A cute problem

A friend of mine came to me with a dilemma the other night. He, along with a group of 9 other friends, decided to celebrate a bachelor party with an omakase dinner at a restaurant which cost $100 a ticket normally. But this restaurant had a deal where a party of 10 or more would get 20% off each ticket -- $80 for an omakase dinner. Each would pay for their own meal, and so everyone agreed to meet for dinner next week. The groom paid a $50 reservation fee for the group, which was non-refundable. 
However, that morning, he had received a group text from Tom saying that he couldn't make it anymore. 

Without Tom, and without a replacement, the group of 10 would, in total, spend 9 x $20 = $180 more for the dinner. If the group were to instead cancel, they would lose the $50 reservation fee. 

Does Tom "owe" anyone money, from an ethical-or-otherwise standpoint? 

On one anti-Tom exrteme, you might say that if the party decides to go ahead, Tom should pay for everyone's 20%. And if the party cancels, Tom owes the groom $50 to cover the reservation fee. 

On the other end, you might say that Tom doesn't owe anyone anything, because there was no "terms and conditions", and therefore no expectation that Tom broke. 

Arguably, though, you could talk about a set of reasonable expectations. You could also argue about a standard of fairness. For instance, landlords expect to maintain some rate of tenancy and rental income on their properties, so if you break contract and leave early it seems fair enough that you cover some portion of the cost while they look for a new tenant. 

At the same time, in general, you cannot reasonably be held responsible for every single consequence that occurs after a decision. Suppose a 10yo kid decides to DDOS a streamer on Twitch, and that streamer comes at him with a lawsuit for his typical earnings multiplied by the amount of time he's been unable to stream due to the DDOS. The kid maybe should have known better, but he's still a kid. And does the math really check out to sue for that entire amount? 
This really reduces to the "fault assignment" problem, which deals with calculations involving hypotheticals, causality, responsibility by based on knowledge, so on and so on. But at the end of the day, I think that even most people who look to assign fault agree that the end goal of such a mechanism should be to maximize well-being of the whole, and that assignment of fault plays an "dis-incentivizing" by scaling the fault to the causal responsibility, and arguably, also estimates the amount of reparational responsibility. Depending on who you speak to there are other theories of fault and punishment, of course...

Code

 Maybe since ancient times, ever since we developed language, we've wished that we could modify the world according to written information. Because, why not? As long as our document carries the necessary specifications, why can't a car simply poof into existence*? From an information perspective, what distinguishes the building of a car vs. the writing of code? Or the thinking of code, even? 

Does this get a bit metaphysical, if you think about it too hard? Does it induce that sense reality is "just" a projection of your perceptions? 
I guess a realist might disagree with this line of thinking "Of course it's hard," they might argue, "Because cars are made of metal and information is made of bits!" 

But that answer is not satisfying to me, and I do think that my line of questioning, as confused as it might be, might be illuminating. Informative, at the very least, to where misconceptions might arise regarding the boundary relation between the information world and the "physical" world, if these ought to even be distinguished to begin with. My view is that they should ought not to be, that there is some "obvious" point we're missing that swallows the whole thing. 

*Maybe because we don't have all the specifications. What is the car made of? What do we do with it? What memories have we formed with it? What is our relation to it in every sense?

I suppose if we have all of these things, then really, the only difference between that car truly "existing" vs. not existing is our willingness to "believe" it. Does a lored-out character in a fleshed-out DnD universe exist any less than the world "around" us, that we so willingly lend our "belief" to? Someone who's experienced it, I'm sure, might tell you how real it feels. It might feel horrifying to think that some universes and events in a novel might "exist" in a sense, that pretty much all consistent universes "exist", but again, why not? 

Systems thinking

Is "systems thinking" just the Western attempt at emulating the "holistic" character of Eastern thinking? 

In a sense, by thinking of a system as a whole made of modular parts interacting with each other, it's still pretty reductionistic. 

In Eastern holistic thinking, there isn't much distinction between the concept of an individual vs the concept of a group of individuals. 
If anything, "real" holistic thinking might actually just be "less thinking". Question why we hold certain concepts, certain distinctions, in our minds, and simply observe. 

It's a pattern you see in mathematical traditions too -- take classical point-set topology vs. intuitionistic point-free topology. In the real and abstract spaces of our minds, do we focus on a foundational unit -- the point -- with which we build out the rest of the theory according to our expectations, or simply observe the space as it is, and allow whatever relations arise to build the theory itself? 

There is no tension, as some would have it, between these two modes of thinking. There's a good interview with Tyson Yunkaporta: Aboriginal and Indigenous Memory Techniques & No More "Memory Wars" with Tyson Yunkaporta - YouTube

Basically, it is counter to aboriginal thinking to try to classify and dictate which mode of thinking is "better". Yunkaporta describes it as almost a "patchwork quilt" of thinking strategies. I like to think of it more as a calm sea -- and Western thinking is certainly a fish in that sea. When we drag it up with the nets of our minds, we simply observe it and say, "Yep, that's certainly a way of sea-ing things!" 

Progressivism

 

Christians

 It's real bullshit that Christians talk about persecution and LGBT in the same sentence. It's real, real bullshit.

And it's always some stupid example about how they were made fun of or excluded because they were Christian, oh boo-fucking-hoo. Dipshits. 

And in the same sermon they're talking about how Christians should want to obey God's will, not because they have to. So how do they expect a gay dude at church to feel? Just forever guilty about their love for another dude and doing it anyway? Like "sorry I'm still gay today, God"? 

Chronically online

At one point in time, I think mathematics students picked a specialty based on their interests, but also it came down to what they were exposed to, problems they ran across in life, or even what their Ph.D. advisor studied. But now, it seems there's so much interesting things out there. Just this week I watched videos on p-adics, entropy, read articles about neural network interpretability, and engaged with "little" math puzzles on a Facebook page. Not to mention all the non-math rabbit holes I explored, that is until I ran across the next one. It feels impossible for me to delve deep into anything at this point or make a choice. 

This, along with other experiences, triggered a growing realization that the internet is not very good for us, or at least me, and there might be much we can do to mitigate that, besides reducing/avoiding. I found myself overloaded, preferring distractions and dopamine hits and shirking responsibilities. I got worse sleep; my memory, processing, and now even my decision making skills have been overloaded and rendered useless. 

I knew about the harm, abstractly, but always dismissed it because I wanted to believe that there were healthy ways to use the internet, and as this new medium was relatively new, we were still figuring it out. Load stimulates growth, so I assumed higher load = more growth, ignoring that excessive load reinforces poor form and causes injury. 

You know it seems a bit silly -- how can an abundance of options cause harm? But paradoxically it's true -- the exposure to all this information and options encourages dilly-dallying and non-commitment. I feel like maybe we underestimate how much choices are actually made for us in life, and undervalue the positive effects of that. After all, it often takes lighting a fire under our collective asses to make us act.