“semantic bulletpoints”
7 posts under this tag.
A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.
As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.
In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.
Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?
That’s an example of the questions Ellen J. Langer, as she recounts in MindfulnessAM, p167-170, posed to a group of elementary school kids in a study on discrimination. I’ve been rattling my brain for good answers since: Why?
No satisfactory answers have been found but here are some stabs at it, in markedly decreasing order of quality:
Above-average manual dexterity
Since most of the deaf speak sign language WP and since sign language relies heavily on hands as the primary vehicle of expression, it is likely that the deaf develop above-average manual dexterity, which would sure come handy in many cooking tasks (say, chopping or cutting).
Since they have one less sense to distract them, they can focus more on flavors. The blind are known to have very refined senses of hearing and smelling, perhaps something similar happens to the deaf?
No stress in noisy environments
Kitchens can be pretty hectic environments, right?
Clear, quick note-writing (and reading)
It is likely that they have had to rely many times on writing clear, quick notes to strangers so they might have developed systems or experience for making them easily understood. That may come in handy in busy kitchens were a lot of information is passed on written notes (so that, say, orders don’t get all mixed up).
Different food cues
They may have discovered different cues for food quality or meal readiness (say, since they can’t hear milk burbling, they might smell when milk is just about to boil over).
Sign language is a noiseless language
So it might be better at restaurants where absolutely no noise is desired from the kitchen. (On the other hand, perhaps it’s hard for a deaf person to accurately assess just how much noise they inadvertently make with cooking instruments.)
More accurate people-reading
A deaf may have learned to rely more on other people’s body language and thus may be more accurate gauging whether people honestly liked her dishes or not.
Any thoughts?
A week ago I learned two friends are coming from the US this July 21: that means empty cases. Two happy days later and hundreds of dollars less: 38 books on shipping parcels from Amazon. Book shopping is a pleasure in and of itself (I’m rarely this happy!), and hereforward’s my list (which is quite an intimate thing to share—it’s the perfect psychological text, if you know how to read it).
I’ve been fiction-starved long enough now.
Erasmo wants to kill the man, I want to do him (I fell in love the moment I read his “The free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving participatory democracy.”).
Wondrous book. Truly. I’m buying these 3 extra copies just to pester friends (and family) with.
The only Ender book I’m missing.
I’d read Mencken’s quotes before, of course. But I just became aware of him a couple of weeks ago through, of all places, a Gilmore Girls episode. I couldn’t be more ashamed of my tardiness. I’m diving into economics these next couple of months.
“This is a book in favor of doing—self-directed, purposeful, meaningful life and work—and against ‘education’—learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe or threat, greed and fear.” I’m fascinated with education these days.
I dig the Austrian School of Economics (or rather, I think I will, when I know more about it).
Frankly, that Edward Tufte’s wife mother wrote this was enough for me, but just think about it: a syntactic critique of 1000 exemplary sentences. This promises to be a jewel.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light” ( Dylan Thomas). For those late deathnights… “[Oliver Sacks’s writings] has done as much as anyone to make nonspecialists aware of how much diversity gets lumped under the heading of ‘the human mind.’” (Amazon.com review)
I want to be a libertarian.
I’ve been a fan of Andy Grove ever since that Fortune feature on him.
A wildcard.
Just how would a society organized by private property, individual rights, and voluntary co-operation, with little or no government, look?
I guess this is just book gluttony, but I skimmed this book in the New York Public library one rainy afternoon and it’s a happy memory.
Foreign aid debunked. I somewhy feel I need to read this now. I need to know this stuff. I guess a happy byproduct of feverishly reading The Economist is to think of yourself as someone with vast geopolitical and economical impact ;). His Art of Loving became an instant personal classic some months ago. “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”
George Soros, long known as “the world’s only private citizen with a foreign policy,” is a most interesting man.
Mindfulness. The title alone was almost enough to buy the book. What a beautiful word.
Yup, I know these children education books are a weird choice but I have a hunch they’ll have much to tell me.
I haven’t read much science lately. The science spark needs some help.
“What would happen if children who can’t do math grew up in Mathland, a place that is to math what France is to French?”
I admire Starbucks.
”Buffet has the strangest of powers in that he comes across as a homespun billionaire. Now that’s different from just being homespun, the way Sam Walton was, or just being a billionaire, like Bill Gates. Buffet flaunts his wealth and his professional love of money, all the while expressing essential, eternal truths in simple, earthy phrases. When I saw Buffet speak at business school he tapped on the microphone to test it and said ‘testing, testing, one-million, two-million, three-million.’” (Marc Cenedella, Amazon review)
“The need for endless learning and trying is a way of living, a way of thinking, a way of being awake and ready. Life isn’t a train ride where you choose your destination, pay your fare and settle back for a nap. It’s a cycle ride over uncertain terrain, with you in the driver’s seat, constantly correcting your balance and determining the direction of progress. It’s difficult, sometimes profoundly painful. But it’s better than napping through life.”
“Without a single gesture toward an explanation, this novel recounts the story of a man and a woman mysteriously given the ability to live their lives over. Each dies in 1988 only to awaken as a teenager in 1963 with adult knowledge and wisdom intact and the ability to make a new set of choices. Different spouses, lovers, children, careers, await them in each go-round of the past 25 years, as well as slightly altered versions of world events. Their deep commitment to one another continues through the centuries of their many lifetimes.” (Library Journal review) I haven’t read this book and I love it already.
Believe you me, I’ll be the first to distrust this bluntly titled book, but I’m floored by who and how many people recommend it.
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.
I stumbled upon the .CBR extension some days ago and it was interesting to read its description, via filext:
This is a renamed .RAR file and can be decompressed with any .RAR file utility. The CDisplay program displays the comic book images so it is useful to use for this particular .RAR archive type.
Think about it, to create the ultimate comic-book format you simply wrap together some images (GIFs, JPGs, PNGs) and some (optional) introductory text (a .NFO or a .TXT) in a .RAR file and rename it. That’s it. A batch of pictures has been converted into a black-box, into a comic book. We’ve reified a comic out of thin pixels. That’s all CDisplay needs to let you seamlessly experience those images as a comic, but you could get as baroque in your specification of a file format as you like. For, say, a hypothetical .BIO file-extension used to store people’s biographies, you would specify a .RAR wrap of that person photo (that must be named, say, “mypic”, and must be a JPG), one photo as a kid (named “kidpic”), one photo of each parent (“mompic and “dadpic”), a curriculum vitae (“vitae”, must be a .TXT file),... you get the picture. Half of the magic, of course, resides in the reading-program, but that’s the easy part.
Here are two extra, contradictory advantages of creating file-formats thru .RAR wrapping:
the tying is loose
The elementary constituents are still available to anyone with a .RAR decompressing utility.
the tying is tight
You’re using a compression format after all, so you are probably saving at least a couple of bytes (though the time spent decompressing things on the fly could easily turn this into a disadvantage).
What struck me about this file-extension thing was how such a seemingly low-level nitty-gritty construct as a file-extension can be blackboxed mostly thru the high-level path of drag-and-dropping icons to WinRar.
I found this curious typographical layout in Ambient Findability and since then I’ve been trying to imitate it wherever I’ve been able to get away with it.
I know it seems like nothing special but I’ve come to find it strikingly elegant—specially when compared with what it might have looked had it been done in today’s more prevalent dummy bulletpoints. The laziness that such bulletpoints encourage would have probably led us to this:
But let’s forget Al, for a time, and delve instead into the depths of human irrationality, beginning with some well-documented decision-making traps.
- When considering a decision, our minds are unduly influenced by the first information we find. Initial impressions and data anchor subsequent judgments.
- Through selective search and perception, we subconsciously seek data that supports our existing point of view, and avoid contradictory evidence.
Had we been lucky, there would be labels to each bulleted paragraph but they would still be obscured within the text and the typejunk bulletpoints:
But let’s forget Al, for a time, and delve instead into the depths of human irrationality, beginning with some well-documented decision-making traps.
- Anchoring: When considering a decision, our minds are unduly influenced by the first information we find. Initial impressions and data anchor subsequent judgments.
- Confirmation: Through selective search and perception, we subconsciously seek data that supports our existing point of view, and avoid contradictory evidence.
And that’s why I like this layout so much: it lets you do without meaningless bulletpoints and it forces you, as a writer, to create a meaningful headline for each paragraph that greatly enhances reading speed and comprehension. I don’t know if it has a name yet but meaningful bulletpoints sounds good to me.
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast
Series Blenders
With the new 60GB DVDs hitting the markets, it is now possible to store an entire series in one disc and this presents many, many untold possibilities. Here’s one: you know the short clips at the beginning of a two-part episode in which they recap the previous one? Well what about if we make, say, a similar kind of recap but for an entire series worth of episodes. For, say, Gilmore Girls’s 130+ 40+min episodes you’d have a 2-hour episode summarizing everything that has transpired during the series. It would be a wonderful (albeit challenging) exercise in synthesis but I think it’d be interesting. You could make it so that hitting play during one of the clips will plunge you smoothly into that episode until you hit stop to return to the blender. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve always felt I’m still too media illiterate: create a novel (or movie or short story) written entirely from quotes and excerpts from our media landscape. I mean entirely. Every dialogue a pastiche, every description a hodgepodge, every paragraph a potpourri. (In fact I would do it as an experiment of sorts. Of what? Of the erosion of self in our present and future.) What with that new movie or series or discography, these days I’m always letting the computer on overnight to keep downloading torrents. It seems like a big waste (and its fan-noisy too) so I wonder if one couldn’t outsorce the downloading business out of the cpu tower. It would ideally be just a small wiFi-enabled cube with at the most one or two status LEDs. You would usb it to your computer and interact with it through your monitor. At night you could turn off the computer and leave the little guy do its late night job. I’m no hardware expert whatsoever but it seems feasible to me. It’s the next leeching step.
iPod web
 I guess it isn’t exactly a revelation but today it hit me as a fairly obvious thing: the next iPod in the family—iPod mini, iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod photo, iPod video—is going to be the iPod web. WiFi in mobile devices (cell phones, PDAs and whatnot) is gaining strenght and it is the (only?) logical next step for the iPod to take. If Apple manages to pull it off with grace and style, the iPod would truly become the one gadget to rule them all (just imagine the open-endedness of having the web in your pocket).
The device I envision is about the size of an iPod video, has a minimal, ultra-fast and responsive OS (mere scaffolding for the browser), a 100+ GB harddrive, a huge screen (say, 4X2.5 inches), and, most importantly, an updated, vastly more capable interface that is still as brilliant as the clickwheel. I only hope Apple has the vision to try it (soon).
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