Category Archives: Literature

What does education affect? Everything.

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Education allows for upwards class mobility, reducing poverty; it drives advances in medicine and agriculture, improving healthcare and quality of life and reducing hunger; it allows leaders to make better, historically informed decisions, promoting peaceful relations between nations and improving the general welfare of citizenry through effective governance; it enriches the arts, philosophy, and humanities, allowing us to probe more effectively our own natures and purposes; and – most importantly – it encourages dreaming and discovery.

Programming by Intent via Automatic Search and Function Binding

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There’s a problem with Matlab. Even though it’s great for high-level programming, it just has too many functions, of which even the most seasoned developer is doomed to know only a small fraction. For example, the function pdist will return a matrix of pairwise distances, yet I’ve seen the same being done manually countless times.

Rather than cutting down the functionality provided by the language or forcing the user to “specialize” in studying certain Matlab functionality, I thought of an alternative approach:

The user knows what he wants to do. He wants to “compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”. At this moment, his best bet is issuing the command “lookfor pairwise” and sifting through the results.

But wouldn’t it be nice if he could type “I want to compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”, and, based on the documentation and some tagging of the functions, Matlab would automatically fill in “pdist(A)”?

This can apply to any language, of course. Java seems another good candidate, given the number of standard classes in J2SE.

Of course! Personal statements and papers follow the same conventions!

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Oh how foolish I was! While reviewing a statement of purpose for a friend applying to CMU for grad. school, I realized my own mistake. Let’s see whether I’m going to play Roark to another’s Keating (if this is to be my role in society, I’ll never forgive it).

I spoke of my goals, how my accomplishments have led me towards those goals, and, unabashed, the research training I wished to receive in pursuit of those goals. My numeric credentials were superlative and spoke for themselves, so I did not mention them. This was all acceptable.

My error was one of omission; one that became blindingly obvious after I figured out how to get academic papers accepted, as it’s of the same nature. The data, the idea, the meat is not important unless properly wrapped. I didn’t brag about my interdisciplinarity; I practiced it and relied upon it being self-evident in my actions and goals.

Just as I had previously relied on acceptance of academic papers through straight and concise representation of the ideas and results of the research before I figured out how those were accepted.

There’s a game to it. Drop names. Drop keywords. Read up on and associate yourself with current academic trends.

It’s a stupid game, but I have to play it at least one more time in the future, so I may as well learn the rules of it if I’m to succeed next time.

I have a feeling knowing someone already in a graduate program is the most significant predictor of success; moreso than any personal factor. Certainly I’ve just provided some help. And in providing that help, I’ve helped myself realize something important as well.

Persuasive Writing: Always Have a "Take Away" Idea

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When trying to present an idea or vision, one important aspect of the presentation is establishing a central idea that will stick in their minds long after the remainder of the prose has faded.

For instance, take this:

“Because curricula would be problem and goal-oriented, spanning diverse subjects, and chosen primarily by students in accordance with their own goals, and because performance would be measured by proficiency rather than completion of a set number of credits, graduates of such a university would emerge highly versatile, with the insight, confidence, and experience required to pursue not only the challenges that society will set before them, but their own private visions of how the world should be. In fact, because students tailor their own experiences and can easily change fields without losing time due to our proficiency-oriented measure of progress and our goal-directed curriculum, they will have already exercised a great deal of personal choice, ensuring that their values are fully developed and their ultimate visions are well-defined and inline with their training. In short, they would satisfy the criteria for personal advancement set forth in Maslow’s concept of self-actualization or Dabrowski’s positive disintegration. Polymath graduates would not only be well-versed, but further along in their human development and realization of their potential.”

Very few people will read through that whole paragraph, and very few of those who do will actually understand and remember it all. But the one message that the paragraph (and the text of the site as a whole) conveys is:

“We are going to train polymaths”.

That’s it. In an honest world, I could trim the text down to this sentence and be done with it.

Even though this is the primary thematic idea people take away from the text, it’s a very powerful and compelling one. It captures the very essence of the vision, and thus represents the project’s goals. Those who agree with it resonate with the goals of the project and very often become its most ardent supporters.

This is a natural consequence of idea-orientation as well – the prose grows around an idea because that is the way the writer is thinking. It’s a component of natural leadership.

Wow, TV/Movie Fantasy has become stupid.

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I was watching the premiere of a fantasy series based on one of my favorite books today. I’ll do my readers a favor and not bother naming it, because what I saw was a two hour train wreck. I honestly do not understand how the producers of this show managed to obtain the author’s approval of their screenplay.

The show took many liberties with the text. This is understandable to an extent, as the medium and audience are very different, but every deviation from the text was executed very poorly. Now that I think about it, what little TV fiction I’ve watched recently has also exhibited the same general characteristics as this show:

The world is portrayed in absolutes: there is Good and there is Evil. The job of Evil is to take over the world. No motive for this is given, and it’s never because the Evil person wants to make the world a better place. The job of Good is to stop Evil, and thus Save The World.

It’s always personal: This originally begins as a personal vendetta after Evil lashes out at the protagonist, but this is quickly subsumed into a sense of duty to Save The World by killing the minions of evil, usually in elaborate, drawn-out battle scenes. Nevertheless, as Good Triumphs Over Evil, a protagonist will invariably make some remark about having given meaning to those who have fallen or having achieved his revenge.

All motivations are exogenous, most caused by Evil: if someone on the side of Good is a traitor, it is because he was bribed or coerced by Evil. If a character is attacked by wild animals, it was somehow Evil’s fault. If it rains and a character gets wet, it must be the Wetness of An Evil Storm.

Morality Determines Causality: Just as most motivations are Evil, most of the plot consists of Evil’s machinations. Nothing can happen independently; it must all be the result of the actions of the protagonists or antagonists. There is literally no setting; it has become an extension of the characters.

No patience for unknowns: This is a bit more specific to the show I was watching. There was an aspect of the main character’s identity that the book kept the reader guessing at for at least 100 pages. I was shocked when the show merely blurted it out, as if it were known all along. And everyone picked it up and acted as if it were perfectly normal once it was revealed!

Violence solves everything: This book had several instances where the characters talked their way out of problems and used their wits. Part of the idea was to avoid unnecessary violence, which is always a smart thing to do. On TV, if one character so much as breathed too near another, out came the swords.

What Philosophy?: Finally, the motivation of Good is to Save the World simply because the Good Guys are Just Plain Nice. They don’t have those pesky attributes of real morality, like a set of personal values or decisions that require them to really think about these values. This makes the characters come off as completely inauthentic. It’s as if an average person were to suddenly become a hero, yet retained the morality of an average person rather than anything that could be construed as heroic. The deeds are heroic, but why are the characters performing them? Think Superman.

That’s my rant for today.

A thought on depressions…

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An economic boom is a time when the value consumed exceeds the value generated within an economy. In other words, there is money floating around that does not actually have a grounding in any valuable economic activity but can be used to consume value all the same (remember, money is not actually value; it’s an imprecise representation of it). The bust that invariably follows such an era is the elimination of the “negative value” that has accumulated from such a boom and a return to economic equilibrium, where money actually begins to represent value again. If I can be so bold as to rip off one of the laws of thermodynamics for my own purposes:

The overall change in the energy of a system is the change in heating – the change in work. In economics, the formulation is even simpler: profit = revenue – cost.

They are actually saying the same thing using different terms. In fact, if you used energy as a currency, these would be exactly the same law.

This time around, many people were given loans that they could not repay. These loans appear to have been used primarily to finance house purchases, which caused demand to rise and the price of a house to artificially increase. It was, of course, the sort of fake money I had just mentioned, untied to any real value because nothing significantly changed in overall productivity to match the increased consumption.

The economy, unlike the universe, is an open system. Value can be both added and removed. No significant value was added to the system, so “value revenue” was 0. The money used to purchase houses destroyed value, so “value cost” was positive. Thus, value was lost.

Because money is an imprecise measure of value, it took a while for people to notice, and thus everything appeared to be going really well.

Until it finally caught up, of course. The fall in house prices that followed was an act of balance. The pathological money was eliminated from the economy as house prices fell, thus it became tied to the actual value of the houses again. (The other solution that would have resulted in equilibrium would have been massive amounts of inflation, so this is actually preferable).

The reason why this is a disaster rippling throughout the economy is mere reliance on this fake money by both the lenders (who collected interest on it) and the borrowers (who “leveraged” it). The interest they collected was fake value too, of course. And then they invested that into other assets. And that was also fake.

When the bubble burst, this complex web of interdependencies, all built with valueless money, fell apart. That’s my take on it, anyway.

So for those who consider my frustration with inauthenticity unwarranted, consider what effect it has had on your economy. They spring from the same cause.

Autumn

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It is that time again
when I revel in nature
unfolding its splendor
all around me.

The glory of reds and yellows
advancing on the green, and set
against the blue and white,
like fluffed celestial pillows.

I belong to it,
and it to me,
a transcendent bond that asks
only that I survive.

I revel from behind a window,
while politicians dance,
and the market fails
and I am trapped.

A strike isn't even necessary

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An Atlas Shrugged-style strike isn’t even necessary to “stop the motor of the world”, as John Galt put it. The world will actually stop its own motor, merely by living under the outcome of its decisions. All the strikers needed to do was comply to the letter, not withdraw, if that was their only goal (however, withdrawal was still required to prevent them from becoming sacrifices to the looters’ moral code, and thus remains the course they’d take if acting in rational self-interest). They only upheld the social order because they were too moral; they refused to comply with unjust laws.

(Of course, any system that forces such a choice between morality and freedom is one best withdrawn from anyway).