Category: crazy ideas

Zen outside the realm of martial arts; outside the realm of zen

Kan: The Intuitive Mind of the Martial Artist discusses one way of thinking, which is applied by masters of far Eastern martial arts, and which is suitable for winning battles.

This way of thinking is optimized to solve the problem of dealing correctly with unpredictable events, when response time is of the essence.

However, most of life, we do not have to deal with such events. We have the time to think with some leisure. Sometimes we are not in a battle situation at all, such as when we are creating a book or a painting or a software application.

In other cases, we are at war but events proceed sufficiently slowly that we can think for several minutes, or even for several days, before making the next move. Business competition is an example of such a war. There is almost always time to convene a meeting of the stakeholders and hash out a plan of action.

I wonder how do zen and other far Eastern philosophies deal with such situations.

Another question, to which I do not recall having seen an answer: every Westerner is familiar with the eerie and unreal feeling, which he has when he tries to grok zen. I wonder how do far Easterners feel when they learn our Western anti-zen philosophy. How do they look at it. With which problems it is better than zen at dealing with.

How did the superego come into existence and survive?

Thoughts after reading the article On awakening the intuitive mind as part of a modern lifestyle:

According to the article, the intuitive, unconstrained mode of thought is probably more productive than the usual constrained mode of thought.

The question is, then, why do we have at all a constrained mode of thought?

I suspect that the answer lies in the pack nature of humans. Humans are similar to dogs in following a leader. Several humans can switch between being leaders and being followers. When they are followers, they are supposed to subordinate their senses and thoughts to those of their leader. They should integrate with the pack way to maximize its effectiveness. The leader alone is supposed to have fully independent thoughts.

The symbolic representation of the above subordination is having in one’s mind the concept of a super-ego, a captain, who gives orders and does not allow the rest of one’s mind to have full freedom to follow wild thoughts.

When an human is alone or is the leader, he is supposed to make full use of his brain. Then the super-ego or the captain are supposed to go offstage until the human is again working in a subordinate role.

Consider the economics of the situation. One human with very free and productive mind can create intellectual output (say, a symphony, an inspiring book, or an ingenious computer program) at rate of say 100 times that of someone whose mind is always in the subordinated state.

However, if a great project needs the intellectual output of 1000 geniuses, then the only practical way to accomplish it is to subordinate the minds of millions of more or less ordinary people to accomplish the great project. It is even impossible to coordinate the workings of those 1000 geniuses without seriously impairing their individual intellectual outputs.

NOTE:
When considering a great project, consider the Manhattan Project, or the project of building a space station capable of housing one million humans.

Question which I asked myself en route to Olamot 2006

As I drove my car from my city of residence to Holon, the city of Olamot 2006, and as I was thinking about Israeli space stations, I came upon the following question.

What modifications are needed on and in Earth in order for it to house 100 billion (1011) humans, without serious interference with other life forms?

A full answer needs to consider the following:

  • Food
  • Fresh water
  • Housing
  • Energy
  • Natural preserves
  • Public health
  • Manufactured goods (such as clothes and entertainment)
  • Enough space per capita to prevent feelings of claustrophobia

Are you a single woman?

If yes, read What Lies Beyond the Haze of Social Conditioning? about what happens if one expands one’s consciousness and transcends above all the trifling and trivial problems, with which normal people preoccupy themselves.

Then, if the article resonates a chord within you, send me an E-mail message. Maybe you’ll find a soulmate.

At the moment, I am eagerly reading several articles from http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/archives/, in which also the above article appears. I did not feel like this since the time I found Steve Litt’s Troubleshooters.Com Web site, which teaches you everything you need to know to be able to troubleshoot malfunctioning equipment.

Agility of small companies <i>vs.</i> inertia of big companies

It has been noticed again and again that small enterprises have agility advantages, which big and established corporations lost as they grew to their present size. Everyone realizes the advantages of small size, but seems to be unable to bring those advantages into a big corporation.

Maybe the following insight can resolve the dilemma.

Let’s consider the examples of building a small house vs. that of building a giant shopping mall.

The project of building a small house is easily-managed. There are few stakeholders to be consulted about designing the house. If plans need to be changed midway, they can easily be changed (of course, assuming that there is budget and the ROI figures are good enough).

On the other hand, when building a giant shopping mall, which involves also rerouting of roads around it, there are several stakeholders. The Electric Company needs to be involved with supplying electricity to the mall, and with re-routing electrical wires around it. Water and sewage systems need to have adequate capacity. Proper mix of shop sizes needs to be determined. Big construction loans need to be negotiated. Firefighting provisions are mandatory. You get the picture.

In the same way, small companies are agile, because they do not have a big network of external stakeholders, who need to be considered when changing corporate policies. On the other hand, if a big corporation wishes to make a small change in its policies, it is liable to find that several of the external stakeholders have an interest in the status quo, and will be damaged by the change.

My conclusion is that a big company may be able to regain the agility of a small business if it can reorganize itself to implement a business version of the Law of Demeter. Each decisionmaker and policy formulator should confine his interactions and influence to his immediate neighbors. Any policy changes should have an effect only on a small number of stakeholders. A stakeholder should be able to buffer another stakeholder, which interacts with it, from changes made by other interacting stakeholders.

If this policy is adopted, then stakeholders can be agile.

This runs against the empire building tendency of top level executives.

The ideal of democracy is relevant to countries, not to groups

Recently I had a discussion with someone, who bemoaned the loss of the principles of equality and democracy in Wikipedia, after cases of disputes and vandalism. I did not feel easy with the principles which he expounded. While democracy and personal liberty are usually related, there are some cases, in which they conflict. The Nazis came to power in Germany through democratic means. The Palestinians elected Hamas in certifiably democratic elections, as evidenced by the fact that Hamas got much less than 97% of the votes.

I was also involved with a nonprofit, which was formed to pursue certain goals. The nonprofit had a member, who used to troll the nonprofit’s mailing lists, and to advocate goals different from the nonprofit’s goals. Eventually he resigned from membership in the nonprofit, but his actions and claims need to be dealt with on a philosophical basis.

One day, I read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy and now I can better express the premises behind the apparent loss of equality and democracy in groups of people formed to achieve a certain objective.

In Wikipedia, once upon a time, everyone was equal. Now, some people are more equal than others. My friend was not happy with this state of affairs. Personally I had no problems with this, because opinions, which oppose those of the “equal-more” people in Wikipedia, can be voiced in the wide Internet – only not necessarily in Wikipedia’s own Web pages.

When setting up a regime in a country, it should respect individual freedoms, and be as democratic as possible as long as it does not conflict individual freedoms. However, inside that country (and even across its borders), one of the freedoms is the freedom of association. It is the freedom of people to form a group to achieve a goal desirable by them (as long as it does not violate individual freedoms).

However! Once a group has been formed, if it has more than few tens of people, it needs some sort of government. It needs to be able to keep out people, who are opposed to the goal of the group’s organizers. It needs a mechanism for dispute resolution, to resolve disputes among people who agree about the ends but argue about the appropriate means for attaining those ends. It needs a mechanism for delegating certain tasks and responsibilities from all group’s members to some members, so that other members can concentrate upon other tasks (delegated to them).

All those mechanisms together conspire to discriminate among insiders and outsiders. Those people, who support the group’s goal, are insiders. People, who oppose the group’s goal or are ambivalent about it, are outsiders. All serious groups discriminate among them.

The dispute resolution and delegation mechanisms have the result of stratifying the group. Some people become leaders and make decisions in behalf of the entire group. Then equality among the group’s members gets lost.

BUT! If the group was properly formed, is properly managed, and its members understand the philosophy and the goals – the group achieves its goal. The group’s major purpose was not to practice democracy and equality. The group’s purpose was to achieve the goal, for whose attainment it was formed.

While acting inside the group, the personal freedoms of the group’s members are subordinated to the group’s goal. On the other hand, if they ever feel uncomfortable with the group, they are free to leave it any time (a group, which does not allow its members to leave it, is or should be illegal). Therefore this is not a real loss of freedom.

How to deal with antisemite professors

Terrorism and tenure is based upon an interview with David Horowitz, who wrote a new book, “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.”

He found professors, who support Marxism, anti-semitism, destruction of Israel, terrorists, and various crackpot conspiracy theories.

The big question is how to deal with those professors while preserving the values of academic freedom, freedom of expression, nourishing new ideas which go against the established opinions? How to avoid imposition of intellectually stifling censorship? How to prevent those professors from participating in tenure-granting committees? Who decides which opinions are objectionable and should be censored?

One possible solution, proposed in the interview, is to publicize those professors’ opinions and embarrass them. The drawback is that also other unorthodox opinions, which are not as politically dangerous, and are worthy of scientific research (such as cold fusion or antigravity devices), are subject to this risk.

A better solution may be to hold those professors to the principles of academic freedom.
It stands to reason that an anti-semite professor would not allow Jewish students and academics to gain tenure in his department, if he is in control of its admission and/or tenure setting committees. He would not encourage people having opposite opinions to come to his department as guest researchers or to lecture about their anti-anti-semite research.

So, it may be a good idea to set up international review boards (more than one board, and they are to operate independently) which review admission, tenure, research funding and guest lectureship policies in departments controlled by professors from the above list. Those review boards would then publicize their findings of the degree of adherence of those professors to the principles of academic freedom. Any professor found not to practice the principles of academic freedom, can be stripped of protection granted him by the same principles of academic freedom.

It also stands to reason that because those professors boycott academicians with opposite opinions, the quality of their scientific research is lower.

Professors with dangerous opinions, but who strictly adhere to the principles of academic freedom, should be left alone. The quality of their research can be relied upon, because they are not afraid to be confronted by people with opposite opinions, they can defend their findings (obnoxious as they can be) by objective evidence, and allow their students to hold opposite opinions as long as those students can defend their opinions using the scientific method. This would protect, for example, professors who support evolution in a Creationist (or Intelligent Design or FSM) county; or professors, who support the rights of homosexuals in an anti-homosexual country.

What about professors, who are true scientists in one area of endeavor (such as physics) but hold dangerous opinions in another area of endeavor (like an anti-semite nuclear physicist, say)? If they discriminate against, say, Jewish students and colleagues, then by definition the quality of their research is a bit lower, because they suppress opinions of people only because of irrelevant labels.

Controlling your environment makes your happy

According to Joel, the more you control your environment and the more things just work the way you expect them to, the more you are happy. He paraphrases Dr. Martin E. P. Seligman as follows – a great deal of depression grows out of a feeling of helplessness: the feeling that you cannot control your environment.

Political implications:

  • People are happiest in countries which follow the principles of free market with low-profile socialist policies. Socialist policies work best when they strive to insure people against risks, which they cannot control themselves.
  • There is high suicide rate of youths in very socialist countries, like Scandinavian countries, because of violation of the above principle. They are not in control of their lives and are not held responsible for their lives.
  • Moslems say “everything is from Allah”, abdicating control over their lives. Then they glorify the explosive belt method of committing suicide.

How to suppress display of the Israeli flag in Israel

According to a news item, the government is planning to impose regulations about the proper way to display and handle the Israeli flag, in the name of paying it respect as a national symbol.

The only consequence of those very strict regulations will be that several Israelis will cease displaying the Israeli flag.

There is also the issue of Freedom of Expression, which is celebrated by ceremonially burning one’s country flag.

(Before anyone calls for my arrest:
The ideal ceremony for celebrating Freedom of Expression is to prepare two identical flags. One flag will be displayed proudly, to symbolize pride in one’s country which is free, strong and confident to allow Freedom of Expression; and the other flag will be burned.)