Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Streaks of thought: Streak 2

Streak 2:
Mind only business with most but do classify some as your heros. That will keep you motivated intangibly.

Actually this is a mirror streak of streak 1. Streak 2 reflects the actual mood in which I came up with streak 1.

Streaks of thought: Streak 1

I several times have flashes of thoughts in mind based on the situation I am in and it is not always possible to hatch it into a full-blown post. So I decided to add them as a series like those of my health posts. (Now that I have found out how easy that is.)

Enjoy the steaks err.. streaks.

Streak 1:
Classify a few as heros and for the rest mind only business.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Cloaks of complexity

This post is about how complexity is one of the most important fuels (hence not misused) for efficient functioning of a society. Yesterday there was complexitycast release on Scott's reasons for believing P!=NP. At end of the cast Bill Gasarch gives his reason to believe P!=NP which is a one sentence summary of part of what I wanted to write:) I decided from now on to maintain a set of possible upcoming posts in the right-side panel.

Ethics, rationality, innocence, creativity, productivity etc. are all desired in society and appreciated and these traits make survival of many possible. Each of these traits have cloaks of complexity of different classes. I call them cloaks as most such traits are not really complex except for getting used (mature?) to them. As you get used to things you unveil the cloaks. While some cloaks can be unveiled by many as part of hardwired process in the society, there are cloaks which are too heavy to lift off like proving hard theorems and hard math. Any such harder cloaks can be handled only by a tiny proportion of the human population.

In my opinion it is this type of cloaking by Nature that keeps its existence. Now comes the main point. This process is adapted (as usual we borrow many things from Nature) by many systems in the society to keep their existence. Einstein once said: The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. This is not wrong if done with good and generous will. If people misuse this and put unwanted (unnecessary) cloaks of complexity it only hurts in the long run. The point is if they cannot uncloak any complexities provided by Nature they put new cloaks of fake complexity to uncloak them later on, much like creating false demands.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Contributions to society and reasons for balance

No one denies that one cannot survive in a society unless he contributes to the society.

Let's take setting where people are aware of themseleves (souls?) and their powerful containers (bodies?) of a finite capacity. These containers are endowded to them at their birth and they are moulded as they grow and several hidden and measurable variables influence the process. (Usually there is a hidden variable hypothesis because not everything could be explained by variables that we can be aware of or measure.)

Measurable variables include like what kind of education they receive, level of richness they experience, level of security etc. Hidden variables are usually measured as probability distributions with some possible priors like assuming that events happen for eventual good to humanity. Though the containers have finite capacities their moulding process decides combinations of chemical elements that they can hold thus with a potential of exponential variety of containers. One can think of categories like nerds, businessmen, peacekeepers, radicals etc.

Depending on the combination that their containers can bear, people contribute and collaborate to experience their combinations. (They can experience their mixtures only when used).

The key element for a harmonious experience is probably the awareness. The awareness of ourselves and our containers (our combinations). It's because of existence of other combinations that we are able to experience our combination. So there's no point in one category ridiculing another. Some reactions might have to be done with extraordinary care: Think of human knowledge about nuclear reactions, there are excellent benefits if properly used and pandemoniac consequences if some factors (like awareness) are ignored.

Bottomline is to keep in mind that one only contributes of what he is abundant in: that what his container can hold. It is then upto the congregation of humans to decide how to synergize. This is possible when we have balance in the awareness of ourselves and our containers. This is why we need the balance that most people stress on having.