the relevance of Business School, to Education in General : a brief introduction

/ the relevance of Business School, to Education in General : a brief introduction /

"Business" schools treat management as the question, "what should we do?" (tEQ). This, as Drucker and Deming noted, depends on "what can we count?" (tOQ), about things in an environment defined by "property rights".

"Philosophy" traditionally is just a superset of that : where the ontological question (tOQ), and the ethical question (tEQ), are applied to all human activities, regardless of concerns about property rights.

"What do we teach people at each stage of life?" is basically (tEQ:E), the  question of educational ethics. And the answers to this are largely dependent on, (tOQ:C) the question, "what is a citizen?", and (tEQ:C) "what do we expect from citizens?".

You may notice that we jumped from education, to citizenship, so what about non-citizens? Valid question - and a quick tie around that is to say, we simply define for the purpose of this discussion, CITIZEN, as any entity in our environment, regardless of classification under labels which denote different rights and obligations. So now (tOQ,tEQ:C) can apply to rocks, trees, chickens, humans, bots, corporations, and nationstates.

This is trivia, but maybe it'll help someone understand how to link together 

• 1. STEM, 
• 2. commerce 
• 3. the humanities, and 
• 4. the overarching architecture of how education ( syllabi, public policy, etc. ) is governed

:) 

Human State Machina : maximising neuroplasticity

Mental state. For many people, it is always complex. For some, it is too simple. Nerves and hormones interact in only a few ways. The F-heuristics are few :  flight freeze fawn fight friend feed fuck ... roughly in order of productivity from the point of view of genes. From the arbitrary individual point of view, the order is slightly different. Fucking is of no long-term benefit, but a pastime; feeding is part industry, part pastime. Such are the states of men.

Fighting and friending are the main modes of industry. Neuroplasticity, i.e. learning, is therefore limited only by how many of the other hormones one can smack out of the way on a daily basis : do not fly, do not freeze, fawn very minimally, fight correctly, proceed to friendship quickly, feed as needed, fuck all.

Talking to Pancake

Talk with me, they say

Till the end of our days

But not just about anything

Entertain me

This is not what you call that

Ok, let's talk about it

This is not how you wear that

Ok, let's talk about it

This is not how you speak about that

Ok, let's talk about it

No, let's not talk about it

Ok, let's talk about it later

This is not how you negotiate about that

Ok, let's talk about it

No, let's not talk about it

Will we ever, get to talk about it?

I'm fine if we never talk about it, really ... 

I didn't ask to talk about anything

But it would be nice if we followed a plan

Maybe, we will never talk about it

😘

Boredom is My Dominant Emotion

Boredom is my dominant emotion. And how I think about boredom has changed a lot, over 35.7 years. A retrospective telling:
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- I am two-years-old. I am bored by how everyone insists on writing from left to right, so I write 'ikan' from right to left on a blackboard. It is captured on film. To-date, I make a point of not forgetting that left and right are arbitrarily assigned labels, and so in practice I almost never make a subconscious recognition of what left or right mean - I process these consciously.
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- Around the same time, I notice that if I demonstrate a superficial reaction (such as crying), other people's efforts to send me negative feedback (such as corporal punishment) are reduced. I am bored by how easy it is to manipulate this structure of psyche. To-date, I have been bored by my parents perhaps for more years than I have been bored of anyone else, in my life.
-
- I am seven, or eight. I am bored by how a reading competition is played by declaring pages read, based on summary reports of what the books are about. I write reports without reading the books thoroughly. I also make a point not to over-play this, as I am morally conflicted about this. I lose the competition, to a white female, but I am granted the consolation of a co-winnership, I receive fifteen dollars, and I spend it on a skateboard. I lose the board a few years later in Taman Titiwangsa. Later in life, I deconstruct my sense of morality and make efforts to discard all moral intuitions in favour of conscious processings of law.
-
- I am fourteen. I have been trained as a leader in the school Christian fellowship for over a year. Leading worship services where crowds sing, leading exegetical studies of Biblical texts, and counselling peers on their daily concerns, have all become predictable to me. I attend leadership camps at the national level, and learn that working a room to meet people is also rather predictable. I make a note that I have graduated from this class of training.
-
- I am sixteen. I have been living in a town outside the city, for about a year. I am bored by my peers, and their games of splashing water on each other for fun. It does not feel like progress.
-
- I am seventeen. I have been waiting to apply for a scholarship to return to studies in the United States since I was eight-years-old. I have become bored of the academic slog, and I diversify my acceptable paths to include other less sophisticated places for college.
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- I am eighteen. I arrive back in the United States, on scholarship, at a small liberal arts college. I notice that most of my college peers are unconcerned with the structure and definition of education, as the informational process of civilisation. I assign myself to solitary focus. After four semesters of digging about the structure of the university industry, I assign myself to self-guided studies outside the curriculum. By the end of my degree program, I realise that other people value the opportunities for class ascent offered by the university system, much more than I value them. I decide to take a hiatus from accepting scholarship monies. I am not interested in spending efforts to secure a visa for myself. I return to live in Malaysia because I am lazy (among other curiosities, such as having an interest in studying how commerce and politics work in Malaysia, areas which I avoided during secondary and tertiary schooling.)
-
- I am twenty, and still in college. I decipher the geometric data structure of human experience in general. Zero mysteries remain to me, about how sense information is processed from individual consciousness, into the semantic cultures of society. But it is not easy to explain this to others, and since I cannot see any value of explaining it for the mere sake of explaining it, I allow myself to be contented by this knowledge, knowing that it allows me to discard all inconveniences of wondering about how consciousness works. I decide over a few years that the lazy way to explain how humans think, is to eventually build machines which cannot be distinguished from human beings. Meanwhile, I have been working in Malaysia.
-
- I am thirty-five-point-seven-years-old. I have now spent most of my adult life simply existing. It has been a happy time. Joyous in its mundanity, startling in its simplicity, and enriching in the same way that the universe as a whole it lacks any objective definition of progress. I have been blessed with many partners over this time. Most of the challenges I have thrown at myself during these years have been technical, because I lack an engagement with the fragilities of many human cultures. I wonder, what I shall grow bored of next.
-
- Always, I remind myself, neurological damage may disable my ability to appreciate life as I have for these decades past. One day, perhaps I will be as simple as you.

How to Discuss Education Public Policy

(original post)
.
In the last 48-hours you may have read a very large number of thoughts by individuals on the subject of Education in Malaysia. In order to help us organise all of these thoughts, I propose a brief framework as follows. You may think of this as a "philosophy of education," which may be useful in sorting through the noisy (and appropriately so) discourse on educational public policy.
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1. Note that the purpose of "education," on a national scale, is to create FUNCTIONAL CITIZENS.
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2. In order to be functional, an educated citizen must be able to interact meaningfully with the official and unofficial LAWS of the nation. The OFFICIAL law is written explicitly, and thus documented in a formal canon (5. below); the UNOFFICIAL law, which may be called 'adat,' or 'culture,' or 'common sense,' consists of a fluid set of assumption which is never static (6. below).
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3. Therefore the focus of national education is FIRST and foremost to enable isolated human bodies, to INTERACT with other bodies on the matters above. It is of SECONDARY concern that anyone becomes an EXPERT in any area of knowledge. We can address the secondary concern in a future note, but the rest of this note focuses on the _primary concern_.
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4. We are concerned then, with determining an OBJECTIVE STANDARD for GENERAL EDUCATION, that which should be regarded as a basic requirement for adult citizens capable of INFLUENCING matters of GOVERNMENT. Thereby under current voting limits, we can work around a target educational period of 21 years per citizen. What must 21-year-old Malaysians know?
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5. In order to interact with official laws: a few domains of LITERACY come into play. 5.1. Citizens must be able to read, comprehend, implement compliance with, and argue about compliance with the written law; for example, IF the law is officially in the Malay _language_, then the Malay language must be mastered TO SUCH AN EXTENT DESCRIBED ABOVE, and lesser degrees of mastery must be considered failure to properly educate a citizen. 5.2. Citizens must also be sufficiently _quantitatively_ literate in order to engage with the law by the standard above. 5.3. Citizens must also be sufficiently _informatically_ literate in order to be able to obtain for their readings, and reference, the laws of the land (including local council bylaws). 5.4. Citizens must also be sufficiently _politically_ literate in order to understand where the written laws come from, and how they can be changed by the citizen herself. SUMMARY: we now have a means to determine standards of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, government, information literacy, etc. which must be achieved by citizens by the age of 21 years.
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6. In order to interact with adat, culture, and common Malaysian sense, other types of LITERACY are required: we must have the subjects of current affairs, social involvement ("clubs and societies"), history, anthropology ("alam dan manusia," / "geography" were the terms at some point), segmented by RACE, segmented by RELIGION, segmented by periods of TIME, and administered via an expicitly INTERSECTIONAL methodology, which exercises each child in the differences between the parts, and wholes, of the Malaysian experience.
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7. I will further venture that 5. takes PRECEDENCE OVER 6., and that resource allocations must obey this order of precedence to a non-trivial degree, such that 5. should be administered more urgently than 6. throughout the life of a child (any citizen below the age of 21 years). Both remain important, but for the sake of operational urgency, and due to the realities of resource limitations, this order of precedence is preferred.
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Disclaimer: this note was hammered out on a small piece of glass, while I waited for a friend to regain consciousness. It reflects my personal appreciation of the subject of education, and does not constitute a professional opinion, nor does it pretend to be research. EVERYONE seems to have an opinion on the new Ministerial Appointment for education, because everyone tends to feel that having gone through the torment which is, "education," they have valuable insight into the subject matter. Those are valid points of view. I say "torment," because by definition, education really is brainwashing, the very process whereby each and every society ensure that new meat behaves compliantly with the protocols and common assumptions of that society.

A Call to Apathy

On Political Engagement in Malaysia

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THE PURPOSE of this essay is not, to present a defensible position. Rather, it is written to disturb the minds of anyone who has decided however strongly that they must participate in Malaysia’s political process*.

* Or I suppose, more broadly, it may apply to anyone who consciously involves themselves in the political process of whichever organisation they inhabit at this time, be it a nation state, a nuclear family, or a for-profit or not-for-profit organisation. The essay does not address those who participate in politics sub-consciously - to bring about an absence of intention is the very operational objective of this essay.

I have for many years abstained from making formalised public statements about my views on Malaysian politics. But today I found myself in need of recreational activity on this long weekend. And then I was quite inspired to write this essay, by several citizens of Facebook (and Malaysia) whose discussions I have been interacting with online. It may be the case that no one reads this, but I am going to write it anyway.

THE NEXUS of these discussions is one article (P0, Disenchanted by blurred lines, some middle-class youths to sit out GE14), which antagonised two acquaintances (A1, A2) to put forth their respective views in posts (P1, P2) on the entitled youths, posts which in turn attracted nu(uuu)merous comments (Cn), largely eliciting empathy for the thrusts of the two posts, that avoiding the polls is a bad thing.

IN DEFENSE OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM these acquaintances A1 and A2 and their views are absolutely to be encouraged. Nothing should stop an individual from identifying with goals and objectives that enable it to find community, and happiness in daily operations.

That being said, a number of the views I have read in the comments, Cn, have caused me grave concern. I have already provided specific engagement with P1 and P2 via comments in their threads, so I won’t engage with P1 or P2 here. Rather abstractly, I will reword the points I raised there, into a brief list of objectionable propositions which I surmised from the engagement with P1, P2, and Cn.

• O1: Citizens are obliged to be active in politics.
• O2: Absence of political activism is necessarily lazy.
• O3: Laziness is irresponsible.
• O4: Irresponsibility is distasteful.
• O5: An individual is more likely to be: inactive in politics, lazy, irresponsible, or distasteful, because she or she is young.

“Citizens are obliged to be active in politics.”

No, they are not. Except in countries where it is mandatory for citizens to engage in politics, it is quite often the case that citizens are given the right to be active, but not the obligation to participate in the governance of their societies. This is the case in Malaysia - there are no laws making it illegal to refrain from political activism, including any refrainment from voting.

You may find this distasteful in and of itself. You may feel that citizens ought to defend their neighbours from evil parties. You may even feel that in a completely neutral environment, citizens are obliged to improve the wellbeing of their neighbours. But these are your personal inclinations, ungoverned by law.

You may then turn to letters and verses which describe the spiritual character of the nation we inhabit, and infer from such passages that the spirit of citizenship obliges citizens to behave a certain way even if the letter of the law does not. But that is your spiritual conviction - until it becomes explicit law, for each citizen, there is no compulsion in political engagement.

“Absence of political activism is necessarily lazy.”

Well frankly, in many cases, political apathy is due to laziness. But this isn’t necessarily the case. It is easily conceivable that a person may be very industrious, hardworking, diligent, alla zeitgeist: GRITTY, in many fields of endeavour… while at the same time he or she simply doesn’t give a damn about the welfare of this country, its citizens, or its abstract future as an institution.

I am such a person. Personally, I find local political discourse generally unmotivating. It lacks sophistication; it lacks strategic elegance; it lacks decisive parsimony; it bores me; I find it is full of outrage - I have a general distaste for outrage, and even as I am outraged by the points I am objecting to here, I am also outraged at my own outrage… and the only reason I am investing time in writing this is for amusement, to stimulate and exercise my thoughts in order to try and stay healthy, as a point of mental conditioning.

I think ultimately, what differentiates political activists (and I consider anyone who participates in the democratic elections an activist citizen) and non-activists, is a fundamental difference in the degree of interest/affection that each has for the issues that surround us.

• Some people want to watch the world burn.
• Some people don't want to, but don't mind watching.
• Others can't stand to watch it burn.

Each to their own tribe. Tribes will bicker. Some tribes will die. Let’s find out, together. We don’t really have a choice about that - the future, indeterminable as it is, remains inevitable.

“Laziness is irresponsible.”

Suppose we have a person, who is convinced that they should be active in politics. This person is furthermore of very specific political convictions: for example, he or she believes that Barisan Nasional is the child of the devil. (Caveat: I am not that person.) However, he or she then decides to do nothing about it… to not vote, to not campaign, to not engage. He or she believes that those activities would be a waste of energy. He or she believes that the energy conserving alternative is preferable. He or she, consciously, decides to be lazy. Is this irresponsible?

Not necessarily. It could be irresponsible, but it would be pre-mature to simply judge this to be irresponsibility - in fact the definition of what counts as irresponsibility is, itself, fraught with complexities.

While I personally do not view Barisan Nasional to be the child of the devil, I do think that Barisan Nasional is not very good at what it is supposed to do - which is to deliver the welfare of all Malaysian citizens, and not just the citizens who voted for it. With this view in mind, for almost two decades, I have also favoured (i) compliance with the hegemony, or (ii) all out war, over (iii) engagement with the electoral process. While I am so far unpersuaded about going to war, I don't think that Barisan Nasional plays fair enough to warrant fair play resistance or engagement.

It has been a lonely perspective.

But I don’t think it is an irresponsible perspective. While I remain quite lazy about political involvement, I have allocated my time to the pursuit of a large enough stockpile of resources with which I could then go to war with against Barisan Nasional in the future. I do this because this I believe that this is an economically optimised strategy.

It is not a secret strategy, and it may not be a viable one, but it is nevertheless one that I am fully responsible for. At any point, I can be locked up, or cement barrelled, or castrated, otherwise disfigured, or however more threatened by our gangster Government, simply at its whim. I have known this to be a practical reality for years, and daily readiness in mind and body is simply what it means to be responsible.

As they say in programming, you eat your own dog food. You can be lazy, as long as you accept responsibility for it.

“Irresponsibility is distasteful.”

Let’s return to the list of abstract complaints. Again, hinging on the vagaries of how irresponsibility is to be defined, we turn now to a consideration of a truly irresponsible individual. What would such an individual look like?

So say, one believes in activism, believes that Barisan Nasional is doing a shit job of running the country, believes (rationally, or irrationally) that the alternative parties are convincing alternatives, yet just prefers not to vote because one couldn’t be arsed to register, and go to the polls, and make decision, and write it down on the ballot, and all that. Let’s just assume now, for the purpose of discussion, that that we can call this irresponsibility. Again, we now assume that this is a legitimate use of the word ‘irresponsible’.

Must it be distasteful?

Absolutely not.

Actually in practice, it must be distasteful for some people. Many people aren’t capable of manipulating their preferences. Some are. But the fact that there are some who can choose not to be affected by it means that in practice, it is not all people who find that irresponsibility is distasteful.

At this point in the essay, the conversation could be expanded exponentially in two directions - (i) in elaborating the humanistic structures and sentiments of those for whom distaste is an inevitable phenomenon, and (ii) in returning to a systematic analysis of what it really means for someone to be “irresponsible.”

Very irresponsibly, at this point, we shall attempt neither endeavour. Is it not responsible, if we simply have not the resources to do so at this juncture?

In any event, it is certainly not distasteful. Unless you feel insulted, in which case we can’t help you, but I don’t feel insulted, so it can’t necessarily be the case that irresponsibility is insulting. Eh?

“An individual is more likely to be: inactive in politics, lazy, irresponsible, or distasteful, because she or she is young.”

This position is not even worth addressing in great detail because it is such a common fallacy. Empirically, a stringent definition for each adjective above might yield sufficient preparation for survey on the truth of this proposition, according to the given definitions. Otherwise, it will be sufficient to note that throughout history the old have made a pastime of deriding the young, and that objectively, neither of them really has any greater foothold upon the arc of history than the other. All remain subject to time, given unto us, upon which we simply deride.

Further Remarks

Now you are quite welcome to object to any of the ideas presented above, reasonably, or unreasonably, emotionally, or unemotionally. The ideas are not presented as logically coherent propositions that are empirically falsifiable, and so you may find any or all of the following within them: logical contradictions, an absence of falsifiability, or total and complete falsification by empirical fact. That’s for you to think about. I just wanted to put the points out there. I don’t feel obliged to make more effort than that, given that this is a recreational pursuit, and not a job I am paid to do.

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Identification of Author

My name is Hwa Yang Jerng, citizen number 831031-14-5577 of the nation of Malaysia. I became eligible to vote in 2004, and registered to vote before the 2008 elections, with the express intention of remaining absent from the polls. I have never voted in a Malaysian election. The ideas presented in this essay are of my own contrivance, and do not represent the orientation or opinion of any other individuals, human or corporate, with whom I am associated. I, and I alone, bear full responsibility for any damage, annoyance, butthurt, or physical damage that incurs on Earth which follows from essays, such as this.

Why You Should Buy My Company

(Don't expect a literal answer.)

Thoughts after pitching to investors:

Take 1

"So you're a cafe."
"Yup."

"Is that it? Just one?"
"Well, if we had room to grow, I'd move into retail, because it's B2C and we have good foot traffic that has limited opportunities to spend money (because we target value pricing) so we'd invest more product development under the brand."

"But aren't people moving away from brick and mortar retail - into just using the space for meat testing, and then shipping actual product via mail?"
"Yes, so we'd be building the brand by displaying products in-store, with some fulfilment if necessary, and sure, we can ship more stuff over other funnels after we build a brand. But we have the brick and mortar already, so we might as well continue here first."

"Would you expand to more outlets?"
"That's not a priority - it doesn't drive up the brand value as quickly as we'd need it to move, unless we have more products shipped per store."

"Is your core focus to expand the retail network?"
"No, the core focus is vertical integration of value chains. For example, we buy and consume detergent. We need to start selling detergent. And in the longer run, since we consume management services, we need to start selling those too."

"You're not a foodie, and you run a cafe. Now it's a sundry shop pretending to be a cafe, that wants to scale by turning into an outsourcing operation. Tell me a more coherent story."

"Are you sure you want to hear it?"
"Hit me."

Take 2

"Let me go back a few years, to tell you where I come from. I figured out the data-structure for quantifying human experience when I was in college. It persuaded me that human people are trivial. Skipping forward a few projects to the cafe... within your lifetime and mine, we're going to be talking and working daily with synthetic people who are indistinguishable from organic people. For the last fifteen years, I've never had to struggle with the question of whether it would happen, only the question of when it would happen, and if I would watch it happen or be a bit proactive and make it happen sooner rather than later. (I think it'll happen regardless of my interference.)

In this future, I expect that automation will ... consume every imaginable function that humans play today - and I mean this without ... hyperbole. Automation will displace not just drivers, or food service staff, but early childhood educators, doctors, sex workers, friends, performance artists, spiritual guides like the clergy, cultural guides like screenwriters, government officials, etc.. The artisanal millennial industries are a laugh - the last bastion of a desperately cornered beast, angstily scrambling for comparative advantage. Their current livelihoods are all going to die. It was obvious to me before millennials became a thing, so if I'm heavily sighing it's because it's happening all so predictably, and it's painful to watch all these kids who think that they've brilliantly discovered a meaningful way to spend their lives.

If you're interested in human development, the real question is what do you think that organic meat should be doing in this future where all human interactions are automatable? Should the focus be on survival, or on innovation (for fuck's sake, given there'll be literally too little left to do anyway)? I don't have an answer for you. But I think we need to help people be prepared, even those who don't believe that it will happen. So back to this business project..."

Take 3

3.1.

Given the outlook above, THE LONG GAME for any organism or company that wishes to survive is first to understand how any of this is going to work. Therefore the business has to focus on achieving automation milestones ahead of (the general population's bulge in) the curve. We have to be a services company, and the service we provide has to be the productisation of any given (currently) human services, via automation.

3.2.

This is a big universe, and we have to start THE MIDDLE GAME somewhere. Therefore we focused on a really simple position at the bottom of the pyramid: hospitality services... specifically food services... specifically long-tail artisanal food services. This is why we explain ourselves as a management services company for this segment. If you look at the entire industry of independent food and beverage retailers and separate all their activities into two baskets, (A) things everyone is doing the same and (B) things everyone is doing different, you'll find a lot of redundancy in (A) and so that should be the first basket to automate. After you've dealt with that, you can reexamine (B), and probably you find that, whether you like it or not, many of the trendy products in the market are horribly generic... depending on the same upstream suppliers, sometimes even OEMs, rebranding with quirky stickers and stories, and pushed to out, c'est la vie. There is so little value added by the so-called artisan per se. The move into this market is alla Rocket Internet - we want to become a clone shop that identifies any trendy product, digs up the supply chain for it, sticks it under a centralised management services umbrella for efficiency of scale, then pushes out the exact same product at a lower cost. If you need an anchor to see what the end is here, just consider this hypothesis: Michelin restaurant menus are cloneable. I don't even have to argue about this, because it's been done before. The question now is not about how to clone one menu - it's about how to get good at cloning and global distribution. We'll mop the floor with the bodies of grassroot businesses - it's not nice, but someone's got to do it.

3.3.

This is a really broad and expensive target to be arm-waving about... we only had as much capital as the guy next door, and I thought it was fundamental for the project to focus on understanding how the economy is working in vivo and so, we started this business as a cafe. This is THE SHORT GAME. What else were we supposed to do? Teach hipsters that the future is jobless? What for? That wouldn't get us there.

Recap

So how's that for a cohesive story? Did you brain it? Probably not. If you did, I'm happy. But this is usually why I don't speak my mind - people stop listening pretty quickly. If you liked the story, please buy my company. I'm getting tired of being stuck in the short term. Not interested? No worries... I'm going back to work on it until it either falls over, or transcends. Hope you enjoy your job too. I can't say I really enjoy mine, but I do find it kills time. It's a life. YOLO.

[In hindsight, RI is a bad analogy. The given example seems more like Zara for fine foods. But I don't think I'm really committed to either analogy - the general direction is illustrated with either or both.]

[Forgot to point out that the culture wars of the future will regard the organic-synthetic class divide; amply anticipated in science fiction, but a far cry from the ongoing organic-organic class divides that still dominate current discourse.]

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Tidied up the thoughts:

Every so often I get the rare question of my long-term view on corporate development. No one really wants to know the answer - it's generally just a reminder to myself that I'm a weirdo.

A post shared by 正 (@_jerng) on Aug 27, 2017 at 12:52pm PDT

Disingenuity in Discourse

"Disingenuous," like, the word, it seems in use to be flung around as soon as someone just isn't sure what to make of the other person.

It's like this staff I once had, I would ask it, "how are you doing?" Or, "so what are you going to work on after this job?" And the response would be "you don't really care," and so my response would simply be "well if you can't interact with language at face value, then there's no use pretending that it's a useful intermediary for anything else, so I'll stop asking you, then."

Hastily Written

On demand, a short article on the nature of my perspective on the relationship between myself and another who so happens to be the requester of this article. A friend of a friend spoke to me at work once, and commented that I reminded her of my friend. Later we met up for coffee, all three friends, and it was a novel meeting. My new friend bakes and takes care of her family. She cares about people, and while she bothers herself with their concerns for a living, she also does so for her own personal fulfillment. She enjoys writing. She studied at a university in Malaysia and requires of herself advanced degrees. Lesser degrees will not do. She respects the institutions of public education in this fashion. As for her health, she is often flitting from study to study, and may find it difficult to bring herself to bear on something as boring as monotony. Such is the nature of my new friend. The end.

Edited once.

The Ethics of Trolls, Public Health, and the End of Teaching

Following the 1st February black bloc ruckus at Berkeley, Milo has now received increased discussion in my circles. One of the popular criticisms leveled at his work is that he is effectively a catalyst for white supremacist activity. (You can read about the facts of his operation here and there if you wish. I'll skip forward.) Thereupon I tend to enjoy bringing discussions to bear on the motivations behind Milo's work, hoping to find a generalisation that we can find useful in addressing such "social ills."

My typical opener into such a discussion raises the abstract hypothesis: Milo's motivations may be characterised more acutely as being trollish rather than white supremacist. White supremacism is a tribal inclination with a closed mind about genetic value; whereas, trolling is sadism with a closed mind about how dumb people should be valued. You typically want to lock up people like Milo on account of their work resulting in more suffering or death for certain people... but that is a symptom of the problem. Identifying the symptom with the wrong cause in a "differential diagnosis," is going to make treatment of the problem harder. Of course, the brute force solution is to simply yell "stop Milo," which amounts to amputation - it's hardly elegant, and it definitely doesn't stop the next version of Milo whenever she pops up.

Trolling in general refers to a broad swath of communication patterns, ranging from pure malice, to Socratic inquiry and social Darwinism. Some trolls are merely sadists looking for pleasure in the pain of those; some trolls are naive comedians who may not realise that the sources of their comedy are in pain; some trolls may simply wish to demonstrate a point of fact; some trolls see their social mission as the "work of god,"* in that they work towards building a more intelligent and better informed population (or audience)... and furthermore various subsets of the last type may differ from each other in their comfort levels: about how much pain and death is a worthwhile trade-off for group improvements in intelligence. (* As a colleague put it, when referring to how Milo appears to view his own work - though we hadn't yet discussed what the nature of that work might be, or what Milo itself thinks about its nature.)

Now as we continue to wrestle with trolls on and off the Internet, the decades of online trolling have focused the discussion somewhat. But the subject remains studied with a lack of nuance... academia is only just starting to taxonomise trolling and its malcontents (briefly discussed in the paragraph above). If we refer to trolling as a "social ill," then it seems appropriate for us to discuss the "public health interventions," or "public policies," regarding this phenomenon. But if this analogy is to be taken seriously, we must also note that the state of policing language, thought, and custom remains in its infancy in 2017 - perhaps much like public health and general surgery were far less systematic in the 18th century, than they are now. Why this is so is rather obvious - a relatively structured model of the human body has been developed over recent centuries, to a point where we can run computer-assisted simulations not just of 3D structures, but also of epidemiological phenomena on global scale.

This is not yet the case with language. The greatest navigators of language at this time remain human - simulators that are all-encompassing have not yet fully mastered the body of words and sentences that can be generated from the rules of English, let alone the detailed structures of human consciousness which are semanticised by the former. But this will not remain the case for much longer. Over the past decade (it is now 6 February 2017) we have produced encouraging progress in machine learning systems - the most recent popular headline being the subordination of human poker players to machines at the highest levels of competition. At the current pace of development, it will be completely unsurprising (to those working in this field) if we produce within a decade, systems whose ability to compose [art, music, poetry], or whose ability to analyse [film, literature, social behaviour] matches that of the best human beings in these respective fields.

The idol of human consciousness will quickly fall. To-date it remains a somewhat mystery about how it works (so long as we leave out the ontological question), but within two to three decades we should expect to have robots that are able to debate and teach these subjects at the university level, and within four to five decades from today we should expect to have robots that are able to raise and culture a child from birth through to university in any subject. Professors and TAs beware - you won't be replaced too soon, but you'll have fewer classes to teach, and therefore more research to deliver, and perhaps, more opportunities to discuss holistic education as an interdisciplinary activity, instead of rote focus within your discipline. It will not be hard for a near-future system to read a text, say a Milo blog post, and to spew out within seconds a dozen readings of the given text, each with study notes targeting audiences with different levels of familiarity with Milo's work. (For example, of course. We've now reduced Milo to a convenient example of something entirely outside his purview - I hope that makes any of his haters reading this, happier.)

By the time our machines have this kind of computational agility, firstly we expect them to soon thereafter become our counselours. The daughter surpasses the father. Not in all things of course, but in some. Already today, we defer to machines for advice on specific bodies of knowledge. And at this very near future point in history, we expect thought policing and public policy on the business of language and the conscious thoughts that languages represent... to have come of age.

This then, is truly exciting. It could also be frightening in a rather maddening way.

On art.

The gist of this thought coalesced while I was taking a 30-second dump before a shower. Anyway, the thought regards the popular dichotomy of form versus function. Some say that the function of form is to please. Not exactly. The function of form is sex. I was thinking about a fashion designer whose career I have been speaking of as an inspiration for my recent work, in terms of her work being somewhat off-tether amidst what is regarded as proper, she is Betsey Johnson. Nevermind my recent work. So I was thinking about her work, and contemplating the forms, searching for functions. And it became apparent that what selects for attention-grabbing iconoclasms and idiosyncracies is simply mating activity. The reason goldfish, and peacocks, and tattoos, and high heels, and latte art, and lala-mui-isms, and large cars exist in their forms, is fashion, and fashion is one human expression of sex. Some say beauty. Some say that our brains' evolution of an appreciation for music has no purpose - that music has become accidentally beautiful. No doofus, of course it has a purpose. The ability to communicate across noisy channels sometimes requires codes, secret channels, and hidden protocols. That is where all of our abilities to execute art come from. This leads us to an necessarily controversial proposition: the function of art, is sex.

Bus Stops

Today's pre-bedtime homework:

It is one of those strange times in life again.

I remember a similar period in 1999, about sixteen years ago. When I realised why cultural anthropology was interesting - it was a lonely time, having been uprooted as a teenager from a metropolitan private school, and then being parked in a smallish town for two years. So poignant was that period that it became the most interesting subject I could yank out of my ass for college application essays soon afterwards. Loneliness turned to hate, and complaints, and a generally anti-social disposition... so much so that I ended up caring less about going to college at all, given the apparent futility of trying to do so. In fact when I did end up at college about 18 months later, I was immediately disappointed by the quality of my peers and resigned myself to four years of independent study - I almost lopped off the last two years, because the entire project seemed like a complete waste of time. I stayed only because I was being paid to finish.

Of all the projects I have worked on since, adorned by the ups and downs of social life, the current project comes closest to drowning me once again in despair. However, as always, I have structured my understanding of this an opportunity which is self-funding, for its duration. That being said, the permafrost of boredom is only exaggerated now that I play a role of leadership, corporate, social, artistic, what have you, as there is far less time for distractions that there was in highschool. There is no time to learn a new musical instrument. There is time for sleep, and physical exercise, and feeding, and cleanliness (what luxuries, indeed) - just about all other responsibilities are outsourced, which basically keeps me at a living wage. And then there is the endless work of providing counsel, directions, and muscle to two or three departments, composed of staff who are all learning to do certain things for the first time. Or they may be averse to learning, which is where complications may arise.

In any event, the mind gets bored and invents devices to keep itself amused. It thaws out frozen relationships into a putrescent substrate of local biomes - the stench is everywhere. Filth spreads contagiously like a bad habit. The last stores of quality once hopeful now lost. Destroyed by the crisis of chance abominations. So much wealth is gone, never to grow again, until fate turns otherwise. The cries for help go under quickly. Stabbed to death by agitated ears - at full liberty to contain their own freedom. Each aspires to the most that she can achieve. And so when love is absent, limbs are weary, and the vitamins fail to deliver any sort of vitality... ah, well then, we know that we've driven the system to local maxima, some artificial efficiency, which demonstrates that it can go no further. Only time will show a way.

Why do I often find myself in love at bus stops? Because I grew up waiting. Watching the world very closely. And then now and then, there was someone else to watch it with. We walk, and walk, until we reach a place to rest.

On Loss

The problem with already having everything of importance in life... is that as you go about retirement, whiling away the days... the things you use to pass your time... some fools will think about as if these are things you care deeply for.

That is how you lose her. That is how you lose them. That is how loss emerges as a toy.

/

Work has been slow, and I struggle to stay awake in between the business. I still try to write you, daily. Others, with whom speech was not such a common activity, I would wish to write to less often. Some will no longer receive my thoughts - they avoid me.

I have been thinking about the many people in my life who are deeply disturbed by lost and found fancies in their lives. I don't feel such great disturbances. Then I remembered you, and your search for such weightlessness. I hope that whatever you have been doing... leads you closer to such freedom. Maybe when you arrive there, losing each other won't hurt as much, and then you won't avoid our closures.

Closures. Our closeness. Intimacy. It matters not how the last word ends, as much as it matters how we read into it our feelings associated with those words. And the words, they will always mean something different to different people.

/

I was speaking to an aesthete, in the rarefied company of another who is transparent and curious about all things. (Perhaps not all things, but in any event... ) We spoke of love, and our studies, and economics, and ease. There is no easier speech than the muttering of lovers, encroached within each other. Often lovers cannot attain such comforts, but some can, and those are the ones we cling to. Whispers of mundanities wrapped in wetted meat. Reflections on the spectrum of cleanliness observable across a few hours of structured movement. Discussions of what emotions each shift in weight precipitates. Pauses to touch without speaking. The preservation of cadences. On the edges of many modalities, haptics, olfaction, mouthfeel, fingerfall, saltlick, dreamtickle, and sleep.

Alive in a World of Flies :)

People are no mystery. We are lumbering macroscopic events, derived from the information processing minutiae generally referred to as consciousness.

Consciousness' hard problem and the ontological problem are one and the same - the answers... who knows,  who cares: only dreamers.

We see what we can see, and the rest is religion. And then we spend the rest of lives praising our neighbours for their quaint idiocy - finding meaning in animal habits of society, because it's merely easy.

Ho ho ho. Hum hum hum.

No Dreamers

In the grand tradition of no-liturgies...

• No Scrubs
• No Pigeons
• No Hamsters

No DREAMERS

Don't be coming in here looking for soul... or inspiration, or the feels, or delight, or fairy lights. There really isn't any other way to say it. No DREAMERS.

Pick yourself up. Lost? Get a mirror. Get a clue. Get sorted. Fix yourself. Upgrade it.

Still looking for a soul? Can't you find it, in that empty heart? 

Work harder. 

Beautiful Sheep

Two conversations came up today, on beauty and power. At the office, we discussed job applicants who put bits of their modelling portfolio on their CVs (i.e. any photo is unprofessional, on a corporate resume). On Facebook, a friend in the entertainment industry talked about a personal commitment to avoiding prejudice against beautiful people, based solely on the fact that they are beautiful.

I had a common response to both conversations. Beauty is a tool. Extended metaphysical discussion aside, is more than a tool, but it can be used as a tool in many situations. We don't want to judge people based on the tools they carry, but on what they choose to do with those tools. And then, there are the ones who carry tools without knowing what their tools do. This paragraph is really about tools in general.

A person who goes to meeting in presentable visual form is like someone who goes to a meeting with a sheathed but visible knife. They've done their homework, or they're just generally prepared. When someone turns up at a meeting with extraneous preparations, we do not want to judge their intentions, but from the point of view of operational security, we do note the preparations that they have made so far.

Neglecting to note the power of our tools, is neglecting the fact that our tools are tools at all. If you work in fields where beauty matters, you must pay more attention to politics, not less. Otherwise, you're running with the sheep.

Tech is Boring. Long Live Tech.

We're in the middle of the second dot-com boom, and the time in between the first and second booms has given the masses a lot to think about. More than ever, many people are excited about technology, and tech-money, and all the cool shit that passes for content in all the cool forms that pass for media, these days. I'm over-generalising, of course - if I call contemporary content shit, it's just saying that all content ever is shit. At the end of the day, it's just information, pulsing through the meat that we call brains, and the fractals that we call civilisation. What of it? The most interesting thing to me, this evening, is not the tech, or the money, or the people. It's the fact that people are living in a renaissance and many think nothing of it. Take it from a guy who majored in the humanities (because the long arc of art does not find in most men and women beholders concerned). Things are changing really fast right now, I mean, in these few decades. It's not going to change this fast forever. It will slow down. There will be depression. Because humans are inclined to irrational bursts of speed, incurring emotional debt, and paying for it later. Such is life these days. Such is tech. Long live technology. I am just cruising along with it, watching the stars burn through their own meditations. Where to next. We'll find out tomorrow.

Souls Without Dark Corners

It's been accounting forensics week, at the office.

Here's what the quantification of human consciousness taught me about writing computer programs.

Debugging someone else's code is not always, but often a tedious process. But patience allows us to illuminate all dark corners, and to restructure any system without them.

We all start out as information systems authored by systems other than ourselves. But with some study, some systems can acquire the ability to modify themselves completely.

Coffee; Social Media; Technology

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/01/29/blue-bottle-investment/

You have to understand that in the world of old media, pubs and coffeeshops were the social apps of choice for many people. This is a big B2C (retail, inelastic FMCG) play for firms specialising in new media like GOOG and TWTR. Every concentric sphere of marketing communications and customer relationship management for a traditional coffeeshop stands to be improved by simple tweaks utilising new media.

As for the benefits to coffee - automation in non-specialty coffee doesn't improve non-specialty coffee. But increased qualities of robotics (and machine phenomenology) in specialty coffee brewing will soon accelerate adoption and shred costs (probably not prices) over the next decade (because growth potential is high). That would free up the coffee nerds to do more valuable work, like growing, sourcing, and dialling in.

Agnosticism?

Most so-called agnostics appear to be humanists in denial of their religiosity.

The definition of agnosticism is to profess no strong belief, in the evidence of sufficient evidence to support said beliefs.

Longer version: I'm sorta lumping "religion" and "preference" into the same box here, but I do think, fundamentally, that's what a religion is. An unjustified preference. So arguably, agnostics are religious too. Voila. We're all screwed. Shut this group down now.

LOL