Power

It's a concept I've been grappling with. In lay terms power is the ability to influence the world; for example, you bump into me and I mess up your day. Or there's some law being put to vote I don't like so I make a call and poof! Several months' work and taxpayer money wasted.

In the martial arts, power is all about doing more work for less effort. So, either I kill you without breaking a sweat or I kill more people before I get winded.

Having power over your environment is a good thing, something to aspire to. It's kind of humanity's schtick, mastering our circumstances. But I can't help but think that the lay definition and the martial arts version are incompatible. See, in the first definition of power the focus is on the effect whereas in the latter the focus is on the process.

An office worker with his crew spreads a rumor about a colleague who is in an outgroup - not part of their clique. The rumor spreads, gains momentum and causes the colleague years of emotional turmoil. The guy that started it must be so powerful, huh? But for things to have turned out the way they did so many other factors had to fall in line. Just to talk about one factor,you're telling me he had a hand in the opinions of the people he was spreading the rumor to?

We save money and seek out high-paying jobs so we gain purchasing power. But if we die before we ever spend a cent, there's no difference between us and a pauper. We may be objectively rich, but effectively we're poor. It's the same with the kind of "power" a lot in our society desire in my opinion.

For another metaphor, and this I learned from an online crisis management course I took, imagine being ruined by some catastrophic, overwhelming occurrence. Say this event destroyed everything in your immediate vicinity, you don't have food or water or shelter. You're taxed physically, emotionally, spiritually even.

You find a big chocolate bar - it's still good. You're better than you were before, right? So, what do you do - do you save the chocolate, prolong your state of relative prosperity for a few more days; or do you eat it? After all, you might not find food anytime soon. It would make sense to keep what luxury you were "blessed" with as long as possible.

Except this would be wrong. Eating the chocolate would remind you of better times, and it would be to you a pleasurable treat - a high point in a situation that doesn't have much of those. It'll help get you in a calmer mindset. Eating it would also give you fuel for whatever you would need to do. Not eating now will make you hungrier and less in a rational mood; if deprivation doesn't kill you it will put you in a state where you'll make a blunder that can't be fixed by the chocolate you put off eating. 

Eating now and going hungry tomorrow is infinitely better than growing more malnourished today because eating won't fix all the conditions your body might get as a result of worsening health.

I kind of like the martial artist's definition. If I get more of the same kind of work done in the same amount of time or if I do the same work with less strain then I know I've grown. It's something that's part of me, like my arms or legs.

Dan Ariely.

Word Clouds

My site's Word Cloud.

I made this over at Wordle. It represents the most common words that I use in my posts, as of right now. 

Very cool app. I'll be trying a few experiments with it in the near future.

I Believed Cyber-Bullying and All the Negatives of Technology were Acceptable Given the Upsides it Brings. This Video Torpedoed that.

Article: Former death row inmate becomes Exhibit A for how eyes can lie

Former death row inmate becomes Exhibit A for how eyes can lie

...Oh my God. We do perp walks over here.

Oh my God.

Love what returns your love

This is one of those half-baked ideas I'm so fond of. It just means to dedicate ourselves to those things which pay off for us. Life is short and we can't afford to waste time and resources on anything that won't benefit us at all.

I speak of this from experience. I've aligned myself with lots of things, invested in all sorts of schools of thought and ways of living; I dedicated my time to so-called friends. All for them to betray me or not be there for me when I needed them most. I paid for that foolishness.

Magic the Gathering has been an obsession of mine. The deck for me is Red-Green Madness; however it's a sub-par deck, and I have a disappointing losing streak whenever I played - less than chance, really. I've only lost more money the longer I've dedicated to it.

Which isn't to say I haven't found gems. There have been things that have rewarded me for their dedication. The martial arts, for instance, have given me power and knowledge I did not have before. And it has also afforded me friends who are true inspirations; I feel privileged for being welcomed into their homes. 

In work, I made the choice to study IT. The sense of accomplishment I gain whenever I fix a bug or make a program work are concrete. I am able to write code that is utilized within organizations, code that is depended upon by untold number of people. The skills I struggled to learn initially are now my ticket to earning money and perhaps getting better things in life. 

Making this blog had a benefit: it made me more practiced in writing essays and has come in handy when I need to turn in an essay during the training sessions I subject myself to.

So, pay attention to those things that have a return for your money, while dropping everything else. Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy. But my key insight regards making the distinction; after all, the hardest part is in knowing when to put more effort in and when to fold. 

For me, it seems like the cut-off is seven months. If after seven months there's no benefit, drop that crap. I am basing this off my experience in the martial arts I am practicing; it was about seven months before I gained anything. Now, the time-frame may be even less depending on the intensity of the activity; for instance, I learned jQuery and MVC in less than the five months I was assigned to a project that required them. 

Now that I've realized it, I'll be applying this criterion to other things in my life. One can always benefit from periodic weeding.

But what about optionality? Ever since I read about it I've been a fan of the concept. This extends from stock options trading, where you are able to buy or sell the right without the obligation of buying or selling something before a specific date. The key is that you can choose to exercise your right only in situations where it will profit you to do so; you don't have to buy or sell in bad conditions. You practice optionality when you think something might happen and so plan for the "just-in-case" scenario. Except this only works when you have a real, practical mastery over the odds and consequences. You also need a big enough buffer to weather any unforeseen  complications or mistakes. People in general don't have the first condition, and we don't have as much of the second condition as we would like to believe.

My point is, people tend to think they're practicing optionality when they're really not. I think it's because we're not so good with long-term forecasting/thinking. I must say though I am still working on applying optionality, so until I am able to say I am comfortable with applying the concept I would tend toward the rubric I outlined here.

Third World and First World Thinking

I've got the seed of an idea. It's not fully hashed out yet, but it has the feel of something that would quickly slip away from my mind if I don't record it. It's interesting, so here we go:

In one of the many Coursera courses I was taking, one key thing you are supposed to do in order to gain resilience and improve your career is to define your values. Before they explained what that was they image that came to my mind was of some trait or attribute, like being a hard worker. Turns out values are the things that are important to you, stuff you prioritize that make you feel good about the world when they are attended to.

This week we had a product development training session at work. The presenter started out by asking what a service is. Those who were asked to relay their idea of what a service is stated some variation of "It's something where someone serves you." The actual definition of a service that was used for the presentation was that service is a material/non-material good or invention that people can feel compelled to pay for. So, people are not really being paid to serve you at a restaurant; they are providing you with the opportunity to sample amazing dishes in a great ambiance, to make your meal an experience, and also without you toiling in the kitchen or investing to gain the skills required to make these dishes.

Values aren't stuff in your personality that can make you successful; they're stuff that inform what goals you will set for yourself, which are in turn signposts to the path of success you need to be taking. While service isn't something people do for you or to you in exchange for pay, it's about something existing in the world that you have to get in on so badly you're willing to pay for it.

It would be interesting to ask people from around the world about this, about what they think values and service mean. My idea is that people in less advantaged countries have a more entitled view about these concepts.

Outrage Culture

I followed with interest the situation involving Josh Olin, former community manager at Turtle Rock Studios. I think it's an interesting instance of a phenomenon on the Internet.

We have to accept that people are irrational. By making comments that have a high likelihood of triggering emotions in other people, Josh Olin courted mass irrationality on himself, his work, his employers, his friends and family. He's right about an outrage culture existing, which demands that something be done.

I've got problems with this Internet trend. First of all, doing something isn't always the most advisable thing; especially when one doesn't have a clear idea if that thing to be done has an impact on the problem. At other times, doing nothing at all would be best - I am reminded of several examples, one of which came from my dentist. She said that one of her patients had a prior dentist who decided to drill holes into all of their teeth and put filling in them because it seemed to the latter that their was a risk for cavities. Said patient now has to pay astronomical bills because those fillings chip often.

My dentist when I was a child refused to drill into a molar of mine that had a black line on top of it, thinking that maybe it wasn't a cavity as would have been the most likely supposition. That tooth has been with me all my life and it has not developed anything at all. 

Or think about democratic countries where there is a chief of the executive branch of government; he has veto power, the ability to refuse to do something.

When people can't take the option to do nothing it's usually one of three things - either they are being kept by a threat of some kind from abstaining, or their emotions are stopping them from making the best choice, or they have some sort of self-centered bias that somehow makes them need to do something where in a more neutral situation they would do otherwise. Josh Olin's former company faced the first situation. The uproar would have been directed at them, and would have affected how their products fared in the future. They had to fire him because otherwise a lot of people would not have bought their wares anymore.

And this is where we see how the action produced from this outrage culture is a lot like bullying. I got this concept from Sgt. Rory Miller; in a protest there's always the implied threat that violence will start if the demands are not met. Others would argue that the threat of consequences keeps people honest - I would counter that it only makes us more cunning with our dishonesty.

For an example, let's look at this unfortunate situation. University student posts pictures of animal cruelty and gets expelled, then made to do community service. In any rational light the story should be done - kid learned a lesson and paid his debt to society. However, look at how thousands of people in the Facebook community still "refused to forgive" him. It's like high school where the cliques band together to ostracize the weird kid except now with the Internet there is no escape for the poor guy. The kid already paid his dues for the crimes he committed, and yet people are still not letting this go - a hallmark of bullying.

Second thing I have a problem with is how everyone keeps tying this to free speech. Josh Olin has said he was trying to inspire dialogue and his right to free speech was violated; his detractors say that the right to free speech only prevents government from persecuting someone for what they say and doesn't save anyone from the consequences (i.e., online threats and harassment) that would arise from his words.

(As an aside, I love how that argument frames the vitriol being rained down on Mr. Olin as somehow a logical occurrence of cause-and-effect; it's classic victim blaming right there. It's only natural that someone lose their livelihood, get death threats, be harassed, etc..) 

To that I want to say, that while it is true that the right to free speech pertains to prohibitions on government actions only, that kind of limitation was built in because monitoring and policing the statements of everyone in a country would have been impossible to implement in a fair and just manner. This does not mean that just because it isn't against the law it's not a bad thing to do. 

Like in my country right now there was a recently passed law prohibiting the production, sharing, distribution, and sale of compromising videos and photos of people who at the time of recording should have had a reasonable expectation of privacy. Before this, there was no such clear regulation that could be applied to these situations, and there was a huge bonanza of sex videos/voyeur videos being trafficked around; some of famous celebrities would even be the topic of news programs and talk shows. Said talk shows would even show these videos, with the naughty parts censored of course - but in a manner that still preserved the prurience of the content. D-list celebrities would even make one of these videos themselves to get some measure of relevance in the public eye. And some unscrupulous lovers would even record their trysts in order to blackmail their partners later on. Law or no law, these things people were doing were already bad. 

Same with the free press issue, just because no one's getting arrested doesn't mean all these people ganging up on him is acceptable. 

Also, speech comes with a hefty piece of responsibility; if you're putting yourself out there essentially you are implying that what you have to say matters, to the point that you are willing to cast attention to yourself and suffer the consequences of whatever opinion you are professing. Now what, if at all, are all of Mr. Josh Olin's detractors risking here? What are their stakes in this discussion? What do they lose - like, if they don't put Mr. Olin down do they have to be slaves at a plantation somewhere? 

Mr. Olin already paid a big price, while the great outrage machine will be moving on to another target, smug in their numbers and anonymity. That right there makes the trolls lose any credibility in my eyes. And I personally do not like being coerced into doing anything - when people try bullying tactics on me I choose to do the opposite of what they want. I would advise any such victim of outrage culture to do the same.