Only a fool answers discrimination with more discrimination, but it is a very dangerous fool who requires others to do the same.
Such a policy is ultimately self-defeating because it continually calls attention to the inequities between groups, when a truly egalitarian policy would be transparent to such things entirely.
This week marks the completion and reporting of the first experiment. The background section is complete now, though I will likely make some further revisions here and there. From now, maintaining my pace will become difficult because I cannot rely on other people’s knowledge to fill my thesis; every gain I make will henceforth come from my own labor. To this extent, I may be forced to conform somewhat to the timetable my group chooses to set out. I can complete at least one experiment a week (once my class ends, anyway; the assignment this week is twice as long as usual), but I cannot simply forge ahead or I will end up walking over someone else’s work.
It’s sad that even now, people still assume I chase after money (a variation being the assumption that I am involved in my Ph. D. for the purpose of getting a job rather than learning), concern myself with superficial appearances, like parties, think socialization is the optimal use of time, get drunk, disdain hard work, etc. Perhaps the worst mistake of all is that they think I care about what “communities” I’m a part of and what they think of me, because this tends to create a fundamental difference between us that cannot be reconciled, as the collective thought of the community is substituted for their own. (“Pack:Wolf::Community:Human”. Does the fact that I can’t follow make me an alpha? Or just a lone wolf? Hmm… I guess it depends on how well I can lead)
It’s quite clearly the result of a projection of one’s own values onto another, since having values that differ from one’s own is a deviation (and we all know that, to those who have not disintegrated from society, deviations represent a threat to one’s own personal integrity because they call the values of the entire group into question). The assumption that a person possesses the specific values in question becomes the subjective definition of “normal” – “normal” people chase money (probably because they are unable and/or unwilling to make a more direct and substantive contribution to the well being of their societies, because they…), avoid working at all costs, are all social butterflies, love to drink, choose mates based only on superficial qualities, see only the surface of things in general, etc.
These types of people also tend to stop growing around their mid-teen years (the transition is rather abrupt, peer driven, and absolutely palpable), fail to even retain the amount of knowledge that they left school with (which is why 85% of Americans cannot find Iraq on a map and 11% can’t find the USA on a map), much less seek more, remain bound to the will of others their entire lives, and finally realize what they’ve missed only when society finally releases them because they’re too old to be of use to their masters – and too old to enjoy their newfound freedom. Having relied upon others to make their decisions their entire lives, the natural course when they are finally free to think is to retreat from this state, abandoning all purpose in exchange for a sort of sensory hedonism. The second factor retreats in favor of the first for those who have never experienced the third. They leave the world little better than they entered it, their only victories zero-sum economic conquests, and yet they call that success.
Yet in my own way, I am also a slave. Why do I do research? Well, part of it is my own interest, but a great deal of it is dedication to the betterment of society – the very society that has made me such a pariah; made my life so difficult, denied giving me the very ability to better it in the name of the community! By doing what I do, I enable others to better control me. If I were an Objectivist, I would be a hypocrite. I suppose one distinction is my wish to extricate myself from society as much as possible while simultaneously pursuing the research that interests me. However, I think the primary factor is my dedication to a more ideal society. I harbor no love for the society of the present, but I can only hope that things will change and can only direct my research accordingly.
I began thinking about the selective nature of certain communities in terms of my “panidealist” philosophy this morning, only to come to a shocking conclusion:
Any community that enforces a single set of common beliefs through selection or coercion reduces itself to the strength of a single free-thinking individual.
Recall that my philosophy states that reality is itself an expression of various combinations of ideas. Mathematically, it is the image of a basis of ideas represented as a matrix. I’ve been told that this aspect of my philosophy is also the philosophical view of Bertrand Russel (though I’ve never read his philosophy and don’t really read philosophy in general, preferring to keep my own worldview untainted by the philosophies of others). However, what I am about to propose extends beyond his philosophy.
We can define the rank of a matrix as the number of linearly independent columns. Because the ideas underlying reality form a basis, they are, by definition, full rank. Their expression is the image of this basis, thus it is not full-rank. In other words, redundant ideas are expressed in various facets of reality (which is fine; the idea of sentience is not independent from the idea of humanity, for example).
Now let us take a community that selects for a shared set of ideas. Such selections include “fit”, personality, interests, etc.
Because all members of this community share these ideas in common, the size (and thus rank) of the basis is reduced. The more ideas are shared, the more the community’s basis approaches the size of a single individual.
Now it gets interesting: what if we define intelligence, or “cognitive power” (to differentiate it from the psychometric concept of intelligence), as the number of ideas one is simultaneously capable of expressing or creating?
We discover that an community consisting entirely of shared values is as intelligent as a single person. A community with completely independent ideas or values (deliberately selecting for people who do not match the existing basis would be the only way I can see of approaching one; actually attaining this is impossible) is full rank, and operates optimally save for the fact that any individual idea may not have enough momentum within the community to become fully expressed (a major problem). As this community introduces more redundancy, the size of the basis does not scale with the number of members, and the rank of the community remains the same despite an increasing size. Thus the average cognitive power of the community drops despite increasing membership. Negative returns.
This results in the satisfying conclusion (if the premises are correct, which is a philosophical matter) that any society that continuously expands its membership while selecting for particular ideas will ultimately run itself into the ground, possibly to be overcome by the thought of a single individual.
As Ayn Rand puts it at the end of Anthem, “For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.”
My vector idea for notation has indeed been formalized already (which is good, because this way I don’t need to make up my own notation): it’s known as “multi-index notation”. I deviate slightly from it in that I make the vector nature of the indices explicit by putting an arrow over them, but it otherwise appears to be the same.
Another Thanksgiving means another meeting with the family and another analysis of the nature of tradition. Clearly, traditions are by nature anachronisms; practices that began generally for the purpose of safety or survival but endure even when that need is removed because of the general momentum of social thought (see the theory I proposed about society being a neural net). However, this predicts the attitude of society to tradition; on the individual level, it is still something that requires empirical observation rather than an abstract theory.
It is interesting to observe how, at least in my family, tradition is a fiercely guarded aspect of individual social identity. To threaten one’s traditions is to threaten one’s self, therefore objective analysis (as if such a thing existed!) becomes absolutely impossible. To even suggest that one examine one’s traditions invites debate.
Now, I should point out that it isn’t Thanksgiving itself that I’m speaking of here. A day of companionship, reflection, and thanks is a welcome thing in almost any social framework; there certainly aren’t enough other days designated for this purpose. It’s simply the lack of “objective” reasoning being applied to tradition in general that is appalling. It represents a method by which one’s society/community can dictate one’s behavior; like all such methods, blindly following without applying one’s own reasoning as a filter deprives one of an individual identity. In essence, it coerces the individual to the ends of the society.
This is one of facets of the constraint function acting upon the social optimization process.
Because of my unique “panidealist” philosophy, I am perhaps the worst person to ask to review papers. If we cannot assess the full impact of an idea (an axiom in the philosophy), something would have to be horribly wrong for me to reject a paper because doing so may very well impose my ignorance upon others.
I hate the way the scientific establishment works. No small group of people should act as gatekeepers. Just let the ideas go before the community as a whole and let them choose which to work with. If you are too worried about massive amounts of quackery, let them “digg” or “bury” papers and sort by number of “diggs” / citations. It will work.
I have not found any sources that already discovered my online manifold learning technique, so I am going to write up a paper for it and submit it for publication in a journal. It might take a year for that as well, but I suppose there’s nothing I can do about it.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t publish it at all, as I don’t particularly like playing that game, but this is something worth disseminating.
Underlying all of the passion and fury in Beethoven’s music is an ineffable sort of… nobility. Yes, there is anger, fear, frustration, rage… but behind it all is an unquenchable human spirit shouting defiantly at the heavens, refusing to be subdued by the ravages of fate!
And how frustrating it is to be mute to this artform, unable to produce anything beyond a mere mimicry for an utter lack of classical training.
We have finally submitted the journal paper. We can expect to hear back… oh, probably in about a year.
Just think – the state of the art is constantly at least one year behind simply due to the turnaround time of research journals!