Dinner Table Conversations

I had two philosophically deep conversations at two recent meals. Only one was at dinner, despite the title of the post, but both contained profound ideas.

The lunch was between someone I had met last year at another meal, and during the latter stages of the conversation one of his friends joined us. I forgot how the conversation started, but the relevant part started with me describing to him what the technological singularity was. I asked him what he thought the future would be like, and him being a fairly religious person, he said that the far future, at the time of the apocalypse, the world will be very different. His idea of it was not the usual everybody dies and goes to heaven though. He had envisioned it as a transformation of the physical world; that is, the earth will still be here, but it will be somehow different. Heaven on earth, I think, is the basic idea. From this, he said he therefore believes that technology will be around for a very long time.

His friend then arrived, and asked a few questions clarifying her understanding of his religion (alright, he's Mormon). My friend explained that he believed humans are literal spirit children of God, and would therefore "grow up" to be like God, with all His powers, including creation. The way I envision it is there's a whole God species, of which we are all spiritual parts.

It occurred to me then, although I didn't say it at the time, that our theories are actually surprisingly compatible. Granted, my not believing in God is a big difference, but I see some of my version of the future being described in his terminology. That a change will abruptly take over all of earth - isn't that exactly what the technological singularity is about? We will not longer be the dominant species, but will instead "share" the world with the machines and its artificial intelligence. Arguably, we will be living under a greater intelligence - that of the machines. And in this way, we have outgrown ourselves and transformed into something bigger: a planet wide machine consciousness.

This (and therefore I myself as the author) probably seems crazy to many of you. Well, I won't be the first person on earth to have strange beliefs.

My friend's friend brought up a good point, however, when I explained the technological singularity to her. As an economics major, she saw change as driven by need. What she questioned was that, since the technological singularity will be in some sense incomprehensible by humans, whether it would be "needed". And if it's not needed, that it wouldn't happen at all.

I haven't thought about that before, and I haven't thought about it enough since to give a good answer.

My dinner conversation was also about religion, as me and one of my friends exchanged our worldviews. He managed to elicit and generalize my reasons for being an atheist into broad strokes:

1. There is no (perceptual) evidence for God.
2. Believing in God is not useful.

I have had vague thoughts in the direction of the second idea before, but this is the first time I've realized it is in some sense necessary. There may not be perceptual evidence of quarks either, or of radiation or other phenomenon. However, I and a lot of people take it's existence to be real, because it serves a purpose - quarks explain certain aspects of physics, and radiation helps with cancer and nuclear weapons.

God is different. I don't think God's existence can be taken as real, because I don't see any benefits to believing in God. My friend made me explain what I mean by useful, which I replied by some sort of utility in helping survive, or otherwise make life better. That could be money, power, a sixth sense, whatever. While I have never believed in God, and therefore don't have first hand experience in saying that it's not useful, this seems to be something which we can test for statistically. Is it the case that religious people earn more money, or live a happier life? Nope.

One argument against this is that people who believe in God go to heaven, while others don't (in the most dichotomized case). Well, yeah, okay, but you'll have to prove heaven first.

Zion National Park

I reinstalled Google Earth today, for fun, after not having played with it since high school. It was fun to explore different places, including where I might be going for spring break.

It was a picture from last year's spring break which brought me the greatest joy.

Here's a picture from the trip:



And here's what I can get from Google Earth:




That's pretty amazing. That's why we all love Google.

Ginny Ryerson

I watched Rocket Science this Sunday, at a free showing hosted by Northwestern. It was a different kind of comedy drama, as it doesn't have the happy ending. Partially because it was about debate, partially because it was about hermetic nerds, I enjoyed the movie. What lingered on my mind afterwards, however, was the question of what motivated Ginny Ryerson.

Movie spoilers ahead.

Let me give a short recap of what I remember of the movie. Ginny wanted the first place trophy for the state tournament, but didn't get it because her partner (Ben Wekselbaum) just stopped speaking in the middle of his speech. So next year, she goes and recruits Hal Hefner (among other similarly "disfigured" students) to the debate team. She makes out with him at least once, and makes him do a whole bunch of work before transferring to a competing school and joining their team. She also makes out with her new partner. Hal then finds Ben to try and win, without success. When Hal confronts Ginny in the middle of her speech, she justifies her actions as giving him the strength to stand up for himself and fight.

I have thought about several incomplete theories which would explain her actions:

• Revenge - The most cliched motivation would be that Ginny wanted revenge against Ben and the school. This explanation is a stretch though, as the school had almost nothing to do with her not getting the trophy. She knew Ben didn't go to college, and therefore probably doesn't value the school much anyway, and so would have no emotional lost over the school being ass-kicked in the tournament.
  
• Self Worth - It could be that Ginny is really looking for self-worth. This could extend back to the point she tried to get the trophy, as that is the only thing that she's missing from her trophy case. She measures herself by how many trophy she has, and in failing to do that, feels horrible. She tries to find other people who will accept her easily (that is, people who need a social life)... then what? She feels the school couldn't help her get the trophy? I could see the making out being about self worth, it wouldn't explain why she transferred to another school.
  
• Desire - Perhaps the most complete theory is that Ginny simply, for whatever reason, just really wanted the trophy. Getting experienced debaters on the team, snogging Hal, then transferring is really all just a ploy to destroy the previously strong school. Snogging her new partner might have to do with making sure he will debate with her. That is, the entire film shows why she forms this plan, and the execution of the plan.
  

I just noticed that none of the theories portray Ginny motives in a positive light. I wonder if her motives are really as she said, that she wanted people who are "disfigured" to learn to stand up and fight, that she was doing what what Ben had done (by leaving her alone at the finals). That's a very cold way to teach someone though - it reminds of the training school in Ender's Game.

There are several more loose ends about her too. Ginny has a gold pendant of her and Ben that she likes, and tries hard to find. This would imply that they were somehow in a relationship, or at least that she had a crush on him. Since Ben didn't seem to care about Ginny loosing, the latter would seem more likely.

Part of me hopes that, although her motivation for much of the film is negative, she changed at the end. Hal showing up at her school probably surprised her, and not accepting the trophy could signal a change in what she thinks, although she still doesn't want to talk to Hal.

Either way, it is debatable whether Hal or Ginny is the one we should pity more.

The Better To Know You With

I took this one from a friend. Usually I have little regard for this type of personal trivia, but for some reason this one caught my attention. I think the first question is especially rare: it borders on one of the party games I've played before. "Party game" is not the right term; it was a very intellectual activity, one only the closest friends would enjoy. So here goes.

Ten Anonymous Things You Want To Say To Ten Different People

1. I wish you would open your mind about certain things. Being right is not about insistence, but about the ability to explain why.
2. I don't think having the second best is better than not having at all. Hopefully you'll find what you really want one day.
3. I am glad for all the adventures we've had, although I have to say that having known you for quite a while I still don't completely understand you.
4. I think (and fervently hope) that respect each other more than we admit. Someday we'll both live happily, I know it.
5. Somehow we've gotten closer when we've been further apart.
6. Your childish innocence and naivety makes me happy. I hope my craziness has brought you the same joy.
7. I've always thought that something was holding us back from something wonderful. But now it's a little too late.
8. You were an awesome partner to work with, and I know you will do well in the future, even though I don't know you well.
9. You are a great friend to have stuck with me all this time. We'll have more time together yet.
10. You'll be fine... You'll be fine.

Nine Things About Yourself

1. I'm just shy, not antisocial (you can talk to me!)
2. I do strange sports like rock climbing, horse riding, and broomball
3. I am a nerd, although I try hard to be a renaissance nerd.
4. I (think I) write quite a bit more than a normal computer science student
5. I really want to become a college professor to teach and do research, but I'm still not entirely sure if it's right for me
6. I alternate between piano solos and progressive metal
7. I'm cool enough to write my own calendar and not use Google/Yahoo/Outlook. I'm thinking of ditching my Moleskine for a Hipster PDA
8. I'm a gothic optimistist - I find melancholy beautiful, while believing life is hopeful
9. I'm a weak atheist

Eight Ways To Win Your Heart

1. Shine - don't just smile and appear happy, be happy
2. Be unafraid of difficult and/or impossible things
3. Try difficult and/or impossible things
4. Surprise me
5. Appreciate the small things in life
6. Be quirky
7. Be excited about stuff
8. Defeat all the other contestants

Seven Things That Cross Your Mind A Lot

1. Computers
2. (Non)-religion debates
3. Stuff dealing with the human psyche
4. Various melodies
5. Thoughts, ideas, musings, and ponderings
6. Things that I can be (and hopefully will be) in the future
7. Electrical impulses

Six Things You Wish You Never Did

1. Been so indifferent
2. Cared so much
3. Spent so much time thinking of regrets when I don't really have any.
4. 
   
5. 
   
6. 
   

Five Turn Offs

1. Cigarettes
2. Drugs
3. Excessive vanity
4. Insincerity
5. Self-absorbance
   

Four Turn Ons

• Humor, and sarcasm to a (very slightly) smaller extent
• Confidence
• Dynamicity
• Blue hair, blonde eyes, etc.

Three Smileys That Describe Your Life

1. ___ (o,o)/) )-"-"-
2. :D
3. 
   

Two Things You Want To Do Before You Die

1. Solve an important question in an academic field...
   
2. ... and have my own Wikipedia article about it (written by someone else)

One Confession

1. Yes, I copied you. I thought it was cool, and I never had the courage to thank you, so here I am.

Week of 2008-02-04

This week has been pretty tough for me, for at least the start of the week. All my classes have work due on either Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, so I usually have nothing to do Wednesday evenings. That said, I've kept myself busy:

• Gave a review session for the EA midterm
• Wrote sections of a progress report for my design project
• Wrote a paper on foundationalism - leading me to stay up till 6 am on Wednesday
  
• Watched clips of early computer animation, in an showing titled "Imaging by Numbers"
• Planned out some details of spring break
• Went climbing - twice, one on Friday and once today
• Watched Rocket Science
  

How To Do What You Love

I was thinking about one of those personal trivia quiz thingies, and one of my thoughts was that while I'm a nerd, I try hard to be a renaissance nerd. Googling that term gives some interesting results, but I ended up spending time at Paul Graham's site. I've visited the site before, and have also read a few of his essays, but today I spent more time on it.

My attraction to his essays could be from his view the superiority of nerds and intelligence, but I also like his humor.

His essay titled "How To Do What You Love", however, was not about that. It's about, on a more abstract level, how to live a good life, the idea that "work" is not necessarily different from "play". It's an idea I've played around in my head for a long time, and have had discussions about it with other people. Thus, I wanted to see if my idea of the concept was the same as Graham's.

After reading, I didn't find to many points of disagreement. There was however one idea I was taken with. In the essay, Graham points out that one of the harder parts of the problem is figuring out what you love. He writes,

The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?

That set me wondering, what do I do in my spare time that I don't get external/material rewards for?

Let's start with what I have been considering as my dream job, teaching and doing research in computer science at a university. Whether this passes the test or not depends on how you break down this job:

• Do I code in my free time? Yes, although less frequently now than I used to. In high school I'm constantly typing on my TI-83+, writing small programs. That was really what started me into computer science (besides a semester course on visual basic, and having been "home-schooled" before in HTML). I still have my proudest creation, a Minesweeper game in TI-Basic. I still code in my free time, but they have been for the most part limited to a few projects. Actually, no, I take that back. I tend to focus on one project at a time, although I tend not to finish them. I played around with NUCollab and a Northwestern Lost and Found system, I helped with NULink, I started a game called Ant Wars. I still write short bash scripts every now and then, and I'm constantly looking for ways to improve my HTML/JavaScript calendar as well as my journal search bash script. So yes, I code in my free time.
• Do I do research in my free time? This is a somewhat harder question to answer. If by research you mean what I signed up to do, that is, modeling human walking with the BME department, then I'm afraid I don't work on that too hard at all. I could argue though that I did in sign up for it of my own free will, so I'm allowing it to take up my free time. If research is merely classified as "learning stuff you don't already know", then yes, I "research" a lot, especially on Wikipedia. These are not always computer science related, but they tend to be.
• Do I teach in my free time? Yes. GSW is a big (as in important, not time consuming) part of my life, and it is the only paid "job" I have currently. And I do enjoy it a lot, as I've told someone last quarter that GSW is "sort of my highlight of the week." I also help SHPE and NSBE freshmen prepare for midterms, so this is the clearest one of what I do in my spare time.
  

One thought about research - people arguably took up their jobs because they liked something about it, as long as they wouldn't go bankrupt or starve otherwise. I can see an argument being made about how people are already "doing what they love" to a certain extent, but that is clearly not what Graham or myself had in mind (I feel so self-absorbed to be putting myself and Graham in one sentence...). I would say that both for my work with WebComm before, and the research I'm doing now, that I don't have to work, but I did it because I want to.

So I seem to be on the right route to doing what I love. But by pulling out computer science professorhood (or is it professorship?), I actually deceived all of you. There's something I've been doing a lot more in my free time than teaching, researching and coding, possibly even combined. It is in fact right in front of you: writing. I've kept a journal since April of 2002, and started this blog September of last year as well. I write an awful amount, and none of this gives me any reward except for satisfaction. Writing is, in fact, my most productive endeavor. As Paul Graham writes,

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.

I do not, however, intend to be a writer, editorial or otherwise. Coming upon Graham's site is actually an inspiration, because he, like me (again self-absorbed), writes a lot. I don't think I would mind if my life turned out to be like his.

By "don't think I would mind" I mean "Yes! Please! Please! I beg you!" Eheh.

Why I Write

Sometimes I question why I write on this bloody thing, since only about 7 people a day read this. Although, from the angle that 7 strangers (alright, maybe 4 strangers) is reading this, it's pretty amazing what the internet can do.

Ahem. Anyway (that sounded like one of my friends), why I write. Since November last year I've decided that I would write in my personal journal less often, in favor of writing daily here. I would import whatever posts sounded interesting back into my journal. Since then, I've tended to still write in my journal once or twice a week, but that's compared to the every other day average for the past five years.

I think part of the reason I've decided to do that was that college is presenting me with a lot of new things, new ideas to contemplate. My journal, as I've said before, is mostly for personal stuff, and although I would occasionally write about computer science, that's the limited extent to which I put academics into it. This blog gives me the freedom to jot down fancy ideas I have, so I could reference it later. It's really not so much that I have a separate space for writing, but a different GUI to look at, so my personal and intellectual thoughts are - at least visually - separated.

That, and I find writing fun, and would like to be better at it.

This being a public blog though, I've been hoping that more people would read what I write. A little narcissistic, I know, but I think part of the reason blogs (as opposed to a private journal) are popular is because people want to share their thoughts. Sharing, by definition, needs other people to participate.

In a campaign to make other bloggers feel better about their blogs, I subscribed to several random blogs, blogs which I thought had a personality to them. One of them was also in French, because I would like to get better. This all portrays me as a very shady stalker-ish person, but I promise that's not the case. Maybe I'll comment and introduce myself. I guess, when I say the blogs have a "personality", that's what I mean: they wouldn't mind me commenting, and would be interested in making friends.

One can hope, right?