Telepathy

Every now and then someone wants to quibble about how seeing a sunset is different from seeing a digital representation of that sunset. From time to time I bother to spell it out. If you've ever had the joy of listening to music, or of looking at a photo ... perhaps you may have considered how everything you see and hear without exception can be reduced to marks on paper, or a stupid little piece of plastic, and then reassembled and put back into someone ELSE's head.

Set aside your feelings for just a second ... and contemplate this fact, and that these problems were solved DECADES ago. Reload your feelings, without their visual and aural accompaniments (including those in your mind's eye) ... you see, the feelings also have a shape, and that is an introduction to how you can eventually send those over the wire too.

Data Science Fallacies

Common fallacies I have encountered while hiring a data team :

1. Your human experience of the world is fundamentally different from a computer's experience of the world. It's not. The algorithms of data science are the same sort of process that enabled you to learn how to walk, talk, and discover your hobbies.

2. The biggest opportunity in businesses today is data management. It's not - it's knowledge management. Most businesses suck at knowledge management because they don't understand 1.

3. Becoming good at data science means learning data science tools. It does not. This is by far the most frustrating issue I encounter in young executives. Becoming good at data science requires you to figure out 1. 

Peace.

Entertainment is the Active Displacement of Values in Analytical Memory

My friend Sam plays games ... on her phone, more often when she is stressed out at work. We often banter about how unproductive this is - however, it turns out that she is probably doing okay, and that this is actually quite productive. 

Sam sent me a post about this thread, which is about this academic paper, which suggests a case for games to be utilised for psychiatric therapy. 

Just before she sent it, I was jotting down a small epiphany about what recreation is at the level of memory pathways.

Studying productivity : repair phase - displacement of short-term memory values is performed by injecting new values, and there seems to be no way around this. So I must return to frequent meditations on the modality of my working experiences, so that I can strategically overwrite them. 

At this point it dawns on me that hobbies are not about (simply) enjoying the sensation of their objects, rather hobbies are about displacing values in memory used by analytical pathways ... by analysing objects different from the objects which one has become tired of analysing. 

Which brings us back to how less productive people

• work, 
• then veg, 
• then work

- but more productive people 

• work, 
• then work on other stuff, 
• then go back to work on the first set of stuff. 

- and how effective vegging requires analysis of the vegging experience.

Today I learnt something related to both my area of study (people as information systems) and the jobs I work on (two jobs in the entertainment industry).