I was recently listening to a podcast about the Branch Davidian cult, led by David Koresh, and how the FBI attempted to end the standoff by, among other things, flooding bedrooms with light to prevent sleep and blaring the screams of dying rabbits over loudspeakers to drive the Branch Davidians insane and hasten their surrender. Apparently, someone thought this was a good idea, and apparently, no one was brave enough to tell that person they were wrong.
The lesson? Speak up. Trust yourself. If you don't pursue your own stupid idea, you'll end up pursuing someone else's stupid idea, and the latter will often be much, much worse.
Two nights ago, I slept on the floor next to Kika, my sweet black cat, as she neared the end of her life. I told her something that I'd like to remember, because it may be true and it may be important.
I don't know if there's any problem that can't be solved better with love.
I vaguely recall the phrasing being a bit different, perhaps slightly less awkward, but I can't remember the exact wording now. No matter. Rephrase it if you like.
Kika passed peacefully early yesterday morning. She was a wonderful cat, and I miss her very much.
The internet can be a confirmation bias machine. If one wants to find evidence that Wegmans is amazing, they will find it. If one wants to find evidence that Wegmans is terrible, they will find it. For that reason, I don't think anyone should celebrate when they find others online who agree with them. It feels like validation, but I believe it's meaningless.
Consensus is different. If almost all people who are knowledgeable about a certain subject agree on some fact, despite their different upbringings, cultures, and worldviews, then it probably is true. Can one find people online who believe that pandas speak Latin? Probably. The internet is a big place. Can one find broad consensus that pandas speak Latin? Absolutely not. That's one way of knowing it's probably bullshit.
Is broad consensus everything? No, but it's a strong indicator of truth. Add it to your truth detection scorecard. Have it replace “my tribe agrees with me.”
I just heard about Tin Can. What a great idea! It's a physical phone for kids that can connect with other Tin Cans for free. For a monthly fee, it can even connect with other phone numbers. Only approved contacts are supported, and best of all, there are no apps! It's an old concept, of course, but something about it seems so exciting, novel, and fun. Imagine kids spending less time on screens and more time actually talking to their friends, building real communication skills. This is what the world needs.
If cost is fixed and you measure speed, you'll get speed, but not quality. If cost is fixed and you measure quality, you'll get quality, but not speed. If you measure page views or ad impressions, your company may become a clickbait factory. If you measure messages sent within your app, your app might begin boosting outrageous content that makes people argue all the time. (Yes, I'm talking about social media.) If you're a bank and you measure account openings, your employees just might commit fraud to “get those numbers up.”
Incentives rule the world. If you decide to incentivize something by making a measurement a goal, be sure you understand the unintended consequences. Better yet, don't make a measurement a goal at all. As they say, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” In other words, when a metric becomes a goal, people will inevitably game the system, and you might be surprised by what they do to “win.”
I'm not a physicist or a philosopher, but I'm interested in how the universe works. One thing I'm curious about is time. Believe it or not, nobody really knows how time works, and effects like time dilation show that time does not work the way we intuitively think it does. Personally, I think time is like an undirected graph of cause and effect (or effect and cause), a directionless web of events, even though it feels like it has a forward direction.
When folks start talking about this, they inevitably mention that it's not possible to travel backward in time. There's a problem with that statement, though, and it only occurred to me recently. When people say it's not possible to travel back in time, or that entropy tends to increase, and so we don't generally see wine glasses unshatter and float back to their original resting places, they're really saying that it's not possible for external events to move backward in time while they themselves move forward in time. Why should that be possible? Why should someone be able to retain their memories and continue aging while everything around them reverses? That would be like the food in my oven cooking while the food in my microwave becomes cold again. Maybe it's simply not possible for time to “move in two directions” at once; the events that led me to start the oven also led me to start the microwave. How could one set of events be reversed without the other?
Maybe backward time travel does happen, but we don't notice it. By analogy, if we were living in The Sims and the “player” decided to rewind the game, causing the most recent frames to be played back in reverse order, wouldn't our memories and experiences also be undone frame by frame? Wouldn't it feel exactly like experiencing it “forwards”, one “frame” or one moment at a time? The “me” from a frame one hour ago would have the idea to write this post, and he wouldn't have the memory of having already started it.
I know this is pretty out there, as far as my posts go. Maybe this is easily refuted by people who actually know what they're talking about. But it's interesting to me. And hey, maybe it would make for a fun Star Trek plot point! “We are going back in time, we just don't remember it!“
I don't remember where I first heard this. It may have been spoken in a conversation about road rage. I think there's something very true about it, though, and it speaks to much more than driving.
When someone is unkind to you, they're probably not reacting to you. They're probably reacting to the last person who upset them.
In other words, when one is unkind or behaves strangely toward you, especially when there is no obvious explanation for their behavior, their annoyance may be misdirected. They may be treating you the way they wish they had treated someone else, someone who came before you. It's not fair, but that's life.
