pitfalls of derived existence

two diverse examples:

1. people's emotions and day to day lives driven by the success/failures of the sports teams/sportspersons they like

2. some "social activists" seeking to justify their existence by claiming to help the under-privileged

in both cases I would like to argue that the thing that you use to justify your state of existence
or use to give "meaning" to your life are questionable causes

the only self consistent philosophy appears to be meaninglessness of existence ..

reasons to go to grad school

1. its a sinecure ( if you are already in grad school theres a good chance that you saw this in your GRE word lists and know what that means)
2. you dont need a clock or a calendar -- time is one continuum
3. present the least possible threat to society -- nothing you do can impact the world outside !
4. minimze your social interactions with the real world -- no social obligations responsibilites
5. reducing your metabolism to absolute minimum levels
6. avoid sunlight/UV related diseases


will keep adding to this list ..

questions to workaholics ..

1. Is there really that much work to be done in the world?
--> Do you really need to put in 80 hr weeks , continuous all-nighters etc etc

2. What drives you .. Do you stop to wonder why you are doing what you are doing ?

this concept of heavy duty work or at least pretending to be working your ass off seems to be a recurrent phenomenon in different fields -- the most pronounced among them being people
in management, financial institutions, academia -- and arguably none of these categories of people do anything useful

I really fail to see answers to questions 1 and 2.. If you know any good answers please let me know

mercenarial approach to life

Warning -- this is a silly, illogical, irrational post

Heres a brief attempt at a description of a mercenarial approach to life:

Assume your current state of existence is y. Define some objective function , which obviously depends on the current state y. ( Given my proclivity to a memoryless approach, I will not allow the objective to be a function of history before y). Optimize the objective function f(y)

There are two clear problems:
1. suppose the objective function in state y is actually defined in terms of an ability to get to a state y' --> then it cannot be guaranteed that at every point along the path taken the similar objective will hold -- thus a myopic approach can lead to local sub-optimalities
2. suppose you are unable to define an objective function for all states -- then in such states your existence will become meaningless -- and my guess is that such states always exist unless you define meaningless objective functions , which then means that your existence is meaningless anyway.

one algorithm suffices for the brain

the only useful algorithm in the brain is nearest neighbor search

1. you can almost always con anyone into believing that you understand stuff by employing some variant of nearest neighbor search and yapping away nearest pattern matches to the topic of interest

2. it is of tremendous use in quizzes, trivia contests, examinations etc -- for most conceivable metrics used for measuring your "intelligence" a nearest neighbor algorithm suffices either for getting the answer or more importantly for convincing the questioner of your competence to answer to the question

3. it is amazingly useful for supposedly high intelligence examinations involving complex formulas

the only hard part then is building up a knowledge base and an appropriate set of distance metrics on which to operate

happiness == RG ?

If you do not understand RG -- dont read on

If you do -- and you havent read the last two posts -- go read them

Continuing on the ramblings about happiness/sadness , it can be abstracted into an RG function over either time (in which the relative grading is with respect to an instance of yourself ) or
space ( over the set of individuals/groups/communities that you deem as a good set for comparison)

RG is thus the all-encompassing phenomenon in life and possibly the only necessary concept a brain should come hard wired with
Long live RG !

random question of the day ..

ever seen the flashing lights on an ambulance or a police car ..
often its the case there are more than two flashlights on the same vehicle ..
would the flashing lights have maximum user impact if they flashed in phase or out of phase?
does the answer depend on the colors of the lights?

emotions are not natural

heres a possibly controversial hypothesis: the human mind does have a concept of emotion (happy, sad, good, bad, angry) by default. the mind only has a concept of physical senses .. all emotions are basically database lookups into historical associations with physical sensations. if you had no memory then you wouldnt be able to associate the current to any previously recorded incident to compare and contrast your current state of existence with respect to the recorded history.

life should be memoryless

the root cause of most sorrow is not desire as buddhist philosophy suggests. I would argue that memory is the root cause of sorrow. imagine you were memoryless .. you would probably have no concept of sorrow since you do not have a historical model of either sorrow or happiness to relate to. so live your life in a streaming model -- have only a small constant amount of memory and only spend a small amount of your resources thinking about the present cause you dont have too much time to process whats happening .

nihilism: the seinfeld approach to life

From Wikipedia:

Nihilism literally means belief in nothing. As a philosophical position, nihilism is the view that the world, and especially human existence, is without meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value.

From Seinfeld:
Everyone is doing a show about something .. lets do a show about nothing ..

research papers

most of the time the only thing that pops into my mind is hans christian anderson's "The Emperor's New Clothes" , people seem to be forced into seeing something glorious, fanciful, and absolutely new ... well I tend to agree more with the little kid in the story

blatant plagiarism from monty python

You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in grad school they are a positive boon.

time paradox

Time is funny .. especially if you are in grad school .. On short timescales time appears to move rather slowly (eg: i have to really struggle to keep myself entertained for the next 10 mins or until 5pm everyday, whichever comes first) On longer timescales time appears to move rather fast (eg: I have no clue what I have done in the last month, semester, year) etc.