Results tagged “philosophy”

Sci-Fi can be deeply meaningful, or just all so much bullshit. It all depends on how you consume it.

During lunch for the last week I've been having a Trek-for-lunch workout session. Just old Star Trek shows (remastered) and the elliptical machine. Yesterday's show was "Return of the Archons" If you're not a trek fan, here's a synopsis of the show from wiki

Teaser
Lieutenants Sulu and O'Neil are dispatched to the surface of the planet Beta III to learn what became of the Archon, which disappeared there one hundred years earlier. Recognized as outsiders, they draw the attention of the lawgivers. Pursued, the officers call for beam-out, but only Sulu is retrieved, and he is in a strange mental state.

Act One
Captain Kirk beams down with a larger landing party to investigate. Spock, Dr. McCoy, sociologist Lindstrom, and two guards, Leslie and Galloway, form the balance of the landing party. Immediately, Spock notices a strangeness in the people they encounter; a kind of contented mindlessness. Then the Red hour strikes - the beginning of the Festival, a period of debauchery and lawlessness. Fleeing, the landing party bursts in on Reger, Hacom, and Tamar. They had been told by Bilar and Tula, two passersby, that Reger could rent them rooms for after Festival. Their questions seem to terrify Reger. They are given rooms and retreat from the mayhem outside, trying their best to get a few hours' sleep.

Festival ends the next morning. Reger, learning the landing party did not attend Festival, concludes they are not of the Body, and asks an astonishing question: "Are you Archons?" The conversation is interrupted by the arrival of lawgivers, the robed servants of the mysterious Landru. The lawgivers command the landing party to accompany them, to be absorbed.

Act Two
Kirk, acting on a hunch, defies them - and causes confusion. He'd correctly concluded this society is built around obedience, and might not be ready for disobedience. Taking advantage of their confusion, Reger guides the crew to a place he knows, where they will be safe. But on the way, Landru employs a form of mass telepathy to command an attack. Among the attackers is... Lieutenant O'Neil. Reger warns against bringing him along, but Kirk cannot abandon a crew member.

Spock discovers a source of immense power, radiating from a point near the landing party's location. Reger tells Kirk about the arrival of the first Archons: many were killed, many more were absorbed. And then he drops the bombshell, mentioning casually that Landru pulled the Archons from the sky... Kirk contacts the Enterprise, and learns that heat beams are focused on the ship. Her shields are able to deflect them, but nearly all ship's power is diverted to this purpose. Communications are poor, escape is impossible, and the orbit is decaying. If Kirk can't put a stop to the beams, the ship will be destroyed. Worse, contacting the ship enables Landru to discover and stun the landing party.

Act Three
They awaken in a cave-like cell, but McCoy, Galloway and O'Neil are missing. Then McCoy returns - and he has been absorbed. Evidently, this is the fate that awaits the entire landing party. Lawgivers appear, demanding Kirk accompany them, and this time, Kirk's refusal results in an immediate death threat. The orderly society has corrected a flaw.

Kirk is taken to a futuristic room: the absorption chamber. There, a priest named Marplon will oversee Kirk's forcible induction into the Body. Lawgivers summon Spock, who is taken to the same place, and there encounters Kirk, now mindlessly happy.

Act Four
Spock learns that Marplon is part of the same underground to which Reger belongs. Marplon intervened to prevent both Kirk and Spock from being absorbed, and returned their weapons. Spock, acting as instructed, makes his way back to the cell.

Discussing Landru and his society, Kirk and Spock reach the same conclusion: the society has no spirit, no spark; Landru's orders are being issued by a computer. Kirk decides the plug must be pulled. Spock is concerned this would violate the Prime Directive, but Kirk opines that the directive applies to living, growing cultures. When Reger and Marplon join them, Kirk demands more information: the location of Landru. Reger reveals that Beta III was at war, and was in danger of destroying itself. Landru, one of the leaders, took the people back to a simpler time. And, Marplon claims, Landru is still alive.

Marplon takes Kirk and Spock to a chamber, the Hall of Audiences, where Landru appears to his acolytes - or, at least, a projection of him does. There, Landru regretfully informs them that their interference is causing great harm, and that they, and all who knew of them, must be killed, to cleanse the memory of the Body. Blasting through the wall, Kirk reveals the truth: an ancient machine, built and programmed by the real Landru 6,000 years earlier. This machine, now calling itself Landru, was entrusted with the care of the Body, the society of Beta III. To that end, it has enslaved all members of that society, and those who visit, in a thralldom of happiness that is stagnant and without creativity.

Kirk and Spock discuss this with Landru, asking it difficult questions it has evidently never had to answer, questions about whether its approach to creating the good is really creating evil. Ultimately, they convince it that it is the evil, and that it must destroy the evil - and it does, exploding in a burst of pyrotechnics.

Kirk leaves a team of specialists, including Lindstrom, to help restore the planet's culture "to a Human form".

It's not a great episode, and I kept noticing that one of the red-shirt guys kept asking stupid questions. The plot would inch along towards us realizing that it's a computer controlling things, and the character would say something like "Don't these people have a soul!"

It seemed kind of stupid, but then I realized that the writers were using all the dumb comments as a way of continuing to explain the plot. Perhaps folks in the 1960s couldn't understand computer mind control. I don't know. it seemed heavy-handed to me. It had lots of problems. If I was going to start picking apart problems, I wasn't going to enjoy the story much. How about making up a game?

So with nothing better to do than exercise and think, I started asking myself the old editors and writer's question: "what could you take away from this show and it would still work?"

• Shiny things are nowhere as much fun after you get them as before, even if they have some value. So yes, that Kindle or iPad or whatever will have a real use, and you will be marginally happier with it than without, but not as much as you think
• You can talk yourself into (or out of) anything. The only difference between smart people and other people is that smart people do this with bigger words and more complex arguments. Be confident, but also assume that you are broken in ways you can never spot. Find some ways to get a checksum on life decisions every now and then.
• You don't need very much at all. Maybe a laptop computer and a couple changes of clothes. Pictures and videos of your life. That's about it.
• Nothing will ever replace experiences. No matter how big the car, nice the house, or professional-looking the suit, it's never going to be as much fun or mean as much later as the experiences you have in life. And it's not just having the experience, it's looking forward to them, and planning them, and making pictures, movies, and blogs out of them. The best part, oddly, may be the planning. So planning a 200-dollar trip to the beach in the Fall with people you love may give you many hours of happiness this summer -- along with the fun of the trip itself.
• Learn to keep picking topics and immersing yourself in them. Most everybody will say to drop out and become part of the system -- 9-5 job and TV/games/internet in the evening. If you want a life you could sleep through, that's fine. But if you want a life you can tell stories about, keep reinventing yourself. And that means constantly learning.
• Lots of shit in life that once looked dumb or stupid opens up into this huge panorama of beauty once you learn the rules. In so many things you are like the guy who never saw a baseball game going to the world series. You kind of get it, but it all seems silly. You don't know the rules. Decide to learn how to appreciate music, for instance. Get a few college lectures on tape, get some good music to listen to, hang out with folks who are music connoisseurs. The more you know about various art forms, the richer your life is.
• Forget philosophy and meaning-of-life shit. You're too young. For now, you are what you do. Go do something worthwhile. By this I do not mean spending a lot of time limiting yourself by placing labels on ourselves and limiting your perceptions by labeling others. I mean you make the decisions to do what you want to do, and those decisions -- what you do, your decisions -- is the essence of your existence.

  The things you may or may not have not done in the past have nothing at all to do with it. If you define yourself by your past actions then you are doing yourself a great harm.

  Every minute you make new choices, do new things, and those choices and actions are your life. The things you do, the decisions and actions you take, even if nothing more than decisions to be happy under miserable circumstances, constitute your life. You own them, and by continuing to take ownership and dancing above the chasm, you live fully.
  We must imagine Sisyphus happy.

• Stick to a daily exercise routine at all costs
• If you are changing and getting better, that means you are changing friends too. This was very difficult for me, but you can't hang out with the same folks and expect to become a better person. There are exceptions, of course, but to a large degree your life is controlled by whom you choose to be friends and hang out with. Be aware that you don't want to be the same person at 30 as you were at 20. I'm not saying be an asshole -- keep being friendly by all means -- but be very careful who you hold yourself up against as "normal"
• Dating is a numbers game, like a lot of other things. Learn the skills of dating and don't sweat picking up chicks (or guys)
• Concentrate on your weaknesses. Make them stronger. When you get to your 30s you can work from your strengths, but there has to be some time in your life to work on shit you suck at, and for me it was when I had the most motivation, my 20s.
• Speaking of which, you have to learn management. No matter what you do, there will be a manager. Even if you don't want to be one, you have to understand what the job is like to help out your manager. Being a good leader means being a good servant. This concept sounded easy (or facile) to me in my 20s, but proved hard to apply in practice.
• You are never ready for kids. Have them early while you have energy. Read all the books about kids if you must, but realize that creating a replacement is about the most biologically easy thing you could do. After all, evolution has been working on making you a great gene transferral and primate-raising machine, so don't get paranoid and neurotic about all the latest parenting fashion. Use some sense.

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• Everybody wants to be a rock star and win the lottery. Nobody ever does, and the ones that do end up destroying their life. Realize slow success is a million times better than overnight success.
• Much of the stuff in life that normal people do is geared around killing time by distracting you with shiny things of no value. You may never be able to fight this completely, but you should at least deeply understand it and how it affects your goals
• Create. With a passion. There are two major kinds of people in this world, consumers and creators. The herd will push you to consume, life will push you to consume, consumption is the easy and default path, but true joy and a full life come from creating. It does not matter one bit how many people like what you create, just create. Write. Blog. Make videos. Make a movie. Write a program. The longer the format and the more creativity involved, the more you are going to turn on and exercise key parts of your brain. Nobody wants to be 80 and only have stories of being at the office, but fuck, if you were at the office creating something at least you tried to make a difference. I'd rather be that guy than the one who watched Sumo wrestling everyday (or played 20,000 hours of WoW during his 20s) The only thing you're going to have at the end of your life are the decisions you made, the things you created, and memories. Learn to maximize these things.
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I was downloading data from my PulseOx this morning and thinking about some problems i had yesterday with type coercion in F# when it occurred to me how good I am at whining and complaining. It's something of an art form. We live in a wondrous world, yet we complain all the time. Everything is awesome and everything sucks. Dude! Where is my jet-pack?

Then I remembered those cool pictures I found last week on the internet and changed my mind.

Yesterday a couple of readers gave me grief for all the "knowns", "unknown knowns", "unknown unknowns", etc.. On top of that , the definitions got a little loose in the essay.

So instead of fixing the essay (Gad no! This is the internet! 2-hours work constitutes long-term commitment) I thought I would enumerate the scale of what you can know and what you can't. I'm probably reinventing something from somewhere, but I think these distinctions are important enough to restate. One of the authors from the articles I quote came to the conclusion that you can deal with any amount of unknowns simply by knowing the questions. Hell no. That's totally whacked.

Ten years ago I sat in the office of a high-ranking procurement officer in the military. He was a fast-riser, had a masters in mathematics and was a very sharp guy. I was explaining to him that the way the software development was going on a certain project was troublesome. The people, technology, process, environment, and bureaucracy were not working together. Instead various misunderstandings, agendas, confusion, and ignorance was causing chaos and poor performance.

It was a complicated discussion, made more so because each of the varying factors - people, technology, process, bureaucracy, environment - were pretty dang complicated in their own right. The way they all worked together -- or were supposed to work together -- was even more complex. Remember, this guy was probably a genius. Literally responsible for tens of billions of dollars. But he had no concept of what he didn't know. It was like trying to explain String Theory to Julius Caesar. We just had no place to meet. Sure, given a few weeks of gaining some common understanding, this guy would be teaching me something. There was no stupidity at work -- he was a brilliant man. He wasn't even classically ignorant -- it wasn't like I could give him a class and a couple of tests and somehow that would fix things. We simply couldn't communicate.

I'll never forget what he said.

"I'm not sure I'm following you completely, but you see, I'm on top of the whole thing. I can ask any questions I like and get an answer"

My thoughts were: yes! But you neither know the correct questions, what the answers might imply, or how the answers to one question might lead to other questions!

Simply asking and answering questions is not enough. This guy had the magic power -- whatever he asked, you can be sure that somebody was going to work as hard as they could to come up with an answer. And the project was still hosed up.

So in the interest of simplifying the discussion of how ignorant we all are in various ways, I propose the following scale:

In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. - Bertrand Russell

I haven't been blogging much lately, and it all has to do with flying. Fifteen years ago a 22-year-old kid at the airport told me something that's been resonating with me ever since.

In my mid 30s, I had decided to learn to fly. So I went to the airport, where I met a young flight instructor. He seemed like a nice enough fellow. He asked me about my desire to fly. Immediately I went through a list of things I'd like to do -- first I'd like to learn how to navigate, and then I'd like to try out landing on grass strip, and then....

"Hold on a second there, hoss," he said, "Right now you don't even know what you don't know."

As I learned to fly, first as a private pilot, then getting my instrument, commercial, tailwheel, high-performance, and complex ratings (including trying out twins, seaplanes, and stunt planes, among other things) I thought a lot about what he said: I didn't even know what I didn't know.

He was right.

His point was that while I was very aware of what I'd like to do in terms an outsider would understand, I had no domain experience at all in aviation, aside from watching a few movies and being a passenger. It's not just that I didn't know the questions, I wouldn't understand the questions, wouldn't understand what they meant, what the answers might mean, or how the questions fit together. There was no basis for us to have an intelligent conversation.

So we spent a lot of time doing things not on my list: flying slow, approaching a stall, reading METARs, talking about maps, talking about priorities in an emergency (aviate, navigate, communicate), talking about all sorts of domain concepts, talking and learning. We created a common model understood overtly, tacitly, and functionally from which we could start to have a conversation.

You see, I thought I knew what I wanted, and I was right in a way, but in a more important way I was worse than ignorant -- an ignorant person can be taught, he simply needs to be exposed to information -- I was a stranger in a strange land. I was just some guy with a boatload of terms and stories that all kind of fit together in my world-view but had little credence in his -- even though the terms were the same. First I had to learn and be able to physically and symbolically manipulate concepts about what I didn't know, aviation, and then we could start talking about what I'd like to know.

The reason I haven't blogged much lately because I am beginning to feel that the vast majority of what we say and do in the world is horribly incomplete. We're all like kindergarteners to somebody else. We don't know what we don't know. This has very mportant consequences

I do not believe in evolution.

When I was in fourth grade, my entire class took a break for an hour while I had a debate with my friend David Hillon about evolution. He argued for evolution and science, and I argued for skepticism and faith.

The world, you see, was only a few thousand years old. The Great Flood made the Grand Canyon. There were too many gaps in the fossil record to demonstrate evolution. Great flood stories are part of every culture. After all, we already knew how things came about -- the King James Bible -- and as long as we understood that was true we could speculate freely about the rest of it.

As long as it supported long-established religious dogma, it was worthy of study.

I have been thinking about my fourth-grade experience and Cato The Elder quite a bit over the last several years.

What was the first-written book of the New Testament?

If you answered "Matthew", you might want to read up a bit on what scholars currently know about the bible.

Most scholars believe First Thessalonians was the first book in the New Testament written. What about the Gospels? Is Matthew the first Gospel written? Wrong again. The first gospel written is widely believed to be Mark. Mark -- without the extra verses tacked on at the end -- is considered one of the best sources we have of what early Christians had for a bible.

A friend yesterday twittered and posted into FaceBook a status update about Kanban and programming teams:

"list of electronic tools for lean and kanban teams http://bit.ly/6WW8cS #kanban"

(Kanban is a way of doing work where you use a board to show a "flow" of work and limit the number of activities in any one stage to a certain number)

To which a friend of his replied:

"Yeah, the whole idea of managing the pipeline in a structured way makes a lot of sense. In fact, strange as it sounds, I can see how you could apply the principles to a larger enterprise waterfall of iterative project[s]. You could use it to focus the team on the immediate pipeline...

Yikes!

Over the summer I've read a bunch of books arguing for and against the existence of God. I've had to cut the series short due to work requirements, but I thought I'd draw some conclusions. This is that last of those posts.

So I think it's fair for the reader to say, "Ok Daniel. What have you learned from all of this?"

I've learned quite a bit, actually.

Over the summer, my goal was to read 6 or 7 books debating the existence of God. The purpose was to take a look at how smart people argue about things with little evidence. I've had to cut my series short due to a bunch of work-related material I need to read, so I thought I would draw some conclusions here.

My purpose wasn't to get into a religious debate, only to see where the strengths of each argument lie. Apologies if any of this offends you!

(This is the fourth in my "Does God Exist" series of reviews. There will be six or seven books on whether God exists or not. I'll read them for you, give a recap here, and then try to draw it all into some conclusions at the end. This is not meant as a religious discussion, more of an examination of the way smart people argue about really tough subjects.)

What would the Bible, the Christian's holy book, look like if it were dissected by critical historians? That's the question Bart Ehrman asks in his book "Jesus Interrupted"

It's not a flattering sight.

Ever since I wrote the article comparing technology to heroin, I've been been thinking about mind and body-altering things and how morals, standards, and mores build up around them to contain the damage and maximize the benefits to society. As we get more and more integrated with technology, I'm waiting for some new standards to emerge about what is acceptable or not -- I think this is a vital next step to maintain some kind of vigor in the species.

Since nobody else is doing anything else along these lines that I can see, I thought I'd create a few standards or morals for myself. A "standard" is just a better way of doing things: standards change over time. A "moral" is something that I personally do not do because I find it harms myself or others. You create standards and you discover morals. I apply the simple rule of discovering morals by asking "If I made this moral a universal law, would more people be helped than harmed by it?"

So let's get with it.

(This is the third in my "Does God Exist" series of reviews. There will be six or seven books on whether God exists or not. I'll read them for you, give a recap here, and then try to draw it all into some conclusions at the end. This is not meant as a religious discussion, more of an examination of the way smart people argue about really tough subjects.)

"The problem with those Christians," my friend told me one night, "is that they want to run all of our lives. I'm gay, and they even want to tell me I can't get married!"

I've had this discussion, or ones like it, many times before. There's usually some initial charge that involves current politics, like opposition to gay marriage, or abortion. Then "the list" comes out. We all know "the list" by now: the crusades, burning of the Pagan temples, the Thirty Year's War, trials for witchcraft and sorcery, and my favorite, The Inquisition (which Mel Brooks made into a wonderful musical, by the way)

(This is the second in my "Does God Exist" series of reviews. There will be six or seven books on whether God exists or not. I'll read them for you, give a recap here, and then try to draw it all into some conclusions at the end. This is not meant as a religious discussion, more of an examination of the way smart people argue about really tough subjects.)

If God exists, then why do people suffer like they do?

It's a reasonable question, first put forward in writing by the Greek philosopher Epircurus before much of the Christian or Jewish Bible was written.

Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is God able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence, then, evil?

For anybody who has had a deeply-held religion, the problem of why evil and suffering exists can be a deal-breaker. For Ehrman it was.

When you're a hammer, the world is your nail, and when you're a professor of religious studies and the bible everything must go back there. So, like lemmings to the cliff, the second book in our series also discusses the question of God's existence and suffering through the lens of Christianity and Judaism. But there is a big difference: these questions regarding suffering and evil are common across all religions, everywhere, so we have a broader mandate and there are many answers to choose from.

Bart takes us on a tour of the Bible, however, and finds that there are many answers to the question of why evil exists. Not all of them make much sense and they are not consistent with each other. In some cases original authors made one point and other authors came back later and revised it to make another.

So what are the biblical reasons for evil and suffering?

(This is the first in my "Does God Exist" series of reviews. There will be six or seven books on whether God exists or not. I'll read them for you, give a recap here, and then try to draw it all into some conclusions at the end. This is not meant as a religious discussion, more of an examination of the way smart people argue about really tough subjects.)

John Loftus is a passionate guy. You have to be a passionate guy to spend so much of your time preaching and arguing about God. As a former minister, Loftus spent a lot of time being a Christian Apologist. (An apologist is not somebody who apologizes, although the root words are the same. An apologist is somebody who defends something)

John just knew that God existed, and he was willing to tell and argue with anybody that he was right. He went through all of the classic pro-God and anti-God argument points.

Then John lost his faith. Don't ask me why, that's a question for him, but best as I can gather, people in the church let him down (severely!) and he had a big problem with why God would allow evil and suffering in the world. So he decided to become an atheist. And, as a result, decided to write this book.

Which is where we begin.

Wanted some kind of fun project this summer while I am finishing up this big contract, and I thought it would be cool to do a "Battle for God" series of reading.

The rules are simple: Select 7 or 8 books. Some books will support belief in the existence of God. Some will not. Each author gets between 8 and 12 hours of my time to make their case. At the end, I'll recap my conclusions for the entire series.

In a way this is kind of a rigged game for me, since I'm of the belief that God as the Great Unknowable is real. Now God as some specific version of some dogma is another thing entirely. But I'll try to keep an open mind about the entire thing. If nothing else it will be an interesting insight into how people think about infinity.

What are the books, you ask?

How many times have you visited a blog or read an article and wanted to reply or comment but didn't because of these issues:

• There was no facility to comment
• You were confused and had a question and wasn't sure anybody would respond
• You didn't want to go through the hassle of having to subscribe or revisit the site all the time just because you were interested in one article
• All the existing comments were jokes or one-liners that added no value, and you had something serious to say
• You really wanted to start a conversation about a topic that was related to the article, but a little different, and was afraid nobody else would be interested
• There were obvious flaws in certain parts of the article, although some parts were good, and you didn't want to have to take the time to point out which parts were good and which parts you agreed with
• The tone of the board/article is very serious, and you thought of a great joke that nobody would appreciate, but it'd be a shame not to share it
• The traffic on the site is so low that any contribution you make really won't get many readers, making it worth much of your time

How about this idea as a response to these problems?

After chatting with somebody online the other day, it appears to me like a lot of people are confused between ethics, manners, morality, and the law.

I'm not sure if this is deliberate or not. Perhaps it's just ignorance. I don't know. But I thought I would go over my working definitions for each of these.

These definitions may or may not agree with the dictionary. Quite frankly, I could care less. They work for me, and they help me deal with complex issues. Perhaps they'll be useful to you as well.

It's been said about the internet that never have so many had so much to say about which they knew so little.

As I sat in the lounge in Atlanta yesterday trying to read, there was a television on. I was subjected to local news, Entertainment Tonight, and some real-life garbage. It was hours and hours of stuff you'd show a person who was mentally deficient a hundred years ago: innuendo, gossip, people arguing with each other over nothing while thousands watched. The vain in search of the famous.

Maybe people on the internet blab a lot about things they know nothing about, but it certainly didn't start with the internet.

I recently had a team that was under-performing by any standards. They were all nice people: smart, capable, positive attitudes, competent in their work. But they just weren't producing that much.

So management told them: produce or die. Basically either finish up your work in the next sprint or we'll just throw away the entire project and start over with a different team.

It was amazing. People started working harder, using and creating effective information radiators. The team's stand-ups became laser-focused on the work. Everybody was looking for obstacles and getting them out of the way before they could affect progress. The team innovated several new ways of getting things done faster. They had a six-fold increase in productivity.

So what drives innovation, anyway? What makes one team create the next Google and the next team struggle to create a simple report?