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

Music theorists and food critics

 So apparently music theory is racist because music theory presumes that valid music follows music theoretic paradigms. Here it is... great watch. Let's define: As Westerners, "music" here encompasses things that deal with melody, rhythm, harmony and other things that extend our set of examples, at least to the extent that we're comfortable with still calling them "music". 

Music theory engenders a certain attitude that even when we include certain non-Western sounds under the banner of "music", we only do so to invalidate it under Western music theory, as perhaps incomplete, or just "bad". The simple yet popular example being Ben Shapiro invalidating rap music because it is missing melody, harmony. 

When we reject this standpoint as inherently racist something interesting happens. We are forced to ask: what then is music, and what does "music theory" have to do with anything? 

We expand: what then is food, and what is "good food"? 

Well, now we are thoroughly confused, and perhaps that's a good thing. Confusion arises from trying, as in trying to fit something that just is into some known mental framework when it never asked to be fit... trying to fit an abstract and infinitely detailed jello peg into a two dimensional hole, if you will. 

And perhaps we should stop trying. Just eat the abstract infinitely detailed jello peg already. Take things for what they are: "Food" is definitely a word, "music" is definitely a word, and we try to associate experiences and things to them, for sure. And so these different "foods" and "musics" inspire all sorts of feelings in us, some pleasant, some not so pleasant. We'd like to assign "good" and "bad" to these things, but it's really not just about being pleasant, is it? Somehow there are all these other variables, like how "special" they feel, maybe the "complexity" of feelings they give you, all that. We're not really sure why we're assigning "good" and "bad" to things, but it seems really instinctive and useful, like understanding which mushrooms are tasty and nutritious and which mushrooms will give you diarrhea and a really bad trip when you're a hunter-gatherer in the wild. It's like a tagging system of sorts.

And we seem to take "good" and "bad" as some context-free indicator of general goodness and badness, as in "things to look for" and "things to avoid", as in "things that will generally improve my life experience" and "things that won't". This, in itself, is actually bad. I mean, at some point I'm sure the classification into "good" and "bad" is useful. I'm sure in some contexts it's meaningful and it's actually a good indicator of goodness and badness. But I fear those contexts are actually "Western music" and "French cuisine" respectively. 

How do people decode racism, and how to encode it

In the recent past I thought of racism very logically. Quite literally, I viewed racism as a proposition in classical logic, say R(x), evaluated as either true or false on the set of scenarios, say S. 

And as a result, saying things like "I'm not racist, I have black friends" wasn't anywhere near racist to me and it never made sense when people said that. In truth, I was actually quite frustrated and angry when people took scenarios that didn't seem clearly racist and insisted they were racist. What did it mean for something to be racist anyway? And how do you know what their intentions were? A non-racist could have easily said the same thing, so your accusation is unprovable, and also harmful. 

I refused to acknowledge police brutality on black people using the above logic. Effectively, I put an inordinate and large burden of proof on proving racism.

It turns out I was wrong: they (they being those people who I dismissively regarded as "SJWs") weren't trying to say that something in isolation was definitively racist or not. To them, it's very much a holistic, and sometimes probabilistic (will explain later), thing: you have to look at what has been said in context of who the person is and what they could have meant. When something is said to be racist, it means something more like "this statement provides information that, when taken in context of the situation and the person (such as: is this person white?), would suggest the person held racist views". 

It's actually quite complicated and is akin to a sort of Bayesian statistical inference, where with the new data we have (e.g. the person says "I have black friends") we extrapolate from prior information to deduce the parameters of our model (e.g. a parameter R determining whether the person holds a particular racist view or not). So the "new data" is not by itself determining R (racism), but rather it represents a positive differential flow of information that helps us determine R. However, the way we actually present the result in language is entirely misleading

The thing is, the language we use to call out racism doesn't accurately portray the complexity of the model doesn't help. In fact it further exacerbates a conflict of models: saying that some element (say of a situation, policy, or a statement/action) is racist (e.g. saying "that was racist" in response to someone saying something... well, racist), which is a common turn of phrase nowadays, suggests that said elements has some fixed quantity or quality of racism, as if racism were some kind of fungible property, like money. That is: money can be added to other money in a context free manner... because fungibility is like "a dollar here is a dollar there". It doesn't really matter where you add the dollar, it increases the value of something by $1 no matter what pile of dollars you add it to*. Further, the fungibility property is suggestive of a linear system: an increase dx always results in the same increase dy, no matter which x you're at. And as I mentioned, that's not the framework in which the "woke folks" are operating: saying something (dx) is racist (dy) is not some universal property of that thing (dx), but is rather an abbreviation for a much more complicated scenario that depends on what the situation (x) is. 

So as it turns out we're literally talking about linearity, and also as it happens, the language the woke folks use just reinforces the linear model. It's a communication problem! And the only way to resolve communication is by true understanding. This can only be achieved by proper listening and going beyond the language. The language, as we mentioned, is flawed: it confirms the linear model. 

The problem is, all of this is extremely difficult to understand. At least, it was for me! To someone who is not particularly invested in these issues (see: anyone who is not personally really affected by racism on a day-to-day basis), they have no reason to move from the simple, linear model to this complicated holistic model, especially when the language is not very helpful. It's much easier to stick with our old model, which tells us to disagree and perceive attacks and accordingly take offense when "called out". And we are surprised at this shouting match between two utterly divided sides. 

Indeed, at the core of any communication problem is a listening problem. In the wake of the Floyd shooting, I think many of us have internally recognized the importance of just listening, that it actually works. There's still a whole lot of the same old not listening, shouting, bickering, but things are getting better in the sense that we are collectively building the vocabulary and concepts required to understand the complexities. 

To further complicate matters, the detection of racist elements is entirely statistical, as nothing is certain. For example, Trump saying something kind of suspicious and racist-sounding might get a pass, but done enough times, we're pretty sure the dude is encoding racism. This is problematic because our entire culture, woke folks included, operate based on an assumption of a "linear world" where making local judgements (i.e. evaluating individual statements and taking things out of context) are "good enough" . This is, of course, in contrast to operating on a global/holistic level, taking things with context, and appreciating nonlinearity and embracing full complexity. 

A side note: Linearity seems to be especially an American way of doing things. I wonder how much of it is rooted in the predominant American culture of pragmatism, where the world is simple and straight and things just are, no fuzzy convoluted stuff. It relates to this sort of engineering philosophy of modularity, where components do what components do, anywhere and anywhen. No weird coupling effects, no mess. And perhaps this is also why Americans are less "global-oriented" and sometimes even insist on ignorance to the point of appearing to take pride in it. To continue with the geometric analogy, what might be happening is just an optimization, from an information-processing standpoint: there's no need to explore the whole manifold when you're assuming it's flat (linear), because local information (i.e. gradient) yields everything you need to know about the rest of the manifold. In short, why explore the rest of a flat hill when you know exactly how high you're going to be at every point? Indeed, to Americans, maybe the rest of the world is basically just America (just shittier).  

And furthermore, at the risk of sounding like I'm contradicting myself, it's not like just because it's statistics, there's nothing really concrete that can be said about racist statements. There are still enforceable "taboos", such as certain words and phrases that are said to be inherently racist. 

But given that we just developed this whole idea of Bayesian statistics and context sensitivity, how could we possibly go back on it and justify calling things "racist" in a context-free manner? How can "things" be "racist", regardless of  how or by whom or when it was said? Well, this is again a language problem -- "that's racist" is a pretty overloaded phrase. It's the "proliferation" argument at work: we should not say certain things simply because we don't want them to proliferate. To use a lateral example, using the word "gay" to describe something negatively isn't homophobic in the sense of the "statistical inference" thing, 

Honestly the whole thing is a little bit too complicated to express in the language of common discourse, which is why we struggle as a society today. The ironic thing is that most such things things are simple to explain in the language of mathematics. It's an unfortunate reality, but usually what happens is that over time, the public learns, effectively recreating the equivalent structure in, literally, their own words. Sometimes the resulting new language and theory reflects the obvious mathematical structure, other times it's a quite a bit different. More on these ideas later... maybe. 

*Generally in finance though, if we go beyond dollar-speak, it turns out that financial decisions are not fungible either, even though we would like to think of them as such (it's a lot easier to calculate and optimize decisions when every aspect of a decision has a fixed cost). For example, we would like to think of purchasing a home as having some sort of fixed value, and one can indeed arrive at some kind of opportunity cost number given some fixed time window like 5 years... but add in just a little pinch of reality and you can ask questions like, if you didn't buy that home and invested it, what then is the cost of the home after 5y? What if you didn't invest it? Should we use that number? Or what if you "invested" in a lottery ticket? It becomes a little ridiculous if we go on, but the point is that it's not so simple, so when financial experts talk about "opportunity cost" of a decision or equivocally the "'value' of the object being bought/sold" itself it's actually in a very particular context. It's important not to believe that $ value applies universally to every financial situation and decision context. 

ice cream is really Good with warm la croix

 yes it is