Being yourself

It is widely accepted that being someone we are not, is very uncomfortable. But it is important to first understand who we actually are. Richard Feynmann once said "What I cannot make I do not understand." To actually understand who we are, we need a process (life) that we actually can analyze. We need to be someone who can sustain the process and focus on aspects that are most dear to us simultaneously. Both of these sub-processes give us some understanding of ourselves and can help us in being ourselves. So there could be cases when you are not being yourself. For e.g. when the sustaining process is not interacting with the focusing process properly or when one of the processes is not functioning.

Based on the situations you are in you get leverage and help in running the two sub-processes. You are usually in the situations you choose to be. If you choose to be emotional you get leverage on the second sub-process. If you choose to be less emotional you get leverage on the first sub-process. But as I said before the leverage on one process could be nullified if the other process is not taken care of. The leverage you get is usually in the form of experience (learned concepts from the data we are exposed to). So for e.g. having a leverage emotionally means that you are very experienced in various kinds of emotions and actually (un-emotionally) use those experiences in focusing properly. But gaining experiences is not easy either. It is well know in the learning theory that even though we need on polynomial number of sample data for learning concepts (hypotheses) it's actually hard to find the concepts. Experiencing is a hard task and so is being yourself.

Streaks of thought: Streak 18

Sometimes even though we know we have almost all reasons to change, we find it hard to change because of just one missing (wrong) reason: A reason to convince others around us that we need change.

The reason is wrong because others will not understand until you actually change and show them the benefits. So don't get stuck in the dead-lock.

A reason to be fan of computer science

Having computational perspectives in life can help design your lives so nicely! Here's a solid example which many singles can use, thanks to Scott for including the dating protocol in his lecture 18 :)

This can not only help in dating but also classifying people into jerks and reasonable ones. If the dating protocol does not work then the conclusion is at least one of them is a jerk, hypocrite, liar or whatever in which case you at least have a solid reason not to worry. Of course it is not necessary that you won't worry though!

Depth of knowledge

The amount of knowledge one has is measured in the number of truths he can handle efficiently in some beneficial way. Truths are deduced essentially using logic even though the deduction process is not always deterministic. The depth of knowledge one has can be measured by quantifying the resources needed for the deduction process: the most important resource being time.

A person is said to have deeper knowledge than another if the other person needs more time for deduction than the former. Having deeper knowledge hence can buy you time! To increase the depth of your knowledge you need to improve your deducing abilities and for that you need to constantly practice it so that you become fast. One useful improvement technique is memoization where you do not recompute the same sub-problem every time: if you solved it once just remember and use it. Don't resolve the same puzzle over and over again. The goal is to constantly build a global lookup table for your life. This will help not only you but also those with whom you can share the table.

This is basically why experience can help increase your depth of knowledge.

Ways of procrastination

Procrastination is the trough in the cyclic process of being productive. It's almost inevitable for everyone in all tiers of society. To scroll to higher tiers you have to adapt their working styles which include their procrastination styles as well!

A simple and good indicator for a better way to procrastinate is to see if you get something everytime. By that I mean stuff that can actually be of value when you use it. Some such examples are reading papers from other fields, reading blogs of good guys, blogging about good stuff :), refreshing relationships with people you care about (which should actually mean who care about you). Some bad ways of procrastinations include watching repeats, talking or chatting with too many (I say this because it's more likely than not that you won't be cared by more than a handful which usually is composed of family (long term) and professional friends (medium term)), basically any activity that you cannot share with atleast 3 different people without getting embarrassed or feeling stupid.

Entanglements and emotions

Entanglements are very commonly observed at microscopic level. These phenomenon were discovered when classical physics enabled us observing the microscopic phenomenon. The entanglements don't commonly manifest in the same way at macroscopic level but I think they do in some fashion. Think about it. Emotions like feelings of togetherness, compassion, right or wrong and on the whole the subjectivity of human beings is kind of entangling behavior. The subjectivity is like an evolving function until it is actually observed when it collapses to objectivity. The cultures which focus on the latter part of trying to observe and collapsing things to objectivity are currently leading because they are capable of supporting more biological life. The older cultures which focus on the former part cannot support life as efficiently but they have their own definition of life. They rather prefer life to be non-mechanical and mechanical life just isn't life for them! But see this is just a matter of choice. And see the choices one makes defines his or her characteristics and personality. Usually heroes stand for the objective strategies which favor purely rational arguments. As Scott put it they are bullet swallowers instead of bullet dodgers.

Heart & Mind

Heart & brain are the two main contending organs for definition of life & death. They are also the two contending organs in decision making. In decision making heart is usually associated with emotions. It's mainly for historical reasons even though there might be some physiological reasons. Brain is associated with logic. More specifically with verifiability in a mechanical way. Since the notion of computation unifies the concept of machine it means verifying in a computational way.

We know a lot of details of working of heart: at least to the extent of having mechanical hearts that can simulate the pumping blood which is the primary functionality of heart for life. While mysteries of brain are still abysmal, self-referentiality of thinking lead to computational model of brain which lead to the dream of artificial intelligence. Efficient computations are usually based on local information which limits its powers in this physical world. In fact the limits of logic as pointed out by Godel are based on the fact that logic is based on local information. In general the locality principle limits us from having God like powers. The more experience we gain the better is our global perspective. Hence experience helps!

Emotions are usually mysterious and quite "non-mechanical" to deal with. This hints us that we might be processing something more than local. We feel emotions instantly about someone miles away something like the famous "spooky action at a distance" phenomenon of quantum mechanics. The typical explanation of the "entanglement" behavior in modern physics is that the particles all belong to "same system" and that's why they are somehow "connected". Though they usually say this so that classical principles (like constancy of speed of light) of physics are consistent with modern principles. Thus there is something global happening with entanglements and hence hard to be verified mechanically. Hence for e.g. even though "heart-breaks" is a common term usually the mysteries of emotions are rooted in the brain NOT in the heart. This realization will atleast let you focus on using appropriate resources for specific problems. Specifically, when you are baffled with emotions you should rely more on brain to help yourself.

N.B.: Updated May 10, 2008. 1:36 AM.

Uncertainty - a life force?

Randomness in computation is very useful to understand some hierarchies in complexities of problems (probabilistic complexity classes, zero knowledge proofs, probabilistically checkable proofs). Randomness (or pseudo randomness) is the key in preventing adversarial attacks. It is the key in simulating physical processes of Nature. It is the key in many practical applications.

Now coming to life part. Imagine if the viruses all know how our entire body works then they can attack us without leaving us any choice of survival. But fortunately future is non-deterministic that is there are uncertainties in future, our genes mutate, the entropy of the universe keeps increasing at least until the pathways of the universe start interfering which is not supposed to happen for a long long long time. Even better: at microscopic scale even past is non-deterministic! All this can lead us to wonder if God wants to keep His power of designing Nature and life and let us just experience/measure and play around with randomness with regularities (bounds) but without complete derandomization. I think there is a good reason in doing this. First it let's us value life (because we don't know the causal reasons to replicate it) and two it keeps the "feeling of quest" alive which is the basic feeling of being alive anyways! The goal of AI as defined by Turing test is to create a machine whose responses can not be distinguished from those of a human being (of certain background). Without uncertainty such AI becomes impossible as well! Remember this is only about artificial intelligence not artificial life because it only talks about "conversations". Simulating the functions involving our intelligence itself seems very elusive. To simulate artificial life we need to simulate even more complex distributions.

About year and a half ago I posted about karma as a possible anthropic analog of evolution and hinted how hope can be argued from karma. Well analyses using theory of karma take "deterministic hidden variables route" for explaining things but even without that hidden variable (karma) we can still argue for hope just from inherent uncertainties that can be exploited to protect ourselves from being hopelessly attacked by adversaries.

Health: Genes

In one of my previous health posts I talked about continually focussing on new challenges in the journey of better health. After being driven by external indicators on our body (like dresses), then we are driven by indicators a layer below those (naked body), then we are driven by those a layer further below (organs like heart, kidneys, pancreas, brain etc.). Now it's time to dig deeper!

The whole point of seeking knowledge is trying to increase the odds of survival in odd times. The more variables we uncover the more we discover that we have lot more to uncover! But we can atleast try to make sure we can rationally handle the ones we uncover. Health science progressed a lot. The role of genes in health is quite an integral part of our intellectual heritage now. There's a lot to discovered about genes but one thing is sure about them: they are programmable, that is they are Turing tapes of a non-deterministic Turing machine. Their states can sometimes be non-deterministically changed (mutations) but they are pretty much "rule oriented". The rest of the body is like the console system (input/output device set) for the basic computations happening on those tapes. The important point is that we can write input onto those tapes. In fact without this ability the concept of evolution is infeasible! Let's try to see what we can do try to write good stuff (stuff that helps us survive) onto those.

First we should not write bad stuff! It is known that carcinogens can seriously screw up the tapes that screws up cell dynamics which can lead to cancer. So obviously don't smoke and in a bigger picture be friendly to the environment both in terms of recycling and using Nature friendly energy sources like hybrid cars, electric trains or in the worst case if you have to rely on gas use mass transportation or pool up. Don't stick to your cell phones all the time! Use them reasonably. Use hands-free devices and keep them a bit far when you work. Do not consume "diet stuff" in excess. It's good to take safe sides on such issues.

Now about writing good stuff. It is well known that writing bug free programs is very hard. So it's not a good idea drying to actually manipulate the genes using some kind of external agents (excluding the cases where it's treatmental for immediate survival). The best programmer of genes so far is Nature itself. What we can do is "ask" Nature to do the job for us. Let's say if we want to write a certain piece of code with which we can be naturally smart, we just constantly try to do smart things consciously and then it will be embedded into your genes by Nature over a period of time. If we want to be naturally peaceful practicing medidation would have the same effect. Beware that period of time might be a really long! But good thing is we at least don't make them worse in such a way. To see the effects of such really long-term plans we have to try to make sure humanity survives!

Streaks of thought: Streak 17

Some results are superficial, some are deep. Some interests are superficial, some are deep. Some wounds are superficial, some are deep. Superficial versus deep in all cases has to with the average case complexity of the resources consumed in respective cases. The key phrase is "average case complexity". So gather enough data to check if you have proper perception of superficiality and depth in a particular case.

Streaks of thought: Streak 16

It's important to experience extremes to truly have stakes and hence understand the importance of balance.

Scott's research advice as a grad student was: "to understand something we need to have stakes in it". Also independently I came up with a thesis about learning being triggered from "losing something". Of course doesn't having stakes mean having something to lose!

Faith in truth

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind... Underlying the effort of science is the religious belief in truth and understanding. These were kind of responses from Einstein when he was repeatedly asked about his religious beliefs.

Having a religious belief is like having faith. There's no objective reason for chosing a faith in something except for interest in survival in a group. Life seems to be liking regularities, patterns which constitute provable truths. The apparent reason for this liking is efficiency because of finiteness. Imagine, if were no regularities then the "program of evolution" has no chance of exploiting structures in the problems of life. This would mean the evolution would be very slow, unimaginably slow! Even the central question in computer science is about limits of efficient computation in the physical world! Scott's thesis and other major theoretical works in CS show lot of evidence that it is very hard to compute efficiently without exploiting structures of problems. Hence provable truths which are about regularites and repeatability atleast in statistical sense is a proper thing to have faith in, in the interest of efficient survival.

Learning and changing

About two years ago, I had a post on learning from losing. There I mentioned about one situation that triggers learning. It's almost always true that learning is triggered from losing something or to avoid losing something. That something can be anything like say starting from survival to satisfaction gained by understanding Nature.

Life can be viewed as a function of several parameters. There are two aspects in optimizing the function. First identifying the parameters then adjusting the values of the parameters. The more parameters one identifies or in other words the higher ones' awareness is, the better he can adjust or try to adjust the parameters to optimize the value of the function. Everyone is typically endowed with certain level of awareness by default as part of intellectual heritage. Then there are some noble ones who add to our intellectual heritage.

Adjusting the parameters is also called learning. Now based on general observations in the population different people find it hard to learn different parameters. Why is that? Let's try to see. Typically to learn a parameter, we need to compute gradients in the parameter space. The gradients are the places of change. The harder it is to compute gradient along a certain parameter (detect changes) the harder it is to adjust that parameter in the direction of convergence. See we know that not everyone can perceive all relevant parameters let alone gradients along those. Again even if one does perceive gradients the function might not be convex along that parameter and it might require more sophistication of zig-zagging (most people adapt this approach) or trying to convexify (some spiritually inclined adapt this approach) to avoid local minima. This is why change could be hard sometimes.

Hardness of learning a parameter depends on the VC dimension of the training examples for that parameter. The complexity of the learning algorithm required is inversely proportional to the VC dimension. The higher the VC-dimension the easier the algorithm can be. Being aware of this helps us in admitting that some parameters can be easier to learn while some may not. VC-dimension can also be viewed as the number of training examples that the algorithm can shatter that is give zero training error. So what can we psychologically do to keep our learning in life simple or optimal? We have to try to adjust the labels for our training data (experiences) so that we don't unnecessarily increase the requirements on learning algorithms. We rather are better off spending our resources on some parameters which genuinely need hard algorithms. Here genuinely meaning for independent samples in successful and noble population.

Health: Portions

Almost as if I am compensating for having such a long gap in my health posts: here's a quick sequel to my last one.

Disproportionate amounts of food intake in terms of quality and quantity can be detected with the following litmus test. The ideal reaction from eating should be turning active not turning sleepy. Sleepiness is a sign of drop in metabolism. Eating ideally should increase metabolism not decrease. Both, over eating and under eating (like being anorexic) trigger this and such repeated training of drop in metabolism will have serious short term and long term consequences. In the short term ones productivity goes down because of various reasons like lacking attention span etc. Serious health issues can show up in the long run, like organs getting damaged because of constant "under performance".

Not giving into the "call for sleep" by consciously doing something active is not a solution as that will result in negative consequences again both in the short and long run. Fighting sleep is not encouraged. What needs to be consciously adjusted is the portions of intake: both in quality and quantity. Quantity is easier to control but what is important is taking care of the portions of quality nutrition intakes. Eating labeled food is a very good practice in this regard.

Health: Food and feelings

After a real long gap in the series of my posts on health since my last one, I intend to discuss some connections I experienced between food and feelings.

The connections between eating patterns and emotional states are well studied in society. Usually the results that are most popularly known are the ones that say how having emotional instability instigates eating disorders. To mitigate eating disorders psychological advice is usually used to reduce the perception of insecurities and induce the perception of one's purpose. Leaving aside serious medical conditions the most common eating disorders are usually because of bad habits.

Alright now comes my main thesis on the connection between food and feelings. Actually this kind of correlation is preached by many spiritual communities, but I wanted to write this because I thought I experienced this especially because of long enough exposure to good American food after eating in India for 20 years. See, I see a chicken-egg relationship between the two. Feelings are produced because of various chemical reactions inside our bodies. Food is one of the biggest modes of injecting new chemicals and triggering chemical reactions inside our bodies. So if ones feelings are bad it might actually be because of the food intakes he is having. The short term effects are pretty clear, for e.g. taking sugar shots drives you a bit crazy, consuming alcohol makes you drowzy. What goes undercover are the long term effects (besides clogging your physical infrastructure like plumbing).

Food is supposed not just to provide nutrition but to provide it in an efficient way. The more efficient way the food fuels us the better our emotional and physical state will be. Signs of inefficient fueling is too much stubborness in adapting tastes to less spicier and "less tasty" foods. Taste is too abstract and subjective that it has to be controlled by us, not control us. So for better health, both physical and emotional, we need good and efficient food and of course with better health the good food habits get reinforced in turn.

A general note: Cultures that control abstract and subjective issues typically produce leaders. Cultures that are controlled by abstract and subjective issues typically end up as followers as they can be "controlled by leaders". Think about it, isn't it obvious from history and differences between western and eastern cultures.

Conferences and corporations

In academia productivity is measured in terms of quality and quantity of publications one generates. In industry productivity is measured in terms of money one generates. I intend to analyse in this post the chief characteristic difference between academic and industrial efforts and how this characterisation demands for balance between the two type of efforts. Similar demands for balance in different walks of life arise from different characterizations as well. Almost always it's the variety of perspectives that automatically demands for balance if we are to survive "long enough".

The main characterization is that the motivation underlying the effort in academia is "first assimilate and then deploy" while that in industry is "first deploy and then assimilate". Now which strategy is optimal? Human progress is gradual and continuous and for us to actually survive and measure the progress we need to switch between both strategies: one cannot wait until we answer all the questions about an idea to be deployed. Think about it, science would not exist otherwise! Similarly one cannot just jump into conclusions without understanding the soundness and limitations of an idea. Think about it, science would not be science as we see today otherwise. So we naturally need a balance between both kinds of motivations similar to that in my means and ends post.

Now for maintaining such a balance the conferences and corporations which are main arenas for both the efforts need to be designed carefully to fuel both types of motivations. Conferences should primarily be motivated to support the academic effort which means they have to provide for ideas which need time to be studied, analysed, assessed, assimilated and then deployed. Similarly corporations, to take on deploying the ideas so that they can be disseminated and become "accepted as a norm". Lately conferences (in many areas of CS) seem to be driven overly by motivations underlying industrial effort. This is partly because of increased short-sightedness of public funding agencies and increased reliance on corporations. This makes papers on "industrially hot topics" get more accepted in the conferences. This year's CVPR results kind of ascertain that as well. This kind of change is also becoming an increasing concern even in theory community.

Usually such crisis points occur in cycles and these are the points to check for the balance. I once presented a paper by Christos Papadimitriou addressing such crisis in databases theory. Since conferences are usually run as peer-reviewed and mostly non-profit, issues like conflicts of interests etc. play more important role than in corporations. Checks on corruption in academic community are more important because it is typically "assumed" not to exist the machinery for such checks is not given so much weight. It is important to remember that investigations in academia are mainly curiosity driven excercise not frustration driven. This should be supported but not exploited to make it go otherway around.

Streaks of thought: Streak 15

Neils Bohr once said: "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."
The founding father of Computer Science, Alan Turing also came up with a test for artificial intelligence based on observations alone. Scott's post about Turing's philosophy about machines and morals is worth a read. Also (after reminded by Scott's post) according to Aumman's theorem we have to behave based on observable priors to be considered "rational".

Einstein effectively was unproductive after generalizing his theory of relativity "for invariance results among accelerating frames" because of his trouble accepting the uncertainities underlying Nature's laws. I intend to add a full post about uncertainties but for this post I would like to say that all these statements suggest us to use concrete evidence in all walks of life instead getting drained by intangible correlations woven by emotions.

Streaks of thought: Streak 14

With increasing internationalization it's better to eagerly adapt the feeling of "outsider" that can fuel ones objectivity and hence productivity and hence satisfaction and hence happiness. If an immigrant in USA complains, then it's most likely because of the lack of the above mentioned adaptation.

Causes of importance

Couple of weeks ago as part of our regular discussions Suzan and I were discussing about ones importance in society and service to humanity. She was saying that all kinds of work are equally important and that it's unfair to down weigh a particular type of work as easy and boring. Just recently Scott posted trying to show how it's meaningless to argue about one field of science being more fundamental (and hence superior). Whether something is important is not, makes only sense in the context of time and majority as per our current understanding of Nature. For eg. we need large number of particles acting at a micro-scale for the second law of thermodynamics to hold on the macro-scale and usually a theorem has to be checked over and over again independently for its correctness.

Monte Carlo methods are usually used for simulations of complex probability distributions without closed forms. Using such methods random samples are drawn from probability distributions to represent the distributions. Drawing random samples implies that all samples are equally likely according to the distribution. But the main problem is that it is seldom possible to draw samples from the complex distributions (partly because they don't have closed forms). Hence the samples are drawn from a heuristic approximation and then given importance weights according to a likelihood function. Metropolis-Hastings is a very famous algorithm for such simulations. If the distribution is dynamic then the simulation is called filtering and particle filtering is a very common tool. Essentially all such techniques depend on the Bayes rule. But that's not my point. For successful simulation of a distribution the crucial design aspects are the proposal and the likelihood functions. These functions can be chosen arbitrarily and usually domain specific knowledge is heavily needed. If they are designed properly then over a period of time the samples start behaving random with equal importance weights, meaning representing the true distribution.

If humans are supposed to represent uniformly drawn particles of the distribution of life energy then all humans will have equal chance of survival. But because of complex correlations and interdependences such uniform sampling is not possible and hence we have to design proper proposal and likelihood functions to give appropriate importance weights so that over time the chances of survival become uniform. We can already start seeing some of such changes based on today's ages of expectancy through out the world. Hence it is important to have such importances to different types of work like giving more importance to let's say medical work compared to the work that can be automated effectively. Thus it is not only not unfair to undermine some kind of work but in fact recommended for greater good. Once the humans reach certain peaks in the distribution then they would have similar weights as is the case for physicists vs. mathematicians vs. computer scientists vs. biologists and so on.

Streaks of thought: Streak 12+1

Working on what already matters in a creative way is much easier compared to using creativity to convince what you do matters. To survive doing the latter takes causal heroes. That's why I get fascinated by scientists who work on the edge or roof-tops.