As some may have noticed (though I haven't been getting many visits), I have slowed down a tad on the posting here, for a few reasons. One of which is, I kind of ran out of steam on the train of thought I was pursuing with my first couple posts - how modern life and society is, in many ways, insane, and, in my opinion, in need of some serious fixes. But I realized that pointing out that things are broken doesn't fix the issue, while simultaneously making for a somewhat depressing read... besides, I have a pretty good feeling that those most receptive to the message already know intuitively that there's something wrong; inversely, I suspect that those who don't get it may never understand.
So, instead of dwelling on problems, I'm going to make posts about interesting ideas I've had, things I'm curious about, and just kind of general musings on life. I'll be honest here - I haven't the foggiest idea of where I'm going right now, but that's the best way to go through life.
So, to start off, I want to share a bit of an idea I had a while back and expand on it. Let me start by saying that in the 21st century, a lot of the important work done in technical fields is really an exercise in creative problem solving. Yet in most places, we continue to practice this under a 20th century framework. A while ago I came across this TED talk which explains why this is a problem: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation
You see, in 20th century business, most work was straightforward - you went to the factory and did stuff with your hands for so many hours, or made so many sales pitches, etc. Here work is measurable, and well motivated by carrots and sticks.
However, creative work is actually hindered by carrots and sticks. What's more, a lot of it isn't easily measurable. I can attest to this as a software developer - a short, complex bit of code can take much longer to write than a long, but fairly simple, chunk of it. Yet to management with a 20th century mindset, the person writing the complex code seems to be doing less work. And to make matters worse, they'll often try to "encourage" the person doing the difficult job with carrots and sticks - adding extra stress and baggage to an already strenuous task.
Bringing this together, I had an idea for a sort of nonprofit organization. Essentially, on one end you have people doing creative problem solving work, such as game programming. These people are essentially given free reign over what they do (within reason), so long as they produce something that generates revenue. Part of the revenue should go to the workers and toward growing the organization, then the rest should go toward charity or other humanitarian causes. I really think if this takes off, the money should be put toward "angel" investments, or research in humanitarian projects.
The real beauty of this is, such an organization could work with barely any management at all - the most you'd need is project leads, and someone to manage the paperwork and accounting. Because of this, the organization could easily run rings around companies that are tied up in their own internal red tape.
The trouble with all of this is, of course, finding the starting funds for such a thing. But then, with the success of things like Kickstarter, it might just be doable.
Sunday, June 29, 2014
Monday, June 23, 2014
Wealth, and Other Mostly Imaginary Things
I'm going to start this post with a statement many may find incredible: Money is meaningless.
For quite some time now, I've been suspicious of financial institutions. They make a ton of money by shuffling it around, packaging it in different ways, and watching numbers go up and down. It seems, to an outside observer, like a shell game of sorts. And in some ways, it is, but not in the way you would think.
You see, the value of currency is judged only by its perceived value. Sound tautological? Well, it is. What is the value of a dollar, after all? Arguably, it is its ability to be exchanged for a certain good or service, at a certain rate. But what determines the exchange rate is the perceived value of what a dollar represents, vs the perceived value of the good or service. To put it in other terms, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" - Publilius Syrus.
Traditionally, currency was backed by something, that is, it could be traded in for a certain amount of gold or other materials considered valuable. Not so anymore. The US Dollar, among other currencies, is not actually backed by anything - the only thing you can do with a dollar is give it to someone else in exchange for something, so they can exchange it for something, and so on and so forth. The entire US economy runs on the faith that the dollar is worth what the Federal Reserve says it's worth! Who here honestly trusts the Fed?
/*Though, while we're on the subject, why has gold been considered valuable for so long? It's shiny and hard to find. That's really it. Humans only very recently discovered it has actual uses in things like electronics. (For the uninitiated, /* */ and // are commonly used in programming languages for denoting comments. I find it a useful convention.)*/
Stocks are a common way to "grow" wealth. But what are you really buying into when you buy stocks? It is, in essence, a promise that you "own" a small part of a corporation, and will see some of the profits, at some point in time, if they feel like paying out dividends. These stocks go up and down in monetary value based on what people think the payout will be; their opinions, of course, influenced by a wide range of factors. Think about this for a second. It's a unit of faith in a company, valued by a hypothetical payout in units of faith in the Fed. And somehow people who make it big in the stock market are considered clever for buying into this scheme at the "right" time. The stock market is a meta-fantasy of sorts, based entirely on perceptions and illusions! Winners and losers are picked by what other people think of the things they chose! Is this really what we want modern society to be based on?
Don't get me wrong, a certain amount of wealth is useful for buying essentials like food, water, shelter, and medical care, or the occasional extra thing you might want. But to view money as an end in of itself is to merely chase after fantasy.
/*I did also want to get to power, and how much of that is also an illusion, but this post has gotten long enough as it is, IMO. For next time, perhaps.*/
For quite some time now, I've been suspicious of financial institutions. They make a ton of money by shuffling it around, packaging it in different ways, and watching numbers go up and down. It seems, to an outside observer, like a shell game of sorts. And in some ways, it is, but not in the way you would think.
You see, the value of currency is judged only by its perceived value. Sound tautological? Well, it is. What is the value of a dollar, after all? Arguably, it is its ability to be exchanged for a certain good or service, at a certain rate. But what determines the exchange rate is the perceived value of what a dollar represents, vs the perceived value of the good or service. To put it in other terms, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it" - Publilius Syrus.
Traditionally, currency was backed by something, that is, it could be traded in for a certain amount of gold or other materials considered valuable. Not so anymore. The US Dollar, among other currencies, is not actually backed by anything - the only thing you can do with a dollar is give it to someone else in exchange for something, so they can exchange it for something, and so on and so forth. The entire US economy runs on the faith that the dollar is worth what the Federal Reserve says it's worth! Who here honestly trusts the Fed?
/*Though, while we're on the subject, why has gold been considered valuable for so long? It's shiny and hard to find. That's really it. Humans only very recently discovered it has actual uses in things like electronics. (For the uninitiated, /* */ and // are commonly used in programming languages for denoting comments. I find it a useful convention.)*/
Stocks are a common way to "grow" wealth. But what are you really buying into when you buy stocks? It is, in essence, a promise that you "own" a small part of a corporation, and will see some of the profits, at some point in time, if they feel like paying out dividends. These stocks go up and down in monetary value based on what people think the payout will be; their opinions, of course, influenced by a wide range of factors. Think about this for a second. It's a unit of faith in a company, valued by a hypothetical payout in units of faith in the Fed. And somehow people who make it big in the stock market are considered clever for buying into this scheme at the "right" time. The stock market is a meta-fantasy of sorts, based entirely on perceptions and illusions! Winners and losers are picked by what other people think of the things they chose! Is this really what we want modern society to be based on?
Don't get me wrong, a certain amount of wealth is useful for buying essentials like food, water, shelter, and medical care, or the occasional extra thing you might want. But to view money as an end in of itself is to merely chase after fantasy.
/*I did also want to get to power, and how much of that is also an illusion, but this post has gotten long enough as it is, IMO. For next time, perhaps.*/
Saturday, June 21, 2014
The Absurdity of the Ordinary
Oftentimes, when I have just woken up or am just going to bed, I have this odd experience of not being "all there". It's a hard feeling to describe, but it's as if my consciousness isn't entirely constrained to the here and now.
One of the interesting things about this state of mind is, it lets me look at life from a somewhat outside perspective. One morning I got this odd thought in my head: "I'm a bag of jelly, ambulating across the room by expanding and contracting around pieces of hardened calcium. I live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, hurtling around a sustained nuclear fusion reaction, which is itself tracing a path around an enormous, spiral-shaped collection of nuclear fusion reactions and balls of rock." And the strangest part of it is, people go about their lives every day as if this is the most normal thing in the world!
I've often gotten a similar thought while watching travel shows, particularly "An Idiot Abroad" (which I would recommend, though it starts to get a bit repetitive after a while). There are people in other places who live lives totally dissimilar to anything in "modern" life. Their ways seem strange and almost unbelievable, yet at the same time, had I been born as one of them instead, it would be perfectly normal to me. The logical conclusion, of course, being that they likely see our ways as equally strange, yet we go about our lives and they go about theirs as if both lifestyles are "default" or otherwise normal.
The next logical question, of course, is "Suppose I had been born on some faraway planet, as a member of some species that has never encountered humans. Would I consider that form of existence to be normal?" The answer would probably be yes, if such a species had a concept of a thing such as "normal". Humanity would be unfathomable to them, but whatever they experienced would be considered ordinary, no matter how strange a life form they would be.
Of course, our conceptions of alien life vary greatly - from "Star Trek" aliens that are basically humans with some minor alterations to downright bizarre multidimensional things. One metaphor I've particularly liked to think about with regards to this is squid. I believe it was a documentary on Humboldt Squid I had watched once that mentioned this - squid are actually fairly intelligent, yet this intelligence manifests itself in ways that wouldn't immediately register to humans as the actions of an intelligent creature, simply because they are so dissimilar. Thus, learning to communicate with squid might someday help us communicate with other sentient life out there, if there is any, because that life is probably going to be as strange as, if not stranger than, the squid. But of course, if you ask a squid, they're perfectly normal. We're the weirdos with the skeletons, after all.
One of the interesting things about this state of mind is, it lets me look at life from a somewhat outside perspective. One morning I got this odd thought in my head: "I'm a bag of jelly, ambulating across the room by expanding and contracting around pieces of hardened calcium. I live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, hurtling around a sustained nuclear fusion reaction, which is itself tracing a path around an enormous, spiral-shaped collection of nuclear fusion reactions and balls of rock." And the strangest part of it is, people go about their lives every day as if this is the most normal thing in the world!
I've often gotten a similar thought while watching travel shows, particularly "An Idiot Abroad" (which I would recommend, though it starts to get a bit repetitive after a while). There are people in other places who live lives totally dissimilar to anything in "modern" life. Their ways seem strange and almost unbelievable, yet at the same time, had I been born as one of them instead, it would be perfectly normal to me. The logical conclusion, of course, being that they likely see our ways as equally strange, yet we go about our lives and they go about theirs as if both lifestyles are "default" or otherwise normal.
The next logical question, of course, is "Suppose I had been born on some faraway planet, as a member of some species that has never encountered humans. Would I consider that form of existence to be normal?" The answer would probably be yes, if such a species had a concept of a thing such as "normal". Humanity would be unfathomable to them, but whatever they experienced would be considered ordinary, no matter how strange a life form they would be.
Of course, our conceptions of alien life vary greatly - from "Star Trek" aliens that are basically humans with some minor alterations to downright bizarre multidimensional things. One metaphor I've particularly liked to think about with regards to this is squid. I believe it was a documentary on Humboldt Squid I had watched once that mentioned this - squid are actually fairly intelligent, yet this intelligence manifests itself in ways that wouldn't immediately register to humans as the actions of an intelligent creature, simply because they are so dissimilar. Thus, learning to communicate with squid might someday help us communicate with other sentient life out there, if there is any, because that life is probably going to be as strange as, if not stranger than, the squid. But of course, if you ask a squid, they're perfectly normal. We're the weirdos with the skeletons, after all.
Don't Read This
No, seriously, don't. Don't read it. What are you doing? I told you to stop. Cut it out. Sigh... fine, do what you want. I'm a blog post, not a cop.
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