The capacity to notoriety of work

Why is it considered OK to flaunt hard work? Will there come a time when it might be more prudent to mask long hours of work behind a finished product and instead behave as if the object was conceived with less work and more skill and intelligence?

Is it because hard work is considered a fundamental opportunity given all humankind?

But just the possession of will and spirit deep within doesn't mean it has to be used, to be exhausted in the pursuit of success, albeit its exhaustion be accompanied with praise. Why is that praise justified?

"He worked hard and long, I worked not half-as-hard and not for half-as-long, and I give you something better": With this example in mind, is hard work considered a nullifier, a currency that translates all forms of luck, ill-luck, opportunity and accident into the form of perspiration and blood? Why should it be?

Moreover, the tendency exists, too, that recognizes, nay, yearns that, the capacity for honest work is somehow more innate than the capacity to fool, trick, spy on, defame, slander, and kill, that honest work is more human than the capacity for all these traits.

Is it really?

Who deigned that work would be that nullifier, a currency, and not intelligence? Is hard-work "more" fundamental than intelligence? Why is the flaunting of intelligence considered impudent while the flaunting of work a sign of the presence of humility? Is the capacity for work less volatile than the capacity to think smart? Is one acquired and the other only delivered at the time of birth?

Will a day come when the flaunting of hard-work is considered a sign of impudence and the flaunting of intelligence a sign of the presence of humility? Or - alas! - is it the implied notion of superiority that so scares us, that keeps us from acknowledging publicly that superior intelligence does imply a form of success, perhaps similar to the success implied by the capacity to work hard?

What sacrifice does one represent that the other, seemingly, rejects? Why does only intelligence suffer the curse of bigotry while honest work retains the privilege to socially unfettered use?

Building the researcher's best friend

One of the most pressing problems for someone conducting any research on personal initiative has to be information storage, access, and reproduction. Even if you're someone who's just going through interesting papers in pre-print servers and journals and want to quickly store text, excerpts, images, videos, diagrams, and/or graphs on the fly, you'll notice that a multitude of storage options exist that are still not academically intelligent.

For instance, for starters, I could use an offline notepad that has a toggle-equipped LaTex-interpreter that I could use to quickly key in equations.

So, when I stumbled across this paper written by Joshi, et al, at Purdue University in 1994, I was glad someone had taken the time and trouble to think up the software-architecture of an all-encompassing system that would handle information in all media, provide options for cross-referencing, modality, multiple authors, subject-wise categorization, cataloguing, data mining, etc. Here's an excerpt from the paper.

The electronic notebook concept is an attempt to emulate the physical notebook that we use ubiquitously. It provides an unrestricted editing environment where users can record their problem and solution specifications, computed solutions, results of various analyses, commentary text as well as handwritten comments.

The notebook interface is multimodal and synergetic, it integrates text, handwriting, graphics, audio and video in its input and output modes. It functions not only as a central recording mechanism, it also acts as the access mechanism for all the tools that support the user's problem solving activities.

(I'd like to take a moment to stress on good data-mining because it plays an instrumental role in effecting serendipitous discoveries within my finite corpus of data, i.e. (and as a matter of definition) if the system is smart enough to show me something that it knows could be related to what I'm working on and something that I don't know is related to what I'm working on, then it's an awesome system.)

The Purdue team went on to implement a prototype, but you'll see it was limited to being an interactive PDE-solver. If you're looking for something along the same lines, then the Wolfram Mathematica framework has to be your best bet: its highly intuitive UI makes visualizing the task at hand a breeze, and lets you focus on designing practical mathematical/physical systems while it takes care of getting problems out of the way.

However, that misses the point. For every time I come across an interesting paper, some sections of which could fit well into a corpus of knowledge that I'm, at the time, assimilating, I currently use a fragile customization of the WordPress CMS that "works" with certain folders in my hard-drive. And by "works", I mean I'm the go-between semantic interpreter - and that's exactly what I need an automaton for. On one of my other blogs - unnamed here because it's an online index of sorts for me - I have tagged and properly categorized posts that are actually bits and pieces of different research paths.

For products that offer such functionalities as the ones I'm looking for, I'm willing to pay, and I'm sure anyone will given how much more handy such tools are becoming by the day. Better yet if they're hosted on the cloud: I don't have to bother about backing up too much and can also enjoy the added benefit of "anywhere-access".

For now, however, I'm going to get back to installing the California Digital Library's eXtensible Text Framework (CDL-XTF) - a solution that seems to be a promising offline variant.

The tyrannical human

In David Eagleman's book, "Incognito", he says that evolution is more intelligent than anything else. He may be right for one very important reason: evolution works with the principle popularly called the survival of the fittest. Within this program, multiple entities engage with each other and their environs in a struggle toward adaptation and, ultimately, survival without aiming themselves at it directly. In other words, the struggle for survival is woven into their lives in terms of needs like food, shelter and dominance, and at no point are they conscious of their march toward becoming a naturally sustainable variant of their species, whichever species that may be.

That said, consider the results of just the last million years of evolution—in flora as well as in fauna. Plants, at their microscopic scale all the same, are of various kinds because of the various conditions they exist in all around the world. Animals have learnt how to hunt and forage more efficiently. Humans have hunted, gathered, civilized themselves, and taught themselves. With intelligence serving as the sole difference, we have set ourselves apart from other animals in various ways. Intelligent thought gave us the capacity to think differently, to remember and to evoke, to mimic, reason, understand, socialize, and defend. Then, at some point, we believed we were equipped enough to simply attempt to recreate the intelligence that nature birthed in our form, and in doing so, we found that we were but ill-equipped.

Intelligence has been described in various ways, and they can all be summarized by the ability of intelligent life-forms to reason. While reasoning, we assess the problem statement, break it down into individual components that each make some sense, understand how they work with each other to create the problem, isolate the resources we may need to arrive at a solution, and then continuously deploy and eliminate our options until we arrive at the answer. In retrospect, isn't this how evolution works? Even though there may seem to exist only a few species of animals, nature contrives to create factions within each species divided solely on the lines of biological specifications, and lets these factions fight against each other until the best answer is arrived at.

Is this technique of combative problem-solving what makes evolution so intelligent? Is combative problem-solving the key to progress and evolution? Has anyone ever heard of cooperative problem-solving as being very intelligent, too? When we are stymied by what seems to be a complex problem, we often "put our heads together" to arrive at a solution. In that case, are we really cooperating? I don't think we are. When we "put our heads together", we increase the amount of intelligence that is available to assess each option before it is eliminated, in the process simply reducing the time taken to arrive at a solution. Why must we compete for the same resources in order for the best of us to become established, as it were? Why can't we simply identify the best traits in each one of us and then strive toward them?

That nature has no way of identifying, by itself, the best traits in each one of us could be an incentive for this process of elimination to exist. Being in no position to identify what we need to become, evolution's survival program is genius because it lets us define what we need to become and subsequently ensures that only those of us who have become it to survive. However, the question remains: does intelligence work the same way? Now, instead of saying humankind is the pinnacle of all evolution, let us assume that intelligence is. Being born out of the survival program like every other living thing on the planet, is intelligence, too, subject to the command of combative problem-solving? Does our faculty that assists with reasoning and logical assimilation naturally offer competing points of view for each problem? Or, more importantly, does our faculty that assists with learning and cognition develop in any sense when we engage in a dialectic with ourselves?

Every consideration, ultimately, boils down to a resolution of disagreement. When there is an absence of consensus, is consensus brought upon us simply by the elimination of the dissenting parties? Remove combative problem-solving from the process of problem-solving in general and disagreement becomes meaningless. When cooperative problem-solving is implemented, dissent is integrated into the problem-solving process, making it more democratic. However, the dissent itself is not eliminated, and cannot remain until the end or we would never have a "tipping in favour" of something.

[caption id="attachment_22938" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Fractals display an internal symmetry, where the shape of the innermost branch is geometrically similar to the shape of the whole - much like intelligence and evolution?"][/caption]

Returning to the larger plot: it seems as if the way we think mimics the way evolution happens. Every time we reason, we deploy an algorithm that considers multiple points of view and then selects one after letting the two points of view battle it out with reference to a frame, a logical statement that we hold to be true. Does this mean combative problem-solving is hardwired into the human brain? Is that the signature of intelligence? And considering evolution is what gave birth to intelligence, is intelligence's hallmark also its creation-machine? Are we a composition of multitudes that cooperate, somehow, to give rise to what we perceive as being firm decisions? Is it at all possible that we can learn without "combative" thinking?

Let us take a simple case-study. When humans build robots to solve problems intelligently (in some part), how do the programmers know what the best way to solve a problem is? There are two options here. The first is that "the best way to solve a program is the best known way to solve it." In this case, the robot will borrow, and suffer, from the programmer's knowledge of the problem and the set of tools that are available to construct a solution. The second option is that "the best way to solve a program is to build into it the tools with which to construct different solutions and also the tools required to make an appropriate selection." A robot that entombs the former logic is called a machine and a robot that entombs the latter logic is termed as being artificially intelligent (AI). (Then again, AI also suffers from an inherited deficiency in terms of the programmer's knowledge of his "tools", but that is too deep a depth to plumb right now.)

Therefore, the creation of intelligence seems to lie within the capacity of thinking up solutions. Instead of asking what the best way to solve a problem is, it seems we must ask if there are different ways to solve a problem. Then, it is only a matter of pitting one solution against another and testing for greatest compatibility. However, even at this juncture, I can't help but think how much life would be different if cooperative problem-solving was the order of the day, if instead of eliminating different points of view and therefore deciding for ourselves what we must strive toward, we included different points of view and decided what we must strive against.

Or is that the ultimate goal?

All of Billy's mistakes

A tick mark here, a tick over there
The sheer number of errors' a scare
I sip my coffee and move my arse
Boy how do I wish idiots were scarce

I flip to the first page of the book
To satiate my curiosity, I take a look
And see the pencilled name of that Billy
Like a kid's scrawl, all crooked and silly

Civilizations rise, people mourn their fall
I only once said we needn't care at all
That's a fact and it's going to hold true
If idiots have used the world before you

But these oddments are all somehow in power
And now I'm still not home at this hour
I've to correct all of Billy mistakes
Before my dawdling career applies its brakes

All of Billy's mistakes

A tick mark here, a tick over there
The sheer number of errors' a scare
I sip my coffee and move my arse
Boy how do I wish idiots were scarce

I flip to the first page of the book
To satiate my curiosity, I take a look
And see the pencilled name of that Billy
Like a kid's scrawl, all crooked and silly

Civilizations rise, people mourn their fall
I only once said we needn't care at all
That's a fact and it's going to hold true
If idiots have used the world before you

But these oddments are all somehow in power
And now I'm still not home at this hour
I've to correct all of Billy mistakes
Before my dawdling career applies its brakes

All of Billy's mistakes

A tick mark here, a tick over there
The sheer number of errors' a scare
I sip my coffee and move my arse
Boy how do I wish idiots were scarce

I flip to the first page of the book
To satiate my curiosity, I take a look
And see the pencilled name of that Billy
Like a kid's scrawl, all crooked and silly

Civilizations rise, people mourn their fall
I only once said we needn't care at all
That's a fact and it's going to hold true
If idiots have used the world before you

But these oddments are all somehow in power
And now I'm still not home at this hour
I've to correct all of Billy mistakes
Before my dawdling career applies its brakes

A Shade Of Solecism

In the process of understanding this wide world, a strange inner transformation comes to fruition. Just like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the expenditure of energy in observing something changes the observation. The world we learn about is only the world that includes us, and the world there is is made up of people who change it continuously. What we can learn is what it is, but the mistake would be in trying to teach ourselves what it could have been instead of understanding it for what it was.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Rites of passage"][/caption]

I learnt of the world outside my window by writing. When I write things and hit "Save", an exuberance sweeps over me that signifies that something has been said and set in stone, that something cannot be changed and for every moment that comes after it, it is embellished deeper and deeper in the murk of history. For that reason, I can't let anything be wrong. I want my footprints on history's pages to be picture-perfect. It's not something I'm pretending to be - it's only something I know I can be and am trying my best to be so. In order to make correctness a habit, I read, I discover, I interpret. Reading and discovering can happen over and over again, without interpretation they will remain useless as time passes. Our mark does not lie in understanding that darkness is darkness and the light is the light; it lies in being able to light a candle without regard to whatever winds may be blowing then.

However, as the writer writes more and more, there is more and more about the world that is new, that is there in the now but wasn't in the then. If this moment has been prepared for, then disillusionment can be spared in favour of understanding, as has been noted that to attempt to learn is futile if understanding is absent. The prevalence of a loss of context forces a delineation on the matter of "understanding": to say that one understands is to not have integrated the ability to recognize, disintegrate and recreate, but to have only remembered the meaning encapsulated therein.

As much as contributions are expedited, so much is the world changed, and the world of the minute before understands its retirement just so. I, who have learnt much in this process of writing and self-discovery, am now a different man than of the minute before and have cast over my understanding of the world then a shade of solecism. The greatest lesson, therefore, does not concern the contents of our learning but the methodology itself: not what we learn, but how we learn. By integrating the idea that the spinning top spins so because tops spin so, we do not graduate from being fools. We must learn why it spins so. A top spinning the moment past will grind to a clumsy halt, but in setting another in motion is our learning vindicated.

A Smart Man's Utopia

I wish most people just shut the hell up and walked away.
Instead of sticking around like geniuses wanting to give me advice.
I hate it when that happens.
When caution is mistaken for weakness.
When patience is mistaken for hesitation to grab an opportunity.
I hate it when people consign me to idiocy.

A friend of mine once proposed what can only be called a pogrom.
Jovially, of course, please don't go hunting after him. He's a nice chap.
He's not a hard worker but a smart one, which I think is the new hard.
He said let's wipe out the stupid people from the face of the earth.
Smart people spend half their time cleaning up after the idiots, he said.
Which is mostly true.
Jeremy: "How do you decide who's stupid and who's not?"
The IQ score was proposed and accepted.

To wit: Jeremy has always refused to take an IQ test.
For all his adult life I'd say - a period of 22 years.
Jeremy is also one of the smartest people I know.

Anyway.

We assumed that the pogrom was executed.
That a hegemony had transcended into utopia.
There were smart people everywhere now.
A smart man no longer had to clean up after his less-endowed predecessors.
Now that we were after the first hurdle - our own imagination - we were up against the more urgent ones.

1. Without stupid people, isn't a more dangerous hegemony in the offing?
   When everyone has an IQ of more than 100, the new stupid are smarter than the old stupid.
   When everyone has an IQ of more than 100, who's going to want to do the old stupid's work? 
   
   When the new stupid are smarter, the issue of re-executing the pogrom is raised.
   The new stupid are going to do things that won't find appreciation from the new smart.
   The new smart are still going to have to clean up after the new stupid.
   Is the pogrom re-executed?
   Or does the executor promise that the pogrom will be halted after the first generation?
   Or can one trust the executor with anything at all?


2. How is the man who condones a pogrom a smart man in the first place?
   By extension, the new smart become the new stupid and there is a massive population inversion.
   I could go into it but am holding back because it would be a heavily mathematical affair.
   Let's keep things light.
   Like killing stupid people off? Sure. 
   
   Can't a smart man have a smart man's utopia?
   Isn't it unfair that the smart man immediately becomes a fool when he desires a smart man's utopia?
   Isn't it even more unfair that the fool can desire anything and yet remain a fool and not worse?
   It's like a spiral that descends downward.

Being smart is like being in a set with an upper limit.
You come all the way from negative infinity.
All the way from being an abject moron to being smart.
The moment you realize you're smart, you start all over again.
It sucks to be smart.
There, I've said it.
I've to start all over again.
I do that everyday, anyway.
Being an idiot is much better than being smart.
An idiot's utopia does last longer.

You might notice how it could be the world you're in right now.
It is.
You might wonder if the idiocy manifests as mediocrity.
It doesn't.
The idiocy manifests as the tolerance of mediocrity.
And other such things.

Sigh!

This chancy, chancy, chancy world.