-supermarket purchase and go as far as spend the time to wait for random food to arrive, or outright grow our own food.

Photography is an interesting field, mostly because everyone seems to be interested in photography these days. We get spec-buff point-and-shoots that make our friends jealous and our parents dizzy with settings. The first step towards the increasing sophistication of taste is the abandoning of flash. We then buy a decent SLR, and after many thousand shots finally decide to stop using the lowest aperture setting. As we get more “serious” about photography, we buy more lenses (many of which are more expensive than the camera), but for many of us, the favorite lens becomes one that is not a zoom lens — but one that sees things the same way the human eye does. What starts as the race for the highest megapixel count, slowly transforms into the desire to have as many features at our disposal, then the ability to take complex pictures (shallow depth of field, crazy zoom like the macro shots of virtually everything that I make fun of my friend for taking), only to arrive at the desire to simply take pictures that express something (“Does it say anything” is a question I realized I should ask myself when deciding whether to keep a photo or not).

The cycles can be found elsewhere. Starting at regular light bulbs, we move on to energy-saving bulbs and lights with a gradation in the intensity setting (God I loved those when I first saw them in my neighbor’s flat when I was 8). We realize that our mood improves if we get full-spectrum lightbulbs. Finally, as we get older, we go outside, desiring natural light.

Sometimes I wish our future selves could tell us “don’t overcomplicate.” There again, the result is something we can only get to if we experience the journey ourselves.

Structured thinking

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

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.

Civilizational invariants

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

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!).

Think of your Plan B

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

When planning things such as a trip, there are two kinds of people: those who only think in terms of happy paths, and those that take into account the chance of things going wrong. I am learning to be in the latter group.

Now, of the latter group, there are two kinds of people: those who simply add buffer time, and those who have contingencies in case their Plan A doesn’t work out. While having some buffer is often a fine way to plan for things going wrong (for example, traffic on the way to the airport), it’s often ineffective. Be creative and think of your Plan B instead of defaulting to just adding more time to your plan.

Spontaneity

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

To truly have a vacation means to enjoy it spontaneously. I realized that just after I realized that I never really had a vacation — most of my time off in the past has been taken getting things crossed off lists and being part of others’ time off.

As I am deciding to take a week off in the Summer to go to Italy, I am tempted to do exactly that: be spontaneous. Wake up, and decide on the fly what I feel like. I think, in addition to being a true vacation, it will also be a higher quality one: because I will be able cater to my feelings and desires as they happen, rather than make plans ahead of time irrespective of how I will feel on a particular day. Do I really want to see the Coliseum today? Why decide sooner than today.

That inability to be spontaneous manifests itself in other ways. For example, while a lot of my friends did, I didn’t enjoy Avatar. A lot of my friends enjoyed the way it drew them in, gave them a feeling of high, so to speak. I sought some higher purpose, a meaning, or an aesthetic, and got neither. I think if I were spontaneous, I would be able to connect to the natural desire of the human mind to be taken to places.

How does one become spontaneous? Ha. (It’s not like there’s a 12-point plan to being spontaneous–I am constantly shocked by how many people make money out of people who don’t understand the irony in this). I think, at least for me, the key to this is to first let go of my desire to control things (yes, I am a huge control freak). This means doing things which I’m not comfortable with (there’s a difference between comfort and what–for a lack of a better word–I’ll call synchronicity that comes from doing things spontaneously). Like go ride a motorbike with my friend in Thailand without a map or purpose, and even though neither of us ever rode one (unsurprisingly, this ended up being the highlight of our stay on this island).

Another thing I have to do is to mitigate risks that don’t directly affect spontaneity. For example, I will read about Italy a lot before going there, because it’s hard to be spontaneous if you don’t have options (and nothing paralyses me more than having to make a decision without knowing what options there are). But I will not ask myself what I would like to do. While it may seem trite, there is something incredibly liberating about waking up and deciding, randomly and on the fly, that I want to do X.

Overthinking it is also an obstacle to spontaneity. I will try to think as little about my vacation as possible. Sure, it will be painful (this is one exception to my rule about ordering things to do), but the effect will be beautiful: here I will be, in Italy, having to rely entirely on what I feel like, what I’ve read, and what I see (my guess on why I’m not spontaneous has to do with the fact that I haven’t really been forced or encouraged to express opinions or preferences until late in life).

The mysteries of evolution

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

As I mentioned before, evolution is probably the most fascinating of all epiphenomena that we deal with every day (I’m not going to focus on alternate representations of evolution). Even though it’s simple in its premise, it continues to baffle us (with scientists coming up with new theories about it all the time). I have lots of questions about this epiphenomenon.

Evolution as a greedy process: evolution is a statistical process coupled with individuals’ mutation that, when viewed at a very high level, creates the impression of progress of species over time. Species evolve from one state to another that gives them immediately higher survival value. It is impossible to evolve to a state through an intermediate state that may be of lower value.
Hence, evolution is a greedy process, always aiming to incrementally provide value. This means that many “features” of species which could be extremely beneficial may never appear through evolution because they would necessitate going through an intermediate stage: in other words, evolution is susceptible to local maxima.

Arguably, this is why species never evolved to have wheels, which we now know to be the most efficient mode of transit. No incremental process can create a wheel (I should imagine that additional arguments may point to the fact that such a wheel would be difficult to maintain).

Invariants of evolution: evolution has no “plan”, that is, the progress is rather random and depends on a number of conditions in nature. Still, are there any invariants of evolution? That is, are there features that evolution always produces (or produces provided that some criteria are met)? Is photosynthesis a necessary process for species to adopt (in other words, does evolution always produce green organisms?) Similarly (and this is of course a million dollar question) is intelligence an invariant?

I believe the answer to both questions is yes, not because there is some higher purpose to evolution but because, simply put, photosynthesis and intelligence are the most efficient mechanisms at particular modes of operation (vegetative state, and being a hunter-gatherer, respectively). Unlike wheels, they can appear through an incremental process. The only conditions are sufficient sophistication and competition. For photosynthesis–directly using a virtually unlimited energy–is a great solution to the problem of limited resources for immobile organisms; similarly, intelligence is an answer to species reaching physical limits of body construction (further mutations won’t make the species faster, or stronger). However, intelligence is an expensive feature to develop which is why I think it could only have been possible after increased competition between species made cooperation within a species beneficial, which allowed to specialization and thus easier mutations towards intelligence.

I am not an evolutionary biologist and so the above paragraph is simply my theory. It will be difficult to come with proof of it (or a proof to the contrary) because, as with all epiphenomena, the system that would need to be analyzed to gain the threshold level of understanding is too large for us to currently tackle.

Rapid feedback systems

Saturday, January 30th, 2010

There is a class of systems that offer rapid feedback to the operator, that is, an adjustment in the way they are controlled is very quickly reflected in the output of the system.

Take driving, for example. You press the accelerator pedal (for good reasons I’ve stopped calling it the “gas” pedal) and the car goes faster. You turn the steering wheel a little and the car turns. For safety reasons, such a rapid feedback system is so natural that it’s necessary — it needs to be as natural to our instincts as possible (so that, when, say, a cat jumps out on the road, you can swerve and not hit it). But safety reasons aside, it’s also a great way to allow people to become good drivers quickly (you could imagine an alternative way to control a car, for example one in which you point to where you want the car to go. While terrible for many reasons, such a mechanism would probably take much longer to master).

I think this explains why people find it relatively hard to play golf well — the feedback is painfully slow (in fact, it’s so slow that special vehicles were invented to try to make it faster–or maybe it’s because those playing golf hate to walk–another reason why golf isn’t really a sport).

This also explains why an RC helicopter is more difficult to master than an RC car (I think more so than the fact that a helicopter involves more complex controls).

It’s useful to use this principle when designing really any kind of system. For example, wouldn’t kids find it much easier to learn to play the piano if the correct next key were a little easier to press (or, if that’s too easy–i.e. would make people lazy and therefore prevent them from learning–at least all notes of a particular musical key, like B flat, were a little easier to press).

Note that it such a system doesn’t necessarily have to be natural in the sense of being an extension of our muscles or senses. Cooking (I mean preparing the entire dish, not figuring out that you’ve burnt a steak) doesn’t offer a particularly quick feedback. Fortunately, its quality is fairly insensitive to the inputs (it takes a lot of mistakes–or a big one mistake–to make a dish taste awful) but we’d be much better cooks if ingredients changed color based on the amount of salt we added.

How to Design an Armchair

Monday, January 25th, 2010

Over the weekend, I fell asleep in an armchair. There is really no good position when you’re constrained to a chair. Eventually I settled on a fetal position across the chair, using one arm as a pillow and the other as support for my feet.

I think an excellently-designed armchair should include this use case. In other words, I’d design an armchair so that its oblique cross-section makes for a comfy bed.