Aristotle I: "Balance"

I told you I'd come back to this topic.

I really, really hate how people use the word 'balance' as a pretense for pragmatism (when it's decidedly not pragmatic, "Our country uses 60 Hz current, our country uses 120 Hz--let's compromise and use 80, that's pragmatic!") and thereby a rationalization for pretty much any action.   Yet, despite I find other "intellectually immature" (did I ever mention that I think someone should make a T-shirt that says, "I am a member of a moronic cult"?  I'm sick of people throwing around that ad hominem...except, of course, when I do it :p.) people who agree with me, try searching around for "criticisms of the Aristotelian Mean".  They are actually suspiciously rare.  So, I will do so here.

One obvious theoretical criticism is that the Aristotelian Mean presents a false dichotomy in the sense that there is a "scale", and only between two extremes, of two different values (as the old joke goes, Congress usually compromises--somewhere between stupid and evil).  The other criticism is that it feels like a straw man.  After all, the name-calling argument is that we shouldn't be "extreme".  Why not?  Is it suddenly considered reprehensible to endeavor to be as consistent as you can be?  Is it suddenly reprehensible to actually have some damn principles?  (see what I did there?  I criticized the Golden Mean for being a straw man, and then in the very next few sentences I presented a straw man.  Either way, I hope the reader understands what I am at least getting at here)

It is, really, just a thinly veiled disguise of false compromise.  Usually performed by individuals who feel that "everything is relative", and are afraid of upsetting anyone (although, really, if you wanted to make sure not to upset anyone, you wouldn't talk at all).

Yet what I find even more troubling is how, essentially, such a typically emotionally acceptable theory (due to its social acceptability because, as I said, it doesn't "rock the boat") unusually forms a solid of Aristotelian ethics.  I've heard plenty of criticisms of Aristotelian ethics, but unfortunately, I don't think this has really been focused on by any other source, so I supposed that I might as well go ahead and do this here.

Next I'll go into my thoughts w.r.t. Aristotle on "Happiness".

Romance of the Programmer

This was something I wrote a long time ago, that I still somewhat agree with.

After the break :U.

I love Megaman

18:10 (actually, 19:45-20:45)

When I saw that the main boss was a balance, I thought that this was going to be yet another, "We should strive for balance in our lives" 'moral lesson' episode.  Instead, I ended up fighting it (literally).

When we give up our philosophy for balance and pragmatism, we become complete moral relativists and lose our sense of identity.

In retrospect this was sooooo cheesy, but...I like it.


...more on my thoughts regarding 'balance' later.

Log

Things that bother me about the log function.

I was just going to focus on "What base do people mean?" until I realized that there's a lot of ambiguous things about this function.

The first is..."What base do people mean?"  Generally, you have to take it by context of the person you're talking to.  If I'm talking to a computer scientist, it's base 2.  If I'm talking to an engineer, it's base 10.  If I'm talking to a mathematician, it's base e.  We all just say 'log' though.

Next up is, "What's the branch cut?"  Generally, people mean the $-\pi$ branch cut, where log of negative numbers is undefined.  However, over the complex plane, we could mean different possible branch cuts.  Moreover, depending on the surface you're considering the log function over, different things happen, which brings me to...

"What's the domain?"  If it's over $\mathbb{C}$, it makes sense to even ask the previous question.  If it's over $\Re$, then _really_ you're considering the domain $\Re^+$, the positive real axis.  Although, you _could_ define a log function over the negative real axis and leave the positive real axis undefined.  Moreover, there's a particular kind of Riemann surface (in fact, it's _constructed_ so that the following happens) where the log function over _it_ is defined _everywhere_.  Moreover, the question of which domain you're considering is important to answer the question...

"What's the derivative?"  I remember hearing this story of a Physics professor docking points off of a student for drawing the graph of the log function's derivative as being $1/x$, but only on the _positive_ part of the axis.  Technically, the student was 100% correct.  The derivative of $log(x)$ is $1/x$ only on the positive real axis because $log(x)$ itself is only _defined_ on the positive real axis.  Because of this, depending on where the branch cut, domain, and even _base_ you're considering, the derivative will be different!

However, we usually don't clarify these things.  All of this information about the log function is usually easily taken up according to the context of the discussion.

Universal Responses

I think we should term the following universal responses (responses that can be used as a reply for anything), as "Passive Aggressive Diversions":

"My mother died."

"I did it for a poem."

"My mother died."

"We all have Lewis Carroll to thank."

"My mother died."

"Yeah, I'm not really into Pokemon."

The Social Effects of Social Effects

I've have been reading this book off and on for the past few months.  A while back I read the book "How They Succeeded" (": The Secret to Success" or some such subtitle) by Orison Swett Marden (I would be remiss if I didn't say that I saw a review by someone saying, "The secret is in the author's middle name.").  I wish to discuss this book a little bit, and then go on to a key point regarding the social lives I saw of a lot of the individuals involved in that book.

Basically, instead of reading a bunch of autobios and trying to find their secrets implicitly, it turns out this guy walked about and talked to these made and wrote a book that is exactly that.

Tl;dr, this book is cliff notes of many autobios summarized with the information _I_ want.

Tl;dr^2 this book is win.

Either way my notes follow and are not made in the normal fashion.  This is because of the organization of the book being so different as to most other books I have read.  Most other books have a few clear points and go about them in a linear fashion.  This book is essentially a collection of interviews.  So for a change of pace, I decided to just read through it and see what sticks.  The idea being that, what sticks would be points common to most of these fairly successful people.   I suppose I should also mention the people he interviews:  basically everyone who was important in the U.S. in 1900.  The author of "Battle Hymn of the Republic", Rockefeller, Carnegie, Edison, Wannamaker, and...really an impressive list.  They all sat down with this guy and gave them their (as the author put it) "advice to young men".

I understand most of these points are trite, but either way I will state them as they had been stated.

Without further ado about nothing (with a tl;dr^2 afterwards bottom):

-Perseverance.  I do not think there was a single person in this vast, vast list that did not mention this.  Even if Orison did not bring it up intentionally in the interview, this trait would always, always come up.  And there was a great amount of attention with everyone to also include a remark disparaging that their success was by chance.  Some said that perseverance simple made them ready for the chances that appeared.
--Really, ALL OF THEM said this.  Keep in mind, that's about thirty some odd rich authors/musicians/scientists/

businessmen and from all walks of life saying the same thing over and over and over again.
-Work hard.
-Do one thing.  Particularly, in what you're good at.  There's a lot of examples of people who persevere, but in many thing.  There was also an implicit lesson in that even if the one thing you specialized in becomes obsolete, it either:  isn't _really_ obsolete and there are a lot of opportunities still available in the area especially since many people will become discouraged, or you pull an "animal husbandry" trick (this is a joke from D&D, supposedly a player put all of his ranks into animal husbandry and was able to get out of every possible situation by clever use or interpretation of what the skill meant) and realize that the large tent of skills your specialization provides or areas it allows access into that may not yet be obsolete or even new.
-Accounting.  Surprisingly, a lot of the great businessmen always talk about some connection or want of first-class [mark the adjective] bookkeepers.  Most either started off as clerks or bookkeepers or really understand the importance of them.  Rockefeller was fond enough of it that he kept his first ledger as Scrooge McDuck kept his Number One Dime, that is, even though it was full he kept it with him.
-----I would be remiss if I did not put a small remark of how I think this backs up my thoughts of the importance of logging here...
-Of all the individuals that highly valued education, they did not start off with free education or being given scholarships into schools.  They started off as child laborers.  In fact, there was one individual who started off with an enormous amount of opportunity (as his father was rich); but he sucked at school and kept flunking all over the place.  Then only when his father kicked him out and he started working did he recognize the values of certain kinds of education.  Actually, his story is not alone in the book...
--But, just like perseverance above, they all mention "study".
-There's a crapload of religious people, and almost all the businessmen speak of philanthropy (even in small amounts) heavily.  Honestly, it seems more like they use religion and philanthropy as a means for business connections and cheap advertisement.

Tl;dr^2:
-Keep at it.
-Work Hard.
-Study.
-One Thing.
-Logging.
-Accounting.
-Applying social reinforcement beneficially is easy.

That last one I want to expound on.

Go check out Hamming's article "You and Your Research".  I want to focus on the 'closed v. open doors' part of that speech for a little bit before going into another example.

Perhaps the closed v open doors thing that Hamming talked about wasn't just about efficacy in individuals' research.  There seems to be this positive reinforcement coupled to the social aspects of talking about mathematics to others.

Conferences -> Social reinforcement coupled to math -> More math

I remembered someone asking me whether I got social needs/crap from talking about math randomly to people in the department.  I answered "NO" out of a sense of wanting to appear tough (perhaps?  I don't know).  But now, knowing what I know about behaviorism, I am not so sure...maybe I do?  Maybe this is the reason that math people do math?  And they appear anti-social because they only stick with people who talk about math, which by definition is not the majority?  I'm just brainstorming thoughts here...YOU MIGHT NOTICE THIS BECAUSE OF THE PROPENSITY OF THE QUESTION MARKS.

I mean, my other thoughts are:

-Again, as above in "How They Succeeded", a lot of the people either blatantly suggested talking about your goals and plans with as many people as possible, or implicitly suggested this (by showing in their own lifes how doing this positively reinforced their actions).
-At least when I talk about the problems I'm thinking about, I'm typically actively solving items in front of the person I'm talking to.
-If not, they're talking about things that I put in juxtaposition to what I'm talking about, and lets me think continuously more creatively than by myself.
-It's really cheap, easy, and passive positive reinforcement (the holy grail of reinforcement strategies).

Perhaps mathematicians aren't anti-social, it's just that the things they talk about can not be conversed with the typical person in public on a useful or reinforcing level so that to outsiders they appear anti-social, but to their clique they are not.

For what it's worth, this is also backed up in a lot of the biographies in found in E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics.  When they were not in isolation, LETTERS EVERYWHERE.  OHDEARLORD SO MUCH CORRESPONDENCE (I WARNED YOU BRO, I WARNED YOU ABOUT THE CORRESPONDENCE!).  MATH WAS DONE EVERYWHERE.  Again, I'm going to emphasize this, and I doublechecked it.  If you look at a lot of mathematician's collected works (I looked at Jacobi's in particular), a vast majority is correspondence.  Even Archimedes had a lot of correspondence (it's surprising that it was able to last so long through history).  Also, whenever conversation strayed from maths, apparently Lagrange started spewing "I don't know" every three seconds.  Furthermore, the only exception to this is Galois.  I used to think his life story was "Oh I have an idea!  Oh hey girls!  Oh hey I'mma gonna die because of girl-feuds!  Oh hey last thesis I just did in a day kthxbai!"  Whereas his life was CONTINUALLY TRYING TO GET INTO THE MATH CLUB and the math club being all "wtfno" EVERY SINGLE TIME.  But then again, I'm not sure how much of an exception this is, since Galois didn't do any other maths other than his one sketch of an idea.

It just occurred to me, aside from possibly the Mersenne circle, the majority of social reinforcement was _correspondence_.  E.g., letters.  Thus, this gives me the idea that instead of going down a few floors each time I have an idea in X, I could just _WRITE A ****ING LETTER_.

....if I could find more people than myself, my advisor and the one (or two) other person (people?) in my department who know anything about my field :|...

Contra Leisure

http://davidkanigan.com/2011/11/19/if-youre-busy-youre-doing-something-wrong-the-surprisingly-relaxed-lives-of-elite-achievers/

What I got out of the article was more of a message of, "Don't forget efficacy."  As opposed to lax-times.

O.K., WHY AM I SO MUCH AGAINST LAX TIMES?
AGAIN, I'M GOING TO BE SAYING SOME PRETTY SEVERE THINGS HERE.  HOLD YOUR GLARES.

I want to give a defense for attacking leisure and supporting work.

First of all, I admit the vagueness in the term.  If I describe leisure as 'doing what one likes', then this includes things that may not be 'leisure'.  In fact, if one defines 'doing what one likes' as leisure, then it seems to me that the ideal solution would be to construct all 'work' in such a way that it is 'leisure'.  I can not say that 'leisure' is the complement of the set of the things that increase the skillset that you have determined to amplify.  Because this would include trivialities such as 'doing the laundry' as 'leisure', and this doesn't quite match up with the common sense definition of the word.  I'm not quite sure how to go about this.

Second of all, I admit I fall into patterns of leisure myself.  From my perspective, it is a fault to correct.

With this said, my first of two basic arguments is the same reason that one might be against using the word 'miracle' is very similar to why I'm against the preconception of leisure being necessary.  If we allow the label of 'miracle' over certain phenomena, it dissuades us from trying to figure out what is occurring with those phenomena.

Similarly, if we say that leisure is necessary, then it dissuades us from trying to figure out how we might use that time to better ourselves instead.

The other reason is behavioral, and is similar to the reason why so many determinists are compatibilists.  The reason, I believe, that some determinists accept compatabilism (that is that ethics and norms exist despite our not being able to choose to follow or not follow a given ethics or norm), is behavioral:  that is that the very fact that we believe in those norms increases are chance that we follow those norms, and this is beneficial in a survival or utilitarian sense.

Similarly, if I say that leisure is necessary, it provides an outlet for rationalization to such a behavior, and thus increases the chance that I do it far beyond what may be argued as 'psychologically necessary' (if such an argument like that exists).