Hiro Antagonist

Versus



"...I don’t believe that school can teach you something like prop and costume making to its fullest extent. A “hobby” like this really requires field experience and just going out there and making stuff at your own skill and pace."
-Izy Cheung

An interesting dichotomy that's come up every now and then is the value of university education versus field training for various disciplines. Some things are best learned in a university setting, where an expert in the field lectures and you take notes and replicate the work of other leaders in the field. Other things are best learned in the field, where hands on experience is the only useful teacher.

I've spent a fair amount of time doing both for different pursuits, math, fine art and philosophy, contrasted with photography, fencing and building things. Some of these things really benefit from being at a good university with excellent professors. Other things would only make you worse off for having an excellent professor try to teach you about it.

Having friends who are proponents of both styles of learning, the academics on one side, the grunts on the other, I've heard the argument back and forth more times than I care to count, one side discounting the other completely.


And they're right. For the things each system excels at teaching, the other system is terrible.


Take photography. It's something I've learned on my own from the beginning, but decided it wouldn't hurt to take a class in, as I was already at a nice university. What did I learn? Honestly, the nuts and bolts of printing were the only useful things I took away from the course. The rest of it was literally worthless - I could have learned the same things faster on my own. I did, actually.

Academic photography is shitty photography on the whole. But photography is often confused with fine art, where sculpture and anatomy professors are actually useful things. Sans the nuts and bolts of photography (printing, darkroom, basic photoshop), a university professor in photography is useless. Everything that makes photography something more than snapshots - vision, technique, etc - are things that are best learned hands on in the field, from doing it time and time again.


A professor could lecture about shooting, you could read about the history of guns, look at diagrams, learn physics as it applies to ballistics, and you'd be a shitty marksman by the time you'd finished. Put in the same amount of time down on the range, or out in the field on active duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, you'll be able to put university training to shame.

Things like philosophy, and math theory, on the other hand - those are things you won't do well at on your own, unless your name is Issac Newton or Georg Cantor. They depend on vast systems of previously discovered and analyzed information, rather than things that are particular to the individual.

And that's where it breaks down, really. Things that are dependent on the individual more than they are human knowledge as a whole are ones that are best learned in the field. There may be a thousand marksmen out there, but each one of them learned in relation to how they shoot, not how everyone else happens to shoot. The same goes for photography. Things that are dependent on the group more than the individual are the ones that benefit the most from a university setting - math, philosophy, fine art, etc.

So NPR airs this bit about how odd it is that the same black pastors that led the civil rights movement are against gay marriage.

It's fine by me if someone doesn't hold with something. I personally don't believe people should be screwing outside of marriage, regardless of gender. But any people that are capable of loving each other getting married seems like it can only be a good thing.

So why would a group of people who led the civil rights movement in the 60's be against what is essentially more of the same? One of the black pastors who'd been in the civil right's movement was recorded saying "If anybody can get married, that devalues marriage".

I sat there, stunned for a second. This was quite possibly the most stupid thing I'd heard in a long time, not to mention quite possibly the worst argument I'd ever heard.


Because, as we all know, 'If anyone could have civil rights, that'd devalue civil rights!'

The thing is, basic rights belonging to all human beings cannot be devalued by letting all humans exercise them. Rights are not like gold in the sense that the more everyone else has, the less your own supply is worth.

I'm not sure which I hate more, hypocrisy or people who make stupid arguments that aren't logically sound.

Something I've never liked about the USA is the thirst for blood. Here in Texas, the public fondness for executing people is perhaps more obvious than in other states. In a fit of extreme irony, you often hear people who are against abortion and the execution of the unborn who are pro-death penalty.

I've been against killing people for as long as I can remember, more from philosophical reasons than any particular religious ones. You should never kill anyone unless your own life is under immediate threat. There's simply no *need* to kill people unless they're trying to kill you and can't be stopped otherwise.

Honesty needs to come first. Life is cheap, and on the whole, humans don't value it that highly. People have always been willing to die and kill for just about anything.

Civilization has been a story of triumph, of man over man's own nature for the last few thousand years. We've been winning more than we've been loosing for a while now, and we shouldn't give up, especially on a battle this important.

Security:
The death penalty is no longer about this. Modern prisons are secure, and can keep society safe from violent criminals. It can no longer be said that a criminal is so dangerous that he must die, otherwise everyone in the country is otherwise at risk. Most people in this country recognize this is a bullshit argument and no longer resort to it.

Vengeance:
Killing people never brought back anyone, or made anything better. I'm reminded of a famous popular saying by Holly Near "Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?" We act as if somehow, when we kill someone as a group (the State), we are less guilty than when we kill someone as individuals.

One of the most respected thinkers on law, William Blackstone, once said "better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

In the last *three* years in Dallas county alone, NINETEEN people have been freed from death row on DNA evidence showing they could not possibly have been guilty of the charges they had been convicted on. Dallas county currently leads the nation in number of prisoners on death row proven wrongfully convicted. It's not a statistic to be proud of. Probably one we should be abhorred by, really.


I have yet to run into anyone who was pro-death penalty because of anything based on reason. It's always been vengeance. An eye for an eye ends up with a nation of blind people when you let animal instinct triumph over reason. There is no animal on the planet more vicious than human beings. But there's also no animal on the planet capable of such great triumph over their negative qualities. Hopefully the chain of victories over the worst aspects of human nature doesn't end here.

Photography, the art - rather than the act of taking a picture - is often said to be 'showing people something that has been seen before in a way they have never seen it.'

Art, with a capital A, is communication. All art is the product of the artist's attempt to express something. Much like writing, it can be anything from a single vulgar expletive to the equivalent of Dante's Inferno.

Whether or not art is good Art should be determined on how well the message was expressed, more than any particular subjective assessment or feeling. Skill always has a role in this, and often the greater the skill, the more eloquently the message is conveyed.

Take 'The Scream' by Edvard Munch. On paper, it's not the most accurately rendered thing in existence. However, it manages to express the message (anxiety) better than just about any image in existence.

A lot of geeks will rag on art in a fairly ignorant fashion because they may not be very sensitive to art in general (much like color blind people have trouble with certain shades of color, there seem to be art blind people as well) or lack a decent education in the matter.

However, unless one is a master at the same craft they are judging, they should not take any haste in dismissing something. If you're a extremely experienced civil engineer, you can take a look at the plans for a bridge and realize 'good god, this thing is a piece of crap!' and be confident in the accuracy of your judgment.

Someone can say 'well, this piece doesn't do much for me', but saying 'this piece is nothing but crap' requires authority in the matter. If you're a extremely experienced civil engineer and a chemist tells you that your bridge is a piece of crap, you wouldn't take their word with as much authority, right?

While growing up, I was often frustrated when told things along the line of 'with age, you'll understand', as even back then I understood that intelligence doesn't increase with age.

Unfortunately, people often failed to distinguish how age generally increased experience rather than intelligence, and in many cases, perhaps weren't able to distinguish such differences with enough clarity to convey them.

Truth be told, the ability to clearly express the things you know in your head via spoken word seems to be a fairly random trait, rather than being correlated with any particular age or level of intelligence or experience. While I was an art major, I frequently ran into this with peers whose artistic ability was something I envied quite a bit, but they would drive me to frustration when trying to have a conversation that involved them describing anything inside their head. Perfectly smart people, often above average, in fact. Highly talented. Couldn't put their artistic vision into words even at gunpoint, however :(


In simple words, just because someone is young doesn't mean they will be unable to understand something. Someone at the age of eleven is just as smart as they will be at the age of forty. However, the ability to grasp a concept and the ability to put it in a mental framework that will make the concept relevant and useful are two different things.

For example, an eleven year old who asks you why someone they know to be a rational person suddenly acts irrational when around a particular person of the opposite gender. If you explain that rationality can fly out the window in certain circumstances, like when someone has a crush on another person, they'll be able to grasp the concept perfectly.

However, until they've had a few years of *personal* experience with the phenomenon, it won't be fully related to all of the other things they understand.


Intelligence, an ability that is constant no matter what the age allows facts to be comprehended. Experience, an ability that increases in a linear fashion as you age allows the same facts to be utilized in daily life with a level of skill dependent on the amount of experience.

Much like a pilot fresh out of flight school knows exactly what all the controls in a plane do and why, the knowledge can't be used to its full potential until they've had a few thousand hours of flight time under their belt.


So the next time a little kid asks you a question whose answer would seem to be beyond their grasp? They're just looking for the theory, not the application.


And if they're not satisfied with the theory of the concept and are actually looking for the application? Tell them that such understanding cannot be given by others, only gained after getting enough XP and leveling up ;)

Medical abortion is no different than shooting an adult in the head, when you get down to it.

To be a bit more accurate, it's more like being a politician that orders some third world guerrilla leader to be assassinated. They don't shoot the guerrilla leader in the head themselves, but in the chain of people that made it happen, they bear the most ethical responsibility for the action. It's a bit easier being the person that gives the orders, less messy and easier to rationalize away. Human beings are big fans of such things.


Often people will debate abortion on theological grounds. In the United States, that's often the only grounds that abortion is debated on. Theology is problematic though, as your debating opponent has to be of the same religion or close enough that the theological grounds your argument rest on hold sound in their view of the world. In other words, an evangelical christian is going to have a hard time convincing an atheist that abortion is wrong. Mostly because the desires of some god the atheist doesn't even believe in tend not to hold weight for them in any argument.

And if the two people in an argument about abortion are of two different religions that have differing views on abortion? Phew! Talk about your lost causes.


Reason, however, is universal to all humans. People might not agree on the existence of a supreme being, or even one that's particular on how people get killed, but every human being with two brain cells to rub together can understand why the statement 'sheep eat grass, therefore all things that eat grass are sheep' happens to be problematic.

Most human beings will say that shooting people in the head isn't a good thing in general. Human life tends to be a universal good in every human society, given how you'll find prohibitions and laws against murder in pretty much every one of them. It *is* easier to kill someone than not if you disagree with them in a heated argument. Especially if you both have guns. Take disputes about cheating in gambling in the Wild West era for example.

But if you go around shooting everyone you have a problem with, society just goes down the drain. Getting good dental care will be tough if the dentist thinks you'll have no problem shooting him in the head when you see the bill. This applies to every facet of society in general - murder isn't something that can be tolerated if you want civilization to work well.

Murdering people who are classified as being outside of a given society is far less problematic though. People from another country that become enemies, people of a different race, color or creed, etc. Gradually people have come to understand that even with these differences, people are no less human for them. The life of a Civil Rights protester is worth no less than that of any other person's life, as it turns out.

"Clearly it must be so Socrates!"


If we can all agree through logic that human life and the preservation of such is a good that we all value, the next question is 'where does human life begin?'

This is often the topic of fierce debate - is a human being still human if it's only a few cells? If it's so many months old in the womb? Only after it has drawn its first breath of air? Only after it has the right to vote?

No one argues against the idea that a fetus *will* be human at some point. To shed light upon this dilemma, perhaps it makes more sense to ask at what stage something will not be human. In other words, if you grow a kidney in a laboratory and keep it alive, it isn't going to become a human being in the natural course of events. A sperm by itself, will never become a human being. Nor will an ovum.

However, get the two together and unless the natural course of events is interrupted, the result will end up a human being. Perhaps even one that ends up reading this, who can say?



Is a human being any less a human being at any stage in their life? Is the life of an elderly person of any less worth than that of one in the prime of their life? Logic implies that human life, regardless of the stage it is in, is worth equally as much at every point from beginning to end.

While it might be hard to declare when something is a human being in the world of biological science, in the world of reason, logic and philosophy, it is far less so. Logic implies that it is human unless it is not. While that statement may seem simplistic, it is very important. For it is much easier to decide what will never and can never be a human being than what is a human being.

Given the two groups, things that will never and can never be human beings, and things that are not present in the first group; eg a baby, one can safely say that killing things in the first group could never be considered murder in the sense of one human killing another.

That leaves that second group then. Things you can kill that are or will be human. Logically, if a squalling infant turns into a polite adult with table manners, the squalling infant is no less human for its lack of table manners. Continuing in that chain of logic, a zygote is just as human as an individual of voting age is.

Logic implies that killing a zygote is an act of no less weight than shooting someone in the head.

The political scene in the United States of America is fraught with the buying and selling of political power, and politicians themselves.

The system is what is truly at fault though, as human beings can only react as well as their circumstances and nature allow. In other words, if you put a steak in front of a starving man, and tell him not to eat it, well... Don't hold out much hope for that steak sticking around.

If human beings are corruptible by nature, the solution does not lie in electing a better politician, but rather in fixing the system that elects them and rules on what they can and cannot do.

Part of the problem is that lobbying is allowed. Another part of the problem is that it's legal to give gifts and money to politicians, and politicians need money to get into office, and when re-election comes around, to stay in office.

If someone contributes money, they'll have influence proportional to the amount of money they contribute. Some have tried to restrict donations to a level that the average citizen can compete with - ie, no donations over what a well off person could manage, but there's always ways around that. The best and simplest solution is simply to make donations illegal, and to have campaigns funded by the state.


Another part of the problem is "Who do politicians listen to?". Lobbyists tend to be very good at chatting up politicians. How do you prevent lobbyists from having undue influence on politicians? If they can't buy them, they'll buy people who specialize in being friends with politicians, and politicians will suddenly have no lack of friends who have well thought out views on certain issues.

Joe Smith at home can't compete with that. Nor should he have to.

How to solve the second of these two problems, I don't know yet. I'm going to be thinking about it though. It's time for a second American Revolution, a bloodless reform of a corrupted political system. Government doesn't have to suck. It can be better. It will be better.

Freedom. It's a personal obsession. I do not gladly suffer any master, endure is perhaps the kindest description.

In life, it is rare that we do not serve someone. From birth to death, parents, teachers, company boss, politician, government and so on. One can renounce all of this and live in the wilderness, subject to no man and no law. However, as man is a social animal, it is rare that this is a suitable option.

How does one gain ascendancy over all other mortal masters?

I've contemplated this question long and hard, and the short answer is 'via the accumulation and exercise of power'. In many cases, money. But even the richest man is subject to the laws of the nation in which he lives. While perhaps not as subject to those with less clout, subject nonetheless. Most heads of state are also subject to the laws of their nations.

So what is left? Well, to be honest, the only position a human can have that escapes all mortal masters is that of a despot, a dictator. Plato went on about how the perfect ruler was an enlightened dictator, but given human nature, that doesn't really happen.

There isn't much territory in the world that's worth something left unclaimed. Even if you could gain territory to dictate, money, subjects, power, material resources, you find your self subject to the game of 'he with the biggest army wins'. Well, in this day and age, it's really 'he with nukes, the ability to use them and the appearance of being willing to'.

Frankly, that's a lot of requirements for absolute freedom. I have serious doubts as to even the minority of them being achievable. You can dream big, but unless you're young, talented and charismatic and in the midst of a great revolution, it ain't gonna happen.

That said, I'll be sure to keep my eye out for the next one!

Something that recently came up in conversation was the tradition of entrepreneurship in the United States and how the rate for small businesses being started and succeeding is far greater here than any other country in the world. There was a bit on NPR a month or two ago on that, and they contrasted the US with Japan, where the small business creation / success rate is much smaller.

The point was made that in Japan, it's much less socially acceptable to have a business fail, as it implies over there that the owner is also a failure as a person. In the US on the other hand, failure is accepted as a standard risk, and even if someone has two businesses fail before a third succeeds, they're not viewed badly for it.

In a lot of fields (photography included), you have to take risks to the point of failure to grow. The fastest way of learning is learning from mistakes. Quite possibly the most effective way also.

When it comes to photography, it's becoming rapidly apparent that unless you're independently wealthy (some photographers are), you have to make money to support your pursuit of the art.

This basically means you have to whore yourself out.

So, pretty much like any other job. An indelicate phrase for a universal situation. Unfortunately, photography has a few challenges not found in other jobs. Job, work, labor, these words do not bode well for any artistic pursuit. When money enters the picture, art can be corrupted all too easily. That's why patrons are such awesome things. Basically, you can make art and not have to worry about how you'll be affording to eat for the next six months.

Sadly, patrons in the world of photography are kinda rare. So you have to make money at it. This is good in a a way, because people who blow completely at photography get weeded out. But people who are alright at photography and very good at the business side tend to do better than their peers who are much better at the art of photography, but not quite so good at the business side of it.

So you get a lot of people who have the artistic creativity of a lemming dominating the business.

And the very rare few who are so excellent that people pay them large amounts of money and they don't have to work hard at the business side and kill their creativity.

Photography as a business kills creativity.

Unlike some of my fellow art majors, I genuinely enjoyed studying art history. The fact that I originally intended to major in military history might have something to do with this. I've always had a very healthy respect and deep interest for theory and the intellectual dissection of the how and why something happened.

After a few years wasting away doing math and CS, I found that art was far more interesting. Quite often though, it was not held to the same intellectual rigor that my previous majors were. Because, hey, it's art, and art tends to involve emotion more than dry intellectual thinking. Art history was one of those things that most students were dismissive of. Because it was (to them) dry and boring. Actually going out and making something was much more interesting.

But if you take the long view, you begin to see that the people who did go out and make stuff, the ones who did really well and had their names in those dry and musty tomes, certain trends were noticeable.

One was that these artists tended to congregate in groups. To continue the example about the Impressionist movement in my previous post, these were all painters who knew each other, in many cases lived in the same cities and their ideas and work tended to cross-pollinate.

There's examples of famous artists who really didn't exist in some matrix of other notable artists around their time, but they seem to be a bit more rare.

Apply that to today. What's happening in the art world now? What will stick out a hundred years from now about today? What in photography will become notable enough to stick in a dry dusty tome (or perhaps the electronic equivalent of the future)?

I'm not sure yet, but I'm keeping my eye open for it.

Human psychology has always fascinated me, though some might claim bias on my part as I'm a human being. Aside from that, there's no end to the strange quirks of the human mind. Strange and fascinating quirks...

One of them is Confirmation Bias. Humans tend to think in certain ways, and when searching for information or interpreting it, the information tends to be viewed through a filter of previous experience that seeks to conform it to previously held beliefs and preconceptions, while avoiding to relate it to ideas that would contradict those.

In other words, to a cop, every suspicious person is guilty.

The problem is understandable - the people the police deal with the majority of the time aren't upstanding citizens. They tend to be called in for the opposite type. And if you deal with criminals day in and day out, it shapes your perceptions. Pretty quickly, every suspicious person seems to be guilty. And if you're dealing with criminals day in and day out, a high percentage of them will be guilty, which only serves to embed the confirmation bias of seeing every suspicious person as a guilty person even deeper.


Confirmation bias can be quite deadly though. Take the Virginia Tech shooting. Steven Lubet of Northwestern University Law School wrote a fascinating paper "How Lawyers (ought to) Think", and his first example was how confirmation bias affected the cops who were trying to solve the first murders. They come in to find a RA (Ryan Clark) dead, and a freshmen (Emily Hilscher) fatally wounded. The police secured the dormitory for 30 minutes, but then let everyone go, as interviewing Emily's roommate revealed that she'd been with her boyfriend Karl over the weekend, and her boyfriend was an avid gun owner. The roommate insisted that Karl was a very non-violent person, but the police rushed off to find him because the facts fit previous experiences.

Case closed!

Or not. As it turns out, another student, Seung-Hui Cho was still on campus, reloading and heading over to a large hall on campus to go shoot some more people. Killing 32 and wounding 28, he committed suicide. The cops were nowhere to be found, as they were off stopping Karl's car and searching his house for the murder weapon.

Unfortunately, a large percentage of the time when a woman is found shot to death, a boyfriend / lover / husband / ex-husband is responsible. And so if you're a policeman and you find a dying woman who's been badly shot and talking to her roommate reveals that her boyfriend is an avid gun owner?

Case closed!


Thousands upon thousands of years of evolution have discouraged overthinking things and going with what works the majority of the time. Unfortunately, 'majority' and 'all' aren't synonymous.

Stay tuned for more fascinating entries on cognitive psychology!

So what do all of the three in the title have in common? They're all inherent bugs (or features) in the human mind.

The topic came to mind as a recent trend became increasingly puzzling. Say you live in a country, where for all intents and purposes, things are going well. Really well, if you consider history as a whole. Yet people around you say that things are going horribly, or that all sorts of catastrophes are imminent when sound logic implies otherwise.

Bird flu, housing bubbles, a weak dollar, a slumping economy global warming - they're all dangers, certainly. But all of them are either highly exaggerated as to how much of a problem they'd actually cause, or the actual likelihood of them causing problems to begin with.

Why would (theoretically) sane people become hysterical and exaggerate dangers? Especially when everything is going really well for them?

As it turns out, it just might be because of that last one.

Evolution is a wonderful thing. It encourages survival of the fittest, as creatures that make mistakes a lot don't tend to do so well, reproductively speaking. Way back when, humans that sat around in the summer when game was plentiful and things were good, those that didn't stay wary of future potential disasters (weather getting colder, food getting harder to find, etc) didn't tend to survive.

So evolutionarily speaking, you get a species that's constantly suspicious of fat and happy times, who find it hard to sit back and relax instead of constantly preparing for the next disaster.

Humans don't like long periods of easy living. They're inherently suspicious of them. Genetically speaking, their ancestors managed to live through rough times because of that exact trait.

I have my doubts as to humanity ever being able to just sit back and be happy when times are good instead of paranoidly awaiting the next disaster.

If disasters come along, you deal with them. There's being prepared, and then there's being so paranoid about disasters that you can't enjoy the unusual (historically speaking) long periods of good times. The latter is fairly hard to overcome.

As one of my lj friends (who shall remain nameless) is being a bit of a dick (nothing like making entries private to stifle discourse [which is why I don't friends lock or make any private entries in this journal]), I'll simply make a full-fledged post out of this instead of a simple comment.

The topic of discussion was 'Why is Capitalism seen as being immoral in the promotion of the welfare of the individual above the whole?'. Basically, why does society get pissy when one person succeeds greatly, and would seemingly prefer lesser success of the group, or even no success of the group, to that? Why are individuals that succeed greatly painted as immoral, or bad for doing well?

As I'm not much of a fan of Ayn Randian pseudo-philosophy, I'll give a reasonably intelligent answer.

The initial post by the nameless LJ friend asked where the immorality of Capitalism lay. I answered "The immorality? The bit that promotes the good of the individual above the good of the whole, of course!" (note that this is said with a certain amount of sarcasm)

wolfrick asked "Who decided the good of the whole was more important than the good of the individual? The whole is MADE of individuals. They are not discrete."


The short answer is, the mentality of the whole. When people get together, there's this groupthink that produces thoughts that wouldn't occur individually. Plato spoke of man as a social animal and it's certainly true - some aspects of human nature don't occur until people are in groups. And when in groups, the thinking tends towards the survival of the group as a whole, rather than the survival of the individual. This can be abstracted to today's circumstances and illuminates the current policies of groups responsible for the welfare of groups (governments, etc).

There's certainly an aspect of the whole 'lobsters in a bucket' thing to it. If you're not familiar with that example, lobsters in a bucket will pull an individual lobster who is escaping back down into the bucket, which gets *all* of them killed. Humans exhibit this behavior to a lesser degree, but it's definitely there.

The thing is, humans aren't complete individuals. In other words, the sum total of a human being does not exist in a vacuum, apart from other humans. Who a person is has much to do with those around him or her. Without other humans, a person is never truly a complete expression of a human being. If there's any rampant individualists out there, I'm sorry to burst your bubble.

Philosophers over the millennia have noted the social aspect of being a human. There are animals out there that don't have any expression of a social structure - ie, each creature is entirely independent and does not have any functions that are only expressed in groups of the same creature - and those that are extreme examples of a social structure - ants, for example. Humans fall somewhere in the middle.

Groups of humans think differently than humans on their own. A certain mentality affects all members of the group. Call it 'group think', or simply groupthink, if you will. This groupthink colors the thoughts of the individual, causing them to take actions that make absolutely no sense on an individual level. For instance, sacrificing themselves in order to save the lives of others. As an individual, one's own survival is paramount. In a group? The survival of the group is paramount.

Now imagine something bigger than a stone-age group of hunter-gatherers. Imagine a *really* big group. A nation. A massive group, it seeks to promote that which serves the best interests of the group as a whole over the best interests of the individual.

Communism and Socialism are noted for this. One might say they went a bit overboard with it and happened to find the limits of the human ability to function as a group.

Capitalism goes a bit more in the opposite direction, and even though it is an expression of the policy of a group, it seeks to promote the best interests of the individual as greatly as possible without undue harm to the group as a whole. Ie, one man can exploit society for his own benefit, until he gets to the point of dumping a cloud of radioactive gas on rural Virgina. Then the group gets pissy.

Hopefully this has been illuminating in some form. Let me know what you think.

Reading things like this make me think about my future. There's this whole thing about working for a living - it can be deadly boring. I have this thing where I grow bored with something as soon as I master it. In other words, as soon as a job is no longer challenging (and I mean in the mentally engaging / challenging way, not the 'oh shit, how do we get ten man hours of work done in 30 minutes to fix today's disaster' challenging).

A lot of the IT sector sadly falls into being a glorified mechanic. You're fixing other people's problems, and maintaining their machinery to keep it from having problems. I'm not terrifically interested in being a glorified mechanic.

I worry that the game industry would get into the same 'wash, rinse, repeat' cycle. Unless you're running the show, the odds of you working on some boring crap, or something that becomes entirely routine are very good. When you've designed yet another level for the seventh generic FPS your company has made, it's no longer fun, it's just a job.

You trade fun for risk though - a boring job usually tends to pay well and be fairly secure. A fun job? Rarely do they pay well in my experience, and often they're fairly risky. Of course, if you're the wonderful sort of person that could be happy doing the same thing over and over again, this may not apply. If you're the unfortunate sort that gets bored out of their skull by doing the same thing over and over again, it's slightly more problematic.

Solution?

Looking into it. I'll get back to you on it when I know more.

A fellow named Neal Stephenson wrote one of the finest works of speculative fiction in the area of nanotechnology, namely "The Diamond Age. Aside from being a 'ripping good read', it presented a fascinating look at a future shaped by the availability of nanotech.

Nanotechnology makes headlines on a regular basis these days. Sadly, this is the stone age of nanotech, and the industrial age is centuries down the line. Being elated about being able to move one atom next to another is pretty much on the 'Oook, I club animal, it fall dead!' level. The 'drop a bit the size of a sunflower seed on the ground and watch it grow into a fully furnished house right before your eyes' level is so far away that it's just downright depressing.

Just as no one today truly wishes they were born a century or two ago, I doubt anyone a century or two hence would wish to be born now. Just the thought of never living in an internet-permeated world gives me the shudders. And anyone in an age of true nanotechnology wouldn't want to live in an era before it. Imagine how the internet has made your life better, or at least far easier. Now imagine that times a thousand and we're getting into the realm of the quality of life that true nanotechnology allows.

Sure people will kill each other, love will never work out perfectly and some members of society will be less well off than others in some respect or the other, but dammit, you'll be able to make anything you can imagine.

Sort of like being able to order pizza from within World of Warcraft, but better. A lot better. Certainly people are good at filling up the time that labor-saving devices 'save' them, but they do have the option of being able to use that time for something other than washing clothes by hand, for instance.

It sucks to have visions of such a future and to realize that you'll be long gone before they come about.

"It's 90% who you know" was a phrase that grated on me when I was younger. Idealistic in many ways, my opinion was that hiring should be purely merit based. I mean, if you can do the job well, or better than others, why shouldn't you get hired ahead of others who aren't as good, but happen to know someone at company X?

As the years have gone by and I've been able to put myself in the shoes of those who do the hiring more and more, and have come to realize something. Hiring people is a risk. A person may have the right skills, but that's only roughly half of what matters. The other half is how they affect the working environment around them. If they're the most brilliant person at their job on earth, but they're a complete and utter asshole and nobody else wants to work with them? They're not going to be useful at too many companies.

Social networking decreases this risk drastically. If you have social knowledge of a potential hire outside of their resume, you can make a more informed decision. In this particular case, more date is always better. If ex-coworker Z knows potential hire Y and can vouch for his good qualities, you don't have to take the risk of person Y being more of a problem than they're worth.


On the technical side, social networking is problematic and not as efficient as it could be. Propagation of reputation in a social network is only as good as the medium it's in, and humans are a so-so medium. Some might expect me to say 'Ah, it'd be better if it was done with COMPUTERS!', but as I've also come to learn, computers aren't the solution to every problem. In this case, the best solution might be a new social tradition that allows employers to learn more about potential employees without having to spend lots of time doing so and (hopefully) get an accurate view of potential employee Y.

Problem: Determining suitability of a potential employee.

Ideal solution: One that is accurate and does not require excessive amounts of time or effort to implement.

Current solution: Social networking, problematic due to aforementioned reasons.

Potential solution: A new social tradition that has all the benefits of the current solution without one or more of the shortcomings of it.


I'll get back to you when I've got more detail on that potential solution heh.

What is art?

Some people believe that art is entirely subjective; e.g., a person can say "I find this to be art" and he cannot be wrong. His opinion alone makes the work 'Art'.

I proclaim that theory to be a load of rubbish.

Now, of course, you'll have to agree to my first principles for my argument to work (hey, at least I state this up front, unlike many others).

One.
An object IS.

Two.
An object cannot Change via the act of a viewer having a different interpretation.
-If another thing is found within the object, or if the object is perceived differently, that difference always resided in the object itself, rather than in the viewer.

Three.
Perception differs from person to person, while the nature of an object is inviolable.
-This means that two people can see different things in the same work of art, but this is due to differences in humans, rather than any change in the art itself.

Four.
The nature of a work of art can be expressed as the set {X | all of set B intersects with set A}.
In other words All humans consist of a set. An artwork is a second set, B. The sum total of what can be perceived in the artwork is the intersection of sets A and B. In other words, if only four humans and one artwork resided in a universe, that artwork could only be perceived to contain what those four people saw in it. Not that the artwork does not have more aspects, simply they cannot be expressed without a viewer. They certainly do exist though, independent of the viewer.

Five.
"Art" is a broad umbrella term, but even it has its limits. The word is only as good as how exact its use allows it to be. Considering that many are of the opinion that "Art" can be whatever they decide it it is, the word has a useful value of somewhat slightly less that spit on a sidewalk.
-The more diverse things the word is used to viably describe, the lower the worth of the word itself.

Six.
Man is not the measure of the universe. The universe and much in it will view humanity as simply an eye blink in the fleeting passage of time.
-Man is finite.
--The pronouncements of a finite human being in a universe that will outlast him should be given the consideration that is due to such a thing.

Seven.
An artwork may easily outlast a man.

Eight.
No one can perceive the 'true form' of an object, only its accidents (and only a few of those, at that). It is absolute folly to declare a work to be absolutely something, given the previous.



Annndd... I need to edit this a bunch, but I've got to get some sleep at the moment.