Information

What’s the difference between Mr. Information and Ms. Information? Misinformation is a very bad thing (ba-dum-tsh)

I know I’ve already written on this subject before (See The Age of Misinformation) but there is a still more important conclusion that I have reached. (Thanks to Michael Crichton) The conclusion is that when people do not check the information they receive these people are more easily manipulated. Many of the latest issues affecting the world were fraught with misinformation or misleading figures. Keep in mind that the competent manipulation of any set of figures can be used to prove any point, and not only that but bias is just as likely to prejudice the facts. People who go in believing one thing are more likely to prove what they believe in. They will often adjust factors and make excuses for other figures that don’t add up to support their opinion. How much room for bias is there? Take a look at Wikipedia’s list of possible ways Experimenter’s Bias can occur (here). That’s 56 different classifications of bias in 6 categories. If you haven’t clicked the link yet, I could tell you that that’s an average of 9 or 10 classifications for each category. This is certainly true but it is also misleading. Almost half (22) of them are in the second category which is selecting and specifying the study sample. I should also point out that this bias applies more often in the sociological and medical studies according to good old wiki. This makes sense because people are biased and they might choose people who might be in their study. The bias listed in that category can generally by averted by use of a double blind study. If you don’t actually know what that is, wiki is here (Double-blind_trials). It’s a good standard to follow but typically only eliminates certain human aspects of bias.

There are still studies that openly contradict each other with figures that don’t always align. So who has time for all the research to determine which studies are more reputable, which ones are based on more solid evidence? Or all the database access for that matter? I find that sometimes as with Marijuana debates there is such a huge socio political aspect that the figures become indiscernible. With respect to such issues which are at the core of people’s beliefs and behaviour, the only thing you can trust is the figures. A questionnaire study I did at a highschool level (and which is therefore reasonably unreliable) supported other, more reliable studies that showed many people had very strong opinions about abortion with a significant number changing political parties and religious denominations based on the views supported by those organizations – all without having looked into how a human fetus develops! If you go up to a stranger on the street and ask them what their opinion on abortion is, they will (be uncomfortable if they’re the shyer type) and often give you a firmly believed opinion on whether it is right or wrong. If you ask the same person at which point the fetus has a heart, brain activity, the ability to feel pain, or actually looks like a human infant the vast majority won’t be able to answer any of those questions. These issues are clouded by confirmation bias or the belief that humans like to select information that supports their view. This is further clouded by cognitive dissonance – the unease you feel when you hold two contradicting beliefs. The classic example being someone who smokes marijuana is not inclined to believe it’s bad for their health and when confronted with information to the contrary will try to mitigate the dangers.

More often than not, an argument is won by the better speaker, not the more logical individual. So beware when confronted with the latest trending idea (Y2K, killerbees, global warming?). Often these are political tools and make use of the media. People become interested and a human habit I’ve noticed is to throw the most shocking figures and most abstract and possibly over extended figures at you. It is suggested that cults and other religious organizations/ publications were/ are political/ economic manipulation. (Scientology, The Divine Comedy, Mormonism, and just to be even more controversial, Christianity in general) In any case, if you are unsure of whether or not you are being misinformed, and lack the time/ skills to research the issue, check out snopes.com or other skeptic run websites and ask their opinion. Expert opinions are great if you can get them but often these issues are much more complex than they’re made out to be. The more you look into science behind issues like global warming the more you realize there is a lot of not-knowing going on.

Why you can’t possibly win. (In 395 words)

Let’s start this with assuming you aren’t God (as in omniscient). If you’re attempting to be an ethical person (See my previous post) then you may be struggling with what is known as existential angst. Some world problems may be bothering you and you simply must do something about it. Or perhaps, you have some personal decisions to make and you don’t know enough to make the informed decision. More or less you have 3 doors and you really have no way of knowing what is behind them. You must understand the limits of what you know, and from that, the limits of how much to blame you are for your actions.

Buddhism has one of it’s core principles as knowing the effect of your actions. Picture a drop of water in a totally still pool of water. The wave ripples outwards, you can clearly visualize the perfect circle and you can see how the drop has affected the water around it. Those are your actions- in a video game. Now picture an ocean in a hurricane. Picture the effect of a drop of water on the ocean. That is you deciding what to have for breakfast. Vastly unimportant in our time and space. You’re not powerless, but in a world of 7 billion people, your ability to cause change is most often limited to the water droplet that starts the leading path the other drops will follow down the windshield in the rain. It’s possible to be the drop that gathers more drops, more and more and more until it is a creek that is joined by others to make a river that carves canyons through the earth over years. Like the water system, it is all connected.

It’s important to understand that your path down the windshield may not be to save the world. It’s not always your job to care for those who are affected by you. Unless you can say for certain “they” are your responsibility, “they” are not. Worry about yourself. The largest changes we can make for ourselves are the ones closest to home. If you break a window in your house it sucks a lot more than if you break a window across the world on your two day trip.

Your actions may cause a butterfly effect- but if you know yourself, then you will know how responsible you are.

Awareness as the goal for ethics (in 423 words)

Coming from my last post, (Determinism in 417 words) I’m taking a quick look at ethics. The thesis here is that the highest ethical goal is awareness. Note that the highest goal is not something that everyone can achieve or that they necessarily should achieve. Simply put, the powers of awareness shouldn’t be given to people who can’t come to understand them on their own.

For example, if Joe Schmoe owns a business and hires Mr. Dude who knows all about how the market works. It’s not necessarily a good idea for Mr. Dude to give that power to Mr. Schmoe. Mr. Schmoe lacks the know-how to be aware of what effects his actions might have on the market and might think too highly of himself to regard Mr. Dude’s warnings. Mr. Schmoe could very easily make some awful mistakes with huge retribution.

The Spiderman motto/cliche is that “with great power comes great responsibility”, which is true enough. There is an unstated condition in this statement- great responsibility requires comprehensive awareness. You can’t simply try to do right with oodles of power, you don’t really know how! So it would seem, then, that our goal should be to know what to do with power. The problem after that (there will always be a greater problem) is keeping power while being ethical with it.

Most people won’t understand the reasoning for your decisions. You may not even be in a position where you can actually explain it to them. It becomes a balancing act of the pressure from those granting you power and the pressure to do the right thing. You may even find that you are forced to make certain decisions based on these and other pressures. (Surprise you still don’t reaaaally have purely free will)

You’ll find it’s hard to have power. If you want easy, then perhaps ignore awareness- life has enough problems. It’s even harder to be ethical with power. As your power increases it becomes increasingly difficult. Humans weren’t designed to be super-powerful. We evolved in tribes of a few hundred and equality was a fairly prominent concept. Of course, there was likely warring between tribes because tribes looked out for their members exclusively. The point is we were not made to ethically consider everyone on the planet, the planet itself, world economies, entire countries (the list is endless).

If you wish to ethically rule anything you need to understand it very well. Otherwise you- like many others- will blindly do what you think seems best on limited information. Awareness is the highest ethical goal.

Determinism in 417 words

Cause and effect is a huge basis for science. Remove cause and effect and you remove logic and continuity from our world.

Pretend you want to decide whether you want a Mac or a PC. A big part of your choice will be based on what the people around you say. If your entire family uses Macs, your entire community uses Macs and your entire city uses Macs, then you’re pushed towards Macs. Your brain looks at all these things and makes it’s choice.

Let’s say then, that you buy your Mac. Your city loves Macs because Mac did a great job advertising. The guy who invented computer programming language died the same year as the guy who got rich using it (and other things) and the world noticed Steve Jobs’ death. Dennis Ritchie probably didn’t have a great media team.

Mac had a great advertising campaign because of the huge amount of money and time put into the campaign. If you look farther back at the causes of a single action of yours, the explanations grow more and more complex. There are, effectively, an infinite amount of causes for any and every action. These infinite causes cause everything that happens in our world.

If you trace these causes back, then you reach the beginning of time. Let’s assume time started at that event and the universe is only affected by forces that came into existence at that point. (Sorry folks, this means no currently interacting God). We can then say that cause and effect took care of the rest. It would as if you hit a pool ball then simply watched as hit another ball and both these balls hit a few more- regardless of what the ball thinks or decides, it has already been put in motion. If you are any good at pool you’ve sunk a few balls. Obviously, this is a gross oversimplification as there are multiple balls and a pool table could never adequately describe the universe. The point is the system is contained and as something created and influenced in every way by the system, your free will is an illusion.

As an agent of fate, however, you still have responsibility. You have to make the best choices you can. The illusion of free will is still there- the infinite factors mean you have to make your best guess at which ones have the best outcome. But that leads into ethics (which outcome is the best? How best to achieve this outcome?)

The recommendation

I’m lactose intolerant, and I always used to state that as my reason for disliking “cheesy” things. But if we get into this metaphor, then I have to face the truth. For, in the process of making cheese, almost all lactose content is removed! Yes cliche’s are cheesy, but cheese is really good.

And so, without further ado, I must recommend, especially those who enjoy psychology, http://www.drkaryn.com/.

I’m not so much recommending her website because I haven’t actually looked at it at all, but her material is rather good. It will sound a little cheesy, and maybe you’ll feel like you’re just too cool for that sort of thing but she certainly knows what she’s doing.

And as she says (and I from my poor memory hazard an attempt at paraphrasing with no attempt at getting the wording right) cheesy stuff is pretty much always right.

And let’s face it, the label cool wasn’t made for people who radiate warm fuzziness.

The sleep cycle

1. I am far too lazy (I’d say time constricted but undisciplined is probably more accurate) to actually cite references for the things I say. Don’t assume everything I say is true. Do your own research and hopefully it will match my conclusions.

 

Sleep cycles are important. It’s important to stay consistent. It’s very difficult to stay consistent. Difficult not so much meaning only the skilled can achieve it, but rather that it may take multiple efforts to achieve it.

There are a few things that make your sleep cycle important. The first is the circadian rhythm. Pronounced :[sur-key-dee-uhn, -kad-ee-, sur-kuh-dee-uhn] (stolen from dictionary.com) or basically any way you feel like pronouncing it, this is your body’s built in scheduler and it takes some cues from external factors such as daylight. A wikipedia depicted rhythm shows different areas of alertness, hormone secretion, temperature etc. Basically it means that naturally humans tend to be tired around midnight and highly alert by 10. Which means it’s a relatively important part of being effective.

The second reason is REM sleep which is theorized to be very important for many cognitive functions. This occurs multiple times in a night but as your sleep progresses, so does the length of your REM. REM is also the stage in which we dream. What I’m getting at is if you have a sleep cycle that is consistent, you won’t wake in the middle of dreams so you can be on time for work. You will, instead, be done dreaming and your body may even automatically wake itself at a certain time which, believe me, is refreshing.

Resources which describe how long you ought to sleep for based on your age are readily available so if you’re really that concerned (and if you can actually afford the time to sleep, which let’s face it, isn’t likely) you can check for yourself.

Through attempting to acquire a regular sleep cycle myself, I find that it is one of the primary methods of increasing my own productivity, and relies primarily on me getting up at the same time every day. I also find that I need a week or more before deviation becomes non-detrimental (and even then it can’t be a huge deviation more than one day a week).

The public diary entry.

People often express envy for things such as perfect bodies, money, power, fame, intelligence, artistic ability etc. however, often what they truly want is support, purpose and acknowledgement. It’s very unusual for people to be assertive about the latter needs. For whatever reason, we believe that if we are perfect, then people will accept us and we will be happier in that respect. I am one of the above described. I’ve even been successful in putting on the illusion that, if I’m not perfect, I am at least somehow better than everyone else.

I realize that trying to maintain such an illusion is taxing. It causes social friction, especially when an aspect of my life I rely heavily on as a crutch for my self-esteem is taken away or an area of my life is unsuccessful. Henceforth, I shall make the effort to remind myself I have personal value unrelated to my pursuits, and neither a need nor a desire to be “perfect”. Each morning I, hopefully, can remind myself that “No, I am not perfect. No, I do not wish to be. As an agent of chance, as is everyone else, I am equal to everyone else- not better nor worse. My goal in life is not to be better than anyone else, but rather to push forward on my path of least resistance in a positive way.”

This way, I can eliminate pride and hopefully take steps to becoming more open with my friends and family. This way, I can do things more for the sake of doing them rather than for the bragging rights which I’ve always fortunately made a point of never using.

On a somewhat related note, I believe the purpose for my life as a teenager was to reach this stage. I believe that really this is the goal all teenagers struggle so painfully to meet. I know I’ve learned this before but failed to apply it. It’s as if I had all the right answers but couldn’t use any of them.

Like all humans, then, I have needs and drives. If I want to discover what my drives are, and presumably, find the most efficient way of achieving that, then I should use a simple questioning method.

1. What do(n’t) I want?
2. Why do(n’t) I want it?
3. What I really want is:

I have found this to be fairly effective. Should we all be honest with ourselves, this could be an enlightening tool.

Reality and equality

We are not created equal. The least observant of us can see that. Genetically, situationally, some people have advantages.Yet our justice system is robotic in nature. Every person is equal. It’s a very Kantian system. All must follow the same rules, otherwise the system does not work. That’s all well and good, people tend more to act on the assumption that some of their actions will cause them to lose the umbrella protection of society. In the Isaac Asimov inspired movie “I, Robot”, a robot saves a grown man over a small child. It calculated the chance of survival of both of them. The protagonist clearly believed the robot to be in the wrong- as would most other humans. Why? Humans understand we are not simply interchangeable units

Yet our justice system to a degree reflects the belief that we are equal. I allow that the jury, judges etc add the necessary human element. It demands however an aspect of dishonesty. If I get caught I have to feign remorse in order to protect myself. I understand the system and the fact it’s malleable in such a way that people can get off with less than the guideline prescribed punishment is not a problem for me.

It comes to things like lying. Why is lying wrong? The only immoral parts of lying are 1: disrespect to the person being lied to and 2: the propagation of false information. Both parts have exceptions I’d be glad to elaborate on if you can’t figure it out yourself. So go ahead, lie to me- but I might just know enough about it to catch you.

Challengers

The most important people are the ones who, through putting themselves out there in reaction to me putting myself out there, challenge me. Not the ones who play devils advocate for the sake of challenging me, but legitimately accept their worldviews over mine. These are the people who push my growth.

The flowchart for murdering people comparing Doers with Writers.

DOER

Someone makes you angry—> murder them—-> Get caught—-> Public resentment and jail time—-> Life Sucks.

WRITER
Someone makes you angry—> Make an elaborate scheme to murder them (takes approximately 5 months)—> No longer angry with them—> Publish and sell—> Fame and money—-> Life is awesome.