Ideas are the most powerful things in existence. Here are mine.
I saw the signs of the collapsing housing market, oil, and the weakening dollar back in 2006 and even predicted the month it would begin to affect the overall economy (November; some instability happened in August as well but it was quickly righted), but I had no idea it would last this long.
I wonder if we’re heading into a depression. I guess if it gets really bad I can always move somewhere else. Hopefully it won’t come to that.
Yellow signs seem to be an emerging Internet meme. Usually you can never see these coming, but I think Knuth did 
I’m beginning to wonder how can I honestly continue to claim that following a moral path has its own rewards and that the ends do not justify the means when the successful almost invariably tend to succeed on their loose morals – they believe that it’s ok to deceive, cheat, subvert, or even outright steal so long as they aren’t caught. When they’re caught, they then bemoan their fate, not because they were doing something wrong, but because they believe they were not clever enough to avoid capture. To state it bluntly, they have no independent moral system in place; it is tied up completely within society’s reaction to their behavior. Because they imagine that their behavior is common and because they have not been caught for all of it, they still believe themselves good people.
I know that Machiavelli observed that this is the route to power, but one of my great quests in life has been searching for ways to obtain success without compromising moral integrity – in essence, to know what Machiavelli said, but to either reconcile his advice with my morals or distance myself from it entirely. I’ve been doing it for 11 years now and I still haven’t found a satisfactory answer.
I know for a fact that my adherence to integrity limits me, but I will not deviate from my personal values for the sake of a society that will not accept them. Regardless of the rejection I’ve found (and the inevitable future rejection I will find) because I refuse to press myself into the molds people expect me to fill, I do not regret this decision any longer. No rejection can compare to what happened to me two years ago, when I was summarily shut out from my desired field and barred from what I then saw as the meaning of my life because I was very much unlike a traditional graduate student (actually, I’d argue that the difference makes me more effective, since typical graduate students have not impressed me, though on the other hand, I’ll never have anyone to exchange complex ideas with and must consequently operate in isolation), and by this time I’ve transcended that rejection sufficiently to realize that if I discard the intrinsic suffering of rejection, no further consequent suffering will touch me. I merely grieve for society itself, that it elevates such people to power!
I’ve already summarized this point in my writing on Positive Disintegration, but I’d like to reiterate: The first and second factors are not equivalent motivators, functionally or cognitively. They should not be placed at the same level of personality development. Doing so equates pathological individuals such as psychopaths with the masses, who generally cause no problems beyond those their society compels them to. Here’s a quote I found on talentdevelop.com to illustrate the confusion that grouping these into one cognitive level produces:
“The great majority of population lives on and rarely grows beyond the level of primary integration. The most primitively integrated character structures are observed in psychopaths and psychopath-like individuals, who suffer from “emotional retardation,” characterized by inability to experience empathy and guilt.
On the level of primary integration, we can observe two forms of adjustment of an individual to society: negative adjustment – non-creative adaptation, characterized by conformity to social conventions, lack of reflection and criticism in approach to reality, adjustment to “what is;” and negative maladjustment, which is disregard for social norms and conventions stemming from extreme egocentrism and ruthless realization of one’s lower level goals (psychopaths, criminals).”
Here we have two separate processes being described as if they are common approaches, when in reality, these are intrinsic responses, the first of which the great majority of individuals will adopt. The second response is only reserved for people who really should be classed at a lower cognitive level, for they are only governed by the first factor.
Nonprofit organizations are much more complex to found than for-profit corporations. This is probably due to the tax-exemption provision, but I am wondering if it is perhaps a prudent idea to find an accountant to help me navigate the maze the IRS has placed before me.
First the battery life of the MX Revolution greatly disappoints, now I also notice that the “60 day” life of the DiNovo Edge is actually closer to 30 days (which is still good).
Logitech really needs to get their battery act together – especially for a $200 keyboard.
Kant is an extremely underrated philosopher. He had some absolutely great ideas. Some of them are similar to principles of my own philosophy, such as his “categorical imperative” and stance as a nondeterminist, while others are similar to principles of Panidealism (which I guess is another facet of my own philosophy), such as the absolute inability to know what the nature of free will is and thus the lack of ability to make an objective moral judgment based on this inability. If you replace morals and free will with a general concept of an “idea”, you have a central Panidealist tenet. Actually, a quick review of his main works indicates that Kant may have hit on this in his “Critique of Pure Reason” (which, in my defense, took him 10 years to write) – the resulting philosophy is called “transcendental idealism”. However, it’s only one Panidealist principle, although an important one, and so my philosophy chugs onward.
Even where his ideas differ from mine, they remain intriguing.
So far I’ve been told my developing philosophy has similarities with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Berkeley, and Russel, and, aside from the Republic, I’ve never studied any of their philosophy. I don’t study philosophy as a subject, as I believe that it’s foolish to let your own philosophy be influenced by the thoughts of others. I simply think, and the philosophy of others just… emerges.
Even if it bears similarities with other philosophers, my philosophy remains new at least in how I combine these principles. The best way to forge ahead in philosophy is to simply ignore everything that came before and think. Maybe you’ll reinvent many things. Maybe you’ll say the same thing in different ways. But somewhere in there, there will be novelty.
For some reason, I’m becoming very good at thinking up the same ideas that Google does. A few of them I gave at interviews or SoC proposals well before they were established products, so it is possible that Google used those ideas, but I anticipated others, such as Knol, very shortly before they were launched.
I should somehow use this to my advantage – but I’m not sure how
To summarize the practical aspect of Panidealism (rather than the theoretical duality):
“You don’t know everything; stop acting like you do.”
That’s it – it simply states that we will never have the complete set of knowledge required to judge the ultimate consequences of ideas, and we should stop limiting ideas on such judgments in our ignorance.
Quoth the New York Times on both perfectly valid research being ignored and how a field becomes “hot”.
The usual pattern is taking place here: first, someone comes up with new results which the scientific community either ignores or rushes to discredit because they’ve somehow got the idea that skepticism (essentially making themselves unreceptive to ideas that don’t fit with their dogma) is the best way to evaluate scientific discoveries:
“But when those tools emerged in the early 1990s, Dr. Dick found stem cells in acute myelogenous leukemia, a blood cancer. He reported that such cells made up just 1 percent of the leukemia cells and that those were the only ones that could form tumors in mice.
Yet Dr. Dick’s research, Dr. Wicha said, “was pretty much ignored.” Cancer researchers, he said, were not persuaded — and even if they had accepted the research — doubted that the results would hold for solid tumors, like those of the breast, colon, prostate or brain.”
Potential avenue that opens up all sorts of treatment possibilities presented, but they “weren’t persuaded”. Nice.
Now, wait for it…
“That changed in 1994, when Dr. Wicha and a colleague, Dr. Michael Clarke, who is now at Stanford, reported finding cancerous stem cells in breast cancer patients.
“The paper hit me like a bombshell,” said Robert Weinberg, a professor of biology at M.I.T. and a leader in cancer research. “To my mind, that is conceptually the most important paper in cancer over the past decade.””
Ah, so you “weren’t persuaded” when one person found it in AML, but if it’s in breasts, well, that’s a whole different story! Now it’s the most important paper in the past decade! After all, even if stem cells may not form in solid tumors, there must be no value in treating what is probably the most virulent form of leukemia, right? (I had described this exact sociological phenomenon of violent swings in opinion with new presentations just yesterday on a Slashdot discussion thread – also, why the disporportional emphasis on breast cancer? There are other cancers that kill many more people, have much higher fatality rates, and strike both sexes equally).
Now we see an idea becoming “hot”:
“Dr. Weinberg and others began pursuing the stem-cell hypothesis, and researchers now say they have found cancerous stem cells in cancers of the colon, head and neck, lung, prostate, brain, and pancreas.
Symposiums were held. Leading journals published paper after paper.”
Etc.
It’s a good thing they’re taking this theory seriously. It’s a bad thing that they ignored it for as long as they did because they were too convinced that they already knew everything to take a valuable hypothesis seriously. Sure, demand proof if you’d like. But don’t take absence of it or a perceived lack of quality as evidence that the hypothesis is wrong. Science is not law; the burden of proof can be taken up by others if they are not satisfied with the evidence because ultimately, we are all in this together.
Here’s another interesting tidbit from a linked article, which in my mind supports my theory that one tumor could supplant another if injected into the same site:
“They then injected laboratory-grown cancer cells into the benign tumors, which spread swiftly throughout the teratoma clusters. The result, they believe, is an ideal test bed for anticancer agents.”
This in turn supports my idea that it is possible to alter the characteristics of a tumor by harvesting and injecting particular cells. Selecting the weak in this manner can possibly make tumors more sensitive to treatment.
Still waiting on the equipment and training – or collaboration with someone who has such equipment and training – to actually test that one