Tag: Insights

Programming is Meaningless

Researchers seemingly have found a way to tell-apart students which will do well in computer science classes and those who won’t. More eloquently put they’ve devised a way  “[to] separate programming sheep from non-programming goats.” 😀

And they come to an interesting conclusion:

Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs – formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language – are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.
— Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, 2006, “The camel has two humps (working title)”

I have accepted it. -.-

Es gibt heute keine Sprache

Es gibt heute keine Sprache – es gibt eine Sprachlosigkeit und eine Ratlosigkeit. Der Sprache wird heute die Sprache genommen. Auf der einen Seite gibt es einen ungeheuren Lärm, einen Kommunikationslärm, auf der anderen Seite eine unheimliche Stummheit. Und diese Stummheit unterscheidet sich vom Schweigen. Schweigen ist sehr beredt. Schweigen hat eine Sprache. Stille ist auch beredt. Stille kann auch Sprache sein. Aber der Lärm und die Stummheit sind ohne Sprache. Es gibt nur sprachlose, lärmende Kommunikation, das ist ein Problem. Heute gibt es nicht einmal Wissen, sondern nur Information. Wissen ist etwas ganz anderes als Information. Wissen und Wahrheit klingen heute sehr veraltet. Wissen hat auch eine ganze andere Zeitstruktur. Es spannt sich zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft. Und die Zeitlichkeit der Information ist die Gegenwart, das Präsens. Wissen beruht auch auf der Erfahrung. Ein Meister verfügt über Wissen. Heute leben wir mit einem Terror des Dilettantismus.
— Byung-Chul Han im Zeit-Interview

Die Suppe der Suppe der Suppe

Das ist einer der besten Nasreddin Hoca Witze überhaupt.

Als ein Verwandter vom Land den Hoca besuchte, brachte er eine Ente mit. Hocherfreut ließ dieser das Federvieh zubereiten und teilte das Mahl mit seinem Gast. In der Folgezeit tauchte ein Mann nach dem anderen beim Hoca auf. Jeder behauptete, ein Freund des Freundes des Mannes zu sein, der die Ente mitgebracht hatte. Der Hoca bewirtete sie alle, bis seine Mittel erschöpft waren. Als wieder ein “Freund” erschien, setzte Hoca ihm eine Schale Wasser vor. “Was ist das?” fragte der Gast erstaunt. “Das ist die Suppe der Suppe der Suppe der Ente, die mir mein Verwandter geschenkt hat.”

Laniakea

In the wake of the newly-released Laniakea paper I was inspired. 😀

Humbled and in awe
Just from the images he saw

Of the pearls of light
Making way through the dark and void

A sign, though abstract
Reminding him to not detract

Those mindful can tell
الله أعلى و أجل

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https://youtu.be/rENyyRwxpHo

Radley Balko on the Militarization of America’s Police Force

VICE talks about why people fear/hate the police more and more, how the militarization of police and the increased use of force are signs that feedback loops are set up to make things worse. 🙁

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https://youtu.be/uTWy8tjTiTw

The Dark Wind Rises

I was surprised. The Wind Rises is a very dark story told in bright colors.

The plot seems innocuous, but at its core is about two sick souls.

One, Jiro, is obsessed with building airplanes and has vivid “dreams” about it since he was young. He is curious and helps others, but his mind wanders around and he’s a serious workaholic. It so happens that it’s leading up to WWII and the only way to build planes is for war.

The other one, Nahoko, is revealed to be terminally ill. None the less she enjoys life painting and being mindful of the beauty of life (e.g. in the scene at the spring). As the story mostly follows Jiro there isn’t much told about her thoughts and feelings.

After meeting once during an earthquake in which Jiro helps her and her maid. They meet again many years later in a summer resort. They fall in love and get engaged.

Now the tragedy unfolds. She won’t marry him until she’s cured, he accepts. Working away he’s constantly worried, leaving work regularly to see her. She finally decides to recuperate in a alpine sanatorium, which she flees from to be with him. He’s wanted by the secret police, hiding with her in his supervisor’s home. They marry. She’s bedridden, he’s engulfed in his work. At least they’re together now. 🙂

They exists at the same time in the same place, but are worlds apart.

In this Jiro represent active, Nahoko passive destruction … Jiro man-made, Nahoko natural … Jiro outward, Nahoko inward. You can watch it eat them up little by little. The only glim of hope seems to be a few genuine moments of love, mindfully spending time with each other, fading out the world around them for a short period of time. But sadly even these moments are insufficient to overcome their sicknesses.

In the end both get consumed by them. Nahoko succumbs to her illness and dies a physical death, in a way leaving the spirit to live in the absolute, in the afterlife. Jiro on the other hand–alive in this world–dies a spiritual death having sold his soul (“ten years”) (losing his soul mate in consequence) and is trapped in the virtual, in this dream of his. She reaches out to him a last time (“You must live”), but he doesn’t understand (“Arigatou”). :'(

Both die in a way, leaving the physical world behind, but in ways that can’t be reconciled. They can’t be together, never!

Very sad and gloomy.

Individual Mass Manipulation

There is great commentary on how and why Facebook’s infamous “emotion study” is unethical. The main point being that the researchers and Facebook violated the “informed consent” principle of research on humans.

There have been other “individual mass manipulation” studies. e.g. you could tip the outcome of close elections by manipulating search results. But manipulating the mood of people on a massive scale is “new.” Don’t get confused, I don’t mean it like “they try to influence what we’re thinking through TV and ads.” I mean individual manipulation. Different things are manipulated in varying amounts for everyone individually … basically anything that claims “to only show you the X most relevant to you” falls into this category (especially if they don’t offer a way out of the filter bubble).

But what should we do, now that we known we have the tools to enforce emotions? Why not actually press the “button of happiness“?

Imagine if Facebook could have a button which says “make the billion people who use Facebook each a little bit happier”. It’s quite hard to imagine a more effective, more powerful, cheaper way to make the world a little bit better than for that button to exist. I want them to be able to build the button of happiness. And then I want them to press it.

My dystopian senses tell me: it will be used, but not in the way suggested above. We can probably draw some conclusions from the fact that one of the authors’ work is funded by the DoD. Why would the DoD (or any military/government organization for that matter) fund anything useful to the general good of mankind?

I see three use cases manipulating emotions:

Or to put it more eloquently:

… large corporations (and governments and political campaigns) now have new tools and stealth methods to quietly model our personality, our vulnerabilities, identify our networks, and effectively nudge and shape our ideas, desires and dreams.
[…]
I identify this model of control as a Gramscian model of social control: one in which we are effectively micro-nudged into “desired behavior” as a means of societal control. Seduction, rather than fear and coercion are the currency, and as such, they are a lot more effective. (Yes, short of deep totalitarianism, legitimacy, consent and acquiescence are stronger models of control than fear and torture—there are things you cannot do well in a society defined by fear, and running a nicely-oiled capitalist market economy is one of them).

I think netzpolitik.org put it best in their conclusion (German):

The problem that these kinds of experiments and the systems that actually enable them pose is not that they are illegal, creatively or intentionally evil. This isn’t the case even if it might feel like it.
Instead [the problem is] that they’re only a tiny step away from legitimate everyday practice. That they look a lot like ordinary ads. That they sit on top of an already-accepted construction of reality by non-transparent providers. That because of their scale and stealth they can be so efficiently and easily hidden. That they don’t devise our loss of control, but only exploit it.

The actual study: “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” (PDF)