- Get a credit report on you. One a year is fine — you can get it free of charge
- Similarly, get a consumer report about yourself
- Finally, get a driving record
- Opt out of direct marketing and marketing calls. Make sure you opt out of any marketing when you get a new car, sign up for a new back account or loan
- Do not give companies, especially retain stores, your address and phone number or email address
Archive for the ‘things everyone should do’ Category
Things I Learned About the World
Sunday, March 20th, 2011Sailing
Sunday, March 20th, 2011Sailing is one of my favorite activities. There is something about being on water, and (while I don’t own a boat) having your own portable real estate. Part of it is the serenity of the water, another part the flexibility this gives you, the ability to get to any port in the world, even if it’s only theoretical.
It’s also a great way of spending time outdoors. Sailing is more active than walking in the park or having a picnic, and it’s much more satisfying, either as a solo activity or as something for a small group to do.
If you haven’t done it, you certainly should.
Reflections on Goals
Thursday, January 27th, 2011This is a somewhat dated collection of my thoughts on purpose and life goals. Other posts have subsumed this topic but it’s still useful to look at it from a slightly different point of view.
Ask yourself: “what is my goal?”
Let’s assume that you start with “To make lots of money”. It may not be the most lofty answer, or the most sophisticated or morally satisfying one, but I am sure it’s a thought that every one of us had at some point in our lives.
Let’s explore this goal. Is this it? What if you had lots of money, but only that? You will probably realize that it’s not good enough. Money is useful to lead a comfortable life, but at the end of your life you will probably wish you could trade some of what you have left (after ensuring your family doesn’t struggle) against something else. Anything else.
For me, this broke down when I thought about all the people who were part of my life as I was growing up, They thought, they knew I will be remarkable in some way. Having money, one of the most universal mediums in human civilization is not remarkable — precisely because money is so universal,
I want to show them that I achieved more than just wealth. Otherwise it feels like all the people who made me what I am wasted a lot of time on me. It feels like I had potential that I didn’t utilize. So maybe there is something to do with expectations that others place on you based on your potential for greatness.
But if I did something remarkable, I wouldn’t want it to be undone after I die. This means that there is something greater than me. Either some kind of an afterlife where these expectations we met meta-materialize, or something to do with mankind itself.
Better still, the two don’t actually have to be that different. An afterlife could be an extension of all the intangible, metaphysical properties of the Universe. And if it is, what is your goal then?
Side View Mirrors
Monday, January 3rd, 2011There are a couple of things I’ve always done my own way (mostly because I had the luxury of not having anyone tell me the standard way to do it) that ended up being a better way of doing things. My favorite example is how I arranged my car’s side view mirrors. I would turn them outwards as much as possible to minimize (or in most cases eliminate) the blind spot. That way as soon as the car disappeared from my periphery, it appeared in my side-view mirror. As soon as it disappeared from the mirror, it appeared in the rear view mirror. This was particularly useful in what I considered to be the primary purpose of the side view mirrors — to help you switch lanes.
Only a couple of years after I started driving my friends told me that people set their mirrors to show the side of the car to have a sense of perspective (a reference frame) and to make parking easier. I didn’t feel that I needed to see the side of my car in the side view mirror — parking is not a common use case and the frame isn’t necessary once you get used to the setting.
Apparently a couple of years ago the DOT began recommending the way to set up the side view mirrors the way I’ve been setting them all along. It felt good…
What do You Care About?
Friday, December 31st, 2010Do you care about things or do you care about people? It’s easy to do the former because things are static, deterministic and easy to take care of. The results of such care are tangible and achievable in the short term.
People, on the other hand, require much attention. Caring about people doesn’t give specific results; and the results, if any, are certainly long term in nature.
But life spent on caring about things is an empty, meaningless life. We are social creatures and we thrive on interactions with people (my theory is that it’s because we crave complexity and only interactions with other people provides us with that kind of complexity). Without other people, we are nobody.
So what do you care about?
Lifehack #33: Do Less
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010The most brilliant people do the fewest things. Pick few things to do, and do them well.
Recording versus Experiencing
Thursday, November 18th, 2010Is what I’m experiencing now worth living or should I spend the time recording instead?
I’ve struggled with this a lot. Do I experience the moment, running the risk that my volatile memory will fail to maintain the experience, or do I record it, running the risk of not really experiencing it? And what value is the recall of the experience, anyway?
Taking photos while traveling is a great example. Most tourists love taking photos, as if somehow reproducing existing photographs but with a much lower quality camera and much less skill and aesthetic sense served any purpose whatsoever. They see the objects they are photographing through the lens of the viewfinder (or, even worse–I get chills–a 2.5″ LCD screen) which is no different than sitting in front of their computer at home and looking at images on Google. They don’t experience these objects; they don’t experience being in their presence.
I’ve traveled a bit and the best experiences I’ve had were those that I didn’t take pictures of.
Most people have this irrational romanticized idea of going through all the pictures they ever took when they are sixty-five, with their grandchildren on their lap. First of all, most of the pictures people take are crap; why on Earth other people, especially those two generations away from us would be interested in seeing them at all baffles me. We’ll likely never see them ourselves either; and again, if we do, we need many fewer to trigger those great memories.
Ultimately, I have settled for some 5-95% split between recording and experiencing. It’s useful to write down a few bullet points to maybe expand on the idea in the future: in fact, most of the posts on this blog came from short phrases I wrote down for my future self to discover and think about further. But the value of the experience, even if it is only a fleeting, present value, is immense. When I’m sixty-five, I’ll be happy remembering the fact that I’ve experienced so much, even if the individual experience have long been lost in the darkness of my fading memory.
Work Interactions of the Future
Monday, October 25th, 2010We’re so used to the current model of getting work done that we rarely think about what it used to be like. Nowadays, we spend most of our people at our desks, staring at computer screens, where we interact with the entire world. The computer is our window into everything.
We used to talk to people in person more, and we used to have more meetings. We used to write notes with our hands. We used to deal with paperwork more. Office supplies–which feel so obsolete these days–were king.
But what will it be in the future? I think it’ll be a combination of the two. We’ll interact with people more–with computers having automated a lot of the repetitive tasks, we can focus on where we, human beings, add the most value: in being human. But we’ll need to be connected in order to get the leverage we need. We need something that we’ll keep handy that will keep us connected and serve as a tool for seeing, hearing, and taking notes. The iPad is actually a great example of a device that fits in very well with that model. I can absolutely imagine all of us carrying one with us at all times, just like we used to carry our notepads.
Faith
Thursday, October 14th, 2010Nothing has been more polarizing in conversations than faith — or, more often, conflicts between members of different religions. I will try to unite everyone now (or make everyone just as angry). I believe we are simply thinking about faith narrowly, which causes all the disagreement.
First, let me identify the most fundamental concept of a belief: a statement that an individual makes that that individual considers to be true (and as such, uses as a basis of decision-making), a conclusion about reality as we perceive it. Beliefs don’t have to be axiomatic (I can believe in something that someone else could prove to be derived from another, more fundamental truth) or even consistent (since we don’t mechanistically apply our beliefs to our life, inconsistencies can persist without any day-to-day conflicts). We all have beliefs at a variety of levels — from a set of grand ones (“I believe that I will be reborn after I die”) to tiny ones (“I believe I deserved that cake”). Sometimes belief is thought of as a conclusion that can be understood or known (as opposed to one that one can only place hope in), but I’ll define is as the broader concept.
There are some concepts that derive from belief that will be useful here. Spirituality is a belief in the immaterial. What is immaterial changes over time (before the discovery of magnetism, the force with which two magnets attract each other could be seen as of spiritual origins); spirituality also takes many forms, from abstract (an invisible energy field that permeates every human being) to specific (ghosts). Faith is a set of beliefs internal to each person that deal with the unknowable.
Finally, religion is an institution that proposes a particular framework around faith.
Of all these concepts I think faith is the most interesting one. What is “the unknowable”? In my view it’s precisely the set of statements that no logical person will be able to confirm or refute. For example, “There is life after death” is unknowable — there is no logic that includes the axioms that define the words “life”, “death”, “existence”, and “afterness” that can prove the statement. “2 and 2 is 5″ is not unknowable, because a logical person can prove that given the definitions of “2″, “addition”, “equivalence” and “5″, the statement is false (interestingly, as Gödel showed, there exist statements that are undecidable so they could theoretically form a basis for someone’s faith).
A crucially important property of faith is that it’s personal, and, more importantly, one person’s faith cannot in any way be compared to another person’s faith. Specifically, one person’s religion cannot be superior to another person’s religion because religions are organized around the idea of faith, which is only applicable to a particular individual. Obviously, in reality religions as just institutions and so they employ a variety of devices — competitive differentiation (or, in the extreme, instilling hate of other religions) being one of them in their plight for survival, and there is nothing surprising about it unless a religion becomes too powerful (and just like institutions, monopolies can have a very negative effect) or becomes a device in the hands of, say, a government (in which case it’s likely abuse of power).
Faith is also universal. Everyone puts faith in something, because our observations very quickly lead us to the unknowable. We don’t have to go very far either — while you may believe in the current model of the Universe (it’s expanding and finite, by the way), it’s still a model and no logical person can prove it’s a complete model. Furthermore, as of today no logical person can tell why it’s that model and not any other model. It’s a common fallacy of many intelligent people to assume that a belief in the current model of the Universe (or even in the scientific method itself) has nothing to do with faith — after all, science cannot prove the model is right; it can only prove that it’s wrong.
In a way, then, we could create an equivalence of all systems of faith — they all serve the same purpose, they are incomparable, and they are universal. It doesn’t matter what a person’s faith is. They are all the same.
If people didn’t organize themselves in religions, there would be much less conflict since discussing one’s faith is harder and looks more like trying to compare apples to oranges. However, just like people organize themselves in nations, they will organize themselves in religions because of strong community-based synergies (mostly good ones — a strong support network, a strong shared moral context making the society safer as a whole, institutional memory). I wouldn’t be surprised, however, in the age of the rising individualism made possible through the vast improvements in efficiency (I wouldn’t be surprised if we could create our own religion online) if more people converted away from their religions and into the more fundamental (and thus personalizable) faith systems.
School of the Future
Sunday, October 10th, 2010What will the school of the future look like? What should it look like?
Rilke in one of his letter wrote that “Each person ought to be guided only to the point where he becomes capable of thinking by himself, working by himself, learning by himself” and I think that in the future, the educational system will embrace that philosophy, together with — also from Rilke — “Schools ought to think about all in terms of individuals, not in terms of grades.”
What would it mean to embrace these statements? Well, first, schools need to be personalized. Through teaching various people in wildly different circumstances (teaching math to a seven-year-old; teaching college students; on-boarding new hires) I realized that different people learn differently, and the element of feedback is crucial to continuing progress; in other words, if the specific lesson someone took (as opposed to being given–which implies passivity) from a session isn’t reflected on by the teacher and built upon, the teaching is not going to succeed.
Fortunately, technology can make this possible, giving the teacher leverage he or she could never have dreamt of. However, historically the teaching industry has been going through much slower release cycles and so it will probably take a long time before any change is apparent.
This is one part of the “thinking in terms of individuals, not grades” philosophy — instead of standardizing on the outcome, think about how the teaching is internalized by each student. Another part has to do with the goal of education itself — that goal is to increase the intellectual capacity of an individual, not to produce a society that achieves high grades. The latter is just a construct of the educational system and just as any system that starts overly relying on its metrics, it runs a significant risk of the educators losing sight of the goal (not to mention the reality of any standardized system being game-able by those who have spent a lot of time in it). So in addition to focusing on the individual, we will have to come up with more meaningful success metrics, probably more qualitative ones (since the tuition will be so individualized, we will no longer be able to come up with a single number to describe an entire population).
“Guiding each person up to a point” is just as important. I’ve always thought that the purpose of school is to teach you to think, not to teach you anything specific–the specific may be a side effect, a necessary outcome of a particular educational design (and may be required no matter what design, although we don’t know that), but should definitely not be a goal onto itself. This also means specific knowledge should not be used as a determinant of how well someone has been taught.
In a way, nobody should ever “fail” an education — the point of education should be to determine someone’s potential and enable them to achieve it by themselves. Of course, an individual may choose not to fulfill that potential, but that is not a failing of the educational system (or, at least, not a primary failing of it); it’s probably a failing of the value system instilled by the parents and the society. Today the educational system also plays a role in providing these values; it would be interesting to decouple the two in order to focus better on the thing an individual has a problem with — and possibly use different techniques for either.
My friend E.P. had a particular design for a school of the future: it should teach the concept of a concept, and hopefully at some point the students will understand that this meta-ness is a fundamental block of reasoning and intelligence. I think while it’s an elegant design, it’s impractical — the students need to be bootstrapped first, before they can understand what meta-ness is. Focusing on the concept of a concept for its own sake will probably not lead to a good internalization.
I think back to my education. How much time did it take me to get to the point where I could think for myself? Specifically, when did I internalize that things are related in hierarchies, and that there are different kinds of relationships between the objects in hierarchies, for example an “instance-of” relationship. It took a while, and by the time I understood these concepts viscerally, I could say that the education satisfied an important objective. But the way I got there was certainly complicated and had many diverse and uncorrelated paths — trial and error, learning by example, learning by rote, learning by thinking (surprisingly not much of it!).
We will not get to the school of the future overnight. It probably needs a revolution just like many other industries did. But there is little economic incentive for this to happen — schools are monopolies and profit is not usually correlated with efficiency (which reminds me of the DMV). Teaching by definition takes longer. Unlike e.g. the financial sector, it’s very difficult to come up with good metrics for success. And the barrier for entry is huge (can a startup really revolutionize an educational system?).
There have been instances in the past of people overcoming similar obstacles. So I am hopeful. And while I wait, I may come up with my own syllabus…
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