Common people

I got a philosophic boost by listening to Common People by Pulp today. I just love the lyrics where a poor Englishman genuinely makes an effort to show a Greek rich girl of how life as poor is. But she just doesn't get it (She didn't understand, she just smiled and held my hand).

"cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
pretend you never went to school.
But still you'll never get it right,
cos when you're laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all.
you'll never watch your life slide out of view,
and dance and drink and screw,
because there's nothing else to do"

Dancing, drinking and screwing is hence just an inferior substitute to something better. Although they hint that there is something better to do for "un-common" people, they unfortunately don't mention what it is.

Apart from the part which I think is hilarious (the part when he drags her to the store to "pretend you have no money", just to show what "common" is being like. I find it funny that he tries so hard for her to get it), one has to note that Pulp doesn't seem to know what they would do if they weren't "common", but just the things they want to avoid from being "common". The grass seems to be greener on the other side, but what does "un-common" people do that is so attractive? We never learn that in the song, which is unfortunate. Great song in any case, listen to it if you haven't .

Non-linearity

This entry will be the first of a few trying to explain why you should have no more than one emotional argument when trying to make a decision, and that you should spend most of your time figuring out which to pick. This will help you a lot when trying to philosophize over though questions.

I kick this off by the following statement: Humans react to inputs non-linearly. If you believe this you are all set for continuing to the next entry. If not, I'll try to explain why I believe this.

If you are not trained in the field of non-linear processes (which is the case if you for example don't know what a non-linear process is), I'll summarize it in a few lines. When the cause and effect of something (almost anything I guess) doesn't seem to be proportionate, the cause and effect are probably goverened by a non-linear process. Here are some examples:

When you shake a ketchup bottle and for a long time nothing happens; then without any proportion to how much you shake all the ketchup suddenly decides to come out.

When you play on a slot machine and bet the same amount every time. At some time you may win alot of money even though your input was just the same as the time before when you won nothing.

When you fall from 1 meter you land on you feet, from 3 meters you may fall and scratch yourself. From 5 meters you may sprain your foot but from 7 meters you could actually die.

This morning I was late for work and waited for hot water in the bathroom. I turned the heat up and suddely realized the water was so hot that it hurt. If you think about it like this it makes more sense.
Holding your hand in 20 degree water is tolerable
So is doing it at 40 degrees
I sort of hurts at 60 degrees
It is completley untolerable at 80 degrees.
So for some reason the difference is way bigger between 60-80 than from 40-60. We of course know this. I suspect that the reason for this is that the skin receptors start to send impulses to the brain that this hurts at maybe 40 degrees. The brain interprets these impulses non-linearly and will we will experience non-linear pain. I am no neuro scientist so I may be wrong on the mechanisms, it can also be that the receptors send out signals non-linearly based on heat input, but right now we only care that we do experience it this way.

Non-linear processes are difficult to predict. This is because the input has to be determined very well in order to get an accurate estimation of the output. This is partly why weather is so difficult to predict.

When you have to make a decision based on emotions in any way (this is almost allways the case, few decisions are not related to emotions), you will MAKE the desicion based on one argument, but when you think about it you BELIEVE that you make the desision based on careful consideration based on many arguments. This may require some explanation.

When inputs are non-linearly connected to output, like the case when our senses create input for the brain to produce emotions, even similar (but not identical) input from senses will affect our emotions very differently (remember the oven and how seemingly similar temperatures affected our brain very differently). This has two implications:
(1): When our brain has created the emotion based on the input from our senses, it is very difficult to use the output (emotion) to determine the input(you know that putting your hand in hot water hurts like hell, but you can't use that knowledge to derive the temperature)
(2): The probability that two inputs derived from different senses or will affect your emotions with comparable strength is small. To do that the objective facts has to be very very similar to each other AND connect in the same way to different inputs. The emotions however are of the same kind and will sort of add up in your brain and affect your overall well being. It will be difficult to separate your overall emotion into components AND THEN determine the quantity of the input.

This affects you a lot! But more about that next time.

Life is a game

Games are like reality but in a box. This may not be quite obvious but hang on for a while.

How do you define a game? I am not 100% sure but I am pretty sure it has to look something like this:

* It has rules.
* It is limited.

I can't figure out anything that I call a game that doesn't fulfill these criterion. With limited I mean that the rules that I apply to the game are at some point turned on and off. A football game for example has clear rules, but they only apply for 90 minutes (at the time, until the next game). When the game is on, other rules of other games are turned off. With this I mean that there can be games within the timespan of other games, but that only one set of rules apply at the time. While playing football we live in a democracy for example. But on the field the rules of democracy are disabled, and you are not allowed to determine the football game by popular vote. Is democracy a game then? Yes, it has rules and it started many years ago. It is actually also bound to stop sometime, be it due to war or the collapse of the universe. This new exciting type of game is a little different: it is played for an unknown time. The game of democracy is also paused when for example your mother demand that you do the dishes and you enter a new exciting game of family. These rules are dynamical and varies between families.

You may question this with something like this: "Your definition of a game is so broad that I can't figure anything out that isn't a "game"." This is precisely true and it takes me to my next statement; games don't have an antonym. I will help you and propose that the closest we can come to something that is not a game would be called "reality". The thing is that reality is not experienced objectively but by humans, and we live finite lives and follow rules while living our finite lives. Our lives are also small boxes placed in reality. Such rules are not meant to mean "rule of law"; those can clearly be broken. The rules I mean are for example cause and effect and laws of physics, but social laws are also useful when discussing the subject. If I rob a bank, I may or may not go to jail but the action itself affects the way people act towards me, usually due to the applicable social norms and conventions that exists.

So with my definition of games, life is definitely a game. We play it for an unknown but finite lifetime and we play it by rules (except if you are Neo in the Matrix). When we die we leave the playground (although we hopefully affected other people in a positive way, but that is then part of their games and not yours).

If you can believe this I have some ideas of how I can use this and develop some appropriate philosophy, based on how I like to play games. This is what I like in games.

* They are clear enough to understand.
* You can differentiate between success and failure.

Knowing me I realize that both these are an effect of me being very competitive. I hate games i which I don't know how I am doing and who is winning. How do I translate this to how I should live my life? The rules of our life are clearly very messy, and often good things comes with bad and vice versa. This is how I should it.

* I make my own rules, but call them ideals. Then I live by them. This satisfies my desire for clear rules.
* I set up goals. When reaching these goals it is the definition of success. When not, it the definition of failure.

This is surprisingly almost how I live my life. It has its problems, especially I have to experience loads of failures when I don't reach my goals. But in the end it is all of what I appreciate in a good game.

You may object and say that you can't set up your custom made philosophy based on what you like in games because "life is more serious than games". Then you are completely missing the point. Life is a game. But since we live in it we perceive the stakes of the game to be very high. But in principle it is not different from playing Super Mario with only one extra life and no continue. Besides that Mario gets extra lives by lethal mushrooms while we die from them.

Can you derive your philosophy from what you like with games?

With this we can now be very constructive! For example; knowing a persons favorite game may tell much about the persons' philosophy. Examples (Very Quasi scientific at best) :
No favorite game -> Either depressed or at least not much of a philosopher.
Solitaire -> Either a Christian fundamentalist (simplistic enough for you?) or hermit (no opponent to play)
Poker -> Poker professional (Self explanatory)

Why do intellectuals believe in the market?

Economics is the science of how "stuff" is produced and consumed, and by who. This may sound simple until you find out what stuff really means. Stuff includes among other things: Cars, electricity, video games, TV-shows, security, risk, sex, house cleaning, ideas, experience. The interface between producer and consumer is called "the market". This is where people exchange stuff.

Why do we study this? One reason is that we spend all our life on either side of the market. We wake up and go to work, spend eight hours producing stuff (with some small breaks for consuming food). Then we go home to consume the the stuff we are entitled to get since we produced things for other people during the day. We live all our life on either side of the interface that connects producer and consumer. A simple example may look like this:
Wake up (consumed one night on your bed)
Breakfast (consume corn flakes)
Go to work by bus (consume bus ride service)
Work (produce cars for others) (Example not applicable in Sweden anymore)
Go home (bus service again)
Relax and Recharge (Consume TV subscription.)
Eat (consume corn flakes)
Go to bed (consume one night on your bed)

Does it alarm you that your life is one big supermarket in which you work some shifts as a cashier just to be able to buy your food? I don't mean to upset with this but I think it shows why we want to study economics (well maybe not you and I, but some guy). If we understand this process we can use it to develop better public economic policy which means that we will know if we should spend our tax money on schools or bailouts. Important stuff.

The problem is that we will never be able to know this. I usually explain why this is impossible by showing an (empty) beer can with the following statement: "At least 10 people were involved in the brewing of this beer in some unknown country (usually Denmark though, Its' usually a Carlsber)g. In some way they made it because they had some value of my calculations. How did they benefit from my calculations?"
The answer is of course that no one will ever know how this happened. For some reason some guys brewed beer for me because I provided something for them. But they don't even know who I am. It's like magic.

People used to believe that there were two different ways to deal with this complex process. The first one was called communism and was based on that clever people were very able to understand this process and use it to make everyone better off. They came up with a plan for their economy and applied this plan to control what was produced and consumed. After the Berlin wall fell it became obvious that they weren't that good at doing this since eastern Berlin looked like the retarded cousin of western Berlin. This was strong evidence against a planned economy. Most sensible people now consider communism as ineffective and wasteful, although many people are still drawn to its more romantic aspects like fairness and such.

The other way of dealing with this is to say that we are too stupid to understand the market process and should hence leave it alone. The government should not intervene and try to fix the market any more than a moron should try to fix a car engine. This side is called capitalism. From this ideology it is easy to derive policy like Free trade, no taxes, no unions and no minimum wage.

Slow down, you may say. All this things are big policy decisions. How do they derive these again? I'll explain it in steps:
1) assume you have perfect engine.
2) assume a moron is standing next to it.
3) Now ask yourself: Do you want the moron to mess with the engine?
If you are reasonable you say NO and start to support all kind of economic policy that keeps that moron away from the engine.

If you are not an economist you may apply some common sense and say: Should we assume that the engine was perfect just like that? What if it is not? Maybe if it is not even working a moron may be able to make some things better. Economists have thought about this and decided to deal with it like this:

1) In the economy, the engine is made of people.
2) These people are not homogeneous. They are problematic to predict since they are different.
3) Well, assume that they are homogeneous then. At least then I can do some calculations before I go home.
4) This calculation turned out to be a pain. Let's also assume that they are extremely selfish and only want to maximize their OWN happiness, that reduces my calculational pain. (This is actually very similar to what we do in Physics: we assume that the electrons are independent and don't care about each other, then we compensate for this later. We do this because it is painful to calculate anything else.)
5) Wow! If this is true; markets are truly very efficient.
6) If markets are efficient, let them govern themselves. Keep the moron away from the engine.

Now we can conclude three things:
1) Markets are efficient and can be left alone IF our assumptions are right.
2) If the above is true it would be disastrous to let the market break down. We should only intervene if our efficient market is threatened. Banks are crucial to the efficient market since they provide liquidity, they should be bailed out.
3) If the above is true investing in schools may actually ruin the market for private education which is more efficient. No more investing in schools.

Intellectuals like capitalism for the same reason that I like my faulty model that I use to calculate how electrons interact. Because I can pretend that I know the truth and I will get numbers and funny predictions out. They will get numbers and fancy policy out.

Better hope that people are selfish and homogeneous (also that they have all the information in the world to make educated decisions, but I didn't have time to talk about that).

Science as religion

Religion is a controversial subject. It is also exceptionally rare that people share the same working definitions about religion when discussing it. If I for an example discuss religion (not a particular one) as a distributor of common norms with someone who dislikes Christianity (one religion) , this discussion is typically bound to end up in discussing ONE religion (usually Christianity or Islam) as a distributor of death, abuse and discrimination.

Scientists are not a very religious group. I do have religious friend where I work but most of my friends think that religion is obsolete.

I know that humans like purpose. I don't know why we like purpose but at least one reasonable explanation is that this behavior has been exceptionally rewarding for us historically. Already as cave men we were gifted in assigning purpose to things. We assigned the purpose of a cave to be our home. We assigned the purpose of a normal sharp rock to be an instrument of power which we could use to kill or intimidate people. We assigned the purpose of smaller shinier rocks to be the instrument of status and exclusivity. Assigning purpose to things without obvious purpose was very rewarding for our reproduction. Purpose is in our genes.

If purpose is in your genes you probably also start looking for purpose for bigger things. When the cave men saw the sun for the first time, it probably worked our like this:

Caveman1: Thinking: Wow, this yellow thing is very bright. Can I use it to kill or intimidate someone? Can I use it to increase my social status? Can I eat it? *Long and hard thinking*
Caveman2: Wow, what is this bright yellow thing?
Caveman1: It is the bringer of light. If you want it to continue to shine tomorrow we have to sacrifice a goat. I know how the ritual works, but you have to let me sleep with your wife before I tell you.

This may be how religion started out. Sort of.
You may object to this. Why on earth would Caveman2 comply and lend Caveman1 his wife? Surely there is no evolutionary place for suckers like Caveman2? this objection makes a lot of sense in a world with only two cavemen, but in reality this could be very profitable for caveman2 if he can learn the ways of caveman1 and sell this scam to caveman3 next doors. It is like a Ponzi scheme (a form of pyramid game where there are no suckers as long as new suckers are initiated, but which eventually falls apart when no new suckers are available. When it falls apart the newest sucker will hurt the most) which also appeals to our genetic desire of assigning purpose to things. And purpose is like crack to us.

My guess is that the role of religion evolved to provide purpose. With purpose I include:
The "purpose" of natural phenomena (thunder, stars, moon, gravity)
The "purpose" of Humans (Purpose of life)

Here are two examples of purpose of life:
Fight fierce and with dignity and you will eat and at the tables of the gods in Valhalla (Nordic mythology)
The ten commandments offer offer you a map to heaven, and heaven is really nice and hence your purpose to reach (Christianity)

Science offers an alternative way to explain natural phenomena. It has managed quite well to do so (at least according to scientists), and most things are nowadays "in principle understood". "In principle understood" means that we may not know exactly how everything works, but we do know the fundamental principle. As an example we can explain that the earth actually circles then sun and not vice verse. We also know why. Scientists probably think that we figured these things out so well that it is no longer a fair fight with religion as the proper way to explain these things.

You may think that science is bound to stay in the business of describing natural phenomena. Wrong! These days we are very much trying to describe what makes you happy, sad and how your brain is wired. We don't know that exactly but we believe that we know the fundamentals, which means that we "sort of know". In essence; we are trying to explain personal things about you like who you are and why, how you function, and if you have a soul or not. And these things are pretty related to the purpose of YOU.

If science is now in the business of describing purpose; why not have science as religion? The problem is that although we can explain how things work and why; we won't get close to give it a purpose. This means that even though we can explain thunder, we can't assign any purpose to it. I believe that this gives science a huge disadvantage to religion in the eyes of normal people. You may object and say that the truth should be good enough to compete; IF we can't show a purpose, maybe there isn't any. Wouldn't people adopt this idea if it's "the right answer"? If you ever sold a product, you know that this is untrue. We don't buy products because they are good for us. We buy them because we like them. As a philosophy product package, science is like carrots: Good for you, but terribly boring. We in principle know how almost everything works, but we can't assign purpose to any of it. And purpose is what the masses demand.

The elephant in our living room

The expression "The elephant in the living room" is used in cases where obvious issues are overlooked. I imagine this as a middle aged English lady sitting in her living room drinking some tea. Behind her and her sofa stands a medium sized elephant. He is overlooking her shoulder to get a glimpse of the next British Idol on the TV. If you visit the lady the discussion may go like this:
Me: Wow! There is an elephant behind your sofa lady!
Lady: There is certainly not. My living room is not a Zoo.
Me: But I can see him. He is right behind you watching British Idol.
Lady: Well if he really is there he is not doing much harm behind the sofa, is he?
Me: He just shit on your floor though.
Lady: Well if you really must know I put an old carpet behind him so there is really no harm done.

I do this all the time in my physics studies. I don't want to bore you with the details but I make a living trying to figure out how atoms and molecules stick to things. Things can be other molecules, atoms or surfaces. I don't do this by testing but by calculations based on models.

My problem is that the models I use are not correct. With not correct I mean that I know that they are not true. What I hope is that these models despite being not correct can still be useful and harbor some fractional truth in them. After a while I forget that they are untrue because that happens when you do something day after day. This is my elephant in my living room. Sometimes when I compare my predictions with actual reality (usually experiments) it is like the elephant taking a shit on my floor. When this happens I can either close my eyes and blame the experiments for being poorly conducted (I may be right, that happens) and hope that the elephant who just shit on my floor REALLY is not there (if he is not, then neither is the shit). I can also acknowledge the shit on the floor and put an old carpet behind the elephant for next time. This is my weapon of choice and in practice it means that I start patching my model to work a little better. The obvious question you may have is now: Why the hell do you not just acknowledge the elephant and get on with your life? The reason is that elephants are problematic to move through house doors; it is simply impossible to move him. In my work, I don't know of any better way to do what I do. Also if I thought about that elephant all day my work would be no fun at all. I could also move to another living room, which I don't want to since I have grown attached to my home. And my new living room is likely to have an elephant too.

So contrary to what you may have thought, the old lady is just like me. We don't acknowledge the elephant because we can't move him. And if we can't do anything about him; why trouble our happiness with acknowledging him? In case we don't want to live in shit we do have to acknowledge the consequences of having him though. By putting an old carpet behind him.

Economists have elephants in their living room as well. It is fun to tease them about this because they often REALLY don't know it is there. So far we may not be smart enough to argue with an economist about the benefits of free market and capitalism, since we saw (from yesterdays discussion) that he always has some clever answer to everything. But we will soon be able to visit his living room and tease him about his elephant and, even funnier, his ignorance about it. And I bet he doesn't even put an old carpet behind him.

Economics 101. Thrown in your face

A few months ago I bought a Netbook. Amazed that it cost around half of my monthly rent, I couldn't help wonder how cheap things can get. Economists often attribute this as the work of the efficient market. Roughly it means that every process involved when building my Netbook is trimmed and worked on until perfection due to the fierce competition from Netbook producers. Every wasteful step is bound to be either detected and corrected or, if not detected, lead to a more expensive product which no savvy consumer will buy. Sort of.

This applies to labor as well and hence jobs are being outsourced to people with low salary demand, since only a fool would buy a more expensive product than necessary. While this may be a local dilemma for the people losing their jobs it is usually argued that the world as a whole will be better of than before since; We will now be able to buy cheaper goods; some Asian who got your job will be able to feed his family; you who lost your job may suffer in the short run buy will eventually be able to move on to do more productive things.

Economists are trained to argue that this is good stuff, and one has to admit they seem to have a point; all the cheap goods in the world for everyone and the only cost is that when you can't keep up you just leave your job to someone more efficient and learn something new that is in demand. You could even get public support to go to school and learn something that you can do better than that Asian who took your job. It's like a global running competition where everyone on earth is running for the same team and where you just can tag an Asian when you get exhausted and get some rest in a bar before you continue with new strength.

As a physicist you usually get the habit of worrying about what happens with a system after a really long time. Although earth will circle the sun a lot of times it is still interesting to ask what happens after a REALLY long time; will we crash into the sun? Drift away in space? Collide with Mars? And although my Netbook will probably work fine for a while; How is it most likely to brake down? This occupational habit makes me a bit of an odd conversationalist since I often wonder more about what happens in extreme cases than in most likely cases.

When analyzing the economist's efficient market I can't help wondering about the limits. Can people always jump ships when things turn competitive? Is unemployment not an issue with this system? An economist will tell you that there is nothing wrong with his model and that the fact that we have a lot of unemployment is rather connected to an unreasonable restricted labor market where salaries are not determined by efficient markets but by unions. Unemployment, he would say, is caused by the fact that society demands salaries for its people that are not reasonably justified in an efficient market. The economist will quite convincingly defend his model i a similar way and blame its apparent failures on the fact that it was not properly implemented in the first place.

After having tried all your good arguments to prove that his ideas about the efficient market sucks, including the bellow the belt ones which is basically just pointing out that he is a capitalist pig, the economist may get on the offensive. From claiming that it makes most economical sense, he now attacks and plays the solidarity card. This involves facts like the living standards in formerly poor Asian countries like South Korea. These countries used to be dirty and poor before we let them take the jobs we didn't really want to compete for, but are now growing both rich and stable. The economist will, together with some other arguments, claim that the competition in the free market is a better policy for improving poor countries than the policies which pretty much only involves sending poor countries some 1 % of GDP to feed the poor. The fact that the economist (Probably working on Wall Street with a Christmas bonus 8 times you annual salary. And yes; his Christmas bonus comes in cash and has the words "Bailout Money" written on every bill with a smiley next to it) is now reaching for moral high ground in your discussion deeply angers you. But what can you do?

Economists are good to measure things. If you still claim that the economist is full of shit he will point out how much better we are now compared to 200 years ago. With some fancy arguments he will take the credit for this.

We suspect that this self serving economist is full of shit, but we have a hard time arguing with him since most of what he says makes sense. But is he REALLY right? I have some thoughts on that that I will share in a while.