small things

 I don't know why it is, but it's from the small things I seem to learn the big lessons. A lot of the lessons I've learned come from sitting in the car and just thinking about some presumably insignificant event. 

But maybe that's how it is. Lessons don't always come from big life events, they accrue over time and a small push is all it takes to finally re-organize your mindset. Maybe you've just been really fed up with *everything* and something small happens which makes you actually think about what's happening, and you change everything. You're forced out of your local optimum to look for a global one, although it may not be obvious. 

I did read that it gets harder when you're older. The analogy from the book "The Defining Decade" is apt: tiny adjustments will vastly change the course of the ship towards the beginning of the journey, but later on, only big changes, perhaps a storm, will impact where your ship ends up. 

Maybe because I'm younger, the brain is more "malleable". I wonder though, there was this other article I was reading about how it's possible to make your brain younger by changing your thinking habits, particularly by being mindful, reserving judgement and not resorting to old habits, and seeing things as "new". Kind of like a child sees things. 

Speaking of seeing things as "new".... I did learn a lesson about that. One of those big mindset changes happened while I was driving through In-N-Out and feeling not particularly that great after some shitty badminton. Now, my phone had died and I didn't quite know how to get to my girlfriend's place because I was reliant on the GPS. This was not that bad since I am used to this level of idiocy from myself, but I was frustrated about a lot of things: about how work was going, about how I couldn't work up the motivation to get any of it done, about how I never got any good sleep or felt very good physically throughout the day. Particularly frustrating was the fact that somehow I kept never doing anything about any of these things and yet felt increasingly bad about them. So a lot of annoying things were racking up and amplifying in my mind at that moment. Also, what the fuck was taking so long? I thought this was supposed to be an in-and-out kind of thing? 

It was then I read this ad about addiction on the drive-thru window. Their website: slave2nothing.org. Then I remembered: That's how I should be. My situation may bind me, the laws of physics may bind me, but there is no reason I should be slave to my own mind. I should be slave to nothing! In that drive-thru I recited (something like) this: 

"I am slave to nothing.

I am slave to noone. I am slave to no man. I am slave to no woman. I am slave to no self, no concept of self, no perception of self, idea of self. I am slave to no perceived limitations of self. I am slave to no ideas of "who I am" or expectations of "who I should be". 

I am slave to no past. Every moment I am made anew. No, not made anew, since there is no old self to compare to. In every moment I simply am, and again I am no identity in particular. I choose to be who I want to be in every single moment; this is the ultimate tautology. Therefore, I am free to the extent that I choose to remember that I am free. 

I am slave to no opinion. I am slave to no idea. I am slave to no method, no "way". I am slave to no particular approach to any particular problem. I am slave to no model, no theory, no framework.  

I am slave to no emotion. I am slave to no attitude. I am slave to no mindset. I am slave to no fears; particularly the fear that I am small and weak and worthless -- such concepts and thoughts are not meaningful, they do not come from my authentic self but rather a simplistic, toxic view of the world. I am slave to no judgements, particularly of others, since it also comes from the same inauthentic model of the world which had enslaved me. 

I am slave to no habit. I am slave to no society. I am slave to no expectations. I am slave to no calling or work. I am slave to no measures or metrics. I am slave to no goals, objectives. I am slave to no norms, be they delusions or rationalized illusions. I am slave to no perceived reality. 

I am slave to nothing. ..." 

Overfitting a definition of success

It often rubs me the wrong way that "success" seems to be generally defined by what people call "superficial" things, like money, fame, power, impact. 

It clearly rubs a lot of people the wrong way too, since these are in fact seen as "superficial" things by a lot of people. 

But I think it is not right disdain such things... money, fame, power, impact are all great if you're into that sort of thing. You might not be, but that is no reason to shit on other people's hobbies. I often think that there's a psychological component involved: since you can't have those things (well, you can, but you think you can't, or don't want to try) but deep down, kind of want them, you resolve the cognitive dissonance by devaluing those things in your mind. 
I guess more than anything, that comes from personal experience. :) So maybe I should speak for myself.

Anyways, I definitely think there is a much deeper, healthy viewpoint: Success is relative -- it is defined as optimality in pursuit of a goal. And that's the dictionary definition: "the accomplishment of an aim or purpose" per Google. And notice that no particular aim or purpose is specified. The aim, goal, purpose is personal -- it can be anything you want, and you can be successful at it. The goal can even to live in a jar as a way of living out your philosophy (see: Diogenes).

But there are multiple definitions. The next two are:

• the attainment of popularity or profit.
• a person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity.

Words can mean different things, and that's great, but there's something... wrong about these latter two. We're in fact being tricked into valuing something because of some language shenanigans. Good feelings are associated with general success, as it should be. But then at some point, success became tied to prosperity, and now "good feelings" are tied to prosperity. Then prosperity becomes of the same ranking as success, despite our original definition of success as not being tied to any goal at all! 

In short, the value that we place in prosperity is undeserved, and only derived by proxy from the linguistic connection between "success" and "prosperity". Success is what we really wanted all along, because success is a more general concept. By definition, success is "greater than or equal to" prosperity. 

Not to shit on prosperity... to some extent, I think all humans want prosperity, we have to. And for some, prosperity IS the main or only goal in life, so equating prosperity and success doesn't really change their perspective/theory/philosophy in any way. 

But in general, people's goals are more complicated, and therefore life-success means something different from maximizing prosperity. Perhaps it's having a good relationship with family, friends. Maybe it's not. Perhaps it's knowledge, learning, self-improvement. Maybe it's not. Whatever it is, this dastardly equivalencing of success and prosperity on the linguistic level makes us forget that success is a much more general thing. It changes our goals, making us forget what we actually want, distancing us from our values. No wonder so many people have stupid regrets on their deathbeds like "I really wish I had spent more time with my friends and family".

At some level we all know this stuff. But we clearly don't act that way or really feel it... because we can't help but talk about success in those superficial terms, like "Wow! Look how rich this person is!" or "Wow! Look how beautiful and influential this person is!" and feel a tinge of jealousy or admiration. We always put rich/famous/powerful/influential people on a pedestal and say "Look! A successful person!" 

This is linguistic theft. You're stealing the word "success", robbing us of something to express the achievement of an arbitrary goal to mean the achievement of a very specific goal. If you've ever read the book 1984 or otherwise experienced this yourself (e.g. the cognitive frustration when you can't find that word, or the joy when you learn a cool new word that expresses exactly the subtle feeling you have) you know what happens when you steal words from people. You steal the ideas that the words represented as well, which has other meaningful repercussions. In this case, the idea of succeeding at life goals loses its expressibility (in the form of the word "success"), and so the idea fades, replaced by what success is now defined as -- succeeding at being rich/famous/powerful/influential. But more importantly, you also take the positive vibes associated with general success in life goals (whatever they may be) and assign it to succeeding at being rich, or whatever. For example, imagine how different our perspectives and our worlds would be if we regularly referred to people like Diogenes as "successes". 

Fundamentally, you can model this with some kind of associative information processing thing and explain it with some brain science, but there's no need: if we just paid attention we would notice this kind of abuse and its repercussions happening all the time. 

Remember this: Linguistic theft is idea theft, word murder is thought murder. Ideas orphaned from words die. (Kind of like orphaned memory blocks. Watch your pointers!) 

In the beginning we all wanted success in the general sense. The problem is that by some influence or another, our goals drifted further and further into "prosperity". If all of the goals are just "prosperity", then of course we will begin to identify success with prosperity and forget the deeper, more general notion of success. 

Another way to look at this: it's like overfitting. You know, when you're a kid when you think a word only applies to a really small thing but it's actually a much more general term (I guess this happens to adults too). Or like, giving a foreigner a tour of America but only taking them to places in NYC so now they think America is all Broadway, stocks, rude people, and good food? You can't really blame the kid or the foreigner for what they think! Yes, it is most often the case that truly successful people are rich, famous, powerful, influential. And it is always the case that these sorts of things really stand out to our lizard brains, because our brains are wired to crave such resources. Media and advertising knows this, and feed into it constantly with the messaging that success = prosperity. And that becomes the percieved truth. 

How do we counteract this? One way I've found is to always assume depth and complexity, from which naturally follows the admission of your own ignorance. In particular, whenever you catch yourself thinking a certain way, just go right ahead and rightly assume that what you're seeing is only a tip of the iceberg. You're seeing a manifestation of a much deeper system... so look deeper. If you can't look, just imagine it, or know it's there. You don't always get to see the whole iceberg right away and it's often easier and instinctive to make assumptions. But knowing that there's "something bigger out there" prevents you from thinking that the tip is the whole thing, so that if and when you do discover the other parts of the iceberg you can more readily understand the bigger picture. I think we should all adopt a mathematical mindset, like in that joke about the purported black sheep in Scotland: all you know is that there is a sheep in Scotland, one side of which is black. 

So next time you see "success" associated with "wealth, fame, power, influence" and catch your lizard brain salivating, think and ask yourself what success really means (hint: answer is above). Go beyond the superficial -- saying you want to be rich or famous can't be the whole story, right? There ought to be something much more fundamental. 

And more immediately, let's redefine our notion of success and stop referring to success as shorthand for "success at being rich and famous". Yes, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett are all successes, but not because they're wealthy or famous or powerful or influential, but simply because they literally attained a lot of goals, some of which were arguably quite difficult. Our current usage is an abuse of notation that is actual abuse, and we should stop. 

Language and understanding, syntax and semantics

Programming languages really are just languages, aren't they...?

It seems a little different, though, because there's the linguistic aspect -- i.e. learning the formal grammar of the language -- and understanding the "way to think" -- this computational, algorithmic thinking, algorithmic, "constructivist" thinking. 

But isn't that true for pretty much anything? For example, mathematics definitely has a loosely defined "language" (I mean, there are subsets that are formalized which claim foundational and expressive power over a large part of mathematics, namely mathematical logics with set theory, category theories, type theories... but that's neither here nor there), but it's mostly about a way of thinking that transcends any particular way of writing it. It's an insistence on rigor and certainty, and a reductivist way of thinking that attempts to capture global complexity by working locally and inherently using conscious processing at least on the surface (the unconscious mind has a huge role, but mathematics is filtered and written by the conscious mind) and scaffolding up. 

For another example, anyone who has ever even attempted to learn a different language has faced the fact that there are certain words that simply don't exist in another language. That's because the native speakers of that language literally think differently than them -- i.e. they slice up the cake differently than you do. For instance, in Korean the word for soybean is pretty much the foundational word for all beans, in the sense that black beans are just "black soybeans". Every bean is just a different kind of soybean. 

This is a relatively easy one because the understanding can still be expressed in terms of English language, and therefore the Korean understanding of beans can be understood in terms of the English way to understand things (it sounds complicated, but just know that there are two layers: language and understanding, and we're talking about two versions of these things represented by their language, English and Korean). 

This is all precisely captured in what logicians and philosophers term as the duality of syntax and semantics. Here, syntax refers to literally the language itself: the words, the grammar, the sentences. Semantics would then refer to the understanding beneath which is expressed by those words.

Hypothesis: Perhaps language learning (as in English, Korean, etc) is a little bit different because there seems to typically be good syntactical mappings between two languages. Everyone seems to split the cake basically the same way, so to speak. If there's a slice that's a bit weird, that slice can often be expressed in terms of simple algebraic combinations of other slices... addition? Union? Subtraction? Complements? Linear combinations? Whatever the proper algebraic structure is, whether we end up talking about linear combinations, sigma algebras (actually the category theorists probably have a thing for this already, so we can talk about some really general structure that fits the bill. Maybe consult math3ma), the point is that some language can be understood "in terms of" another language and vice versa. And this "in terms of" is a "simple enough" transformation (linear? continuous?). 

But then again, is it really? 

An emotional algebra? On formalizing/theory-fying "fuzzy stuff"

 If reasoning with so-called "material" information is so extensively formalized by logic and mathematics in general, why do we shirk from doing the same with so-called "emotional" information? 

There are so many things in history which we could not have anticipated a "formal theory" of. Yet we did it anyways. 

First, we understand it intuitively. Often, people who understand it well enough are seen as incredibly wise, smart, "emotionally intelligent". Then, we start naming things, and build a vocabulary for it. Finally, the words themselves paint a picture as the underlying structure projects itself upon these words, and you end up with a grammar, a language. And once you have a language, the theories are just a step away. 

I like to think of it as there being this deep, vast sea with complicated currents moving under the surface. If you were to take a submarine down there, you might get the lay of the land and begin to understand the currents.

But perhaps an easier way to understand them would be to sink some weighted floaty things beneath the surface, and have little colored flags poking out. This is akin to building a vocabulary. And once you've done this, the rest takes care of itself: the currents under the surface move the flags and you can at once see the "structure" of the currents without diving down. The structure builds itself -- it's what you might call a homorphism between the underlying currents beneath the surface to the arrangements of the colored flags above the surface.

-Need to return to this and add examples, can only think of the "idea" of it atm but no concrete examples