知之为知之。不知为不知。是知也。
true knowledge is admitting both what one knows and what one doesn't.

聞くは一時の恥、聞かぬは一生の恥。
admitting ignorance is a temporary embarrassment , feigning knowledge is a lifelong shame.

Admitting knowledge is honesty... and feigning ignorance is? Probably profitable!?

Thoughts about war and tradition

Thoughts about war and tradition

The strength of a select, cooperative few is power, the strength of the diverse non-cooperating multitudes is resilience. And evolution is the dialog between them.

Power is always attacking resilience head on and resilience never fights back. It holds on until power runs out of steam.

And so we always have war and peace, the age of power and the age of resilience. Sometimes we have both at the same moment, in the same place.

In peace we build up and pile up all sorts of walls against enemies that do not exist. In war, the few come together and tear down the walls they can. And when we continually get the most diverse of people to build up walls that are strong in the most unique ways and then get the most powerful of people to tear them down, what we have left, is that which cannot be taken down.

Tradition and heritage is thus time proven. Except that the speed we build up and tear down isn't linear but exponential. Tradition isn't entirely about preserving what the dead have left us - it isn't carved in stone. Tradition is always in the making. And in the age, more so than ever.


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Is being a housewife a real job?

Is being a housewife a real job?

My short answer: it is a calling, not a job.

The female pronoun is consistently used below but only for convenience. Similarly, housewife should be interpreted also to mean house-husband.

The debate has been going on forever, but here's my take on the conditions it should satisfy in order for her services to be evaluated to be worth as much as services provides on a professional basis.

1. Do the customers have the freedom to comment and freely criticize on the services provided? Are customers allowed to compare the service of providers of similar services as an evaluation of the services?

2. Is it a monopoly? How are the conditions regulated?

3. What is the penalty for performance that does not match up to the customers' expectations?

4. Who is the employer and who are the stakeholders? How do they evaluate her performance?

5. Are services provided performed to the highest possible standard achievable, or is there any grounds to suspect negligence?

My conclusion is that being a housewife is more like a vocation or calling, like priests and activists. It is a noble role, but the services do not qualify to be rated in monetary terms; a housewife deserves to demand to be provided a standard of life that is worry-free so she can focus on the calling. And since it is a calling, all rewards should come from the providing of the service. Any additional material or monetary rewards should be received in exchange for a "real" job that she must perform outside this calling.


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4 kinds of people

I think there are 4 kinds of people. Those who have a need to know and are able to learn (scholars), those who have a need to know but do not have the ability to learn (believers), those who do not have a need to know but have the ability to learn (evangelists), and those who do not have a need to know and do not have the ability to learn (non practicing believer) . 

Lottery

aka The Power of Personal Testimony

Q: Let's say there's a 3-digit lottery for one million dollars every week, in a country of 3 million people. I set up a fortune telling web site called lucky-number.com and give out lucky numbers. It's free, but if you strike it a second time, you have to give me a 20% cut on your second winning. That's just 200,000 out of your 2 million. Fair? Do you think I can make any money?


Disclaimer : I'm sorry if I did my math wrong!

A: Firstly, given that numbers are given out evenly, every week 1 out of every 1,000  will strike lottery. Thus the chance of anyone striking using the given number is 0.001. Let's call these numbers 1,000 and 0.001 n=1000 and p=0.001.

We always give people a second chance when they don't do well. That is, that they need to lose twice in a row to stop buying - meaning unless they lose the first 2 times consecutively, they will end up trying at least 3 times. So we first consider the following scenarios:

(win, win, win) 
and believe that the site is true
 The possibility of striking (win, win, win) is p³, which means 1 out of 1,000,000,000 people will get this. since we have only 3 million people, let's assume this does not happen.

(win, lose, win) or (win win, lose) or (lose, win, win) 
and conclude the site is mostly right 
People who experienced (win, lose, win) and (win, win, lose) and (lose, wine, win) will conclude that the site works most of the time. So the probability of people thinking that it mostly works is 3(p²(1-p)), meaning 1 out of 333,667 people will feel that the site is useful. That is 8 people in 3 million!This means we would get either 8 times our 20% cut which is $1.6 million by the 3rd draw!

(win, lose, lose) or (lose, win, lose) 
and conclude that the site changed their odds from 1 out of 1,000 to 1 out of 3.
The probability of this is 2((1-p)²p), meaning 1 out of 501 people will come to this conclusion. For a population of 3 million, this is 5988 people!

So now we have 8 people convinced that the site is mostly true, and 5988 people who are not totally convinced, but "feel good" about the site.

Now, let's say each person is directly connected to 10 other people, and they tell these 10 people about their lottery. And their up to their friend's friend trust what they said - beyond that it's too far away to be trustworthy. Let's call this number c=10.

So many people can these 5996 people reach?

So we have friends who number 5996c and friends of friends who number 5996c², and if we include the initial 5996, this is a total of 665,556 people. In a community of 3 million, this is 22%. That means 1 out of 5 will feel good about the site! If you're connected to 10 people, it means you will know 1 to 2 persons who feel good about the site!


Let's say these 665,556 people decide to buy a 4th time.

(win, lose, lose, win) or (lose, win, lose, win)
Those who struck 1 time the first time, would have to pay us if they strike this time - the 5988 people who stuck (win, lose, lose) or (lose, win, lose). What's the odds?  (2((1-p)²p))p, that is one in 501,001. Bingo. We have another winner. Add $200,000

Unfortunately this doesn't grow our "feel good" crowd. But still, with some optimism, we would have collected $1.8 million by the 4th draw, all by giving out random numbers!

Moral of the story
1. Personal experience does not constitute statistics
2. Don't take information second hand.
3. Almost All isn't anywhere near All. When you listen to a testimony first hand, don't skip the details cos that's where the devil lives!

What is God? My take

What is God? My take

I think human beings are at the top of the pyramid very largely because of persistence, which comes through working hard at something though logic says that it is just impossible. This form of self delusion we prefer to call hope or faith or believing in oneself taken to the extreme IMHO is what birthed religion, which crystallized in the form of God. Subscribing to the concept of a real God then allows the everyday man to invoke a deep conviction in the realizability of his desires, and that conviction drives him to make his dreams real. In that sense, God is a kind of technology, ready for direct application by anyone who chooses to invoke it.

Consider asking another question. What is the Internet? Is it a specification of any framework that can support something like facebook and Google? Is it the collective sum of servers running it? Is it the tcpip stack? Is the Internet still the Internet if the middle layers are swapped, or if it interfaces with other networks by way of SDN? Is it still the internet if it gets fragmented into two or more disjoint networks? Which disjoint fragment will become the internet? Is it still the Internet if I use a quantum network to steam real time content from my brain? Will my brain become part of the Internet? Or is the Internet defined to be the sum of everything accessible from - the Internet?

I think the Internet exists in a real sense because we as a global community has come to a consensus of its existence. And this consensus of its existence is essentially what makes its existence real.

We tend to think of God as a person, so defining God as a non-person becomes somewhat heretic, but wait, what about the Internet when non-human AI interacts as much as human beings on the Internet? Will your brain be as much part of it as the non-human counterpart? Will it be then fair to say that the Internet is both alive and not alive?


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Privacy

on privacy

another daydream post. i'm not an expert.

i read somewhere that the concept of privacy is a recent invention, and that people nowadays don't think of wanting to preserve their privacy, rather, they consider it as asset to be trade-able for goods or services, which might imply that the concept of privacy as a kind of personal freedom in the so called "traditional" sense, may already be fighting its last fight.

i have previously read of a few viewpoints on why you need privacy which i shall summarize briefly below:

1. Nobody is perfect. Given the correct conditions, some law can always be used against you, even if you think you have nothing to hide.

2. Knowledge is power. Knowledge of who you are and what you do (1) psychologically give people power over you, causing you to act differently by knowing that you are being watched, and, (2) gives people a means to social engineer a situation into deriving some advantage off you.

3. Victimless crimes are committed in private when people are experimenting or trying to sort things out and figure out their lives, and that ultimately leads to progress of the individual or society as a whole.

but i stopped to think today.

Human society has so far been in its nature once which is close-knit, where people are deeply involved, interacting which each other in ways that are beyond what the law provided clear-cut rules for. There always are people who want to get into your head or your pants to get something out of you so that they can gain some kind of advantage, or so that they can "help" you. Everybody always needs everybody's help so that the "greater good" is finally achieved.

Such an environment keeps society together. Put it in other words - society is self-perpetuating through the deployment of mechanisms such as the use of power to directly or psychologically affect or limit any actions to modify it. I say "deploy" because I think the State consciously created these mechanisms ether directly or indirectly. And given free rein, this mechanism can be exploited, perhaps, to the point where society is perpetuated for the sole purpose of perpetuation, such that individuals are continually born into the society, work for the society, but derive no innate pleasure or advantage from doing so.

The concept of privacy to me, is basically saying "beyond this line, I can manage on my own". Which means, privacy for me, is that line we draw to say, okay, this is as much you (society/State) need to be bothered about.

What if, the mechanisms that perpetuate society, do not work anymore?

What if one day, someone doing a term in jail is viewed at with the same attitude as someone who paid a speeding fine? And nobody would care less if who you slept with as long as you are doing a great job as the president?

How would privacy change?

Of Adam and Eve and Marrying Cousins

Of Adam and Eve and Marrying Cousins

Disclaimers: I'm not a creationist. Neither am I an expert on the game of life. This is not a paper, just a kind of mental scribbling aka daydreaming.

One of the problems I had with the Adam and Eve story was that of inbreeding, that inbreeding raises the possibility of recessive traits appearing, lowering the average survival ability of the population in general. How do cultures that practice reproduction with relatives survive? Does inbreeding mean that you end up with an inferior culture?

Enter: the game of life.

If you're unfamiliar, the game of life is simulation "board game", formed with a grid like a chessboard, where you place pieces that either "grow" or "die" according to rules as simple as the following set (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life, where "cell" refers to a square on the board):

1. First you start with a starting configuration, where you mark certain cells as "live". All other cells are dead.
2. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
4. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
5. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction. 

That's it. And just depending on the initial squares, the game can keep running for thousands of generations. You might want to try out some configurations on the wiki page at http://www.julianpulgarin.com/canvaslife/and see it for yourself.

What does this mean to me? That while inbreeding is the causes of a lot of genetically-based disability, it is not in itself fatalistic. But rather, whether or not we end up with an end-game where everything dies or everything keeps on growing, or everything is stabilized, depends also on the starting configuration - and that starting configuration, must be instantaneously created or there must be one instant where the starting configuration became true.

That is to say, if the creation theory needs to be true, it is not just the mechanism that needs to be proven, but that the starting configuration needs to be found. So maybe, just maybe, just because God created Adam and Eve, doesn't mean he didn't also create Adam and Steve.

Common sense

Common sense: a habit or protocol people are obsessed in propagating because of a perceived benefit derived through a mechanism or reason considered taboo.


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