Sentio Ergo Sum

My friend and current boss, Al Shalloway, has been talking with be about cogito ergo sum for a little while, now.

While I think the ergo sum part is the critical insight - the recognition that your knowledge is limited to your own existence - he's been debating the cogito part.

The assertion I think he's making is that you don't think.  I don't know if I agree but I definitely have become convinced that you don't know you think.

You do, however, know that you experience.  At least, I know that I do.  Moreover, I don't know anything else.

So I wonder if the sentio ergo sum is a more appropriate declaration.  It still contains the essential assertion underpinning all reason: that we basically don't know anything.  It's actually a stronger statement of that fact.

Cogito Ergo Sum

First, I'll Rant About How Crazy People Are...

If you're one of those people who is insane but can't face it so you call my ideas nuts, you might want to skip this section.  You know who you are (but can't admit it).

When I learned about Descartes's discovery.  I learned from someone who understood what it really meant.

I'm referring, of course, to the discovery he made that mattered most, not all his contributions to mathematics.  His mathematical contributions were great but, next to his philosophical contributions, they are a mouse fart on the Yellowstone Caldera.

It has come to my attention that there are some insane people who have interpreted "cogito ergo sum" as the foundation of all knowledge.  This is false.  That discovery is the root of all doubt.

The fact that the only knowledge you truly have is that there is an observing thing doing something you call "thinking" that you call "I" means that everything else you call "knowledge" is actually just a well-supported guess.

It doesn't matter if this was his intent.  This is the correct interpretation of his findings and it is why he won philosophy regardless of what he meant.

It sure looks to me like he meant the right thing but there's no point in arguing with someone over what a dead guy meant.  If you don't believe me just go count up all the Christians who think they can use the words of the most world's most famous pacifist to justify war.  So I'll just say that the right interpretation is the right interpretation and move on to my real point.

Doubt as an Exploratory Tool

The tool Descartes used, as I recall it, to arrive at his critical discovery is a powerful tool and I don't think it's done all the work it can.

First, let me introduce a similar tool I first heard of by reading the Heath brothers book, Decisive.  One of the thought-tools they suggest for widening your options is a mental game called "the vanishing-options genie."  In this game, you pretend that you have a reverse genie following you around taking away options (rather than granting wishes).

I've seen this tool help people break out of narrow-frames of reference when making decision.  It's very effective.

That got me thinking, can we use a great Deceiver to do the same thing with our analyses?  So often, I find that humans (myself included) want to stick to what they know.

We start with a thought and say "Is this true?"  Sometimes we say "How might this be wrong?"  Either way, we're starting with a point-of-reference that shapes subsequent thoughts and actions.

One tool that helps me is to use Descartes's omnipotent deceiver as a stand-in for the vanishing-options genie; instead of being a vanishing-options genie, it's a vanishing-assumptions genie.

Basically, when you are trying to understand why something works the way it does, take something you know to be true and assume it's actually one of the Deceiver's illusions.

I find this helps me branch out and consider alternative interpretations more readily.

Implementation

In case my previous suggestion was too abstract, I'll throw some examples in here.  The examples of knowledge to abandon are just placeholders; you'll need to pick stuff relevant to whatever you are considering.  The examples of kinds of replacements are probably reusable.

One way to do this is to replace the "illusion" with a "truth" - an alternate reason why something works the way it does.  For instance, you could say "it's not going faster than the speed of light, it's just going back in time."  Or, if you're one of the nutjobs who already believes that kind of crap, flip it around and see what happens.

Another option is to replace the "illusion" with an admission of ignorance.  Instead of "pull works because it aligns the efforts of many people toward a single goal and organizes their work in a delay-minimizing order toward achieving that goal."  You can just say "I don't know why pull works."

A third option is to replace an "illusion" with an assertion of illusion.  Replace "gas makes the car go" with "gas doesn't make the car go, something else does" and see what happens.

Try It...Or Don't

It works for me and it works for other people.  Try it and see what happens.  You know...or don't try it and don't see what happens.

Division of Ideas

We choose how we organize ideas in our heads.  Take the concept of a wrench.  For me, there are two kinds of wrenches: regular wrenches and monkey wrenches.  That distinction exists because one kind of wrench is useful for binding while the other is good for bashing.  For a mechanic, however, I'm sure there are many kinds of wrenches.

I'm not sure either of us is wrong.  Now, I want to be clear: I am not saying that everyone who believes anything is correct because it's what they believe.  I am saying that someone who looks at a room full of people and sees two groups is every bit as right as someone standing right next to him who sees three groups in that there is no "right" way to divide things into groups, only "useful" ways to do so.

This may be obvious to others but it wasn't obvious to me.  I'm documenting it here as much to ensure I'll have the discovery available for myself when I forget it later as to share it with you.

Regulation versus recommendation

I have a long drive to get home and it gives me time to think.  Today, I was ruminating on the fact that I am so okay with traffic signals and lanes while I am against government-imposed regulation in almost every other form.

Why?  I think the reason is because traffic control works and it does not impose an undue cost.  Why does it work when, in my eyes, government almost always fails to accomplish its goals?

Why does a stop sign work?

I'll tell you one reason that is definitely not why it works.  Stop signs do not work on account of enforcement for the simple reason that there is not enough enforcement to make them work.

If stop signs worked on account of enforcement, people would come to a full stop every time because they were afraid of the consequences.  People don't because they aren't.

The reason why stop signs and other traffic signals work is because they inform people in a way that is useful to them.  They say "someone has thought about this intersection for a while and they think people should come to a full stop, here, or they'll risk collision."

Different people do different things with that information.  Some people, like me, come to a full stop and look at all the other directions from which vehicles may approach and then proceed through the intersection.  Other people slow down and look around to make sure there is not risk and then roll through the intersection.

Almost everyone, however, pays some level of attention to a stop sign and, really, to almost any traffic sign or signal.  Again, that's because there is a useful recommendation being made that is trusted by its recipient.

This is the direction I think I would like to see our regulations go.  Instead of telling bankers what they can and cannot do, we should provide benchmarks that must be met in order to be a "Grade A Financial Institution" or some such.  Instead of telling people what they can and cannot put on the air based on Christian values, we should provide ratings that Christians can use to regulate their media intake.

Instead of trying to control what food people can eat or what drugs they can consume we should simply say "this has't been tested... knock yourself out but don't come crying to us when things go south."

Why do I like this system better than one wherein regulations occur?  The obvious reason is that, instead of infringing on the liberties of producers, it increases the freedoms of consumers by way of education.  There's another, less obvious reason though.  I bet that yielding recommendations cost a lot less than enforcing regulations; a lot less.

Even less obvious is the fact that ratings probably work better than rules in the first place.  Psychologically, they are positioned as tools of collaboration rather than oppression, which probably helps them get adopted more quickly and thoroughly.  Mechanically, they have the property of aiming markets at problems and markets have conclusively shown themselves to be better decision-makers than central planners.

This seems like a good balance, to me.  Any rational do-good-er should be satisfied with the outcome of government simply recommending what is safe and what is not.  Any rational Libertarian should be satisfied with the increase of liberty and reduction in expense.  Some of us are willing to entertain the thought that there really are "greater good" things where the impact is so high and the burden is so low that it makes sense to couple them to government.

Now, I'm not saying that there is no place for regulation at all.  For instance, there is a real conversation to be had between environmentalists and Libertarians.  My guess is that the two frameworks can be reconciled nicely as (for instance) things like dumping poison into a water table, which is a sin from the perspective of an environmentalist, also constitutes an assault in the Libertarian model.

What I am saying is that, in most cases, there really isn't a useful conversation to be had about whether or not an individual should be told what they can use or a company can be told what they should sell.  If you want to restrict what consenting people do with their own bodies and properties, you are wrong.  Simple as that.  Until you can accept that you have no right to interfere in such things, you have no right participating in the political process at all.

In fact, anyone who believes that it is one person's right to tell some other group of consenting individuals what they can do should really do us all a favor and just shut the hell up altogether.

We still aren't qualified to tell people what to do

I've thought about this some more and I've come up with a scenario in which giving someone the answer works.  It's worked on me and it's worked for me.  In a true mentor/coach type role, you can tell someone what to do if you happen to have experienced a problem very much like what the person you are helping is going through.  You cannot dictate what they shall do but you can tell them what they should do.

This, again, has very to do with intellect or training and very much to do with real world experience.  If you've never ridden a bike before and someone else has, you could possess twice their mental capacity and they would still be able to teach you something because they've done it before.  Furthermore, it's an offering of knowledge rather than a binding of rules.  There is no guarantee that you will follow the instructions but, if  you do, there is a benefit to you.  If you don't, then you get the benefit when you eventually come around.

I've experienced this in the work world.  Those who've taken it upon themselves to help me have patiently explained how to patiently explain things, knowing that I won't necessarily (or even likely) do what they suggest.  Likewise, I've explained how to do technical things to people who refused to adapt, knowing that even though they weren't going to start that day, they may eventually start seeing things my way.

In contrast, the opposite has happened.  I've see brilliant and enthusiastic students try something out right away to see if it works.  Likewise, certain things have clicked with me right away, leading to nearly instant adoption.

In all those scenarios, it didn't matter who was the teacher or how intelligent they were.  It matters a little bit how smart the student is but it matters a lot more how ready to hear the lesson they are.

So if you really feel the need to go out and better people's lives by telling them what to do, you can do a lot of good by picking a topic on which you have experience and mentoring young people.  A hell of a lot more good than you would by trying to get rules made that people must follow.

I'm not qualified to tell anyone how to live and neither are you

I'm a pretty smart guy.  Smarter than most.  I have a lot of natural abilities that allow me to solve complex problems much faster than people of average intelligence and, really, even most people who are significantly above average.

That's not bragging.  Some people are born rich.  Some are born good looking.  Some are born smart.  Some are born with absolutely nothing to distinguish them from the next guy.  It's just the way things are.  If you don't like it, tough.  That's still how things are.

A lot of people are of above average intellect.  By definition, half are above the median.  If you are on the smarter side of the spectrum, it's pretty easy to look at someone who is struggling through a problem and think you can improve their lives by dictating how they should live.  Sadly, people who are on the dimmer side of the scale seem at least as able to imagine that someone smarter than them should be telling them what to do.

It doesn't work that way for a couple reasons.  I'd like to set the stage for those reasons by examining what motivates most people to try and tell others how to live.  There are really two basic reasons:

• To help others by improving the quality of their decisions.
• To help one's self by tweaking the decisions of others in favor of one's own interests.

It doesn't really matter how many people are driven by one of those forces or the other or even how many people have a foot in each camp.  One of those motives is not even worth considering as valid: the latter.  If you want to improve your lot in life, do it by making your decisions better, not by making others' decisions better for you.  So we can safely disregard the self-enrichment motive and focus on the do-gooder impulse.

Why does the motivation matter?  Because dictating how other people live is observably contradictory to the goal of improving their lives.  Ironically, people who have a lot of influence in my life told me this a long time ago and it took me nearly a decade to internalize it.  You'll see why that's ironic in a moment.

The reason why making decisions for other people runs contrary to their interests is that there are more forces involved in making a quality decision than just how smart the decision-maker is.  I wouldn't even pretend to guess at how many favors there are in making a good decision but two that are always present are intimacy and context.

Everyone has a very intimate relationship with themselves.  Few people, if any, truly know you better than you know yourself.  Really, it's not very likely that anyone - even your wife of twenty years or your husband of forty - knows you even half as well as you know yourself.

Why does that matter?  Because there are too many variables in the universe for anyone - no matter their intellect - to pay attention to all of them when making a decision.  We all have an innate sense of what is important to us and that helps us focus on the factors that we think will drive the outcome we desire.  Even a terrible assessment of what matters that based on one's true desires yields a better outcome than decisions made by some ivory tower intellectual who has never met or even heard of you.

Another important factor is context.  It doesn't matter how smart you are, you cannot plan the future.  You cannot even have perfect knowledge of the present.  It's outside the current scope of human intellect to do either of those things.  Because you cannot predict all of the contexts in which someone will face a problem, you cannot know the forces involved in solving that problem.

It turns out that people who are terrible at problem solving but know what the actual problem they are solving is are way better at solving that problem than someone with great problem solving skills but no idea what the actual problem being solved is.  Don't believe me?  Maybe you should run an experiment with someone you consider to be your intellectual peer.  You make up a set of rules to deal with a category of problems and have your friend try to find contingency in which the rules set doesn't work. Repeat that process until one of you gives up and see who wins.

There is yet another reason why telling people how they should live does not work.  Compliance is not the same thing as agreement.  If you make rules for someone that they don't understand or agree with, then they will either ignore the rules or comply with the letter of the law rather than the spirit.  So, even if you are right and do really know what should be done, getting someone to do those things in a way that will help them by way of mandate is extremely ineffective.

This by the way is the source of irony to which I earlier alluded.  Someone told me not to tell people what to do and to let them figure things out for themselves and I ignored that advice until I figured it out for myself.

So what should you do?  Well, if you're the sort of person who wants to make other people do things in order to improve your own life... well... go fuck yourself then jump off a cliff, I guess?  If you are in the other camp, I'm not going to tell you what to do.  I will tell you that improving people's lives - truly improving their circumstances appears to stem from helping people change how they think, not telling them what to do.

If you can persuade someone to understand why you want them to do a certain thing for their own benefit and believe that it benefits them, they will start making the right choices on their own.  If not, all the regulation and coercion in the world will only make the tiniest and most fleeting of impacts before backfiring to make things worse than they already were.

But most importantly, I must reiterate: If you want to make rules for the simple purpose of enriching one group of people at the expense of another, fuck off and die.

I'm so sick of hearing about how unfair the campaign funding system is

People aren't stupid.  At least, that's what I keep hearing.

Yet, whenever it comes to a matter of advertising, everyone gets up in arms about how the person with the biggest advertising budget wins.  It doesn't matter whether it is for a product or a political contestant.  The complaint is always the same "oh, he only won because of all the money he got from X so now he's going to be beholden to that entity."

So which is it?  Are people smart enough to make their own decisions and vote or not?  If they are, then you don't get to blame the advertisements they see for their decisions.  If they aren't, guess what: You still don't get to blame the marketing to which they were exposed.  Being stupid is a defect, not an excuse.

The problem isn't that Johnny Politician gets too much money from entity X.  The problem is that someone can win an election using a lot of campaign funding even when they are a complete douche nozzle.  In other words, let's not blame campaign funding for the bad decisions that voters make.

You may ask "Okay, so maybe people are too dumb to make their own decisions, shouldn't we control the media to which those people are exposed?"  The first and most obvious answer to that question is "You should probably replace 'people' with 'we.'"

The fundamental problem you are trying to address is that people are gaming the system... at least, that's what some of you believe is happening.  I defy everyone reading this to come up with a true example from history wherein adding a layer of rules to a system reduced the extent to which that system could be gamed.

If you want better decisions to come out of elections, your only real option is to try and get the voting population to be smarter or at least to be better decision makers.  You have a lot of options you can try.  Here are a few of them, and I'm not recommending any of them:

• Educate voters in critical thinking so their behavior is more their own
• Provide incentives that entice intelligent voters to activate 
• Provide incentives that entice unintelligent voters to deactivate
• Provide a filtration system that weeds out stupid voters
• Reduce the number of stupid voters to raise the average

Education is controversial if you are teaching the issues.  It's not so controversial to teach critical thinking skills themselves.  The real problem with that kind of education is that most people who think the can teach it actually cannot.  I'm guessing we have something like 1% of our population that can even approach objectivity when considering something.  Maybe less.

I'm not sure what incentives you can provide for intelligent people to get them to vote more.  The thing that would get me voting would be if voting were worthwhile, so maybe just doing other things to get the quality of the voting population up would do the trick.

Incentives to get dumb people not to vote aren't hard at all.  The main obstacle is giving someone the ability to prove with reasonable certainty that they didn't vote.  Once you've done that, almost any trinket would do.  I bet you could keep five percent of the worst voters away from their ballets for $100 a head or less.  The great part is, so long as you don't run out of funding, you don't even care if someone managed to defraud you.  After all, if they can outsmart even the simplest amount of bureaucracy, it's probably okay for them to be voting.

A filtration system is dangerous as anything that is not opt-in would be.  It could quickly convert from a quality-assurance tool to one of oppression.  I can't imagine any system where the government says "no, you cannot vote," that doesn't degrade into something Orwellian in decades.

Reducing the number of idiots in the world has the same problem.  Or, at least, it did until the advent of modern birth control.  Offering free vasectomies in exchange for small prizes would let the worst portions of our population select themselves out of the gene pool while leaving them, the entities that are already born, free to enjoy the rest of their lives.

Whatever the case, the problem we have right now isn't the few who have the funds to buy ad-space for their favorite candidate.  It is the many who are so easily influenced by such parlor tricks.

One Week and Counting (You Are All Doomed)

There's only a week left until they release Test-Driven Database Development: Unlocking Agility.

On the surface, this seems like a really good thing.  Good things don't generally happen to me.

I've been thinking a lot about all the ways this could not be a good thing.  I've found nothing so the only reasonable interpretation is that some horrible event is going to block this.

Here is a list of the things that will probably happen to prevent my book from getting into public hands:

• An asteroid could destroy civilization as we know it.
• A zombie apocalypse could destroy civilization as we know it.
• A plague could destroy civilization as we know it.
• Barack Obama could destroy civilization as we know it.
• An army of angry DBAs could rise up and destroy civilization as we know it.
• I could die.
• Aliens could destroy civilization as we know it.
• A solar flare could destroy civilization as we know it.

Let's deal with those one at a time.

Asteroid strikes are rare and we are a very deep infection.  I sincerely doubt that a rock large enough to be our undoing is going to hit us in the next week.

Inaugural ceremonies and zombie uprisings appear to be almost identical and we've survived many of those.  I'm sure we can weather a "real" zombie uprising.

Plagues are destructive but they don't wipe out whole populations.  It is exceedingly unlikely that one will could kill enough humans to cause a total collapse of civilization.

Barack Obama may have some terrible policies and be an incredibly destructive force but there's one thing about which he is incredibly passionate: keeping his friends in the banking industry happy.  Those guys have absolutely nothing to gain from the total collapse of civilized life so I'm sure he'll behave.

DBAs have been working on destroying us all for decades and have yet to succeed.  They're probably not a threat.

Near as I can tell, when I die, the universe ends.  That's inevitable, though, so there's no point worrying about that.

Aliens probably already know everything in my book as well as any other software development book that will be written in the next ten thousand years.  If anything, their arrival would accelerate our understanding of how to do our work.

Notwithstanding the kind of garbage espoused by the movie Knowing, it's doubtful that a solar flare would strip the Earth of all life.  However, one could kill a lot of Earth's life.  Almost worse, it could destroy virtually all of our infrastructure.

That's a potent combination.  A 99.99% reduction in equipment could knock us back into the eighteen hundreds.  Pair that with a large reduction in population and no ability to coordinate (at least, none such as anyone alive today has ever known) and we really could collapse into another dark age.

So there you have it.  By March 2^nd, either I will be dead and the universe will cease to be along with me or a solar flare will kill most living things on the planet and destroy nearly every electronic device at the same time.

Either way, the best course of action for you is to take advantage of Amazon's awesome advanced purchase policies.  You can be sure to buy your copy before the world ends and, in case it doesn't, you'll get the best price available between now and the end of March 3^rd.

See You in Hell, Facebook!

I never check my Facebook profile anymore.  I have an Android tablet that will tell me if someone has sent me a private message and I will go in to read any such transmission.  Other than that, it's been a couple weeks.

It's a good thing.  Facebook is such a toxic place.  Humans cannot function with that kind of exposure to what the people around them think and feel.  It's much easier getting through things if you aren't constantly faced with evidence that those around you are completely insane.  I'm sure all the insane people around me appreciate that I am no longer constantly threatening their delusions, too.

I'm not urging you to leave Facebook.  Maybe it does you some good.  Maybe you only accept friend requests from those who share your beliefs.  Maybe you are just plain better at tolerating people who have no rational basis for their ideas.

If you are like me, though, it will drive you mad to know that someone can appear to be rational on the surface but then end up believing in magic.  It will infuriate you that someone can see the deleterious effects of certain policies first hand in personal interactions but then believe those policies will somehow function when applied on a larger scale.

If you are like me, you are better off living in denial; better off focusing on the superficial rationality rather than the rotted thinking inside.  If you're like me, it's not Facebook that is the corrosive force in your life, it's the people you know.  Facebook is just the medium through which the destructive thoughts those people carry can reach you.

If, like me, you are better off keeping relationships skin-deep, then it's probably a good idea to try getting away from Facebook.  Having done so has certainly improved my happiness.

Republicrats and Democans - A New Way to View Them

...at least, a new way for me to view them.

Everybody with half a brain knows that Republicans and Democrats are basically the same thing.  I've many times said that Democrats are just sheep in wolves' clothing.

Recently, a reason why they might be so similar dawned on me.  They actually believe the exact same things.

I'll start with the obvious case: Republicans.  Most Republicans, not all but most, fit the following description.  They are people who believe in some kind of god figure and imagine that this god figure will always balance the equation in the end.  If things aren't made right here, they will be rectified in the hereafter.  This is why Republicans lean toward financial liberty.  The impulse to make everyone live the "right" way their god wants them to is also why they lean away from social liberty.

Now, I'll propose an hypothesis about Democrats.  A Democrat is someone who knows that he should not need a god figure in his life but still does.  He has lost the battle with his mind and is desperately searching for a replacement god.  After a short scan of what he thinks he knows, he finds an entity large enough and complex enough that he can ascribe magical powers to it without the burden of critical thinking getting in the way: government.

The Democratic god of government then has the same job as the Republican god with only a difference of "when."  That is, while the Republican god grants happiness or punishment, thereby making everything fair in the hereafter, the Democratic one must do it in the here and now.  For this reason, social liberty is promoted (as a form of heaven on earth) and financial liberty is restricted.

Democrats and Republicans aren't just similar.  They are the same broken model for the world: There is a giant, intangible, benevolent entity that will make everything right if you only allow it to do so.  Near as I can tell, they differ only by the stipulations fed into those broken thoughts.

So what's my conclusion?  I don't know.  I just discovered this and wanted to share it with the rest of the world so that you can call me crazy and ignore it like you always do when I'm right.

False Dichotomy - Who is the Bad Guy?

People are divided about this Christopher Dorner thing.  Some people think that he is the bad guy in all this.  Some people think that the LAPD is the villain.

This is typical of human behavior, to try and make a problem simpler than it really is and therefore to make it more complex.

Let's start with the simple analysis.  Regardless of how you feel about police, Christopher Dorner killed two innocent people in cold blood and without provocation.  That's classic bad guy behavior, right there.  So he was a bad guy.

That, however, does not make the police the good guys.  Let's consider how they reacted to this situation.  They opened fire on a couple of old ladies with no provocation.  They rammed some random guy's car and tried to shoot him to death after determining that he was definitely not Dorner.  They tried to assassinate some other dude based on no evidence at all.  Their policy was, objectively, "shoot first and ask questions later."  Finally, they intentionally burned down a building with something they were pretty sure was him in it so they didn't have to do their jobs.  That's classic bad guy behavior too.

So the obvious answer is this: Christopher Dorner was a bad guy.  A real, honest, full-fledged nut job - if the killings didn't tell you that, his political beliefs certainly would.  That said, the police in Southern California have been for many years, and still are, an occupying force rather than keepers of the peace.  They too are the bad guys.

One of the many disservices the media does us, is to train us that the whole yin and yang thing is not the complete load of horse shit it is.  For every darkness, there must be a light.  For every villain, there must be a hero.

It's just not true, though.  There just because there is a bad guy, there doesn't have to be a hero.  The reality is that the world is mostly bad guys and normal guys, with just a scant few good guys struggling their way through a tide of apathy and malice.

An Introduction to Fault Arithmetic

When people collaborate to create a problem, that problem can become very difficult to fix.  One reason, I've recently realized, is that people have difficulty properly assigning blame.

Take a typical codependency problem.  Person A depends on person B.  Person B enables person A.

It seems to me that most people would say that each is half responsible for the situation but fault arithmetic doesn't work that way.  In fact, person A is 100% responsible for the situation and person B is also 100% responsible.  Here's why:

If person A decides to stop being dependent, the situation ends.  So person B's decision is not sufficient to the problem.  If person B decides to stop enabling, the situation ends.  So person A's decision is not sufficient to the problem either.  In fact, since either person can end the cycle with their decision alone, both of them are necessary.

If your participation in an activity is necessary for its continuation, you carry full responsibility for its consequences.  So division of blame doesn't work like division of, say, a bushel of apples.

(9.31 gallons) / (2 bags) = 4.65 gallons per bag

...but...

(100% blame) / (2 necessary participants) = 100% blame per necessary participant