If you subscribe to technology blogs, you’ll know what I mean — the sense of being bombarded by new technologies, tools, gadgets, advances, and ideas. If you don’t and you buy technology magazines, you’re out of the loop already because these magazines are obsolete the day they come out.

It seems that new generations of computers and phones come out every year (this is certainly true with Apple products). In fact, technology products are now designed to last a very short time — battery that you can’t replace, OS updates that cripple old hardware — as opposed to the years or even decades that old casette players or even first CD players (my dad is a proud owner of one of those) used to serve their owners.

New standards coming out and adopting the philosophy of more rapid change — HTML 5, for example, is now a rolling standard. This will very likely push software and hardware makers to iterate more on their products.

Technology is creating a world where you have to sprint all the time because if you don’t, you’ll get left behind. This is true for the product makers, but also for the customers.

But what has changed, really? Magazines were out of date before, too, but somehow nobody cared. Vendors had their release schedules that were mostly unaffected by the higher level products’ release schedules. It seems that we want to have the information available to us sooner, in some strange kind of arms race, almost like the high frequency trading companies or news corporations.

More rapid iterations may seem to be accelerating progress, which is a good thing, but they may also introduce much more noise to the system. We’ll be so consumed with consuming the latest that we’ll lose sight of where we’re going.

How will this information be used by future societies? For anything other than pure speculation, we should refer to history to see themes and patterns from the past.

The Romans–one of several civilizations whose society was probably as sophisticated as ours is today before its decline–were capable of recording information, even though it was more expensive. Then why do we know so little about them, relatively to what we would hope to know? Were the Romans one of the cultures that decided to reduce the amount of information they generate for some reason (I could imagine in the near future that our society would have a culture of information reticence, where larger and larger hard drives are simply not needed just like more than one computer mouse is useless to us now)? Is this information simply irrelevant to us because it happened so long ago so over time we chose to obliterate it? Does information naturally degrade regardless of the society’s attempts to preserve it?

Talking to my friends in business school and slightly older friends who are beginning to take on more meaningful positions in the industry, I am beginning to realize that my generation will bring more honesty into the world. Between the trend to be more socially and environment conscious, it seems that it’s a less selfish generation — concerned about the good of the whole as well as one’s own — and with selflessness comes honesty and integrity.

But introspection is really a double-edged sword. If you are introspective but can’t use your ability appropriately, you are condemning yourself to a lifetime of frustration and thus unhappiness — aware of what makes you tick, yet unable to deal with this knowledge.

But what I’m seeing now is the emergence of an entire generation of nerds: people are becoming more and more computer-savvy. They blog. They laugh at xkcd comics. Technology is no longer this inaccessible cloud of mystery.

People like me don’t like that precisely because of the amount of effort we put into being different, into being special.

Throughout many posts, I’ve shown examples of some simple concepts that I think are fairly universal. Those concepts are related in a kind of hierarchy. For example, here are three concepts related to one another:

• Change: change is good; it’s fundamental and more powerful than any of us; it happens all the time (despite our perception bias related to viewing things, for example history, in a very narrow way)
• Cyclical behavior: a lot of the change the happens is cyclical (in fact, if one is to take an Occam’s razor view of things, the simplest change in nature is a cyclical one because of the balance that is held between many competing factors; or in math, the simplest function that changes all the time is a sine wave). New ideas are just permutations of old ideas; we often take diametrically opposite views and switch back and forth many times
• Equivalence: things are instances of higher concepts; those who can see it (we call those people conceptual thinkers, can make more out of the world because they can take the specific things they learn everyday, convert them to learnings about the concepts, and then apply the concepts back to the specific.

If you take the concept of equivalence to its logical conclusion, you will realize that everything is related in some kind of hierarchy. In fact, this idea of recursively reducing concretes into concepts is a very powerful one — you can build an entire life philosophy on it. Let’s call it reductionism.

According to reductionism, you begin understanding that everyday complexity can be lessened by relating things to one another. In other words, by taking concrete things, creating equivalence classes of them by grouping them by which concepts they represent, and then grouping those concepts together, you can travel up that ladder where the concepts are few, simple, and very fundamental. The feeling of understanding the fundamentals of the world is a very satisfying feeling. It can also help you make decisions: start with the fundamental concepts, derive the consequences, and keep going until you get to the level of specificity you require. In a way, reductionism is a wonderful framework for knowing what to do, and it’s a wonderful way for you to feel connected to everything.

Of course, there is a trade-off implied in reductionism. The higher up the hierarchy you go, the bigger the distance between your thinking and everyday life. This means that to make specific decisions (and, operating in a very concrete world, we have to make specific decisions every minute of every day), you have to do a lot of thinking: derive a lot of information from the few highly conceptual ideas. While some people I know can do it very well and almost automatically, it seems to me that nature prepared us to deal with the concrete very well — by giving us relatively more scratch space (a kind of cache to keep the details in) than computational ability (there’s only so fast that we can derive these concepts). It probably makes sense, evolutionarily — when you’re chased by a predator, you want to be able to trust your intuition rather than re-derive the idea to jump on a tree from the concepts of survival, physics, and the physical characteristics of the predator.

There are other caveats too. There is more than one way to create a hierarchy of concepts, to reduce a set of things into a much smaller set of more abstract things. There is no right answer when it comes to the most fundamental concepts (after all, those are the different philosophies that, just like apples and oranges, cannot be compared) despite what people tell you. There is no canonical arrangement of all things in the known Universe in a hierarchy of concepts, although a poster that shows one example of such a thing would be a wonderful idea.

In other words, reductionism reshuffles the risk: from millions of tiny errors you could make in the realm of the concrete, to one humongous error you could make in the realm of the super-conceptual. A small difference in the definition of the concept at the very highest level propagates down the ladder in a nonlinear way and can produce an entirely different picture of the world (and thus can easily make you pick a totally opposite view to the one you had before the correction).

What if, despite these caveats, we want to reduce everything that’s around us to as few concepts as possible? At first it seems pretty easy. We reduce a lot of behavior to human nature; we reduce nature to evolution; we reduce the fabric of the Universe to a small set of rules. We reduce the different religions to one concept. Then we reduce the concept of religion and science. We reduce art to feeling (synthesis) and science to understanding (analysis).

In fact, I believe that we can reduce anything to a set of two concepts that are opposites. Above, synthesis and analysis are opposites. Many things can be reduced to good and evil. Other good opposites which things can be reduced to are change and stasis.

All these concepts are themselves an equivalence class. Let’s conveniently call them yin and yang. So we can reduce the infinite number of objects, ideas, thoughts, words into just two.

We can, but reducing Two to One is infinitely more difficult than reducing Infinity to Two.

England was successful as a colonial power because it understood man’s universal driving forces–money and power. They built an impressive trade system which likely boosted the colonies economically. I’m not a historian, but it seems to me that England had a near-monopoly on international trade. England leveraged the political systems of their colonies, rather than changed it — the highest positions were British, but below that all was open to the natives; this, combined with provided a kind of power continuum–given enough levels of hierarchy, there was always a more powerful position to aspire to, and with the overwhelming majority of the pyramid belonging to the natives, nobody wondered who actually runs the country.

England during the imperial period is an excellent example of that fact that it’s not size, or population, that matters, but leverage. With its unbeatable navy, and a relatively efficient (and definitely ahead of its time) organization England had control over vast lands and — thus — natural resources.

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

• 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.

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.