clarity and death

I have never been able to achieve clarity on demand. It happens to me every once in a while when things suddenly fall apart.

When things really fall apart, you do not feel a sense of emergency. On the contrary, the very notion of emergency disappears. Priorities do not get reshuffled. Something less destabilizing but more drastic happens: They lose their order structure altogether, aimlessly drifting in mid-air, like specks of dust. You become a passive spectator of your own life, stupidly gazing back at your own gaze.

Clarity clears. It makes you so empty inside that the sheer pressure differential physically bends your body into a withdrawal position. You feel hunger pangs, but weirdly start enjoying them. You start forgetting things, but feel no discomfort for doing so. 

It is amazing how effectively body and mind can let go in the absence of the will to live. We as a society focus heavily on our positive adaptive capabilities which give rise to all the heroic content that we shovel into our popular narratives. Our equally remarkable negative adaptive capabilities remain largely ignored. 

In short, clarity kills, but it does so only fractionally, not in a wholesome way. Of course, when you die one third, no one even notices...

order out of noise

Firehose of falsehoods and diverse contradicting statements distributed through many different channels create completely noise environment. Through this noise everyone weaves their own story. That of course happens to be the one that they want to believe in the most. Since most of these facts are pro government. The end result is a diverse array of personalised strongly held pro government stories!

- Networked Propaganda and Counter Propaganda (Jonathan Stray)

Noise contains all possible structures as subsets of itself. Since we are naturally predisposed to recognizing patterns (i.e. compressing information), it can act as a "mirror" reflecting our complex web of pre-existing cognitive short-cuts and biases back to ourselves.

For instance, we can not help but hallucinate ordered structures out of visual and auditory noise. (e.g. pareidolia) I myself experienced a few such bizarre moments, involuntarily scalping out complex musical pieces out of random environmental noise. These episodes were inspiring but also quite intimidating. (I felt as if my unconsciousness accidentally leaked into my consciousness. Is this why some people enjoy listening to noise music?)

If you are willing to experiment with drugs like LSD, you can simulate such experiences using the brain’s own background noise:

Sometimes patterns can arise spontaneously from the random firing of neurons in the cortex — internal background noise, as opposed to external stimuli — or when a psychoactive drug or other influencing factor disrupts normal brain function and boosts the random firing of neurons. This is believed to be what happens when we hallucinate.

- A Math Theory for Why People Hallucinate (Jennifer Ouellette)

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Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

- Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman)

Jonathan's observation above is enlightening in the sense that it situates Orwell and Huxley as two ends of a single spectrum for controlling public opinion.

• Orwell: Dictate people by spoon feeding them your point of view

• Huxley: Incapacitate people by drowning them in complete noise

Both strategies backfire in the long run:

• Orwellian regimes can quickly unfold when information from the outside world starts leaking in.

• Huxleyan regimes shut people completely away from serious matters and this can set in motion a cultural backlash.

The best strategy is a mixed one: Drown people in variations of your point of view so that

• the information environment stays rich enough to make people feel as if there is an open public discourse

• the proportion of trivia among the narrations in circulation stays below the critical threshold that can set in motion a cultural backlash.

This way, all the stories people weave out of the pseudo random environment you created will stay close to your point of view.

Note that, as technology progresses and information flows at greater speeds, it becomes harder and harder to maintain an Orwellian regime as opposed to a Huxleyan one.

receiving advice on shaping your life

College is a critical period in one's life. During this period of plasticity and exploration, a good mentor can change one's life.

But of course good mentors are hard to come by, especially at universities.

Academicians are obsessed with political correctness and cultural relativism. Moreover they generally view university as a playground for conducting their research rather than as a platform for imparting big picture wisdom to students and actively helping them shape their lives. They neither have the time nor the desire to get to know you at a level where they can feel comfortable supplying customized non-generic advices. Therefore, you will be hard pressed to find anybody who has the guts to tell you which career path you should choose, especially in individualistic countries like United States. At best, you will receive some relevant information and then be left alone to decide what you want to do.

The office of career services (that methodology-driven, hygienic place whose mere existence formally relieves academicians of all the moral obligations associated with shaping others' lives) fails as well, due the simple reason that it is not easy to influence someone, even if he / she is young and hungry for advice. To influence someone is a deeply psychological and formula resistant process. As the receiver, you need to have a good dose of respect, trust and admiration for the other side. Only then you will turn off your rationalistic defenses, open up and move deeper down to an emotional level. Instrumentally speaking, there is really no difference between shaping a single person's life and moving entire masses, and obviously career services (and similarly human resources) departments can not move masses.

Real education inevitably has a slightly despotic character. To deny this is basically equivalent to equating information and wisdom. Young people - by definition - mistake the forest for the trees. No matter how much information you can dump on them in four years, they will still be more or less in the same exact condition upon graduation. Gaining wisdom without going through the hard way of building years of experience is a deeply vulnerable process. It involves opening up to the other side and gulping a distilled solution whose contents look currently opaque. Of course, you can always choose the hard way, dive in, make mistakes and try to learn from them. (Never fall under the illusion that you are building yourself from scratch. We all operate on a gigantic tapestry of background wisdom, called culture.) That is basically how one grows up. But making avoidable mistakes is just plain dumb and results in unnecessary loss of time.

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Due to the vulnerability of the process, you should be very careful about who you are opening up to. 

• Beware those who are too eager to impart their knowledge and shape your life. They will, even if they have good intentions, often fuck up the mentoring process by moving too fast and skipping on getting to really know you and building the necessary trust base.

• Beware those who fail to grasp the basic open-ended nature of future. This is especially true if you have the option of operating at a cutting edge. Academicians (in their ivory towers) can be severely out of touch with the reality of an ever evolving economic landscape. Always keep in mind that most of the currently available jobs were literally non-existent a century ago and the speed of change is accelerating. (For instance, one of my biggest passions turned out to be user experience design which is a very young field that did not even exist while I was in college.)

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All of what I said above applies only to normal people. The upper (and also lower) ends of talent distributions have special needs.

Extraordinary talent basically comes in two types: Those who define a new genre and those who defy all genres. They are respectively the great explorers and generalists of culture, moving humanity forward along with them. To an explorer, a career advice can sound like an insult, since that person is literally creating a new field for himself / herself. To a generalist, a career advice can feel like a prison, unnecessarily boxing that person into a singularity while he / she is capable of running several threads at eighty percent mastery level, meanwhile facilitating new explorations by opening up new channels of communication.

In my opinion, such people should only be provided content-free motivational coaching and a psychological / physical safety zone. That is all. (On a similar topic, read taming geniuses.)

hubris as high mutational burden

Checkpoint inhibitors seem to work best against tumor types and cancers with lots of genetic mutations. Because it is unusual in the body, this heavy mutational load seems to be easier for the immune system to identify as not belonging to ‘self’. Lung cancers triggered by smoking are generally loaded with mutations, and smokers respond to the checkpoint-inhibition therapies better than those who have never smoked. One strategy is to use combination therapies — such as chemotherapy plus a checkpoint inhibitor — to trigger mutations that will make it easier for the immune system to recognize tumor cells.

The Quest to Extend the Reach of Checkpoint Inhibitors in Lung Cancer (Weintraub)

Stronger cancers are easier to defeat. (Who would have thought that smoking can increase the odds of survival?) Strategically speaking, this outrageously counter-intuitive conclusion is actually quiet generalizable.

Making your enemy stronger makes sense in many different contexts. Once the ego inflates and hubris kicks in, your enemy inevitably starts making mistakes, just like a highly mutated cancer cell giving itself away to the immune system. The trick is to reach this state as quickly as possible so that you still have enough energy to act with fury when your enemy makes the fatal mistake. (Remember that you do not need to win every battle to become the final victor.)

Complex systems exhibit phase transitions. Making your enemy stronger can tilt the equilibrium, helping you initiate a favorable phase transition. For instance, as a young adult growing up, you need to rebel against your parents and friendly parents make this maturation process harder. Similarly, as you dump plastic into it, nature needs to learn how to turn this waste into food and eco-friendly policies make the adaptation process harder. As you can not expect to grow up via trivial adversities, you can not expect nature to come up with plastic eating bacteria via occasional exposures.

PS: On a similar note, see the post Against Small Doses which argues in favor of (low frequency) high doses within the (positive) pleasure domain, whereas the current post is focused on (negative) pain domain.

data as mass

The strange thing about data is that they are an inexhaustible resource: the more you have, the more you get. More information lets firms develop better services, which attracts more users, which in turn generate more data. Having a lot of data helps those firms expand into new areas, as Facebook is now trying to do with online dating. Online platforms can use their wealth of data to spot potential rivals early and take pre-emptive action or buy them up. So big piles of data can become a barrier to competitors entering the market, says Maurice Stucke of the University of Tennessee.

The Economist - A New School in Chicago

Greater centralization of internet and growing importance of data are basically two sides of the same coin. Data is like mass and therefore is subject to gravitation-like dynamics. Huge data-driven companies like Google and Facebook can be thought of as mature galaxy formations.

Light rays travel through fiber optic cables to transfer data and cruise across vast intergalactic voids to stitch together a causally integrated universe.

on taking notes

Writing is one of the most important innovations of humankind. Use it!

• Once you put something on paper, you start interacting with it. Ideas lead to ideas and relationships among them become more apparent.

• As time passes, your self-dialogue with the text matures, accumulating small insights that eventually avalanche into a big insight.

• Your embodied memory is finite, but with proper organization you can store an unlimited amount of information in writing.

• Offloading stuff from your memory is relieving, allowing you to focus on new things with renewed vigor.

• Putting open ended ideas on paper allows you to see everything in new light and recognize phenomena that no one else is paying attention to.

• Once an idea is written down, it becomes more real and arises a greater urgency to be completed.

• Once you throw a bunch of ideas together on paper, they start to grow like bacteria samples on a petri dish. Contradictions that we were not clear from the beginning start to appear. Some get dissolved through additional text. Others get dissolved through deletion of one of the initial ideas, just as one bacterial colony enlarges to engulf another.

• Taking notes help you to get to the gist of the matter, compressing and synthesizing information. It is a waste to carry around unprocessed data in your brain.

Business-specific remarks:

• Some boast about their memory and never take notes in meetings, forgetting that writing is not a passive activity. (As in Parkinson's law, people with better memories exhibit a greater tendency to fill their minds with junk.)

• In a meeting you have to write a note anyway, to share it with your colleagues and add it to the collective memory of the company.

• People feel important if you take notes while they are speaking. But, in order to not dilute this effect, you should not take notes all the time. Even the most delusional people know that not everything they say is remarkable.

• If you take notes all the time, then people in a meeting may think that you are a complete novice for whom everything being discussed is new. This may not be a great idea if you are supposed to display an already-built mastery.

parenting as signal processing

• Good parenting is about signal filtering: Let the moderate, regular stressors pass through for the purpose of developing your kid's stress response muscles and absorb the high level, irregular stressors yourself.
• Having a kid is a traumatic experience for every young couple. Amplitude, frequency and irregularity of the sinusoidal rhythms of life dramatically increase. You get subject to previously inaccessible levels of happiness and despair via emotional swings that are much faster than the speeds you are accustomed to.

These two points are intimately related. Absorbing the high level, irregular stressors will bring upon you previously unimaginable levels of misery. In return for this favor, your kid will shower you with gratefulness-inducing moments and take you to emotional heights that you will be completely at a loss for words to describe.

competition types and originality

Competitions where players compete directly with each other are fun to watch because they encourage differentiation and breed novelty. (e.g. chess tournaments, tennis games) Winners are the best originals.

Competitions where players compete indirectly via a centralized set of criteria are boring to watch because they encourage uniformity and breed predictability. (e.g. beauty contests, national examinations) Winners are the best unoriginals.

privacy and public identity

Privacy advocates have started wearing dark glasses to protect themselves from face recognition algorithms. Good for now, but sooner or later algorithms will get better and become able to identify you from some ineffable combinations of subtle static and dynamic physical features like your hairline and the way you walk. At the end, we will all have to wear burkas and voice distortion masks, obliterating our public identities in the name of preserving our private identities. (This will be the physical analogue of the current mass migration away from public social media spaces to private messaging platforms.)

manipulations and regulations

New deception and manipulation techniques enabled by machine learning technologies are massively more effective and covert than the old-school psychological tricks that consumers eventually grow out of. As we collectively regress back to a state of childhood-level naiveness, governments should to step in to protect everyone with the sensitivity they exhibit while protecting innocent children.