when i met you, 
i knew you,
with every passing day,
i  knew you less,
 until today,
i leave forever,
a stranger

Up to a certain point in your career, knowing more increases your options in the future. 

after a point, everything you don't know starts becoming a liability

is life sacred ?
is all life sacred ?
all life, unless you are a plant, means death also, for all life subsists on other life.

is the life of a fox is more valuable than the chicken it feeds on ?

is the life of a human more valuable than the life of the chicken which was previously a chicken, is now a meal and is tomorrow equal parts human and poop ?

if yes, then life as such doesn't matter,  only utility.
taken to a logical extreme, cannibalism can be justified if a big enough utility can be found.

if not, what're you gonna do ?
 this is how you get fruitarians. 

we can't all be fruitarians.

 to sustain 1.2. 7.x billion people ( note, we aren't able to do this even now
WITH farmed meat, hunting, fishing etc),  you would need lots and lots of orchards
assuming no pesticides, you would still have displaced a huge amount of animals, birds, and insects, leading to their deaths.

or wait, if you could build a matrix, and stack humans 10 per sq. meter ( standing) , then you rope in all humans into a region built specially in a reclaimed desert or plain ( we have lots of these ) , just the size of New York City , then you have the rest of the planet free for planting orchards, and robots powered by ,well,  electricity derived from the pod humans, can run around and gather fruits from all over the world and bring them to the humans.
When the humans and the orchards and the robots reach a sustainable harmony, we can start exporting this setup to other planets. 
Sounds like the start of a great science fiction story. hopefully one in which things work out, and not go all dystopia where the heroine wakes up to recurring dreams of fruit gathering ( on earth, lacking electricity to generate simulations to keep humans engaged, the GoPro from the fruit gathering robots is collected and cut to form 3d for the matrix), and is told of her destiny by some local robots and hobos, and makes a trip back home to earth expecting a planet of orchards, only to find a silo (pods) and a cube (central software generator) and robots plucking fruits
//we could use terraforming robots that build platforms
//  logical terraforming to build programming platforms
// GPT3 based software and character generation modules in the cube
//a religion of chanting which uses a telephone book (?)

if my life is as sacred as all other life, then am i not required to sustain it, cost be damned ?
if you add that the universe cannot be known ( matrix - all that comes to our brain are electrical signals, plato - cave of shadows) , then i cannot know for sure that there is life elsewhere, only a reasonable facsimile of it.

the only working answer seems to be  "my life is sacred, i wouldn't answer for the rest"

Book notes : Dance with Chance

Dance with Chance : Chapter 12

Overall goal of the book : not be fooled by the  illusion of control, and to know where control is possible and available, and where it isn't

- Benjamin Franklin's method of dividing a sheet of paper into two columns, and writing the Pros and Cons
- technique to increase 'batting average' of decisions.
- this chapter will read like a book on 'how to improve your skills in ,say golf of tennis'
- will help you face your dilemmas consistently and methodically

- roadmap
- two types of decisions - repetitive and unique
- m 1 - blinking, or gut level decision making
- m 2 - thinking, dm via articulated deliberate process
- m 3 - `sminking` - use Simple Models or decision rules
- m 4 - opinions of others / experts

example of repetitive decisions
Company  making hire/no hire  decision on a fresh graduate applying . The same question keeps getting asked repeatedly, within the same context.

example of unique decision
graduate receiving a) an offer from company A,  b)while holding an offer from company B ,  c) while company C has given positive feedback but not yet an offer, d) also having  option to en-roll into an Ivy League school in a coveted Journalism major, e) while his girlfriend wants to tour Europe after graduation (separation, or join)
one-off life changing decision

Sminking - aka Simple Model ing
 1. Couples asked to monitor 2 variables alone - #times they made love - #times they argued
 2. Bell Labs had problem with bad debts - they gave 80,000 new customers access without deposit ( out of 12million new every year. (  Hadoop guys must be jizzing their pants)). This was the fore-runner of the credit scoring system.  points for how long they've held their job, lived in their house, whether they owned it, household earning etc. Saved around $137 million.

- in baseball, your batting average is the best bet.

counter argument
  - the human brain can process much more information and can make a better decision than simple rules - god knows what they are leaving out.
 - cuts out chance of  human intuition weighing in
 - cuts out experts who have depth in the area

counter counter argument
 - human brains make different decisions given the same information in different contexts, different times etc. There are also biases( Kahneman, Ariely, Munger, Bevelin, that 'you are not so smart' book.. )

misc :
  - such rules could be discriminatory ( or more like they expose the true state of society ? )
  - simple rules work only a majority of the cases. do not use it for unique decisions

experiment : A, B buttons, Red, Green lights . Green light = small cash prize. Red == 0.
Over time participants glean that both buttons bring up both lights randomly.
a little later, they identify that button A brings up the Green light more often than not.
They press A more, instead of doing only A ,which is the Simple Rule  conclusion.
Conclusion : want to feel in control, greed - want to out-predict the system
 - people are less like to gain control by ceding control to a simple rule.
Corollary - when stakes are increased - more reward, or a punitive, people stick to pressing A. Now fear of losing  is in the mix.

SimpleModel ing has saved billions of dollars
SimpleModel ing is not easy to build, depends on choosing the right variables. to do this, the difficulty is emotional, not cognitive.

SimpleModel ing is limited by inherent uncertainty

Decision making in Unique situations :  ask and answer the 3 basic questions -
1. What is at stake ?
2. What are the uncertainties (AAA approach) ?
3. What is our risk appetite ?

sample question
0 . while there are many offers, each one presents an opportunity cost, so no need to be over-obliging
1. does business experience help with experience and money for a degree in journalism later
2. does any of the cos publish a journal he can write for ?
3. is the relationship strong enough to survive separation ?
 
AAA approach
  - accept there are uncertainties, generate alternatives
  - assessment  - lay out what works what could go wrong how will things typically play out
 - augment  the uncertainty ( or rather, adjust the margin of safety, or in IT terms, add buffer) - eg IT projects suffer from optimism bias.

When uncertainty becomes threatening, there's an unwillingness to consider the consequences

approaches
   - take an outside view, imagine you are a consultant hired to make the decision.
  - consider and use benchmarks
 
(success in journalism is more about flair, networking and pushiness, plus a healthy dose of luck)

setting risk appetite
 -  fear and greed (and biases) kick in differently when decision is represented differently ( people might opt for a surgery  presented as with 60% success rate but not for one presented as with a 40 % failure rate). So consider both perspectives - what if you win what if you lose

Experts
If you consult an expert and the advice doesn't work out, do you say " hey, I did my best and got a good expert" and relax, or do you curse ? (Hint : it's your responsibility, and outcome.)

The Harry Potter Rule : There is no magic in our world. We are all muggles.

use expert advice as one of the  inputs in decision making. ask experts about other options, their personal recommendations ( to family/friends for eg), areas that you might not know of , other experts, sources, conflict of interest .....

Experts, fakes and Blink - Meegeren painted many Vermeer masterpieces what were exhibited in great European galleries until revealed as fake by him.  Experts didn't catch it .
Grand masters can 'blink' only after 10 yrs of extensive practice with  consistent, accurate feedback.
 If time allows, follow the grand masters , follow each Blink with Thinking.

Blink = good for muscular reactions.
Sminking rules can become obsolete .

Philip Tetlock (Haas), massive study , 82000 decisions by polsci experts => simple models are more accurate

Emotion vs Reason
 - the heart has its reasons that reason knoweth not - Blaise Pascal
 - ...reason is subservient to emotion - (paraphrasing) - Hume
-  the most important things are known by the heart (paraphrasing) Antoine St-Exupery - Little Prince
- emotional Bermuda Triangle - greed-fear-hope
 - note your emotion w.r.t the decision, defer decision until you can consider it under different occasions
-

How did I get here ?
via
https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Books/popular.html
Review(4 stars)  : https://www.amazon.com/review/R118HK6UBQM6DM/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Next :
Sowell :
Economics = scarcity + decisions on using resources ( aka trade-off-ing)

my soldier bookmark

if you toss a coin and get a head, you may not get a tail the next time. yet, if you toss a coin a million times, you are likely to get equal heads and equal tails. reeks of an eventually consistent system to me

a  hundred unread tabs open,
they tell us,
we often reach for more than we can grasp,
wisdom & fortune don't hide here,
this is the message of our times,
you can't have everything,
after all, where would you put it ?

( the autoplaying video hides very well indeed,
the medium is the message)

opposite of 'cost' as in 'belongs to a cost center' is not 'profit, as in 'belongs to a profit center'.
it is 'business differentiator', as in ' can make the difference between business success and business runaway success'

when you try to improve  or transform yourself, you run a great risk

if you know what your final stage looks like, i must ask, how do you ,before the change, evaluate how valuable the changed state will be ?

and you can't improve unless you declare yourself not good enough. and if your measuring rod is off, and you end up measuring against a standard set in the mind that you left in your old skin, then you are lost.

without objective measurement of progress, you are completely adrift in a sea in the fog

Some ideas are like electric chairs. one must sit in them gingerly, tentatively, and never all at once.

Big Money - P.G Wodehouse

SPOILER ALERT

1. Berry and Biscuit, both impecunious, scions of nobility

2. The former forced to become a working stiff, a wage slave, rush-to-reach-the-office-on-time

3.  The latter keeping up appearances, 'the touch' being the chosen and fallen-to way of generating income.

4. Biscuits 'Guvnor', a Lord, with a large estate eating taxes, lives the same way.

5.  Biscuit always dreams of fortune, is always open for the large jackpot, not beneath walking up to strangers and saying' I know your secret' and acting on the outcome. Berry shows no such appetite for fortune - he'd rather be out prospecting in the West, and be known as  ' as tough as they come'

6. Biscuit sniffs Hoke's scam, walks up to Hoke, says ' I know your secret', and is prepared to raise money to buy up all Horned Toad stock the next morning.
If the story has a comfortable ending with a large buffer of money,  it is this activity that brings it about.

7.  Berry facilitates by knocking out Hoke ( and  his Retainer, by knocking out the Captain).

the body is not a machine. it is a biological system. meaning if there is no immunity to a current pathogen, it can manufacture the tools needed ( antibody thinggies - templates, alerts)  and alert the. cops (wbc) to watch out for these.
a computer or a car cannot do that.
but an economy and state can ?

I started out reading (about)  'The System of Objects'  , my stand on OOP  (against) notwithstanding. I noticed that the content was more arcane than usual ;  I am used to going through multiple steps to 'get' a point being made, but in this case, the point never arrived.

Only later did I realise that  this system of objects was not like that system of objects,  like the one I had in mind - such as the one written by Luca Cardelli,  who is neither a chocolate ( blue ones have salt)  nor a female who played Velma,  but is(was?)  a computer scientist in the employ of Microsoft (when he wrote about Object Calculi )


As per the writer, things are, then man makes copies of them, which function well as proxies, then later the deluge of kitsch replace the reality, then we end up with William Gibson sitting in the back of a limo saying "We live in a mediated world".

I always thought Gibson was talking while standing on the shoulders of McLuhan(s).


Mouse : Do you know what it really reminds me of? Tasty Wheat. Did you ever eat Tasty Wheat? Switch : No, but technically, neither did you.

--- The Matrix (1. there's only 1 Matrix. there are no sequels, there are two other movies that share the name but are in no way related)

Mouse is talking about the taste of 'Tasty Wheat' and how no one has ever eaten some. Coz the matrix, of course. But are there real world parallels ?

Of course .

If you talk to older folk, like my grand parents, they'll tell you that the rice we eat tastes nothing like the rice we used to get ,that was real tasty etc etc. Modern day rice looks and tastes like plastic etc etc

A few hundred years of human breeding has 'taught' rice to grow up and out in three months, and not fall prey to a host of diseases and pests, and most importantly , be discoverable in a corporate's labs as well as lend itself to documentation.

Funny how the destiny of a plant is tied to its compatibility to an offshoot of Gutenberg's invention.


Of course, bananas looked like this without human intervention

attribution : Warut Roonguthai / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

the key is to work on something at which you get better with time. technology is a quicksand laden with landmines. you can spend all your life on building things with tech and come out a novice in a year as a few hundred dev stacks roll out. what makes the trap stickier is that they don't throw away what is there ,so you cleanly level up, there are still java developers who don't know reactive, and there are still folks who know mysql who don't know replication etc etc...

unless you get a handle on the business end of things , you are going to be in deep wank-land, coz it's nice to build a neural network that can recognise pictures of kate winslet etc etc , and  the line between business and hobby code is thinner than f, but one pays and the other doesn't.
and that makes all the difference.

What if there's just one particle in the entire universe, one super small sub atomic particle, and a very powerful probability generator which makes the particle appear all over the place, and simultaneously ?
if there's no conservation of mass, then is it not possible that at the subatomic level, the particleS are just a manifestation of a 3 piece probability function, and that time is an illusion there fore they seem to appear in sequence, but are actually different throws of the same dice (particle) ?

I think I sound so smart, but I wouldn't be surprised if I cringe at these lines at some time in the future

God's Debris makes so much sense ....

time is an illusion

"Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so"
  -

Am I conscious this moment ?
Yes
Was I conscious a moment ago ?
......


- Susan BlackMore , Ten Zen Questions


As per Wen the Eternally Surprised, time is an illusion and there is only the present moment. The universe is destroyed  at the end of it and created anew .

Scott Adams, God's Debris. goes on to say that between the destruction and creation, probability comes into play. And this accounts for all change.
In other words, Probability is, and in each iteration of the world, it manifests so that it looks like a thing is changing.
Brains are delusion generators and come up with stories  like aging and growth to explain chance.

// Hogfather quote - justice mercy

Zen harps on 'there is nothing' so does all buddhism

Right knowledge in Buddhism is Jhana or deep absorption states where the self is silent,
Nirvana is when the self is silent

therefore, it follows that the current noisy self is just a large distraction, a newspaper full of text and color and no content.

it is highly stressful for all to co-exist in presence. my recommendation is all activities have their own closed working areas as much as possible and some common tasks which need co-operation to be open areas.
 open overlapping work areas are a panopticon and a personality killer.