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Corruption and capitalism

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

There is no difference between very efficient corruption and capitalism.

Imagine going to any of a number of shows during a music festival. There are seats but since it’s a festival, seating is sequential and kept in order by the festival staff. Initially the staff seat the customers on a first-come, first-served basis but pretty quickly into the festival, people start offering bribes to the staff in exchange for a better seat. The staff has full discretion over seating so they willingly take the bribes.

As more and more people catch on, the staff begin reserving seats in anticipation for future late-comers who may offer a higher bribe. A secondary market forms where people come to the concert, offer bribes for multiple seats and resell them later. These people now have specialized jobs which allows them to find customers better (and, since they are not staff members, can openly offer good seats for money). This also pleases the staff members because they get bulk pricing and have to spend less time dealing with money.

If this is an efficient market, there is competition between secondary market makers, and the best ones minimize the risk of having a seat unfilled, so all seats are filled, but each seat now has a price tag attached to it. A system where staff members were given the power to seat the customers and they succumb to corruption naturally turns into a fully capitalistic system.

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Song Lyrics

Monday, August 16th, 2010

I’ve always appreciated songs for their music than their lyrics. In fact, I couldn’t even tell you what some of my favorite songs are about. I think this may have something to do with the fact that I don’t absorb lyrics — maybe it has to do with the fact that I wasn’t born and raised surrounded by the English language. It’s also probably one of the reasons I find poetry difficult to take in.

This is interesting because it means that there is this entire dimension to music that I can’t see that others see. What is it like? Is appreciating music for its lyrics like seeing color after a lifetime of color-blindness?

Posted in art, discovery, puzzle, reductions | No Comments »

The Dramatic… Depressing of the Button

Thursday, August 12th, 2010

The pop culture taught us the drama of a button press. Be it a doorbell that the stranger rings on a rainy night, or a nuclear weapon being launched by the Army commander, the culminating moment happens when the button is pressed.

Which is why it was somewhat shocking for me to realize that with buttons on a computer screen, what triggers an action is not the moment the button is pressed, but the moment it is released. Once you press the button, you can still change your mind — simply move the cursor away. This creates a very different kind of drama — in a way a slightly diminished one, as we have one more chance to rethink what we’re doing, but also a more suspenseful one, as the thing that now separates us from the action is a natural state — a release of a button, the removal of a hand from the mouse key.

Posted in comparisons, for reflection, reductions | No Comments »

Watching TV

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

I don’t really watch TV, but a few nights ago I spent a couple of hours watching some late-night programming. That TV has a unique power to draw the viewer in and not let go had been clear to me, but it was only then that I understood an important reason for that, at least for me.

When we watch TV, we can judge.

We judge everything, from kitchen shows to commercials. We make instant decisions about what we like and what we don’t like. We judge without being judged, and, even better (thanks to TV’s feedback-less nature), without ever figuring out (or needing to know) whether our judgments are right. For example, I saw all but the very ending of a show titled “24 Hour Restaurant Battle” (not a particularly imaginative name) where two teams compete to create a restaurant in 24 hours. The show makers gave me ample opportunity to make my judgments: this chef had a moment of panic here, that waiter tripped and fell, and so on. I ended up turning the TV off just before the verdict was given, and I realized that I couldn’t care less about the actual result. In fact, I remembered, the show just before it, “Iron Chef”, took nearly one hour to show me the competition and, subsequently, rushed through the conclusion in the last 7 seconds of the show. I barely had time to review the scores given to both contestants.

We want an opportunity to judge without the responsibility to judge well; and so as such, TV creates this little bubble, my own instance of the world where I’m right and nobody can tell me otherwise.

Posted in discovery, for reflection, human nature, reductions | No Comments »

Britain’s Monarchy

Friday, August 6th, 2010

The Brits faced the impossible challenge. They couldn’t have kept their old political system in a new democratized world. But an empire so renowned for (and deriving so much of its strength from) its monarchy could not simply have abolished it. They’ve done a brilliant thing and invented a new kind of balance, one that combines the best of two worlds: the short-term stability of a democracy (giving people the impression that they are empowered to control their own destiny) and the long-term stability (having a uniting figure, a symbol to be proud of and worship–as the desire to worship is in my opinion one of the most fundamental traits of mankind).

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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

Posted in for reflection, human nature, principles, reductions, retrospective | No Comments »

How we Add Value

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

I’m becoming increasingly more convinced that where one adds the most value in a workplace is not a set of skills one possesses, but the ability to make reasonable decisions faced with imperfect information, which is really just three things:

An ability to see the possible outcomes (ability to visualize; one something you may call creativity)
An ability to enumerate the value and the possible risks of each
An ability to evaluate these trade-offs

In other words, everything there is to a responsibility is the ability to make decisions and each decision is simply an output of an evaluation function of all the pros and cons of all the possibilities.

Posted in reductions, retrospective, things everyone should do, whatis | No Comments »

Faking it

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

About a year ago I took one of those aptitude tests. The test was what all standardized tests are — inaccurate and easily manipulable. One thing I took away, however, was the hypothesis the interpreter of my results had about what I perceived as a strong organizational ability (yes, sometimes bordering with OCD). Perhaps — the person suggested — my ability to keep track of many things at once, never forget what needs to be done and when, and organize things into related categories are all a coping mechanism that I built for myself to compensate for being naturally disorganized. While it’s a long shot, there is some evidence for it — I need to write things down as my scratchpad memory is weak and I have spent a long time perfecting a mechanism for staying organized. But the idea of having a trait be a disguise for a natural lack thereof struck me as interesting.

An aside (while we’re at “faking” things) that I alluded to above: I think a test is either accurate, or can be streamlined, but never both. The latter requires some level of systemization and trivialization, and thus the possibility that smart people will be able to fake the results by reverse engineering the test. The MBTI is a perfect example of that: the algorithm for delivering the MBTI metric is very deterministic which makes the test easily administrable but because of that, it’s pretty obvious what choice will yield a particular MBTI type.

Posted in for reflection, human nature, reductions | No Comments »

I’m OK!

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

I noticed some time ago that commercials that depict some person in a dangerous and potentially life-threatening situation (falling off a cliff, jumping into water, etc.) always end with that person getting up and awkwardly saying “I’m OK!”

This looks so contrived and un-creative that it makes me think that there is some law that forces commercials into showing that kind of all-is-good-after-all scene. Maybe that’s in order to ensure the commercials are children-friendly?

Posted in The Daily Badness, discovery, puzzle, reductions | No Comments »

What impact the littlest thing you do may have on your life

Monday, July 26th, 2010

I like the idea of the butterfly effect applied to our lives. Run Lola Run, for example, captures this well with series of snapshots of what happens to the minor characters in the future. For each of the three alternate stories, the snapshots are wildly different. This highlights the randomness of our lives — the littlest things we do may affect our life in significant ways.

This concept is explored often. The most popular examples are random encounters with people which turn into love affairs, and, eventually, one spending the rest of one’s life with that person. It’s hard to argue that what may have seemed like a fairly insignificant event (how many random people do we meet in our lives?) may lead to directional changes in the person’s life.

I received a Facebook message the other day from someone whom I didn’t recognize at first. It was someone that I supervised in summer school back when I was in high school. The message was

It feels like forever ago now that I’m about to graduate from college, but back then 14-year-old me was definitely thinking, “wow, look at that smart kid. I want to go to an Ivy league school, too, one day.” Be careful what you wish for, indeed…

I had no idea that such a small intersection of our paths, something that I don’t recall at all (I still don’t remember what I did; maybe I said something insightful–doubt it–or got into a conversation about something meta), ended up being so life-defining for the other person. I cried.

Posted in changes/cyclical, for reflection, reductions, retrospective | No Comments »