Context is everything

Early in Plato’s symposium it is suggested that a specific action in itself is neither good nor evil. But the context and intentions are what makes the action good or bad.

The interesting thing was that the action they were talking about, within today’s context, is always assumed to be evil.. an older man “loving” a young boy.

I guess this example shows a major cultural difference, but it did get me thinking.

What if every action shares this characteristic? What if no action in our world is inherently good or evil, but it is only when considered within a specific context that it becomes so.

So I thought through some of the things that are labelled as evil and tried to think of a context within which that they could be acceptable. To this I found it was particularly easy. Murder is acceptable for a soldier, there are wierd fetishes involving rape, robin hood was a hero for stealing…

I have heard somewhere with enough assumptions any action can be justified.

It is a wierd concept, that everything is dependent on the where and why aspects, and that universal truths don’t exist.

This is actually one of the reasons I hate watching the news. They strip the context out of every story to make it more entertaining.

Its just one of the reasons why you need to be careful about critiquing a situation using the “default” assumptions (Because these assumptions change a lot in different environments).

2012
11/02
CATEGORY
The World
TAGS
Leave a comment

creativity and intelligence

I like to believe that these concepts don’t exist. Rather that the only important trait is experience (and practice).

If someone has experience in an activity that is socially defined as “creative” then they are described as creative, but a musician with no experience in painting is not very creative with a paintbrush.

Similarly someone with experience in “physics” will be labelled as smart but they may or may not be able to change a tire.

If you are a rookie and try something new but find that it doesn’t work, it is more likely to be human error rather than a bad idea. The more experienced you are with something, the more comfortable you get with you own ability and thus are able to know when something works or doesn’t.

This allows one to create things like music, mathematical proofs, computer programs etc. But it requires confidence in ones ability which can only come from experience.

What is known as intelligence might be simply defined as knowing lots of information. This definitely comes from experience.

That is why I don’t think humans can be creative or smart, we just get experience in area’s associated with these “labels”.

2012
10/29
CATEGORY
The World
TAGS

Leave a comment

The third option.

There are a few paths our world can go down. I used to believe that there were mutually exclusive options of destroying ourselves or enjoying the benefits of the technological singularity.

But there might be a third option, we could drain all the worlds important resources leaving nothing for distant generations to come.

Society might regress into a pre-iron ore era. Where the only tools we can make are those using the most common of materials.

I doubt it will happen, but it is interesting to think about.

2012
10/28
CATEGORY
Future
TAGS
Leave a comment

Saving

I used to read a lot of the blog “Early retirement extreme” but it definitely got repetitive. The whole website can be summarised as follows:

  • Live your life cheaply
  • Save lots
  • The lots you save soon will be able to pay for you cheap life

And then you can remove work from the equation. They use percentage of wage saved as a benchmark for whether one is living correctly (Not wasting money). This figure is expected to be up and around 70%. The last couple weeks I have been managing 80%..

And I feel they are completely correct about the assumptions. Material possessions bring temporary and minimal pleasure, the best and most important things in life can be done really cheap.

For those who think they would get bored without work, thoroughly going through the 16 things you should do everyday will take up a good part of your day (Plus they are almost all free).

Currently I feel work is dominating my time, so I think there isn’t even enough time to fully spend the money I am earning. People falling into the trap of living above their means seems really weird to me.

2012
10/27
CATEGORY
Financial
TAGS

Leave a comment

Being exhausted

One of the most crippling things about working full time is that you come home exhausted. There is no desire to do anything but lounge around and be unproductive, this is exactly why people fall into the rat race and/or wage slave paradigm. The basic cycle is as follows:

  • You get up in the morning, still sleepy and not completely rested and force yourself to get ready for work.
  • You go to work, contribute nothing towards your own self improvement.
  • You get home exhausted, and watch TV or some other pointless activity.
  • You go to sleep.

Obviously its a little more complicated than that (Work occasionally is a medium for self improvement), and weekends and holidays and jazz. But in essence you can’t break free, you live to work. It’s a terrible situation that many are faced with.

2012
10/24
CATEGORY
The World
TAGS
Leave a comment

Don’t forget to bring a towel

I have been reading the hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy series and have kinda become addicted to it. I don’t read novels too often but they really are amazing books.

My favourite character is Ford who spends his whole life hitch-hiking while writing articles for the guide (And going through crazy experiences as if they were nothing). But I especially love the idea that the most important item anyone can own is their towel. In their universe none of the crazy advanced gadgets or spaceships or technology is important. It is all disposable, but not their towel.

It draws a parallel to the real world. Not specifically towels, they are pretty useless as they are. But we have all this technology; Televisions, Cars, Computers etc.. and it is all disposable crap.

What is the most important item that exists? no clue. But the simple, cheap and common items do tend to be the most useful things around.

2012
10/23
CATEGORY
books
The World
TAGS

Leave a comment

The brain measures time by events

A day is a day and a week is a week. In your memory however, a length of time changes depending on how much occurred in that time period.

If you spend a week flat out doing experiencing memorable moments then thinking back the week will seem like it lasted much longer than a week.

Alternatively, an uneventful year will speed past, mostly because there aren’t enough memorable events to reference.

Compare one person who lives outside their comfort zone their whole life. They experience so much and have so many memories that retrospectively their life seemed like it lasted an eternity. Another person works their whole life, living safely and cautiously. The years begin to blur together because they are all very similar.

The difference? when death approaches one of them will look back and feel their life came and went too quick. The other will say “That sucks but it doesn’t matter, life was getting exhausting anyway”.

2012
10/20
CATEGORY
Fitness
philosophy
The World
TAGS
Leave a comment

Applied computer science

I finished up my Ruby on Rails tutorial last night and I felt that it was a little anti-climatic. There was no rush of achievement or anything. But there was a little excitement in what it meant, it meant that I could start working on my Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is a fully working computer, probably with the power of a pentium 2 but with a little added for graphics. But because the only place to store anything is on the SD card it means that the really low level tools (The boot-loader and the kernel) are exposed and easily modified.

This allows for us to mess around with some parts of the computer that are normally pretty difficult; this sort of programming is named Bare Metal (because you are working almost directly with the hardware).

So I spent today learning all the basics and getting the tool-kits working. Then after many hours I managed to do something really simple: I got a little green LED on the board to light up. That is all I did.

But the significant thing about this insignificant LED was that it is the first external thing to ever come out of my efforts in computing.

Normally when I am playing around with this stuff, all that ever comes about are a few pixels changing on the screen. This LED is tangible, it required a signal down a specific line to power up the LED. It isn’t much more effort to make the signal work all kinds of electronic circuits.

And there was a significant feeling of achievement, all because a silly little light turned on.

2012
10/17
CATEGORY
IT
TAGS

Leave a comment

Disagreeing with the media

So it turns out that my opinion on Doping within the sport of cycling is similar to that of many journalists. It actually kinda annoyed me when I read another article that agreed with my viewpoint. This is because the “media’ is usually wrong.

I understand that disagreeing with something simply for the point of disagreeing doesn’t contribute much at all. But I do like trying to find perspectives that don’t align with the hive mind, regardless of whether I believe these viewpoints or not.

That is why I originally took the stance of pro-steroids. Now I’m taking the opposite stance by arguing that a big part of taking performance enhancing drugs is individual genetic traits. Some people will benefit way more than others and you don’t really want two cyclists competing and the guy who trains harder to lose simply because he is less receptive to the drugs.

Athletes should be rewarded for training harder, not rewarded for being genetically compatible with steroid use.

However on the same note there are many people who trained their absolute hardest but were genetically incompatible for their sport (Flat footed for example), Michael Phelps being shaped like a dolphin with huge flipper feet likely contributes to his “skill” and that definitely did not result from a dedication to training.

Ideally the correlation between the winning athletes and the athletes most dedicated to training should be 100% and steroid use definitely distorts this relationship. However there are many other influences in sport that similarly swing the balance in the wrong direction which need to be considered (on equal grounds) if steroid use is to be banned for this reason.

2012
10/15
CATEGORY
Fitness
TAGS
Leave a comment

Investment Banking

There is a reasonable amount of anger in our culture directed at Investment Bankers, the reason for this is that they are paid an incredible amount of money for what seems like a relatively easy job. For a while I couldn’t figure out why they earned what they did but Benjamin Graham came along with the simple explanation that made everything click.

Whenever a company needs to raise capital through equity (Issuing new shares on the share market) they go see an investment banker. The issue of new securities (shares) is a complex task, and rather than the company dealing with the process itself they outsource it to people who are more skilled at the job. The investment bankers will then buy a proportion of the stock from the owners at a fixed price (Underwriting). They then issue the new stock. If the shares are sold below the agreed upon price then the investment bank loses money, but mostly they make a profit.

This is the goldmine where investment banks source their profits. Everybody has heard of a company who made a killing on their early day’s of trading, guess who received the majority of those profits…

That is why Investment Banks have so much money, that is why a relatively easy job (In comparison to something like surgery) pay’s so incredibly well.

Note: Investment Banks are probably a necessary evil. For a company to issue new shares they have to release a prospectus which is hundreds of pages in length and they usually have to navigate a jungle of bureaucratic red tape. That means diverting a lot of effort from the company’s core activities, which almost all companies are unwilling to do.

2012
10/14
CATEGORY
Business
TAGS

Leave a comment
Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started