September, 2008
16 posts under this date.
David Friedman ELZR introduces a fascinating classification of human cooperation in The Machinery of Freedom ELZR. There’s
force (imposing my end on you),
trade (“I’ll help you achieve your end if you help me achieve mine”),
and love (“making my end your end”).
The definition of love alone is, I think, a great achievement. It surely doesn’t include everything we mean by that impossibly burdened word (it doesn’t mention romance, liking or sex) but it does reveal one of love’s most important yet often implicit threads. It is abstract yet the more likely we are to call a love pure, the more likely it is about A caring about B for B’s sake alone.
An interesting exercise came to mind after reading the classification: What human activity/field corresponds to each kind of human cooperation?
The first two kinds are straightforward loosening words up a bit: Politics is the exercise of force. Economics is the exercise of trade. With love, I stumbled for the longest time. I have an answer now.
The exercise of love is… technology. A tool is the purest embodiment of love, of making someone else’s end your end. That’s why technology is so ambiguous, its ends are its users’ ends. Giving you a tool is the ultimate act of love, the more so the more control of it I give you, because by doing that I make my end your end, whatever your end may be—defending your life or stealing. Think of the geeks that cobbled up the internet, ignoring wtf the thing would be used for, coding only so that it would allow for it.
Don’t dismiss this as one geek’s techno-euphoria. There’s something deep in here. Technology is the exercise of love. “If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.” Nothing less than the meaning of our lives could be here.
Life Results from the Non-Random Survival of Randomly Varying Replicators.
My answer to life, the universe, and everything:
Randomness begets persistence
For among things that vary a lot,
and vary varyingly (= non-independently = causally),
what varies little remains (duh!)
For among things that persist,
what copies itself is an outbreak
Replication begets complexity
For among the ways to copy oneself,
the more successful ones are among the more complex
(for there are many, many more complex ways than simpler ones)
 Both for what has happened to me and for what lies ahead this year, I knew I had to read Harry Browne’s How I found freedom in an unfree world (download PDF) sooner rather than later.
I just finished it yesterday and can’t believe how different I am already. How freer (me, always so proud of my freedom!). It really is a handbook for personal liberty. It’s so selfish that at times it even angered me (me, selfish as they come!). But then, well looked, the book’s an extended version of that famous parable, existing in some version in most cultures:
When I was young, I wanted to change the world. I found it was too difficult, so I tried to change my country. When I realized I could not change that either, I began to focus on my town. I could not change even that and being older, I tried to change my family. Now being old, I realize the only thing I can change is myself. Suddenly I realize that if long ago if I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the country and I indeed could have changed the world.
Or as Harry put it
As you view any situation in which you have a goal, there are basically two types of alternatives available to you. I call them direct and indirect.
A direct alternative is one that requires only direct action by yourself to get a desired result.An indirect alternative requires that you act to make someone else do what is necessary to achieve your objective.
Once you’ve seen the positions and attitudes of the other people involved, a direct alternative requires only that you make a decision; an indirect alternative requires that you change the attitude of one or more other persons so that they will do what it is you want.
The recognition of the two types of alternatives is one of the most important keys to freedom. Most people automatically think in terms of indirect alternatives — who must be changed, how people must be educated, what others should be doing. Consequently, they spend most of their lives in futile efforts to achieve what can’t be achieved — the remaking of others.
In any situation, a free individual immediately looks first at the identities of the other people involved and appraises the situation by the simple standard: Is this what I want for myself? If it isn’t, he looks elsewhere. If it is, he relaxes and enjoys the situation to the maximum — without the problems that most people take for granted.
He automatically thinks in terms of direct alternatives. He asks himself, “With things as they are, what can I do by myself to make things better for myself?”
I’m gonna be Switzerland. Mind my business. Be my own man. Neutral. Flexible. Pragmatic. Quiet. Living my own, happy, private life. Free in an unfree world.
Published the day after the towers fell, this the finest thing I’ve read on 9/11: Harry Browne’s When will we learn?
And now, as sure as night follows day, we will be told we must give up more of our freedoms to avenge what never should have happened in the first place.
When will we learn that it makes no sense to give up our freedoms in the name of freedom?
What should be done?
First of all, stop the hysteria. Stand back and ask how this could have happened. Ask how a prosperous country isolated by two oceans could have so embroiled itself in other people’s business that someone would want to do us harm. Even sitting in the middle of Europe, Switzerland isn’t beset by terrorist attacks, because the Swiss mind their own business.
When will we learn that without freedom and sanity, there is no reason to be patriotic?
Hans Moravec’s Mind Children is dated at parts but it is as lyric, visionary, and deep as anything I’ve read. Here 2 excerpts I particularly enjoyed: one on robot bushes (forget many-armed Vishnu, this will be the avatar of the gods), the other on artificial life, spontaneous and deliberate (a great story of a virus put deep inside Unix by Ken Thompson himself and a subtle but intriguing example of spontaneous alife).
I’m experimenting with taking quick page snaps and bundling them into PDFs, so these are rather crude. No matter, it’s early days and I’ll get better at it. PDF/CBR is the new MP3!
The text below was when I fell in love with China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. I wasn’t sure for many pages, never one to care much for fantasy. But this, this is what fantasy should be.
Reading the book, as many things else, got interrupted by the exile, but I’ve been possessed downloading ebooks lately and I just found a great HTML version of the book. Let the reading recommence!
Isaac and Lin sat naked on either side of the bare wooden table. Isaac was conscious of their pose, seeing them as a third person might. It would make a beautiful, strange print, he thought. An attic room, dust-motes in the light from the small window, books and paper and paints neatly stacked by cheap wooden furniture. A dark-skinned man, big and nude and detumescing, gripping a knife and fork, unnaturally still, sitting opposite a khepri, her slight woman’s body in shadow, her chitinous head in silhouette.
They ignored their food and stared at each other for a moment. Lin signed at him: Good morning, lover. Then she began to eat, still looking at him.
It was when she ate that Lin was most alien, and their shared meals were a challenge and an affirmation.As he watched her, Isaac felt the familiar trill of emotion: disgust immediately stamped out, pride at the stamping out, guilty desire.
Light glinted in Lin’s compound eyes. Her headlegs quivered. She picked up half a tomato and gripped it with her mandibles. She lowered her hands while her inner mouthparts picked at the food her outer jaw held steady.
Isaac watched the huge iridescent scarab that was his lover’s head devour her breakfast.
He watched her swallow, saw her throat bob where the pale insectile underbelly segued smoothly into her human neck … not that she would have accepted that description. Humans have khepri bodies, legs, hands; and the heads of shaved gibbons, she had once told him.
He smiled and dangled his fried pork in front of him, curled his tongue around it, wiped his greasy fingers on the table. He smiled at her. She undulated her headlegs at him and signed, My monster.
I am a pervert, thought Isaac, and so is she.
Liking David Friedman’s Hidden Order a whole lot. Not trivial reading, but rewarding. Through intuitive graphs and simplification he comes up with some interesting economics theory (with my math background the hand waving and naivete of the presentation’s obvious but I’m still rather unconvinced of a formal, math-based economics).
But perhaps the part I liked most is this inspiring little quote, awfully important in an age when technology allows contracts to make the dreams and nightmares of both sellers and buyers to come true, from DRM to discography torrents.
Suppose you are a businessman or an attorney negotiating a contract. It is tempting to go through the contract term by term, trying in each case to get whatever term is most favorable to you or your client.
But a more profitable strategy may be to go through looking for the contract terms that maximize the combined gain to both parties. Only when you get to the final term—the price—do you shift back to trying to make it as favorable as possible, thus collecting as much as possible of the gain produced by your well-designed contract. Most of your job is maximizing the size of the pie. The bigger the pie, the bigger you can make the slices for both sides.
In what is to date the biggest purchase of my life (my obscene former desktop was a gift), I just purchased the bulk of my travel for the next year or so. Check out my itinerary and start planning on visiting or bumping with me!
27 October 2008
Mexico City MEX to Tokyo NRT (via London) for 4 months, 22 days of Japan!
20 March 2009
Tokyo NRT to London LHR for 4 months, 29 days of Europe!
17 August 2009
London LHR to Toronto YYZ for a month of Canada! (ticket back to Mexico to be purchased)
All the flights are with British Airways. All for $1,852, which still amazes me—BA is a great airline, flights are incredibly main-airport and nonstop (can’t stop in the US). It’s all beautifully simple, better than I dared hope. Past week has been a Kayak and travel agency blur but it was worth it.
So, so exciting!
Been playing with travel sites all day, (Kayak FTW!) and I discovered several interesting anomalies with which I plan to tour the world for some $2k in air travel. Flight arbitrage, if you will.
Guadalajara ↔ Toronto ↔ London ↔ Tokyo (at least!)
You see:
- Travel within Europe is really, really cheap. As in
€30 £5 London – Madrid round trip. So Europe can be thought of as one point: London, by far the cheapest hub.
- Round trips are a considerably better deal than one-ways. I understand they are the industry’s version of wholesaling but a 40% difference seems too much (a one-way can be 140% the price of either round trip leg)%.
- Travel order is everything. Mexico-Tokyo, one way is some $900. Tokyo-Mexico, one-way too, no less than $2,000! That’s right, the exact same distance can cost you over twice as much depending on where you start!
Putting it all together, my plan is to buy the following round trips: Guadalajara-Toronto, Toronto-London, London-Tokyo. I travel from Guadalajara to Toronto, then to London, then to Tokyo, where I stay 3 months. Then I return to London, where I stay some 6 months (to travel cheaply around Europe), then I return to Toronto and stay some 3 months, and only then do I return to Guadalajara.
All this for some $2k!
It’s a tad complicated and wasteful, and I need to plan far ahead, but the price’s pretty good, right?
Can you think of something else?
Know any other anomalies? Youth discounts? Passes?
Got any tips?
I haven’t bought yet but I think I will soon!
I still remember how impressive Lehman Brothers’ New York headquarters were…
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