The Mechanical Beings

Selling software applications is not like selling tomatoes, you know.

When some guy tries to sell me a tomato, I never asked about what this tomato is going to do with my body.  More than that, when somebody sells you an exotic fruit you never tried before, my reasoning is that if it is cheap I will buy one and see if it is good. Nobody would sell me a poison, I guess.

However, it is common when selling softwares to have to explain exactly what it does. The problem is that as with fruits we do not known completely what the software does. We know what it should do.

Many times if not most of the times, this starts to be a problem.

Maybe the problem is just that we are used to the fact that machines are mechanical beings. In the mechanist sense, that is, we think they should be deterministic and understood completely. But why?

Because we should create only things that are completely understood by ourselves??

I just wonder if this is not a very biiiig limitation that we are imposing in machines. I mean, we humans do not understand the most part of our surroundings. So, machines should be that simple?

This gets even more interesting when we think that all companies employ humans to do a lot of things. And if there is something we can not understand is the human being! The brain is still the biggest puzzle around and that is not to say that we have this complex beings in groups and exchanging information. They also do complex group behavior that we hardly understand. Still, we employ them. 

In fact, it is by working together with such ununderstandable beings that we prosper. What about the Machines? 

The most reasonable answer is perhaps that machines are our child. And a child is not about being the best, but being the dream. Maybe we are just too afraid of all this chaotic relationships we have and we just want our little child to be what we wanted everything to be: mechanical.

Purity?

The Purity line of thought is everywhere in society. But in nature, it is nowhere to be found.
That is why I began with a Yin Yang symbol which symbolizes among other things the mixed, impure reality.

When we talk about purity, there is a strong stigma from religions that pure is good and as a consequence impure is connected with less good (in the dictionary there will be a second meaning for impure which refers to morality/religious thoughts). But this is just stigma, both should be the same.

Going back to the main topic, purity can never explain anything. Purity's main purpose in society is to balance. In fact, it is interesting to think that by showing a strong pure good line of thought, religions are trying to balance unbalanced societies. For example, societies with higher crime rates have an increasing religious population. That is, although they try to see everything by their simplistic pure perspective, they are part of a self-organizing aspect of society to balance and mix everything.
In the same manner, societies seems to abandon religion as soon as they escape from social/environmental problems.

Supposing we are living in a developed and well balanced society, why can't we learn Yin Yang right from the beginning?
I mean, kids still see a great amount of strongly polarized good vs evil cartoons.
Lets learn the big picture, lets teach our kids the big picture. Modern society is obstructed in many ways with the knowledge it produced, making it slow and static. Almost unable to absorb new understanding inside social machines such as institutions and organizations. But that is another topic...not entirely another topic though, since the adaptability and self-organization of society is related with the balance of forces in a Yin Yang.

Yin Yang is a difficult abstraction in relation to purity, but the big picture it gives is worth it. When you start to understand everything under the balance of Yin Yang, things get very realistic and pleasing. Many martial arts were based in this concept or influenced by it. It is about understanding rather than choosing or taking a party in some election. That is why it is difficult, people usually wants to do something or have some guide to decisions (e.g., the yellow side is always better). Purity is the shortest path to knowledge, not necessarily the best.

With our current overall extremely weak education systems, the knowledge concept itself has degraded. People started to believe that knowing something is knowledge. There are people believing they can buy knowledge. People are always so focused on the objective, that they are getting far away from it. Am I digressing again? No. This is just to show that as wicked as the society grows thinking that shortest path is the best, everything goes with it. Unbalanced. That is the word.

A bit of Yin Yang understanding could have helped many houses, if only they took a little time to think about it. Yin Yang differs from many other lines of thought, because it also focuses on the process itself not on the product. That is, what conclusions you get from it is just as important as your process of thinking to get them.

Notice that balance is not equal size, but equilibrium. In the same sense that an iron ball is balanced with a much bigger watermelon, balance in Yin Yang is about finding the equilibrium rather than putting two things with the same size to coexist. In other words, the white and black part will most of the times differ in size in a balanced system.

Knowledge is sometimes not about getting new tools, but about opening horizons.

Why villains are so evil?!

Ever asked yourself the reason why villains from cartoons are so evil? Specially cartoons for kids.

What are the reasons behind it?

I have a hypothesis. In most of the cartoons the good side seems to have many benefits in relation to the evil side. For example, it is clear that McDuck , Mickey and his friends does not have much problems with money and status. That is, there is an unequal society there which may be the first reason.

A second point is that although the society is uneven, never the evil side can actually win a bit to balance things around. As a result, the evil side becomes more and more evil. While the good side tries to use morality (showing their actions as inherently good and therefore correct), politics (never showing or demonstrating the existing unbalanced society) and fake ingenuity (I am sure you noticed that Mickey always pretend ingenuity to avoid talking seriously about many subjects) to keep the social status unchanged.

In fact, up to some point the good side itself created the evil side.

My Friend: The Japanese Code

The Japanese code, or as many like to say, language has been my friend for a couple of years already. And I came to know, like or at least respect many of its characteristics, though still having much to study in the years to come.

This friend of mine is full of history as any code not artificially created and boiling of creativity, as you can tell from many new words, expressions and whatever fun puns the new generation carved into it.

Different from German and other languages I found the taught Japanese too different from real casualタメ口 speech (basically 98% of the used Japanese for young people). To give you an idea, in casual speech the structure is different (loose rules), the words are different, the endings of words change in many ways to reflect the feeling and style of the speaker, etc. 

I underlined style and feeling above, because this is really something unusual for myself. It is like the Japanese code has "colours" and every person paint its speech in a giving colour according to its style (though not necessarily its nature).

This is just a tip of the iceberg. There are also dialects, to be expected in countries where isolation or strong internal cultural trends were present. In Japan both things happened. However, the code diversity is not necessarily respected. I find a shame that people that study language sometimes fail to see the marvellous code they have in hand. 

Each society has its own ways of showing admiration though. The Japanese do this in silence which causes much more explosions than it seems. One Piece is a manga who is beating record after record of sales, much more than books ever dream of selling. Different from books, this manga fully explores many aspects of language mentioned above. It is without a doubt the language alive. And it is recognized for it all. It is a work that is impossible to translate without losing what makes it so brilliant, the language code.

For those that think that manga is not how Japanese really talk. I do not know which manga you are referring to, but many of them are pretty realistic to how they talk in real life. You just have to get a person that wants to talk. Or do as Japanese do and share a cup of 日本酒 which make any person want to talk.

The Strength of Vagueness

Vagueness is often disregarded.

But it is there. Always been there. Everywhere.
People just do not notice and when they do, they despise it.


Vagueness may seem like his cousin, the emptiness.
However, unlike his cousin, it says many things and let others be foretold.


We must apretiate what it does, without doing it.
Because it is in the left empty spaces that our mind is put to work to create diverse and amazing worlds.
With much more details than any other description could do.

What mistery without vagueness?
I mean, we can describe like "the ancient tower" or "a tower built by ancient civilizations".
But it is in vague senteces like "ancient civilizations left what resembled like a tower" that really passes the thrill.


Articles also need the power of vagueness.
When we create something new, it does not mean that we need to describe its future or limit its use.
Quite the contrary, we certainly want to point many paths.
Some of them we may not know exactly.

Opposite to common thoughts, vagueness raise the questions which guide development (See Hilbert).
In my opinion vagueness and doubt differ in style but are twin brothers.
Vagueness is an implicit doubt.

Red Pill's Self Service: Conclusion

Lot of things was taken for granted in the last post.
But there is something interesting about the search for clarity and avoidance of mistakes.
Everybody wants both, but it is not the search for both of them which is bad. It is the searching process which is not good enough.
If we try to avoid mistakes in the first place, we will not learn much and consequently commit more mistakes in the long run. And if we avoid confusion, we may end up with everything clear. But we will shut down the other possibilities, that is, ignoring what is not clear and may contribute to an even bigger understanding and clarity.
A good road for the avoidance of mistakes seems rather full of mistakes.
And in the same way, a good path to clarity seems in the same way flooded in confusion.
There is no contradiction in that, but sometimes a good path is full of what we want to avoid and that is what is counterintuitive.

Red Pill's Self Service

I have to make a confession: "I love to do research!"

In my job I not only can commit mistakes, but I have to. I am very happy to say that many or most of the programs I did, just not meet my expectations.
Not that I was happy at the moment, but after sometime thinking and philosophizing about the solution I got into something that might be right.
As one of my professors said, an unexpected result is not rarely a better result. 

What then? Then it is time to make another mistake. As I said, mistakes are the rule and the more I found the better I understand it.
C'mon, I dont believe in childhood all you guys believed in your mom at the first time you saw fire. Man, after seem that huge ball of incandescence pleasure with the eyes, nothing can stop a baby from putting a hand on it. I surely did tried it once.
Well if you havent, shame on you. You will never know the feeling of burning by fire. Although you can take a more orthodox position and say that fire would only cause pain and so on, I would like to remind you that this feeling can help you understand other feelings as well. And you can even extrapolate the feeling to other occasions to a certain extent. Yes, we have a model of sensations and we do can predict feelings.

Fire may not be a good example. Anyway, someday ago I for the first time I eat beet. It was nice and I learned to appreciate it in most of my days. For me it was not a big deal, but imagine if I was a cook. That could have changed my life.

What does that have to do with research? Everything, I learn the more I try it. Every experience, even a small one. And the things I did wrong not only help me understand what I do, but help me change what I do!
I would love if more people could feel this too, but sadly we learn two bad behaviors in school:
1. One is not to do mistakes (which is a terrible mistake per se).
2. To have too much clarity.

To counter the first one, we can listen to Socrates: "the knowledge come from the inside". We have to ask ourselves questions (Socratic Method). I myself can only think of learning as an iterative process. And avoid doing mistakes means stop learning. Human beings learn to like the latter and avoid the first, while they end up losing both without noticing it. (Just some little digression, we borrowed so much from Greece, but forgotten all the principles of education throughout the process. Just to remind us, the principles of education in Ancient Greece focused on the the mind, body, and imagination. We just forgot about the last two and modified the first one to fit in our economic system)

The second one,  I do not need to say much I think. The quote of David Wolpert says it all: "To purchase insight you must pay beforehand, in confusion". He is a senior research scientist at NASA, which worked on  understanding optimization (in fact, part of his work was misunderstood, he even has an article to clarify it).

I love the idea of every step I do may prove everything I believe wrong. What then? Learn with it. More than that, learn that the process is this. And if you are doing everything right, you are just not doing anything new.
Some people told me that the majority of the people cannot bare to have every believe being rebuild from the scratch every single time. My answer is simple, we can bare it. And in fact there is a little thing that can help the process, just do the opposite. If you do not like something, get near it, do it, become a master on it. Then rethink, is it still wrong? How is it?

I do not mean for every single thing we do not like that we should become a master in it. No no. Some things may be excluded from simple logic, others are just waste of time and recreate the wheel. But there are certain problems which you do not like, but cant really prove them wrong to yourself.
I did this with so many things. So many things I hated and became good at them to prove they wrong.  At the end? Well, I just proved me wrong or I proved they are really wrong. Both changed my life, both were nice.
When I proved myself wrong, then I just forgot about everything I believed which was proved wrong and start from a new basis. I advise you, this path may seem painful, however, it is in disguise very rewarding. You not only changed for the better, but you cannot forget your experiences and you will be forever conscious of the valley were you walked. More than that, the valley may give hints of what is better now, which the other people not have a single idea. It is the red pill.

I recognize few jobs let people free to take the red pill many times. Learning to live with the mistakes is a rewarding experience I wanted to share. Right now, I have two research lines. One going against the other. One have to fail? Not at all, in the world there is still place for the red and the blue. And notice, whatever is difficult to blue may also be difficult to red. They may be different paths to the same thing, going in opposing directions. But they are just different beings living in the same world.