“epiphanies”
81 posts under this tag.
This is one of the many things I ended up pasting on my wall last week. Since it’s something of an important breakthrough for me, let me try to explain what I mean with it.
I have always marveled at rich people, particularly at how one could get rich, and it always seemed impossible to the verge of immoral how a single person could earn on the order of tens of thousands of dollars per month. There were very few things I could think of for me to do in an hour that would be worth the hundreds of dollars I would need.
That is completely the wrong way to go about it. There really are few such one-hour isolated things that will get you a couple hundred dollars and most of them involve decades of poorly paid specialization. There is a better, more productive way to think of the problem, and that’s what the equation above serves as a reminder of: If you get one thousand people to give you fifty dollars per month, you’ll make fifty thousand dollars per month.
Yes, I know it’s mind-numbingly stupid, but it’s true. And fifty dollars aren’t really that much money, and a month is quite a big chunk of time, and a thousand people doesn’t seem as much to me now as it used to—that’s about the daily traffic of Imagery a couple of weeks ago (and yes, I know the comparison is worth squat, but it still was a landmark in my life to realize how easily I could interest and benefit and touch thousands of people).
Of course that getting-people-to-give-you-money part is not at all about mind-washing or extortion, it’s about creating more than fifty dollars of wealth in a month for over a thousand people. And doesn’t it seem exciting and achievable put this way? At any rate, it has my mind reeling, because a couple of days ago I finally crystallized an idea of a website that could do just that and much more (codename: maki). And it promises to be a lot of work, and to be the greatest challenge I’ve yet undertaken, and it will take me out to the real world every day, and I’d meet thousands of people, and it’d get me walking, and… well, time’ll tell, won’t it?
I went to Mikhail Bakunin’s God and the State to read his famous boot-master quote straight from the source. As it often happens, the quote makes no justice to its context, which now follows. This is lucidness embodied—”simplicity that is clarity, the light of intelligence.”
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor the savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such an individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.
If I bow before the authority of the specialists and avow my readiness to follow, to a certain extent and as long as may seem to me necessary, their indications and even their directions, it is because their authority is imposed on me by no one, neither by men nor by God. Otherwise I would repel them with horror, and bid the devil take their counsels, their directions, and their services, certain that they would make me pay, by the loss of my liberty and self-respect, for such scraps of truth, wrapped in a multitude of lies, as they might give me.
I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labour. I receive and I give—such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.
This same reason forbids me, then, to recognise a fixed, constant and universal authority, because there is no universal man, no man capable of grasping in all that wealth of detail, without which the application of science to life is impossible, all the sciences, all the branches of social life. And if such universality could ever be realised in a single man, and if he wished to take advantage thereof to impose his authority upon us, it would be necessary to drive this man out of society, because his authority would inevitably reduce all the others to slavery and imbecility. I do not think that society ought to maltreat men of genius as it has done hitherto: but neither do I think it should indulge them too far, still less accord them any privileges or exclusive rights whatsoever; and that for three reasons: first, because it would often mistake a charlatan for a man of genius; second, because, through such a system of privileges, it might transform into a charlatan even a real man of genius, demoralise him, and degrade him; and, finally, because it would establish a master over itself.
The recent and thankfully past presidential campaign in Mexico was a bizarre spectacle of major rifts in each of the 4 major parties. So important they were, it is not far-fetched to imagine that had a party managed to avoid them it would have been an easy victor. The ruling party, the PAN, was torn at the beginning between the incumbent’s pre-candidate, Santiago Creel, and the party’s one, Felipe Calderon; the PRD between the Cardenas family and Lopez Obrador; the PRI between Madrazo and Elba Esther Gordillo.
And that was all childish bickering compared to the hard, unprecedentedly dirty fights between parties. The race had simply never been this close.
It all made for grisly headlines, nauseating TV spots, debilitating internecine wars, and tiring discussion in every reunion you care to name. But now that’s past I can’t help but think of it as progress. You may call me naive or unsophisticated but I’ve oft thought, in what I do not believe to be my least lucid times1, that if there is such a thing as progress in politics it is nothing but the fragmentation of power2.
Yes, fragmentation can be ugly, and noisy, and wasteful, (particularly at its early stages) but we only know one answer to the ancient Latin question of “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who shall guard the guards themselves?”) and it is ”each to one another” (Can someone please translate this to Latin?). No matter what convoluted system, ideology, rules, mechanisms, or technologies of any sort we throw into the mix, it always comes down to the people that implement them, “it’s always a people problem.” In fact, the most that can be said in defense of a system is that it fragments the power to do wrong between many people.
Take the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) If it deserves any credibility (and I think it does) it is not because our voting technology ranks among the most sophisticated and expensive in the world (it does) but because there are deputies of every party3 physically overseeing every step of the electoral process.
Idling at the pool with my sister Chepe I came up with a 3-question test I specially liked. I have no psychological training whatsoever (nor do I believe in much of it) so I don’t have any ready-made answers at the ready if you do decide to answer it. But I promise it will be interesting and make you think (and that’s as good a yardstick for doing something as any).
Pay special attention to the wording and the intended meaning. It is not whether you would rather be intelligent or empathic, is whether you would prefer to have some more intelligence or some more empathy than what you already have.
3-question test
(1) Would you rather have more intelligence or more empathy?
(2) Would you rather have more 1) or more self-confidence?
(3) Would you rather have more 2) or more self-control?
My answers btw, are empathy, empathy, and self-control.
I feel naive and pretentious today, and I feel like writing down some of my fundamental beliefs in whatever simplistic terms my 21 years are able to muster. These are some of the rules that I’ve gleaned throughout my life, those by which I want to live my life, and those thru which I choose to conceive the world. They are not written in stone, they’re not hold-come-what-may, nothing is, but they are among the more hold-more-stubbonly-at-least that I’ve got. And they are in turn based on some even more fundamental certainties: that knowledge is better than ignorance, that love is better than indifference, that technology is better than helplessness, that liberty is better than slavery.
The form I’ve written them in is not arbitrary, I believe each of the 4 axes (knowledge, love, technology, and liberty) can be approached in basically just 3 ways:
That which is looked for can never be attained.
Reasons vary but self-flagellation is among the more common: we’re simply too stupid, too egoist, too different, too irresponsible, too brutish, etc. Or perhaps the gods are simply too wily, too treacherous, too twisted, or too evil.
This is not only the laziest attitude to take, it is plainly false and misleading, for we’ve all understood something, loved someone (however briefly or faintly), achieved something thru technology that we wouldn’t had been able to do alone, and been part of free societies (your family, your friends, spontaneous commercial activity…).
It is the opposite of action, the opposite of hope, and it is embraced only after a lifetime of the most demeaning indoctrinations (see Religion).
That which is looked for can be attained sometimes, but usually not.
The usual attitutude, it at least acknowledges everyday experience. Though not necessarily harmful, it shortchanges its believer and generally leads to apathy, because we give up too easily.
In it most dangerous form, it borrows from the previous attitude, either casting us as unworthy searchers of the particular instance or wrapping it up in mystical mumbo jumbo à la élan vital.
That which is looked for can always be attained.
This is the only creative attitude and the only one with any merit. For it is the only one that spurs us to action, blaming the responsibility for improvement squarely at us (and that’s why this attitude is so hard to even entertain—laziness is just so comfy). It is the only empowering attitude, the only one that offers hope, tapping boundless creativity and ingenuity that would otherwise remain dormant.
In its root it is simply another face for the fundamental problem strategy of assuming there’s a solution:
I have found there are ways to foster finding useful analogies when working on problems. First, you need to assume up front that there is an answer to what you are trying to solve. People give up too easily. You need confidence that a solution is waiting to be discovered and you must persist in thinking about the problem for an extended period of time.
Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence
And do note that it cannot be falsified: if that which is looked for has not been attained, even after a million millennia of trying, this does not imply that it is not attainable, just that it has not been attained yet, that we still haven’t tried hard or smart enough. It is thus, to a degree, an act of faith, but one which we, and we alone, are responsible to carry out.
And so here they finally are, 4 things I believe in:
Anything can be understood.
Intelligence itself, Mind, Consciousness, Emotions, Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Anyone can be loved.
Anyone. I repeat: Anyone. Gender, Age, Race, Class, Nationality—they’re only bothersome hurdles, not insurmountable ones.
And mind that I’m not talking here about sexual love or romantic love, I’m not talking about the love whose opposite is hate, I’m talking about the one whose opposite is indifference.
Anything can be done thru technology.
Universal Translation, Space Colonization, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Uploading, Time Travel, Eternal Youth, Immortality, Abundance, Artificial Reality, Godness.
Anything can be done thru liberty.
That is, anything can be done thru voluntary agreements (the free-market, nonprofits, open source, whatever). In fact, I believe a substantially bigger claim: everything that can be done thru coercion (that is, thru violence or its threat), be it for good or for ill, can be done better thru liberty.
Applied, this means that private money, private law, private health systems, private roads, private intellectual property protection, private police, private FDAs, private militia, private philanthropy, etc. are not only possible but preferable to their modern, illegitimate incarnations.
Through the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s, recognition of the cataclysm spread. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the “hard” science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such fantasies millions of years in the future. Now they saw that their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable… soon..
But as time passes, we should see more symptoms. The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors. (I have heard thoughtful comic book writers worry about how to have spectacular effects when everything visible can be produced by the technologically commonplace.) We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs. We have tools right now (symbolic math programs, cad/cam) that release us from most low-level drudgery. Or put another way: The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity. In the coming of the Singularity, we are seeing the predictions of true technological unemployment finally come true.
My grandfather, Luis, is going to be 84 tomorrow (today, actually) and the whole family is hectic preparing him a humongous birthday. We, my sisters and I, are in charge of the digital accouterments and since I’d been wanting to create a photo mosaic for a while, I decided to give it a try today. What ensued baffled me.
I googled photo mosaic and went to the very first result, a 2004 engadget tutorial. The tutorial was very clear and to the point, and I donwloaded the freeware featured in it: AndreaMosaic. The thing was simple, unpretentious and surprisingly intuitive. Some minutes later I was off churning mosaics away and trying the different configurations.
It still took me the better part of the day to finish (with zam distractions) and get the thing 1.27×140m printed but, come on, I even feel ashamed of how little work I actually did. I’m going to be the one with the most impressive, flashy thing in the party and all the time I’ll just be thinking how disproportionate was my effort to the result.
Think about it for a second, a clueless guy in the middle of Mexico is able to churn out in a couple of hours (for something like 50 bucks) a graphical confection that would have floored anyone 50 years ago, that would have been nigh priceless a 100 years ago, and that would have gotten him burned at the stake earlier than that.
I’m unsettled and, frankly, the fact that it isn’t unsettling to anyone else is all the more disturbing to me (because that only hints at how fast this thing I did has already become obsolete). We’re smack in the middle of an art singularity of sorts.
to blackbox could be to reify thru interface. To suggest or implement a conceptualization thru interface. A basic strategy for synthetizing reality, it stems from an active rewriting of the famous duck test: “If I make this look like a duck, and quack like a duck, I may as well be able to conceptualize it as a duck”. The conscious, deliberate, “I make” part is crucial; to blackbox is not just to simply conceptualize, is to wilfully conceptualize something by painting an interface on it.
(Contrived) Usage Examples:
- “In modern programming, we blackbox our way out of complexity thru functions, objects, aspects, macros, and the like.”
- “Money is our society’s blackboxing of wealth, that is, of ‘what people want.’ We ought to remember it when trying to ‘make’ money.”
- “With the magic of silicone, you too can blackbox yourself a pair of massive pointy hooters!”
- “At this point, perhaps a better title for this essay is probably ‘An easy way to blackbox your own file-extension.”
- “The Kuratowski definition of an ordered pair as {{a},{a,b}} is pure blackboxing.”
- “In defining the class PlanePoint, from the stored attributes xPos and yPos you can (and probably should) blackbox Distance from them thru the distance formula.”
- “Let’s wrap these almost-expired candies with this cute cellopane bag and this lace bow, and blackbox them into a ‘Super Saving Kit’.”
- “I’m dying for someone to blackbox reputation, population, authority—the whole memetic shebang—thru some kind of social software.”
- “Don’t you find it amazing how blackboxing lanes and pedestrian crossings on the street thru mere painting can be so useful?”
- “Let’s blackbox operating systems away thru browsers!”
The word comes, of course, from the technical meaning of blackbox: “a device or system or object when it is viewed primarily in terms of its input and output characteristics.”
But the strongest outrage was reserved for the film’s final scene, in which Gallo’s character finally meets up with his ex-lover (Chloë Sevigny), and she performs unsimulated fellatio upon him.. Sevigny, already known for taking on controversial roles, had been a real-life girlfriend of Gallo’s. Notably, after the film’s release, the William Morris Agency dropped her as a client, claiming the scene made her unmarketable; she quickly signed with another agency and has continued her acting career despite fears to the contrary.
The quiet last line of this paragraph is a pearl of capitalist freedom that could so easily pass unnoticed, taken-for-granted. If Chloë was able to do what she did was only because she wasn’t tied to prude William Morris, one of the largest talent agencies in the world; it was only because there were other agencies more than willing to take her in.
Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy.
Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
What a wonderful world to live in, isn’t it? One in which puritans can be self-righteous while we enjoy watching a purdy gal blow her ex-boy.
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
I used to laugh at the elaborate calculations and stratospheric numbers you always find when reading papers about the limits of computation —as in, say, “Just how much computations per second might the entire universe theoretically support?”. It was something more than my incredulity (it involves too much hand-waving at times), it was simply indifference. So what if the universe could theoretically handle one zillion jillions to the gazillion cps? We might as well ponder how many angels might fit on the head of a pin…
I read Ray Kurzweil answer 3 weeks ago and it hasn’t stopped resounding on my head ever since:
Because computation underlies the foundations of everything we care about, from the economy to human intellect and creativity, we might well wonder: are there ultimate limits to the capacity of matter and energy to perform computation? If so, what are these limits, and how long will it take to reach them?
Our human intelligence is based on computational processes that we are learning to understand. We will ultimately multiply our intellectual powers by applying and extending the methods of human intelligence using the vastly greater capacity of nonbiological computation. So to consider the ultimate limits of computation is really to ask: what is the destiny of our civilization?
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