On the 8 Spot

I am proud to say that i see this in a few of my friends, where other people might ask why? they just do!

Why is this? Based on my all too biased personal experience I find that the majority of people I know are like this, consumption maximisers and probably all that I can blame is probably environment. TV is the national obssession.

I remember a local rock legend ranting about how the kids nowadays just buy off the rack punks wear, etc. Things like this are akin to exercise , you need to get to form a habit of doing, creating and when you are you probably just can’t stop.

But how?

-Find what you enjoy by doing a multitude of things and try to do it till you feel at least two levels of pay-offs, so you can evaluate if something is “your thing!” Why two levels? Well most experiences either have different pay-offs and different level of pay-off per skill level, you may not get to evaluate how much you would value something if you quit to quickly!

-Just like the previous post try to incorporate it to your life/habit. Remember how Randy Paush, when he is thinking always had a football in his hands, you could do this with guitar playing whilst watching tv play the guitar, or while walking think of poems if you’re into poetry, think of blogposts while waiting for your train, you have the time, you are just not using it wisely.

-Find a friend to help you with your hobbies. Remember its always fun to do something with someone.

-When something is beginning to define you step back and think if this is really something you want to be defined by.

-Evaluate the effort you put in to your thing. You must always strive to improve because you might end up just with another reflex action.

-Evaluate you thing. Sometimes doing your thing would hold you back on some important parts of life, Like how my Internet addiction is slowly making me more socially inept than I already am.

Read the whole post its packed with information.

I suspect something else is going on. That something is the spread of purely instrumental rationality – the idea that utility maximization consists solely in maximizing consumption for minimal expenditure of time and money. Many of us take it for granted that it’s rational to spend as little time cooking as possible, and that music should only be a consumption good.

What this ignores is that many things are worth doing for their own sake. I’ll never play the guitar as well as Martin Simpson, or cook as well as Gordon Ramsey, or grow enough vegetables to be self-sufficient. But I play the guitar, cook and grow my own because these things are worth doing for their own sake.

Labour is not just a cost, to minimized. It is – or can be – a form of satisfaction in itself – a way of asserting who we are.

Stumbling and Mumbling: Consumption deskilling & utility.

The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.

The Atlantic Online | March 2009 | How the Crash Will Reshape America | Richard Florida.

I forgot from what blog I got the advice but I remember distinctly an advice I got that said “be wary with people who say impossible” or something to that effect.  I realize now after reading this post from chuck’s shared items what that really meant.

People who love or are in a habit of saying impossible is more probably of the closed/skeptical mind type, there is nothing wrong with being skeptical but there is for me something wrong with being close minded. When you are close minded you are living a life ruled by bias that you may or may no longer know how you came about having. When you live like this for a long time you end up with outdated/no longer true beliefs/ideas.

Why? This is because the world changes so fast and if you are not aware of a lot of the reason(like the previous post a lot of the evidence that influence our beliefs are somewhat invisible to us) you think/act a certain way you maybe doing something that is going against what you originally intended to do or achieve.

The take away in my view is three things:

-Try to journal what is influencing your thoughts.

-Constantly reexamine beliefs to understand if these beliefs/actions/habits are already outdated and should be stopped.

-Finally creating your own personal framework to make this as normal as breathing!

Dennis Lindley coined the term “Cromwell’s rule” for the advice that nothing should have zero prior probability unless it is logically impossible. The name comes from a statement by Oliver Cromwell addressed to the Church of Scotland:

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

In probabilistic terms, “think it possible that you may be mistaken” corresponds to “don’t give anything zero prior probability.” If an event has zero prior probability, it will have zero posterior probability, no matter how much evidence is collected. If an event has tiny but non-zero prior probability, enough evidence can eventually increase the posterior probability to a large value.

The difference between a small positive prior probability and a zero prior probability is the difference between a skeptical mind and a closed mind.

Musicians, drunks, and Oliver Cromwell — The Endeavour.

I honestly was blind sided by this. I find it tedious to explain myself to other people. I find it hard to understand why people don’t understand what I say.  This is enlightening to me.  The problem is with me, and not the person I am conversing with. I am aware of only a small fraction of the relevant evidence and analysis that influence my belief!

Disagreement – When someone disagrees with you, you should wonder what they know that you do not. They might explain their reasons for their differing belief, i.e., their evidence and analysis, and you might hear and ponder those reasons and yet find that you still disagree. In this case you might feel that the fact that they disagree no longer informs you on this topic; the reasons for their belief screen their belief from informing your belief. And yes, if they could give you all their reasons, that would be enough. But except in a few extremely formal contexts, this is not even remotely close to being true. We are usually only aware of a small fraction of the relevant evidence and analysis that influences our beliefs. Disagreement is problematic, even after you’ve exchanged reasons.

Overcoming Bias: Beware Ideal Screen Theories.