Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Attitude for accolade

It is often said that winning is attitude. Attitude is something which we build over a long-period of time. Mindfulness of events happening in one's life helps him to learn a better (winning or successful or positive) attitude. Examples of attitudes we learn are discipline, security, individuality, independence, interdependence etc.

Almost all successful people have these attitudes. It's a different story if they are aware of it or not. If they are aware (and expressive) then they can be useful to the society by more than just being successful. Since humans are social beings some attitudes come almost by default that let them survive. The more complex attitudes like interdependence are the key for higher levels of success (or I guess semantics of success change over time to indicate only higher level achievements:)).

I would like to discuss a bit about interdependence. Humans have a wonderful potential namely cooperation. To unleash it we need what I call detached interdependence. To learn that, we need to remember that we belong to the whole and at the same time we cannot have/gain absolute control of the whole. We have to do things in a detached style that is do things without worrying too much about results. For that ofcourse we need another attitude called security which again is our choice and is influenced by the system we are living in. We should axiomatize that we won't be unnecessarily insecure.

I would like to show how mindfulness helps.


This is a rough plot of success vs. time for two hypothetical students from two different scenarios.
The top curve is of a brilliant student with very productive environment (environment that drives attitudes by default). The bottom one is that of a brilliant student with not so productive environment. The thing to kept in mind to have a useful attitude is that the blue lines are (or could be made) equal in length. The slope in the bottom curve can be interpreted to be difficult and more enlightening probably because of its difficulty.

(Edited: April 21, 06)

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Risk in life

In my previous post I talked about people taking risks. Rational people try to do activities that keep them involved and busy. If survival is not an issue then the most promising thing that can keep them so is taking risks. That's exactly why many rich (either in thoughts or resources) people like to take risks and time has been convincing us that taking risk is essential for growth. I went on hiking for my first time in my life yesterday even when the weather forecast said it would snow badly. I would have never imagined doing such a thing before adjusting myself to lifestyle in US. Ofcourse the activity itself is not at all important but what I think is that activities like having risky hobbies (eg. sky diving) and having passion to realize hidden potentials have similar kind of base thinking and such style must either be built into the society or be learnt for experiencing the higher purpose of life, ofcourse if one cares about it. This whole post might turn out to be trivial to many, who might not have had background similar to mine, but not to all.

Monday, February 06, 2006

Logic for life

Logic is a reasoning technique. It is very useful to be applied for reality or build potential for reality. Assuming that reality has correlation with our experience in this world, emotions are also REAL. In the never ending battle between emotions and logic in gaining control over human judgemental ability, one should not let either win but let the battle (activity) keep going so that we experience progress.

We all know there is no absolutely complete system from Godel's incompleteness theorem. Logic needs axioms, learning needs biases. We should try using logic to learn proper biases in using emotions effectively and use emotions to learn appropriate axioms for logic to build useful SYSTEMS that can penalize any extremities. History shows the first direction is harder than the second. People tend to do and assimilate things that they are comfortable with. The second direction seems pretty saturated. While there is lot of work to be done in the first direction. Most of powerful axioms like axiom of choice, axioms of equality etc. have already been found and assimilated. People gained justified power by working in the second direction. What I imagine is that there could be lot's of potential for better living if some effort is put in the first direction. Spiritual organizations etc. seem to be working in that direction. There have been such organizations that are very successfull but very few.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Rationality and class system

The world is inherently (atleast since we cannot understand infinite) is finite. So we have to be rational in this world to be happy and peaceful. That is we need reasoning. The hard part is not coming up with reasons but implementing them. Example is class system in society. This was initially built for effectiveness in human cooperative actions. The not so good thing is that most people have a wrong perspective of this system. The truth is that it is not hierarchical in the sense of superiority it is just modular and hence might be hierarchical in the sense of engineering.

The second-order system (or the governing system) that manages the society should be able to grant sufficient freedom and open-up paths for sliding through different modules (classes) in the society and it should have necessary constraints (usually revealed as deterministic parts of outcomes of efforts) so as to avoid thrashing (as in OS) and increase through-put of every human.

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Living in a developed, liberal country

One can see a more enlightened view of living in a developed country when he can compare it with that in a developing country. I call this tool as "Contrast thinking". Will post about it some time later.

Very obvious thing is one CAN pursue whatever he wants to. The developed system should take into account most possibilities that can arise in the process and make sure society is safe and prospering. One of the most important directions is research. Playing around with borders, limits of ultimate "perceived truths" is possible in a country like US for a guy with not so shiny academic background. For success first thing is we need to ADJUST to the buffered life style of US. We have to make sure that we don't under-fill the buffer or over-fill the buffer (because of the defensive survival mode) that is prevalent in most developing countries.

It's often thought that people in US can think out-of-the-box and most others don't. This probably is a close to being a fact. To be like a real developed society member we have to understand that there is no ABSOLUTE truth and we just have to play our role effectively according to the situations we are in. We don't need more brain cells but We have to GET USED TO that thinking. Risk taking is REQUIRED to exploit any potential fully because it psycologically and physiologically triggers efficiency spots because of the responsibility of taking risk. People in US are more risk taking because they have to. People in most other countries refrain from it because they have to. So base thinking is same for all humans (they do because they have to). I can expand on why people in US have to take risk... but that itself is worth another post. But to be smart - be a Roman while in Rome (old cliche but very useful).