The Armchair Genius

That’s right people. I am an armchair genius. I sit in front of my tablet, read the news or watch it, read blogs or online magazines, and think about how much smarter, how much more self control, how much more morally consistent I am than everyone else. It is not hard to believe, after all, the world revolves around me. And as such, I’m glad you’ve humbled yourself today to catch even a small nugget of my intellect.

Yesterday I read about the Stanford Prison study. There have been other psychological experiments which yielded similar results but the conclusions drawn here were applied to an article discussing torture and Abu Grahib and the kind of situation that can make otherwise “good” people go “bad”. I will state now that in my infinite wisdom, I have already determined that “good” and “bad” are very subjective. That good and bad are not fundamental qualities of a person, but just a general consensus of how we (and they) view the results of their actions and motivations.

For example, the issue of torture. I’m sure there are many who believe what they were doing is right. That their methods were justified by their results, whatever that may actually have been. That by “keeping us safe”, they should have a get out of jail free card. But on my end, I just see torture. And as with anything that does not directly affect me, I feel that our laws should be immediately and impartially applied to them.

However, there are those that passionately feel the opposite. It is tempting to think they are idiots, immoral, unethical, lacking of humanity. But mayhaps they are not. I used to believe that ignorance played a major role in such things. It certainly can neatly explain why racism still exists and how many conservatives act like it doesnt. It neatly explains how they can earnestly decry any responsibility for what minorities have gone through and continue to experience in this country. It is how they can make statements like “What other country do you people have this level of rights and standard of living” without seeming to realize that until things are equal, truely equal, I would rather work to make America the place where minorities are treated and regarded as equals and not a place where it’s the best we can expect to have in the world. The best shithole amongst shitholes is still a shithole. Seems simple enough to me.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I thought, given that I have wisdom and knowledge and understand these things and they don’t, it is clearly an issue of ignorance. They just don’t know what I know. But perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe they do know what I know. Yet their life story has crafted such a widely divergent viewpoint, their current situation presents such a different outlook, I fear that no amount of knowledge can bridge the gap.

My thoughts turned to relationships. I was in a long term (3+ years) relationship a few years ago. One that my parents very much objected to when they found out about it. At the time, I wondered why they didn’t understand, why they didn’t support me, but now that it is over and time has passed, I’ve come to see some (but definitely not all) of their rationale (one does not become an armchair genius overnight you know). My being involved, no matter how pragmatic and impartial I think I can make my self, irrevocably changes they way I view things.

One conclusion of the study is that in situations like the prison experiment, our mind attempts to deal with two conflicting ideas and what wins out is that of conformity, the decision that is in line with those around us, those with whom we have a very close relationship, those with whom are in authority over us. I’m not saying that other people on the outside are always right, but providing a framework for this logical leap – which is that relationships can be the same way. We can at times deal with conflicting emotions, desires, and thoughts. But we stay because of inertia. Things have been moving in a certain direction, other people expect things of us, we have obligations, we want to do what seems “right”, so we suppress those contrary feelings and move on.

It can be easy for me to then say, the things that I allow myself to do should be those, for better or worse, that don’t generate internal conflict. My current academic/career choice and direction has been largely internal conflict free. My relationships, not so much. Buying my car, conflict free. Buying a ring, not so much. The problem is, I recognize that certain things in life, by their very nature, cannot be completely removed from conflict. Or perhaps, the reason is by my very nature, I cannot experience them without internal conflict.

My personal views about long term relationships have undergone a drastic shift in the past couple years. In 2007/2008, while I was single, all I wanted was an end to that status. To have a relationship with someone that I care about, respect, enjoy spending time with, and wanted to grow with and allow them to help me grow. In many ways, I’m a very private person. I dislike sharing information about myself and tend not to make what I feel are unneccesary conversations. So, when I am with someone who I can open up to, it means I’m in a very vulnerable state, and as such, that person must be special.

Now that I’m with such a person, my mind wanders at time. Damn the greener grass syndrome. I wonder if I just need time to get it out of my system. A friend of mine had his girlfriend recently leave him because she wanted to be single to discover who she really was. She’s been in one relationship after another almost continuously for the past 6+ years. Is this possible? Can one ever truely satisfy that kind of thirst? I don’t know. I’ve always said that commitment isn’t a feeling as much as it is a decision.

I hate second guessing my decisions. I fear that I can make wrong ones.

By the way, I actually am a good writer. However, my thoughts themselves (at least when not concerned with robotics) tend not to be organized. What allows me to pass english classes is an ability to turn jumbled messes into works of art. Unfortunately for those who came to see art, I feel no such compuction with this blog to clean it up beyond what flows from my mind (and any sanitization to protect my vanity).

A rant I forgot to post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufsl5p8gtIM

Once again, Pat Buchanan demonstrates that he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about when it comes to race. While there are plenty of items here to criticize Buchanan (and in many cases, general white thinking on race and this country), Dyson addresses a lot of them, albeit while suffering from technical glitches in the transmission of his rejoinders. However, near the end, Buchanan starts saying things to the effect of “America is the best country for black people”.

Well, I’m not going to argue with that. Dyson doesn’t really notice it, but I think this statement highlights what is probably the biggest issue black people will continue to have with Whites for years to come. This statement perfectly captures a deep misunderstanding of the current state of race relations and demonstrates that people just don’t understand what exactly is injust about racism.

Perhaps I can illustrate the problem with this example. Buchanan is essentially saying, for black people, you can either go elsewhere (other than America) which is pretty bad for you, or come here (America) which is just bad. Since America is just bad, we are the best, because everywhere else is pretty bad. Given that we are the best, black people should be happy and focus on working out their problems themselves, because the rest of us (whites) no longer have anything to self correct.

You can see the problem here. Black people DEMAND equality to whites. We don’t want to live somewhere that is the “best in the world” for US. We want to live somewhere that is the best in the world. We are not satisfied with the status quo. We want to have status in America, be treated in America, have opportunity in America, equal to a white person. We are not satisfied with having status, treatment, and opportunity that is better here than anywhere else. That’s not good enough. Because it doesn’t take much to see that as much as white people “treat us nicely here in America”, they still treat themselves much better.

It is so obvious to me what that simple sentence conveys and it is amazing that Buchanan can say it and it not occur to him what it means. Perhaps it’s because I’m black. . . I guess there are some things that will continue to boggle my mind. All this being said, I commend Buchanan for the courage to speak out the way he does. (*note, I don’t quite like the title of that video. I don’t think Buchanan is racist, I think if I could have a day to talk with him, we could clear up a lot of things). Because by doing so, he educates the rest of us on what whites are missing when blacks talk about racism and our struggles and problems within the community and by understanding that disconnect, we can work towards having a more fruitful discussion between blacks and whites.

Six Years is a Long Time

So over the holiday weekend I was at home visiting family. As luck would have it, a couple of my friends from HS were in town and decided to get the gang back together. The first time the four of us have ever been in the same place at the same time since a couple months after high school. Anyway, at some point while waiting for the fourth to arrive, we decide (and this is probably alcohol fueled) to call a couple (female) friends of ours (or at least friends while we were in HS). Obviously, they’re still friends with at least one other person, because I don’t have their numbers.

The first did not answer what I was told was her cell phone. However, with my buddy insisting that it was, I sent a text message afterwards. In fact, now a lot of things are making sense. So, earlier this morning, I got an angry IM telling me not to “play” with her phone when drunk. Given that I know exactly what I did on the phone, I’m at a loss as to why it would constitute playing. However, I remember my phone giving me a message that it was unable to deliver an sms to voice message. Thinking it was for me, I enabled that feature. So, I’m guessing that indeed, it was not a cell number and that was what likely prompted the IM.

The other chick we called happened to be an ex girlfriend of mine. I suppose the conversation was tame, but now, a few days later, and given the IM from this morning, I’m starting to think about a couple things. It’s been my policy of late on facebook to remove people from my friends list who are not family or actually friends. There are a lot of people who were friends 6+ years ago, whom I’ve not really talked to in the time following graduation.

I added a lot of people, and likely so did they, in the initial join facebook frenzy of finding out who you know that is also on, however, now, I think it is now time to start purging my list of people whom I barely talk. Just a simple “remove everyone you haven’t talked to (by any means) in the last two years is probably enough to kill off half my list.

Perhaps I should just stop using facebook. Not sure why this came up, given that I now have less than 90 minutes to finish a hw project, but it seemed like it needed to be written.

One of These Days

I’m going to figure it out. Like in my controls class, we went over a method for finding stabilizing controllers for unstable systems using coprime factorization. This method results in a characteristic equation equal to one, not zero. In the interest of taking notes, I did not question this when it first came up, but waited until after the professor had gone over all the material. The answer he gave wasn’t fully satisfactory, but after thinking about it some more, going home, and doing more reading, building on what he said, I think I understand the reason, though I’d much prefer to find a textbook explanation that connects the dots in more mathematical terms rather than inferences that make sense based on my understand of controls.

In any case, that anecdote is relevant to other experiences in my life. I’m able to get to a certain point, but things don’t progress beyond that. This is relevant in that I feel the reason is somewhere just beyond my grasp, that I possess most of the knowledge and experience to get an intuitive feel of the reasoning, but I’m looking for that definite aha light bulb moment or explanation. I’m betting it will turn out to be one of those things where you smack yourself on the head, perhaps a bit too hard, but go “Wow, this really should have been obvious to me all along! WTF was I thinking?”

And so today I write off another one. Well, in reality, that action is nearly meaningless because I’ve already been written off. Though part of the problem is my inability to be completely objective in these situations. I’m just too close, having an interest in one outcome, it’s hard to track evidence that leads to the other. Or worse yet, I’m likely misclassifying things.

Perhaps I’d be best served by attempting to create a bayesian decision network to model these things. I’ve had this idea before, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to actually act on it. Who knows, if I can come up with a good enough model, there could be some marketable potential.

Who is a Marxist?

The current charge in our political discourse is one of socialist. Some have even been so bold to call out others as Marxist even going as far to quote Marx to make their point.

From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.

This is used in making the argument that:

 Your rights to your property exist only so long as government will allow, and it’s just not fair to have more stuff than someone else.

Of course, this ignores the fact that even under the our current government, the first part of that sentence is true. Our right to anything exists only as long as our governing (and law upholding) body is able (has the legal means and authority) to allow.

The second part of that sentence requires a willful disregard on the part of the quoter of what Marx said. Specifically, if we look at the critical portion of the quote, to each according to his own need, it is clear that the amount of “stuff” you have isn’t controlled by enforcing some strict limitations on how much everyone can have but instead based on what you “need”. So, saying that it’s just not fair to have more than someone else is a very misleading interpretation of Marx. That implication brings into account an issue that Marx is not addressing there at all, fairness applied to a citizen’s wants, rather than needs.

Now, I’m going to let Boortz off the hook now since I’m primarily discussing attacks on political candidates, rather than misguided attempts to show that our schools are indoctrinating children with some government is the solution to everything view (a view that I’m not sure even counts as being socialist). I highlighted his piece to illustrate how pundits are deliberately misunderstanding Marx’s words in attempts to score cheap political points.

One of the arguments against Obama is that his “Marxist wealth redistribution plan” is bad. The rationale provided behind the arguments is that Obama is taking wealth away from hard workers (who are struggling as it is*) and giving it to layabouts who don’t work anyway and already live on the government (and our collective) dime. The problem with this argument is that it is NOT Marxist. As the quote above shows, Marx advocated that ALL citizens contributed according to their ability and are provided for according to their needs. 

This means that in a Marxist society, it would be impossible to find someone capable of productive work who is NOT working. The government wouldn’t allow it. Or society wouldn’t allow it.

I hate when people muddy the socialism vs capitalism argument with such bogus scenarios and claims. Fundamentally, the argument is about two viewpoints. One where the most important thing is the right of the individual and the other where the most important thing is the right of the society. The most important thing is more than just rights; it encompasses livelihood, values, etc.

Here is the problem, the ideal first view depends upon the assumption that everyone is equal. Equally hard working, equally intelligent, equal starts in life. That is impossible. The second requires that all work, intelligence, motivation, etc is treated equally, that is impossible because we are humans. As such, most of us are unable to live in a world where the reward for being a great window washer is exactly the same as that of discovering the theory of relativity.

Instead, we live in a medium between the two. There is no country that is truely capitalist anymore than there is one that’s truely socialist. Both are extremes that cannot exist due to the imperfections of humans. So, it is ridiculous to attempt to demonize someone as socialist or capitalist, given that our government, our political process, our economic process, whatever plans that either political party will conceive, will always have elements of both.

The Newest Insult to Hit the Streets!

You arugula eating, soca berry drinking, peanut infused oatmeal-granola health bar chomping, three day a week gym exercising, people of the world love engendering, multicultural, non-conformist.

Seriously, all the kids are already joaning on each other using those words. I know I’m out of the game. But if you even come back to me with a word that relates thirteen and pastries, I’d be forced to call you a greyhead.

Just letting you know.

The run your car on water hoax

I know I should not get worked up over this and mostly I don’t. However, every once in a while, I happen to stumble across an ad for some website that is bilking people out of their money or see some article somewhere and for some reason, it just raises my ire.

I suppose I have an above average understanding of chemistry and physics, but I’m really disappointed that the US education system is not apparently good enough that most people can see this for what it is. Unlike other scams which prey on your emotions, greed, and naivety, this one specifically targets your logic!

First, they attempt to convince you that there is some special “brown’s gas” aka HHO that is somehow different from H2O that is produced. Second, they attempt to argue that you can get MORE energy out of turning H2O into HHO than you waste in breaking it!! However, that is a pretty hard pill to swallow even with the (apparently) crappy education system that we have, so they attempt to tie in all sorts of anecdotal “evidence” and phenomena to show that it would work.

Some places claim to use sonic vibrations at the resonant frequency of H2O bonds to break them at very low energy. Why they say it works. . . uh because opera singers have been known to shatter glass with their voice. Umm. . . first – they shattered very special glasses – wine glasses whose composition differs from other run of the mill drinking ones. Also, the wine glasses used typically have a minute imperfection, not on the order of VVS in diamonds (ie, you could probably see the imperfection without needed 10x magnification), but something that if you held up the glass to show someone in front of you or over a tv camera, nobody would really notice.

And that’s just the beginning. Then, they claim results which are never EVER scientifically substantiated or are even reproducible. In EVERY SINGLE test ever conducted (under legal duress – ie, someone got sued for selling a fake product), somehow, it always failed. Of course, the whole industry operates under a huge conspiracy umbrella, that big oil, congress, your grandmother, and little Timmy down the street are all out to get them and foil everything they do.

Then, there are the testimonials where people claim to have improved their gas mileage by <= 10mpg. Hmm, that is NOT hard to do at all. Proper tire inflation, engine tune ups, all sorts of things which are probably happening behind the scenes. The biggest one is playing around with the oxygen and Mass Air Flow sensors on the car. Again, perhaps I have above average knowledge of how modern engines work, but it doesn’t require a genius to understand that if I screw with how much air the engine thinks it is getting, it will inject less fuel.

So, in the short term, you get better gas mileage. Long term, you’d probably need to replace your engine at some point due to the damage it’s accumulating. . . then I suppose you’d have to see if the $$ you saved compares to the cost of replacing the engine. . .or car.

Of course, each and every one of those systems violates a fundamental rule of thermodynamics – namely that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. They do it in numerous ways, but the easiest one to demonstrate (textually) is the claim that the water (fuel in this hoax) gets converted BACK TO WATER when done. So, you’re telling me that the fuel I burn to run my car. . . get’s returned to me.

Nobody expects the gasoline that is burned in the engine to come back out. That is plain foolishness. People almost understand why that doesn’t happen. So, why do you believe someone when they tell you that the water that powers this system gets recirculated back?

And seriously people, name ONE product EVER mass marketed and used that the science of the day unanimously said was impossible. ONE!

Would “they” change the White House to the Black House?

I’ve not noticed these kind of sentiments and statements lately, though that does not mean they are gone. Perhaps the focus is on more things like how the McCain camp can’t help but acknowledge that people seem to like Barack a lot more than they do John as they attempt to portray him as nothing more than a ditsy celebrity despite that the two they chose are likely the worst that anyone would attempt to project qualities from onto Obama.

Perhaps though, that was playing it safe. Well. . . I can’t imagine they’d have an easy time getting many black actors/actresses or other personalities to appear in the ad. Wow, I just realized this. . . that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears may have been their only available choices.

But that aside, I started saying that maybe they were playing it safe because featuring a Kanye West for example may trigger some rumbling of attempting to portray Obama as an “angry black man”. Not that I’m saying Kanye West is an “angry black man”.

In any case, this post though is about speculation than an Obama presidency would actually change the name of the White House to “Black House” – pure bullshit, that pork-n-beans and chitlins would be served at the White House (I assume dinners with foreign dignitaries is the implication), and other such “blackification” [to coin a phrase] of the White House.

Now, aside from the ludicrous, what’s actually wrong with any of those things? The White House is the residence of the sitting POTUS. It is his (and his family’s) prerogative to institute whatever types of foods, drapes, bedsheets, portraits, rituals, and anything else they want – within reason and maintaining the decorum that befits someone representing the executive might of the United States.

Anxiety over these things is more than just worry that Obama will somehow sully the presidency. It speaks to a disconnect with and scorn for aspects of black “culture”.

The VSB Post I Never Wrote

Hmm. I’ve been thinking about some things that have come up in the past couple days. I’m not sure if I should post this on VSB. In fact, I’ve decided not to post it. Perhaps I’m way off. But while I’d like to get a lot more feedback on this than posting it here would garner, I don’t quite feel its ready for a bigger audience. Perhaps I’m still feeling out my thoughts on this and don’t think it’s finished. Or perhaps I don’t want to ignite something or further shade the way people interpret my posts on that site. I’ve always known that people color what they read based on their perception of the person saying it. So, I usually attempt to present myself as neutrally as possible though for the most part I’ve not made any attempt to disgender the kamakula personality. Anyway, no more prefacing . . .

Black Nationalism (BN) to me is a response to the feeling that the best things can become is separate but equal. That while black peope may be able to wrest equal rights and treatment out of the government of the USA, blacks will never be accepted as equals. I feel this is a fundamental basis for BN and feel that this is flawed. Therefore, any further deductions will also be flawed though more or less self-consistent. I think it’s critical for some to realize that a flawed argument can still be self-consistent. Everything will hold together, it’s just an underlying assumption that would be shown to be wrong. Perhaps that’s what makes it hard to address those who are in the BN camp.

There are some who approach the argument (or perhaps another one altogether) from the point of preservation of black culture. I think I can make the argument that it’s a pretty big stretch to say that there is a black culture (or white culture) in the United States. When I think of culture, I think of something uniquely defined by language, religion, art, literature, customs, modes of behavior, and physical locality. If two groups of people have several of these things in common, I’d be hard pressed to say that they are different cultures.

Now, before I continue, let me get a dictionary definition of culture. This is the defintion of the sense of the word from merriam-webster:

5 a: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations b: the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group; also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (as diversions or a way of life} shared by people in a place or time <popular culture> <southern culture> c: the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organization <a corporate culture focused on the bottom line> d: the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic <studying the effect of computers on print culture>

Black people don’t have a unique language or different language from the rest of the country. Black people don’t live in a different region of the country than everyone else. In fact, if I try to pin down the ways in which blacks as a people are different from the rest of the country, I’m left with just looks, the shared history of being oppressed by slavery/racism and the hiphop/rap music subculture. The remaining differences – art, other areas of music, and possibly behavior – I believe stem from regional variations and are not strong enough to stand on their own as a basis for identifying a separate culture.

So, in the context of my belief that our country is moving towards a more or less unified state where race does not matter, it would seem to me that not only does a black culture not really exist, but the natural progression of things will ensure that one does not emerge. The forces that push black people together into one group for common survival, interaction, and general enjoyment of life.

Yet, there is a flaw in my argument. Black people definitely look different from the rest of the country and while we’re attempting to minimize the effect of race on society, that is a strong cultural indicator. I don’t think that the context in which I frame this argument is strong enough to overcome this. I’m not sure it should.

Double Standards and Gender Inequalities

So, this post is prompted by this topic on VSB. Reading through the discussion, several things came up over and over again that I took some issue with or felt hinted at other issues:

1. What you do when you’re drunk is just a manifestation of your actual self. Nobody does something that they didn’t already want to do when drunk.
2. Because there is no penetration when two women are together (sexually), it is quite a different scenario when two men are together (sexually).
3. In a heterosexual relationship, a woman revealing that she’d had a one time experimentation in sex with a woman is virtually a non-issue but a man revealing a similar episode with another is an immediate deal breaker.

Ok. #1 – this is total bullshit. My example – a guy (21+) is extremely drunk and a persistent and attractive 14yo (or 15-16yo) has been hitting on him all night. He finally does the deed with her. Is the guy a pedophile? What about the drunk guy or gal that palms a shot glass at the bar? Does that mean he/she is a thief? To be honest, I think most people saying the stuff in #1 would say no. However, they’d also say that sex is a much different thing and attempt to push some metaphysical connection of sexuality and one’s true self versus any other behavior that I could show could be generated under the influence of alcohol but never when the person is sober.

#2 – I think this one is a case of homophobia. Strangely enough, just as many women expressed this sentiment as men. Which means there is some sort of phobia among these women of men who have either been in this situation or otherwise exhibit behavior that they consider too feminine. I think this is in part tied to #3.

#3 I find this interesting. Why is it that a women would be a lot more threatened by a man having experimented with another man? Some of the comments on this give explanations that run like when a woman does it, it can be written off as she was lonely or didn’t have a man, but when a man does it, it points to him being a latent homosexual. Or a man doing this is immediately no longer “manly” enough for me”. Whatever the rationale, this suggests to me that there is still a big gender equality gap. Relationship-wise, there is something more important about a man being a man than a woman being a woman.