Nassim Nicholas Taleb once made a distinction between those in professions that are relatively stable ("Mediocristan") versus those that can be volatile ("Extremistan"). His point, broadly summarized, was that while a baker could expect gains proportional to the effort put into the work, someone like a Wall Street trader could find himself gaining and losing millions within a single trading day for reasons completely unrelated to his skills. 

There are many types of work out there where this applies. In the recording industry, the popularity of a song could depend on so many factors outside the artist's singing skill. In acting, consummate chameleons rub elbows with purveyors of cheap fare. Everything takes a second seat to the question of whether the audience likes you.

In Extremistan survivorship bias lives and breeds. How many people out there go follow their dreams in these professions every year, and of these how many are able to derive a good living off of it? For the winners, dreams do come true - but for the losers, they don't even register. 

I think it's the constant risk of going belly-up that prompts companies to become so restrictive with their talents. In K-pop companies for example, the contracts can be positively draconian while the training is extremely rigorous. 

Check out the video above at 4:22. The chart shows an Internet ranking of K-pop idol groups. Out of so many groups at the time of the airing of this program, only 16 can be said to have a hold in people's minds. And of those sixteen, only two are at the very top. This ranking is obviously very volatile, but the top groups are very comfortable in their position. For the others, they have to hustle because the competition is very fierce and tomorrow they could slide down from their current position. It's not a very objective example, but for illustrative purposes I think it serves the purpose.

Why should we care? Because when people are in desperate situations where they don't know what to do to get ahead, they end up willing to do anything to get ahead. Like getting minors to work in conditions that would be unacceptable in other countries. Or getting them to be of the mindset that doing stuff like this is appropriate.

Privacy

Ernest Hemingway survived war and many other privations. He thrived in adversity and conflict, that would lay other men low. And yet it seems that in the end he was unable to prevail against his own government watching him. Then again, it's very hard to fight against a shapeless, vague threat as compared to, say, a plane crash. In the latter one's priorities are clear.

Scrutiny does change how people behave - you only need to look at all of those fallen stars that litter every country's social scene. Being looked at is disconcerting - many convince themselves that it is a good thing just to escape from the unease. Ultimately, they try to dull their senses or withdraw. Anything to keep away from the eyes.

There are good arguments out there for protecting the right to be left alone. We are prone to biases; we think that such surveillance won't really be directed at us. Or even if it were, that the authorities will not find something. To that I say - the determination is not up to us. More to the point, them knowing so much about us makes it so much easier for them to use us however they like. 

But perhaps greater than all these arguments is that our privacy is fundamental and inalienable to our psychological make-up. We need that space to share only the parts of us that we want to share; and it shrinking can only bode bad things for our future as a species.

If one could have a soundtrack for one's life, I want this to be mine

Too Good Too Bad

I can't help visualizing this set to the music above.

Hacking and Writing

I'm not the only one that has noticed the overlap between coding and writing. The difference is mainly in the audience and purpose of what is written. In fact, code is categorized together with literature in terms of intellectual property. The article below riffs on a lot of concepts - definitely worth a reread... or ten.

Learn language

Boxing Wisdom

I'm a big fan of articles like these. Wisdom should always come in small, testable nuggets - nuggets hard-won through experience.

Twelve things maybe Cus d'Amato only knew

The world of martial arts that has long since passed

Get health and fitness tips at Greatist.com

Flow

Canabalt

If you've a couple minutes to spare and you were so inclined, please try out the game above. It's free and simple to operate. At first you won't be any good; the game though is addictive and you will soon last longer.

As you try again and again, you notice that your avatar goes faster and faster the longer you survive in the game. This is dangerous because it leaves you only a split second to assess the distance to the next platform, detect any traps, and press the control properly. It's much wiser to slow down by hitting the chairs and boxes that litter your path. However, every time you come back to the game the conviction that this thinking is wrong grows. You want to last. You want to be pure. So you might choose to jump over the obstacles, sort of another challenge to yourself.

As the distance of your avatar's run increases you begin to feel pride in what you're doing. You also feel, in a detached sort of way, that you won't be able to maintain this for much longer - you'll misjudge a leap, or your character will slip, or he'll hit a trap. But you haven't failed yet, and it's a thrill. You're not being bogged down, nor are you stalling. You have built, and continue to build, momentum on your run. You're soaring.

This must be a fraction of what masters feel.

On letting go

On awkwardness

This article got me to thinking not about intelligence, which was the actual intent of the piece, but rather about clumsiness. If all intelligence is situational intelligence, this means that being in a less than optimal situation is a result of not being able to shape the situation to our advantage, even with all the talents or advantages we were blessed with starting out. Shaping the situation jumps out to me because it's precisely what we do in the martial arts - we take a bad situation and somehow turn it into one that favors us. This means that shaping things to our benefit is a skill that has wider implications than was previously thought. It also means that starting out in a less-than-ideal situation is the norm as well as the consequence for failing to reverse things.

A skill is proficiency and artistry combined, that is being able to do what you want and being able to think of novel ways to apply what you know. To gain skill one starts out clumsy, but through long and intensive refinement one moves away from always being clumsy to being so less often. Skill also takes focus, and if focus wavers even the most skillful can look like amateurs.

Nothing in life is always clear-cut, and perhaps recognizing this is why we derive enjoyment from media that are vague or ambiguous. Things that don't have neat endings engage our imaginations, and things that don't go smoothly are more interesting to see. Perhaps there's an element of schadenfreude there as well. We hate awkwardness within ourselves though, and despise it in others. This is why it is so important to have one's grand achievements seem effortless in execution.

I think we tend to equate effortlessness with familiarity of something, the opposite of being clumsy. After all, back in the early days of our species' evolution a clumsy situation was more of an annoyance - do something wrong and your people could be wiped out. 

And I don't know how to render a proper ending to this train of thought, so in honor of the subject I'll be tabling this as it is right now.

The Scrappy Heap

So I've read that T-ARA is being considered to be some sort of Scrappy of K-pop groups right now because  of all the controversies they've figured in. I for one feel that it's a waste of their good talent to have them be hounded - just because they are public figures does not mean that they should be acceptable targets for backlash. 

It's the cost of free speech, I guess. When anyone can speak up, no speech is special. I consider being able to speak your mind as a safeguard for individuals so that they can create imaginative, meaningful and relevant messages. I really doubt it was for members of cliques to raise themselves up in their own eyes by dressing down targets, for instance.

Me, I believe in silence. Keeping mum isn't because I'm too slow to think of a comeback or that I'm riddled with guilt. I keep quiet because I know neither side will ever admit defeat, and to fight in such a situation is just a drain on my resources. It's better to do the job in front of me. It's better to grow in strength and expertise in all the things that are important to me. Let others do what they feel justified in doing; though they wish to exert power over me, I am myself and that is all I need.

Alas, my favorite K-pop group doesn't have that luxury. They need to go on interviews and talk to so many people. But they keep moving forward. So they truly are scrappy - as in, full of fighting spirit.

A Family-Unfriendly Aesop

Here's something to provide food for thought - turns out life is better with college and a steady 9-to-5.

Survivorship bias

An Irrefutable Data-Based Argument for Going to College

I'm putting this up largely to remind myself that in life, there are no guarantees. Even with skill and hard work and talent and luck and dirty tricks, you might still come up short. We need to take a hard look at the data - those who succeeded as well as those who didn't. What are the relative proportions between the two types? 

It seems cold, but you only get one life. If you need to sacrifice for something, it would be good if you could guarantee something for yourself and your loved ones. Yes, the loved ones as well - because whether they are agreeable to it or not, they do get roped into our shenanigans. We owe it to them to make our shots count. 

I wish I could say this to my college-age self; I was a bad student then, hung up on pipe dreams and distracted from the business of actually earning a degree. I struggled to finish my major, and up to today that still rankles. The humiliation is not only on myself, it's on all those who scraped to give me that education that majority of the world's population could only dream of. It's also on the institutions I learned under, who had great expectations for me. 

But I learned my lesson and did otherwise when I went to technical college to learn programming. This is my personal family-unfriendly aesop: your study determines your work. You work is your life. Friends are fine up until you need help paying the rent. Work hard, don't be distracted, choose your battles. Politics and fitting in don't really get you paid. Do the job in front of you, and achieve things. Save up for when you truly need it, for when your loved ones truly need it.

Always Be Coding

In my quest to be a better programmer, I came across these articles. I recommend them to anyone who wants to become a brilliant software engineer.

Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

ABC: Always Be Coding

Rely only on your own arms

This is something I come back to several times. It's a lesson from Robert Greene's "33 Strategies of War." It's a very hard lesson. We are dependent on so many things. The key is in remembering that the things we are dependent may not necessarily be material in nature. We rely on what we've learned, what we've developed - we rely on what worked, and what we think might work. 

It's a horrible thing to doubt yourself in this way. You have to second-guess yourself, and that's when you realize the full extent of what you leave on auto-pilot every second of every day. What I've found is that there are principles to correct action. For instance, in the martial arts one strives to move with the barest minimum of effort; moves are not supposed to be excessively committed to; one must be able to change to the situation immediately. In dealing with oneself, there are a multitude of biases one's mind is subject to; considering carefully is important, but one must not let fear creep into the process of decision-making. When dealing with others, remember they have their own agenda - we all are subject to conflicts of interest. The input of others is useful as feedback, but never as a judgement of your inherent worth.

Wishing for more of something doesn't help; in many cases doing so is a waste of time as more is not forthcoming. We have to make do with what we have, and hopefully at the same time grow because if we survive the current predicament odds are good another, potentially greater, problem is on the way. Someone once told me, the problems you have today won't be the same things you worry about fifty years from now. It's not much, but I still want to reach that future. 

So I pay attention. And when the chips are down, I pay attention even more. May we never divorce ourselves from reality. Keep fluid. These things I tell myself, everyday - but what happens isn't always what we intend. 

Why We Love Psy

This probably explains part of the appeal.

Ask Ariely: On Lyrics, Joint Accounts, and Dialing Mom

Myself, I prefer songs without lyrics. Instrumental pieces tend to be more evocative to me.

Irrational notes

Dan Ariely's course has wrapped up, and here I'm posting my notes for the last three weeks. Fourth week is about labor and motivation; fifth week is about self-control; and the sixth week is about emotion. The studies are all available with a little searching.

Week 4:
Feeling Good about Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior - People who feel happy give more, and those who give more are happier. Advertising the emotional rewards of giving does not reduce the tendency to give, but further research is necessary to disentangle between the costs and benefits of self-interested giving.


The “IKEA Effect”: When Labor Leads to Love - People value more the products of their labor only when they are able to complete their labor - that is, they can see the fruits of their work. The effect occurs even for those who do not have an affinity for "do-it-yourself" projects.


Large Stakes and Big Mistakes - Small incentives or incentives given where there were none before may increase performance, but past a certain threshold increased stakes increases motivation to the point where there are perverse effects on performance.

Effort for Payment - In the realm of effort and payment, one may find oneself in a monetary or social market. Monetary markets are more sensitive to the economics of compensation, while social markets are independent of the magnitude of compensation.


A Fine is a Price - At a day-care, a fine was introduced for parents who are late in picking up in their children. The parents possibly interpreted the fine as a cost in the sense of a monetary market and the number of latecomers per day shot up. The increased levels remained even after the policy regarding the fine was rescinded.


Man’s search for meaning: The case of Legos - When there is meaning to the tasks that people are assigned to do, they are happier at their jobs and are more productive



Week 5:
Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-control by Precommitment -
People are willing to self-impose deadlines to avoid procastination, even if it is costly. However, people space deadlines suboptimally


A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety -
Children with higher self-control ended up wealthier, healthier, and less likely to engage in crime in adulthood.


Counteractive Self-Control in Overcoming Temptation -
When the decision of undergoing an activity is threatened, counteractive self-control kicks in to increase the perceived value of the activity and ensure that motivation is maintained. This occurs when the cost of the action is moderate, tempting alternatives to the action are moderate, and before the performance of the activity. The counteractive self-control action motivates individuals to bind themselves to restrictive agreements, and delay rewards in order to ensure compliance.


The significance of self-control - Self control is a significant predictor of future welfare even after controlling for intelligence and family background; however, people struggle with wanting and in wanting to want other things.


Personal Decisions Are the Leading Cause of Death - The cause of many deaths can be said to be due to personal decisions; these deaths could have been avoided if a readily available alternative had instead been chosen. Over 80% of the deaths attributable to personal decisions in 2000 were due to smoking and being overweight. In 1900, just under 5% of deaths could be attributed to personal choices.


Rewards Separate Neural Systems Value Immediate and Delayed Monetary - Impulsive behavior is driven by limbic activation, while non-impulsive behavior is associated with the activation of regions of the brain responsible for higher level deliberation.


Save More Tomorrow: Using Behavioral Economics to Increase Employee Saving - Households that are saving too little may be because of bounded rationality, self-control, procrastination (which pro-duces inertia), and nominal loss aversion. SMART is a methodology encouraging increased savings using principles
of behavioral economics.


Week 6:
Dread Risk, September 11, and Fatal Traffic Accidents - In avoiding the risk of being caught up in an incident similar to the events of 9/11, more Americans took to driving - thus increasing the number involved in fatal vehicular accidents. The number of those killed this way even exceeded the total number of fatalities in the four flights that were hijacked.


The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad - When a stimulus reaches a threshold when it can be characterized as intense, it causes people to raise defensive measures to attenuate it. In cases of behavior this results in counteractive self-control, and in cases of hedonic states quicker abatement. This can result in situations where someone ends up hating another for a less grave offense and forgiving (or even liking) yet another for a bigger offense.


Psychic Numbing and Mass Atrocity - Crimes committed against a big number of people do not grab our attention and inspire our actions as they do crimes against an individual. This makes our moral intuitions not trustworthy in dealing with cases like genocide. We must find a way to treat cases of mass atrocity with the gravity that is commensurate to our belief that every life is equal and of great importance.


Emotions in Economic Theory and Economic Behavior - Economic models need to take into account the impact of deeply-rooted affective states (drives, emotions, passions) in individuals' decision-making process. There is a big gap between the actions of people when they are in a "hot" and "cold" state, and their ability to
predict their behavior when in a particular state while they are in the opposite one is impaired. These empathy gaps can occur for hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, anxiety, curiosity, and pain.

Learning Five Programming Languages

In these two videos we have the founders of two programming languages discuss which languages they believe every professional developer should know. I'm kind of happy that I'm familiar with most of the languages they enumerated.

Bjarne Stroustrup, of C++ fame

Larry Wall, Perl master

I've coded in C, C++, C#, and Java before. For webpage front-ends I know HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript - what I'm not familiar with Google generally supplements. I'm studying Scala for my functional language, and I have been exposed to Python through my own self-study. For databases, I have basic experience in MySQL and T-SQL.

Here's the thing though - in my experience knowledge in these programming languages is kind of expected for a developer gig. What really sets apart good software engineers is in the mastery of frameworks and tools for these specific languages. That means you have to know which tools are popular and get decent with them. This article helps break things down for us. Oh, and don't forget to take a look at this article as well, for a reversal of perspective.

The last couple of posts were rather short; I know I intended to have this blog be more about essays discussing stuff I find interesting, but right now I am thinking that it can sometimes be more effective to show people the things that I find of note. It helps to have others get a sense of my thought process, and in the future it'll be helpful to me in evaluating how I was today.

The above is something else that I look at regularly. Zheng Mingxing is a master with phenomenal skills; his hands move like lightning. He's a role model for me in how to develop my form.

More clips of the man can be found here.

Dedication

This link is a report on one Korean idol telling people in a variety show that she was a trainee for her company for 11 years. This woman is a determinator, pure and simple. What makes her unique is that increased motivation doesn't generally lead  to increased performance; if anything, higher stakes worsens how you do in something. Perhaps she found a way to channel physicality in her craft, which is usually when motivation and performance go hand-in-hand. In any case, I would love to shake her hand.

And the Clip-Fest Continues...

I hope this becomes a trend. My country's local programming is too dumbed down to compare; I spend my time watching clips of subbed foreign shows on Youtube. A full show is a treat for me. Anyway, please enjoy!

Brief Clip of Zhang Ziyi's Training for The Grandmasters

The work ethic these people have is awe-inspiring. It really makes martial arts movies that much more authentic when you have masters guiding you in expressing their art accurately. Oh, and those stretches do hurt - I still have scars from when I was forced to do splits for a martial art I was studying back then.

Baguazhang is a beautiful art. My current teacher swears by their footwork. Here's a brief introduction to the Circle Walk Practice and the art itself.

Afternoon Diversion - T-ARA

Nothing much to be said, really.

Afternoon Diversion - SISTAR

Time spent doing Zhan Zhuang passes by very quickly while I watch this :P

Say what you will about the man, but you have to admit he's pretty cool. 

Barack Obama Killed It In His White House Correspondents' Dinner Speech

Amor Fati

A good spirit or Tykhon (the personification of good fortune). The good spirit holds spits in his hands as a sign of good luck, and is shown with enlarged genitals.

Today was a nice day. There were no bad news, no life-threatening events. Everything was boring and ordinary and quiet and comfortable. But at any moment it could have been worse. Mistakes could have been made, or a confluence could have occurred where things overlapped and changed everything for me. 

I think that as we grow older this becomes more and more apparent - that we don't have absolute control over the universe. Our death or our ruination may come in the next breath, and we would never know. What things are even now happening behind the scenes, to someday threaten our lives and hopes and dreams? For the sake of our sanity we retreat ourselves into self-contained, "safe" little universes. Thinking that if we do not mind what's out there, that it can't hurt us; we strike this bargain, conveniently forgetting that those outside forces didn't actually agree to this deal. We will never be immune to absurd coincidence ruling our lives.

Greater men have been laid low by circumstance. And not everyone who adapts does so quickly enough, or appropriately enough. Robert Greene talked about "Amor Fati" - loving your fate, whatever it might be. This is the same concept the Stoics espoused, with regard to not letting your mind be clouded. Victor Frankl also wrote about acceptance in his book - that one can find meaning in one's life even through accepting the unacceptable. I take his word for it, him being a man who has thoroughly lived this philosophy. 

According to Robert Greene, accepting whatever comes your way leads to nothing being able to truly hurt you - for, as he puts it, you are able to "turn shit into sugar." Like this person. 

I still dread the future, but I will endeavor to accept. I will be grateful for today; and I will be aware that things could have been worse, and yet they weren't. And if I find myself in a hole, I promise I will stop digging immediately and work hard to get out of it. Amen.

Your mistakes, like mine, are a part of who you are now. You can't move on from that. Believe me, I've made a sizable number. But...sometimes your mistakes can surprise you. My biggest mistake, for instance, brought me here. At exactly this moment when you might need some help.

Tragedies

I posted this stub before about a ZenPencils poster I found. I'm calling attention to this because even up to now I still feel the same, perhaps even more so after reading this article on a victim of the Boston bombings. 

She had wanted to be a bank analyst. She went to a different country in order to pursue her goals. These things already mark her as special - I should know, being someone who has struggled against failure and self-sabotage. What she was able to accomplish was impressive - who knows what she would have been able to do had she lived longer?

We are all going to die, and we are lucky because there are those who never will. They, who were never born, include people with talent greater than ours. And yet it is us in our ordinariness who are here. I believe this. But what of those who were born, but who die too early? They include this young woman whom I had the honor of reading about. She was more than me, perhaps more than I could ever be. And yet it is me in my ordinariness who is here, not her. 

I feel something heavy on my shoulders at the thought.

Hands Free Penta Kill

Kudos, sir. This is Grand Achievement, indisputably.

Gamer Gets a Rare League of Legends Kill Without Using Hands

Blast from the Past - Sleeping Fist!

I was going around reddit when I found mention of this gem. They used to have this movie on reruns when I was a kid, must have watched it a half-dozen times. The dub is ridiculously funny, but it's the same dub I remember years ago - swearing included, haha.

Notice that the guy on the left outright stops the kick, while the one on the right diverts the punch. Old man has some seriously efficient kung fu.

Jin

This discussion in rumsoakedfist is very informative. It seems like there are many ways of generating power in the Chinese martial arts. Erle Montaigue enumerated a couple others in his Power Taiji series (copies found here). I think there's something in this, that could probably be used. It's certainly food for thought for me.

Extracting these formulae is fascinating work for me. It's taking the essence of a martial art, finding what makes it work. I like finding articles like this or this that really breaks things down. It reflects on the mastery of these authors that they could describe things so clearly.

15 Career Insights from Benjamin Franklin

26 Time Management Hacks

Having fun with WebMatrix

I only recently learned about this IDE yesterday. It's got a ton of functionality and looks really convenient to use. Best of all, it's free - I'll be playing around with this some more on my off time. Here's something I made:

It's T-ARA's Eun-jung's Twitter feed! At least, I hope it's Ham Eun-jung's

I read about this lately. Before that, I read about this. And before that, there was this.

I suppose we don't need more convincing of how horrible we can be to one another. I can only imagine a little of what the victims are probably going through - children can be cruel, and who ever really grows up nowadays?  

But I wish there was someone who told them: these people who are tormenting you don't know you. They're not people of substance, and should not be listened to. They're average people, trying to fill up their dull lives with flashy imagery and shallow posturing. They don't care whether you live or die because you were never real to them to begin with - well, not much is real to them anyway. In a hundred years they won't even be remembered, save perhaps for a census entry. 

The world changes explosively almost every decade. The Internet won't stay the same; think about Friendster. Remember Friendster? For a time it was like Facebook - now all the images and video and comments are gone. Whatever they put up, isn't going to last. It's the tendency of these people to settle for building things that don't last. 

But you - while you're still in the world, you have a chance. You can build something that might exist until the next age of Man. Tomorrow brings new wonders, new possibilities. There will always be others who will love you for who you are. There will always be paths you can travel. There are entire worlds out there who wouldn't have even heard of your humiliation. So much left to discover, baby - but only if you stay here, with us. 

It's unfair, what you have to go through. People make the world unfair. But when you're gone, there's nothing. No more bad feelings, and no more good times either. The good times are worth it. Do you understand? This is the life. This is the only life!

On dealing with aggression

In the end, I don't have to live with this fellow, so I don't really care if he is an idiot. And we can't all go about our lives trying to correct the behaviour of idiots.

In this regard, I always say that it is pointless trying to swat mosquitoes at a barbecue. You'll never get them all. You're far better off applying insect repellant or moving indoors. Idiots are the same: too numerous to deal with on a case-by-case basis.

So I agree with my friend Jeff Mann when he says:

"I completely understand and share your sentiments. While some of the resistance we may offer (verbal or otherwise) is designed to make us feel better, there is an element of spite in there as well."

As understandable as it is to have a strong reaction to bullying, I don't think emotion should be the impetus for our actions.

Pearls of wisdom from Mr. Dan Djurdjevic. I find myself reading his series of articles on non-aggression a lot lately. I'm a hothead and even though my implementation of his ideas is not perfect, he's helped me make things not as worse as they could be. Hopefully this can help someone out there - link

Irrationality, Week 4

I thought the image above appropriate, since Sancus was an avenger of dishonesty; Week 3 of Dan Ariely's course on Irrationality covered dishonesty. It's interesting stuff - his idea is that within a group there aren't a few bad apples, everybody cheats regardless of the reward or the likelihood of being caught - but they all cheat only a little bit, because they still want to appear moral to themselves. Impartial or biased behavior also arises every time there is a conflict of interest.

The readings for this section were fairly long - I was only able to get take down summaries for five out of the six articles, which is a shame because the last one was all about the psychology and evolution of self-deception. I'll try to finish reading it sometime.

Here are my notes about the other papers:

Contagion and Differentiation in Unethical Behavior: The Effect of One Bad Apple on the Barrel - Dishonest behavior is affected by social norms and saliency more than cost-benefit analysis. Subjects in the two experiments demonstrated that when the unethical behavior is done by someone identified as not part of their group, dishonesty is reduced; the reverse happens when the unethical behavior is done by someone identified as belonging to their group. With salience, even just calling attention to the likelihood of unethical behavior caused dishonesty to be reduced. The control was a situation where cheating would be detected unfailingly; however, the findings indicate possible applications in policies to curb dishonest behavior. Dishonest behavior is contagious. 

Prefrontal white matter in pathological liars -

Liars and malingerers have more white matter and less white-to-grey ratio in their prefrontal cortex, even after controlling for brain volume, age, psychopathy, and antisocial personality disorder 

Washing Away Your Sins: Threatened Morality and Physical Cleansing -

Being put in a state where one's self-concept of one's morality is threatened results in a need to cleanse one's physical body and/or a greater affinity for cleaning products. Physically cleansing oneself also alleviates negative impressions caused by being in a state of threatened morality. The mechanism for this seems to be that a person will engage in activities to make indicators of a particular self-concept meet standards if that person perceives that his identification with that self-concept is lacking, even if said activities may not be related. In the case of morality, the tie to ideas of cleanliness and purity was probably where this tendency came from.

The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance -

Based on the results of this paper, even though people place a high value on honesty and in general ascribe to moral standards, they justify dishonest actions through malleability of categories (for example, stealing a pen against stealing money equivalent to the price of a pen). Even though they may be aware that their actions are dodgy, they may let awareness of such actions "fly under the radar" and refuse to update their self-concept with regard to this behavior. Instead of magnitude of punishment or likelihood of getting caught, it seems like being reminded of their moral standards and having them compare their possible actions to this at the point before temptation strikes is more effective in reducing dishonesty. 

Justified Ethicality: Observing Desired Counterfactuals Modifies Ethical Perceptions and Behavior -

People lie more often when they perceive a justification for their behavior, even if such justification is known only to them. This is because people value feeling honest in their eyes. One justification used in the study was that an event "falling just short" of reality could be passed off as reality (a lie). People are less likely to lie in a situation where there is a narrow choice of options, because it becomes harder to justify to themselves the act of lying. 

Week 4 is all about labor and motivation, can't wait!

Blast from the Past - Dream High!

This was a great find - I loved the original series, and this was a nice way to end things for the fans. And Ham Eun-jung looked amazing!

Link Dump!

These are some articles I'm reading right now. There's some cool information here, I hope you find something that takes your fancy! 

philosophy

Understanding the Dangers of Ego Depletion

Seneca - Letters from a Stoic (pdf)

Marcus Aurelius - Meditations (pdf)

Article about Michel de Montaigne

Stoicism for Modern Stresses

improvement

Speed Reading and Accelerated Learning

How I Learned to Swim in 10 Days

Reality Distortion Field - all about Charisma

The Painless Path to Endurance

Simple Techniques to Increase your Productivity at Work

language

Learning Language

Why Language Classes don't Work

How to Learn but not Master any Language in 1 Hour

Resurrecting a Language you Forgot

Duolingo

go

http://www.learngo.co.uk/index.html

http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/

http://barrybecker4.com/go-lessons.html

air quality

15 House Plants to Improve Indoor Air Quality

NASA Study Finds House Plants Clean Air

Top 10 Air-Purifying House Plants

Protect yourself Against Lung Cancer

Rebuild your Lungs

programming

Using Web API and HTML 5 for File Uploads

ASP .NET Profiles Overview

CSS Performance: Debugging Naming Conventions

Designing Open-Source iPhone Games

scala

http://twitter.github.io/effectivescala/

http://matt.might.net/articles/learning-scala-in-small-bites/

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1305

http://docs.scala-lang.org/style/

http://twitter.github.io/scala_school/

misc

http://asia8.jimdo.com/

http://www4.gvsu.edu/triert/cache/articles/t2/bic.htm

Yomi: A Newbie's Guide to Starting with Lum

Money

I just finished Week 2 of Dan Ariely's free course "A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior." This week was all about money. It was all about how we aren't really strategic when using a resource that we work so hard for. And even when we have all the money we need, we're still not happy.

The above clip from "Glengarry Glen Ross" gives an inkling about how cutthroat working can be. The stakes are really high, and people can be inspired to take advantage no matter how unethical the situation becomes. The salesmen have it rough especially since we generally don't want to part with our money; it's this tendency called pain of paying. Things would be easier if the payments were using credit cards though, as the more a mode of payment becomes removed from actual physical currency the more willing people are to part with their funds. 

In the movie, a character protests that their leads are weak, which I took to mean that their prospective marks weren't big-shots. To invest in real estate when the costs of doing so are so huge compared to  one's income and savings means you have to be suffering some pretty strong delusions to go through with it. 

The sales tricks of offering something for free and offering bulk purchases serve to screw with our decisions - when something is free we don't focus as much on the quality and usefulness of the product, or even if we want such a thing at all. We'd pick the free option over what we truly want, if the latter has a price attached to it. Offering bulk purchases makes it so that the costs of what we're purchasing jump less at awareness. And if that isn't enough, we tend to forget that we have a pool of money to draw from. We instead operate under a tacit  understanding that this much money needs to be consumed only for this category of goods. In essence, it's hard to provide an accurate accounting for what we are giving up when we choose to buy something, so we don't - we just focus on the cost on the price tag.

And when we have money, we get primed to be less helpful and less likely to seek out others. The irony is that from studies the behavioral economists do, it's clear that we derive more pleasure from using our money and other resources to help others. The social considerations trump the financial ones in a happy life.

Following your Bliss

This article was a good shot in the arm, a validation and a wake-up call all at once. There are lessons here, to be considered at length.

Follow your Bliss, Right Off the Cliff

Wuxia, Part 2

I still can't stop thinking about the movie I saw yesterday. "The Blade" is haunting me. The land of rivers and lakes where countless heroes leave their mark, has no water to be seen except when it rains. And the heroes are no different from the villains, except maybe that the heroes have less of a body count since they only started recently. I wonder, how many people were inspired by these stories? As the feudal knights probably imitated the conventions of Sir Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur.

It's kind of sobering to someone who practices martial arts that came from the same cultural milieu. In the film, people who are purported to fly do so with the help of ropes. People leave after every bloodbath - why? To evade justice? To avoid revenge? Because they can't fix anymore what they broke? Or is it because that's what heroes are supposed to do? And the martial arts they learn - these forms that I work on, these techniques and conditioning; sure they've been refined, but in the beginning were they the result of nothing more than someone getting lucky?

Wuxia

I just had the pleasure today of watching "The Blade," a wuxia flick by Tsui Hark. It shares a lot of parallels with  "One-Armed Swordsman," which I've also seen recently. I think it's important to view the latter movie first and then watch the former because you won't get the full impact otherwise. Seen the order I recommend, the two films become a sort of tension between fantasy and what-most-likely-was-the-reality. 

"The Blade" is definitely grittier; it's a deconstruction of the typical wuxia fare, and it starts that off by having the plot lampshaded by a female narrator. She points out quite rightly that life for your itinerant warrior isn't romantic at all - you have to deal with poverty and other people would soon as kill you as look at you. Underworld figures are that - underworld figures. As in, bandits and robbers and murderers. 

And you might as well kill yourself if you're a civilian - aside from the same problems I stated above, you have to deal with getting victimized for sport by roving warlords. And it's even worse if you're a woman...

The ending was quite sad - the narrator gets left behind and her man has to walk the earth so that he doesn't become a target - and perhaps because he caught the bug to somehow gain glory for himself in his crapsack world. She spoke something quite memorable to me: she said that the Jianghu that they live in is about getting revenge, from generation to generation. She even admits that if the villain hadn't died before her father succumbed to his wounds she would have gone on to exact vengeance herself. In that kind of a universe, escalation is inevitable. And that now kind of makes me see all kung-fu movies in a different light.

Getting educated

I'm currently taking Dan Ariely's Coursera course on Irrationality (link). I'd been waiting for the course since last year and I have to say it was worth the wait. The production values for his videos are pretty high, he's funny and there's a lot to do on the site once you sign up. There is a lot of readings, and you get tested for reading comprehension and retention - apart from the lecture video quizzes. I don't mind though, since a lot of the information is eye-opening. The thing that's really jumping out at me is the concept of "coherent arbitrariness." The idea is that while we're very good at judging the relative value of things, we kind of suck sometimes when trying to construct the baseline on which those relative value judgements are based on. In fact, they could even be influenced by completely unrelated and inconsequential factors - think the weather when you're visiting a prospective college you're thinking of joining, for example. And the scary fact is once that first choice is set, we tend to base future decisions that share a connection with that first choice on the thing that we chose. In my case, I had the choice when applying for my first JLPT exam to go for the N5 or N4 level; N5 was a cakewalk while N4 would be substantially harder. I chose the N4 level and failed that exam, and I again failed the N4 exam the next year. All that grief and wasted resources and no certificate to show for it - I remember rationalizing to myself before all this started that N5 was common since most people in my school were going to go for it, so I should go for N4. Except now that I'm taking the Irrationality class I realize that since the level had a "4" in it and 4 is my favorite number, it may be that I chose the N4 because there was a four in the title.

Week 1 also had a discussion on defaults and how this can change how we perceive things as well as the decisions that we make. It resonates with me since when I passed the entrance exam for the college I took I managed to qualify for two scholarships. Taking them came with the restriction that I had to choose my major from a list of subjects. I'd initially wanted Psychology, but it wasn't in the list. Not taking the scholarship would have been a financial blow, not to mention the phone calls and notifications that would need to be sent. There was also an appeal to being chosen as a scholar, and giving up the scholarship would have meant turning my back on that state of being "special." Plus there were so many discussions and arguments with my parents since they wanted me to take a course in the approved list. I eventually capitulated and went for the default. Let me just say that was the worst decision of my life so far, and I think my life would be very different today if it hadn't been for that first choice.

This is why I recommend everybody take this course - and while we're at it, study rationality and decision theory and game theory and scientific thinking and mathematical thinking as well. Why this isn't being taught in grade school is beyond me.

By the way, below are some summaries of the takeaways from two papers in the required readings for the course's first week that I made. Just to whet people's appetite, and to make sure that I have a handy place to  get them from in case my computer croaks.

How actions create – not just reveal – preferences
People do not have on-demand knowledge of their preferences; these preferences have to be constructed every time one makes a decision. The construction process is not perfect. The mind takes in contextual information, it might rely on memories of actions that are devoid of their initial context. The present state of mind of the person, any consequential event that occurs that may trigger any of the mind's heuristics can derail the proper accounting of a decision's benefits and costs. And once this decision is made, it becomes a precedent for decisions that run along the same lines. We then have a situation where a person's life may be influenced by entirely unsound judgments. An example lies in how people do not deviate much from an   arbitrarily assigned number when placing bids for items in an auction.

Tom Sawyer and the construction of value
Although individuals have the intuition that more of a good means that they either must pay more or be paid more for it, they do not have a fundamental grasp on the value of the good in question. The perceived value of the good changes depending on how it is presented - a good that is to be paid for suddenly becoming free will be seen as valuable by more people than if the same good was initially paying off others then suddenly becoming free. There is great uncertainty about the value of something, and people tend to act sensibly instead of according to a grasp of that value. This raises serious problems with mainstream economic models. In coherent arbitrariness, coherence depends on whether the value to be changed is quantifiable, the closeness of the decision to the first decision, and whether the current decision is overtly similar to the initial decision. Arbitrariness depends on the ambiguity of value.

Torment: Tides of Numenera Kickstarter

Planescape: Torment was one of the best games from the nineties. It's an isometric RPG game that had a stellar cast and even more stellar writing. It's the only RPG game I've played several times; the gameplay is close to today's  Japanese RPG's.

They're making a spiritual sequel to the game, and it's called Torment: Tides of Numenera. The fundraising went off on a very fast start but now they need help with closing in on some stretch goals. They are almost at 3.2 million as of this writing; the funding closes in seven days, and if they reach 3.5 million Chris Avellone, who was behind the Planescape: Torment development, will join the design team.

We have here a chance to help produce a thing of great quality, instead of the sometimes hackneyed and exploitative games that get sent our way. If we really want video games to transcend their medium, let's support projects like this.

Link to Kickstarter Page

Numenera Tumblr

Teller Reveals His Secrets

I used to want to become a magician when I was a wee lad. I don't anymore, but it's always fun to read up on people who actually did it and made the big time. The article is a fascinating look into this often-silent magician's philosophy of magic.

Link to Smithsonian article

CNN: Gaming Reality

CNN did this interactive treatment of several facets of gaming. I found myself identifying with the story about South Korean gamers.

Second Thoughts

It's natural for one to question where he is at a certain point in time. It means there is a need to get your bearings, that one may have strayed and reorienting is in order. I'm just thankful that I'm not doing this second-guessing while, say, halfway up a rock face with no other climbing tools aside from my hands. 

I am in the process of achieving mastery in two fields: web development and martial arts. I have been training with my teacher once a week for almost a year now, and I have been training almost everyday. There are a score of drills that we have to practice and I have improved on them all so far, right now I am focusing on refining my understanding and execution of the principles of the style. For web development, I took time to study IT two years ago; I then spent a humbling eight months casting about for any company willing to hire me. After an additional five months of company training, I was made part of a development team maintaining the in-office resource management system. After five months, I was then put into a new project that entailed more advanced technology.

The above seems like such a short paragraph, now that I am looking at it. It doesn't even begin to cover the whole range of my experience - from raised hopes to dashed expectations to minor frustrations to big problems. I've found my performance lacking at times, for both of the things I'm trying to master. Other times I have been completely over my head. I've been lazy and paid the price, and I've also made mistakes that I didn't pay for. There's been good luck and bad luck in equal measures. 

I've had a senior in the style I practice not like me, but eventually he was able to get over it; I've had to fight office politics at my workplace, to not what I'd call a victory but at least I avoided a worse outcome. There's a lot that's been done and learned and discovered in these past three years, and there will be many more. But I'm scared that this might end up a failure. There are no signposts to the future after all, and I've already failed at a previous endeavor that I'd gone into with great energy - only to end it with tears and regret. I am unsure if I am on the best path for me; I am unsure if I am on a path at all.

I am not being guided by some Presence on high. I only have myself to rely on, with all the irrationality that humans are known for. The stakes grow higher every year, pretty soon I will have no one else to support me. I'm not rich, I have no power, and I worry about my family and about starting a family. Somehow, "going with the flow" isn't a feasible stategy anymore. Would that I end up similarly to Malcolm Gladwell, whose career does seem like that of a late bloomer. But there's no guarantee, is there? 

The Less Wrong wiki is a fount of very instructive articles on the subject of, in the words of the author, making sure the map matches the territory. The articles are very easy to digest, and I do recommend everyone to take the time to really absorb the concepts.

The past decade has opened up some really amazing fields of study - I wish I knew then about the existence of things like game theory, decision theory, and behavioral economics. I would have paid more attention in school. I'm making up for lost time though, and I am of the opinion that people everywhere regardless of their background or heritage would benefit greatly from taking careful note of how to be more rational. I would start with the wiki, then move on to Nicholas Nassim Taleb's and Robert Greene's books, Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations" (of which I'll be writing more about soon), and anything about Charlie Munger.

Fun with Architecture

Definitely worth a look. It's fun to see feats of ingenuity like this. Definitely reminds me of the Dymaxion house.

The Tulous of Fujian Province

Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House

Flights of Fancy - or, Pretty Good Harry Potter Fanfiction

Back when I was little I loved to spend time walking around the house while I imagined what would happen if my favorite TV characters got together - or more often, what would happen if they penetrated the veil that is the TV set's monitor and managed to land in my world. It's a fun piece of escapism and I remember spending hours just getting the interactions to mesh with the characters' personalities. 

I find now that I am older that I still retain an interest in "What if?" stories. I love to think about crossovers and team-ups. I'm not the only one - there are those who discuss in forums the myriad ways this character would trounce another in a straight fight, who would have the better abilities, etc.

Today, I submit a worthy contribution to the genre: this fanfiction by Camwyn brings together Harry Potter and John Constantine from Hellblazer. It's certainly funny, and the author has managed to get the characters' voices spot-on. I have to say it's a superior piece of fiction. It also raises another thing about Intellectual Property Rights - I mean, a lot of people really love the author's idea, but if copyright restrictions had their way this work would never have gotten off the ground. Even though the series is incomplete - and has not been updated for seven years now - it's still incredibly creative, and we are the better for having it. In fact, I'm currently looking to it for pointers on good fiction writing. 

It is that good. Please take the time to give it a read!

Remembering 1960s Afghanistan, the photographs of Bill Podlich

I love these pictures. Many of the places you'll see are gone now; I suppose there are those out there who don't miss them, people who would say that losing these things was for the greater good.

Basing it on the pictures, it seems to me that things were looking to be quite well already.

Remembering 1960s Afghanistan, the photographs of Bill Podlich

Do You Believe in Magic?

I did. I even went through the same thing he experienced, poor guy.

Systema - Learning to Hit Deep

Systema is a martial art that fascinates my teacher. The principles that he's seen so far being reflected in their training and fighting would indicate that this martial art is firmly grounded in the internal style of fighting. I myself have a couple of DVD's from this website. My teacher likes how System practitioners sometimes practice pushing hands with more than two players; I prefer the breathing and conditioning techniques that they do.

The video below is from Sharon Friedman's Systema Israel blog. He has a lot of interesting ideas and he periodically comes out with videos on Systema drills. Most of the time the drills need a partner, which is a bit problematic for me. Systema has a lot of emphasis it seems on partner work, while the art I am learning right now has a lot of training methods you do on your own. For partner work like pushing hands or form correction, I have my teacher who checks me once a week when we meet.

I came across these, and I have to say they opened my mind up. I think a large part of why I browse the Internet is to find these gems - pieces that provide a different way of looking at things I haven't thought deeply about before. The author's page is here - please check your knee-jerk reactions at the door.

Trafficking in Wrongs: Why Californians Need to Vote No on Prop 35 and Why the Rest of Us Should Care

What Prostitutes, Nurses and Nannies Have in Common

I came across this article about a Russian family who was able to live in complete isolation for forty years. It's interesting because even after being offered the chance to move back to civilization the family refused. It's most likely human stubbornness and fear of the unknown that prompted this decision, but perhaps there's also in play a little bit of not caring to be stuck so close to strangers. I myself have noted how little I care for my fellowman; they may care for things that I don't give a whit about, or they don't give enough weight to the things that move me. I have elected a life that quietly lets others be, yet some of these people in their perversity still feel entitled to interrupt my peaceful existence. 

What I've noticed is that people have these stories about themselves and others. These stories are largely fueled by their own insecurities and petty thoughts, but invariably are all about them being better than others. Woe be to you if you somehow manage to give cause for someone to think that you could figure as a villain in their stories. In order to gain support for their narrative they will trumpet it aloud to sympathetic ears, give malicious intention to the most ineffectual of actions, make themselves out to be martyrs in some theater of their imagining. People have been baked in ovens because of such fiction being believed by too many.

Where people gather reality becomes soft. However, being alone in Siberia renders reality a bit more objective. That is, you either you find the means to survive or you don't. The food you catch or grow may be enough to fill your belly or it might barely sate your hunger. In this minimalist existence the tiniest of things gains true material significance. Everything is pure.