Long-ish Rants:
Some (hopefully) insightful rants on various topics by me:
On addiction (and specifically, my addictions)
Learning from Dungeons and Dragons
Patent Lawyers should work for Commission
E for Effort
Academic Close-mindedness
Immortality
The Importance of Economics
What a Mad Scientist would do
Scientists and Knights
IQ, I Will, and Destiny
A Curiosity about a Correlation
On Human Male Drabness
On Darwin's Other Theory
On Entropic Death
On Candles
On Free Will (Part I)
The 4-C measure of a human
The ideal form of government/society
Appalling gay marriage propaganda
On makeup
Preference lists and the marriage problem
Cold fusion
Hackers and death penalty
Knapsack problem revisited
Pet peeves in (other peoples') writing
A surprisingly scary order of magnitude estimate
On Addiction (and specifically, my addictions)
So, lately I started having the strange urge to play World of Warcraft (WoW). I've never played WoW before, and honestly, I don't generally like the Warcraft storyline that much, so it is a bit of a mystery to me why I suddenly developed this urge. Anyway, I rationally realized that playing WoW would be a terrible idea, and set about trying to rid myself of this baleful inclination. So today (technically yesterday, I guess), in between typing up 3 pages of text for my paper, I spent maybe 2-3 hours reading WoW Detox, a self-help website for WoW addicts wanting to quit the game because it's ruined their lives. My plan was working.. I felt my desire to play the MMORPG steadily dropping as I read about hundreds of real people, who failed in courses, jobs, and marriages because of WoW.
And then I realized, to monumental irony, that I was becoming addicted to reading WoW addiction stories. (There are over 40,000 posts on the website! I read maybe 100 over the course of 3 hours, so reading them all would have taken 50 days of non-stop internet browsing!) Before I get into my introspections, I'll first discuss some thoughts on WoW addiction.
There is ongoing debate on WoW Detox on whether WoW addiction is the same as alcohol or illicit substance addiction. Given the selection bias of the visitors of that site, it should not be surprising that the overwhelming consensus is that WoW addiction is no different than conventional addictions. I think that oversimplifies the response, because I think WoW addiction is not a single phenomenon, but rather a medley of different ones with similar outward syndromes.
From reading the various addiction stories, I can broadly separate the addicts into 2 distinct types. The first type is the "Competitive Underachiever." Addicts of this type were "normal" people in life, yet they possessed the desire to be more than normal. They harbor ambitions that sadly cannot be satisfied by their real world abilities. WoW offers them a world in which they can excel, a world in which they can earn the respect of thousands or even millions of others. These addicts usually break free of their addictions out of frustration at having to play 8+ a day continually just to maintain their places in the game world, because of the various new content that Blizzard Entertainment regularly adds.
The second type of addict is the "Rejected Socialite." Addicts of this type were unpopular in real life because of looks, socio-economic status, or general introvertedness. They desire to be sociable, and their primary goal of the game is not to kill monsters, but to develop a network of online friends they can turn to. These are the people who, 20 years ago, would have been chat room junkies. They revel in virtual interpersonal interactions, because real interpersonal interactions are too hard for them to accomplish. These addicts usually break free of their addictions because they realize their real life friends and family care for them, or because they become disillusioned with their online friends.
To summarize the two types of WoW addicts, there are normal people wanting to be heroes, and there are losers wanting to be normal people. Members of the latter class of addicts are probably similar in profile to conventional addicts of alcohol and illicit substances, generally possessing low esteem and succumbing easily to peer pressure. But the difference between the former type of addiction and conventional addiction is night and day.
Though I never played WoW, I did play another MMORPG several years back, in 2004, called Final Fantasy XI. This was near the nadir of my life, and I was losing the confidence that I had continually cultivated for the previous 21 years of my life, due to a combination of bad luck and bad choices (the latter of which stemmed ironically from overconfidence). With no publications and a GPA below 3.0, I was feeling very.. average. For someone used to winning awards and scholarships on a regular basis, average was completely unacceptable. So, like many other type 1 addicts, I got sucked into the MMORPG, determined to distinguish myself as the fastest levelling solo character. In addition to playing at least 4 hours or so every day, I'd also log out frequently to preserve a low in-game playtime. I perused the online strategy guides, and I even spent about $100 buying virtual currency to help me in my goal. I eventually managed to quit playing the game because of a combination of two factors: first, I realized I was clearly lagging behind players powerleveled by their friends (and thus I could not reach my goal of being fastest leveller), and second because one of my science ideas actually turned out to be quite good (and gave me hope that I could distinguish myself in the real world).
So in retrospect, my starting and ending Final Fantasy XI can both be quite rationally explained. But what still didn't make sense is why I'd suddenly have the urge to try WoW: by most standards, I'm doing quite well at the moment, having recently won a prestigious fellowship, published and submitted several good scientific papers, and a loving girlfriend. My salary isn't as high as that of a lawyer, but I'm OK with that because becoming a professor will give me the opportunity to commercialize my science and potentially become *really* rich in ways lawyers can only dream about. What gives? Well, I'm pretty sure I have a more valid alternative theory.
The first thing I realized when introspecting was that my life has been more or less filled with addictions, since the time of elementary school. Some of these were "good;" for example, math competitions. I was addicted to math competitions from the 4th grade, when I got my first taste of prestige in winning 2nd place at the KATM, up until 9th grade, when I got disillusioned by the USAMO. Some of these distinctly bad; for example, I logged something like 30 days of playtime in Final Fantasy XI, and probably much higher numbers for Diablo II, Starcraft, and Angband. Others were probably neutral; for example, Greek mythology and online Diplomacy and fiction writing (to each of which I devoted at least 4 hours each day for at least 3 months).
The number of different addictions I've had is definitely WAY higher than the mean of the population at large. One consequence of that reality is that the amount of time I've spent/wasted on each addiction is significantly less than that of most addicts on their vice of choice. In fact, professional psychologists may even hesitate to call it an addiction, and would perhaps use the term "hobby" instead. I disagree. I feel that when I spend over 12 hours a day thinking about a particular topic for days if not weeks or months on end, that topic has crossed the line over into addiction or obsession.
In actuality, my behavior probably arises from a seemingly paradoxical combination of attention-deficit disorder (ADD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). (Disclaimer: Although I have read numerous psychology books and administered the MMPI to myself, I have never been formally tested by a psychiatrist for either disorder.) Basically, it means once I latch onto a thought or activity, I'll restlessly pursue it for anywhere between 2 weeks and 6 months, with almost exclusive concentration and focus. These addiction states don't end with me retreating into a lethargic, unexcited state, but rather with me switching very excitedly over to a different addiction. In the case of Final Fantasy XI, I switched into it after becoming depressed at my transcriptional circuitry research results, and I switched out of it after becoming excited at the prospect of TAing RSI students. The new, invading addiction could be triggered by the most random or incidental of events. In my current case, I think it was because I repeatedly saw some ads for a different MMORPG, which somehow led me to remember WoW, and think that it's probably a pretty good game, with its 9.5 million different subscribers and 3 expansions. Remembering my experience with Final Fantasy XI prompted me to search for ways of killing the urge, and that led to the proto- WoW addict story addiction.
Sun Tzu wrote in his Art of War that "Knowing yourself and your enemy guarantees victory." What battle plans have I developed after introspecting and writing this lengthy blog post? Well, first of all, I'm something of a positive feedback cycle. As long as I'm accomplished and continue accomplishing in real life, it's unlikely for me to get sucked into any virtual reality game. Second, rather than trying to fight my personality eccentricities, I should learn to cultivate them. A famous Chinese saying goes "It is easier for a realm to change kings than for a man to change his personality." So what if I'll be forever juggling addictions for the rest of my life? As long as all of my future addictions are relatively constructive, everything's fine. My current addiction (not counting the WoW addict stories one) is writing scientific papers. When that fades, I'll try to channel myself into doing DNA synthetic biology labwork. When that fades, it'll be about time to start in Chad's lab on gold nanoparticle chemistry. When that fades, I'll starting interview at different universities for faculty positions. Variety is the spice of life, and I'm a man who likes Szechuan food. As long as I'm sampling different types of peppers and not mushrooms or wild almonds, I'll be OK.
(Writing blog posts is another of my seasonal addictions, but it carries enough benefits and I manage enough moderation that I won't try to kill it ;-) )
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Learning from Dungeons and Dragons
Life lesson I learned from playing D&D: Take all of your weaknesses and concentrate it all in one area. Then do your damnedest to minimize that area's importance. Examples: Paladins with 4 WIS who take Force of Personality, Wild Shape Druids with 6 CON, and Wizards with 6 STR. Basically, the "min" part of min-maxxing.
Application to real life: Right now, I'm sticking everything ad-hoc and undefendable into section 3 (out of 5) of my paper, and piling on disclaimers at the beginning of the section. In exchange, the other parts are quite respectable and scholarly now.
Actually, this reminds me of an event from elementary school. One of my neighbors was lamenting and consulting me on how to present his homework scores to his parents. Most of the grades were decent (B's and A's), but a fraction (maybe 10%) of them were really bad (something like 40-50%). He knows that his parents won't take the time to look over all of his homework grades (because he had a large stack of graded homeworks), so the question was how to arrange the homeworks in a way that his parents take minimal notice of the bad grades, so that they keep giving him a nice allowance.
The strategy I suggested was this: take all of the decent grades, and arrange them chronologically (there was no obvious variation of the scores with time). Then, take the homeworks with poor marks and randomly distribute them in the middle 50% of the good homeworks. That way, when his parents flip through the stack of homeworks, they'll see only good scores in the beginning and the end, and while they might catch a bad score or two in the middle, they'll underestimate the number of bad scores because the psychological "primacy" and "recency" effects worked in his favor (I didn't know what they were called then, but I definitely grasped those concepts!). I think it worked out fine for him.. at least until his parents saw his "surprisingly" low term grade.
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Patent Lawyers should work for Commission
So, while (re-)writing yet another invention disclosure, I got to thinking: why don't some patent lawyers work on commission? (Or maybe they do and I don't know about it?)
From talking to Hertz alums with entrepreneurial blood, there is a strong consensus that the patent lawyer is important. You'd much rather pay $1000 an hour for a lawyer that's good than $200 an hour for a lawyer's that mediocre, if you expect your invention to make you any money at all. A good lawyer adds value to your invention, not only by writing your patent in a way that's impregnable to infringement via silly tweaks, but also by giving advice on potential applications of your technology that you may not have thought of.
When I asked them how to identify a good patent lawyer from one that is merely expensive, the Hertz alums laughed that said that you just have to build good working relationships with good patent lawyers, and it's just something that falls under the ommnibus "entrepreneurship experience" heading. That, of course, depressed me, because Caltech does't have a law school, and thus my social network is devoid of good lawyers.
But that also got me thinking: the free market should have arrived at a good method of matching up good patent lawyers with good entrepreneurs. After all, a good patent lawyers wants to work with entrepreneurs who are successful, in order to maximize repeat business. But that incentive may be too small.
The natural solution that I saw for this problem was for good patent lawyers to work on commission. Charge nothing until the royalties start kicking in. If the patent was poorly written, there will be naturally less of a commission to be earned. Good patent lawyers will then be much more vested not only in doing a good job writing good patents, but also will be incentivized to only work on the patents they think have some chance of paying out.
In the age of steep lawyer costs and patent trolling, the solution would simultaneously reduce the social inefficiency of many poorly written/conceived patents, and increase the odds that a good invention is protected and successfully becomes a technology.
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E for Effort
Most American schools use the A through F grading system, with a conspicuous lack of an E letter grade. This probably should be corrected, and reserved for students who supposedly gave "effort" but yielded no results. The problem is, instead of putting the missing E grade where it's supposed to be (that is, between D and F), the expectation of most now is that effort should be sufficient for a B or a C (or an A, if you're at Harvard). This is not so much of a problem if it was limited to academia, but unfortunately, people take this perspective into the real world.
The most striking examples of this in recent times are the string of bailouts: the banks, then the insurance companies, and then the automobile manufacturers. Modern economics is based on the idea of competitive advantage: if Japan can make cars better and cheaper than the U.S., and the U.S. can make medicines better and cheaper than Japan, then it's in the best interest of both to specialize and trade. So the United States should give up the auto industry if it's not good at it.
But the problem deeper than that. Why are the U.S. auto industries not competitive? Because of the workers' unions (specifically the United Auto Workers union, in the case of the auto industry). Unions started forming in response to the appalling conditions of the 1920's laissez-faire business approach, which yielded conditions that inspired Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." Unions sought to protect the workers from being exploited by powerful businesses, which was a legitimate concern back in those days. But not anymore.
These days, unions provide a backdoor to communism. UAW workers are paid about 50% more than non-union workers at Toyota, and thousands of them are being paid not to show up to work. Fundamentally, the reason that unions have taken this turn for the worse is because of the popular acceptance that effort somehow should be rewarded, in addition to results.
There are two problems with the "effort should be rewarded" philosophy. First, it is difficult to measure the intangible "effort." A person who "works" long hours may in fact be using his workplace's free high-speed Internet afterhours for listening to music. A salesman who travels everywhere hounding potential customers may in fact just like to travel. Even for those whose jobs have a tangible product, such as a worker making widgets, it is difficult to tell the worker's maximum productivity were he truly using his maximum effort.
Second, there are competitive advantages among individual humans too. A widget-maker who produces fewer widgets per day than his peers shouldn't be incentivized to keep making widgets--he should be encouraged to find and put to use his real talents, be it waiting tables or writing or teaching yoga. At the end of the day, rewarding effort, rather than results, yields an unhappier and less productive populace.
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Reminiscences of academic close-mindedness
So, Caltech is a pretty good place. People are generally smart, there are a lot of scientific resources, and people are usually receptive to at least considering ideas that seem crazy initially. However, even at Caltech, the last is not always the case. So I'll share two stories from my Caltech undergrad days.
The first one takes place before I was even officially a Caltech undergrad. I started early in the summer of 2000 to do optics research as part of the Axline program, and it was during then that I took the Caltech placement exams for placing out of introductory classes in math, physics, and chemistry. In the math exam, there were about 6 questions, and most of them were relatively standard calculus questions. There was one that was interesting though; it went like this:
Four ants start at the four vertices of a unit square. Each ant moves towards its right neighbor with equal speed, and so the ants spiral inward until they meet in the center. What distance do they travel before they meet?
I think the intended solution was set up parametric differential equations, but I figured, because of symmetry, the positions of the ants always formed a square around (0.5, 0.5). Travelling directly from (0, 0) to (0.5, 0.5) is distance sqrt(2)/2. However, the ants always travel at a 45 degree from the vector to (0.5, 0.5), for every 1 unit that they travel, only sqrt(2)/2 of it is inward. Thus, they travel exact 1 unit of distance before they meet in the middle.
Math ended up being the only course I didn't place out of.
The second was during my freshman year at Caltech, during a Theory of Computation class. One of the problems on the homework set was, show that there exists a bijection between N (natural numbers) and (N,N) (ordered pair of natural numbers).
The solution we learned in class is to do a diagonalization. Ordered pair (m,n) is the (m+1)th point on the (m+n+1)th line, and is mapped to (m+n+1)*(m+n+2)/2 + (m+1). But that formula was hard to remember and I wanted to do something original. So I did this bijection:
Take an ordered pair (m,n), and create a new number that alternates the digits in m and n. That is, (25, 36) turns into 2356. This can be written as pseudocode as:
for (i = 0; i < MAX; i++)
x += pow(10,2*i) * ((m / pow(10,i))%10);
end
for (i = 0; i < MAX; i++)
x += pow(10,2*i+1) * ((n / pow(10,i))%10);
end
I got a 0 on that homework problem; the TA didn't get my solution >_<
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Immortality
So, one of my favorite books growing up was "Tuck Everlasting," which is about a family who drank from a spring of immortality. (Don't anyone dare give me any crap about the 106-year-old boy falling in love with the 10-year-old girl!) But, like many other childhood favorites, I grew ambivalent to it as I grew older. While the depiction and plot are still good, I very much disagree with the central message of the book, that "death is a part of the cycle of life, right next to birth." That people who lived indefinitely would grow bored of or despise life, after a mere 150 years--especially if they maintained their youthful bodies. Also, why would the four stay together continuously for a hundred years? Family is nice to have and all, but most people have at least some ambition to go out and do something on their own. Heck, if it was me, I'd start my campaign to conquer the world second thing after I discovered my own immortality, with the first being to destroy the spring (perhaps after letting some cute girl also partake ^^).
To me, the most plausible explanation is that the water from the spring possessed a secondary effect of altering the psychology of those who imbibed it. Chained to the blessing of eternal life was the curse of mental decadence. I'm not sure if the writer intend a Biblical allegory constrasting the Tree of Knowledge with the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, but if so, it's most delicious. If I were to write a sequel to the book, I would have the family discover a way of removing their immortality.. only to gain clarity the moment after they commit themselves, of how truly precious a gift they have forsaken.
What about me? Would I drink from it, knowing full well that the liquid would boost my vitality at the cost of retarding my mind? I'm not sure. Maybe in ten years.
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The Importance of Economics
f I could force all of the kids in the US to take (and learn well) one course during their high school days, it wouldn't be math or science or literature or art. It would be economics. And not the mathematical micro or historical macro, but an example-focused course on externalities and decision-making.
Why? Because, fortunately or unfortunately, the United States is a democracy where everyone gets exactly one vote no matter how smart or dumb, rich or poor, good or evil they are. And since the dumb outnumber the smart, the poor outnumber the rich, and the evil outnumber the good, there is a problem. But even given this distribution of traits, we can still have a good government.. as long as people realize what governments are for.
Ask a random person on the street today what the government is for, and he'll probably answer something along the lines of collecting taxes, building schools, regulating pollution, fighting wars, punishing criminals, etc. But they have no idea what these have in common. The government corrects inefficiencies due to externalities. An externality is anything a person does that affects many other people, for the better or for the worse. The problem is that because there are many affected individuals, each of them benefit or suffer a small amount, and thus they are unlike to take any actions, in the absence of government.
For example, if serial killer Sam is on the loose, then every individual in the community is threatened a little bit, as any of them could be the next target. However, the risk of being murdered by Sam is much less than the danger of trying to violently confront Sam. If the community had 10,000 people and Sam would kill 10 more people in his lifetime if not stopped, then the risk to each person is only 0.001. But the risk of confronting Sam is high, say 50% chance of being killed by Sam. Since a 50% chance of death is worse than a 0.1% chance of death, no one will confront Sam, even though society as a whole benefits by 9 lives if Sam was confronted.
It is for the purpose of correcting the incentives for actions with externalities that governments exist. Public works should be handled by the government because too many people benefit for one person to foot the entire bill. Pollution control should be handled by the government because too many people suffer for one person to reap the full benefits. For the government to influence actions with little externalities, such as retirement funds, is not only wrong but inefficient. If people can be trusted to spend their incomes, why can't they be trusted to plan their own retirements? For that matter, why is there even a set age for retirement? There is no hard and fast genetically encoded rule that people become decrepit at 65, and even if there was, there's no good economic reason why unproductive members of society should be supported indefinitely by the productive ones.
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What a Mad Scientist would do
So, I was having dinner with Rob Bao today, and we were discussing Jared Diamond's book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel." The both of us agreed with one of his points--that the average person alive today is probably not as smart as the average human being alive 10,000 years ago. Back then, there was a lot more selection pressure to be stronger, smarter, stealthier, because those who weren't were killed by lions, avalanches, or neighbors. When the selection pressure doesn't exist anymore, the gene pool naturally weakens due to entropy.
This, of course, leads to the question of how one could go about reversing such an unfortunate trend. The standard mad scientist response of "create a virus and wipe out 95% of the population" is a bad one, for it selects for an arbitrary disease resistance, and also the genetic bias to have more children, rather than smarter children. Similarly, fomenting war also selects for the wrong traits, cowardice and beauracracy. For example, in World War II, many a brave and cunning captain was sent on submarines to torpedo enemy ships; the ones successful and destroying their target were rarely successful at surviving, and vice versa.
Barring some very artificial and contrived method akin to the Spartan infanticide rituals, what else is there? Well, we may not be able to directly select for intelligence, but there is one thing possibly correlated to intelligence that we *can* select for.. willpower. Promoting drug use is bad, because even the strong-willed who quit eventually are mentally damaged in the process. What we need is.. something insidious enough not to draw attention of the government as it works its way into killing the dumb portion of the populace; something forgiving enough that those who try and later quit are not permanently penalized; something powerful enough that it actually influences the demographics of future generations just by its very existence.
Enter the MMRPG (Massively Multi-player Role Playing Game). At the moment, it unfortunately is an affliction more of the higher end of the intellectual spectrum rather than the lower end of the willpower one. But, graphics are rapidly improving and the simulated worlds are rapidly becoming more immersive, thanks to companies such as Blizzard. One problem remains though, which is that Blizzard and other game-making companies are essentially for-profit conglomerates. This not only prevents the very bottom layers of society from being afflicted, but also leads to the inevitable luxury tax by the government, when the government realizes both its pecunious potential and its destructive results.
But! If a non-profit organization was to provide this, then it is essentially invulnerable to government interference, because of the basic right of freedom of speech. Furthermore, a virtual drug of the mind differs from a physical drug in that there is no marginal cost of production; certainly there will be server maintenance costs and such, but these pale in comparison to synthesis costs of THC and LSD and others. The infected populace can grow arbitrarily larger with no additional cost. If anything, donations will increase with an enlarged user base.
Today, in South Korea, arguably the most wired country in the world, scores of youths are wasting away in Internet cafes, dropping out of colleges to pursue their second lives, and physically attacking each other for indignities committed by their virtual characters. This leads me to an interesting hypothesis of the results of a natural, uncontrolled experiment: Assuming that the remainder of the population not enslaved by the MMRPGs is many enough to reproduce efficiently, then we should see a rise in the average intellect of the average South Korean over the next few decades. That is, if those pesky government folks leave the business alone.
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Scientists and Knights
The world needs more scientists and engineers. From a standpoint of demographics, what other professions are there? Service sector primarily exists to increase the morale and efficiencies of other sectors. Manufacturing is constantly on the decrease as robotics and automation improves. Medical, law, and business mostly deal with the proper distribution of products of science and technology to the rest of the population. In a sense, I see science as the top of the pyramid for which the rest exist to aid, since only science improves the world.
To draw an analogy, in medieval times, less than one in a hundred of population were knights. The rest all go towards roles of support--the farmers to feed the knights and everyone else, the tailors to clothes the knights and everyone else, the blacksmiths to make swords and tools for the knights and everyone else. The knights were the only luxury class, in that they didn't have a sharply defined goal with regular output; they were the investments, for they allow the nation to expand by conquest. Today, with most of the Earth populated, wars are a zero-sum game, so the most reasonable path of expansion is improved efficiency (or take to the stars), which is based on technology. So, to me, if anything, we have too few scientists in the world, and too many bankers and lawyers and salesmen.
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IQ, I Will, and Destiny
One of the few strong memories I have of my childhood is entering the Gifted program. I was really proud of this, especially because I was tested to be borderline retarded in second grade. Additionally, that cute blond girl Ruschelle Jones (my second childhood crush! First one being Flavia from first grade..) was in gifted, and I was always a bit envious when she and a couple other students would abscond the classroom on Fridays. "What secrets of the universe were revealed in that room down the hall?" wondered I since the beginning of my third grade. More than two years later, I'd finally find out.
On my first Friday of being part of the smart cabal, I walked into the gifted room, looked up, and saw a poster. "Your 'I Will' is more important than your IQ." Naturally, at the time, I was a bit miffed by this, since I was quite fond of my newfound high IQ. In retrospect, the great irony was that my IQ was directly a product of my 'I Will:' I worked actively at learning, with getting into Gifted being a goal, and managed to raise my IQ by over 40 points over the course of 3 years. But at the time, I was just ecstatic that my IQ was "misreported" earlier, and that I was actually one of those lucky winners of the genetic lottery. I believed that IQ was immutable (though not necessarily easily revealed by tests), and that success was necessarily my Destiny because I was one of the Gifted.
It would be another 11 years, 40 IQ points, and a major life crisis before I finally fully embraced the message of the poster that I saw on the first day of Gifted. Along the way, I've seen many of the Gifted stumble and fall, some never to rise again. I came awfully close to being one of latter. You see, we who believed in our Gifted Destinies eventually put enough faith in it that we felt we no longer needed to contribute to keep it real. And when the image flickered as it had never done before, we were struck with a sense of panick we had previously never encountered. The later in life this happens, the greater the panick, for reality betrays a firmer belief. This is often life's major turning point: some disappear forever into obscurity (or in some cases the Pacific Ocean), some turn to a different brand of faith, and some start again by picking up the pieces after a good, long cry.
Gems are often valued by their purity, their uniformity, their wholeness. Destiny, however, is a patchwork, a gestalt, a Frankenstein. Each surviving one is built on the ashes, chips, and splinters of its brothers. The starting reagent is usually a good mind, but those are plentiful compared to the unguents that hold together completed Destinies.
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A Curiosity about a Correlation
So, here's something I've been wondering for a while: Does physical looks correlate with innate virtue? That is, are beautiful people in general better or worse people than ugly people? Obviously, this generalization isn't meant to be taken too far, as I'm sure things like family upbringing play a much bigger role. So, as far as I could figure, there are two main effects in play: entitlement and perception.
Entitlement refers to the fact that in general, beautiful people have an easier time making friends than ugly people. Beauty, in fact, is defined by the average "attractiveness" level to some population--people we conventionally think of a beautiful may be considered ugly in another culture/world, and vice versa. So, given that people with good looks can make friends easier, they will also need to put in less effort to maintain their group of friends. "So what if I forgot to get him a birthday present? If he doesn't want to be my friend anymore, I can find plenty to replace him." People with less good looks, on the other hand, have to and will work harder to maintain friendship. Thus, they will generally tend to be more empathetic and generous. So by this argument, beautiful people are in general worse people than ugly people.
Perception refers to the feedback between a person's goodness and the goodness of the environment around him. Simply stated, people generally abide by the Platinum Rule: "Do unto others what they do unto you." Beautiful people, immersed from early ages in an environment of fawning generosity and friendliness, are likely to think that this is the standard for the world that they live in, and thus are more likely to treat people better too. Ugly people, everywhere facing closehanded acquaintances who seek only to maximize their own benefits, will quickly learn to care only for themselves as well. (Gratuitous opinion insertion: I'm generally a pretty imperturbable guy when it comes to looks, but even for me, there's maybe 0.1%-1% of the population that puts me to cerebral shock by vice of outward appearance alone. Of course, I try to be polite and just avoid them in the future, but I imagine the world would be an awfully lonely place if most people refuse to talk to you just because of the way you look.) With the feedback devolving into a vicious cycle of reinforcing animosity, ugly people in general would be worse than beautiful people.
Of course, the possibility exists that it's not a linear correlation.. maybe the good people are all somewhere in between, while the extremes in looks are generally bad.
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On Human Male Drabness
Humans are unlike most (if not all) species. No, not because we're conscious, or intelligent, or saved by Jesus. Rather, males of the human species are the drab ones. In most species males are more colorful and flamboyant than females. This is due to the fact that females invest more in reproduction than males (that's how we define female, in fact.. the bearer of the egg (as opposed to the bearer of some magical Y chromosome). In chickens, for example, females are ZW in sex chromosomes while males are ZZ.) In humans, it's the same--a girl needs to bear the cost of the being pregnant for 9 months, while a guy only needs to convince the girl of spending the night. So why is it that guys aren't the ones putting on makeup? (Siping Han, the exception, aside)
I have a theory on this. It's because humans, for the most part, are monogamous. While many ancient cultures tolerated polygamy, by and large (way over 90%) of the populace abided by monogamy out of practicality. "But wait!" the astute reader may interject. "There are certain species of birds that are monogamous too (like the Mandarin duck). To the best that the human eye can judge, they're equally drab!" Well, let's consider the ramifications of monogamy. Once the male and the female are "married," their reproductive fitness become inseparably intertwined. Ignoring for the moment divorcees and widows, the married man (or bird) has exactly the same number of descendents as his spouse. Thus, males would be just as selective as females in finding a high fitness mate. So both sexes should logically be equally drab or flamboyant.
So, back to the case of females. Why *are* girls so much more fashionable then? My theory that humans are also unique or near-unique in another way--they have wars, and their wars involve only (or mostly) males. Most other species, when there exists intra-species conflict, it occurs at the individual level, rather than the population or community level. What about ant wars and termite wars? In a sense, those are also conflicts between individuals, because the ants of a single colony are all genetically identical. The worker ant is more akin to a finger of a human than a whole human.
Thus, the human species possesses a strange feature in its time-based demographics... with some periodicity, the male population will shrink substantially, so women outnumber men. Because of the inefficiency of cultural monogamy then, some women of those generations will end up with no husband, and dies leaving no offspring. Thus, there is much more competition among women for males during those periods just following war. This led to the eventual (global) trend that women tend to primp more.
Eventually, however, society and humanity makes up for this oversight. For example, in Islam, men are allowed up have up to four wives during period of wartime. In China, some female babies were drowned at birth. In modern day United States, where war has negligible effects on male population pruning, we have the "metrosexual trend." Geez, if anything, that's good reason to have another war (j/k!) ^^
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On Darwin's Other Theory
As the reader may or may not know, Darwin actually proposed two theories in the explanation of evolution: the theory of natural selection, and the theory of sexual selection. The former is already half beaten to death, and also undoubtedly true. The other, on the other hand, is neither. In fact, it was the only disagreement between Darwin and Wallace (the other discoverer of natural selection) that was never resolved.
The general idea of sexual selection (sometimes also called runaway selection) is this: males of certain species will have disadvantageous traits that are counter-intuitively favored for by females. Darwin's favorite example is the peacock, with its majestic (albeit impractical) plumage. Possessing a large plumage is necessarily a general drawback-it's heavy, and slows down escape from predators. Darwin (and Dawkins) argue that this is precisely why females favor large plumages--because unfit males who try to counterfeit large plumages are unable to evade predators. The drawback of the large plumage is costly, which is why only virile males possess them. In contrast, other traits correlated with fitness may be easily faked.
I personally don't buy this at all though. There are much smarter ways of displaying fitness that does not hurt the species at large, and those species would therefore possess competitive advantage in the long run, eventually causes extinction of competing species that adopt harmful displays of fitness. Ideas that occurs to me immediately are: a large stock of food, an elaborate nest, and expensive courtship presents. Large stockpiles of food and elaborate nests are difficult to acquire, impossible to dissimulate, and if generally favorable to the individuals possessing them, because they are utilitarian (food and be eaten and shelter protects from predators and adverse weather). Expensive courtship presents (such as food) is also deletarious to the male courting the female, but the female benefits equally, so the species as a whole isn't penalzed. In fact, many species utilize each of these three techniques. It stands to reason that if any of them shared a niche with the peacock, then the peacock would have gone the way of the dinosaurs.
But they didn't. What does this tell us? Either they were extremely lucky in that no species arose that shared their exact niche (unlikely), or that the plumage held a utilitarian purpose (at least until recently when humans started collecting them as fancy pets). It's not impossible that the sudden display of large plumage may scare some potential predators. Alternatively, the peacock diet is partially composed of insects. Perhaps the large plumage acts as a net in which food can be trapped. Many other possible other utilitarian purposes for the plumage can be thought of, such that I would not be convinced by this one example of Darwin's other theory.
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On Entropic Death
Most people with some knowledge of thermodynamics know of the Second Law, that entropy of an isolated system is ever-increasing. Combined with the assumption that the Universe is an isolated system (which most cosmologist believe it to be), and it's an unescapable conclusion that the Universe will one day die an entropic death, where all atoms are Iron and at a uniform 4K temperature sparsely distributed across space.
Given that technology advances at such ever-increasing pace, one may additionally be led to only two possibilities on sentient life regarding the entropic death of the Universe. First, it is possible that all civilizations that ever live in this Universe are doomed to fall, and no advanced civilization forms in the doddering old age of the Universe. Second, it is possible that some civilization will achieve enlightenment, and become ever more technologically advanced. As they advance, they will gradually develop technologies to minimize their own energy consumption, and also slow the inevitable progress of entropy in the Universe. Where energy is necessarily spent and entropy necesarily increases, systems will be coupled so that work is done or information processed. In fact, the Universe might last a whole lot longer under the husbandry of an advanced and conscientious species. But they can only delay, and not prevent, the inevitable.
What will happen when the Universe is down to its last few terracalories of free energy? First, the obvious: cannibalism must be abound; even if not active cannibalism of seeking out and destroying other members of the species for their energy and the disentropy of their molecules, then the passive one of efficient recycling of resources through no intermediate. Cannibalism will, of course, by that time fail to be considered taboo by these rational super-beings. Second, also obvious, but perhaps less so: Darwinian evolution, and reproduction in general, will cease. The developmental process is too long and energy-wasteful for a species scrounging every calorie of free energy left. At best, a modified clone will be created when an indiviual dies. I'm using the term "clone" here liberally, of course--standard definition of clone is an organism that goes through the normal developmental proccess, whereas the idea apropos would be more like an unzipped version of a lossy compressed file.
Third, lastly and most disturbingly: the species must at some point face the decision between death and lobotomy. When the real crunch comes.. that is, when there is absolutely no "free" free energy left, entropy will inexoribly still increase. At that point, either sentient individuals will die due to "mutations," or non-sentient knowledge will be sacrificed as energy to preserve lives. First to go will probably be their annals of Shakespeare and Monet and Mozart, for these information are luxuries. When the last of the art has been thrown into the metaphorical furnace, next to go will be history. As Robert Heinlein once said, "A generation that ignores history has no past.. and no future." Presumably, the realization that there will be no future has already sunk in by this point. Finally, science will be abandoned. The species may perhaps live on meagerly as some obscure branches of mathematics are trimmed, but when at least biology and computer science and engineer are sacrificed, then they can no longer maintain their thrifty way of life.. and end of the Universe quietly arrives.
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On Candles
For those of you who don't know, the candle lit at both ends is often taken as symbolism, among other things, of the Caltech student. "The candle that burns twice as bright bu
rns half as long." I originally heard of this quote through one of my all-time favorite movies, "Blade Runner," and it was spoken in reference to the short-lived but physicall
y and mentally superior replicants. I never took much stock in it: by this, I don't deny that a physical phenomenon that a candle lit on both ends will last approximately half
as long, but in the symbolic meaning that those who excel are doomed to early deaths. If anything, I believed the opposite: Humans are machines, and some machines are better
designed and built than others. Given only that one machine is more efficient at doing what it does than another, one would conclude that the former would also likely last lo
nger, simply because superiority of craftsmanship would usually correlate across all aspects.
Thus it was that I found one thought in Richard Dawkin's "River out of Eden" particularly arresting. "Whenever natural selection favors a gene because of its beneficial effect
in youth--say, on sexual attractiveness in a young male--there is likely to be a downside: some particular disease in middle or old age, for example." The source of his (or
rather, technically it is due to P. Medawar, G.C. Williams, and W.D. Hamilton) reasoning is that while mutations in genes generally have more than one effect, it is likely that
ones which stay in significant numbers in the population have exactly one beneficial effect: the vast majority in the space of all possible mutations on existing genes that a
re those with no beneficial effect (and many harmful ones) would quickly be removed from the gene pool by natural selection, and the space of mutations having two or more benef
icial effects is vanishingly small compared to that of exactly one, and would rarely if ever be sampled.
The one intrinsic assumption in this line of reasoning is that humans as a species are at equilibrium, or at least a steady-state: Genes that are successful at ensure their ow
n propagation are already present in optimal or near-optimal concentration. This assumption is based on the idea that number of years that occur the life of a modern man pales
in comparison to that of the length of the history of humans as a species. Yet here, inevitably, Dawkins made a flaw in reasoning, for his next chapter in "River out of Eden"
claims exactly that we are *not* currently in an "average" decade/century of human growth. We are at the threshold of science, where many fields are intersecting which greatl
y prolongs the expected lifespan not only of individual humans, but also humanity as a species. In the past hundred years, the fitness of many genes have been violently skewed
, due to the advent of modern medicine. Almost all genes that confer resistance to certain diseases have had their benefits diluted. Almost all genes that favor the buildup o
f fat in the body has suddenly been inverted from an advantage to a disadvantage. Almost all genes that favor longevity and delaying of menopause are much more valuable now (a
nd possibly even more valuable shortly, with human cloning).
Thus, I believe there is hope. I remember once chatting with an old-aged Chinese seller of paintings, and he was saying he did not remember me (I've bought on the order of 5 f
rom him). He said that he had great memory as a kid, but in life, often precocious perceptive and intellectual abilities are accompanied by stronger versions of senescence. It fits Dawkins's theory, but it may not necessarily be true for everyone.
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On Free Will (Part I)
Are the actions of every person deterministic? Or, for that matter, is the life of the entire Universe deterministic? These questions seem to me to be a bit more complicated
than an initial passing evaluation would suggest. In the absence of quantum mechanisms, I would be tempted to believe that the Universe is in fact, deterministic. Assuming a
finite isolated Universe, which was inactive before the Big Bang, then all mass/energy would follow a fixed trajectory from the initial starting conditions. The fate of the Un
iverse might be very sensitive to small changes in those starting conditions, but it would be deterministic nonetheless.
With the consideration of quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle which introduces tiny errors and imprecision in all events, the question becomes much more com
plicated. On one hand, due to the exponentiating effects of small changes on future events, one's first instinct would be that the Universe then must be non-deterministic (sim
ilar to the butterfly causing typhoons in Chaos Theory). However, consider that there may be robust limit cycles and attractor states in the evolution of the Universe. That i
s, the small changes that accumulate may be periodically reset/neutralized by catastrophes. For example, exactly which fish eats what algae in a pond doesn't really matter if
the pond dries up in the summer (and thus everything in it dies). In this fashion, the Universe may be "mostly" deterministic despite the presence of quantum mechanics.
Now, up until quantum mechanics, physical theories were assumed to be valid only if they obeyed casuality, locality, and determinism. Quantum mechanics, however, provably viol
ates locality or determinism (good intro link). I personally favor non-determinism over non-local
ity, simply because it's more intuitive (I could be wrong though). In one interpretation of such a view, the Universe is a huge, complex cellular automata (each cell affecting
only a finite neighborhood which is a proper subset of the space of all cells in the system). Quantum mechanics introduces non-determinism by effecting the (small) error rate
s that plague each individual cell with some probability in each timestep. Since the Universe is finite, then there is some finite positive probability of catastrophic error--
simultaneous errors in many, many cells. However, that doesn't prevent the Universe from being "mostly" deterministic: consider that there exist error-correction algorithms o
n cellular automata (such as Toom's Rule, GKL, and my own mixed strategy algorithm) that with high probability prevent chaotic behavior within some frame of time. As the time
of evolution tends towards infinite, of course, all error-correction algorithms eventually fail because the probability of catastrophic error monotonically increases. But with
in a short time span (say, the life of a human, 100 years), these could lead to predictable behavior.
There is no reason to expect that the Universe is implementing some optimized error-correction algorithm. But in any cellular automata system which is not reversible (i.e. mul
tiple initial states lead to some future state. A vast majority of CA are not reversible.), some errors can be effectively corrected (i.e. moving from one state to another tha
t both lead to the same future state).
(to be continued later)
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The 4-C measure of a human
I learned a number of years ago that a diamond's value is dependent solely on its 4C rating: Cut, Clarity, Color, and Carat. It occurs to me that people ca
n also be evaluated on a similar 4C scale of Courage, Creativity, Competence, and Character. In fact, I argue that these are what distinguish humans from a
nimals and robots.
Courage. A robot may step in line of a bullet despite the bullet's potential to harm itself, yet even should it save one's life at the cost of its own, the
beneficiary would not feel indebted to it, because robots (at least the ones we have now) cannot comprehend fear. Robert Heinlein once said, "Courage is t
he complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool.)" To be courageous is to take a bullet in the arm for one that woul
d have struck a friend in the heart. To be fearless is to take a bullet in the heart for one who would have struck a friend in the arm.
Creativity. Humans' creative use of tools is what led us to be the leading animals of the planet Earth today, yet I fear that creativity as a trait is all
too infrequent even among humans today. I did, however, see a remarkable example of creativity just yesterday--Po, at no one's suggestion, decided to re-pr
ogram his cell phone to control his home computer. His computer at home would parse short command messages sent to it by his cell phone, and then text-mess
age back portions of relevant files. It's a simple idea, yes, and most people with basic competence in programming could probably figure out how to do it i
n a few days. But the simple yet useful idea occurred to him, rather than the other millions who use cell phones.
Competence. I define competence as the ability to produce good, tangible results given non-specific instructions/tasks, such as "Go do research," or "Build
me an army," or "Make lots of money," or "Raise a child." For certain, a specicialized robot can crank out more widgets per hour than any human can, but it
cannot produce a widget doubled in size, or perhaps out of a different material, or fit it into another device. It would be even more lost if its boss tol
d it to "Produce and sell just as many widgets as to maximize our profit." Thus, it is not competent. Competence is marked by the ability to generalize an
d apply one set of skills to another task.
Character. Character is difficult to evaluate (and very possibly depends on culture). A dog will treat a person kinder when he gives it a bone, whereas a
robot will not. In this manner, the dog is perceived to be "grateful," and possess more character than the robot. On the other hand, a man who takes a bri
be and makes a decision based on that bribe is certainl considered "corrupt," rather than grateful. Experimentally, lower animals can be induced more frequ
ently than humans to comply given tangile rewards. It is not practical to go into the depths of evaluating character here, but at the same time, it is cert
ainly an important metric in evaluating the worth of a person (and possibly the single most important).
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The ideal form of government/society
Imagine a world where in every city, government-sponsored cafeterias are open during mealtimes to provide food gratis to anyone who shows up. Equivalents of the YMCA (except secular, of course) are spread across the city to offer shelter and residence to anyone down on their luck. Education is also free to anyone who wishes to enroll in classes. Government-run hospital offer free medical treatment to all citizens. Free public transportation take citizens to and from their destination of choice.
Sounds a lot like communism right? Wrong. It is neither the idealistic communism of Marx and Lenin, nor the fake communism of Stalin and Mao. People are still paid the standard wages, with a small, fixed percentage (say, 20%) taken for taken for taxes to fund the government. Privately-owned restaurants, hotels, universities, and car manufacturers will still thrive, because those who have cash will want the extra benefit that money can buy. Entrepeneurship will still be well-rewarded. The only real difference from that world and today's America is that welfare is made in terms of the necessities (food, shelter, health), rather than Hawaii's $18/hr cash. No one would be allowed to take extra food out of the cafeterias and sell them, of course, and abuse of the system can be punished by exile. Single mothers won't be able to buy booze while their children starve, because she will not receive money and her children can walk into the cafeteria themselves for food.
Luxuries are still present to incentivize the populace to work, instead of subsisting on the bounty of the government. In fact, the only real problem I can see is uncontrolled population growth: After all, if the heavy check of having a child is footed by the government, then some will make a profession of bearing children. This can be easily curtailed in the form of an "adoption fee." Since the government paid for all of the costs of the newborn child, it is therefore property of the government. If the biological parents wish guardianship over their child, then they will reimburse the government for the hospital fees. Unclaimed children will be brought up in state-of-the-art government orphanages, where they will raised with the standard mix of education and play, until adulthood.
This type of a society contain the best elements of both a capitalistic and a communistic government: Since tax rate is flat (as opposed to progressive in the current US scheme), the incentive to work for real cash is not diminished, and since all the basic necessities are taken care of by the government, citizens will not have the stress of the possibility of "homelessness" weighing on their mind. More high-risk high-payoff projects will be embarked upon, because no one will truly fear the prospect of bankruptcy. Those who choose to change careers in their middle ages will be free to do so, without worrying about how to pay for re-education or their children's dinners.
Criminals can then be more severely punished, because the excuse of stealing or robbing to feed family members will no longer be available. I generally am for capital punishment, but if others do not wish to mar this utopia with bloodshed, then exile can be the ultimate punishment.
Immigration, and specifically illegal immigration, will obviously be a problem. While a humane system of catching all illegal aliens and gently expelling them might be more ideal, practically I believe this problem should be dealt with force. The first time a person is caught in Utopia without a visa, he will be sentenced to solitary confinement without food/water for one day, and then shipped back to his country of origin. Every time the same person is caught again, the number of days in solitary confinement without food/water is increased by one. If he should happen to die, then that is a risk he knew he was taking. Anyone competent enough to evade the system for, say, ten years in a row, will be awarded citizenship.
A brief economic look at the practicality of such a government: Thanks to economies of scale, I would argue that each person can be well fed for $5 a day. Shelter maintenance should come out to be about the same, about $5 a day. Health care and education are a bit trickier to estimate, but I think $30 a day should suffice for the sum (comes out to about $11k per year). So that's $40/day per person, or $15k/year per person. However, note that not everyone will be using the government funded facilities (or at least not all the time). Let's take an overestimate and say the actual figure comes out to about half (i.e. only 50% elect to buy "luxury" goods), or about $8k/year per person. Current average wage in the US is about $40k/year, so the tax rate required would be 20%. Of course, this ignores the fact that not everyone can work.. in fact, probably at any given moment less than half a nation's population in the labor force (the rest are too young, too sick, or re-educating). And this also ignores the fact that the government has other expenses, such as police, military, and public works. So Utopia cannot quite be formed based on today's United States (it would take about 50-60% tax rate, which is high enough to disincentivize many people).
However, I do believe that once such a society is set up, it will be self-sustaining. Everyone in the society has the opportunity to be well educated, and real economic growth will be by leaps and bounds. As everyone becomes richer, fewer will subsist on the government-funded facilities, and more funds will be recycled in the private sector. Such a society would symbolize the ideals of the founding fathers of the United States: Freedom and equality for all--not equality of cimcumstances, but equality of opportunity.
Note: A large portion of the above is inspired by the novels of Robert Heinlein (though I added the touches on the adoption fee and the immigrant punishments). If ever I become super-rich, I'd make it my goal to create such a society in miniature somewhere to test it out. If my thoughts are correct and it is an efficient Utopia, it will grow rich and grow larger (like an exponential amplifier!).
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Appalling Gay Marriage Propaganda
I just read the most utterly appalling arguments for gay marriage ever:
10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage is Wrong
01) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
02) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
03) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
04) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
05) Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britany Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
06) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.
07) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
08) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.
09) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raise children.
10) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.
It's utterly appalling because it uses just the right mix of spurious logic to try to mislead the masses. For comparison, here are analogies I draft for legalizing heroin:
11 Reasons Why Heroin Should Be Illegal:
01) It is unnatural to inject things directly into the bloodstream, such as glucose in intravenal (i.v.) drips for hospital patients.
02) Heroin usage will encourage people to be heroin addicts, in the same way anyone who watches a game of basketball become then addicted to playing basketball.
03) Legalizing heroin will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to snort porcupines, because porcupines are small enough to fit through your nostrils and dissolve in your bloodstream.
04) Non-heroin chemicals have been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; it's still illegal for Jews to eat pork, it's still illegal for Indians to eat beef, and it's still illegal to serve alcohol in the United States.
05) Non-heroin use will be less meaningful if heroin were legalized; the sanctity of hot dog-eating competitions and beer chug-a-thons would be destroyed.
06) Non-heroin use is valid because they provide nutritional value. Heroin use, Diet Coke, and iceberg lettuce shouldn't be allowed to be ingested, because Americans aren't fat enough, and the world needs more lard.
07) Obviously heroin addicts parents will raise heroin addict children, since non-heroin addict parents only raise non-heroin addict children.
08) Heroin usage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.
09) Children can never succeed with parents who intake anything but normal food. That's why we as a society expressly send all children of known alcohol users to orphanages.
10) Heroin legalization will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new chemicals in our body. Just like we haven't adapted to Coco-cola, aspartamine (a.k.a. Nutrasweet), or longer life-spans.
11) Heroin kills people. Things that kill people like heroin and driving should be outlawed.
The sad part is that even I had to think about the original arguments for 2-3 minutes before understanding why they're logical fallacies. It may sound like I'm bragging, but really, how often does one pause at a random flier to think about its logical validity?
And in case it wasn't obvious enough from my sarcasm, I do NOT support heroin legalization OR gay marriage. I'm sure some liberal hippies would have taken the wrong message from my "counter-example." Basically the above exploits three main logic holes:
1. Some part of the socially accepted system is broken, therefore we are free to add whatever. Just because something like Britney's marriage is considered marriage doesn't necessary invalidate all marriages, or even the majority of them. Whenever one makes laws, there is ALWAYS a probability argument involved. The fraction of standard marriages that are infertile is very low, whereas it is 100% for gay marriages. The proper consideration for the above point would be what fraction of traditional marriages are "successful," and what fraction of gay marriages would be "successful." The definition of successful, of course, will be subject to another debate.
2. Change has been part of the US and world's history, therefore we are free to implement change. Just because technology such as cars and air conditioning have been phased into modern life doesn't mean everything produced by technology has to be. Whenever implementing a change with a legal status, there is a long and hard look at a cost-benefit analysis to society, that the author of the original posts seem to conveniently ignore.
3. There is no obvious direct bad influence of gay marriages. Now come on, who has done a rigorous study on whether this is actually true or not? In the case of heroin, it is obvious that there is a high correlation between addict parents and addict children. In the case of gay parents, who are we to say whether or not there actually is a bias/correlation or not, without actual data? Again, the existence of one negative example doesn't break the argument, since this is a probabilistic one.
No, I'm not religious, but compared to the anarchistic left-wing Democrats who are twisted by illogic such as the above arguments, the religious right who select the correct moral decisions (possibly out of wrong reasons) sound infinitely better.
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On Makeup
Most people who know me know that I tend to hate makeup on girls, and will tend to give bonus points in terms of physical attractiveness to ones who elect not to. There are a few reasons for this, the most trivial being that a girl who wastes tons of money on makeup doesn't know how to manage her finances. Stepping away from the pragmatic side, lots of girls don't know how to apply makeup properly (Asian girls especially), and end up looking like cheap whores you'd find in Shanghai circa 1920's.
But my main complaint is with personality. Taking a substantial fraction of her day applying makeup indicates two character flaws: first, that she is ruled by vanity, and second that she is insecure.
I have NO idea what the average amount of time a girl spends on makeup is these days, but I'd venture to guess a large fraction (if not a majority) spend at least an hour (maybe not all in one chunk, but time grooming in the bathroom counts too!). Let's say a person is awake for 16 hours a day on average, that's more than 6% of her waking time applying makeup. Now, other things being equal, I obviously like pretty girls better than ugly ones. But someone who can't find something better to do with 6% of her daily time than applying makeup is just sad. Think about it. An hour a day jogging or exercising, and one becomes much more fit (even after just a month!). An hour a day reading newspaper (or newsites, these days), and one becomes much more knowledgeable about current events. An hour a day doing research... well, we won't go there. I mean, come on! Girls these days always complain about how they're being viewed/treated as sex objects, but they completely ignore the fact that wasting so much time on makeup, they really see themselves as no more than just that.
Second, a cute girl is cute no matter what (at least in my opinion). An ugly girl, on the other hand, might be made to deceive the public with judicious use of makeup. So, by spending ample quantities of time on beautification, a girl is basically expressing her insecurity of her own looks. In comparison, a girl who knows she's beautiful, and doesn't bother waste any more of her precious time grovelling to media-created fads, scores much higher in my book.
Now, usually when I make this argument, any girl within a 50 meter vicinity will attack me. I've heard a lot of "counter-arguments" but only one really makes any sense to me. The argument is that, a girl who spends a small part of her day applying makeup is actually investing her time. By being more pretty when she sees herself in a mirror throughout the day, her morale is higher, she's more cheerful, and more motivated to get whatever done. Viewed in this light, applying makeup seems to be similar to going to college.. you're paying upfront, but reaping the rewards later. I could buy that argument.. but not for more than 30 minutes per day.
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Preference Lists and the Marriage Problem
A, B, and C are boys, X, Y, and Z are girls. Each person has a preference list of utilities for being married to each person of the opposite gender. Suppose the preference lists look like this (apologies for lack of making a real table.. too lazy):
Person----------------A------B------C------X------Y------Z------
----------------------------------------------------------------
Top (4)---------------Y------Z------X------B------C------A------
Second (3)------------X------Y------Z------A------B------C------
Bottom (1)------------Z------X------Y------C------A------B------
Now, anyone who's taken computer science knows that the classic marriage problem involves a symmetry-breaking, depending on whether girls or boy initiate marriages. For example, if boys initiate marriages, then A would propose to Y, and Y would accept until someone higher on her preference list proposes to her. However, since all the boys have different top choices, the A-Y, B-Z, C-X marriages are "stable", and the boys all end with 4 utility while the girls all end with 1 utility. Conversely, if girls initiate marriages, then the pairings become X-B, Y-C, Z-A, and girls all have 4 utility while boys all have 1 utility.
All this is review, and can be done with two people of each gender. However, with the preference lists I showed, there's additionally a "best" global pairing of A-X, B-Y, and C-Z, in which everyone ends up with 3 utility. This is considered "best" because the total utility of everyone is 18, as opposed to 15. However, it is not actually attainable, according to the rules of the marriage problem (i.e. each person proposes in order of his or her preference list), which are the rational rules of human behavior (i.e. you also try your top choice first).
But then, one can point out, that all it would take is one insightful prodigious man to move the system toward the global maximum. For example, in a male-initiated society, if A realizes fully the situation, and chooses to propose not to Y, but rather to X, then it doesn't matter if C has already proposed, X will accept A. And since B will not propose to X, A-X then becomes stable, forcing the displaced C to propose to Z, which further causes B-Y.
So the outlook isn't quite so glum? Hardly. I don't know about you, but if I was one of B or C, I'd go beat A up, and torture him repeatedly until he rescinded the proposal. He's being a traitor of the entire male gender, because he has decreased all of our utilities down from 4 to 3, and he didn't even benefit personally. Thus, the considerate heroes are removed from society.
The only other possible way, is if one of more parties, who are interested in the utilities of both the female and the male of a party, convened to dictate the marriage--i.e., arranged marriages. I.e. if all the parents of all the marriage applicants got together and arranged things, then the global best would emerge. Would their children be ecstatic? No, A would be bitching about how he could have been with Y, while his wife X would be bitching about how she could have been with B. But as the A-X couple grow older and have children of their own (say, 1 boy and 1 girl), then in order to maximize the sum of their children's utilities, they would also do the same, and arrange marriages for them.
I don't understand why arranged marriages fell out of vogue in a monogamous culture that is society today.
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Cold Fusion
I just read a recent article on Angew. Chemie, about "pathological science" and cold fusion, as well as a fairly date (~1998) Wired article about the same. Both agreed on one extent--there are a lot of underground scientists these days who are pursuing work on cold fusion, but cannot get any mainstream journals to take them seriously, and thus have converged on a underground forum.
Now, I will declare myself a skeptic with regards to cold fusion, but at the same time, I do believe in keeping an open mind, especially regarding science. Certainly, the initial work by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann were (1) overblown, (2) highly unorthodox in that it was published to the media before the scientific community, and (3) not highly credible due to lack of proper controls. However, the field has already paid for this initial blunder with a decade of ridicule. There are enough people claiming to be scientists working on this still, and they are following the scientific method closely enough that I do believe they shouldn't be out-right dismissed from journals sheerly due to their topic.
People's conceptions being as they are, however, it seems to me that it'd be much easier for them to gain mainstream attention if they would only abandon that damning phrase, "cold fusion." Call it "low temperature electrochemistry," for crying out loud, and report "anomalous heat production" instead of "possible nuclear reactions." Unless they enjoy being the pitied/flouted underdogs of science, a little diplomacy and scrupulous word choice can work wonders.
Finally, the whole advancement of that field is still very very much slowed by controversies on patents. Now, I'm all for making money, and (will soon) have 2 patents to my name, but there is a issue of timing. The scientific community has scoffed at the cold fusion scientists for a decade, and will not hesitate to do so for another decade, if that's what it takes for these silly patents to expire, so that real scientific work can begin. Science begins with communication, because no man (or woman) is infalliable, and everyone more or less needs someone else looking over their shoulder to make sure they don't zark up something big.
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Hackers and Death Penalty
An editorial on the economic sagacity of imposing death penalty on hackers
Most people who know me know that I staunchly *SUPPORT* the death penalty, and in fact urge for its scope to be expanded to reduce crime. In this particular case, however, I disagree that hackers should be put to the death. This is not because of moral concerns (I completely agree with the attitude that "Any policymaker who won't do this kind of arithmetic is fundamentally unserious about policy."). Rather, it is because of potential wasted.
The key fallacy I see to the argument is the valuation of the "vermiscripter"'s life. Landsburg estimates it at ten times that of a normal life, at $100 million, rather than $10 million. I argue this is too low. For this, I'll not even challenge the other side of the equation ($50 billion cost certainly didn't subtract the amount of jobs created for anti-virus companies such as Symantec, and it's doubtful that none of the time wasted by deleting spam or running anti-virus wouldn't have been somehow otherwise squandered, see article on time squandering via Internet).
Consider that the modern computer would not be, without someone like Gordon Moore. Modern operating systems wouldn't be without Bill Gates (spare me the groan, all those people who think Gates is the anti-Christ; his influence on computer history definitely looms large, at least). There would be no Internet without Licklider (from MIT). There would be no Internet security without Rivest and Shamir (of RSA). How high would an econommist value those lives? Almost certainly more then $50 billion a piece--I'd their lifetime contributions could probably be measured in the trillions. Now, the key figure lies in the probability of a hacker being a potential one of these history setters.
So, if we consider that a hacker's life has p probabiliy of being worth $100 billion, and (1-p) probability of normal $10 million (average human), the probability threshold for $200 million that Landsburg estimates is p = 0.0019, or about 1 in 500. Now, at first look this may seem like a risk worth taking, because genius definitely occurs in the population at large at much less than 1 in 500. However, it's important to realize that this is a *conditional* probability.. the probability that someone who can write a worm so clever to cause billions of dollars of damage, can do something equally (or more) constructive, once rehabilitated. Now, honestly, how many notorious hackers have there really been in the history of the world? I'd wager less than 500. Thus, it seems irrational to me to assume that the probability of a reformed hacker making a breakthrough that is economically very valuable, would be less than 0.002. And thus, death penalty should be applied to murderers, arsonists, and terrorists, whose lives do NOT have the potential of being worth trillions after being reformed.
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Knapsack Problem Revisited
Suppose there are n goods available, the ith good of which provides utility u(i). If you are to pick k different goods, then to maximize your utility you simply implement a greedy algorithm, picking the goods with highest utility first. For example, you sort them into monotonically non-decreasing utility order, such that u(i) >= u(j) for all i < j. Thus, good 1 has the highest utility, and you would pick good 1 through k.
Now, assume that in addition to picking the k different goods, you are also allowed to "upgrade" one good. A good i provides utility v(i) in the upgraded state. Thus, each good provides a marginal utility of upgrading m(i) = v(i) - u(i). Now, how would you pick the goods to maximize your utility? It's pretty simple, really. You start by sorting the goods by u(i), just as before, and pick goods 1 through (k-1). Now, find the value of j between 1 and (k-1) which provides highest m(j). Find the value of x between k and n that provides the highest v(x). If m(j) + u(k) >= v(x), then pick good k and upgrade good j. If m(j) + u(k) < v(x), then pick good x, and then upgrade good x.
Pretty simple economics problem, no? Now, replace "good" with "girl" (or "boy" if the reader is a girl), "picked good" with "friend," and "upgraded good" with "girlfriend" (boyfriend). And thus, we see there exists rational reasons for the two distinct strategies. Strategy A is to select the "girlfriend" from the group of already picked "friends" (when m(j) + u(k) >= v(x)), and strategy B is to select the "girlfriend" from the group that you wouldn't normally even be "friends" with.
This, additionally, provides rationale for all the saps out there who wonder, "I'm such a great guy and friend. Why the Hell does this stupid girl refuse to date me?" It's because your marginal utility is too low, silly. And that's usually indicative that your friendship utility is too high. Honestly, why should/would a girl date you when she's already getting everything she could just by being your friend? Additionally, this seems to explain empirical evidence of why girls would date "jerks"--it's because the perceived v(x) is high; the girl assumes that the "jerk," once reformed, will be a keeper.
This probably is pretty intuitive to some people, but I'm dumb and had to work it out mathematically. Now, all I need to do is get this published in AIR.. ^^
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Pet Peeves in (Other Peoples') Writing
ARGH! Major Pet Peeves in Writing that I've recently been reminded of:
Poems that don't rhyme, have no meter, and in general is just prose with weird spacing and punctuation. The really scary thing is that some of the authors of these pieces of crap actually think they're good poets. I mean, what the zark!? I know I'm not a great poet, but at least I try to rhyme my lyrics and keep the syllables correct, and have a basic layout and organization. What is this weird "flow of consciousness" crap that people are passing off as poetic these days? Well, you know what? I can write a 100=line computer program in C that composes those poems--it's called random juxtaposition of unrelated words!
Along a similar line, I absolutely *despise* anything written in second person. What the zark? Unless you're writing an interactive game, there is no "you." Especially not in novels and poems.
Writings with the following words comprising a majority of the text: "thing," "stuff," "got," "very." Use word variety, dammit! Instead of "very," try writing "truly," "genuinely," "undoubtedly," "extremely," "intensely," and many others. In place of "got," try "possessed," "obtained," "acquired," "requisitioned," "extracted," "created," "achieved," etc. It's not hard; spend a week browsing through a dictionary or reading good literature.
Excessive use of sound effects in writing. An occasional "Haha" or "Ow" or "Doh" is fine, but if the author's depicting every "Ugh" grunt and "Heh" chuckle with sound effects, it's probably a bit excessive. Same thing with SCREEEEECH and CRASH! and BAM! and exclamation marks. Using sparingly to achieve the desired effect, the reader is desensitized after the third one in a paragraph.
Lack of realism (except in satires and slapstick comedies). A female bookworm who reads high-level technical biology books will *not* be shocked during her first period. A plain-looking guy with no particular virtues will *not* rack up a harem, unless he's the last man alive on the planet. A person, no matter who smart, will not be an ace dog-fighter without ever having flown a real plane before. Even in settings where magic and/or science fiction is abound, try to keep a degree of realism. A Molecular Disruptor that is still in use 4000 years after it's invention? Insanity. Just for reference, clubs to swords to arrows to flintlocks to muskets to rifles to automatics to tanks to missiles to nuclear bombs; none of these lasted in dominance for more than even a third of a millenium.
Mary Sues/Marty Stus. If the author describes one character in particular detail but fails to do so for any others, it's a sure bet that the description matches the author, or at least the author's ideal image of himself (or his girlfriend). I generally tend to skimp on physical descriptions, but if for some reason I decide to actually cover it for a piece, I make sure to cover it for every single character. Along similar lines, if the fiction is blatantly supposed to be a self-insertion (such as Connecticut Yankee, High-Tech Knight), there should still be some realism concerning abilities. A fencing champion in of a mid-sized university cannot hope to compete against a professional warrior from the middle ages--it's a simple matter of experience (maybe 10 years * 1 hour per day for the former, 30 years * 12 hours per day for the latter). Even if "talent" is used to justify miraculous achievement, it should still be kept within some degree of reason.
Along similar lines, undefeatable heroes. I'll be honest. I do generally tend to like stories with happy endings better (although quite of few of my favorite works, I'd consider tragedies: Great Gatsby, Count of Monte Cristo, Les Miserables). But I will note that I absolutely despise stories in which the hero is "undefeatable." It's fun to empathize with a smart/powerful protagonist, but it's boring if the protagonist is too powerful. Just Doom or any other shooter game is much more boring on God Mode with infinite weapons and ammo. A good piece keeps the audience on their toes. The hero should be strong, but not invincible.
Implementation of extreme descriptions. I have no trouble with describing a character as the fairest woman to have ever lived, or describing a musical piece as the most elegant tune to have ever been composed. I do, however, get upset when the author foolishly tries to draw the woman or compose the tune. Authors should know their strength and weaknesses. Unless he can claim with significant confidence that he's an artist capable of capturing the radiance of an astral diva, the illustration probably detracts from the work.
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A Surprisingly Scary Order of Magnitude Estimate
So Rob and I had lunch today after badminton. Being the weird Bah-Mitzvah crashing fake Jew that he is, Rob was talking about mail-order brides while eating pork dumplings. I expressed disbelief, arguing that there can't be that many cute girls willing to sell themselves in a tight age range. So, with nothing better to do, I did a full Fermi-type order of magnitude analysis, on the number of dateable women in Los Angeles.
So, I don't know the exact population of Los Angeles; I set my initial pool at 10 million. Assuming a more-or-less even distribution of ages between 0 and 80, and let's say I'm interested in a three-year age span (one to three years younger than me), that reduces the number to somewhere around 400,000. Call it 500,000 just to be on the safe side. But only half of them are female; 250,000 left. I'd want someone at least in the top 20% in intelligence, so that cuts the number to 50,000. To be honest, I think there's less than 5% of all personalities I consider myself meshing well with, but just to be on the hugely conversative side let's put that number at 10%, so we reduce it to 5,000.
Well, I'm neither blind, nor noble enough to completely disregard looks, so let's say the girl has to be in the top 1/3 for looks. So we have about 1,500 left. Now, I'm not racist or close-minded or anything, but generally I don't find myself attracted to African-American and Hispanic women, so cut by another 30%, to 1,000.
Whoa! Only 1,000 in the entire Los Angeles area that I'd even consider dating, due to the four basic factors of age, intelligence, personality, and looks. That's not even including a whole bunch of other minor things, like health and non-nuttyism regarding religion, celebrities, professional sports, politics, animal rights, etc (no, I didn't include those in personality). And maybe the fact that some of them are engaged or married, or very nearly so. Including these and other factors, I'd say there's less than 500 girls in the entire Los Angeles area I'd consider. That's fewer than the number of people who ace the SATs every year.
And then let's not forget that I have been assuming independence in all these factors. If you use a better Bayesian model and account for the fact that smarter girls are less likely than the population at large to be in the "pretty" and "personality" pools, then we're down to pretty sad numbers. And before I get a bunch of hate-mail saying how I'm an idiot because there are girls who are smart, pretty, and have the right personality: NO, I'm not saying they don't exist, I'm just saying the number is fewer than the expected from multiplying the probabilities. Because, let's face it; smarter girls generally tend to exercise less and speak out less.
So... that's pretty scary. Even if we multiplied the initial pool by 30 to account for all girls in the United States, the final pool is still only at about 10,000. I think I now see why there's so much effort to build a true AI.
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