10.29.2011
One of the fundamental difficulties that lie in the way of our understanding of the universe is that we humans must have a name for everything. Every object, concept or even a simple fragment of knowlege must be named. Humans have historically operated in a world of discreet macro-physical objects, and we instinctively project this same system onto the world that is inaccessible to our perception. Must the electron be named and pointed out? Even if we force ourselves to accept the uncertainty, we must still revert to the things we have seen in our macro life and imagine the concept of a “cloud”, which is still wrong.
To attain a true “understanding” or “awareness” as it were, we must stop discretizing our experiences into previously defined “buckets”. We need to get used to gray areas. Living with uncertainty and accepting seemingly irreconcilable concepts is our edge over “the machine”. It is our only hope against bigotry, morality, anxiety, fear, tribalism.
Risk aversion and negative bias help filter out bad and mediocre things. The past as history retains it is a reduced gravy that consists of what is deemed preferable and of higher quality.
Being “modern”, living a modern life means dealing with a lot of noise, bad quality to noise ratios.
Must stop being bogged down in unimportant minutiae, things that are supposed to facilitate life but carry no intrinsic value. I. E. It’s ok to be behind the latest tends and gadgets.
Furthermore, training oneself to have a statistical outlook on life is hard, but it is the first step to taming the instinctive chaos. It is hard not to mistake special cases for general rules, especially negative events.
Another approach is thinking in terms of opportunity costs. What is an hour of free time worth? What does $1000 of disposable income represent? Should we spend Saturday mornings cleaning and doing laundy? Or should we hire help and pursue part-time graduate degrees? Perhaps go skiing instead?
Hapiness Hypothesis.
I took away three main powerful concepts: the rider and the elephant; the dimmension of ‘divinity’; and the importance of group and individual selection in human evolution. The divinity dimmension may just touch on something I have been struggling with for a long time. I do feel that a dimmension had been missing from my attempts to understand people. Most of us simply let their inner elephants stampede most of the time. On rare occasions that elephant is a beautiful, inspiring beast. But the rarest case of all is someone with a level of self-awareness and vision. Someone with an additional axis and an ability to percieve the shades of gray — a recognition of the fact that there is very little in this world that is certain or pure.
I have been using my iPod Touch to jot down some thoughts that pop in my head every now and then. Most of the time these notes are disjointed phrases that cannot be understood without the context of a particular situation I am in or a book I am reading at the time. Come to think of it, this entire blog is not very coherent either… But I digress. I decided to use the email-to-wordpress function and start posting these notes here.
When things go up, and up, and up for any stretch of time, even a temporary slowdown feels like a complete collapse, and crushes one under the weight of intense introspection. The objective reality is such that I do not have the right to complain about anything and should stop over-analyzing stupid office games that people take so damn seriously.
But there is a catch. Call it a rat race all you want, but if one stops participating, one is eventually relegated to the outskirts of relevancy and finds oneself being fifty years old with a ridiculous haircut and too many dog pictures on the desk, while being “coached” on “attitude” by a twenty-something middle-management up-start.
