Software Developer Life

Goodbye Blogger. Hello Medium.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 13:24:00 +0000

Further blog posts will be on my sofdevlife medium account

The Intention Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 16 Sep 2017 19:36:00 +0000

The end of corporatism. How net heads will help society on creating smart and easy to use tools for managing your personal data. An end for the corporate having the upper hand of controlling and planning our customer journey and a beginning for the individual to show their intention.

You may be confused on the difference between net heads and net bells. It is very straightforward. Net-heads enables us on becoming more productive members of society. Instead of making a profit from a product, they created free useful products so everyone could add more value than without. Net-bells, in contrast, are dogs wagging their tails hoping their master will give them a treat. Net-hands, on the other hand, care about their integrity and providing services without gimmicks. It is the net-heads that provided the Linux environment system and the Internet protocols that we use today. We take for granted on the flexibility of the systems we use and how we connect with each other. Most of the systems that operate today run under Linux and open source software. There is a huge negligence from the community and are seriously underfunded for its contribution value. Quoting from the report "Roads And Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure", after the Heartbleed bug, Marquess took to the Internet to make an impassioned public plea for funding stating

These guys don’t work on OpenSSL for money. They don’t do it for fame. They do it out of pride in craftsmanship and the responsibility for something they believe in. There should be at least a half-dozen full-time OpenSSL team members, not just one, able to concentrate on the care and feeding of OpenSSL without having to hustle commercial work.

This giving is the same giving as a couple bringing offsprings to our world. They do this act of goodness without expecting something back as a reward. Similarly, it is no wonder Steve Jobs named one of his computer projects as Lisa, which was the name of her real daughter. These projects are like their own little babies and a deep care is taken for them in order for them to become valuable and useful assets through our society. It is thanks to those pioneers and builders that we were able to horizontally spread so everyone is able to enjoy a better customer experience. With big companies like Google and Facebook, we have:

The Android, an open operating system for mobile devices.
Several open source development tools that were used internally from those companies.

A lot of innovation related to customer experience that is fairly new comes at a great cost. The time of research, designing, gathering the resources, is not an easy task. Take, for instance, Apple, which tries to provide revolutionary forms of customer experience vertically through innovative products that only a few and the rich can afford. Nevertheless, we should try to optimize existing processes that in today's world are perceived as costly. However, we should not cling on those processes once they are efficient enough. Optimizing existing innovations is like working with a kettle. When the water boils enough, there is a whistle that says enough is enough and we need to move on improving the next existing innovations that are not affordable. In other words, we have to be every so often vertical as well.

We have to be Steve Jobs and say we can do better and even better than what our customer experience could be. This community so far created a set of builders that manifested the world where each of us had a better customer experience. However, let us admit one thing for sure: A need for better customer experience is overestimated. A need for a society with more customers showing their intentions is underestimated. We need a new Steve Jobs that focuses on better customer intent instead of a better customer experience. We need leaders that drive the car instead of builders that build a car. We need to incorporate righteousness not only by providing better customer experience, but to keep everyone have a conscious voice that they are able not only to speak it but to navigate it and reach it. Where instead all of the planning is done by corporations, individuals play not only an influential role but are the ones that initiate the pivots for where corporations have to head next. This in part requires us to change our mindset from ones that focus on providing only a better customer experience to a one that takes accountability that all of us can a have a more meaningful role than what we take part of today. This dance has been one where corporations that was forced and never apologized when they stepped over our shoes and it has to be changed to a one where each dance has the respect of the sensitivities of our partners.

Society today is plagued with customers that do not have intent. Instead of customers with intent, we have passive consumers. In the online Recode article "The Rise of Data Natives", there is a trend where Data Natives (the next generation of society after the "Digital Natives") on a Store of Starbucks not only want to use the Starbucks app but also "want" the app to "know" their favorite drinks — and when to suggest a new one. It seems our next generation want an application that is customer-centric instead of customer-driven. We are further away than original before for the average individual bringing up their own intent explicitly. If we do not provide the tools that enable a two-way road where also the average individual can express their own intent (CRM, I am talking to you), the more corporations will do all the planning for us. In order for setting the other sideline of the road, we need to allow each individual to have its own personal data store that is very responsive through API on taking and accepting requests. That initiative is called VRM. In a world where we live with the internet of things and more mobile technologies, this is starting to become an infrastructure that is more enabling than ever before. The book discusses the many initiatives that have gone through on providing this system of thought where the customer can be reached instead of being captivated. With machine learning tools that are handed to the few that derive biases of our own intentions, to little to no liabilities when our personal data is misused and breached, to providing inaccurate information of our self and limiting the choices of our preferences to only the most popular ones, there is more a need than ever for the individual to step in and have a side version of their own demands. With how current online agreements are a contract of adhesion, there is no much the individual can do to this day.

This has to be flipped one day and humbly speaking, there are four pillars if done properly can make the individual exponentially a more trusting entity than a corporation. The author says that there is a lot of MLOTT (Money Left On The Table) where people can give to others without a second thought whenever they appreciate a specific service. But I begged to differ, as I know for the fact that most do not have a lot of money left on the table because of the following reasons:

Make Sure People Are Healthy: We need to make the commitment where people prioritize their health issues and keep their bodies straight and fit to prevent the inevitable. After all, an ounce of prevention is a pound of cure. I think people will not have clear intents when their bodies preoccupy them (painkillers are not the ultimate solution).
Make Sure People Are Merited By Value: We live today in disrupting times where Artificial Intelligence is removing those mundane jobs that can be replaced with computers. In the online HBR cover story "Inside Facebook's AI workshop", Artificial intelligence is not used anymore only by experts of the field, but your average Joe employee, by making the user interface of those AI solutions simple. For this reason, we have to keep people ahead of the curve on bringing value to society before they fall in a deep hole. For people who have families and others to take care of, this weight is even further for them to take themselves back on their own two feet. If people can barely pay their next bills, not due to extravagant lifestyle choices, then how can we assume what they can offer when they can't keep up with themselves?
Make Sure They Do Micro Accounting: A lot of the stuff that we use and buy as a service we seem worthy may not be worthy of the actual value. I think being accountable on investing in products and services that will add value to the long-term is a step that people should already start making it as a habit. It will eventually be a cornerstone habit for people actually putting money on the table at the right place.
Make Sure They Have a Growth Mindset and a deep care how our brain works: If the physical constraints are lifted from the above three, then according to Maslow's Pyramid, they have the ability to self-actualize. But it's best we self-actualize in a way where we all live in harmony instead of stepping others in order to reach the top. In that sense, we won't be any different than what corporations do these days. Education focuses a lot on giving us a foundation on how to be able to survive with a technical field of our choice in our society instead of how to be a morally ethical good being with the rest of the members of our community. This was part optional for the education system to teach because we so far lived a life where we most were responsible to follow the status quo and be passive. In the intention economy, this will not be an option, it will be mandatory for everyone to have some form of good intent, or otherwise, without good intent, the wheels won't keep rolling.

Please read the book The Intention Economy by Doc Searls, as this is only one out of the few authors that go beyond the Advertimania we have today for improving our own customer experience and unearthing our customer intent in order to keep the books between demand and supply on balance. The only reason I gave it four stars is because this book is very open-ended that needs you to take the time to look at the many references the author goes through in order to have a more better clear picture. Other than that, it is very well organized and provides as much historical background to understand how we ended up in this current situation mess besides all the good intentions the founders of the internet envisioned.

My last parting words are that there are supporting movements for individuals that have lost their time spent by the influences of corporations. Tristan Harris, behind the movement "Time Well Spent", discusses in of his 2017 Ted Talks "How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day" on the different tactics companies use on taking most of the attention from you. Taking away of our attention may not be harmful, but it is definitely psychological. If the person submits their time to others than spending something more purposeful, we are decreasing the value of what each individual is worth, stagnating the economy on the long term. So if you care about the world where people can take their own small ships and traverse their own adventures rather others letting them do the handling for them, let's make the Intention Economy a reality in order to have a more accurate model of the supply and demand market.

The internet is free
But our data is not free
It is not a "chance"
It is "guaranteed"
One day, we will definitely flip
That card with the words engraved:
"Get Out Of Jail, Free"
To use or not to use the card?
Time to make the switch

Time Well Spent

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 20:07:00 +0000

In the past, we were limited to our own physical vision.

Today:
1. The accessibility of the internet has penetrated to most of our world [1]
2. The amount of internet bandwidth capacity has reached to a point where we can blur the lines between real and digital life [2]

We cannot deny that we live in times that are better than ever before on creating new opportunities to our self. Instead of being constrained to our current physical location, we have the ability to gain insights and bring influence to anyone anywhere in the world.

We are discovering today one thing that we were in denial, but cannot be in denial anymore: human nature has the choice to not run the pedestal of improving our world or move the pedestal of improving our world. Besides all the bumps we went through, we fortunately, by the mercy of our minds on making our world a better place, made great strides on making people more connected and expressive.

The next step of our mission is how to make people more complete. In this world, most of us, we feel that we do not have complete control of the ship that we are on board, that our fate was not chosen by our own will, but by picking a ship whose captain we most like, for after all, would we be good accountable captains when the responsibility was granted to us?

This is a mission that few will take, and even fewer will take if we still treat people as passive consumers and professionals only merited by skill. The world will have a lot of people that will provide basic needs by playing the role of a passive consumer and many enough on creating the basic infrastructure as the role of builders, but only very few will be shaping and lifting the world as the role of an inventor.

Builders and passive consumers take actions that have no liability because they are not the ones that choose the destination where the ship goes. It is a very safe path to choose, but at the same time, these people cannot be trusted to run the wheels for big destinations, for they do not have the competency to keep the ship afloat for long. In contrast, we need to give people training wheels on running small ships on their own for short trips before they are able to get challenged with bigger ones.

I think people taking control and taking action on improving our world instead of just being a member of our world will be a big paradigm shift in how we view ourselves and others. For we can always give an excuse and blame if we follow orders from a captain that lead us to a road astray that was away from our expectations, but we cannot escape on the choices we make and how we react and adapt to them when we become in charge of running the ship. Then, at that moment, we will be more focus on improving our own self instead of expecting others to take us to our ultimate destination. Before, only a few had a moral compass for improving themselves. Now, more will have accessibility to that compass for striving a great fortune to their inner self.

People will learn a lot of elements when they start improving the world: They will learn that expectations cannot be too lofty. Expectations cannot be redeemed in an instant. It requires a lot of steps before we can reach to our ultimate destination and we have to be disciplined on keeping running the pedestal through that destination. Second, we will be better at not underestimating and overestimating things. A lot of the stuff that we use and buy as a service we seem worthy may not be worthy of the actual value. I think being accountable on investing on products and services that will add value to the long term is a step that people should already start making it as a habit. It will eventually be a cornerstone habit for keeping our planet clean and avoid climate change.

People have a choice now to become accountable. There is and will be more technology for people to become more accountable. However, we cannot wait for too long. It seems people are asking for bad habits and technology is feeding it in the same format smoking companies profited from it. When scientific evidence shows that smoking caused lung cancer, it was not taken into account because the effects did not become on a grand scale. Only after decades when a lot of people already suffered from its effects, did it became conclusive. And even when it became conclusive, people, especially the youth, were on a smoking spree. When people have a choice and they do not choose the good path then we do not have any other choice other than to regulate it: In most developed countries, we don't allow people to smoke indoors, hotels and cafeterias have their non-smoking spaces and we even have cigarette packages with ugly images for the side effects of smoking where you have to even pay higher taxes from the rest. We do not want people to be forced in doing the right thing, but if they do not, for the sake and mercy of humanity as a species, we do not have any other choice but to influence them to do the right thing.

Now, we may not be harming people physically, but we are influencing their attention. It may not be physical, but it is psychological. If the path they do deviates the person to innovate, we are decreasing the value of what each individual is worth, stagnating the economy on the long term. If the path they do aligns with what they want to innovate, it increases the value of each individual is worth, increasing the economy in the long term.

There is a lot of friction for people to innovate these days, especially if you are not at a young age and have to take care of your family or health. We should not be too afraid of playing small risks on finding our own sense of morality by taking a small journey on making our world a better place through trial and error, for when the time comes when we depart to this world, how will we know that we were good moral characters in the world in the end if we didn't experience doing it in the first place? The other problem is that the education system (even the digital one) focuses too much on placing people to build stuff instead to innovate.

There are a lot of companies that give back to the world. Allocating that giving properly to the right people can expand their capacity on giving back to the world, accelerating our growth and diversity. However, a company is more whole if it both gives and teaches people how to be better role models of society. It is similar to how companies hire people: smart companies do not hire people with their skills alone, they hire also if they are a good cultural fit or not. Similarly, teaching people to be better role models will be the culture fit for humans bonding with earth to transform our world into a paradise.

Companies may not choose to disrupt themselves if it does not affect their business. We cannot expect a better social world from others if they do not care as much as we do. So if you care about the world where people can take their own small ships and traverse their own adventures rather others letting them do the handling for them, join the movement Time Well Spent. Although we live in a world where there is a lot of clutter of information that must become relevant to us, we lack more on prioritizing our free time with correct expectations on the daily challenges we personally live. We need technology that solves the problem of us being more active & conscious of how our brain responds to time to get the best for me and others. Planning our time that adds best value will be the new revolution in the next 100 years. Joining the movement has a chance of making a difference on whether we will have more engaging technological products that engage our life on taking more risks and less staying idle as passive consumers.

Thanks for reading.

[1] Thanks to the low cost of mobile phones, despite political instabilities and monopolies of the physical infrastructure, a lot of developing countries were able to afford access to the internet and gain the benefits that it could offer.
[2] At the time of writing, we have devices that have 4k video resolution, 360-degree cameras, and early stages of virtual reality. Several countries provide an internet subscription to its users that handle the bandwidth capacity on streaming through these devices.

My Experience With Hemorrhoids And Migraines

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 02 Apr 2017 06:47:00 +0000

Is Stress The Main Problem?

Have you ever had migraines or hemorrhoids? Well, Marvin Grossberg and Mia Fey will let you know they have one! Although they are fictional characters in a courtroom trial from a visual novel adventure video game, we all know how stressful a job of an attorney is. We attribute migraines and hemorrhoids symptoms being aggravated by stress. In addition, lifestyle habits that keep us overweight (Grossberg BMI can be categorized as overweight) and quick temper (Throughout the game, Mia Fey is not your most anal character, but will definitely want you to keep things organized or else) can play a secondary role why you have migraines and hemorrhoids in the first place. Speaking about courtroom trials, it is definitely stressful going with testimonies that contradict with evidence. Similarly, when you work in a white collar job, you have people with different type of business reports that print different results for the same definitions. You have to cross-examine and find out the key piece evidence that makes that contradiction in the first place. A white collar job is no different than a detective saying out loud "There is only one source of truth!". Not to mention, your co-workers may seem that they are in a quick hurry on fixing this thing. Events like these are like a car accident within the main highway, leaving a traffic jam for the rest of the drivers. Conclusively, stressful experiences abound for both your average lawyer and white collar worker.

But is stress the actual cause? And is lifestyle changes and meditation the only way to remedy the effect? Although they can be, my experiences with migraines and hemorrhoids were different. Fortunately, the experiences that I had so far with a migraine and hemorrhoids were very mild. For those people who have severe conditions with migraines or hemorrhoids, it is best to consult a doctor.

Migraines - That throbbing sensation in your head

When disaster strikes, the helmet will come to save the day.

Most people acquire migraines after they go into an accident. Mine was just your common bike accident. Unfortunately, I didn't wear a helmet at that time. Although I wear a helmet regularly when I bike, I was too confident that I did not need one as I was only going for a basic stroll while doing my normal errands. Nevertheless, the chances of getting injured that day were very high as I was carelessly juggling things by typing messages on my smartphone in my left hand while strolling my bike slowly in the sidewalks of a park. It was my most careless mistake I did ever in my life and I only did it because someone on the other side of the phone was very attentive on getting a response to me over a specific matter. Suddenly, I got a surprise. One of the sidewalk ramps was unusual from the rest I usually encounter. The slope was steep from the rest of them. It was almost like the shape of a spoon. Suddenly, I felt a rush of acceleration from my bike and it was very hard to control it with only one hand. I think I made it worse by hitting hard the brakes immediately after that. Pushing the brakes pulled my body out from the bike, floating forwards in mid-air. Both my body and forehead made an impact on the concrete asphalt. The force of my body was strong enough that my head had to still grind the concrete asphalt road until I got to a complete stop. My forehead was bleeding from the grind. I went to a local restaurant nearby and they voluntary offered me tissues and other first aid kits to clean up the mess on my forehead.

Days forward and I started to have some mild symptoms from the accident. I started to feel disoriented on occasions. Thankfully, that disorientation slipped away after a while. However, weeks later from the accident, I started to have a mild throbbing pain in my head from time to time. And it did not seem that doing nothing would go away over time. I went to a doctor and explained the situation of my accident. I was kind of worried and wanted to know the facts straight whether my accident had any impact on the symptoms I recently had. Maybe an X-Ray could help to diagnose the problem. However, the science of how the brain works to this day in the medical industry is still a mystery. The benefits over the cost of doing an X-Ray to the brain does not give much valuable information as for when doing an X-Ray to your teeth. After all, there are no much practical applications in the fields of neurology. For further enlightenment, you can get a glimpse how the medical industry has done so much slow progress on tackling brain deficiencies by watching the movie Concussion. For many years, it was neglected that multiple head impacts, such as in a game of American Football, were the main cause of the several mental disorders that were diagnosed by Athletes (I do have some personal development notes about that in one of my past blog posts). So like any traditional practitioner would do in our current situation and given my symptoms were very mild, they assured me to be less worried about it unless my symptoms ever got worse. However, some startups, such as Neuralink, are disrupting the industry by finding ways on alleviating the symptoms of dangerous and chronic medical conditions in the brain, such as Parkinson Disease.

I learned a lot from my accident. Besides playing it safe, bike taught me to pay more attention to my surroundings, especially blind spots.

Remedies

1. Not focusing too much on the screen

Spend less time on the screen to avoid getting disoriented

This is not a very easy task if in your daily workplace you have to face the screen all the time. If you cannot avoid facing the screen in your workplace, try to avoid facing the screen after your work. Limit the things that you could do regularly before, such as watching a movie, playing a video game, and surfing the web. Besides screen time gets you overloaded with too much information to process, movies and games you were comfortable with may start to disorient you with its rapid motion. For the first few months, I tried to stroll out to the malls and stores, leaving the video games I used to play for another time.

2. Doing a haircut

Spot the difference

For those who keep their hair long, a hair cut may kind of help. Actually, doing hair cut often for keeping my hair short kept my migraines at bay. Besides lifting off some weight from your head, it helps the skin of your head get more oxygen.

3. Sleeping enough

This is straightforward and important. If you do not sleep, your body will not replenish to its full potential. That includes your head.

Hemorrhoids - The Harlem Shake that is going from behind

I never knew what hemorrhoid actually was until I got one. I thought that I did the best hygiene, diet, and toilet practices for keeping my digestive system in shape. However, something was itching on my back and I did not know what it was. I did not notice I missed some corners after I got diagnosed from a doctor that I had hemorrhoid. Hemorrhoids may be the next irritating thing after migraines and they may get worse the more you neglect and do not treat them properly. Hemorrhoid gets worse the more irritation it gets from friction and pressure from the body. I had to find ways to reduce the irritation.

Remedies

1. Regular hygiene and hemorrhoid positioning

The way I cleaned my back was not thorough enough. During a shower, most of us clean our back in the laziest way possible. Try to find a positioning wide enough that cleans your back properly and thoroughly. Hygiene is very important and it keeps the itchiness at bay.

In addition, hemorrhoid may get irritated from the pressure from the body. Try to position hemorrhoid in a place where it gets less pressure from the body. Tucking it in helped me in the long run.

2. Wet wipes

Buy a stack. Take one along with you.

After going to the toilet, you should clean yourself in the shower instead of wiping it off with toilet paper. Sometimes that is not possible because you are in a workplace environment. Instead, buy some wet wipes that will not irritate your hemorrhoid. This helped me tremendously from having further hiccups of my hemorrhoid being irritated from the use of toilet paper. Buy a stack of them and keep them on your desk and take one along with you whenever you go to the toilet.

3. Toilet and diet habits

The oil of the digestive system: Blending some fruit with probiotic yogurt.

The last important thing is your toilet and diet habits. I used to force myself going to the toilet instead of going only when I had the urge to and I thought that was OK. I thought that as long as I could do potty with the use of some force, I kept my digestive system in shape and I thought that was OK.

Although it is very healthy going to the potty, it is even healthier if you can go to potty with the least force. The more force you use, the more marginal gains exist on improving your toilet and diet practices. It may be one of the reasons why you have hemorrhoid in the first place. For toilet practices, try to see if you can go to the toilet whenever you have the urge to rather than preparing ahead of time or delaying it for later. For diet practices, try to eat as much fiber and probiotics as possible for keeping your digestive system in shape. You can include in your diet some granola bars that punch a lot of fiber and probiotic yogurt. I started eating once a week some probiotic yogurt with fruits. I can feel my digestive system being much better ever since.

New Vlogcast On Improving Our Economy Better

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Mar 2017 16:36:00 +0000

Hey Everybody. Long Time No See.

It has been a while since I posted on this blog. I finished writing my personal development portfolio #selfdevboostermentalmaptour. It is based on several books that we discussed in this blog.

Focusing On FinTech And Health Tech

My ambitions before was to create the next social network. However, I sense we have not done enough work on improving our own self before we can improve and help others. The quality is not there yet. We need to achieve a lot of intermediate steps before we are able to reach to that ambition in the first place. It is like the game of civilization. In order to advance on our ideal social network, it requires people to be able to manage themselves. Therefore, people managing their resources and health with logic by the applications of FinTech and Health Tech will get us closer to the goal of attaining humans possessing of better qualities to our society. Conclusively, this blog will focus on topics related to FinTech and Health Tech. I discuss the importance of FinTech and Health Tech in the video below

Coming Soon

It is time to hit the rubber on the road. Join me as I bike stroll while talking on better ways of making our economy better: From recycling resources to incorporating FinTech and Health Tech in our personal life.

One Activity. Three Benefits to myself.

Brainstorming on our present situation to recalibrate and get motivated in the current trending domains of our society.
Improving my speech skills.
Getting some essential exercise.

The Grand Tour Of Our Present Economy

Starring Cycler softdevlife

Warping Between Space & Time

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 25 Dec 2016 21:09:00 +0000

It has been quite some time since I posted on this blog. The main reason for that is I planned to distract myself with my current obsession warping myself too much in time in order to be able to adjust myself be more oriented with space. The words time and space are defined here based on our perception. When we take things in an abstract way, we live in the Perceiver/Teacher world where there are no constraints in time, but space is restricted. For instance, a "word" in our perception can belong to only one definition, it cannot belong to two definitions, but each person can have its own different definition for the same word. Then it is quite possible that each person will create their own set of values and beliefs with the same set of words by assigning each word a different meaning (or space) to allocate with. What matters when we speak with people is not the words that people say, but what meaning these words define behind. Those same words can direct us to a better or worse space analogous to the real world safe and not so nice neighborhoods. Then it is very important the model (or mental map) we have in our mind to be driven by something that is better not only for our own end (as that will ultimately be biased as it distorts what is generally good) but to work in harmony and in order with the fractal world we live in (a nice neighborhood is much better than just a nice house). My view is that people should focus on making the world a better place than just focusing too narrowly on a specific domain that we slip the externalizations that come from it. I am pretty sure that the average person who voluntarily work in open source or similar projects these days, as well people who did scientific breakthroughs and advances in manufacturing and technology in the past could have done so for the wrong motivations (as much as the student who gets a degree for the sake of the degree rather from the knowledge gathered), but I am pretty sure all companies, organizations, and institutions start with the good will of making something better for the world instead of the bottom line of making profit for the sake of recognition and fame. So for that reason, what we set as a destination is very important. To some degree, we have to become ultimately at some point very obsessed with it in order to gain faith from it. I think that is the easiest way for an idea to get stuck in our head so no matter the pressure we get from others, it will still remain stuck in our head (In other words, it remains solid). However, that is just one step of the whole process, yet an important one, as if we drive to the wrong location, it will feel like a mid-life crisis. The next step is warping more into space. And warping in space has a different frame of looking at things than how we looked at them before (again, I have to re-iterate that the previous way of looking at things, from a time perspective, is very important. It is learning the building blocks to express ourselves, like a kid learning its own alphabet).

An obsession is kind of a very hard thing to get out of the mind. To say the least, it is kind of hard to change an attitude if all your activities you did in the past relate to your past obsession. Definitely, this is how the Mercy mind works in some way. The Mercy mind takes with the very importance the recent actions and experiences the individual experienced within space. In order to not be obsessed with it, you have to avoid those experiences (believe me, a Mercy person by default is very good at using the best strategies for "avoiding" painful experiences). However, we avoid those habits and experiences not for suppressing them, but in our dearest motivation to bring a more balanced mind where we don't let our minds be too dominated into time, but also be dominated in space as well (in other words, for each cognitive style to have its own space to express itself). This will result in past experiences to become diluted, allowing us for more flexibility with our attitude to focus more on other areas we haven't explored yet. My insights about the story allegory of the cave explain that well. Briefly, I was focused too much on a local minimum, when there was a better global minimum that I blindly couldn't see as I was trapped with most of my recent actions.

Sometimes obsessions will not reach us to our best destination.

It makes us narrow-minded with a tunnel vision.

I reach enough faith after reading so many psychological and self-help books that are popular, books that people and society agree and "like" with 5-star reviews, that support the statements of mental symmetry, that I cannot find anything else that it can contest against it. Of course, the song of this faith that proclaims is not from rose-colored glasses, but what matters is that it does "fit" with our current situation and those ideas can help us construct a better future. Even the director of applied machine learning at facebook tells that the future of AI requires knowledge of neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy and even ethics aside only from machine learning and statistics that dominates much these days. In addition, technical specialization is becoming too mature that there is no much more supply for people to engineer on any deep know-how on how to manage resources efficiently. Instead, we have more supply on how people will use existing building blocks to form a better business domain for the employer they are working termed as FINDEV according to this article. Essentially, more developers will involve and tackle in the decisions and ethics behind any project. Most developers will have fewer chances on focusing only on the technical stuff like an old-time hacker used to be. For that reason, subjects like ethics and philosophy are important, for if we don't pay too much attention to them now, we may reach a dead end. The steps of the destination I want to go is fruitless if I cannot give a general tour to you to the internals of this ship that is designed to handle any waves that can withstand to our destination. A tour is a tour, it is not a deep know how or a source to blindly be in faith, as you can tinker around adding and removing stuff on anything that "fits" with the general message of the destination we are heading. That is the reason after I finished writing some sort of "dissertation" about mental symmetry, I dedicated an abstract of that dissertation as a tour called #selfdevboostermentalmaptour. It is a set of 12 small essays discussing the mental map that I follow which mainly all tie in a direct or an indirect way to the theory of mental symmetry (list bellow along with the main extracted sources taken):

1. The Challenges Of Being Empowering ("Modern Man" by I.M. Panagiotopoulos extracted from 2014 National University Entrance Exams in Greece)
2. Empowering Trait: Psychological Safety in Teams (Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg)
3. Executive Paradox and Mental Symmetry Diagram (Executive Paradox by David G. Jensen)
4. Meeting Tasks in Executive Paradox (derived from my past experiences and my on views of how the economy of Greece was handled)
5. Demystifying the gender gap (The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine)
6. Channels of communication: Writing (derived mainly from my business law classes)
7. Introduction to Mental Networks & Neural Networks (supplementing Clean Language by Judy Rees for understanding Teacher Mental Networks)
8. Tools For Creating Model In Our Minds (derived from the main Three Inputs Of Learning I learned as a tutor)
9. Feedback and Our Obsessions (Feedback Revolution by Peter McLaughlin)
10. A philosophical framework: An introduction to cognitive styles (All Sorts of People: Ordered Complexity by Lane Friesen)
11. A theological framework: Setting our minds not for short term success, but for the ideal (Natural Cognitive Theology by Lorin Friesen)
12. Other important readings (Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhhig, Stopping the noise in your head by Dr. Reid Wilson)

Without this tour, I feel that I would have left most people lost, as an adult knows how easy it is to write a sentence, but for a baby, it will be lost in the mud, as it does not have the starting building blocks to even express even the basic things in life. To get a full overview of the whole subject in the matter, I created a snapshot of the mental map I created. However, I still felt that article was too much for someone to read, and hence, I created a tour so anyone can have an easier access on comprehending the main message that I am trying to communicate. I am creating more bridges for people to understand the message.

However, like I said at the start of this blog, this is just one segment of the whole journey. I think anyone has to cross that path first, but they should not be stuck on this path once they already have strong faith on it. At that point, it requires spending more time warping into space instead. In space, the things are mirrored. We can be in any space, but our time is limited. We cannot do all the actions we envision in our world. For that reason, we have to prioritize which actions are the most important for us to do. We have to sacrifice some of the stuff we like which don't get us closer to the mental map we envision. After all, our happiness will blossom if our actions get closer to what we envision deep into our mental map (and hopefully it is not a short term one that ends us in disappointment, but one with long-term joy). Discarding our goals for substitutes that don't directly touch on what we want to accomplish or procrastinate on it can lead to chronic depression. Research suggests that chronic depression is one of the factors an individual from their own volition acquires mental diseases, such as Parkinson Disease.

To be honest to myself, that leaves me ahead to read "Stopping the noise in your head" by Dr. Reid Wilson (You can read my review of Stopping the noise in your head in order to understand a brief summary of the book before reading on). This book seems that it strikes more closely on changing perspectives between space and time instead of trying to assume there is no problem at all. Although this may sound like I am a person with anxiety, you have to understand the definition of what anxiety really means. Generally speaking, anxiety is an irrational fear of a perceived threat. For example, a person that wants to do something bold in their life ends up to not doing it because of generalizations of the outcome having bad results. Perceiver mode is really good at not letting an idea to run its own course. It will find all the mistakes a theory (=Teacher mode) has to the point it requires endless refinements to it before it can properly rub the wheels to the road. In some sense it gives us worry so much, that it dominates the rest of the mind, that it does more harm than good, letting that great idea we have in our heart get dissolved thanks to Perceiver mode giving us a good reason to procrastinate on it and substitute it with something more safe that can still charm us but very sure not for so very long. Believe it or not, just because we didn't check ourselves, doesn't mean we are fine, as most of us have some psychological problem in our heads that we are very good at covering it up and be in denial at it. It is good to be honest with our self before it is too late with what we do with our minds to the point it becomes irreversible later on. I think this book will help me. I will remove any noise from this book and get the good stuff it covers and may write a summary of what I learned about it later on.

Being honest myself, I need to take a read on this to tackle my deepest aspirations more effectively

So after finishing reading that book, my goals for the upcoming years is to dedicate more time on space, to myself, in this limited time, on this present moment that time ticks on, to be back on the engine as I used to be. However, my focus in this second visit is to find new habits that align with the mental map I created. For now, as FINDEV comes on the horizon, I have found that a focus on learning software-wise on how to develop fast with tools that have the traits of being cheap, flexible, and accessible as a worthwhile investment in the end in order to have more ample time on what business domain problems I want to tackle with. Last but not least, I have some interests as a hobby of what business domains I am interested, such as creating the next social network that helps people contribute to society with the least fuss, understand the obsessions (in a positive way) each person has, assist others clearing cognitive dissonance, a platform that solves problems instead of creating more problems, an attitude where people view others in terms of their potential to personal growth instead as a dead end. I think no business domain exists yet that addresses those problems in a bold way, but somebody has to, in order to avoid this foggy life where every person we meet we cover it up with general formalities like nothing has happened. People should not make relationships based on status and appearances most people these days end up to, but instead of what the character each represents that can assist them off (instead of using them) along with their strength obsessions they carry. There are many ideas that I have for this next social network. So I think I will start to cook some ideas that I have thought and on any further brainstorms I do later on.

The goals I set derive from the idea that if the idea of god really exists, then we live in a world as machine learners. How we treat machine learning to computers may apply to us as well. As we apply machine learning to our world, not all instances we create end up to be useful models. That is because they did not behave as we planned them to do under unsupervised learning. With a bible that exists along with the events of history that reflect the bible, with the contents of the bible discussing frequently the personal development and transformation of our childish mindset from different perspectives, it is kind of hard to dismiss the idea we are machine learners under unsupervised learning on a transformation plan and not test the waters if it is true or not. And of all ideas that try to bring a general purpose to the world, it is the only idea that the idea itself makes it rewarding. For if even if this idea was considered a myth, I would still continue the work of this idea, because nobody else has to prove to me that this idea is fruitful for our current world in order to be better off itself (in the same way our advances within the industrial and commercial revolution). If we have worries (as we always do "naturally", as it helps us in overcoming challenges), I think people should worry more on what deeds they did that reflect their identity as a whole. Our achievements don't matter as much as the good ideas that we give to the world that helps us make better decisions that can last even for new eyes from next generations to see. Each of us come from different obsessions, so it is not the attention of specific ideas that we need to follow, but how we harness our obsessions for the good will of our world.The hard knocks of life may twist us in a world where we lose our origin hope and accept a Medieval or Darwinian theme. That does not mean that an ideal world is much easier to face where everybody gets transformed from their birthright. In actuality, the road of being a better person is a longer and thoughtful road than taking the shortcut of losing hope and keeping our childish mindset intact. It comes at a personal cost from what we represented from the past and requires a lot of time to commit to that. With what business domain we want to marry with our rest of our life, it is better to marry with the wildest horse, as if we can handle that, we may be able to handle any other difficult obstacles that we will have to face in the future.

Mental Map Epilogue: Motivation - The two sides of the coin

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Aug 2016 18:34:00 +0000

Motivation is extracted by the book Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg. You can read my review of Smarter Faster Better in order to understand a brief summary what the book is about before reading on.

The old philosopher Socrates was famous of the doctrine of induction. We form induction from generalities (Perceiver-> Teacher). In contrast, a deduction is based on translating ambiguity and metaphors (Teacher-> Perceiver). Induction is when you create a general hypothesis and test them if they work well or not in statistics. We make a deduction on NPL and artificial intelligence in the effort on decoding the words described by a person to a set of specific, concrete examples that can fit.

Induction is forming a belief or theory out of evaluating things in the concrete world. Our values are sensitive and to a point emotional when they get contrasted with something that does not fit into our equation. Given this assertion, the easiest way for others to accept an induction is for allowing others on the bias to act. The philosopher Socrates did induction in a specific way. In most cases, he never did the induction of others from his thinking, but instead facilitated others to do their induction themselves when they asked questions to him about the grand explanation of the world (which represent a grand scheme theory or belief). This bias of action, letting others have control of answering their version of faith is easier to do than giving one that may not match (emotional beliefs are paid off considerate attention. Society already understands that perception so much that it protects the beliefs of others - whether they are the right path from the rest is another story - whether they take a high emotional toll on the individual is scientifically evident). The philosopher Socrates was a Facilitator person, and Facilitator people are the ones that can create the most acquaintances. Their ability to delegate, especially in the way induction was presented for others to have control of, made people easier to the debate of philosophical things. Instead of conflicting views to escalate to a dead end discussion, the conversation was able to keep flowing. Maybe it was a way to motivate people to do philosophy. However, whether philosophy was able to transition to the right direction by the way the practice of induction was presented is a different story. When it was time for the philosopher Socrates to address there was one form of God on controlling the system of the world instead of the existing twelve Greek gods ancient Greece had, the conflict was so adamant to society, that society thought that his version of thinking was poisonous to society. He didn't accept the world being of a form of paradox. He didn't believe the world need to rely on the different type of gods for the various needs for different situations. He believed there was one integrated system in place for handling all things. Socrates was a proponent of the unity of virtue. That virtue represents “one and the same” and “parts of a single whole”. If he didn't give up his views, the government warned that it would take his life. In the end, he didn't give up on his views and died for his beliefs.

What can we learn motivation is off? If it is of having control and it doesn't match with what our situation is, when is it appropriate to change plans? The tipping point is motivation alone can lead to a dead end. It indeed leads you to do things correctly on things that are not of complex nature. But if they are too complex, then foundations need to be addressed to tackle those complications. It is like riding on a race track. Nobody will ride a road these days straight out with their legs. They will instead get some form of education to be able to ride some car to get a head start up instead of re-inventing the wheel. At that point, the foundations are competitive enough to bulge into mediocrity and beyond, but maybe not so much to the top. It may be disappointed by the disillusionment that it has the right platonic forms. As Alex Danco paradigm shift machine article resonates me, "But if you don’t get the paradigm right, then you won’t learn the right lessons! 'Fail fast, learn faster' is only truly useful information if you understand how things are arranged—otherwise you’ll draw the wrong conclusions." At the other hand, people who do not motivate to do anything of their ideas about their beliefs will also be disappointed as well. So motivation has a two-way street. More specifically, motivation is the Exhorter mode which has access to Mercy and Teacher mode. Motivation not only addresses on doing things with ourselves (Mercy) but also creating our foundations (Teacher). Creating a mental map resides in Teacher Mode and doing things with ourselves resides in Mercy Mode. Joining them together is technically where the rubber hits the road. It learns the ropes (or foundations to say the least) and puts the tires on the road (applies those foundations in real life). Since Exhorter consciousness overrides Contributor consciousness, the plans are done in a sketchy way instead of being polished. We can see that the material is grasped like "castles in the air", such as the parody theory of "the flying spaghetti monster" (low Perceiver confidence) while the skills shown are sloppy as it is on their first encounter (low server confidence). Some people are good at initiating things (Exhorter mode), and others just like to maintain things being stable and orderly (which represents Contributor mode). We see those two types of personalities often in executive positions. Any work requires those two cognitive styles. Firstly, by creating a prototype and later making that prototype mature. On the other hand, if we have no motivation to start anything, we leave our mental maps in an idle state.

Unfortunate events happen to us when we already have something that we believe, yet don't do any actions on learning how to cross the path, without creating a mental map. Furthermore, it can lead to the habit of having depression, and ultimately to have higher risks of Parkinson disease as described in one of my past presentations. Creating a mental map either through abstractions (a better path to not re-invent the wheel as discussed before) and concrete experiences (learning from real mistakes - more potent when in a safe environment) is essential. For Perceiver and Teacher cognitive styles, they usually focus on foundations first. For Server and Mercy cognitive styles, they often focus on experiences first. Exhorter, Contributors and Facilitator cognitive styles can both switch to foundations and experiences like turning on and off a switch. Usually, those type of personality types that can swap between the two are the ones that can drive a car earlier. Usually, the passive consumer prefers them to experience life on the "here and now", so they tend to be attracted more on experiences instead. Perceiver and Teacher leave the car in the garage to collect dust and Server and Mercy model a car that can maneuver very well, but is inferior compared to the average leader.

As a Perceiver person, Exhorter motivation regarding foundation had come in good chunks of pleasure every time I supported my mental map that explained existing concepts I knew as stronger pieces that I can replace within my main puzzle. However, the cost and reward of replacing parts are becoming to such a degree that the reward becomes less and less for each learning material. I encounter that there is less gaining something as most of re-inventing the wheel of the best architecture has already been completed. What I am worried is how alienating, and far away I am from the rest of the people who will not be able to grasp it. It is like I am the situation of being the author of Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions and you know you won't get out more explaining about paradigm shifts if society does not accept and grasp the concept in the first place. At some point, it becomes depressing focusing more on foundations as there is no intrinsic reward to it. In contrast, the potential of intrinsic motivational rewards on applying that mental map to self is abundant. For the Perceiver person, the path ultimately is to actually drive the model car that you compiled out of your foundation. What the car represents is of great design from the rest of the cars that only did primary education that did not contain much personal development. However, even a great design is still one at inferior state compared to other cars where their model is inferior. That is because those inferior designed cars upgraded all the components to the max and they can maneuver it smoothly. Those are some elements that a Perceiver style may have never touched. With a great designed car, the maximum capacity to outperform other cars is there. To reach there, it needs my effort to get the proper server skills that will give me the upgrades. It needs me to practice a lot to get the maneuverability to ride the car in such a way that it will outperform the rest. I only have the base car, not the details or how to use it properly yet. The real world is messy so on the first tries, I will be a failure, but ultimately, if we have the correct paradigm, we will eventually win after many failed attempts.

I still mainly favor for all of you people to learn foundations until you are confident to change the switch where you are sure you can move in your life and start riding the car. There is some few stuff that I wanted to end this year, such as analyzing the book "Smarter Faster Better" by Charles Duhigg and the magazine "Philosophy Now". I also wanted to analyze the two movies Pulp Fiction and Moneyball that I planned to watch. I am afraid that I am planning to cancel them permanently. My aim focus right now is to generate some Server Confidence. That means to use my commanding skill, and ultimately, I think nobody will be able to stop me because I have emboldened my mental map better than others. I do feel that I have the correct paradigm. My paradigm is the following:

There is a need for personal development to happen. The process must be convenient for people. We need to change the attitude for people not setting others as a dead end but instead to see their real motivations, needs, and the progress of their personal growth. The theory of mental symmetry fits the bill. We extract information from others in a messy, unorganized, slow manner. People don't have free time or the efficient tools to express their mental map and their progress or able to identify others mental map and development. We need to make that scarce resource that wastes time with inaccuracies to become seamlessly efficient and accurate. There is a lot of search and social media tools that are either over saturated or under saturated and should be balanced instead where everyone gets enough feedback. There is a lot of unorganized content expressed about needs and the qualities of people these days that we need to transform it or facilitate people to convert it into useful information. We have to understand the situation by comprehending how the current behavior of individuals are first and make conclusions out of it. From there, we can create innovative solutions for improving the quality of relationship and communication. Right now it is estimated that each person has close high-quality relationships down to less than a dozen people because it takes a lot of effort to know them. We want to increase that number from 100 to 1000 individuals with the new model. I am persistent that personal development exists from many accounts and we have to solve this in new radical ways or else we will never solve this problem.

Smarter Faster Better has been discussed in most part on my blog already. I discussed Chapter 8 about breaking down information on my previous blog. We address chapter 1 motivation in this post. Chapter 2 is mainly a mix of my analysis of the book Feedback Revolution and Black Box Thinking. However, I think Black Box Thinking discusses better which organizations progress better. It is true psychological safety may make employees happy, but there is no guarantee if they stray away from the original mission statement of the company to fit their needs. My previous short snapshot blog illustrated my mental map, which represents an example of what Chapter 3 talks all about. Chapter 6 Bayesian thinking is actually how Perceiver Mode works with abstract concepts while placing each a level of confidence. That level of confidence always changes when new samples for the same category come in. I am conscious at this mode. I at some point got fed up evaluating self-development that I want to chip big bets instead of my chips collecting dust or the equivalent of a car collecting dust. Chapter 4 is all about planning and setting closure.These traits are the strengths of Contributor thought. I illustrated Chapter 5 "Managing others" on how an organization can be agile by the use of Executive Paradox diagram.

I can go on about describing cognitive styles. It is already self-evident to me as this is the closest theory to explain everything in general. Maybe it is not self-evident for you. So I leave the work for the rest of you, to test your doubts, whether I played the chips right or wrong, or whether it was all a bluff. At first, I didn't start reading any books to analyze the topic of mental symmetry. I tried to believe them and explain what each cognitive style does. In early stages of my blog, you can see a lot of posts about Mental Symmetry that discusses a lot of topics about it in detail [1]. Most of them are easy to read. The website www.mentalsymmetry.com by Lorin Friesen did the best job of describing those concepts so please go ahead on that site and read them there. My early posts are relevant only to see that you also need to explain those concepts in your context. It helps you start motivating yourself, pushing the button of bias to action, to be more interested in the theory of Mental Symmetry. After that, you can push yourself to correlate that theory with other books. In the end, you have the choice whether you want to stick with this paradigm or believe there is a better theory you know that can address all the problems. Because each person has a different personality, your adventure will have a different style from the mine you see here now. If you have some strong general knowledge from your previous education, this journey takes around 1-2 years with deliberate practice. Consider them as an investment to your future. Know when you don't get more reward out of it after you practiced enough out of it.

Creating a mental map is really like a lengthy side trip climbing a mountain all alone without anyone telling you to do it or anyone able to visibly see the token of value underneath. It is true that I created a mental map. However, the adventure of refining the mental map is not over yet. When driving a car, the fun part is not keeping the mental map frozen, but how to accommodate the mental map in reality to trespass all the challenges that are ahead of you. Trying a lot and failing will work well enough if you have the correct mental map, because one way or another, you will be able to know how to slide in all the challenges ahead of you. Nonetheless, there will always be times where you have to rethink the existing mental map whether something is missing or not. Those will be easy to unfold as having a great mental map from start leaves you out from doing any significant leaps that will be impossible to take head-on. In addition, you also have to acquire the right skills to upgrade the parts of your car and try out as many environments to practice in order to accommodate your vehicle to have better maneuverability and stamina between all situations.

I would like to thank the authors who created the material that helped me create my mental map. I would like to thank a lot the Theory of Mental Symmetry by Lorin Friesen. If the old philosopher Socrates resurrected, we would hope the type of God Lorin Friesen described is the one he would follow. I believe the theory of mental symmetry Lorin Friesen describes and its associations with Theology. Since it is always a challenge to communicate Mental Symmetry to society, I extracted similar content that describes the same concepts from other books. I want to thank the Journalists "Matthew Syed" for "Black Box Thinking", "Charles Duhigg" for "The Power of Habit" and "Smarter Faster Better", "Professor Karen J Pine" for "Mind What you Wear", the practitioner of leadership "David G. Jensen" for "Executive Paradox", "Peter Maclauglin" for "Feedback Revolution", the class of "Philosophy of Values" in my university at "Cal Poly Pomona" that introduced me to philosophers "John Locke", "Imannuel Kant", the national library of Singapore and its curators for placing the books "Black Box Thinking", "Executive Paradox", "Feedback Revolution" in the main highlight shelves. You guys have a great taste. Without all of you, all this amazing work would have been a missed opportunity.

That is it for my journey. I leave most of the rest up to all of you: interpret your story with your context whenever you are stuck, rely more on your internal self-esteem instead of external self-esteem (Chapter 8 Analysis of "The Power Of Habit").

[1] Highlight posts that illustrate are Internal Problems with my existing current job describing the dynamics of mental networks within the working environment, Parkinson Disease in 5 minutes discusses how chemicals in the brain activate specific cognitive styles and a brief description of Exhorter strategy, the interplay of emotion and confidence discuss about the purpose emotions (Exhorter, Mercy, Teacher) and confidence (Perceiver, Server, Contributor) exist and how they interact together, Obstacles of the ideal critical thinking discuss the blind spots and limitations each cognitive style has, concluding that most of us have not a clear visibility or clarity of other cognitive styles which can stray us from ideal critical thinking, Types of Pain discusses the different type of pains (physical, mental networks, denial) and the dynamics of the cognitive styles that happen beneath that process, Visualization and Consequence talks about humans only being limited by mercy mental networks as input and how those can be transformed to a perpetual abstract foundations which we must implement with the help of visualization. Although those articles may be incomplete and I didn't have enough confidence at that time on them because they were not supported by others experiences, they were the supporting pillars for me to motivate myself to research more heavily on the topic of personal development.

Update

About the movies: Although I am not going to analyze movies I aforementioned, I still advise you guys to watch them. Pulp Fiction illustrates there must be a correct sense of mental map before enforcing righteousness. It is a great watch coupled with Nihilism by Mark Conard & further analysis by idleafterdark. Moneyball is a decent movie. Statistics is valued not for an unfair game, but people not following marginal gains within the rules of the game. There is always an open space in sports and business when people care less when they feel their resources are too abundant becoming an easier victim like the story David and Goliath. Furthermore, it would have been better if people were obsessed with scarce resources and personal development instead of baseball tickets and hot dogs. In addition, both in baseball and business, we see the power of money can kill the motivation of others to innovate.

My last words: This is my final words on my mental map epilogue. I am putting my last advice of words as a rite of passage to myself. I hope this helps for others that walk on this same journey.

Back to where all begun, just this time looking things through new perspectives: Putting Server skills in the right direction.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Jul 2016 04:31:00 +0000

It is interesting how all this blog started. The creation of my blog was just a reaction to a dream while I was sleeping. Maybe it was just a sign that:

The way I thought and did things did not align from the observations of the external world.
My thought and skills were inadequate to correspond appropriately and effectively to observations that I faced all the time.

What I ended up with this blog was to create a mental map where my thoughts could fit with my past observations I had trouble to cope with. I motivated myself to create the mental map by doing the following:

I created a page on my blog named "Direction to this blog" which addressed that I wanted to transition my mental map from only fulfilling my profession to an interdisciplinary one where it could tackle any observations that were out of my professional skills.
I tried to be more honest in one of my blog posts, associating my direction to align with the direction of my blog. After setting that direction to myself, even if it was not detailed enough, it promoted me to create a mental map (by reading and analyzing books, such as Executive Paradox) that it was impossible later for me to put that mental map down out of sheer low confidence.

Now I am trying in this blog post to motivate myself honestly to learn and apply server skills that fit with my mental map in order for "me" to become "part" of the mental map. However, learning any skills is not efficient. I have to set some rules and concepts that should be respected when learning and using skills. All of this will become clear soon.

But before looking on how we process things, let us start to address the 2 main problems of individuality: personal ease and development. If we use Maslow's Pyramid, we can self-actualize by fulfilling our personal ease and development. Personal ease corresponds to the basic needs of Maslow's Pyramid, such as basic and safety needs and being accepted as a member of society. Personal development corresponds to our self-esteem.

From Maslow's Pyramid, we classify Physiological, Safety, Belonging to Personal Ease and Esteem to Personal Development

Society in the past tried to fulfill both types of personal needs at the same time and it always created a stall. What eventually happened in almost all cases was personal ease was always an obstacle to society to have the free time to think clearly in personal development that forced people to ideologies of personal development that were inadequate, such as raging war by comparing other races inferior and classifying people wrongly in the days of eugenics and slavery.

I kind of agree that personal ease becomes a big bottleneck for personal development to have a clean mindset. For that reason, the inception of society to wear the attire clothes of professionalism, to ignore personal development ideologies and to instead attach fixated on improving society on its personal ease. The theory of evolution was created to support people to run their course on such direction. Ironically, this lead later for people to have a more clear mindset in incorporating concepts of personal development within organizations as described by the book Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhhig. That was due to people having most of their personal ease fulfilled with the help of science and technology . Now a lot of attention has been focused on the philosophy of the mind and artificial intelligence emulating the mind of our own species.

At the time of writing this, the latest magazine of "Philosophy Now" discusses Philosophy and Science merging together. Times are changing like the library of Alexandria in Egypt. Just this time, instead of books curated to our personal ease, there are books addressed to personal development.

Science branched out from Philosophy to study the objective world.
Why not use scientific thinking for personal development as well?

If we want to illustrate where personal development and personal ease location exactly are, we can demonstrate it by the bellow diagram. In contrast with personal ease, personal development has a long road left to still ride. One of the main problems is due to people not placing personal development as their core strategy to the product. It is true that the new lab these days that effectively find insights to personal development have changed hands from governments to organizations. However, these insights are later long forgotten. These concepts are used only in peripheral ways throughout the organization in order to only gain competitive advantage. It is true that these principles can become the envelope of a company's culture. However, these forms of good can fall in tragic ways when they are not re-enforced to be more thoroughly developed. A platonic form of an ideology cannot sustain itself when we do not put enough effort on constantly getting more closer to it. That is an example of how hospitals ideal foundation (i.e. hospitals mission to save people's life) to become fragmented (i.e. the norms of the hospital on how they reacted to mistakes lead for hospital mistakes to be one of the top 3 causes of people's death). Shouldn't we embrace the attitude of improving our personal development as long as we can?

My thesis is that we should put personal development as our core strategy for adding value to our society. All these books I read and analyzed so far were supporting material on creating a mental map for my thesis. That does not mean though that I will ignore projects that improve our personal ease. There is always the danger that we won't have as much personal ease as much as we have today. However, I am sure we will recover those pitfalls faster as we embrace the paradigms of science and technology. In contrast, there is no much attention paid to personal development. There are chances that the days we live is a period where personal development can blossom. One of my economy teachers always advised us to look at the diagram of the supply and demand. He told us that many people pay attention to exemplars of our world that consist of high demand. A smart person instead will focus his attention on exemplars that consist of low supply. If that is the case, should we not pay more attention to personal development? Profit companies need to think of being a non-profit organization with some of their leftover net revenue instead of giving it to charities or being socially responsible beyond their core product. They need to think how their product interacts in overall within the big picture instead of attracting people to their product limited to a specific domain.

Now let us use the diagram of mental symmetry and executive paradox to see how far I reached and where I have to go.

At first starting this blog, as an individual, I was an entity that used skills with no purpose. I consciously knew that there was a framework in life on how things work. However, since I didn't explore it myself consciously, it was easy to get drift apart from society's emotional pressure that other matters in our day to day life are more important to focus than to ponder deeply to that question. Whichever represents more emotional and the peer pressure from external self-esteem is what takes us in control in order to neglect anything beyond the normal boundaries of current social norms.

One of the things a Perceiver person has an advantage compared to other personality styles is it contains the starting bridge to personal development. In detail:

The Perceiver is the only mode that can see most clearly the Mercy cognitive style and at the same time not be attached to it.
The Mercy cognitive style contains the derived product of a Teacher's theory. For the Perceiver person, that figure is a state that needs to be measured on how close it represents to the ideal platonic form. The Perceiver person is at best at self-reflection.
The Perceiver person can force to create a new theory from an existing one and then Server mode will subconsciously aid in filling the required mental map.
The Perceiver person can force to use an existing theory that is not used to be applied to personal identity and then Server mode will subconsciously aid in integrating them together.

The interesting thing is while doing each of the steps discussed on point #3 and #4, the Perceiver can reflect clearly whether it is going farther or closer to those goals due to point #1 and #2. That reflection lets him adjust and improve the steps required for point #3 and #4 to become accomplished. Even when Perceiver has no direct contact or influence to Server mode, the results of Server actions are stored in Mercy mode which the Perceiver has access to. Unfortunately, I have no guide how other cognitive styles can gain the same results as I do. I think the Contributor person can achieve this path faster than a Perceiver does, but not as very accurate as the Perceiver does.

Contributor and Perceiver have a bigger flexibility on personal development in terms of speed and accuracy correspondingly

Forcing the Perceiver to be interested in creating a new framework from existing knowledge can lead as a strong motivator for the Perceiver to force itself to implement point #3. That lead me to create a mental map by associating the framework of mental symmetry with other self-help books.

So now this blog post is all about doing point #4. Eventually, the trigger of point #4 is when a mental map becomes so strong done from point #3 (the more connections or associations, the stronger the mental map becomes) that it can defy or make itself immune from being affected by existing social norms that oppose your views. In a matter of fact, why on earth would you approve existing social norms that have less correlation to the new framework you already have? At the same time, the Perceiver Person has the biggest horror to his own self: "All this time, I was deceived by wrong facts? I really do things still the old way. Does that make me a hypocrite? There is an alarm beeping me that I do not reflect the new framework I didn't pay attention before. Okay, I acknowledge the contradiction. Give me a break. This is too much for me to digest right now"

Whenever I have to give radical new orders to Teacher, I always do a rite of passage. I had to write an extensive blog in detail before I decided to leave my job. I had to make a detail explanation on how to approach point #3 and now I am doing a blog post again on how to approach point #4. I expressed within my rite of passage that I am now a Philosopher and Theologist so I can now move on to be practical to these disciplines. I usually do a rite of passage associated to my internal self-esteem instead of my external self-esteem. For instance, I never celebrated my achievements of my university. Even when I received a CGPA of 3.95, I didn't attend the graduation ceremony because I didn't feel anything special yet on me that made me become radically different. Every rite of passage is created due to a self-crisis. We all deal with suffering when we walk mindlessly on a path with no deep thought until we end up in a mid-life crisis. There is another way to learn the same lessons faster by the virtue of patience. In this case, you create artificially the crisis to your own self to jump through the hoops within a safe environment. It takes a lot of time to see the benefits. It requires a lot of willpower and patience to stick to the plan when present life looks stable.

Does all the material look so familiar with you so far? Great, that was the main thesis of this blog: Our ultimate goal is for our identity be part of personal development. Now I have to give steps to Teacher on what recipe the Server should follow for achieving that. Ultimately, in some way or another, I am confident that I will be able to progress myself as I used to do before. However, this is an endless journey. I am not sure what awaits after that, but here goes nothing:

1. Do not re-invent the wheel yet try to break things down you don't understand.

One of my teachers in community college that taught programming languages had the mantra "Do not re-invent the wheel". The world is richer if we continue what others have left so far behind instead of doing copy work of others. Beyond understanding the work of others, we have to create new insights in order to make progress to our society. If we all only just copied each other, then what will be ahead 200 years will be the same as what we had 200 years before. We will be in a stall state within our civilization as we didn't establish closure and move on to progress beyond the existing stuff. Besides clarifying stuff, it is greater when we create more abstractions with the existing stuff, more achievements that get us closer to the platonic forms we want to ideally be.

In contrast, we should also break down things we don't understand, as illustrated in Chapter 8 "Absorbing Data" from the book "Smarter, Faster, Better" by Charles Duhigg. Absorbing data was a think I always did the first thing when encountering a new environment. As I illustrated the algorithm competition I entered in my previous blog, I avoided figuring out which algorithm I had to use to solve the problem and how it worked. Instead, I tried to figure it out myself. Although my attempts failed, I think I got a bigger appreciation of algorithms than if I just plugged and play with the algorithm immediately to solve my problem. Furthermore, I didn't use any libraries for my solution. Although my solution was not the best in performance, this helped me to understand very precisely what the algorithm did in detail. Another example is the ritual I do whenever I am in a new work environment. I always do the following for the first months: I open my notes or my text editor and write down how all the components of the system work. I try to make explanations and correlations with diagrams and notes out of my own context to grasp the material faster. Although for some people this may seem stubborn like I am re-inventing the wheel, I had known I could grasp the material more clearly and faster from just the usual observation. Lastly, I wanted to learn more about personal development. That is one of the main reasons why I kept contributing to this blog. That was the only way for me to grasp the material better. Besides that it is also to set goals for myself, I hope others can extract valuable information out of it.

In order for any material to be grasped, we need to have access of how all the components work together. The stuff that we create should be tools where anyone can see underneath how it works instead of being stuffed in a locked black box. For without being able to put the material in our context, how can we be sure when we do stuff, we do it in such a way where we didn't miss any of the stuff on how the model works in the first place? Let us also iterate that one of the ideological principles of the "hacker manifesto" is for all software to be free. Free not in terms of price, but in terms of able to access the source code.

2. Constantly aim the goal of personal development but in small risks

Obviously, the goal is to add some value to personal development. Of the variation of many paths that exist, re-inventing the wheel should only be considered on topics that have extreme importance, are underestimated, and for learning purposes. After all, we only live once. From our own willpower, we should strive to replace old work to be replaced with new ideas. Let's make a role model example of ourselves for others to see that people are more than just a commodity that runs only by values from our present times. However, this is a video game where you have one life, not a thousand. Thus, it makes sense to make risks with lower probability of failure or risks where failure can be easily recovered. We discussed in Black Box Thinking that failure is the only way to success. However, that does not mean to relentlessly do something stupid when you could have planned ahead to eliminate most of the risks. Secondly, although society ideally should not judge people mistakes as a dead end, current mindset of the average person does. For that unfortunate reason, it is ideal to do most of your mistakes in a safe environment. Lastly, risks that harm or neglect your body substantially cannot be recovered. You have "statistically" higher chances of having some success with your goals by placing a dozen of small risks within your lifetime instead of placing one or two big ones that can succumb your rest of your life. The importance is to constantly think about your goal instead of snapping about it on the last minute. For me, I will always appreciate doing works of personal ease. I cannot imagine the many benefits it brings and how critical it will be in the times where human resources become limited. However, I will always try to find small opportunities or how to turn things around in front of me on the attention of personal development.

3. It is very easy to lose track out of over-confidence and peer pressure. The last thing we want is being in a stall state or going backward.

There are two types of confidence: Perceiver Confidence (point #3) and Server Confidence (point #4). In point #3, we created a Teacher Mental Network as a separate independent entity so powerful that the Perceiver can see the contradiction with his own identity. In point #4, Server tries to do personal actions that correspond with such independent entity created in point #3, imposing new habits over old ones, affecting our existing identity.

Perceiver Confidence and Server confidence can be confused with one another. They may think that their own version of confidence represents the only type of confidence that exists. Feelings behave the same way too. Feelings of external self-esteem (Mercy) can have the same fulfilling experience as internal self-esteem (Teacher). It is only when you explore and master the two type of feelings that you can explicitly sense they are different from the cause they are originated from. The same can go with Perceiver and Server confidence. It is easy to do generalizations that Perceiver and Server confidence are the same. However, if we look at the details on how they operate and where the confidence originates from, then it easy to distinct them apart. In the book review "Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by John Dewey", "But a problem arose when the medieval philosophers and theologians adopted the radical split between Plato’s higher (Perceiver->Teacher->Platonic Forms) and lower (Server->Mercy->Merging platonic forms with Identity) without recognizing the cultural cause of the distinction...They adopted the earlier model where all that was lower was fallen, and all that was higher was divine. Truth, beauty, and reality were to be found not in the fields or mines, but only in heaven (=our actions became irrelevant in most philosophy, it was considered unfeasible to reach closer to Platonic forms)." That is also one of the main reasons the scientist Feynman disliked much about the current state of philosophy entrenched only in Perceiver confidence. Without lower motives, we can never put more effort into reaching to a platonic form, to get things clearer, as I quote in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. 1", "We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers... one saying to the other: you don't know what you are talking about! The second one says: what do you mean by 'talking'? What do you mean by 'you'? What do you mean by 'know'?". Science is lectured only by facts, only by Perceiver mode. It does not have the process of Server mode, on unraveling better understandings of the universe by trying to comprehend uncertainties and unexplored territory. As in Issue 114 Philosophy Now article "Richard Feynman's Philosophy of Science" I quote "Understanding, for Feyman, is a much deeper relationship with the world than knowing what gets taught as facts... for science is a lived activity and has an inexpressible aspect. I can write down what it is for me to ride a bike - describe it terms of bio-mechanics or highway code rules - but none of this is how I do it, nor will it teach you how to do it...Science is not merely its form, method, past examplars, or the beliefs and knowledge it generates, for these change when great discoveries are made." Philosophy (Perceiver) lives in the abstract while poetry (Server) looks at the perils of actual life and expresses the day to day emotions. In the book review "The Philosophy of Poetry" I quote... "philosophy & poetry to be mutually alien...De Sousa outlines a project of bringing philosophy and poetry closer together, but this may be something of a forced alliance...the result may merely be more bad philosophy on the one hand and more bad poetry on the other." In overall, we see that Perceiver and Server confidence are completely alienated. We see that when Philosophy is stuck on Perceiver mode, they stray away from reality and the new paradigms that they have to stroll.

Last but not least, there is always the power of peer pressure for holding us back to get closer to our goals. Sometimes in life, we have to hold back and appreciate what civilization has achieved so far. We have to do small risks in our goals, not big ones. However, let us not be too comfortable from that where we forget our original goals.

Conclusion

We can have a more conclusive balance we individuals should aim in the world. I attributed before my vision of HPLR (Health Planning Learning Relationships) Ethics. More specifically, we can deliberately say:

Health: Beyond that we learn scientific thinking is the most effective way recovering our maladies statistically, it is one of the most important elements to balance well our personal ease. As we have seen, keeping personal ease in an uncomfortable situation can create inadequate personal ideologies that keep personal development in a stall state. As the development of personal development only progresses with a clear mind, we should be pro-active and supportive on supplementing initiatives for learning and keeping healthy our well-being.
Planning: Whether we will be controlled by the one that has the biggest force or we control to shift our perception for other less existing choices to control us is up to us. In many times, whatever is in front of us, it may not be the most optimal solution. It may just be a coincidence that it is in front of us to think it is the right thing or the a priori may be a dead end as we have seen from many mainstream ideologies throughout history that ended up to be proved as inadequate. Planning is a very powerful force and is the only path to achieve our actual effective personal development within the theory of this blog and according to the theory of mental symmetry. The plans I placed before aided me to create a mental map and my plan to associate it with my identity now requires to again also plan about it. We will see that planning a mental map is related mostly to learning while planning your identity to merge with a mental map is related to creating new relationships and changing your attitude on existing relationships.
Learning: We make better choices if we have a better mental map. The best mental map is created when you can create a framework on interdisciplinary sources that can apply to us. The best grand explanation that can bring the least contradictions to the way we do things in life, the better. As Einstein said, "A theory is the more impressive...the more different the kinds of things it relates and the more extended the range of its applicability". Our main goal is not to just find some finite content that can explain the meaning of life, but also having a great tool by forging it like a sword. It is having a mental map that creates a mental map, understanding how the mind works, as we have done in this blog, in order to create with our effort the best possible content in any situation. A meta-theory facilitates into creating new paradigms that can fit into specific variables of our current situation. That makes a meta-theory to be immune from any influence of existing variables. As in Issue 114 "Philosophy Now" article "Chaos & An Unpredictable Tomorrow" states, "A complex system evolves over time, each iteration of the system - each of the system's cycles or outputs - provides a new condition that feeds back into the system." However, this complexity can be handled by not having a fixed mindset on a particular paradigm, but relying upon a paradigm of a paradigm. If we reference a star as a theory and a dancing star as meta-theory, then this resonates well on the article "Nietzsche and the Problem of Suffering" article quoting "Zarathustra comes down and preaches... to become an Overman (Ubermensch). But 'One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.' One has to suffer anxiety in oneself to become creative. Zarathrustra fears that the day of the 'Last Man' is coming, a day in which men shall not want to give birth to a dancing star, men who will ask 'What is longing? What is a star?' They will just want to be a part of the herd. They will have their little pleasures for the day and those for the night. They will claim, 'We have invented happiness.'" This is more easier to grasp and more self-evident for people who read self-help books, do leadership, study social sciences. However, it is evident that many people are not motivated to learn more about personal development. In contrast, our motivation is captured by other things that look more entertaining to the eye that require less thinking. Even when people access to content which requires less critical thinking, most of us do not engage in depth, do not assert the feedback of others, and do not give helpful feedback to others. A huge progress will be made if people become more engaging critically on the content they see and start appreciating more on content that fastens their self-development.
Relationships: Relationships are the whole purpose our life is meant to be. That is no different with what Buber has said in "I and Thou". However, we all have a different interpretation on how we should approach relationships with others and when to step more away or closer in an existing relationship. For Perceiver people, creating new relationships start when they feel confident their mental map is stable and mature. A Contributor person can create these relationships at a faster pace. In all cases, creating new relationships means their identity is progressing to a different location than it used before. It is the same story when an individual hangs with a bad gang and then learns his mistakes and hangs with a good community. Thus, if we want our mental map to match with our identity, we have to match them with the proper organizations of subjects of interest, people, and social groups. Our relationship with the work we choose to contribute to our society must also fit in a role where the responsibilities match closely to our mental map. There is a lot of limitations based on our situation. It is impossible to find all or any of our relationships that match perfectly with our mental map. What all matters is to find the closest one and constantly do small risks on it. That shows you put all your effort on it and that is what all matters. What matters is whether there is high probability you did the best instead of whether you had bad luck. If all followed your path, society would have progressed more already. You should give a pat on your back for your effort. On the other hand, make sure the mental map you cover is one that is in short supply and adds a lot of value to society. In addition, there is always the temptation for your identity to feel safe in a constant location with existing people and groups that you are surrounded with. Do not let that safety make you forget to still aim closer to the mental map you embrace. Besides learning stuff relative to what you are doing in your day to day life, always re-evaluate your mental map on new insights that you may have missed before. I have to add that my next ambition I am focusing is creating the next social network prototype. I want to understand the current situation and to know more details about the many ways external and internal esteem work in order to have a better clear model of how I can incorporate a personal integrated system. All these are in my hopes that it will give us a concrete solution on how to improve the quality of relationships among society.

Some pictures I created on how to tackle Server:

And so the direction of my blog has steered to a new direction. I now have an interdisciplinary map where I can navigate wherever I want. My goal is to lift up personal development from its current trenches.

Right now, I set myself a goal to learn more skills in statistics and machine learning in order to derive conclusions of external self-esteem. That will help me to have a more clear picture of the personal integrated system I discussed before, which will be a component of the next social network prototype. My course can change over the course of time on what I will tackle next. However, whatever it will be, it will always be related to personal development in some way.

Expect my next blog posts to be technical related to data, as I venture to acquire the right skills to sail smoothly into new continents others haven't explored yet. As for now, I think this is the end of the main story line on transitioning from Phase 2 to Phase 3.

Short Snapshot #9: From nothing to driven by skills with no direction to creating a mental map that placed purpose to aligning skills with mental map

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 23 Jul 2016 18:15:00 +0000

From nothing

I remember my first days when I was 15 years old. I was really determined on learning more about technology. I used to be a passive consumer enjoying the immersion technology provided. I guess I have no much shame to say that as I think the majority of us land there as our primary and main destination. In the circa time 1997-2003 while I was 9-15 years old, the first 3 years of that period was an inception of the world wide web being more widespread than ever before. The major points during that time for kids our age was:

1. Nintendo 64 for the fist time had the ability to render 3 dimensional playable games.
2. The computer was booming in the world wide web with 30-second video clips or songs from famous cartoons or tourist destinations in inferior youtube 144p quality with dial-up modem 56k connection.
3. There were a lot of free video game demos on downloads.com, such as riding large monster trucks through dirt or space cars in a future apocalyptic highway.

Although limited, for us kids they were more enough to drool around. I am pretty sure there was more educative content around that time, but I believe most passive consumers at such young age would browse those websites on their free time, especially if your computer was shipped with Windows. After some point, the content of the internet exponentially grew to a point which the traditional search engine Yahoo couldn't keep up, and the rest is history.

Above are just two images of two PC demo games I used to download on the old layout of downloads.com before it was merged with CNET: croc and monster truck madness.

Skills with no direction

Then, while I was on vacation after one of my summer breaks in high school, I had the opportunity to spend some of my free time to stumble myself on learning some new programming language by reading the book "Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days" by Jesse Liberty. I tried other books before that, such as "The C++ Programming Language" by Bjarne Stroustrup, but they were too deep, not practical enough. I was at this stage where I didn't know what you could do with a programming language and never heard the word compiler before. Beyond that this book was very popular, it shouldn't be confused with other book mockups "Teach yourself... in 21 days". This book didn't try to skip foundational parts of the programming language. It discussed topics related to the hardware of the computer, such as how pointers have a tangible connection with allocated memory. In other words, although it said you could learn all this material in 21 days, it took me about 1-2 quarters to complete reading the book, as I had no previous experience in programming before. It was really fun learning all the stuff that you could do with a computer. I was kind of determined already that I wanted to be a programmer at that time.

I bought Bjarne Stroustrup book because it was recommended by the bookstore. It was too deep for me, I need it something more elementary, so I picked later on during vacation C++ in 21 days.

At my last years of high school, I tried to compete in one programming competitions centered on high school students. It consisted of solving puzzles by using a programming language of your choice and using the appropriate algorithms. I had no idea what algorithms was all about. There was one puzzle that I had to solve by using Dijkstra's algorithm. I thought all problems could be solved by common sense. It was like I was ignoring all the arduous efforts others spent enough time and I was going back in time to be the first one to find the algorithm instead. After a lot of effort figuring it out myself, I gave up. I found a link that portrayed the steps of using Djikstra's algorithm. What is fascinating is that I was a beginner on programming. I had no experience of using any libraries at all. There were at that time a lot of libraries that contained elements that could solve Djikstra's algorithm. If I used those, I could have solved this puzzle with less than a couple dozen lines of code. At least, the code that way wouldn't be so complex while reading it. However, I spent a lot of time just by using multidimensional arrays. I managed to pass all the test cases and was accepted to compete in the final round of the national competition. This was my first time entering in such competition. I only started to solve puzzles within the last 3 months at that time. Compared to other competitors who studied algorithms for years, I knew that I could be outnumbered. I remembered that I had to take those big fat computer programming books within my school in order to prepare myself for the competition. I was actually ignoring the lectures and the study material within my high school for the sake of preparing myself to compete well. Some classmates would compliment me on what I was doing while teachers could condemn me for not being able to remember the school lecture notes. It was a mixed feeling, but I didn't regret it. I was able to solve some of the puzzles within the national competition. I was outnumbered and was not able to participate in the global competition. I ended up in 12th place. Besides that I felt it was remarkable how far I reached up to the competition based on how much time I spent on puzzles and algorithms, I already knew at that time programming was my career choice with no doubts.

This is just an illustration and a diagram of the puzzle that requires Dijkstra's Algorithm that I had to solve. The exercise of the project is named Acropolis. Click here for the complete puzzle.

When I was at college, my goal was to study computer science. Computer Science majors have to study a lot of maths and physics. However, an accident happened. It seems fate can be changed by an opportunity you accidentally do. What happened was: While I was at San Diego City College in the first semester, I mistook some classes that were not for the degree path of getting a major in computer science but instead to a major in business administration. I thought business law and business communication was general education classes all students had to take and I did those for the first semester. When I completed the business law class, it fascinated me. I conclusively figured out that complexity did not exist only within computer world, complexity also existed in the social world for centuries. There was so much critical thinking on solving these puzzles of human behavior with the use of law and order. There were so many similarities to the things I learned in computer programming, I indeed wanted to learn more how the social world operated as well. I realized on the second semester from my advisor that I was on the wrong career path to get my computer science degree. In addition, the amount of additional courses of math and physics I had to go through would require delaying my degree for at least a year from the existing degree path I was taking. It was this accident that guided me to see things from new perspectives, to get a degree in Business Administration: Computer Information Systems. For the next 5 years, I did the most deliberate learning on this interdisciplinary major. I ended up getting a CGPA of 3.95. To this day, I still associate and reference through my expressions and decisions from the lectures that I completed, especially within the business, computer information system, and physical and social science domains.

Right now I work in data stuff within my career. I only completed only one data course in my university and I had no clue how to use SQL besides doing the basic stuff. The lecturer at that time that was teaching databases solved database solutions that I didn't understand at all that I just copied and paste. From work experience in creating custom format flexible reports and managing data warehouses, I was able to excel databases. I spent this year just a week on Hackerrank going through the practice exercises and ended up in 9th place in the last SQL competition they run this year.

I only spent 30 hours in Hackerrank & I was able to rank in the top 10 in their "Simply SQL" contest

Reading a book, competing in a competition, doing an education, gaining experience, re-enforces your skills. However, skills are just the tip of the iceberg. A skill is a tool that gets created for a reason in the first place. Tools are used to solve our social complexity. You need creativity on how to solve social problems and that will get you to the right direction on what tools you really need in order to tackle the problems.

Creating a mental map

One of the things that I noticed while working on technological corporations is how an organization lacks or forgets what foundations it needs on how to run itself instead of only looking if the tools work properly or not. Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhigg although it doesn't provide the full picture, it is a great book that illustrates how organizations found over the years specific foundations that made them be more productive and effective. Unfortunately, I suffered from companies attributing to fate or take it for granted on their reaction of why software don't work properly, why there is a high turn-over or low morale in the workplace, and many more. I spent the last 2 years by starting doing my own rants on my blog to see how much I know, then correlate with other human behavior theories I already knew, and then correlate with other books and analyzing them. The final product is the result of this blog. If I have to present the main highlights of the blog, then they are the following:

Habits & Maslow's Pyramid

An analysis of the books: The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and Mind what you wear by Professor Karen J Pine
An

This discusses some of the features of habits, which represent mercy mental networks within the theory of mental symmetry. We also discuss the nature and differences between holding mercy mental networks (external self-esteem) and teacher mental networks (internal self-esteem).

This is a great reference to understand how the mercy cognitive style mindset works with mental networks. The mercy cognitive style lives mainly in the concrete world and focuses a lot on creating a platonic form for the individual self. That is a main reason why Mercy people love to reflect their identity with the right attire of clothes. We follow the story on how mercy mental networks become a supporting pillar to our identity. However, we also look why we should pay attention to teacher mental networks, which represent abstract concepts (i.e. the framework of how habits work within the book the power of habit). Teacher mental networks makes us become more independent and less depending our self on specific concrete external cues.

Twisting or hiding input is due to locking to an inadequate theoretical big picture within our self and norms of mainstream culture

An analysis of the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed

When making a mistake is treated as a dead end instead of growth for society, when individuals do not want long term effort on admitting mistakes and shortcut to workaround, then we are straying away from the ideal platonic forms of making a world a better place. Admitting mistakes and working with mistakes and handling them humbly is the only way for ours and everyone's else growth.

Focusing on a platonic form (a teacher mental network that consists a theory) that handles mistakes makes the whole system to continuously improve and withstand on new situations within the environment and not fragment itself. Focusing on a platonic form that uses tactics which focuses on embracing mercy mental networks (protecting our individuality from humiliation of a mistake) is a prime example of how many organizations with an ideal foundation (i.e. hospitals mission to save people's life) to become fragmented (i.e. the norms of the hospital on how they reacted to mistakes lead for hospital mistakes to be one of the top 3 causes of people's death)

An architectural framework of how leadership works and why balancing all functions within that architecture are essential to keep the organization being agile

An analysis of the book The Executive's Paradox by David G.Jensen

We have seen basic frameworks of how mental networks work described by others, such as "cue-> routine->reward" within the book the power of habit. In contrast, this is the closest a book has achieved to describe a cognitive style within a framework. As the book discusses its main audience are those that work on leadership roles, it apparently describes the "Contributor" Cognitive style.

Here we describe how each of the 4 modules correlate with Contributor thought and its associated concepts. Contributor thought works with Perceiver and Server cognitive modules. Perceiver and Server cognitive modules interact with Mercy and Teacher cognitive modules correspondingly. One of the weakness of leaders that use Contributor thought is using Perceiver mode and ignoring Server Mode and vice versa. Hence, the author recommendation for leaders is to stretch instead of snapping out due to the negligence of the other modes. I describe lastly a story that agile is all about balancing those modes. In contrast, we stray away from being agile when we don't balance those modes.

Feedback: How to cross instead of burning bridges when discussing conflicting views

An analysis of the book Feedback Revolution by Peter Mclaughlin

Feedback can be in different forms, but the most effective feedback is one where the message can get across and not pass out through the other ear. An attitude of having doubts of "our own" feedback we give, presenting feedback to others with patience as a path to personal growth that takes time instead as a dead end, trying to give feedback continuously incrementally asynchronously, as well presenting the message nearest to the time of the incident are great points to embrace.

However, being empowering, a Mercy cognitive style, a mode discussed in the Leadership role in Executive Paradox, is not so easy, especially in cultures that do not embrace accepting any feedback from others due to people being sensitive about it. As discussed in Black Box Thinking, dealing conflict by hiding or twisting input to avoid confrontation makes us and society fragmented instead of having a pace of progress. First, people need to learn to give feedback properly as discussed. Second, organizations need to give people the ability to express themselves as much as they can while handling and teaching people to give proper feedback so it doesn't become abused or as a dead end that makes an organization detrimental. We follow this story in detail.

An objection to John Locke's view on punishment

Merging John Locke on Personal Identity & Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed

Personal Identity was always a topic that I always felt bonded to explore deeply. It really touched me to unravel Locke's Argument "On Personal Identity" over the period of years since the first time I read it on my "Intro To Philosophy:Values" class in San Diego City College. Locke's argument that is still controversial to this day is whether we should punish a character's mistake to the same degree even when the current character of the individual has shown legitimately actions and efforts that show the individual has learned from his past mistakes. Locke's argument on that is that we should, as long the individual remembers he did the mistake in the first place.

After reading Black Box Thinking and integrating such concept with the framework of Mental Symmetry and Executive Paradox, I object the argument of Locke's view on punishment. I present examples that point out that having consciousness of past actions are not a good enough basis of punishing a person rightfully. We should give a choice for the individual to quantify his level of misalignment to society by how his present attitude views the world presently. What matters is the character the individual is and tries to aim to. In addition, instead of punishing a person being the only choice, we should give the option and awareness to society for the guilty to embrace what steps are required to align himself with society. We should have the platonic form that people that did mistakes can have equal chances on becoming one day the presidents of this world instead of looking at clean record sheets. It is only by handling mistakes that we can learn to improve ourselves.

Mental Symmetry more than just a philosophical framework. Mental Symmetry and Theology

Analyzing the book Natural Cognitive Theology by Lorin Friesen

If we simulated beating the challenge of unraveling "mind and human behavior" as a vintage Super Mario video game, then treat the rest of the topics discussed so far as easy or challenging levels while this one in here as running through a boss level. It took me around a month with full effort on reading and grasping most of the material of this book. The reason it is not that easy to read is because it discusses the topic of theology and it brings mental pain when it embraces a theology which discusses which mental circuits are potent and which ones lead you to a dead end explicitly. Because believe it or not, our culture and way of doing things consciously or subconsciously may contradict with what the book discusses.

We have seen Philosophy brings a framework of how things work, such as mental networks being described within the book The Power Of Habit and Contributor cognitive style being described within the book Executive Paradox. Mental Symmetry framework covers that and many more. We also found books that describe a way of doing things in life, such as: 1. Learning from mistakes from Black Box Thinking 2. Stretching our other modes of thought from Executive Paradox 3. The attitude on the way we give feedback from Feedback Revolution 4. Becoming independent of external influences by embracing to control our habits by a use of a framework from The Power of Habit. We see all of them in some way teach a way of doing things, a theology. We shouldn't tone it down or be in denial about it, it is a theology, for avoiding such foundations, it does not make our society able to continuously progress itself. The book Natural Cognitive Theology describes how the current state of theology has stray away from the original colors of theology that used to bring advancements to our civilization. In contrast, out of the mill journalists, independent researchers and others who dedicate the study of human behavior bring forgotten pieces that embrace back the true colors of theology.

The book Natural Cognitive Theology tries to describe how mental symmetry as a model can be used to study the topic of Theology correctly, which if done properly, it can bring faster advancements to the development of human behavior and our interactions with other human beings in order to become more sophisticated, integral, and fulfilling to society. It will bring the same transformations as how science advanced the empirical world to our physical needs.

Conclusion - Aligning skills with mental map?

The process took long like getting a Master Degree, but it was well worth it. Now my skills can be aligned with some purpose instead with no purpose at all. I know now what skills I need to learn and where to align them exactly. Next post will detail my assessment to how I reached up so far and why my current direction has to eventually walk down to the ground firmly where my skills closely align with my path.

At first I was nothing

Then I eventually got skills but had no purpose

Then I eventually ended up knowing my purpose but did not got my hands dirty

Now it is time to do my rite of passage to commit my purpose with the required skills to create real value to this world.

Introduction of the books "Power of Habit" and "Mind what you wear"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 18:53:00 +0000

You can read my review of the power of habit and mind what you wear in order to understand a brief summary what these books are all about before reading on.

Humans live within concrete world. Thus, it is hard denial that people's transformation starting point is by looking at our norms.

In order to support those statements, those conclusions that I assert above, I will use sources from the above two books: "Power of Habit" and "Mind what you wear", along the theory of mental symmetry "mental networks", "maslow's pyramid", and "music"

The power of habit: Humans live within concrete world. Thus, it is hard denial that people's transformation starting point is by looking at our norms. What I am implying here is that concrete habits is the starting point for all personal development. That is how our childhood starts its learning process, as discussed in Piaget Childhood Development. That is how students achieve goals in the education system. They don't crave the routine itself (the benefits of having substance of understanding how the world works), but instead they crave for a concrete physical reward (the physical degree so they can earn more money in their lifetime, the praise by parents or the peer pressure of a diploma degree in order for the approval of low ties of organizations that we want to work for). The point is that I have found over and over again and I find self defeating myself that we all start learning and bridging routines and procedures not because we are craving the routine or procedure itself because we acknowledge it benefits us, but because we put boundaries and rules (where putting requires will power and boundaries and rules represent self discipline) artificially, as an indirect approach to still fulfill our old habits (getting the same reward) while also fulfilling new habits at the same time (the new routine) that can help us later on to take over our old cravings with cravings that match with our new habits. You see, some people later after doing education forcefully, acknowledge later that education was not ever about the degree or diploma, but instead to improve our way of thinking, or most importantly, to enable our main circuits, to understand how things work correctly, and by correctly, I mean to fill out our minds with content, to create out theories out of them, to dispute them by using critical thinking, and so on. Those elements we were taught in school, we would never imagined at our prime time of our age, on how useful later they could have been in our adult life, especially habits that reflect on making the most optimal decisions. Thus, it is imperative to understand that people have to understand how this framework of behavior works (which the power of habit describes) and once that framework of behavior becomes understood (in this case: cue-> procedure-> reward), it becomes an abstract habit (the other side of the amygdala will notice and make it as a theory). It is a habit that this book does not describe in detail, but it is the essence of how belief works. So if there is a god, it is a god like Dirac have said: One of mathematical beauty, where wherever we place variables in a theory, such as a formula (in this case the framework of how habits work), they would essentially print expected instead of random results. So if god exists, then that god must be the same essence of the scientific formulas of the objective world. But instead of analyzing how things work, we instead care for the first time in generations try to analyze how people work, and base of just that, we found from natural cognitive theology, that some circuits give the same reward, one with content, and one without content. I propose that filling with content on how people work, such as this book tries to achieve than instead of making it as a mystery, gives us more control to our life, as the author have described within the end of the book. The author tries to express that there is a lot of ways to substitute our mind with other concrete habits. That is true. However, for abstract habits, for abstract theories, a world where academics show a crave for understanding how things work, a use case where you only see it in academics and not with the average person, we found that theories are not an easy substitution. There is not a lot of theories that are replaceable. And as Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions describes, most scientist live and die with a partial understanding of the scientific discoveries and instead it is usually the young scientist that takes the lead with a better complete understanding on how the world works. It is the same feeling as being addicted to gambling, not because it is impossible to choose differently, but unlike the concrete world where the choices are multiple to replace an existing routine to get the same reward, theories are always limited and requires a long journey, especially given that theories require a lot of time and effort to study (instead of 5 minutes to grasp a concrete concept, this may take months and years), and as always, the habit needs to be formed as an indirect instead of a direct way of understanding how things work (like how students learn stuff from schools). This concludes us that the book "The Habit of Power" by Charles Duhigg, focuses on habits that are of concrete nature, or in regards to the theory of mental symmetry, we can also name them as "mercy mental networks". These mercy mental networks are the base on how most of us individuals drive our world (except less inclined to that is me :) or people and scientists that are obsessed with theories ). After several attempts, it is apparent and self defeating to admit that talking to them an indirect concept as a direct concept is kind of impossible for most individuals to even grasp. It needs kind of to be "sandwiched" with some familiarity as the book describes and requires a craving that is unrelated to the concept you are describing, feeding instead an old habit in a different procedure in order to replace the new habit with the old habit. Grasping those concepts are quite important because believe it or not, once you reach this stage and understand the theory of mental symmetry, think not whether you are an open minded person for accepting such theory, but think of how other people whether they locked into a different theory and they believe this theory works for them but they don't notice the externalizations that they affect by imposing such theory. So I kind of realized, especially for strangers, if you want to make a connection and guide them, think of them as the devil-advocate, the worst case scenario, or else, most of the time your communication will fail on getting across the point.

Mind what you wear: The second thing is discussing about self actualization, the highest floor of the Maslow's pyramid. Maslow's pyramid and its reflection to mental symmetry can be found within the old book of Lorin Friesen "God, Theology, Cognitive Module", as one of the last sections within the table of contents. I advise to read that before moving on. The book "Mind what you wear" by Professor Karen J Pine, is an extension of "The power of habit", discussing the habits that are influenced by the cues we set to our self (the power of habit instead focuses mostly only on describing the routine and the reward within the framework of a habit). Given that both authors were a lot inspired by the father of Psychologist, William James, specifically, the material self, it is no wonder that they are good pair to just join those two authors together, as they essentially, describe the same topic. It is essential to understand that self actualization is the final destination of our own individuality to flourish. It is the only component where there is nothing "above it", "no pressure to reach other goal", "it is the final destination". Thus, instead of looking at self actualization main essence, we have to grasp how we reached in self actualization in the first place, which always comes from esteem, either directly (external self esteem with no content) or indirectly (internal self esteem with effort to gain some content to that motivation). We know external self-esteem is more crumbling, but alas, here is the main point of the theory of Maslow's pyramid: If there is no internal self esteem, external self esteem overrides over. External self esteem can be described as peer pressure of others to give approval to you, the clothes you wear, and many other elements that boost your confidence. Imagine how many people have build any internal self esteem to themselves except of their required qualified skills to be employable on a career role? I assume many do not have any content filled in the internal self esteem, so that is why we live in a world where we are overclouded with external self esteem and be governed by it. Especially for strangers and people you do not know, the only way to express themselves is through external self esteem. However, that external self esteem should compliment with internal self esteem in the process like how education works. It is okay for our clothes to reflect our external self esteem of "what is" and "what we could be", as long our internal self esteem aligns on that same mission. It would be a mismatch or a hypocrisy, if what we wear, is what we do not actually become inside. It is interesting that women wear clothes to express their mood, but it is not essential if they don't put any effort to fill in content that represents their expression. In retrospect, men who ignore to caress their external image against only caressing the internal skills is not the full throttle life is all about, as people that do not express their identity externally to the world will not make a huge impact as they could in their full capacity. There are many other people that we let try to achieve that which they do not fit internal content in their heads, a more flawed map or strategy that fills peoples needs inadequately. So as long you are miles ahead relatively to others on fulfilling a better mental map externally as a journey, it is a wasted effort the benefits it could accrue to society if you didn't started more earlier on contributing on that or being the main core of such mission instead being a service of worship of someone that has a worse mental map than you do (does that make common sense?). In addition, apparel is a self reflection of our identity, in the same way music becomes a self reflection of how we view our world as. Thus, the analysis of music with mental symmetry which the author describes, which was one of his main core parts of his life, can also make me describe apparel with mental symmetry as well, which was part of my whole career so far, as well my close relatives (my passed away mom and my current wife) were/are big fans of apparel.

Now that the introduction is over, I will briefly describe an analysis of each book in detail.

Notes about the "The Power of Habit - How Mercy Mental Networks work"

Chapter 1: The Habit Loop - How Habits work: This is kind of a representation of how a static character represents. In this chapter, they describe a patient as a use case on how the habit loop works. However, habits always get influenced by new content and they alter in terms of variation and taste, can become stronger, can become less stronger, and be overridden with other habits. In this case, it seems all input trigger habits are then disabled to be outputted after a routine and successful/failed craving has elapsed, as usually, a new input for the habit to self assess itself or be influenced as it happens by default is not there. If assessed with bad emotional experience, it will not notice it next time. If assessed with a new event that can convert us to a new habit, the motivation will always be driven in the same format, always being seen whenever we see the same cue, it will always will feel like we are converting ourselves as a first attempt instead of an iterative attempt that makes the new habit that wants to replace an old habit more stronger and stronger. It seems time has frozen to that individual for his character did not progress any more to new experiences other than just showing all the different habit loops if the character is static. It is pretty freaky but at the same time scary to say the individual has stopped to gain growth to itself, but for one thing we can say sure is that whatever he picked up from the past, he still attains, the same foundations, the same beliefs, the same love, it is just that he doesn't has any system of flow in his mind to alter existing habits with new information, that even if he pushed against strong will power, and even if he did so, he would not realize next time to create such strong will power again cause he doesn't recollect he did strong will power before, to change his own character anymore. To many of us, it is a question to ask: If we had the ability to disembody our-self as philosopher Swedenborg has once said, and if habits is what represents the essence of our individuality, as Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics describe, is that how we will live for our rest of our life if we don't have a brain anymore to influence of changing our existing habits? Is this an acceptable way to live and if so why? And if we lived that way, does it make sense to create a static habit that we are able to respond in the world in the most efficient way as possible no matter the circumstance, like a scientific formula is always unalterable? Test and see if you can live your life with a habit that you never change (place it as a king) and see how long it lasts and don't think about changing it and see where it fails. For that reason, a theory like mental symmetry (even the theory of the power of habit cue->procedure->reward in a specific domain is much helpful than having no framework at all) is imperative in order to place a king that can fit most of our behavior to be compatible with anything in the world (I am not really confident on this, but it seem a theory imposes new cues or triggers so the individual can progress through the "same" theory next time it sees them instead the environment imposing what the individual should do. It is definitely a different way of seeing things and it is really scary and alienating to us, if such use case or scenario had to be).

Chapter 2: The Craving Brain - How to create habits: This book describes that we live our life with rewards as an enabler to activate certain procedures (that illustrates, such as Febreze had to change itself as a reward instead of a procedure. Febreze instead of removing odors resembling the activity instead became an enabler for people to clean the room more often while craving at the end to use the smell of the spray Febreze has). The reward concept of the "Power of Habit" was discussed much on the introduction in this post. In summary, rewards are an indirect way of changing old habits with new habits. In here, it describes that no procedure cannot be fulfilled without any reward. The point is that a reward does not need to be of concrete essence always. It can also be an abstract essence as well. Understanding how things work, an "a-ha" moment, making all things fit together, is a craving that people want to fulfill again and again, and the possibilities of fulfilling that habit becomes endless, as each event in our life is like a puzzle that awaits to be solved by the use of some understanding. For instance, using the framework of the power of habits cue->procedure->reward becomes a habit to fulfill the craving of our understanding, by replacing old bad habits with new better habits, and then improving new better habits with even better ones, an iterative process that never ends by the craving of gaining understanding of topics we had no clue how they worked before. I think ironically, this abstract habit, which represents a theory, according to Thomas Kuhn scientific revolutions, becomes a king of the king of all habits, as a meta-habit, describing habits about habits. Having this framework and having faith on it that it will stimulate the cravings of understanding (which we will see later on the next chapter how faith emerges) is the most powerful way to control our habits. No wonder this book was popular and thank god it is, because now its more easier for people who are familiar with this book, to connect them in some way, if we want to discuss them how the brain works. In summary, this book created a new habit that it would not emerged if it wasn't observed by scientists and discovered, if it wasn't described in a book, if it wasn't read by many to use it as their main application and be driven and see its positive results, just like new technology would not emerge if a scientific theory was not discovered, written, taught and create products out of it. Next chapter talks about "procedure" and beliefs on changing a habit.

Chapter 3 The golden rule of habit change: Why transformation occurs: Here it talks about two concepts. Substituting habits and having faith that things will work. As in economics, where purchasing power can influence people buying alternative products that have the same benefits (lets eat cheddar cheese instead of Swiss cheese), so our habits can find alternative habits that can push the same rewards. One of the key points is how to master a skill. If you are jack of all trades, it is impossible to master a skill. It is important to have confidence that you can do a skill and that happens only by the repetition of doing the same forms of actions again and again, such as playing the piano. The essence is of course deliberate practice, but before deliberate practice, we all start at deliberate practice when we try to learn something new in the end. In the example of the football use case described in chapter 3, people had to master the habits of reacting immediately and not thinking of uncertainty, but that takes time, as you have to fill the gap of the uncertainty to certainty by filling all the use cases. At some point, you have to remove the plug and stop having doubts to yourself anymore even if there is some marginal error that your cues did not respond correctly, but the marginal error is so low, that in most cases you read the play correctly. That is the use case or framework or theory that the coach instructed to the players, that if they followed it, they would gain the craving of winning. At first they had doubts, but later on they believed and they started to win games. However, when reaching to the final game, their belief was tested to their limits. This is no different than when you have to play piano under huge audience. It is when feelings overwhelm the mind of uncertainty and let the mind become in a frozen state. In the case of playing a melody, we do remember the notes how the melody plays in the piano yesterday through our tip of our nose, but when it comes on the day we have to play on the huge audience, we start to wonder with contempt whether I really actually remember how the melody really is in our mind or not. It is this type of adversity or authority, in this case the audience, that tests our faith under how much level of pressure we can be confident that we can pull it off.

Chapter 4 Keystone habits or the ballad of Paul O Neil: This is an interesting chapter that discusses how small habits can change a set of habits that are associated or labeled under the same category. Figuring out which small habits can be represented keystone habits is of essence, as not all habits can create a domino effect of influencing other habits, but many can do, and some in greater or less effect. What keystone habits have a pattern is that there is a form of generality, that is, the generality is not seen, you have to shape the generality, you have to describe and present how this habit fulfills several needs. For instance, Paul O Neil importance on "safety first" was not seen by people in the hope O Neil expected them to see it as. It took them time to see the effects of how this keystone habits benefited not only the workers but the company's costs on liability as well better quality products for the clients that receive from less defects. This in all turn-around benefited every role within the organization, whether it was an employee, an executive, or a client. Once a new habit achieves replacing an old habit, the mind can instinctively see what are the differentiation of the old habit and the new habit, as both are now explicitly shown instead of just implicitly acknowledged. Then it is very easy, given that now they are in empirical form, how the new habit type can be categorized as while the old habit type can be categorized as of, and then do more actions that resemble the category of the new habit. Keystone habits work in an essence that it makes an implicit thing an explicit thing, it is like the story when executives never knew that they treated people in poor conditions until somebody explicitly documented about it and they do immediate action about it. Contributor style focuses on small acts that have high frequency to occur as a major opportunity to control his destiny (this is the cognitive style that wants to have the most control compared to other cognitive styles). For instance, one of the traits of Contributor style biographically was found of being frugal in small transactions and sets it up as a keystone habit. Because unlike high transactions occur less frequently, acting on small transactions which occur more frequently allows the Contributor to make it visible to himself the trait of frugality so the individual is more prepared and already empowered as a habit on being frugal in big transactions as well.

Chapter 5 Starbucks and the habit of success when willpower becomes automatic: There is no such essence where willpower becomes automatic, as willpower always has a stamina. One I admit myself is this blog itself requires a lot of willpower, as it requires 1. lot of reading 2. lot of writing 3. while taking care of the daily needs of relationship/work/self. I would really wanted to articulate my writing more clearly, but I acknowledge the limits of my will power and put it as a plan to refresh this material in a book when I have more free time, contact connections, and able to make some small impact of what I have written so far within my life. However, will power is a true blessing, it is the essence of how freedom or free will emerges, it is by how we are able to fill content to new habits that are more motivated and able to crush existing habits. Will power in the book is described as writing plans to yourself. That is one of the great examples and it is one of the elements of my draft of my next social network to be (I want people to understand where they are, where they want to be, and have a plan on how to go there by understanding by what they lack and what new features they need). As the book described in Chapter 5, patients tried explaining all the bottlenecks they were about to go and how they would be able to resolve those obstacles, making these new habits breath new air when the cue arrived instead of being struggled by the existing habits when the event arrived. I think the best habit to enforce our self within our willpower is replacing a habit that looks at a tunnel-vision to a one that looks at the big picture. You want to address the problems instead of ignoring them and locking them like in a black box and representing it as a pandora box. Why bad organizations exist and why good organizations exist is between the ability to admit mistakes and create new learning processes that fills in the big picture and be prepared ahead of it next time instead of being narrow minded which we have seen in the black box thinking book, within the airplane, healthcare, and criminal justice system. Starbucks does not want its employees to re-invent the wheels. So for that reason, Starbucks train its employees to existing patterns the company already knows that people behaved not according to the full picture of things and made them as small exercises for new recruits to solve as homework so that they plan ahead how to react on those situations appropriately.

Chapter 6 The power of crisis. How leaders create habits through accident and design: A crisis can either represent learning from the mistakes of others or just stuffing it in a black box. Chapter 5 described how to resolve the situation of a crisis. Chapter 6 describes the opportunity of a crisis to either use or ignore it. It is up to the organization itself. Basically, this chapter is already devoted by a whole book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed, that gives in more detail and more stories about how failure can be a learning material, as it is the only way to grow ourselves. Thus, I did an extensive analysis of Chapter 6 by analyzing the book of Black Box Thinking. That analysis gives a more clear view (as it includes Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions) what is going on with organizations when a crisis happens.

Chapter 7 How Target Knows what you want before you do when companies predict and manipulate habits: This chapter talks the essence that habits are predictable and the only time when habits change is when you are either forced to change yourself because you read a book like the "Power of Habits" (which is very rare and the book ironically doesn't describe that until the end, as it is used so far in schools, but maybe later it will influence worldwide?) or the environment changes with new events coming on our life that forces us to create new routines we never did before, such as getting into a new marriage, having babies, and so on. Those events need to feed new needs they never had to feed before. Those needs need to be fulfilled by companies where clients are not very familiar with. The one that comes early to the door step is the one that has high chances the customer will become loyal. That is how the retail store Target (according to current writing of this blog, it is the second largest retail in United States) got its big scoops of money - targeting people as early as possible who are on unfamiliar territory on new needs so they can become their loyal customers. Imagine if you have baby and you don't have the time to go outside because you have to take care of the baby. It is such cases where e-commerce, for instance, can grab that opportunity and make those new mothers as loyal customers. Not only that, creating a new habit, associating a purchase with a retail store, has chances of becoming a keystone habit, the implicit becoming an explicit thing, motivating people to buy everything they need (and not only for the baby) in that commerce site. The problem is that the retail target store knew way early with their algorithms, I mean way way early that their customers where pregnant, that even their parents didn't know that they were pregnant in the first place. It becomes a topic of controversy, so Target had to make the unsettling thing to settling, by making the coupons that they wanted to target to instead be filled up with other random items so it didn't appear that the company was stalking to the customer's buying patterns. This in essence tries to characterize the characteristics of a mental network by Lorin Friesen (which we refer them to as habits so far): A mental network expects a consistent input. Inconsistent input brings pain. The whole point is that actively changing habits is a thing we "choose" our self and "acknowledge" that we want to change an existing habit with another, as we even put "plans" to it, in order to motivate that habit to override our old habits. In contrast, when we do not want to change an existing habit and others force us to change that habit, then we get more inconsistent input and we receive pain. For that reason, the act of having my own sense of privacy, even when reality is different and inconsistent with what the person believes, as long we don't show inconsistent input that we violate the sense of privacy, the person will still believe that people do not violate the sense of privacy. Here, familiarity to influence someone to adapt something unfamiliar is tossed out with the sandwich effect in order to influence people to change habits (mixing random items with targeted items to the customer to hide they actually spied the customer). I am not sure if this sandwich effect will ever make individuals accept that big brother is always be watching you or instead be in denial about it. However, I do agree a lot of cases where the sandwich effect does work. It is the same case of when going to school in order to get diploma. Money and being accepted by society is something familiar for a kid, as he receives allowances and approval by parents, but the use of understanding how things work is not something the kid can still grasp at that time. I remember in one of my class where cultures were classified as follows: American use Sandwich, Germans do not add any familiarity so they give the raw burger instead, while Japanese do not add any unfamiliar topic, so they only get the bread instead. That is maybe one of the reasons why the Japanese culture is something that is very hard to change, such as the gender gap inequality. In contrast, cultures such as Germany, may have to wire in a brain in such a way, that they are accustomed to not feel threatened by unfamiliarity and able to be much faster on adapting through changes.

Chapter 8 Saddleback Church and the montgomery bus boycott: This chapter describes how the power of acquaintances (low-ties), an external self esteem, is so powerful, that can set the whole society to a revolution. However, such form of revolution is not enough if it is not feed out with internal self esteem. For instance, the Saddleback church was not able to help all people to learn about the bible within the church, so what McGravan, the founder of the church, asked for its people, was to do their bible studies in their home itself. Only when we transition from external self esteem (lower motives) to a more powerful force as our internal self esteem (higher motives as in this example illustrates) we can hold more stability to stand on habits even under strong influence. What it means is that everything starts with lower motives, but at the end of the day, we should always strive for higher motives that will be the main pillars of support of our lower motives to still stand even under influence. Esteem is part of the Maslow pyramid. External and internal self esteem will be discussed more in detail when analyzing the book "mind what you wear".

Chapter 9: THE NEUROLOGY OF FREE WILL Are We Responsible for Our Habits? As I described in my previous blogs, our free will is based on our choices (also called as motivations), choices that only come out by creating a mental map (like the example of Starbucks creating a plan ahead) that can replace an old habit with a new habit. It requires a lot of willpower for the old habit to replace the new habit and once that new habit becomes from implicit to explicit, such as achieving a keystone habit, can transform the rest of our motivation to be pulled by the new habit as it is empirically visible. That can be used to replace bad habits to good habits, or the inverse, transforming good habits to bad habits, such as in the case of casinos. The casino example just alone without discussing about habits is just a great read alone, on how we manipulate habits within individuals. It is terrifying and any person who works on marketing should just pay attention when we manipulate habits of others that narrow minded focus on the domain of their profit. If we look at it through the big picture, it just crosses the limits of humanity, as it places infrastructures to enable or convert people from good habits to bad habits. That is why you should be grateful why government tries to limit gambling and other restrictions imposed, but at the end of the day, it is us as individuals, as discussed from chapter 8, that we should commit on internal self esteem (such as studying and understanding the book of the power of habit, makes us independent of others influencing of our own habits) instead of external self esteem, such as social ties, that are prone to manipulate our own habits. In supreme court, it was alleged that gambling could be similar as someone who killed a person unconsciously when they were asleep walking. The difference between the two is: the gambling person's brain is active within all regions at all times and if it became unconscious due to drinking, it was an act that was of no necessity. In contrast, sleeping is a necessity and when the person's brain does something while sleepwalking, a part of the brain becomes disabled and he is not self aware of the actions. Two stories one of necessity and in turn becomes a disabled mind and the other with no necessity to disable the mind and most of the time with an enabled mind makes the case of someone gambling not a one who did it involuntarily compared to someone who murdered someone while sleep walking. However, I even extended that the court system should go "beyond" Locke's unconsciousness on punishing people, but instead to what their current habits represent to limit the punishment level, as well the punishment system should be worked in a way where when the person gets out of jail, he becomes of better character and a role model of society, instead of becoming an individual that represents a dead end to society, as currently society judge people only by looking at his criminal record. As Black Box Thinking discusses, growth only comes from mistakes, not from avoiding mistakes.

"Mind what you wear"

This book essentially describes the power of external self esteem, as well influencing the cue within the framework of habit instead just focusing to substitute procedure to replace an old habit with a new habit or adding a new reward for a habit to become enabled. In this case we influence the cue with the use of clothes. By the nature of clothes are, unlike external environment, ones clothes go wherever we go and stays around us along within our identity (just like when you have someone close to you, like you wife and husband). This cue is something though that unlike our close loved ones influence us, it is instead something that we can choose how to influence our self by the use of clothes, as long others don't influence on what to actually wear. Closed relationship with people along with the representation of the clothes we use, represent to James William, as the "material self". Clothes not influence other individuals, but our own self as well, in the same way when we choose a partner to be our wife, it becomes in some sense a part of our identity.

If you compare with the essay about music essay in Lorin Friesen, you can get the similarities with what the author of "Mind what you wear" book and Lorin Friesen describes: clothes are more than just an aesthetic thing or a thing of taste, like the model being the canvas to paint something aesthetic. Yes, especially Lorin Friesen, describes in his essay that music correlates with science, so in the same premises, the author of this book describes how apparel influence us psychologically, making apparel a business at last for people to subject it with substance of science instead of all fluff and only care about the operations and just bench-marking only what brands just only sell. Like a business operation, what habits we instruct others to impose, can be either to facilitate others in decisions like Target does by helping maternity mothers to buy their necessary stuff (but its motivation most time is not really an altruistic act, but to gain loyal customers for profit, a craving that does not match with the original procedure), or it can be to facilitate others from good habits to bad habits, such as the casino industry does, or the pornography industry indirectly in some way if they try to use data analysis to make their customers addicted as each company's mission is something people try to obsess about, and so on.

We notice that some clothes make us more depressed, such as a buggy top, or wearing clothes that cover most of our body, such as jeans, or where studies report that we de-individualize our self, such as covering our head with a hoodie, or wearing a specific dress code that all have to wear within an organization. Lorin in the same vein discusses that music transforms people with no content these days. In these days we instead listen to very simple beats to feel the ecstasy of a rhythm. Songs today does not include a melody or journey, where we go from home, find an obstacle and fight with it, and then our old motivation gets replaced with a new motivation, such as like all sonatas come into those 3 stages within classical music. Classical musical has complicated rhythm that is hard to identify the pattern as the emotions are more complicated to express, yet for the good classical music listener, he can identify the patterns that are composed within the melody.

It is interesting that the author expresses that clothing can be a key cornerstone habit as the book implies in bold letters: "Get your clothing right and everything else will fall into place." Although I agree that it is a good starting point to use clothes as a bridge to communicate with others and also improve our self esteem, which is a valid point when James William had thoughts of suicide and tried to transform himself by taking control of his external reality. However, there needs to also have correspondence to improve according to Maslow's pyramid, our internal self esteem, such as in chapter 8 of the power of habit illustrates as the last main bottleneck for the transformation of a culture to erupt. So if we want to create a diagram of the Power of Habits in terms of clothes, we would have: Clothes -> Changes our identity to a new cue -> Different Routines -> Different Rewards. It seems that a new cue represent a substitute of another cue that can represent for doing the same routine, which the author defines it as "enclothed cognition". For instance, focusing on doing well on studies can be re-enforced by being in an environment, such as sitting in a classroom or library. However, if whatever the circumstances prescribe, if you have on your backpack a jacket of white coat scientist wear and strap it on, as the study suggests, you will be able to focus to solve puzzle exercises more nimbly and accurately than without it. Thus, enclothed cognition can represent placing cues that help people to enable specific habits (routine -> reward) to emerge by the use of clothing. Wear the wrong type of clothes for a situation, such as wearing swimwear clothes while doing a mathematical exercise, and as studies suggest, women perform worse than men with the same type of clothes. It seems women are more sensitive to external self esteem as the studies suggest. It also seems women are creating a platonic form by what the average person expects she has to wear in order to be recognized and get praised in order to get the maximum external self esteem (while in many cases, as opposed to men, ignoring internal self esteem, such as acquiring a skill, such as being good at math). As the study suggests, clothing is used as form of guiding to our self actualization by using external self esteem (the top 3 results are to be confident, comfortable, express myself while only 28% say to be fashionable). I suggest that we can extend chapter 8 of the Power of Habit to what other factors can create acquaintances. Besides strong friends can create acquaintances with friends of friends, acquaintances are easy to make by using clothes that are shown by peer pressure that you need to respect that person and compliment, as you feel you are connected within that social group. That is why people compliment some people that stand out with their clothes compared to others who just try to hide under the background with their clothes. Another reason may be is that most communication happens when one person wants to stand out and do something in the external word and the only way to do that is with the help of others. The only ones with high rate of possible candidates that can contribute are others that also stand out and do something in the external world. And in order to stand out, you have to wear clothes that are vibrant and makes you stand out more from the rest of the crowd. Thus, that is another factor that people can form acquaintances, forcing for another way a person to establish self esteem. But if you have seen in the last chapter 9 of the Power of Habit of Self Esteem, that was also a type of way the casino organization manipulated the habits of people by establishing a sense of being acquaintances. For instance, the casino spokeperson could say, "I gave you this and this and this, should you as an invisible contract, although you are not forced to, to give something in return back to me?". So that is how external self esteem is vulnerable if it does not have an internal self esteem that can hold as a pillar for those external self esteems to not be manipulated and get crumbled. In other words people need to have foundations (such as the framework the "Habits of Power") in order to not be influenced by external pressures and instead be guided by internal foundations.

Last but not least, a great advice the author says is "What you wear mirrors your mental state". I totally agree that it does represent a mental state. But what mental state does it represent? A one that is hypocrite to itself , a one with lofty ambitions, or a one that wishes to improve himself, is trying to improve himself, and already improved part of himself? We all wish people wear clothes for the latter part reason. But in order for that to happen, people have to create a proper mental map, a proper foundation, a proper internal self esteem, that will more reflect their clothes actualize progressively become successful in their life and that they can manage their habits, wealth, and network with balance. Having the proper attire shows that you have the passion, determination, re-enforcing your mental map that you are ready to collide with the external world and make a difference. It means following the golden rule of habits as discussed in Chapter 3 of the power of habit: Believe in the mental map and follow them as natural instinct and follow ahead, as there will always be low risks that are unavoidable, no matter what emotions you will get rolled down against adversity. As my blogs go onward and onward, I see for the same effort right now, although I got new discoveries and connections, they become over time less and less, creating opportunities that I can start tackling myself where nobody has re-invented the wheel for those yet. The apparel industry is one of them and is one that I have worked for a long time and many people see there is no science to it in the same manner people disapproved in the old times where the female brain was no different than the male brain. If there is only one god, then that god must not be playing with dice, as Einstein said. So if that is so, let us find god in a scientific way, let us see how people work in the same way how we discovered how the world work, as we, part of being machine learners, I think our creator wants us to reach our ultimate state where we are conscious how not only the objective world works, but as well how the subjective world works. For that reason, I will focus how to make science on subjective stuff, such as in this case, how to create a personal integrated system (in the same way we integrate objectively different departments by an ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning) that there is an alignment instead of a mismatch with the mental map of internal self esteem against the clothes that creates the external self esteem which boost our-self and the external public. Since I am in this industry, fate or not, it is better to do something about it, as anybody else would love to have this opportunity and I become a burden if I don't do anything about it.

We talked about habits and we see some countries are progressively change fast or on average pace, such as Western Europe and United States while some change in a slow pace, such as Japan, by illustrating the example of sandwich, only meat, and bread correspondingly. A very recent article at the time of writing this post was posted that "Japanese women are being urged to swap flats for high heels to 'empower themselves' and improve their posture". We know Japan has the most slowest country to change the pace of eradicating the gender gap of career progression within its country that it tries to use tactics of external self esteem as a starting point for women to gain their rights, even when those external self esteem activities, such as wearing heels, academically and scientifically, are not healthy for women to constantly wear.. The article later says quoting "British people petitioned parliament in the UK, calling for a change to an outdated dress code law that allowed employers to require women to wear high heels in the work place.". In contrast, that means British women, a country that at least progressively has a faster pace of changing things more than Japan does, realized they have created internal self esteem that they are confident that they can do their part keeping the gender gap not going astray by not requiring to use external self esteem anymore. As Maslow's theory goes in terms of self esteem: If both external and internal self esteem exist, internal self esteem overrides external self esteem.

I think I hit grid and made all the lights of the town turn on. The world is more interesting and not boring after all. Lets live life instead of watching old soap operas. The real soap opera, creating science out of the subjective and the conflicts that will ensue is about to begin in the next decades. Improving operations (globalization) will be the old me at some point when we will have reached the peak of all infrastructures around the world be at its maximum capacity. At the same time, there is always exemplars that we learn from new use cases of migrating an existing infrastructure to different cultures, and for that, I do not say it was a wasted effort, for it is a great thing for our current times. However, I think it is more exciting to lead to a "new thing" that can help the world exponentially substantially improve their quality of life. Lets pack it all these nice things in a sandwich for these things and make sure they become explicit at some point in order for keystone habits to emerge and transform the world, shall we?

Natural Cognitive Theology By Lorin Friesen Summary: Demistifying human behavior driven by 2 components: motivation and value

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 08:40:00 +0000

You can read my review of Natural Cognitive Theology in order to understand a brief summary of the book before reading on.

While I was reading the book Natural Cognitive Theology, I expressed that the study of the individual should not be taken casually but seriously, should not be taken as a peripheral element within the context of society but as a core element that can drive us "in" or "out" of the road on our journey on advancing our current civilization.

After finishing reading the book of Natural Cognitive Theology, I wanted to give a final wrap up of what I additionally learned and also resembling the very close similarities to the books that talk about "thinking about thinking" (meta-thinking), such as black box thinking, executive paradox, revolutionary feedback, clean thinking, and so on. However, I also want to focus in here the driving forces of our behavior, which consist of 2 attributes: motivation and value.

Motivation creates value and value drives our action. Values is a thing I suppose everybody should already know. Values are the most deep rooted things in our inner self explained in several psychological books. It is that when a topic resembles more closely to our values, the more passionate our actions become. On the contrary, input from our environment that has no relevance or association to our values becomes a drain to process in our mind. It is more apparently that we do not have a free will and react based on our values. Just try to see what activities you do on your free time outside of your work and try to categorize them. Just check if there is a pattern in the activities you do and check on the time intervals on when they happen. Some of the activities you do in your free time are independent, but some are based on the dependency of others. When I mean "others", it can be the places you go, the people you hang, that they would not happen, because they only are triggered most strongly when your presence is surrounded or expect the presence to be surrounded if that entity we talk is a living and intelligent thing. I have to mention, when we refer to entities, any atomic level of the entity still becomes a valid point. For instance, the entity does not require to be an individual. It can represent a group influencing another group, such as between companies, organizations, and countries. Those can be illustrated as what does one company does with acquiring another company, what happens when one government puts specific measures on an organization, what happens when one country puts measures on another country, and so on. On the contrary, the choices we do independently is usually because we think our choices is right and thus we do them. That because is due to a motivation, that motivation either be of empty or lack of content or with content, as we will describe later on. The important thing to ask is: "We have free will, don't we?". Yes, apparently, we do, but it can only come through major events when your own self have 2 conflicting motivations, and it is usually always in the following use case: "Your existing motivation that is driven by the values you already have and your new motivation that is driven to different values than the ones you currently have". If you try to look at your past history, where there values that show different actions that drive you completely different to the values that you have and act now? The breaking point in between those two most likely is due to our free will, two motivations embarked, leading the new one being stronger than the existing one. If the motivations is not strong enough, then don't expect any new transition. Otherwise, most of our life is locked by our values and the term "options" only comes if we find something else more motivating than what we already do. The point is those motivations (I would also refer those as active mental networks if I kept the terms close to the theory of mental symmetry) are very rare to occur to the average person in their daily life, and if they do appear, in most cases, they are not strong enough to overlap of our existing motivations, making our life for most of us individuals to work most of our activity of our life to the same existing values for a series of years. That is why society is very easy predictable in most cases. We know that a behavior of "most people" (pay attention here that I don't focus to one individual here) will not change overnight so we can have high strong confidence on the evidence we grab from the user behavior will still retain a consistent pattern for an extended period of time. Now add some handicaps to your desire wanting the user to use X product, then the only thing you have to do is either creating an environment that makes it dependent to be triggered to do that activity or boost more content that supports the motivation of that individual from other threats that can be de-motivated, and you have more higher chances (more stronger confidence) than before that the people will still keep consistent that pattern. As in statistics, the value that we want (i.e. be healthy) is predetermined by our choices (i.e. are we eating healthy? do we avoid smoking or drinking alcohol?). Thus, in order to reach such value where we are the most healthy, we look at all of our options, and we see which choices makes us the closest to our value. The theory of mental symmetry describes this concept as divine sovereignty, such as the light does a refraction within the medium of the water in order to reach to the least time. That is a platonic form which in real life we can never reach, but when we try to make decisions, we always try to check all possibilities (when in reality, we cannot have all possibilities) and pick the best output for our value we are motivated for.

Now let us examine how motivation is created. Motivation can be created either with content or without content. The interesting thing is "content". When we do science in the objective world, our motivation to solve our problems was always based by content. We try to find patterns that create a platonic forms (such as math) and then we create use cases or examples that fit a specific category for a platonic form (that is what science does and we call them as exemplars - hence, it is important your content to have relative works out of it). Those two fill the content of making our objective world with layers and layers of abstractions that become reliable because our previous layers of abstractions were able to hold as a foundation for the next layer of abstractions to stand above, like constructing a building with a lot of floors. It is all about understanding how things work. However, that was not the case for a lot of years before in our history. The thing is it is bad to do stuff without first understanding how things works in a platonic form in our head first. That is, if we are more away from our platonic form, then our works, whatever will be, will not align with how things work externally precisely. Our values will be partially filled due to motivations of platonic forms that didn't study the matter of the world precisely enough to understand it well. On the other hand, hanging too much on platonic forms and showing no works out of it will not liberate us to create beauty to the external world and create more layers on top of it. As actions represent the values that we hold, we keep that motivation being the living thing and pushing others to follow as an example while any other motivation becomes a thing that remains dormant. That is what a lot of years before the renaissance times life was like. The motivation of science was always there, but not so strong as a living thing that will capture the whole world to appreciate its true value. There was once time, as the book of Natural Cognitive Theology describes, Alexandria hugest library, becoming one of the wonders that could lift the world at that time in the same premises like the renaissance times did, but unfortunately it did not, as the major motivations of society these days was tribes conquering other tribes, like the game of Warcraft, not having a true understanding at that time that there were other values that if everybody was motivated, would have made a world better with less resources to waste and become scarce abundant not only on the average daily needs the individual required at that time, but to exponentially grow the activities that they could manipulate and communicate with society, such as we do in today's age with technology and science.

Such motivation we have today to make our objective world a better place. Let us look at the example of the airline industry. The airline industry created a platonic form to have the least accidents as possible. A flying airplane is a very complicated machine and is under pressure by different environments high up through the air, requiring pilots to be very careful on their flying patterns, for any mistake could become a full casualty. When the airline industry started, crashes were very common and the process to avoid flight accidents at its inception stages didn't have the adequate impact to reach close to the platonic target to reach little to no airplane accidents at that time. However, given the airplane industry had a scientific attitude, embraced transparency and avoided mental networks of culture and authority to interfere and tamper with filling the actual content of the data, they were able to create a system where all pilots had to learn in order to become effective on the objective platonic form of having the least airplane accidents as possible. We see the airplane industry practiced the same traits of attitude like the great library of Alexandria. At that time, Alexandria tried to not be under the influence of pantheism and other authority figures. All cultures focused solely on that time on integrating the concept of god as how things work, making that era as one of the biggest concentration of scientific achievements. Similarly, the airplane industry, created a lot of reforms to its system of how it handles things: Pilots publicly reporting all the accidents and flights that had high risk so everybody could gain access and learn. Private investigators that could check the incident carefully. Adding procedure and rules as part of the norms for staff and pilots to follow in order to minimize behavior that could yield high risk of airplane accidents. We can see that if we retain a platonic form that defines on how things work instead of people's desire on how things we wish to be, then the content that we fill on each exemplar that we do (in here, our reaction on every airplane accident that happens), our reality becomes closer and more closer to the platonic form that we want to achieve. There is still a problem with the example of the airplane industry, where the type of righteousness we have here, which by definition means a platonic form matching with the reality of the world, is only contained within the norms of the airplane industry and in most cases not contained within the people. That is, it would be more interesting if instead the norm being the living thing to motivate people to do what is right, for people itself to motivate people what is right. That is, if people look at those concepts of rules and procedures beyond just a norm to follow, but instead to the underlying structure why these norms where created in the first place, then people would be more pro-active and more motivated to do more than what those norms and procedures state in order to get more closer to the target the platonic form wants us to reach. I do not state that people are not motivated in the airplane industry, for the actions of publicly reporting airplane accidents and high risk incidents, as well the interest of understanding how things work, as long those foundations are driven for most people working in the aviation industry, then the platonic form and our reality will not stray away over time. When there is a mismatch with the motivation of individuals and the norms, then there will be a strong willingness for individuals to influence the norms of the platonic form to not follow the procedure of how things work to a procedure that mitigates or adjusts things to be less of an issue to examine the contents of the incident. That can be attributed to the healthcare industry, where in many cases, they have a lot of liability and accident costs, where the norms don't justify of the original platonic forms hospitals intended to do " to save every human possible life as possible ". Accidents happen and we cannot do much about it, but what we can do is what "we could do in the future" for this accident does not happen again, as after all, platonic forms mission always strives on "what could be" as opposed to sticking or covering up what already happened so we follow the utilitarian principle of making the most people happy and reduce the least conflict.

This attitude that a lot of healthcare industries have is an example of doing decisions by not filling content and contemplating that we are still doing the right thing, a shortcut of the mind that drives motivation of a platonic form that ignores reality. This can be illustrated by one narrative a teacher on theology discussed that when he visits a church, to paraphrase with my own words, the atmosphere of the environment becomes so captivating that it influences the mind. I am not intending to say that being emotional captivated by a thing is wrong, especially when we have a lot of problems that need content to be analyzed, as they can be stressful, and having a "small rest" is essential if you are too much out of your comfort zone, but making our whole lifestyle being captivated emotionally like the healthcare industry does is like we are avoiding content, avoiding reality, making the platonic forms that were originally intended by the founders to stray away to what we actually do. Other examples that I can illustrate is when you are under pressure or somebody places authority on you, you are more prone to disable perceiving and making sense of things on your environment, because you become overwhelmed with emotions, and usually most of our choices in reality that end up bad is usually due to that. Again, I have to illustrate that platonic forms are of the essence of "what could be". I think neurologists know that much more better than I do. One neuroscientist teacher could state "why don't we think of how to fix things ahead of time instead of patching things up". And the main point the reason of the cause of that is because we don't have a progressive action on filling up content on a platonic form that leads to little to no mistakes and we leave up instead to be forced up to "learn from content" when reality and the platonic forms we held are so stray away that it is inevitable to still defend ourselves and say "well, it is a small mistake" as opposed to the counter evidence that we cannot emotionally avoid.

In summary, we saw that lot of organizations follow the platonic form of how the objective world works, but some, such as the healthcare industry did not, and are starting to force to learn from others the correct practices. But let us turn around and see how we looked at "how things work in the objective world". Before the renaissance age, most individuals looked things in a superficial way of how things work, attributed to pantheism or gods where its transcendence is something where man cannot understand. People placed strong value on a god with no content, but those bets, at least on the objective world, turned out to be wrong. Man can understand how the objective world works by creating a platonic form (math) that can match with reality with exemplars (science) that create layers of abstraction within the objective world that benefits humans to amplify the ability to manipulate and access resources (technology). As if I practiced theology, if god exists, then that god I believe must make sense and can be grasped in a similar vein as an object that lives in a computer program can grasp how the source code of the program behaves in the world. However, this behavior of transcendence with no content has not been faded out away, it is a shortcut humans can take as the epitome of their motivation that drive their values, and similar conflicts will exist like past tribes tried to contest science as sort of witchcraft or some sorts of curse in order for such subject to not contest the rulers of the party that controlled the world.

What I am bringing up to the conclusion is that we are starting to see a conflict again of the same issue again, but now on the subjective part, that is, whether we as individuals can be understood in the same way we apply math and science in the objective world. Nobody tries to achieve that because it is a very sensitive topic, as it impacts our own ego. However, when people think that they do have freedom when there are no rules to be contested against them like science does to the objective world, it is actually an illusion, as there is always some order placed either by government or corporation or society that drives humanity to work in a certain direction if it does not have a direction of its own self that benefits human society. Again, I have to emphasize, the platonic form society intends to do is whatever benefits human society to progress itself where no crime exists, less misunderstandings exist, people doing what they passionately love and contribute the maximum productivity, and many more. Yet those platonic forms are ideal, they are very hard to grasp if people are not motivated to achieve exemplars to those platonic forms, yet impossible to achieve any of it if the platonic form does not constitute of "how individuals work". Yes, I am intending to say that we should focus and learn more "how individuals work", and if all things considered, humans should not be an exemption of an entity that does not have a system on how its behavior is guided. Neurology, psychology, and other findings are closer to unravel more on how the individual works, and the times will come near, where we have to identify our actions in a mathematical and scientific way instead of being guided only by culture and norms, which is only an effect, and not a cause, on how our behavior originates. However, norms are important. It represents where our current state in our society is, it represents our current motivation. Based on those norms, they need to be tested for each activity that we are motivated, whether when it is tested against the waters or not, whether it is beneficial to society or not. As we looked at the example of the healthcare industry, those norms and cultures that were manifested were not potent and had to be discarded. However, they cannot be discarded without replacing a motivation with a better motivation, as our free will is usually guided that way. In order for a new better motivation to replace an existing motivation, that better motivation has to be created under platonic forms, under "how individuals work" in the first place. It is very not apparently something we don't understand how individuals work, it is more that we don't want to admit that individuals can be understood on how individual works. We do not want to admit that if we understood how individual works, then we could create better effective systems in place, like the aviation industry does. We do not want to admit that the aviation industry main factor for having an almost clean record of airplane crashes was due to understanding how things work not only objectively, but also by how people behave. We are embracing the same attitude of authority of Julias Cesar where we don't see the importance of trail pathways that contribute to understanding how things work in individuals, as in the same way Caesar didn't see the great importance was to keep intact the great library of Alexandria in Egypt. When such pathways like I and others do to envelop an opportunity for making our society a better place as all cultures idealize but instead here with content like science does and in the end we fail, they would see our history of today and see how the negligence and ignorance of other people covered us in the dust and see us missing an opportunity on how better and earlier our civilization would have grown to a culture where those platonic forms and reality become closer instead of separated as they always currently are. Instead many are taking the world as for granted and nothing that we can do about, creating subjects such as "economic irrationality of human behavior", and so on.

I don't think we are over yet on making a perfect world. We need improvements, especially on our attitude, to observe the world not only on how the objective world works, but how us as individuals work. Those will give us the energy to create systems that the individual is motivated to bring personal value to the world instead of the government forcing it, individuals to buy and sell values that are attributed and integrated to the personal development instead of only on improving our objective empirical world as opposed non profit organizations and governments subsidizing to such acts where corporations in most cases are fully negligent about it, making social responsibility a second priority. The mechanics that we still have will be in place. The important element is that we put the scope of people included in the system on how things work and attribute positive and negative value out of it, such as in the same way we measure between systems of healthcare and airplane industries. This in token requires a great heart as it requires to go out of our comfort zone. Strong attention should be paid that this is no different than having an obsession like entrepreneurs (also called as "inventors" in the theory of mental symmetry) do. It is expected that many people will follow the status quo and expect a lot of rejection from them or not having a complete full picture or they may be in alignment, but don't have strong motivation of grasping and taking action of the full picture. That which requires great heart also requires great rest, as entrepreneurs know that they have to have a balance with their life and that they cannot do everything by themselves. Instead, it is only to expect others to follow, to have hope that the whole world will unveil this same message that understanding with content will get us closer to the truth, which the limits become unstoppable when we hold to such platonic form, as it aligns with reality. See the impact of math and science to the objective world compared to the pantheism attributing the objective world being attributed to the suns and the solar system. Many will not be able to "not follow Caesar" and "work in the great library of Alexandria". It is a thing that the heart has to go out of its comfort zone and it is a thing that most people do not want to dare to.

Many people think that content as "how individuals work" do not exist, but they are blind, as there have been several and critical books that discuss how individual works in essential detail. After reading a part of the book of Mental Symmetry by Lorin Friesen, I tried to back up the facts of the books by reading other books that discuss about thinking about thinking. I found a lot of books that resembled very close similarities to the theory of Mental Symmetry, such as Executive Paradox by David G Jensen, and a lot of the illustrations above besides the book of Natural Cognitive Theology in this article come from Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed. There where other books that talked about thinking about thinking, but within a tree of a forest instead of the complete forest: Those books that articulated parts of understanding people, such as Feedback Revolution by Peter Mclaughlin, as well parts of understanding metaphors, such as Clean Language by Wendy Sullivan and Judy Rees. Natural Cognitive Theology all correlate those 4 books in a greater big picture and places theology back to its true colors, like in the times of the great library of Alexandria and renaissance times, on understanding how the individual works as opposed to the traditional practices of theology we see today where they try to derive some understanding only by looking how cultures and norms of different religions behave. Natural Cognitive Theology tries to state that theology ulterior mission is to try to understand how things work on the individual level and then create its own versions of science and technology for the subjective part. Neurology (a lot of neurological findings describe accurately the cognitive styles of theory of mental symmetry), Psychology (Like Piaget childhood development), Philosophy (Like Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions), and the 4 books that I just mentioned that discuss thinking about thinking are little helpers to unveil that path of personal understanding to such fruition. It is such content and more content that will unify people and improve our quality of our communication. It is like one of my teachers in neurosciences have partially said "Why do we have two different political parties? one on the left and on the right? They all share the same mind, they should be integrated instead." The book Natural Cognitive Theology by Lorin Friesen is not a book that looks things through making individuals being overwhelmed by emotions to understand the meaning of life like many other books do. It tries to fill in content instead of making a statement out of no content. It does things at a rational scientific level, which I think, scientists or mathematicians who believe only on math and science on the objective world, will be in faint love with this book as it looks all things from a rational perspective in the same veins of the subject of math and science, but in a subjective level, instead of an objective level. If you are keen to learn more about:

History:great library of Alexandria, the after effects of world war 1, the renaissance times
Psychology: Piaget childhood development
Philosophy: Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions, Plato, Swendenborg

And many other more inter-disciplinary studies that makes the book a topic that is very hard to dismiss. Which brings us to discuss the final thing about neurology: how our motivation is modulated. There are different paths that our motivation is modulated: technical thought and normal thought. This is very similar to what Black Box Thinking describes marginal gains as technical thought while innovation being attributed to normal thought. Neurology have found that normal thought (innovation) is a more high level type of cognition than the one people excel on a specialized skills, which is attributed to technical thought or improving marginal gains. Nonetheless, as both in Natural Cognitive Theology and Black Box Thinking books discuss, they are both important.

Technical thought or marginal gains only focuses on a specific domain and tries to improve that domain as much as possible by playing by the "rules of the game". Technical thought can be considered as being driven by an existing motivation and trying to achieve the most value out of the motivation. Mental symmetry describes that example as the game of chess where the domain is already limited by a set of rules, making it easy for the mind to excel within that domain after understanding all the rules within that set. That is how artificial intelligence was able to win a game in chess, to consider all combinations, and pick the most optimal path. In the same sense, in Black Box thinking, we have the example of the hot dog guy that won the hot dog contest by breaking the highest record two-fold. What the individual did was observe what things he could and could not do with the frame of the rules of that domain allowed and took advantage of doing things differently to bring the maximum value out of that domain.

In contrast, when focusing on only one domain, it doesn't bring the essence of innovation. That is what innovation comes in or normal thought by the theory of mental symmetry. What normal thought does is to create a new form of motivation to replace an existing motivation by filling content based on how things work. It creates a new mental map for a new motivation to thrive in. In such case, instead of focusing on a motivation to create the maximum value, it tries instead to create the mental map that will replace an existing motivation with another motivation by using the essence of normal thought. That is how dyson created the idea of cyclones in vacuum cleaners that disrupted the traditional vacuum cleaners that used paper bags. Instead of playing the rules of the game, in this case, you are trying to figure what are the new rules of the game (filling up the content), new rules of the games that were already there, but not discovered, because we were too narrow minded on the existing rules of the games due to the existing cultures and norms we are attributed to play along with.

I think there are so much more that I can discuss, but I think those are the main important points. If you are interested to learn more, just check the various free resources of the website of www.mentalsymmetry.com in the downloads and forum sections and check the book Natural Cognitive Theology, as it will make you see theology from a different perspective than what we usually ordinary do. In addition, I also need to mention that like how science and math are very hard subjects to learn, so mental symmetry is on the same level a very hard thing to learn as well too, and unlike math and science are subjects that society motivates us to learn, learning about our own self is something that people treat it an apophatic way or too deep that people think it does not bring any value to our world (as like when abstract math was looked in the same veins in the past too).

Draft #01 of the next social network prototype

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 May 2016 19:06:00 +0000

Introduction of Ideas

So here is just a first draft of the next social network prototype. The alarming point here is that there is nothing new in here. Instead, it is more integrated, more holistic, for the same things we already have, just placed in a different way, with a different purpose. Instead looking things at the lens of how the mechanics of all things work, we see how a machine learning instance, such as the human being, gains a righteous character, one where its desires compliment with adding value to the big picture of our world.

Note that this prototype is just an idea and nothing else. They are all derived from mental symmetry and other books that have a similar paradigm like mental symmetry, such as the books Black Box Thinking, Executive Paradox, Clean Language, Feedback Revolution. That is my context of what I referenced along with my experiences. I think anybody else will have its own references where it brought to the same conclusions. Lets take note that these instances we create, like this social network I am promoting, is a derived product, is an effect, is not a cause. Those derived works may look like the greatest works of all time. I may be a little bit of bias, but it is hard to deny, that with the help of Christianity and with the bible, we created great works of philosophical work like those of Immanuel Kant that described the categorical imperative and John Locke on Personal Identity (although he didn’t got the “best conclusion”, he got it right that we should not judge people by their external actions only and instead focus on internal factors as well). Regardless of the nature of those works, they are still and still just effects and instead of tackling how those effects are flawed in some circumstances, we should instead focus on how those effects were derived from. Once we know where they are derived from, we can use our creativity to substitute to a more effective effect. From Thomas Kuhn notes on scientific revolutions, that seems the most effective way for people to have a dialogue on. It is okay to scrutinize an idea, but to put it completely away, as for the individual that idea represents the only log where the individual can still float in the water, if we don’t have a ship to substitute for that log, we are being negligent of the person and we only focus on our ideas.

Like our constitutions, if we don’t protect them, if we don’t hold of the main principles that they were derived from, the effect of those foundations become cheap and we don’t hold them anymore to their original form. I am afraid that incorporating this social network will bring bad benefits if people see this service in the lens of the old way of thinking instead of the lens in new ways of viewing the world. Information will be extracted not for improving the character of the person, information will be collected for the purposes of a specific domain to take competitive advantage, and so on. We must put a stop of those practices and instead for people to use this information differently.

I think its time to put some concrete examples as my blog will look insane without some of it. Hopefully, this will bring some inspiration how much tangible mental symmetry can be.

First idea: Lets Make it Concrete - The individual with no purpose (short term habit) and the individual with a purpose (long term habit)

So we have a lot of social networks and they are all great. But I have to tell you the truth, a lot of my colleagues and a lot of my past friends, they never use social networks at all. In a matter of fact, some completely abandon social networks or the public internet for life because they see a very common element in those products: feeding and regulating people in short term habits . To me, I would say that the whole reason is not due to the producers of those products were sinister evils, but instead they followed what most customers wanted that brought the most engagement and the most time spent on those products. That metric is kind of flawed. We don’t measure first the quality of those engagements and we don’t output the added value we got over the time spent compared to other activities where we involve spending the same amount of time. Yes, for once and for all, I want to quantify, be rational, do scientific analysis, not for the product, but for you, whether you get something more or less out of it. Indirectly, these products regulate us in short term habits. By default, our nature is to do shortcuts and get instant satisfaction. We do that all the time, such as getting the shortest line on a supermarket store. However, some problems are not so straightforward, which they need the support of other individuals that have the right context, which you have to use abstractions in your head, which you may make decisions based on wrong information or you do decisions that are not appropriate because you didn’t read the full environment, and so on. In all of those aspects, the solution is not straight forward. Instead of solving these problems that makes us sad, we instead substitute our life with other things, other shortcuts, that can make us happy, such as entertainment or pretend it does not exist and focus on our existing domain that does not involve “me”, feeling we are doing the most value to our society. Those are all elements of escaping our life’s real problems and imagine that they do not exist. I think the biggest game to play instead is our real life and it is a waste to immense ourselves in other worlds all the time, abandoning this life because of the sensitivities of dealing with it.

I discussed that one of the topic for this social network to be effective is transparency. However, at this point, I think it will be at its limited form, as society in general does not respond to failures as a process, but instead as a dead end. Books like black box thinking describes this topic very well. So like I said before, the social network will be limited, but bellow is visualized if the social network was fully transparent.

We already regulate people and we regulate people with short term habits as I mentioned before. So if we are already regulated, why instead not regulate ourselves into long term habits that benefits us in the end?

So here, I present you the system of “allocation time”. Yes, allocation time. This really brings me memories as my previous job was working as a developer on an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution and allocation was a completely important thing to manage which products sell and which do not sell and adjust the quantity of purchases accordingly. I cannot tell you how much the level of sophistication allocation we put in those systems. If we put so much sophistication on objective things, why don’t we do for our own individuality as well? Quantifying how we spend our time puts us realistic expectations what we do, what we are, what we want to get out ahead of our life. You go to a social profile and you have no clue how each individual spends their life. I think every chat conversation people do is to know about the whereabouts of the activity of another person. In addition, that same person will give a different response to each individual for the same experiences.

So here are some main points of setting your actual timeline
1. We have “available 24 hours” per day
2. Some we “reserve” those hours and do not change at all. We are forced to them for some reason as consistent habits. Those are habits that they do not have any other to compete with, they are the kings of the whole world.
3. Some are “allocated”, they do not represent constant representations, they are a form of discovery. Those are habits that they compete with other habits. They always struggle with other habits, so they are not always mandatory, but more of as an option.
4. Some of our time is "available" still (unallocated), we didn’t specify a goal ahead of time and when we reach at that point of schedule, we use them up on something, most likely what we do is either arbitrary or a very secondary goal in our backlog that we wanted to complete.
5. A system that is easy to track your time. System can recommend what you are doing if you are at a specific time or in a specific location by GPS, the best recommended activity that you are planning to do based on past history will be told with a 5 second time limit to accept or reject that confirmation followed up by either expressing the new activity or swipe some of the recommended alternative common activities you do on that specific time or specific location.
6. A system that can predict based on the activities you do whether that activity is “available”, “reserved”, “allocated”, “unallocated”, awaiting confirmation like point #5 and specifying the rules why it assigned that activity to that category. There can be other rules that do the same for specifying the category type of that activity as well. All those rules can be configured by the user, but they must be transparent on his profile so others can understand how their time allocation is formed as.
7. Another important element is to add an expression of mood correlated with that activity. It is not that we always engage an activity without any distraction. It also expresses how healthy or not healthy is our timeline and whether we do something about it.
8. All those activities will need to be analyzed why in the first place they are reserved, allowed, unallocated. What the previous points does is determine “what is”, not really the “why is”. (More explained on that later)

Your actual timeline is something in most part you cannot control, but your ideal timeline is set up mostly out of our own free will.

What is your ideal timeline activity? Make something that you really want, as well adding value to the general picture of the world. Once the timeline is drawn, we have to make the conclusions of:
1. How to get there as an end result? What activities we have to sacrifice already in order to give more free time to do this? What activities we are already doing to get that end result? Are we doing enough progress or little progress and why do we feel that way?
2. Why we want to go there? (We need to figure of how this timeline was created, the “why is”)
3. This may sound like a time management system, but it is just a part of it, and that part of it is more than just that. In here, it is to show an initiative or not of whether you need help from others or not, as well the context of stuff you are interested in:
A. Less generalizations, speculations, finding info about the individual.
B. Contact of communication will be in the context of what the individual wants to talk about. When interacting with others, it will not be of introductions, formalities, it will be about evaluating information by using clean language and giving feedback back, suggestions to contribute, suggestions to assist, whether inter-personally or as a group
C. That means there will be no friends contact list. How friends with others is not done through a contract by oral communication, but by how much interaction you do with others as part of a metric.
D. We are all learning machines, we all have the same level of opportunity to gain the same incremental slope potential to be better characters. The goal is to have individuals with better character. Not individuals to put more expectations than they can ought to take in their timeline. There will be more value indicated within the social network when somebody contributes to an individual that requests demand of help or some form of feedback that has requested for a long time.
E. Everybody will know what is involved with that person. This is probably the most important element of all. If all individuals know what the other person is doing, we would not imagine that individual has the time for us. There are a lot of people that are over saturated and a lot of others having a lot of free time. It is essential then to focus on people that are undervalued and under appreciated. Let me repeat, the goal of the social network is to make the rest of the individuals better character and if someone asks with a mentality that has a direction to put purpose in his life, then we should embrace it with open arms. Instead of distancing imagination and actual reality, our imagination will align with reality.

Second idea: Lets make it Abstract - Analyzing Problems with mental symmetry (“why is”)
The second problem is analyzing problems. It will be using mental symmetry and most likely this will be the most complex design within the social network, as there are a lot of attributes to take into consideration. I have no proper design yet and I will have to think about this and get ideas from others as well. But I am going to give you a demonstration what this is all about. This may sound that this is like a portal with Questions and Answers, but this is more than just that. First of all, unlike portals where the people ask questions and are completely anonymous, here we know mostly the full context of who they are as individuals. Second, the most important of all, is that we can see how that individual took some solutions and whether they were successful or failure to him. The question and answer platform we have these days is the same type as psychotherapists treat their patients. The psychotherapist gives him a message, the individual accepts the message and gets better, and we don’t follow up years later to see whether the individual is doing better or worse in terms of his character. So problems here have a history we can see through that individual to make any indications what worked for him and didn’t work for him, like a medical history.

So I think the first element to do is to identify our self. We have to find out why we spend our time as is based on the actual timeline, we have to figure out where it comes from. Mental symmetry gives the answer to all that and here I am just going to do a very brief summary. I have a complete example you can see on why I left my first job and explained the reason by using the concept of mental networks. In any case, lets start: First, we have beliefs or ideas which represent formulas that are believed to be right. Those we consider as theories and they live in the Teacher cognitive module. Our timeline is driven by that teacher cognitive module. The steps, the recipe, the actions we do, is generated by the server cognitive module. It is the output that we give to the world, and that outcome as well becomes the input that we get on our world, which we will either respond positively or negatively, which represents the mercy cognitive module. When the teacher cognitive module finds an exception to their belief and ideas, it generates pain, and it represents a sign that we have to fix the theory, in the same way a physical consistent pain means that we have to do something or need to go to the doctor. Otherwise, it feels getting rewarded with positive emotion, especially if it completed complicated stuff based on a theory that tested the grounds (i.e. launching a rocket successfully). In contrast, mercy is driven usually by its default nature by short term goals. For instance, the teacher may be creating a theory on how to lose weight, but the mercy is fighting between two different good experiences: Having good experiences daily with food or imagining to have a good fit body so they can wear clothes with smaller size. The latter must be focused stronger while the first part can be substituted with other experiences that have good emotional feelings, such as going to the cinema as less money spent on food, and so on.

Understanding all the cognitive modules will help us to understand what steps we need to do in order to get what we want. The ideal thing to do is to create long term good habits that makes us social responsible. The problem we have will shift usually in different cognitive modules. We can give feedback to that problem while it shifts into different modes of our cognitive model and we can see based on our feedback whether that person still solved that problem or the problem is still stuck in a specific part of a cognitive module. Feedback will be like each person indicating a person to focus on the existing cognitive module on what to do or focus on another cognitive module. It will be more like playing basketball and trying to pick which team mate to pass the ball to make a score on solving your problem. Like software has a software development life-cycle, so our individual problems also goes through different stages and need the help of different cognitive modules. This is more complicated than it sounds, as we have to take account the difference between the male and female sex emphasis of cognitive modules (male is more focused on perceiver and server while female in mercy and teacher cognitive modules), how children and teenagers will use this when they are still in Piaget development stages, how it will need to adjust with current society trends, such as people trying to hide information, such as the book Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed indicates and also people’s attitude that life is driven by nature by the theory of evolution.

I think I do not want to take this idea lightly into this matter as it is essential to get this right because the abstract part is the most difficult part to make sense out of it. It is part of our actions within our operating system which we do not see and there is no much evidence to know if we are in the wrong path except out of our own emotional reactions, which are indeed subjective, as we put forms of defending ourselves and putting a form of denial to hide our real feelings.

Also, I would also emphasize that mental symmetry discusses that each of us focus on one special cognitive module. I can’t deny that it exists, it is pretty evident, in some way. But focusing only on personality instead of how to use all types of personalities to get to our ultimate state to improve our character will not reach us long to get any value out of mental symmetry. It is the latter that is the most important, while the first one, it really beats me why this simulation was created that way, the same as to why male and female brain sex is different, and why we have to go to child development through Piaget development stages. It may be cause its too complicated for one individual to handle all of those things at once and it may not be so rich and clear to have all the cognitive styles into our mind compared to for some be really good at and only one being very proficient at.

For that reason, all the time I spent before when analyzing mental symmetry, it was all whether I could confirm it is the correct theory or not in the first place. Now it is more of trying to read the same material but in a different lens: how to apply the theory within our context of our world. Black box thinking, for instance, if you read the news related to that topic, it did it in some way a small win, and it brought a big impact with hospitals and other companies initiating to think in terms of “using the black box”. In a similar vein, the goal in here is how to make our abstract implicit thoughts explicit and how they can be communicated with others in an effective way. I really have to get inspiration from others as well reading material related to mental symmetry over the months to create something that is more sophisticated. But at its simplest form, just knowing the content of the cognitive styles and the purpose behind each one, will be more than enough, for people to communicate what are the blockers and how much progress a specific problem has gone so far to be closer to its solution.

Conclusion

And that is just my first draft of how this next social network will be at its bare bones. I think it will take me a long time before I start posting another draft design as I want to gather my thoughts. I really want to get the ball rolling and also to not just make all hype and no show. So that is that. The rest of my answers will come exploring with other people and as well the presentations, essays, and books related to mental symmetry.

Why creating the next social network?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 May 2016 07:45:00 +0000

This is an analysis in response to my comment at a cityam article, especially in particular the last 2 paragraphs within that comment. The last 2 paragraphs may look like the main problem is Amazon, but in reality that is not the main problem. The main problem is the original source, which is human stupidity and irrationality. Amazon is just an instance of human desires. Amazon is just a slave, it become the master of the customers choices. The solution is creating the next social network that will solve the source of the problem. I address in detail in here why is that and why should you contribute to make a world a better place.

Assume Company B exists. Company B is driven by the demand characteristics of group A. Demand characteristics of group A do not realise the conflict of interests with the demand characteristics of group B. Group B must be catered by the needs instead by another system, lets say company C. Company B and Company C work in different purposes, different interests, different domains. And so as a war ensues between 2 domains, except instead of here being concrete like our past world wars, they are abstract.

Although they do not ensure any physical harm, they waste a lot of time like wars do and people are limited to focus only on their own domain, which results in their inability to see the full picture, that is, that both domains in most cases are compatible to each other instead of incompatible.

Let us illustrate an example for demonstration purposes. Let us say that company B is looking at cutting costs, in other words, improving marginal gains. One way is to have a process that automates tasks so people can focus on more abstract concepts, such examples can be using creativity and improving existing processes by looking in depth of how things work, instead of focusing only on manual labor. This idea can become handled in a bad way as in that many companies don’t complete the full process, the full cycle of the benefits automation brings. In other words, instead of earning growth righteously, they take shortcuts and use hack growth. Lets take the most common example that happened a lot in the past within our world, which in most cases we don’t do anything about it: Selling very cheap items out of manual labor done by cheap countries. The profit is consumed by two groups of people: The buyer itself, demanding a product that is cheaper and the company itself, to instead use this profit to transition his employees from manual skills to abstract skills, they mostly use most of their profit on expanding the processes to make more profit instead of investing most to its employees to focus more on abstract concepts. But the huge problem of all is to understand why companies behave in this manner in the first place. I hear all the time that businesses that became successful, all they had to do, was to listen, adjust, and adapt to the needs of the customer. So I beg your pardon for you all, but the source of the problem in most cases is not the company, but the customer and the customer itself. The customer does not always follow the rules of Immanuel Kant categorical imperative, creating an anomaly to our universe by its choices it makes. When a customer goes to a store and buys a product, he does not think beyond the price tag other than how much it benefits him instead of asking the question whether it benefits the whole world. I am not addressing that we should be paranoid for every decision we make, but instead of having an attitude of being rational in a holistic instead of an individualistic level, as well companies whether they should only focus and being a slave on listening all customers or focus on limiting themselves to listen only to customers that follow mostly Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. An attitude that both people and organizations express in the sense of doubts and justifications whether we violate or not an anomaly in our world. In recent times, there were a lot of startups that do the unimaginable, but that's how all marriage starts: Setting a product at a cheap price that customers do not understand the implications behind. Cheap prices are not a constant thing we can expect in this world. Like falling in love with the opposite sex, it seems you get all those mesmerized good experiences at a cheap price first, but the whole reason is only a bait to experiment and try the product and nothing else. You then at that point have all the facts and evidence you accumulated by experiencing the product, that leads you to make a better sound judgment whether this product is worth at a higher price tag than you used to pay, which is much better than judging a product with no correlation in your mind to what this product does in the first place. Higher prices for mature products is essential and they should not do extreme hack growths, for do you prefer your date to be one that dresses in class or you want it to be the most flamboyant to stand out only for the purposes of getting the most attention? The latter sounds too good to be true and it doesn’t sound that it can last for long, especially if the individual expects that it can still gain the same attention with the same premises.

And still, we see big companies that are driven only by customers and ignore the human component. That is, mature products, even when increasing prices, they still want to keep the prices low because the customers are driven at it and in order to reach their target goals they have to do big sacrifices. In order to do that, they drain the employee on every drop and sweat to make the maximum value out of the specific domain the company employs, making the human ignore the rest of the domains that makes a human more complete.

Such companies created with their specific domains a world that requires skills of specific specialization, not letting people to see the world in other domains beyond the company itself, for the less focus on the domain they are forced to work, the less they add value to the company they are employed. People cannot focus on other domains, such as families, hobbies, contribution on other fields, what makes us live in the gestalt, in the same way how our world is physically globalized. Instead, we are forced abstractly to live only in one country, one domain, and make the rest as an enemy of our time. People’s nature is not that way and some will conform to it and some will see its anomaly and can see its insanity on it.

When an anomaly like that happens and we don’t have a solution on our current paradigm, we treat it as nature’s way, a paradox, like an agency detector telling us that we have to blame it on a supernatural thing we cannot comprehend (such as nature, the forces of evolution are always a mystery what it selects or not). Losses of words come in my head, as this is normal science as Thomas Kuhn has described, it is a figment of people’s wishful thinking in order to retain our current normal science, our current paradigm. We try to conceal that anomaly because this anomaly is consistent so far and because it is constant all the time and repeatable, people mistake it to represent the truth, but the real truth behind all that is it created by our own self, by our own halo effect. Our choices, which currently is made out of our natural impulses instead of thinking in terms of the big picture, creates the “effect” of the organizations, institutions, and companies that surround us in the first place. Because we choose cheap price, the companies that will last and grow the most are the ones where its employees focus on the most within that domain. Other companies that lets treat its employees in a more holistic manner will not be able to do that because the costs will be too much to keep the prices low. They don’t have the competitive advantage when other companies sacrifice the human component to make those humans put all their effort into one specific domain.

These abstraction wars used to exist separately between developed and developing nations. That notion is starting to blur, as families now can invest indirectly (such paying money for something) on a very successful service that forces people to work on a limited domain where their brothers and sisters work. This subconscious and silo fragmented thinking in our head is so prevalent, that even the employee who works there may buy products for that service itself. The tragic irony to that is stark like the ones of Homer.

In summary, companies have a new master, the customer. Companies are slave to the customers, and unlike economics want to predict that humans by default are rational creatures, they usually can easily be manipulated and regulated still by our own embodiment, a part how we used to work in our childish mindset during the stages of Piaget development. We are controlled by the stupidity of people, as Einstein labeled them. The reason we are stupid and don’t see the big picture is because nobody teaches us about it and we never practice it in our daily life as to be our current paradigm, like the scientific thinking we have these days.

My solution is the creation of the next social network that will transition humans from their natural impulses to instead looking at the big picture of the world and make our society a better place. This will not be the biggest impact if this is done only with on hands and face to face experiences, as we will not be able to see the full picture what is going within our world around us, as well we will not be visible enough for others to give feedback to us. You can get a lot of hints from mental symmetry website , natural cognitive theology, a summary of cognitive styles, a summary notes of Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolution, the executive paradigm diagram I draw in correlation with mental symmetry , the common abstract implications of black box thinking which are very closely correlated with mental symmetry.

I am thinking the first prototype will be with the help of some people that are new to this theory on bringing some feedback and direction. So I am entertaining you here with a reason to drive in this theory as you have nothing much to lose. I am confident that you will learn in here something much better that will add meaning to your life than what you learned in school or other books. This is a better theory than the fictional one we immense in multiplayer games where we focus only on the concrete external actions instead of the abstract internal principles that life drive us. If you have done charity before, this is the best charity that you can give to your own self.

The research is kind of done on convincing myself that mental symmetry is a solution to an existing flawed paradigm. Now is time to polish and research the market on how this next social network can fit as a better alternative to existing social networks. What is ahead on our radar is convincing and making this idea practical.

I need your help on that, so follow me and send me a direct message on my twitter account along with your blog or personal profile so I can know more about your character. It is time to venture on ideas on how to make this idea a reality, as it is all up to our choices whether we want to still live in this same reality or to change it.

On Confidence on Mental Symmetry and how to be prepared for getting in the Matrix.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 17 May 2016 11:11:00 +0000

This is a presentation of my current experience gaining confidence on mental symmetry and what it made me in general to learn after that. When experiencing dominant confidence on mental symmetry, it is in some sense, emerging in the first phases of stage 3, or to be more motivated to be driven on stage 3 instead of stage 2. If you don't understand what I mean by stages, you can look at the sources of life section within my blog.

My confidence of mental symmetry was kind of sheer luck. I was lucky, to tell the truth, as I find this theory at a young age, around age of 15 or something, and I didn't had any care or interest or concept that the world could have even have a theory on how the personal works. So it was my first theory and I didn't had any experience of feeling having incompatible input from my previous theory because I didn't have a previous theory in the first place. However, even in that use case, it was a challenge to have enough confidence to believe this theory, because believing this theory suggests the theory itself that in order for you to believe it, you have to use confidence in the end (meta-theories are like looking at the mirror, there is no shortcuts to pass the mirror). So Lorin Friesen tried to associate with many different books with his own theory of mental symmetry in the past years, and as always, you should always have the doubt the person who is writing this research whether he selects those books he associates selectively and excludes other books, making exceptions of the theory. So without further ado, I did my own associations as well with many different books randomly, like an auditor does to check the accounting of a company's profile. I picked some books that where the main highlights on the library and read them. Not a lot of them astounded me, but no book had any flaws about mental symmetry. In particular, the book "executive paradox" and "black box thinking" where the best books that went through my list that boosted me the strongest confidence that the theory of mental symmetry is not fluke and it is the real thing. Along with many other experiences I associated with it which are analyzed through this blog, and along reading more excerpts from others and from the author of the book mental symmetry, I was kind of convinced that this is the best theory for the personal content has to offer. Again, I have to repeat myself, don't believe it directly, gain confidence to believe it, it takes a lot of time. I suggest it takes more time believing a theory than creating a product with a theory. I think it is more challenging for people that have existing theories of how the world works in their head.

I also have to tell gaining confidence comes at a big cost. It is no wonder gaining confidence on theories contains a lot of sacrifice on the physical, making people maintaining in their lowest of lows in the physical world (as in the classical parable, depending on the pace, you have to sacrifice the appropriate flesh (concrete) in order to get the appropriate magic (abstract)). I had to ignore relationships, even my health at times, and I am kind of paying the price now for not taking my health carefully, but I still have ample time to fix it. I don't know about genetics, but my father also did the same thing. He studied so much in the old days that he forgot to go to the potty for months. In a big picture about my overall experience between me and my dad, I cannot deny that a lot of his time I saw him facing the problems of gastronomical problems, having to stay at the toilet for hours to cleanse his system. There is a huge price to pay to sacrifice your physical self. However, there can be a lot of rewards gaining confidence on the abstract world. For instance, his end result on his full effort on studying so much ended him up to work as a nuclear engineer moving to different nuclear plants to every state in the United States every two years, gaining the title of being a chief engineer, and so on. I think my dad did a more energy efficient world, but I don't think he learned much about himself with science. And it is very speculative how he felt his life internally, as he ended up to have Parkinson disease, a disease no much of any of our generation of our family ever had.

Believing a theory through confidence and not directly is imperative, but don't spend too much time on it, but not so little either, as our time is anyways limited. Think of taking this part of belief as buying a land in the physical world where you will end up living in your rest of your life and give it to the grandchildren. Location is very important and you have to compare other locations to pick the best one. You have to research, associate, compare, in order to pick the best location because once you are in, you will never be able to check out. Some decisions are small and you can go over them and forget them, but some of them you only have one lifeline on where you want to end up to. However, buying a land is not the only element of life. There are other two elements that we should take into consideration: Building a house in the land and making a street for others to access the house. If we spend too much time on buying a land, we won't have time to do the other two. Let me tell you why the other two are important.

If you don't build a house, there is no evidence that you expressed your confidence in some way or not. You are kind of definitely saved "in some way", but if we take this as the ultimate way in terms of the categorical imperative by Immanuel Kant, we are not saving ourself, because how can I help myself if others don't help in the end? Helping our world thus is half of our purpose and not doing so makes us incomplete on aligning the path this simulation wants to go in the end. And since the simulation is the theory, then it is like we do not believe in the theory so much in the end. The main catalyst of the simulation is to reach us to our ultimate state. You wouldn't be gifted now without others gifting first in the first place, it is our duty to give back as well. We also know that we will only know better building a thing instead of observing a thing. At the same time, building a thing has chances to make a better version of the existing buildings. Our other natural human drive is marginal gains or automating a manual labor to become a scarce resource. So if you have ample time and have an existing house, you can build new houses or improve existing ones.

Due to our limit of time, our efforts should start on building only a small house using most of our strengths. Let others build the rest of the house, learn your limits and focus on your strengths. Now the type of houses we have can be of two types: objective and personal. The objective ones currently are almost in a platonic form and almost flawless while the personal one has no uniform direction, living in the same nightmares pre-scientific thought used to be for the challenges of the objective world.

Let me tell you one thing: I respect the objective world very much. However, my direction is to fill houses of personal world. I just can't imagine how many benefits the objective world would be without it. It made our life more convenient, eliminating most of our manual labor, much easier to catch errors earlier, and do the same things by using less or more efficient resources, as well immerse our imagination in things that we wouldn't possible have access to. However, the source of the source problem of many of silly mistakes and irrationality humans behave in all of those platforms (please read the book black box thinking to understand that) have not been solved and we can do something as a solution not only for that, but to have a better sense of understanding for our purpose of our life, of others, and to improve the quality of relationships we have with people. I have seen a lot of problems in my life: Bad management decisions, bad lifestyles, and misunderstandings my parents had. I also have seen through my software experience people not understanding how to manage properly the abstract world of software, as well huge teams vanishing within a workplace in a very short amount of time. I don't mean that this could be prevented with mental symmetry, but they could be reduced and understood why people create not lost lasting mental networks instead of lasting ones and the only way for that to happen is to put those mental networks openly in the table. Given my experience in technology and my passion to make mental networks the opportunity to become explicit, my aim is to create the next social network that will attribute to that.

However, there can be so many directions with the same foundation of mental symmetry, so please don't be limited to what I just say, set your own personal path, it will be worthwhile as you know the most context of the situation on how it can fit with mental symmetry.

And last but not least, we have to create the streets of the road where anybody can gain access to that house. In other words, we have to create visibility. What is the point of building a house if nobody can get in there? That is why I also tell you to not waste all your time on building a house and instead building a small one, so you have time to make awareness that this house exists. As for the people you connect, don't focus in people where their time is oversaturate or fully booked. Focus on people who have more time and a beginner's mindset attitude. Pick the fisher man and train them to become knights. Start this as early as possible, once you are already confident of your goals, cause you need to teach them that same confidence to them before they can even start on something. Another reason why you should build a house in incremental steps is due to the following: Learn from your environment how to adapt that idea steadily in fruition, the differentiator between the present world and your ultimate vision has extremity and facilitator thought would not let that to pass through, requiring for you to instead to break the big chunk into small pieces. Timing into specific steps of action instead one single action is of essence.

Now if you read this and have read and followed my blogs, understand my confidence, trying or achieved to get the same confidence as me, then we all have to grasp the following about mental symmetry: How mental symmetry works is like a mental network. It is incompatible with the present world cause it overlaps with another paradigm we currently live. So in the end we may just believe it and engage that mental network to be "on" privately. But then we kill it when we come to reality and are forced to live in the current paradigm in order to survive and make connections with society. It becomes an "on & off" switch and it is not a very fun way to live life with such a theory that always becomes incompatible. However, we have to realize that the current paradigm is limited, aiming to suggest that living has no main purpose and assumes it represents the correct paradigm. How can it be the correct paradigm when we set exceptions on the economic system or accept paradoxes as a natural thing of life in contrast with the scientific community where if the paradigm had those type of characteristics, it would have addressed as a violation of reality and we instead had to adjust to a better paradigm than the one we instead have.

Do we set robots or machine learning to have no purpose at all? To not go from point A to point B? What if after we die we expect to be at point B in order to pass the simulation? Isn't it the same way we treat our creations of our simulated environment? To have a purpose? If after death, we don't reach it, can we reach to such point B immediately, without the ability to practice, after we die? I leave that question up to you.

My passion is to bring mental symmetry to fruition. Many will treat it as seclusive religion or as a cult to anyone who personifies a theory. But aren't we just hypocrites that we say we don't personify a theory, when we actually do to a one we believe it has no main purpose in life? We actually are so reactive to a theory, as quoted by Lorin Friesen, people would say "You have wasted your life. You do not know how to think rationally. You need to stop what you are doing. Your theory deeply offends me". They will definitely do this either by their words, non-verbally, or through their actions. You should know that this is a reaction of a teacher mental network trying to hold to itself. So do you want to believe in a theory that implies that there is not any real strategical purpose in this world? For I do not. I believe in a world of order and things making sense instead of believing we are in full control from the fate of the environment. Mental symmetry is already a battle lost when we are enforced to live in a world with the current paradigm, as we have to take care for our well being and survival. The mental network immediately decays and it doesn't emit the light when we go back in reality living in the current paradigm. Don't expect hope of any change by using still the same environment as it is, yet don't forget it is possible to light it eternally if you change the existing environment first. Mental symmetry is living in the darkness in the same way as science lived too once. Have instead hope to create this mental symmetry even if it doesn't emit light now from an implicit thing to an explicit thing for that is and that is the only way it can emit its light. My project, the next social network will aim to tackle that, how far I can reach depends on how many I can connect and help me on this idea.

We all have to follow the same path of confidence as I did and the less your mind has a beginner mindset and the less you are passionate to approach it, the longer time it will take to believe it. There is no shortcuts to this, it is a long path to take. Once you are in, you are more prepared to live in the matrix. Take your time strategically what you can do on the above (land, house, street) with balance. You shouldn't be frustrated, as I was frustrated too, but having this process as a strategy at least means your character did its best based on the situation, and as long you don't forget daily your purpose, you have high chances to understand the whole purpose of this simulation. If you hold this, the rest of the context of the life will be straightforward on how to go.

Lets not be just brilliant only objectively, but brilliant also personally.

On Personal Identity And Careers + The Prologue of my design of my next social network

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 May 2016 11:15:00 +0000

Maybe the whole trigger was reading this article from bizzwriter that described 10 things an individual should do in their career profile to improve their chances getting a job. I was not at my best state at that time (having headache), and my teacher mental networks resonated most than the usual average time to express strongly "a step" about a theory of how to get a job in a labor market that contradicts with "my step" for the same topic. So I wrote this comment on that article. The reason I talk to recruiters or other consultants that work in such field was never in the bottom line to get a job from them, but for most of the time, learn how these career individuals how they treat our "personal identity", such as whether they get treated as humans with its own quirks or just only as cog machines. Anyways after a good sleep, I associated more memories to that trigger and here I am going to give you the full story why this is important.

It is important to represent our current character in order to grow it and not to keep it in a stale state. That does not happen in a world currently when we condemn the person by its whole history of what he did and not on its current character. Memories of our past events, sometimes they can or cannot represent our current character. It depends how much focus we put on those events, how much we allow those events to be triggered and be part of our normal routine. The second problem is that we place current character flaws as a dead end instead on a trail of how much improvement he did over his past character and how much potential the individual can attain from its current character with some adjustments. That is, in some respects, the wholly grail of how machine learning works. Why do we leave machines to be more sophisticated than humans and why people wish they attain the good characteristics of a robot, but they do know actually that it is not possible to attain to, for the current paradigm of society does not let it happen to be.

I talked the implications of the legal system and now it is time to also cover the labor market system. One of the common template I see for applying a job as a cultural norm is to "show only our strengths" and to "hide any unnecessary personal information". It is a copy paste template I see on many articles and it is time for that tradition to fade away. In actuality, that would be a good advice if on "average" most people showed a lot of personal information, especially information that does not represent their current character. However, on "average" actually most people currently hide most of their personal information, especially information related to their current character. Some organizations have seen that skills alone do not make the fit to make a healthy workplace environment, such as Zappos value "create fun and a little weirdness" so they created the idea of people creating a youtube video about themselves describing a part of their personal self as part of their resume. In here, we see the opposite, where any personal information is necessary as a decision whether the individual is a good hire or not. The point of those youtube videos is not to show all your personal information, but only on what you hold the most of your memories strongly, the things that drive you regardless of the cultural norms and work career roles society expects you to do. In other words, your true passions. I know that many employers always ask and want the job applicants to have a strong passion of what they are applying for. That is impossible to be attained if we hide our own character. And unfortunately, the best way to show our character is to express some of our personal information, because in many cases that personal information may not align with our past work experience, education, and other stuff that we put in a resume, leaving our strengths to not reach to the maximum potential. I also talked in my presentation about black box thinking on the manner we treat individuals flaws. We treat flaws as a dead end, making it impossible for trust and transparency to reach the maximum potential for the individual to improve itself.

The old educational traditional system had some drawbacks and strengths. However, the most potent of the traditional educational system was that it was a non-profit organization that cared people to improve their personal character instead of their skills. Now we condemn those traditional educational systems for not focusing on skills, being negligent on how potent the attributes of character you can attain from those existing institutions. It may be too late that those institutions to still teach the foundations of character as much as before, as they now adapt to only focus on skills that fit within the current labor market.

And here are the things that I learned from the past on some teachers that wanted to bring an impact, even for a little bit. One of the teachers said that when we try to create a topic, we should focus on writing a topic that fits within the future generations and not only for the current generation. The topic should focus on how broad it can be instead of only what's trending. The more broad, the more value the topic it is, as it can linger the same meaning across future generations. This can be applied to great philosophical excerpts, Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolutions, oh, and maybe the science of Evolution (limited only to the hardware stuff, but still useful, that is how anthropology was created), Lorin Friesen Mental Symmetry (this one will be the king of the kings indeed), and even the recent article of Emergent Layers of Alex Danco, which describes how we change paradigm shifts through our own operating system from making a limited resource to scarce only within the scope of the hardware world (mental symmetry instead can expand also through our "own operating system" as well). That is possible because our operating system ingrained in our body has the template of using scientific thought. It is impossible to make a personal limited resource to scarce these days because we don't have a template ingrained in our operating system on how to handle this. Thus, our operating system is limited, but can be expanded, by upgrading our operating system with the module of mental symmetry. There can be more sophisticated models of mental symmetry, but so far, at the present moment, this is the best we have reached so far. Now, we go back to the topic of "hide uncessary personal information" in our job applications. Should we really do that? Is that the thing our future generations should focus on, to hide personal information, because most cases, we regard as "unnecessary"? The point is: What is the current pace of how much information we provide on our character to the public. If we provide too much information of our personal life, even information that does not represent to our current character, then I agree this advice should be enforced, but if its the other way around, where we don't show any of our personal information, even the ones that present our core character, then that average advice should not be such case. Evolution did a great thing to show how the hardware of this world works with a wonderful template. This brought the different branches of anthropology and learn the physiological adaptations of people through genes and in general the form of our bodies take shape to adapt those different new environments. However, evolution has nothing to attribute the personal character. In fact, cultural anthropology uses the same template of evolution to describe a software theory through a hardware theory. That is, that our norms are attributed by the physical environment, in other words, that everything is attributed to our embodiment. We even characterize that the people that lived a thousand years ago had different brains than the ones we currently have due to evolution, due to the hardware theory. Is that so or is it more fit to say that our operating system through our mind did a "software upgrade" to see perspectives in different ways in order to transform the world that fits the needs in an automated way? That is what I imply instead, by the establishment of scientific thought through our community, that advanced us to have an accelerated pace on creating products that improve our external world by understanding the theories and mechanisms of our external world. However, we lack the understanding of the personal individual much, as much as we can't automate it these days because we don't have the right formula of how our personal character forms. We live in pre-scientific days right now through understanding our own personal self where each of us have our own version on how it works. We need a template to uniform all these ideas into one and mental symmetry may be the template of the personal version of "scientific thought" that can lead us to create transparency and trust more than we do so today. The reason we don't want to know the personal information of others is because we are so incompetent on how to handle it that we prefer to dismiss it by living only through the theory of evolution and let the evolution do its own part, its own mysticism on how it will transform us, the way it is, is the way it is, and we cannot change it, unless the environment changes, is that so, or is it instead in the end all up to us? On the other hand, I feel pity expressing this major flaw because: If there is no existing theory to expand beyond just the theory of evolution, then by all means, in what way can we live or have a purpose in our life? If I don't give a solution, I am just giving no purpose to you, and that is not my intent, as my intent is there is another way to view things, another way to upgrade your operating system, in such a way, where you don't only focus the physical and ignore the personal, but to focus instead on "both" in order to make our life more complete than it used before. Currently, society ignores the personal in many cases, but we shouldn't, and we should embrace to be better, a motivation and hope to create a template, that can fit the personal through clear understanding on what is going on.

So then there was another teacher that gave us an essay to write with the following topic: "If you had to find a job, which job would you pick, one for the purpose of money or one that reflects your character?". This is a topic that is very controversial, as you know, character these days, has no meaning as much as to what are the demand skills of today. One of my economic teachers could just laugh and say in an ironic way "If you are majoring for art, good luck! If you are majoring for economics, then welcome to the real world to make a difference". I kind of admit that is how our present world is in some way. Art and literature majors have no much hope in career opportunities as much as math and technology. However, we have to understand that literature and art are a part or ways we cognitively think and some people are passionate to show of those skills. There is a major shift these days forcing women to focus on majors like math and science because those are the jobs in demand. Of course, I would agree by no wonder that those jobs are kind of the only option to have a sustainable life in a developed nation. I really care women to have a life that can afford. On the other hand, I am worried whether those skills they attain are things that they are really passionate or not. Why in society these days we value some majors over other majors? Why in society we focus on some cognitive styles over others? For instance, literature, it is a wonderful thing, it focuses on analyzing the individual itself. As opposed to science, we only focus on the physical things only. So then, ideally, I would say character is more important than money, as it is a big sacrifice to give up our development of our character which will result to depression (guess why many people take anti-depressant pills?) in exchange to something else that does not reflect us only to self satisfy our self with materialistic stuff. I created a flash presentation from Lane Friesen excerpts, which on some part of it, we see an individual that had a deep sense of responsibility, majored in a major that did not reflect her character and ended up having Parkinson disease due to contradicting her character with her job role during her daily life. In other words, we should have a balance of both instead of only focusing on materialistic stuff. In other words, when picking a job, unless it is your last resort, it is imperative to not ignore expressing your character as that is the only thing that will fulfill your most happiness.

In order to have a more clear explanation of the above, to substitute our current paradigm to another paradigm that upgrades our own operating system to use our environment more to our maximum potential, in order to not fill hurt but have a better substitute of the current theory of evolution, then we have to make it explicitly clear this theory of mental symmetry and also establish it as a guideline, because we have seen what goes when there is no guideline in the past, for the scientific though existed for a long time, but it was of no major implication until scientific thought was established explicitly as a common way to process things through our community. And to fill both of those two requirements, I have finished reading the chapters of introduction, mental symmetry, mental networks through the book of Natural Cognitive Theology by Lorin Friesen and will only focus on those chapters for now to create a draft design of how within those chapters only we can design our next social network that will fit the template of mental symmetry which will fulfill our personal needs. Then I will try to ask other people to give their opinions of those topics. Then I will try others to contribute as well to contribute on those other chapters and other chapters as well. Then we will try to do iterations of existing chapters with existing drafts done to see if we missed something and do that over and over again. That is my plan. I guess the most challenging part will be finding people who are passionate about mental symmetry to contribute in this project, and as long anybody can express themselves something within the language of mental symmetry, then you are definitely invited to express your own ideas and contributions. That is the end of the prologue of my design of my next social network.

On the site creation of: "The place where volunteers can meet and develop the prototype of the next social network"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 May 2016 13:09:00 +0000

Hi everybody. So this is just again another blog post, but a short one, in continuation of creating a prototype of this social network, with realistic expectations that its form will be limited at start. I already said the many problems our current society is facing by the current personal paradigm we live in. Between deciding, should we choose to have hope that we face the personal realm this time in a rational way or to have the fear we will fall in the same mistakes others did in the past by being irrational? I hope for those who are reading so far has chosen hope. There are many ways to solve this paradigm, as long as it is done in an explicit way. I chose the social network will be a best fit model for this situation as it closely represents a mirror of the physical world.

And so, it came to my conclusion that this is a huge project that needs the volunteer of as many individuals as possible to bring their expertise on the table. How we will do this then? Okay, so the first challenge is to create a prototype. In order for the prototype to not be a mock up but instead almost the actual thing that it will be close to the live product, it will have to be where 1. Not only people understand what it is but already be aware of it in order to have a more confidence to "buy-in" on this paradigm and 2. To have already a system that it is polished that it becomes useful to the average user from day 1 this product goes live. I said I will create a bicycle, not a bullet train, but a bicycle that at least you can ride it, not where it has flat tires. The idea is that many companies can start up easily with a one person idea and then funded by several volunteers to complete the idea because it uses an existing paradigm and the scope is specific and not very general. Due to the scope in here is very general and the paradigm is totally different to what current society is, nobody will buy in this idea if its not sophisticated enough and how it can materialise to a world that it will not be volunteering at it first, as in like old scientists not accepting new scientists on "their community" as in Thomas Kuhn scientific revolutions. I don't think my part will be doing everything on here. I am only just starting this initiative and bringing ideas on how to facilitate this process to come in fruition.

Those 2 problems for creating a great prototype can be solved by hitting two birds with one stone: Create an open platform website for bringing in design features for the social network prototype. The purpose of these features are to give a better experience and usage to the average user. These features will come from the concepts that will be analysed within the basis on how they will fit in the social network from the book Natural Cognitive Theology by Lorin Friesen. At the same time, those concepts that were added as features in the social network will be formatted in a way that will bring awareness to the public through press and videos, so we are both in check with reality and gain more buy in on this model of thought.

The reason this book will be used as a source is because 1. This book was written in such a way where a beginner's mind could dive in and understand how this model works 2. This is the only author I have seen so far in this earth to delve the personal realm, regardless of the limitations of his specialisations. There is no much people that have spent so much time on translating their specialisations on the personal realm and try to be as clear and as much closely accurate as possible. The point is to build a bicycle for the realm of the personal and for me this is the one so far that has driven a longer road than others which tried but stopped in the middle. There are several and several concepts that are introduced within that book and leaving them apart will make the model less rich than its original intent. My original thesis is to create a social network where people can express their problems instead of the traditional "Facebook effect". Those problems over time will have to go through a flow of different cognitive modules in order for the problem to be solved. The way we solve problems are either stuffing them into a black box or using that information to change our perceptions. However, many of us are not aware how our mind subconsciously does those actions. Furthermore, we don't express our mind of those problems to the public, a place where someone else can give us a hand, especially if that problem is shown that it is stuck for a long time. But then I figured out that there could be many missing stuff addressed for the user to use this model the most effectively. This thesis would be incomplete and less rich if we don't add features already completed by someone else instead of re-inventing the wheel. This book, especially the kindle edition, may be cheap for developed countries, but if you are one that cannot literally afford, you can always request the original author for a digital copy. My blog and the author's website www.mentalsymmetry.com may be a good bridge for any beginner to "buy-in" on reading or requesting this book (believe me, the book I suggest we use as a source doesn't add much to what you already read in this blog and the author's website. It just condenses the most important parts in a more clean language).

I haven't thought about how the design of the website will be exactly, but the main culture of the website is to incorporate 360 degrees transperancy on everything that is discussed. We will use many forms to communicate these ideas and anybody can play a part of helping this prototype to be in fruition. Until the website is created and I place on that website a few concepts that are analysed from the book in how they can be integrated as new features within the social network, I look forward to your patience. I will try to make any social connections that can compliment me on such endeavour and see how this will work out. If you haven't figured just now, my mind is one that tries to not have a constant theory, it has a direction on finding the correct theory on implementing this. At first, I thought the social network was going to be complete, but then I realised it would not be and instead be limited. At point of developing the prototype, I thought it would be easy to create it all by myself. But then I realised that most of the work is already done by the author Lorin Friesen and the only work left is to be interpreted in the form of a social network. In addition, I already knew from a long time that nobody will buy in on this prototype so easily unless the prototype is rich in detail. Thus, there is a need for as many people to volunteer on this prototype as in the same volume of effort as completing a full live product. There may be more bottlenecks that may come through the way, but I have hope, if anybody follows a mindset like the one I try to do, we can actually one day end up to the final destination where we create the personal realm in a rational way where it is explicitly shown to society.

Demystifying John Locke's pitfalls - An open letter for legal system promoting character & a more transparent society

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 07 May 2016 15:30:00 +0000

In order to understand Locke's main argument on personal identity, read my overview of the main points of Locke's arguments.

Locke, one of the philosophers that had a main influence of the current foundations of our current society, set the main pillars of the social contract. A contract where our purpose was put in motion by certain laws that were only meant so everybody was able to express themselves, to make their own choices, to have liberty. Our physical life was protected, for how can we express ourselves without some form of vessel? As well the protection of our property, but by what will be the meaning to express ourselves if we do not have a base, a home, a structure where we can hold on and do further progress? But 2 mistakes Locke did on expressing what an individual represents - on representing an individual only by the memories that holds and the belief that mistakes should be punished in absolute terms no matter how the programming of the individual currently is. In both, he ignores the implication of time.

Let us say Nestor changed the body of a prince to a body of a cobbler and the cobbler to the body of Nestor. Only Nestor knows that he was changed to the body of a cobbler. But by how can one acquaintance identify that Nestor is not Nestor, but instead is from someone whose body was before of a cobbler? Only by "the consecutive actions" of Nestor contradicting himself being Nestor then the acquaintance can say he is not Nestor anymore. But by how much correlation we can say that he is not Nestor anymore? On the occurrence of the body swap occurred at time 0, will Nestor know that he lives in the body of the cobbler in the first place? But wouldn't Nestor identify himself immediately after his realization, the feeling he is not Nestor anymore if his body was changed? What would happen all the possessions he contributed or hold to society by his previous body? Let us say that over the course the body of Nestor doing more actions that are visible to society, people more know that he is not more of Nestor anymore. Does it really mean that the body of Nestor is not Nestor anymore? Let us say there was a body called Mary in the 18th century and another body called Cindia in the 19th century. Let us say that through their very detailed historical autobiography of their actions that Mary resembles much in character and behavior as Cindia and Cindia was influenced by Mary as she has read all her historical autobiography. Does it mean then that Cindia is a re-incarnation of Mary? For what can people tell Nestor is really within a cobbler's body other than through generalizations by what they have seen so far, in the same other extreme case, mistaking Cindia for Mary? Moving on, if a vessel functions differently than it used before, how can we treat Nestor now as a cobbler, for isn't more clear to say that Nestor was Nestor for a specific time and Nestor was a cobbler for a specific time? In this case, if a machine teller function was able to use its slot for customers to deposit money in their bank account and that same machine changed the next day to use that slot instead for customers to withdraw money, then what is that teller machine in overall, a machine that deposits money or a machine that withdraws money?

Memories may be a good guide on how we ended up to be, but memories cannot attribute to what person we are today, for we hold stronger some memories than others over time. Can we believe that a person whose name is Mary has the same identity between the years she was young and the years she was old? For it may be Mary hold a memory less stronger in her teenage years and that same memory more stronger in her old years. For if Cindia has to mimic Mary, which side she has to represent more of Cindia, the one of the young age or the one of the old age? Thus, keeping memories are of no relevance as much as how we use that information. Our recent actions represent also very recent memories that attribute to the highest weight of what our identity represents. However, over the lapse of time, we have the choice how more stronger or less stronger we should represent those memories by being more or less engaging in terms of actions through the lapse of time. Then, we have to conclude, that time, is an important factor of what identity represents. For identity is associated not only by vessel, but by a specific time as well, they are intertwined together and cannot be separated, for they both are the only way to actually represent a specific character of the individual, for if we talk that same vessel over a specific different time, at close proximity they may be almost similar, but by a gap of time, there is high chances that are different. What if Nestor wanted to be the character of a cobbler, dispose all his memories that are associated habitually out of his mind, and interconnect with himself habitually on similar memories of a cobbler, due to some motivation, such as an individual wanting to change working on a different career? Can at that point say that Nestor is not Nestor, for if Nestor is indeed, but instead, it took him time for Nestor to not be Nestor anymore. For it is true that Nestor's character cannot change within the same vessel at time 0, for only that could be possible if his body was possessed by an actual cobbler. However, Nestor at after some time X can be the same as being possessed by an actual cobbler, without requiring to be possessed in the first place.

And here, we have to come to the definition of character. An individual character is a fluctuation, yet a constant representation over a specific fragment of time. Thus, memories or actual past events of an individual are not a big factor of what an individual's future contributions, decisions, and actions to society, as much as what the current character the individual is, especially within how close or contradictory or aligning his choices are over to respect and improving life in overall and whether the environment leaves the reflection of his character to be more or less fruitful on such endeavors. But do we represent an individual by its current character or aggregating all characters an individual has contributed to the same individual, even if some characters contrast at the present time?

The problem of today's society is we still live in the world of Locke's words, attributing an individual to the past mistakes as part of his present character. For if he did those past mistakes, then he is in grave danger to do those past mistakes again, thus discipline should be enforced. For if an individual that did some grave mistakes in the past, even when he was regarded competitive in his role, if he did learn from those mistakes to not do again rightfully over time, should we still punish him something that he already learned when he self-assessed of his own mistakes? But how externally will anybody know as a proof that an individual self-assessed fixing his own mistakes, yet even admit those mistakes, for if he admitted those mistakes, wouldn't he immediately be punished? Furthermore, there is a problem that the individual did not self-assessed as much as or as much properly to his own mistakes. Then again, can we testify that the systems we put do better than that when we punish people in order make them an improved version of themselves? Or do those systems only do when they get released is just putting more fear of those individuals to not make those mistakes again? If the individual has no mental incapacity, why do we want for a character of a beast to sleep on its bed eternally instead to transform him to a human being. For indeed it is all up for an individual's choice whether to still be or not to be a beast. But what crime would it be if the environment that we lock him does not allow him any other choice but to regard himself as a beast from that past mistake and to disregard its current character, not allowing to flourish, in the environment we set him up to be.

Can we stop deny what actually happens that what hypothetical happens for once? Most individuals truthfully want to learn from their own mistakes if they have the possibility to. However, given how society treats mistakes, they have fear to admit their mistakes, for they know the system does not help individuals grow from their mistakes, leaving them the option to either learn their mistakes privately or discard the mistakes they did. Even in the possibility they try to learn from their own mistakes privately, it is kind of impossible to get the full picture without gaining more perspectives through other members of society, and that cannot happen without the individual being transparent. We hate the legal system that we place it as a last resort, we only use it after several attempts that it could not be resolved inter-personally or when we hate the individuals that much, that we set a lawsuit against them. It has become a common practice that if a mistake is sound publicly at hand, then it is out of control and some intervention is need it, to a place to quarantine the mistakes of individuals instead of improving them. If it is not out of the public, then it is considered under control. But is it under the best control or are we just playing hide and seek for the wrong reasons? We have seen that when people put their information into a black box, they are less social responsible because the only way to solve their mistakes is by disclosing it publicly. We do have systems currently that promote anonymous reporting for past mistakes because they add value to society for other individuals not making the same mistakes. But if the individual discloses it with his name on it, he gets punished. Like I said, any information that is not discussed publicly and that is not attached to the individual, it is considered under control. Rather than saying it is a paradox, shall we suggest that the punishment system is flawed in a sense that it does not motivate individuals to go through the course of learning their mistakes because they feel the punishment system currently does not allow them to learn from their mistakes and does not make them look better individuals than they used to before? For what is society after all than the betterment of life in overall? Can the punishment system not be negligent and have a duty on that?

Here we live a world of fear, a world with one word to protect their fear: privacy. For an action currently in society that is shown publicly is treated the same way regardless of their current character and enforced throughout a process that does not make individuals improve better than if living in the regular life of society. If the individual has money to avoid punishment, then we treat mistakes in the same form as prostitution, for mistakes are treated as cheap experiences, as assets that are nothing that we can learn from. The only way mistakes can be addressed is through the transition of the individual to a greater character than it was before and we should not address by money earned or gained not relative to our mistake or by suppressing the individual of all actions. We live in a world where we have limited time to improve our character than the one we had before and the only way we can improve our character is by practice. That is our ultimate goal behind all of our endeavors. If the individual picks as a choice to make itself a greater character, we should allow it, as long as its future actions it promotes show a model that has a bigger interest on improving its character than it used to before. Mistakes, if possible, depending on the degree, can be addressed by their own self-assessment and the whole society, even when it is disclosed publicly. The system that protects our society needs to change where it not only confines and quarantines people, but improve people. Psychologists, neurologists, philosophers, and other human behavior experts should be the mass that will instead work on those systems where they try to understand instead only arrest an individual.

Once the system cares about the progress and the image of an individual, so does society will also not reflect other individuals only through their past mistakes and failures, so does the individual will be more open to disclose its mistakes in the hopes of improving itself. The choice of society reflects on the choice of the system, as society lives in a contract, a paradigm through their external environment that they cannot avoid and have to follow. It will still be a choice up to the individual to be more open or not open to society. However, with the change of paradigm of the system, the choice of being open to society will be more compatible to our environment than what it currently is. Those who are more open will be more rewarded as they open doors to improve themselves and allow others to be improved either passively or actively. Thanks to Lorin Friesen, there is a good starting model, called mental symmetry, that improves and compliments both society as well the individual, a model that is founded based on neurological and biographical studies.

My plan is to create a social network, but currently due to the limitations of the existing system, the social network will be limited to what people can disclose publicly, but they can still learn to improve themselves, by disclosing whatever society and themselves feel comfortable to. It is a long way for the system to improve on its own accord, there will be a need for a large context of how each use case should be addressed. But one thing for sure is this: The current paradigm of the discipline system could be better in a sense more people could be allowed to learn their mistakes and improve their character through society, to be more transparent and not hide information in a black box. You do not have to believe at first the benefits of this social network. As a proof of concept, we will show how many benefits this social network can grow out of its limited form. After that, it is up to the voice of people, when they realize that the whole reason they keep their privacy is because we created a punishment system that does not care the present and future character of the individual. But that privacy comes at a big cost of not able to extend our learning on matters that attribute to our personal self. What really matters for each individual I think is their own death. When death comes to an individual, the mind does not work through the lapse of time anymore. His character is his last character we will see him on this earth. It is our duty that all individuals attain the best character they can because our mind programmatically is ingrained always on improving things, a thing that we cannot be in denial from all the technological and scientific achievements we have done so far. But of all things, let us not force the individual to work in alignment to what he is programmed for, for only by our own will we can get close but not exactly to what we are programmed for, as our programming was an effort of the correct direction and not of an effort of getting the correct answer or achievement.

This letter is addressed through the realization that the current paradigm of the system is not effective on making people the most transparent. Due to my motivation of creating a transparent social network, it is not possible to have its full potential with this current paradigm set in our society
under place. The social network will be created and be limited due to the reasons addressed above. Regardless of the limitations, we will continue working on the creation of the social network on its limited form, always with ambitions to make our social network be more transparent if society and the system is aligned with. We know that there are a lot of benefits that we can bring to society even with a limited social network. For that reason, even at its limited form, it will still be a potent model to society, regardless if the paradigm of society will change or not change, though we envision more lasting benefits when we have the doors open to a more open society where we learn through our mistakes more effectively.

The legal system has a long way to go when it looks currently at the individual from the sense of only their mistakes and also the government careers that only recruit people with white sheets with zero mistakes done on their public profile. Instead of looking individual's mistakes to how far they approached to a dead end, they should look that individual optimistically, to the point of having the capacity of being a president of a whole country, all depending on the progress of the character of the individual, which should give them as a choice to that progress if the individual is up to. On the contrast, to those individuals that they think the best person that can solve their own problems is by their own self, how can you be so sure we don't bias ourselves, as much of the mistakes in the aviation industry where found by the private investigators and new scientists taking over older scientists in the revolution of new theories. In order for those mistakes to publicly be disclosed to the public so others would not avoid those pitfalls, they had to circumvent the system by letting people to post their writings anonymously. That information was so important that we don't follow the rule of reporting the person of their wrongdoing, but instead share the content of the mistake, so other people do not do the mistake. This letter is just a draft of what the legal system should do and kick start itself to be a better model of itself. To instead have metrics on how many people who have done wrongdoing to instead have metrics how many people who have done wrongdoing lifted them up to become the next presidents of the world. Right now we live in a world that is not transparent, not having the ability to understand the motivations of the individual, giving by default the same punishment regardless of the individual's character. If we had the option to give another form of punishment that was more lenient if the individual is more transparent to his life and had the attitude of improving his own character, then shouldn't we give that as a chance, to make each individual a better model to our society?

Short Snapshot #8: Black Box Thinking Presentation + The next social network endeavor will be either me building it or volunteer others achieve it

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 25 Apr 2016 00:49:00 +0000

You can read my review of black box thinking in order to understand a brief summary of the book before reading on.

If you haven't been viewing my twitter profile lately, I have done a presentation on a small singapore personal development club lately about the book black box thinking and posted an online video recently that discusses that presentation in detail what black box thinking is all about, how to use it properly, and in what ways we can make this implicit thing into an explicit thing. You can find the presentation here and the video here or you can view them bellow here for your reference:

The reason for creating a next revolutionary social network that will change the world is twofold:

1. One is due to the book Black Box Thinking brought topics to the table which resemble in many ways the problems that bound within the personal/subjective and task/objective split. The objective world is doing very fine running its own engine. However, our personal life is in the Mohave desert, not having found its niche, its own "personal valley". I elaborated that difference very briefly where everybody could understand in one of my linkedin posts. Black Box thinking elaborates that problem in detail, describing the mechanisms of that problem and the issues that arises on that problem with a lot of examples within, from the aviation to the criminal justice system. It does not give a solution, but it does give a problem, that is very clear for everyone to understand, a step more forward from our previous generations where they didn't realize that this problem existed in the first place and how fundamental it was. It has a lot of concepts mental symmetry discuss (most that can be found here and a lot of my blog articles within my blog activity analyzed as well) and almost both tackle the same challenges the current society has to overcome. It is like black box thinking is the little brother of mental symmetry. I have been fond of it posting this post and this another post showing how important it is, how relevant it is, that I even had to write a review for it just now.

2. The posts of Lorin Friesen within Q1 2016 made me to write a blog, "The important message: On beginning new things over things" , on how convinced and strongly I believe that personal development in our world is left out of the spectrum. We forced to create a paradigm to ignore the personal due to the atrocities we did in the past during world war 2 era. We now treat it as a mystery due to that trauma. Trauma we should have if we treat the personal in an irrational way again, but it does not mean we should put a wall when we do it in a rational way and still treat it as "pseudoscience". One of Lorin Friesen interpretations is that we have to create the implicit to explicit. The only way to create an implicit thing to an explicit thing is to create it artificially, like how we use metaphors to describe abstract concepts, it has to be a part of our life, this artificial thing, such as an internet of things, or in some type of format that we are at least visible and aware in our active life. A great starting point is to create a social network that can build the building blocks where we grow our quality level of relationships and communication that we never imagined before. It will be based on the model of mental symmetry for now and its form at first will be like a "bike" and its later stages will be a "bullet train" once more scientists and neurologists accept and contribute that we have to create an integrative model that gives attention to the growth of our personal self.

Moving on, we have to also realize, that the method of learning through the individual, is quite different from one of the computer.

For one, the computer can definitely learn from different environments, but it always has a cheat sheet how to optimize itself on its current environment. In here, the spectrum is two fold.

1. We shouldn't only focus on improving the individual itself, but also the environment itself to be adapted or changed in such a way that the individual itself can gain the most personal growth out of himself. Because if the environment does not suit the individual to the fullest capacity, then we reached the threshold of what the individual can do. We did increase the threshold of the individual output with the inception of scientific thought, but we only created rich worlds externally, but still kept our inner worlds empty.

2. Our individual self is not programmed to know how our inner self works or to have a cheat sheet how to optimize ourselves through self learning. It is a very independent system that it has to learn the ropes by itself, which will make him more confident once he realizes itself than instead somebody giving the answer to him. So in such sense, we need a different model, a model that resembles the human mind architecture the most, to take account of the sensitivities of the individual, why he would choose something that focuses to choose decision that add value for himself and not decisions that add more value to our society. A lot of times, the problem comes from point #1: the system that we impose in our environment does not let the individual to make choices that are more social responsible.

And without further ado, I will over the next quarters (it will take some time) to prototype the design of the next social network. A social network that 1. We are more transparent, where we give more information of our troubles and mistakes so people don't generalize or fill in the gaps in a negative way due to missing info that we as individuals always try to hide publicly. 2. To make individuals be more lenient on the mistakes of others and accept them as journeys of personal growth.

I don't have a lot of free time because I have a very busy workload and a lot personal matters to attend within my relationship. However, being practically realistic, it is a thing I want to see over the next decade to come, so I may create some future connections in the future once I wrap up a prototype.

The important message: On Beginning New Things Over Things

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 23:10:00 +0000

The problem

How do we start moving forward with our limited understanding?

It has been quite long since my last blog post. Some of it is due to being too preoccupied in some work assignments and some due to taking a short break recently for a few weeks to refresh my thoughts other than from my usual daily routine perspective. I promised on my previous blog post to continue providing a more elaborate plan on solving the issue of black box thinking. I mentioned two important aspects that must be addressed due to that topic: 1. understanding 2. protecting those values that can undermine such understanding.

However, in order to move forward to those two issues, they must be addressed within a "strategy plan" in some form, even minimal, before it can transcend as a universal way of doing things.

Let us think how the inception of scientific thought became a visible thing. It was all attributed mostly to the the invention of the printing press, where written books could be copied without manual labor, allowing many to gain knowledge not from their families or neighbors, but from experts on a specific domain, living miles away from their home. The individual access of experts knowledge through books was able to scale in levels that was not possible before. However, another turbulence came aside. Religions, which had political powers at that time, was threatened by its own core mental networks (or beliefs to say the least) from the books over others that either brought doubts, contradictions, or drove interest down on the traditional fundamentalist views of the church. Instead, books were driven a lot in the pursuit of some form of scientific thought and scientific adventure. A lot of the books that gave a bad word to the church where banned. In addition, authors of such books where placed behind coffins, and many scientific and philosophical books where converted "by any means" to be placed by the "light of god". Of course, people realized at some point that secular religion, with or without it, scientific thought would still output well by using only scientific thought. Coupled with the immersion of people among time with the inventions of our modern time, such as the train and the telephone, people found out that secular religion thought as it was, was not compatible with objective rational thought and added literally zero value. You can see that there was indeed a space of time for religion to prove worthy on its part, but most likely its timing was not correct at that time as religion could not correlate human behavior with neurology. In addition, people did not have enough "space within their time" to think abstractly (thanks to scientific thought, as most innovations came to cater the needs of the average person recently, the individual has the option to focus more in abstract stuff and less forced to meddle on the concrete stuff of the world). More specifically, religion, on its own, had nothing to offer at that time as there was not enough drive to enable people to build content, resulting in content that was not enough to bridge the gap of what of current religion secular thought was and what it was actual supposed to be. And although there was enough philosophy at that time of age in the renaissance world, it was not yet ready to contest and have enough political power to face the challenges of the secular religion. In contrast, scientific discoveries from the past expressed within books were able to extrapolate the individual in mass to create objects within scientific vigor. The reason why science lead to its glory from superstition/pantheism to a rational concept while religion remained to its mystery/mysticism is due to the nature of our physical world governed only by the cause and effect of the so called "empirical world". In contrast, our emotions, beliefs, characters, or to say them within a set, mental networks, are immune to any natural laws, in the same way like a "computer program" is being "contained" within a "computer" where imagination is its own limit. In other words, we can be anything or anyone we want, as long we respect the premises of the physical world, its people, and its limited resources. In contrast, the physical world is governed by cause and effect which is to large extent inescapable. The only way to skip tasks of manual labor is to create concepts out of rational scientific thought that can explain concisely through roots of cause and effect, the mechanisms that combined can explain a theory which can partially or fully automate a task away. Again, I have to entertain the thought that science must be transparent and explicit and it cannot avoid shortcuts as it inescapable lives in the external world where the obvious is very obvious and it will be futile to warp minds around it (if for instance, a rocket crashes onsite or a software takes more manual labor and delivers less tasks than another software, then it is futile to be negligent out of it as we will create cognitive dissonance out of external evidence that is in front of us).

Moving on, when science was the movement of enlightenment, religion secular thought was marching literally on its graveyard as what most profoundly the old German philosopher Nietzsche has once said "God is dead".

Right now, we live in a world where every physical body is free to do whatever they want to do "as long" we don't intrude the other physical body in any way (both physically and even mentally). We have constitutions and rights such as the right to keep our privacy from the hands of others, as well as battery charges if someone touches us, and physical/verbal abuse that can be applied on petty cases at the same level of degree of scrutiny in terms of punishment as an actual physical verbal abuse. There is a fine line between crossing one individual over another, but "how long that line should be" and at what costs we are paying ourselves to that big line we sacrifice almost everything for it? Let us first entertain the thought of why all of we are "forced" to be "professional" in these days.

The reason or the coin termed "professional" did not come at hand until "post-world-war 2" white collar jobs came at hand. Because if you aren't professional, you are more ought to sue others and others sue you over petty things, and then you are on a dead cycle, a never ending spiral of death, for replacing unprofessional people to professional people. If its not suing, then people treat hyper pain as a negative energy and as a negative outcome and take immediate strong repercussions out of it. If someone yanks my hand then maybe it is, but if my body signals me a pain over and over again and again while being idle, then maybe that pain is a sign that I should do a corrective action to myself, which represents, a natural response, to a positive outcome? This priority within society is becoming more attentive, as people are giving recently their privacy (even when they want their privacy - I know, that sounds schizophrenic) at the sacrifice of "protecting" themselves. If you didn't notice, we live in a world where every physical body is free to do whatever they want to do "as long" we don't intrude the other physical body in any way is the current paradigm we embrace today as our main religion. "Professionalism" helps us getting more closer to such paradigm (and probably the one in the current world that followed the most today has created the most rational objective technology ever in the world). Due to these practices in labor and life of all sorts, urban areas naturally created an alienated environment to "strangers" because they are "strangers". Only friends and strong acquaintances can speak more freely because there was an element of trust created beforehand, even if that element of trust was not honest, sincere, lack commitment, all due to allow other individual to speak something with greater confidence where in the past you didn't need to go through such forms of loops that required to such extent to create courtship to every individual you meet (A newspaper article recently suggested that customer service jobs with a fake smile over their face within clients brought more workplace organizational problems than without it). In result, we can see such forms of communication can either be expensive or damaging, as if you commit, it needs a lot of time to build a trusting relationship, and if you don't commit, you break your own values and principles when you say something that really didn't mean or do. Furthermore, if society uses these "polite" words as a tool to meet the demands of the current paradigm that was pointed out before, then these words become cheaper and lose meaning as I have described in one of my articles. The most damage of all is that we are inescapable of delving the personal realm if we are not allowed to poke on it, to be driven in this world through a rational bases within ourselves.

We are starting to see emerging trends of rational thought being applied on the internal realm boldly, such as black box thinking, but they are not a true success yet by current society living still with paradigm described in previous paragraph. We can see black box thinking budges in some way pass through "not intrude the other physical body in any way". For indeed intrusion we do in order to make our living compatible not only on what we specialize, our own self and social group, but also to the rest of the world and people. Of course, we are starting to see the tip of the iceberg on this, but at the end of the day, we are reminded that among these insights, customer service and customer experience is the ultimate paradigm within the current context of our business world, that whatever the customer, which represents the individual, is right, and we must carter to his needs. "The customer is never wrong", we say, "and making their life easier they can continue in their leftover time to do what they can do best". I certainly do applaud the innovation of things making our world eliminate tasks to think more abstractly. However, eliminating tasks did not lead to people to make their life more delved to abstract concepts. Instead, it lead life to even more focus on eliminating manual tasks in order to lead a life with more time on entertainment. I don't blame entertainment, as it is a stress reliever, a stress reliever that it wouldn't be required so much if our purpose of our work had more important topics to embrace aside making our life more efficient and effective within our menial routine life. Placing scientific thought as the ultimate paradigm, has made life more inhumane. To elaborate, we ignore the concepts of human behavior to allow every individual do what they want, making individuals focusing on anything they want as a strategy path (even the bad strategies black box thinking discusses about).

However, we have to grasp that secular religion thought did the same thing at that time: Influencing scientific thought to be under religion instead of integrating and balancing religion. Religion was incomprehensible and a mystery at that time, so whatever the natural childish mind was programmed, scientific thought would execute its orders. Of course, the consequences of it were a complete disaster. Scientific thought was used to eliminate people instead of replacing manual labor with automation. The result was the creation of advanced weapons, ships, and tanks for the purpose to wage war. Religion was also used as a form of rationalization, but with an incomplete theory, with results such as treating blacks as slaves and the eugenics program in world war 2. The world wars were devastating and the outcome was to put a freeze on christian secular thought and also the person itself to not poke any more on personal matters except of their own self being. Maybe because of this trauma, people do not want to drive the car of personal transformation in order to experience the same incident happening again.

If we compare secular religion influence, we can see objective science is currently influencing the current personal rationalization in the same way. Here is the epiphany if you haven't seen it: human behavior has been accepted, but it is under the paradigm which anyone cannot interfere with the values of others. For instance, there are a lot of algorithms and concepts that can predict the human behavior needs when the individual is immersed in the external world and identifying his existing habits. Changing their habits into something else that contradicts their existing values for the general good is something the government usually does with tax paying money and private institutions abhors it for there is no profit under such demographics if they followed such campaign. A best example to explain that is by the illustration of smoking manufacturing companies never had any social responsibility on the means of changing the habits of people to less smoke while the government did so by increasing the taxes of such products and by applying labels of images above the carton package of cigarettes that disturbed instead of bringing pleasure within the mental networks of the act of smoking.

Although this paradigm we live in today's world may seem a futile life, it is not as bad when religions was influencing scientific thought, and that is why many want to still keep it. Before medieval times, we didn't improve our concrete life, we were stuck miles away to a lot of mundane manual labor, and so many disadvantages that if these people instead lived today's life, they would have felt they were given a blessing. Regardless, people feel "too blessed" or too immersed, "too professional", to keep the current paradigm be frozen and in a stall state. People these days want to keep and accept that the human condition is a mystery and we have to live with the existing habits of other people that may not be potent to life. The main reason we avoid this is due to the hyper pain of changing a paradigm shift and that pain is more stronger than ever before as our current paradigm dictates us that we can assume we have the privilege to play our world in any way we want it to be. The second reason is the recent personal trauma of the childish mindset theories that religion created before the world wars ended. So ultimately, as society is trying to self satisfy themselves as best as they can with the least manual tasks as possible and as the rate of the growth populating is decreasing (especially in developed nations), their expectations of how their life should be is interacting in the social world with other people in order to satisfy their habits and the habits of others without in disregard whether those habits they live or influence whether they are potent or not.

What we have to do is to extend whether those habits are potent or not in a rational way (just like weapons were replaced with inventions that eradicated a lot of manual labor tasks). In other words, to interfere within the personal realm and be a part (along objective rational thought) of the new economic system.

So to put it briefly, historically:
1. The world was void of personal transformation and objective transformation.
2. Objective transformation emerged, but it was under the influence of the void of personal transformation, guided by a childish mindset that created the two huge world wars, the biggest slavery and eugenics program we have ever seen in the world. (Anybody can do anything in here)
3. Objective transformation emerged to automate manual labor (We added a law where we cannot interfere with others individual space)
4. (Currently where we live in) Personal transformation was emerged but it is under the influence (instead of both having a balance of both powers) objective transformation. What we see is people can have any habit they want and they do not have any competitive advantage/disadvantage as they are protected and nurtured of their personal space within the capitalistic world. What matters is only our skills that bring objective transformation to the desired habits that are currently or expected to be in demand. The economy (supply and demand) is driven by habits of people, or to say, by the capitalistic system, the "invisible hand", the "invisible contract". According to capitalism, human behavior is a mystery and it cannot be explained by rationalization what is and not is a potent habit. Instead, any habit is good. This model is how most current organizations work and are driven by.

If we have to make an analogy with point #2, it is like objective transformation uses personal transformation as a product to itself instead of being a mutual channel exchange of communication. The assumption is personal transformation as we have seen in the past, was childish, is childish (obviously I can't deny), will be childish (that is a wrong statement, it is just an expectation that the personal is impossible to be rationalized). Like in the old times, secular religions thought or assumed that science could not overcome the challenges itself without their "own version" of god's help, so at the same token, science in here concludes that there is nothing beyond the objective realm that can bring order of the personal world (the current paradigm we follow is focus only objectively, do not delve in subjective matters, their "source" is a mystery). Paradoxes, the objective vs. subjective split, mysticism are all the "personal products" created within our current paradigm to keep focus on the objective realm only. It is a cognitive dissonance due to being too much immersed on the objective realm.
5. Personal transformation becomes independent and extends itself to influence and add value to the habits of others. For petty stuff (in terms of bad habits), personal development should be encouraged instead of strict punishment so people can have a more corrective action to their self instead of long self serving systems that punished behavior to such extent that motivates people instead to hide their bad habits away instead of being transparent. The value and the quality of the world will be more involved in the internal component instead of the external component, adding quality to the communications and relationships of people.

What science was once upon a time a research and development program that was only funded by the government ended up being part of the capitalistic market manual guide for private companies to emerge wide to accommodate the personal needs of the world.

Similarly, since population is stabilizing and people have longer times to spend on leisure, at one point in the past (like point #4), such personal transformations will not be seen as the ultimate value and will be funded instead only under the influence by the objective world of the old capitalistic systems. However, a some point, people will be in a dead end with their easiness in the way of life it is given to them and instead focus on investing and spending money (yes, literally money, in a sense as much people in medieval days will feel absurd anyone would spend money on education in order to avoid manual labor working on a farm) on "personal transformation innovations" that create a better quality relationship with people. What better this way can be done other than through rationalizing the subjective world the correct way?

And indeed, we do have so many philosophies that discuss about personal transformation. We do have neurology that helps us to see how habits emerge and how they are aligned or misaligned with the environment depending on how we react. Mental Symmetry by Lorin Friesen may be the closest best model so far that can break apart the current paradigm that we breathe to instead a more better one.

I can visualize in the future that something similar or exact to mental symmetry will be the basic mental blocks of basic education that children will learn.

I also assume that there will be a next Facebook, but instead of photos, it will be taking habits of a person, with the ability to scrutinize and praise the habits of an individual through rationalization, such as how we analyze common literature in traditional classes, but in a more profound way with mental symmetry. The point of scrutinizing people will be on the means of correcting people to better modes of thought, scrutiny will be a norm , in such a way, that it will not be felt as a threat or as much punishing as it will be done in a rational manner and done within close proximity of time. The reason for that is because habits take essentially long to be built and wired. If they can be fixed at early stages, the pain will be less to bear and hold. The book revolutionary feedback discusses that specific topic in very detail. Long will be the times "only" praising others with only gut feelings.

I assume the quality of relationships will be improved in an iterative approach as well. Compared to the present world where relationship tools are for dating (mostly for short term and few daring for long term), there will be tools that will create genuine relationships not only for dating, but for friends, acquaintances, and more. How those tools will start is like a bicycle in the first stages and in later stages it can be sophisticated as a bullet train.

This is the glimpse of how the new world people yearn for and want to flock right now, but all of this, I sense it will be a somewhat slow, yet continuous transition.

The solution

So I asked before how can we embrace black box thinking. Similarly, how did science embraced to triumph over religion secular thought? 1. The scientific thought was became wide adopted. 2. Scientific thought added value to the world and when people started to compare which element added better value at their "current situation", scientific thought was the winner (It all comes down to the end - the battle of mental networks - which can triumph over the other). Similarly, if 1. we embrace the model of mental symmetry 2. people understand the difference between the two paradigm shifts the individual has to leap for 3. apply products or services that add value to the personal self, then by all means: people in the "current situation" will prefer to invest or add value to personal rational transformation instead of "objective rational transformation" as there is already plenty of demand for such with few supply within.

There is already a billion dollar entertainment industry that is not the most important thing we need to spend our life. If there is anything more important to spend on, is to spend our time that adds value to personal transformation. I hope my blog and Lorin Friesen mental symmetry may help in the initial starting points for this engine to keep on running more loudly.

Another great thing that will emerge out of this personal transformation (and I think most likely it will be the most beautiful thing in the world) is that for the first time people will work on personal transformation initiatives that they will be in deep "love" on the "content" that it delivers. In to such extent, such work environments, will have less of a split of the objective versus subjective, or in other words, there will be less work on content that does not self fulfill us.

So in conclusion: What do you want to be doing: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" said once Steve Jobs. But here, I do not suggest to change the world, but transform the world into a different paradigm than what it already is. What Steve Jobs did was only shake the existing world, the existing paradigm, such as Mega Alexander did when it conquered a big part of the world. But it is a different set the world that was void of scientific thought (Mega Alexander times) and the one with scientific thought (Steve Jobs times). In a same sense, the world that we live right now is within an implicit personal transformation that will totally be different or a "past of the past" when explicit personal transformation emerges in our world. Both face the same challenge though: We cannot await the people who sell "sugar water" to be social responsible as much as the smoking manufacturing companies did in the past. For that reason, it is all up to us to bring not just a change this time, but a transformation, a challenge that may be the most challenging leap the world will ever make.

We live in a simulation. Assume we create artificial intelligence in our own simulation. Would we want them to live a life that their work routine is more complete or keep them living in a life that their work routine is continually incrementally good, but still incomplete?

It is great that at start we are all born by not having directly the answer to life in a form as a "cheat sheet" where we all type it in our exam sheets, pass the exam, and have no clue what it was all about. No motivation, no understanding, no vision to the matter of topic. If we had directly the key, we wouldn't be able to understand it, but if we find the key ourselves with our own initiative, the more embedded and in faith we are that the key is the path for everything. What can be more exciting? An artificial intelligence that follows rules or an artificial intelligence that figures out the rules through pattern of observation? How can an artificial intelligence have confidence that a rule is and is not followed if that rule was not generated and instead given by hum? And in so, I say that the concepts of mental symmetry alone cannot give immediate faith and confidence to follow. They must be tested, experienced, correlated with other findings (such as I did in my blog). Once you are on a point where you have enough confidence that you can make yourself not feel a sense of loss even if you sail "this ship" in the middle of the ocean in the search of new continents, then definitely you are sure that you are not guided because someone told you, but as a choice of your own self.

I have to be bold that Exhorter Contributor and Facilitator modes are what makes the whole engine run or the pillars that keep us on stand functioning effectively in our daily stuff. A lot of my emphasis on my previous blog posts where about Contributor mode because it seems leadership books focuses a lot basically on that, but Exhorter and Facilitator modes are very critical as part of the start and the end of the contributor process. Exhorter drive is need it in times of peril to bring out new ideas while Facilitator mode is the one that sees the ending and sees the start, the cause and effect, or just to say simply, experimentation. Their observational skills can be a critical point as an intersection to not warp our mind and also to adapt to new information we receive for every step we take on a strategy plan. Regardless, it is topics that I would love to discuss more

Anyways, I have enough confidence that this path will aid in the progress of personal transformation. If personal transformation through rationalization is educated and applied in the context of social life, workplace, communities, software tools, relationships, it will definitely will make our life more better and richer than it was before.

As my social responsibility, it is a path that I will take and contribute as much as I can, but another important message that I want to share is that it is also a part of all of us that we can and should follow as well such path too, as we all have our own unique strengths and context that can add value others that have missed or didn't have enough time to do. I hope that this is a general draft anyone can start and plan this exciting journey, as there is plenty of space to explore in such field.

I have to also thank Lorin Friesen last 3 big essays he has written recently that give a more clear picture of our current situation. Now that the biggest challenge is fixing the current situation and that is no more than just getting your hands dirty in the mud.

Expect more blogs later (whenever I have the time of course) about discussing in my own point of views about other mental symmetry topics and any initiatives on my journey that can add value on "new things" over existing "things".

Notes
As far me as contributing in such field, I do not have much neurological knowledge as much Lorin Friesen does due to being very work-alcoholic on my past work environments due to peer pressure or due to duty of fulfilling requests of abandoned assets. However, another reason I didn't delve to neurological knowledge was because I am more interested how neurology can apply its concepts to society instead of only how they interact with other modules of the mind and with the body. I have done one neurological class, but it only provided the basis of me knowing how the different 5 senses work within our brain, as well how the basic chemicals can enable or disable neurons. If you wanted to compare with learning a language, it is like we only learned how to pronounce, write letters, and make some words, but lack vocabulary to form some basic full sentences. I also have experience with neurological disorders for several years, such as Parkinson Disease, as one of my close direct relatives had such type of disease. In addition, I know much of human behavior through several fields on my life: My major Business Administration described elements of human behavior from different perspectives within how the current business organizations works. Mental symmetry was probably a thing that I got into the early ages of my adulthood and it was a thing that kept me stuck still ever since. Since it was consistent in so many aspects, I started using it to analyze my work environment, my personal relationships and post it within my blog. I then tried to correlate this theory with three other books: Executive Paradox , Feedback Revolution, Black Box thinking. That was more than enough correlation to feel that this mental symmetry is indeed the real thing. All people come to the same conclusions, yet they don't know that those conclusions are so vital and so important that we must embrace them more than just a book, but as a paradigm, or as a way of life.

Black Box Thinking By Matthew Syed: My associations within my blog. Part 2: The Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 19:32:00 +0000

It wasn't enough of my previous blog post to describe the associations within my blog about Matthew Syed Black box thinking. I promised a review before, but the review is not more important as much as the importance of the main topics (yes, it does contains a lot of topics', not just "one" topic - in the same way as we can't describe the whole universe with only one science formula but many science formulas at hand).

After all, as I discussed in my last blog posts, it is imperative to have a goal at hand by being "great and correct leaders" . Because anybody can be great, but few can be correct. As you can see, a goal can self satisfy me, but it may not satisfy others. Ergo, it was not designed for the whole system. Actually, there are a lot of challenges that are ahead of us, but the most important one is that we are having too many great leaders and few great and correct leaders, that leads our society in a stall state instead to keep us innovating to our external world, as well to our inner self. A challenge that I invite and I propose to anyone of great value to our world, as one I indicate to be one of the biggest purposes within our current context, current generation, current life which we all collaborate in this society within our world is the following: "correct" leaders to be "correct". It is simple and straightforward, but from experience and experience of others, it is better most of its part is approached in an indirect instead of a direct way. To look at it based of as a pattern of ideas that are intertwined together with all sharing a common issue instead of fighting alone as an individualized case. It is like wiping out a fire with water instead of finding the source of where the fire comes out from. If we only wipe out fire with water and not finding where the source of fire comes from, then we are not solving a common problem, but only fixing what is just in front of us. If that is not obvious, then let us see, why just even to our this day we live, that besides psychotherapy is ineffective in most these days, that besides many high role people behave in many situations for their self interest instead of the collective level of the world, and worst of all, we still to this day cannot pass scientific breakthroughs. Seems science is not the potent solution to everything. Because people to this day have not mastered the skill of black box thinking, a skill that it is not natural, but can only be acquired through experience, an art that compliments our other half half to our other half half we are knowledgeable of to bring the best productivity not just locally, but globally.

This is not much better illustrated of the problem in detail (but not explaining too much the mechanics and its solutions) within the recent real life story that is not very old to this day and still on going problem described in the movie Concussion. The funny thing about the movie Concussion is that it is really a black box thing. To elaborate, the movie unfolds of a story that finds a scientific breakthrough of a new diagnosed brain trauma caused by the repeated events of concussion , called CTE. The alarming thing is that this disease cannot be identified through scientific evidence with our current technology until the body of the host dies (as such as opening the black box of an airplane that crashed). The second thing is that these deteriorating symptoms that makes the individual close to his death do not happen immediately after the event of repeated concussion, but after 1-2 decades. So we have 2 problems: There is no decisive evidence why a disease happened and there is no immediate cause and effect. Because of those 2 arguments, it brings individuals to have lower confidence of diagnosing the real reason of the disease, as it has to 1. correlate with a pattern that happens from past events for those affected individuals and 2. have similar symptoms 3. cannot be identified with some physical evidence. It is in such sense, that people have not mastered the art of black box thinking, that they only rely their confidence of descriptive statistics which are visible and have a correlation within a close gap of time. Not only that, but nobody ever attempted to open a black box thing to see the underlying cause of that disease for many years that was misdiagnosed until one man, Dr. Bennet Omalu, an open minded man, who had the capacity and ability to uncover the uncertainty of the black boxes he opened up beyond the confidence of only descriptive statistics, but to also correlate with past events of individuals and bring out sound explanation and conclusions, with his first journey for the discovery of CTE being Mike Webster. The first hurdle of having physical evidence was present, but the correlation from a past event of concussions being the underlying cause was not a feasible task, as you have to do, as described from black box thinking, A/B testing. The operations of dissecting a brain to identify CTE and the time required for dead bodies to show up with symptoms of CTE is expensive and time consuming. With limited funds and time to do the most possible good on the earliest possible, with those constraints set, yet rightfully, by the scientific community, what can you do if we are actually right and let others keep doing the same mistake for a long time and get paid the consequences? When time is ticking and your fate is like being in a world of war, when your only options is to correlate data, how do you handle uncertainty? It is purely to the point that finding and explaining the underlying mechanics with the most "big picture" answer, the more supporting it is. Let us take from the excerpt of "black box" that illustrated the example of airplanes that returned back to the base had most of its shots done within the wing of the airplane and none within the cockpit. That may seem from first impressions that the planes need more protection from the wing. But if we accommodate the "big picture of things", that only the fraction of the airplanes were the ones that returned, and that most of the airplanes didn't return, the conclusion becomes the opposite - as the strongest airplanes that returned was because they were not hit by the cockpit. Thus protecting the cockpit was the correct answer as it accounted all use cases instead of only few cases. It is ironic, as within the movie Concussion, it followed the same suit, but took the wrong direction, only seeing the symptoms that can be identified when a patient is alive and not by the ones that were already dead, giving medications that repeatedly couldn't figure out what was the underlying cause of the problem. But the problem is not having physical evidence as much as the attitude of not having any evidence. It is like taking our previous example and saying that we don't have any physical evidence of what the rest of the planes that have already sink what the underlying cause was and we will try all different combinations until we find what the cause is. We don't correlate the surviving planes as the cause not being hit by the cockpit. We don't correlate the people who were identified CTE were playing as football players 10 years ago. Any correlation may take a lot of time to be explained sufficiently, this includes the mystery of our own existence and our purpose on this world, a black box thing that cannot be easily or maybe not enough time to be unraveled (or maybe impossible to be unraveled within our limited perception and ability) with physical evidence and/or close proximity of cause and effect. However, what we can do best, as in the same case as of CTE, is to bring some evidence and a sound explanation that resembles the best big picture. But, here is the big "but" 1. many people don't like to solve problems with uncertainty and only want to solve problems with certainty and we must teach them to be brave to explore uncertainty and 2. There are some people that among evidence and sound explanation, they cannot change their ideas, either because their ideologies and the groups they follow are conservative or they have priority of their own self they represent (what career they work for, what possessions, assets, reputation they have) at the stake of the collective level. Point two in most cases becomes a trump in a game of cards, always taking victory of covering up deep beneath the seas the underlying black box through our history of times. Little do they know that there is a same satisfying feeling to accomplish something for the collective level of the world, like Dr. Omalu spending his own money for doing the expensive experiment under Mike Webster. On the other hand, the NFL at that time having a lack of feeling for that scientific discovery, for several years it tried to block or divert a scientific breakthrough to go to public. It shows the effects of cognitive dissonance, as Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed provided within his book.

The two important points to advance our world one step further:

1. Mastering the correct art of Black Box thinking

It is surprising that to this day that many can't be brave on making correlations of theirs and other experiences to bring innovation and instead just follow the status quo, having others fear to condemn them for being opinionated and to just follow whatever is already descriptive, whatever is the status quo. We expect that what we say should be facts, but we shouldn't, it is not a world where everything we listen should be of certain certainty, and what we say to be should only of certain certainty, as we will be more in stall of innovation, of situations with limited time and resources. As long exploring things with expectations that what we say may be wrong with open arms, I don't find this type of attitude is inappropriate, instead a potent one. That is a thing that can be understood more well by learning and experiencing the mechanics of human behavior. Much of it can be found by the suggested books "The Executive Paradox" , "Black Box Thinking", and mental symmetry's website by Lorin Friesen. They all do the same thing: correlate a theory of how our mind works and how it should work optimally. It is a learning experience that you have to conceptualize it within your own context and ultimately be driven by it. All has been provided, but is laid out in theoretical grounds. In practical grounds, we "are not there yet" because of point 2, sometimes, even masters of black box thinking can fall prey by following point 2 sometimes. So for that reason, the rest direction of this blog and my personal life will be spent on:

2. The people who block or are against Black Box Thinking

And here is our main thesis of why this is so important: What is the point of people who practice or start to practice black box thinking, like Dr Omalu, bringing the scientific breakthrough of the mental disease named CTE, only to be humiliated and condemned through society? How can we motivate other people to change themselves to a better mindset when most who follow that path are looked as being inappropriate and instead should conform to the status quo and respect the sensitivities of others? In other words, black box thinking as a mindset is not ready yet to dive in this world. It is like a programming language that is not mature yet. It does not have all the library components or tools to protect itself and be more rich of itself, it needs a community, a foundation, that it can cross the lake over a log of tree without drowning itself. Otherwise, people will not be confident to stray on that path and feel protective. For that reason, my next blog post will go on the direction of how to tackle Point 2 at a collective instead of an individualistic approach,the reason why it has to be approached that way, what are the most prevalent attacks point 2 does that destroys black box thinking, and what are some practical solutions as a community we can create to prevent from those happening.

My experience working in Inefficient business models in the wrong location

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 05 Jan 2016 20:31:00 +0000

Inefficient business models

I graduated college at the end of 2011 with very generous scholarships and grants from a Polytechnic University which covered most of my costs. Hopefully, those grants and subsidies was tax money in the hopes for the new generation make our nation and also the whole world a better place.

However, that pillow cushion of financial support was just only one lift I was able to do with that help out of the many other weights I still had to tackle later on.

Compared to other colleagues, my parents were both deceased. My mother died out of cancer when I was at the age of 12 and my father died out of Parkinson Disease and natural causes when I was at the age of 20.

I had to live independently. I had to survive compared to my other colleagues. I couldn't take it easy and go with the flow. I was living like the lifestyle of my ancestors who experienced World War 2, as my consciousness was filled with tragedies and limited resources.

To make matters worse about limited resources, most of my relatives live in Greece, which at that time (and still is), are in a more financial turmoil, where their problem is not getting a low paid job, but actually finding a job, any job.

So I immediately accepted an offer near the Los Angeles area on working in a small company that little did I know that it was slowly rusting out at that time (or had a lot of problems to say the least). The company had a big client that relied on their software for many years. However, a lot of the small clients were dwindling out. Most likely the employer could use his own savings he saved a lot of years to maintain the company to still churn gas if it fell on any of those worst case scenarios. However, given their business model of the company was in a stall state and not skyrocketing like other companies where they on board 4-5 employees in one year and double it the next year, the location of the working environment was very inappropriate if they didn't had enough funds or any benefits to compensate for employees living there. The rent and standard of living for an average employee is very expensive within that location, let alone the state tax (compared to other states), taking in the end some significant pile out of your income.

I am going to philosophize a little about this on this end anyways because many think that I overlap the concept of minimum wage into the equation, which I do not. For instance, New York proposes to raise the minimum wage to $15 for people who work in fast food chains. When a lot of the fast food chains have kiosks inside instead of people, when I read articles about Obamacare where fast food chains try to do loop holes to circumvent people getting any health benefits, when fast food chains have a lot of huge turnover. What can we get out of this? The answer is pretty simple. Nobody actually wants to work in fast food chains when these services can be easily automated for most of its part. People go there as a last resort. We are coming at a stage where services need to be re-structured where 1. Services that can be automated should be automated within rich densities in the world to output the maximum productivity of an individual. Services with good business models should be located in rich densities as people who work there have past experience on tasks that are yet to be automated instead of already automated 2. Services where their business model is inefficient or they don't have the capacity or enough funds to produce the desired automation should be located in more poor densities where it creates positive productivity to an individual. I do not agree to the current rules of the capitalistic system taking competitive advantage of its own without caring the collective level of the world, but I agree some of the nature of the capitalistic system we live in: We cannot live in a world without accepting and experiencing failure (i.e. the state of being poor). The point of failure though should not be so bad as to the point of not able to stand on your two feet, but the point of failure should be bold enough that you can distinct whether you are in the correct or not correct side of the equation. How to perceive an environment that lives in failure is an interesting topic. For one, we can cover up the failure by having the value of land and commodities in cheaper face value so people can still be able to stand in their two feet. The benefits of living in a world that is more automated, more of a success, is like living in the future, while living in a world that is not automated, like living in the past. Which path to take is up to you - either is not bad - but the future is always best. You may think the past is the same world and product as the people of your past, that they were working "for the future". However the same product is run "now" instead by people who are working for the past instead of a future, a completely different mindset, living in a world going backwards instead of forward, something that distinctly our nature of our mind does not work in such state or wants to work in such state - denial, shifting our mind to the future by covering our mistakes or learning our mistakes so we don't land on the same past spot again is some of the natural responses people will go through when they land on such space. The latter is not happening, and because the latter is not happening, along the strategy of the capitalistic mindset not thinking about the collective level of the world, together, intertwined, I suspect that is why the capitalistic world shows an effect of great inequality. Inequality is actually not a correct word to put, but a much better word to put it is "misaligned" (the process or the formula of our nature of our world is not optimized. The growth of our economy could run in a faster pace if there was more engagement, less stalling around for most of the population that are stuck in the past world). The most iconic view to illustrate this example is seeing the poor and rich version of Hong Kong, like a great divide. Such a divide is natural, it is need it, it shows failure, and progress will not come if we don't have visibility of failure, of problems, like an ache or a pain in the body.

What happens when inefficient business models are located in a rich location where people are taught the basics, the foundations for young graduate students? An anomaly occurs. If you are working on a white collar job with a paycheck that is low as almost working in a fast food chain with paid overtime in New York City, then watch if the business model is going forwards or backwards, whether it nurtures the collective level of the world. If you are learning something backwards, hey, it is not bad at all, believe me. For one, learning the perspective of failure from others will make you less blind to fail yourself over that mistake later. It will save you a huge time later thinking you are invisible, invisible to your own mistakes. But doing that in New York City with the high rent is totally unreasonable. In New York City, if you are lucky, and have good grades, catch only the ones that pay you extremely well. Otherwise, move to a cheaper city and relocate there, as you will find plenty of jobs with that "same environment" that offer almost the same income as working in a fast food restaurant with overtime pay. You will have plenty of space to breath, as well for the employer to you, as it is a "safe zone", a world that lives in the past. You see, that "same environment", is more a live or die situation, when it is faced in a world that is i.e. New York City. You will experience an anomaly. What anomaly? With the same effort, you will not get the same results and same treatment as in other "work environment" that breathes a good business model. To stop the anomaly is to solve the anomaly. You really need to convert the business model to a sustainable on that location as it is otherwise the same as spending over your budget. So if you don't have the guts or strategy on that plan, the rest will be a demise within that work organization.

Let me elaborate more in detail:

Here are 3 sample incomes that I am going to demonstrate while living in California:
1. $19000 : An income of a person starting to work as a cashier in California (income above average compared to other states)
2. $31200 : My starting income of my first job in California.
3. $36000 : Hypothesized, not actual income for my second year of my first job if my raise was done immediately after my first year of work in California (My actual income for the second year was definitely less than $36000 because I got my raise very late within the second year).

First sample Income

Income Given: $19000.00
Monthly Gross Pay: $ 1583.33
Federal Withholding $ 170.31
Social Security $ 98.17
Medicare $ 22.96
California $ 20.41
SDI $ 14.25
Net Pay $ 1257.23
Annual Net Pay $15086.76
Federal Refund $ 1170.00
State Refund $ 124.86
Total $16381.61
Actual Monthly $ 1365.13

Second sample Income

Income Given: $31200.00
Monthly Gross Pay $ 2600.00
Federal Withholding $ 322.81
Social Security $ 161.20
Medicare $ 37.70
California $ 58.98
SDI $ 23.40
Net Pay $ 1995.91
Annual Net Pay $23950.92
Federal Refund $ 1186.00
State Refund $ 157.34
Total $25239.34
Actual Monthly $ 2103.27

Third sample income

Income Given $36000.00
Monthly Gross Pay $ 3000.00
Federal Withholding $ 382.81
Social Security $ 186.00
Medicare $ 43.50
California $ 82.10
SDI $ 27.00
Net Pay $ 2278.59
Annual Net Pay $27343.08
Federal Refund $ 1195.00
State Refund $ 168.32
Total $28706.32
Actual Monthly $ 2392.19

How it works?

When a job advertises you get $36000 per year, you actually get $27343 per year. And that is for the low brackets. For higher income (higher brackets), the cut taken out of your tax is more staggering. Ironically, if you are married, you pay less tax. However, we all know that living single alone is more expensive (tax refunds above are based living as single). Most likely, they promote people to marry, but that is another story, now that gay marriage is legalized.

Social Security, Medicare, SDI (Disability) are withheld and are used for your retirement income and health insurance. You cannot opt out unfortunately and don't expect any refund from it. That alone took out $2667 out of my annual $31200 first year income. Of the rest estimated $3300 cut out of my $31200 income, $550 goes to the state and the other $2750 goes to the federal. In total, around 25% of my income is cut by the system's retirement funds and tax collection. Compare to the 14% cut out of a $19000 income and you see the due is almost cut by half (You have to note that incomes $19000 or less have their health insurance subsidized or even free, requiring less monthly expenses to paying the current mandatory Obamacare insurance compared to other income holders).

First year of income

Gross: $31200
Actual Annual: $25200
Actual Monthly: $2100

Average budget living around the area I was living

Rent + Utilities Bills: $1100.00*
Food daily intake: $600.00**
Health Insurance: $200.00***
Dental Insurance: $20.00
Transportation Bus $60.00****
Cell Phone: $10.00

* There was once I found a studio for $900 with utilities included as part of a grand opening promotion. Those are very rare to find.
** How it was calculated? $12 for lunch + $8 for dinner => $20 multiply by 30 days = $600. The lunch is usually expensive for dining out, especially a healthy one which will fill your tummy up. I couldn't take shortcuts, and thank god I didn't, as I had some mild/moderate gastronomical problems at that time.
***Given premium health insurance was starting to become mandatory due to Obamacare, this is the minimum that I had to pay around my area. For my first year of my job, this was optional, as the law did not pass on effect yet.
****How it was calculated? $3.00 round trip multiply by 20 working days = $60

Savings after income and budget

Actual Monthly: $2103.77
Actual Costs: $1990.00
Savings: $ 113.77

Questions of average budget

What can I do with $113.77 per month?

In 12 months, I can save $1365.24?

Is it enough?
Miscellaneous costs not included in budget:

What if I want to use a car instead of a bus? How much will the gas cost me per month?

I didn't even include the monthly cleaning costs, such as laundry, drying, detergent, cleaning spray for toilet floor and carpet.
Spending my savings:

What if I want to buy a new laptop or I need to buy some medication? Can I afford it?

And to my surprise there are so many suckers who get a job like that living a lifestyle of said above, without a budget, splurging by backup loans and credit cards, not looking at the mistake early on that they picked the wrong job and align it to a wrong lifestyle. For those job opportunities, they are only best if you have some support from your family or already have a second income that shares the same assets as you (i.e. husband/wife), unless you have kids or your wife is pregnant, very rarely you will see benefits from companies that are struggling in a rich developed world.

Every person has different needs.

My needs were:

I need it a laptop for my own personal use in order to improve my technical skills. The laptop in the office was antique. The laptop felt literally like I was reading the specs of the <<new laptop in town>> 5 years ago.
I had a lot of trouble with my teeth to the point it bothered me on my daily activities so I need it a lot of extra dental treatment.
I had a girlfriend that was out of United States doing her degree where she didn't had enough money to make her studies more convenient and have the basic tools to complete her assignments.

Basically, it was a ton of money that I had to spent, an investment for fixing myself, voluntary helping others, and to improve my skills so I am more productive at work.

My regular fixed actual budget to allocate my misc cost needs was

Rent + Utilities Bills: $550.00 (Overall Experience: 30%*)
Food daily intake : $450.00 (Overall Experience: 70%**)
Health Insurance: $ 0.00 (Overall Experience: 0%)
Dental Insurance: $ 20.00 (Overall Experience: 90%)
Transportation: $ 0.00 (Overall Experience: 80%***)
Cell Phone: $ 10.00 (Overall Experience: 90%)
Other stuff: $ 73.77 (Overall Experience: 80%)

Actual Monthly: $2103.77
Actual costs: $1103.77
Savings: $1000.00

* I lived in a room that always was very easy to have smell problems if you didn't air it properly or clean it often. All utilities were included. I only had to pay $50 for wireless internet as there was no phone line. Sometimes my nose was clogged from the smell (yes, it was that bad!), that I could just walk out past midnight on the streets to take some fresh air (luckily going out in the streets was okay as rich locations have very low crime rate). You pay what you get for.
**I was locked on a 9 to 5 job - work organization was eerie if you work a little bit later than usual, not accommodating much flexibility. I had to spend some money for dining out which was usually around $10 to get a full good meal. Dinner was cheaper at $5 by eating microwaving packaged steam chicken and basmati rice (I still miss "that" basmati rice!) or a subway sandwich on the small occasions (they used to always be on sale those sandwiches constantly with different campaigns).
***$0 folks, $0. I bought a "bike"!
****laundry, detergent, drying, spray bottles for cleaning floor/toilet, toilet paper, filtered water, and so on.

Aha, wow, now that is staggering. My savings are almost equal to my actual fixed basic need costs. I was able to save or do misc costs with this lifestyle by the volume of $12000 per year (most of it spent on different misc costs). Most of them where for actual good reasons. I spread the wealth. Without that capital savings on my hand, I could not had the liberty to buy a new laptop, to fix my teeth or to use my savings to travel to other countries. Instead, I would be tied out to a workplace environment that I had to conform for my own survival.

But I have to say the following:

Aftermath: Don't live a frugal life - How can you be productive by living beyond your means in a developed location?

Meeting the old world in the new world and the new world in the old world

While my girlfriend had the joy of using her new digital camera and using her new digital phone that I gave out of my own generosity in a country that is not developed, I was stuck with a small phone with a screen so small that had no touch screen, that I only used it to find when the bus was on time so I can go to my dentist appointment or my journey to visit a mall and eat something nice (and on few occasions, watch a movie).

At the other side of my work office, they had the veracity about giving one of my co-workers a new upgrade of their next phone for free, a phone that he doesn't often uses based on observation, but my girlfriend uses it often. With so little effort they have the ability to word out those words out of their mouth. It is a tragic irony when they cannot see 2 feet besides me, there is an employee here me living with so many hardships I had to endure on my basic daily living standards with the smelly apartment I used to live in order to afford the very same things, not for me, but for my girlfriend, which they said they would give others for free.

Living affordable is not an option

Support from company is essential

They would joke me often how I was able to pay my dental costs for my orthodontics. They were thinking I was paying a monthly payment out of it like most Americans do, which I did not. They were treating me like I was a fool with a budget that would make me happy so I can be tied later to credit card debts and loans. Maybe that is what they wanted me after all to be: To have no savings so I can conform to them.

When I asked them support for assistance on some tax refund due to my heavy medical orthodontic costs, they wouldn't bulge to help me. They only cared to do the minimum paperwork for each employee. I could have gotten some substantial tax refund that could have increased my savings if they helped me do the paperwork required.

Provide ideas with long term positive effect

At other times, they told me to replace my bicycle with a scooter. If I wanted to stay long term with the company, I wouldn't buy a scooter. I would buy a car and learn how to drive. I never had the opportunity like other children to learn how to drive and it seems interesting how it is like. For others that take driving for granted, I take it still as an opportunity or a new experience that I can't await to try out, before I become too old.

If you can't afford it, hire or transform people to have support out of job (i.e. hire people that live in the area and don't pay rent, relocate people in cheap areas and let them work remotely, etc.)

All the people living there had either someone to support them or had their own challenges. One of the best co-workers who worked there had at least a house and was able to drive a car and had somebody from his family to support him. I think the standards of the house he lived was comfortable and didn't made him grumpy like it did to me (I rated my room 30%. It was that horrible, words can't describe the experience I had, but I can't argue much for the price I paid). He was very absorbed with the technological world and I don't think he was too pre-occupied with relationships at that time. At the other hand, there was another co-worker who had a girlfriend, but had his own challenges dealing with his own girlfriend. Lastly, there was another one that worked remotely and was a great leader while having his own family. Owning or renting a house in Los Angeles is absurd, so working remotely from another state, like he did, may save you tons of money.

I don't think the idea of working remotely was trusted for me by my employer. I sometimes used to come late and leave late at work and I was interrogated sometimes why I was late instead of allowing me to have more flexibility with my time.

For me, I think I was in the worst situation compared to everybody else. I was trying to find a motivation, a motivation that I could substitute out of my bad living standards with a culture that inspires people to do great things. However, the software was a mess, hierarchy ruled the organization due to the crumbling state of the software, it was best to have patience and appreciate life beyond job, as in lunch, when I listened to the management and co-workers on what they were talking - they were all talking about the slice of life and were completely oblivious about the future of our software. They just showed to me how hopeless they were with the software in front of me. I worked in a team that had the same exact fashion some months ago. Talking about the slice of life? Guess where that went?

Note about talking about slice of life: Talking about "slice of life" is not so bad at all, but like if that topic becomes the main thesis of an essay or becomes the meat and not the potatoes within the main course you are served, then it may be chances of following the cognitive strategy of self-handicapping ourselves, so we can use it as an excuse why we ended up on the wrong road in the end. To illustrate an example, from an excerpt from black box thinking, med students that studied so hard for many years could flunk the exams by getting drunk instead of studying hard, self handicapping themselves, in order to make a proper excuse of their failure not falling unto our "self-esteem", but "objectively" to an "unexpected event".

Conclusion

However, beyond job, given the income and the freedom and the means of a balanced life I wanted to keep, it was not a realm I could dive in. With no choice where to go, I had to take a break, a vacation, for 3 months. When I came back, they told me they already fired me and I was not entitled anymore to the paid vacation I accumulated/saved over 2 years which was about worth of one month's income. (yup, no severance pay). My salary bump increase of $288.92 was useless as it would take 2/3 out of the mandatory Obamacare insurance that was going to come (yes, no benefits) and it was already wasted already with the salary I did not receive for my paid vacation.

He had the tenacity to ask me if I would work back again, and if so, in what income. I suspect, given I did not got my vacation pay, that he expected me to get paid in lower income due to being hopeless. It is pretty simple that if you look at the 3 samples incomes that I provided before, that if I had to choose a bad culture with a bad lifestyle with savings of $1073.77 compared to living in a family while working in a supermarket store where you could keep all your savings for $1257.23, it is a no brainer anyone would have chosen the latter in the end.

Lesson learned: Next time, if you work in a small company, with strong background education and competitive skills, never ask for less than $80,000 as your starting salary. Getting into a small company should not be an easy task to get in, and if you get in, you have to work hard while the boss giving you all the amenities so you are able to focus more on your job and less on your personal problems. They did not achieve that to me and I was not experienced at that time to understand at that time on what type of culture I was going through.

Maybe they learned the lesson now as they are hiring now at this time I am writing this blog post - a customer service job in the range of 30-36k gross income - which does not require any educational background or heavy abstract practical work experience, the same income range for the IT job I took.

This individualistic experience can be conceptualized to a lot of other business models (this pattern happens everywhere)

I have to admit though that most of my mistakes was my own lack of general picture. I was very passive and just lived with the consequences that maybe I could have ended it much better. Even now, I did recently some mistakes with the current company I work for, enriching my general picture further.

But regardless, I am getting a better sense that these applications of old world vs new world, automation/non-automation, cheap versus expensive living costs, are all correlated, can be seen in our everyday life, and we can't violate those natural laws that exist in the capitalistic system, but at the same time, lets think how to do things for the collective of the world in the best way we can. If we live in anomalies, we have to fix them, and if we fix them, people see the effect and not the original cause, and we have to underlie the cause instead of covering it up, to have honesty and transparency instead of cognitive dissonance.

Black Box Thinking By Matthew Syed: My associations within my blog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 19:59:00 +0000

Black Box Thinking - The name implies everything

This may be one of my top list of recommended books (that is well accepted by public) for anyone to read, as it meshes up well together with the executive paradox book. In some sense, if the executive paradox book talked about the topography of the executive mindset like a class of geography while adding how each component part of the executive mindset is important to triumph successfully to problems like a class that teaches the nature of our world's food chain, then black box thinking in essence gets your feet under the water like a lecture that teaches you architecture, physics, chemistry, technology - how those foundations glue together best in practice.

Black Box thinking is an attempt I already did in my previous blog posts when I analyzed the executive paradox book, which was intertwined from the mental symmetry "transformation", the concept of god from Lorin Friesen. And in most cases, both explain the same conclusions just each explained in a different context.

Note also how I make metaphors on my first paragraph. I try to underpin the personal mindset challenges that we need to overcome with similarities of the already objective external world that we learn through our school curriculum that has boasted to the advanced efficient civilization we live today. But what improvements have we done to ourselves? The author at some point said that science in certain periods did not do anything to improve the "condition of man". That was because science was condemned by blind faith. However, he does not only uncover that, but he goes further on, by quoting "We notice that creative people make great leaps in natural sciences...but when it comes to the social world we often trust gut instinct". This implies that science so far has solved the external conditions of man, but we never applied it to our internal self, to the aspects of topic that are applied internally (social sciences) instead of externally (natural sciences). This book in some respect gives the solution to that problem. It gives the solution how to apply science in social sciences, something that has been overlooked by mostly all science books that teach science through natural sciences. It is assumed that natural science and social science are the same, when in the actual fact it is not. There is an element that distinct both very substantially: subjectivity and objectivity. Many repress subjectivity as an ill effect of our mind instead as a tool for our learning experience (the key point the author tries to make) , but how can we repress something when that is a foundation component in the way we are able to grow ourselves?

The author uses a word very often. The word he uses often is "evolutionary". The author tries to integrate all his conclusions as part of our "evolutionary" process. He is talking a theory about a theory of how evolution has emerged, and the evolution he is talking about, is not a dead end one, but a potent one that will make ours and the world a better place. I do not know what, but he nailed the theory straight up. I am pretty sure his insights might came deep from his career as an athlete (concrete experiences) and a journalist (abstract experiences) while reading a lot of books and connecting the dots, such as the Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. These are all speculations and I may be wrong, but whatever the reason, he brings a lot of topics in his book with a lot of detail and examples that were already discussed in mental symmetry and this blog.

The best impressions is how remarkable and fitting the title of the book's name is: "Black Box Thinking". In some sense, that is how an executive mindset actually works, through black box thinking. I am pretty sure that what he really represents is the "black box" airplanes contain. However, in real life, do all of our situations allow us to have a "black box" within us? And if we "do" have a real replica of a black box like airplanes do, should we still have no doubts that we didn't miss anything? And most importantly, how can we judge that our individualized event applies at a collective level, how does it "correlate", how can we know that the culprit is this variable and not another variable that we didn't notice? After how many tests can we be sure we are confident? These questions may sound we are having a compulsive obsessed disorder, but in many ways, it is not that we have to diligently evaluate in very much detail whether our speculations are correct or not, but we do not put enough effort or evaluate it only in only an individual case that we may set a wrong "theory" of the whole process. But regardless, the word can have another definition: "black box testing". Black box testing is the act of testing a thing many times out to find a bug out of a software. Black box as opposed to white box represents explicit uncertainty: it does not give us the key on how all things work together, instead, we have to figure by experimentation how all things work together. In real life, problems are like that, it is not like we get the actual parameters, replace them on our formula and get the correct result. Instead, it is actually trying to figure what the actual parameters are as most accurate and fast as possible. In the end, we have to act, make a decision, and either fail or succeed through that decision. Only through that way we will have a better clear picture what to do next. It is going from gray thinking to creating a recipe, following and not looking back in a white or black style. However, in most cases, the first iterations will fail and we have to go back to gray thinking. However, as the author Matthew Syed incorporates as his main message of his book, people instead of accepting their mistakes cover their mistakes due to their sensitivities, their ego, or only looking through their individualistic experience, resulting a cognitive dissonance to themselves. If you don't understand what I mean, let us start with the associations of my interpretation of mental symmetry + executive paradox on how it fits with the context message of black box thinking in my next section bellow.

Lastly, but not least, leadership lately has become a very important aspect in our daily life that I never thought it would have led so much light into these days. It may all be help with the emergence of big data in our lives as well, as we can amplify the use of our Perceiver mode more than we can imagine these days. It seems that the example all we should resemble is to have a leadership style. In other words, contributor mode and using it correctly is the key to make ours and the rest a better place. Executive paradox and black box thinking are popular public books in the press that glues those two things together well for anyone to start digging in.

Many people will be baffled and they will say is that all life is? And I would say "yeah, that is all life it is". Many people are in disbelief because they don't want to believe there is any existing answer to life as it won't be a mystery to what life really means. Only when you want to stop making life as a mystery and believe the actual purpose of life is to be what we are supposed to are, great and correct leaders, then the next step will be more clear, much better than not knowing what next step to take.

Associations of Mental Symmetry + Executive Paradox And Black Box Thinking

This is a remarkable book, maybe through iterations and some patience, instead of tackling one tree within the forest like Revolutionary Feedback, this tries to give the big picture of the forest in practical context (actually, the epilogue is titled as the "big picture").

The main message of the book is to admit mistakes as a learning process instead of burying them down due to our ego. That will result in cognitive dissonance and not the ability to grow ourselves.

The same message is applied in mental symmetry. It discusses in length of the mercy mode being the one subject controlling the teacher mode. The mercy has an ego that tries to self defend itself with hyper pain within its mental networks. It is very hard to remove the sensitivities of individuals that create an obstacle for people being transparent and looking at a collective (teacher mode) instead of an individualistic (mercy mode) level of things.

In my illustrations, I mentioned that if mercy rules what teacher mode to do, it will always guide teacher to a wrong results, creating bad emotions (teacher mode has emotions), which the mercy mode will "spin" them around by substituting with alternative explanations (theories) that can fit within the "values" of the mercy mind. This in result creates cognitive dissonance and the individual will never grow by ignoring their mistakes. This intersection of whether to accept or reject mistakes is immediately after performing an action in server mode, which results an input to the mercy mode whether to bury or use it as a humble experience where the perceiver mode can use it to create a better theory. The latter will impose the teacher to rule over the mercy mindset over what are the best values that will compliment as an individual. In other words, it is auto correcting ourselves by the external part of the world.

Beyond that being the most important message of the book, it brought topics, such as top down and bottom up thinking (visionary versus detail oriented) and the ability to re-iterate both cycles often. It is no much different than what my illustration tried to achieve with combining the map of mental symmetry and executive paradox diagrams and creating a flow within them. He illustrates with an example that people who operate bottom up are better than people who work top down for a problem that has no real applicable solution yet. It is always useful to use top down thinking for problems already solved before, as it is a waste to re-invent the wheel. However, most of the problems we are hired to face are within a context that you cannot solve it by applying mostly a top down thinking, it requires some bottom up thinking, to refine for that specific context.

But the most important of all is how to distinct blind faith and facts. He starts with the most easiest and obvious blind faith - authority, which you can see in upper management and professionals that have a high level of scrutiny if they make mistakes (i.e. doctors). They have to obscure the truth and their mistakes with authority. This comes at a sacrifice at the collective (and also individualistic level) that nobody learns from those mistakes. He further goes into areas that look like facts, but they are not. He illustrates the example that simple trials are not effective because they do not tell much the effectiveness without comparison. Simple trials in essence is just a sentence, a fact, twisted as a theory, with no other fact (other trial that does it differently, like the opposite), that supports the theory. A single trial is like saying "A", whose value is 10, is greater than X, which represents the opposite of A, without testing whether X is greater than 10 in the first place or not. The emergence of A/B testing came due to the fallacy of single trials. But even if that is not enough, he goes and sees evaluating facts in different perspectives: If the vision is correct, then marginal improvements is the correct way to do. If the vision is not correct, leaps of connecting the dots to new creative ideas is the correct way to approach things.

All of those associations are done through extensive depth of different industries in our world today - from aviation to the health industry, to criminal justice. The clarity, simplicity, details, and narrative - all wonderfully mesh up to bring up a topic in the most provocative and influencing way. A must read and I will definitely be writing a review for this book soon.

Why Yokai watch is popular - Concepts of Agency Detector / Generation "Digital Native"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Nov 2015 19:01:00 +0000

From Generalist Professions to Specialist Professions to Intelligent Digital Systems

I sometimes focus closely what our current world has to offer to the young generation that live in our present world. The present of our world is very vast and different than it used to be in the past. There is more and more the shift of people not requiring the mental effort to use problem solving skills and instead more relying on authority figures. This shift is linear and progressive. To illustrate, at first there were different professions that were generalist on a specific domain. So if we had a problem that we need to solve, we could have gone to that figure of authority. Society became more complex and wanted to make the well being of each individual much better. For that reason, professions became more specialized and each individual had a very specific domain he had knowledge of. But if that wasn't enough, we went in these days to go to the next step, to provide accuracy based on a collective set of knowledge and experience only a professional with extensive experience could provide, that an individual itself could not have come to these same conclusions or follow the best practices no matter how much effort he has set on his lifetime. However, we encounter two problems on this facet: one, it is too ideal for each professional to fit on that role very competitively and two, there is not enough resources of such amount of professionals to cater that need to the current demand. So for those reasons: we transcend the authority of those figures from the physical to the meta-physical: intelligent digital systems that harbor some or most of the elements a professional could achieve. These are the systems that a generation of "digital native" will term alike or even better than the current physical people of professionals that cater our needs. It is the next billion venture thing that will rule in our next generation and it is scary to what implications this will turn out to be.

This all ties together to the concept of the "Agency Detector". Let me elaborate what the agency detector does by looking at the show "Yokai Watch". But before looking at Yokai watch, lets see why Pokemon is totally different from Yokai Watch, because although many people they think they are alike, we all know that there is something different, but can't articulate in details what this different thing is, which I am going to venture you on it for now.

What is the concept of Pokemon that is different from Yokai Watch

Pokemon is totally different from Yokai watch. The reason Pokemon is different from Yokai watch is the perspective it looks at what a "fictional paranormal animal" represents to me. First of all, unlike yokai watch, pokemons are something that everyone can see. They are not separated into a different realm. Secondly, the aim of pokemon may be the same as yokai watch to capture as much mythical creatures as possibles, but the goal is different in here, as it is to be the best trainer of all. In other words, the point is how to use the existing creatures to your advantage in order to be the winner. It is no different than big companies trying to hire the best combination of people or the best set of companies to out-beat other big companies to still retain the status of being the king. We see elements of pokemon as using the assets of mythical creatures as like being an executive to win others who compete in the same world with the same assets. The last point is that in pokemon, the key to progress the story is paying a lot to the external physical environment: the landscape, the skills and traits of the pokemon, and the skills and the traits of the other pokemon. Although yokai watch has those elements too, pokemon although has different laws than our natural world, it predominantly focuses on the external environment. The reason pokemon is a success is because the creativity and the content of the world was executed well. If the 900 pokemon was like your typical real world animal zoo, it would not be so exciting to see. Its novelty that propels and also the ability to ignore animal cruelty for the sake of enabling our cognitive mind to play the executive mindset on how we can be the champions of the world. Because admittedly, if pokemon used exactly the real animals we have in our animal kingdom, we would have thought that this show is as cruel as grand theft auto. It is the same concept as replacing humans with zombies, because it feels more rightfully to us to eradicate a zombie or a mythical creature that we don't know or can relate in real life than something that it actually exists. Regardless, besides the implications of what pokemon is or not, it was a success due to those key points it brought to the show and many tried to create re-iterations of the same thing with a different style, such as i.e. Digimon.

Why is Yokai Watch completely different thing from Pokemon: Agency Detector

Yokai watch is a completely different beast. In fact, there may be later clones of Yokai watch because it introduces something that was never introduced before in a show so explicitly as this: Agency Detectors. What is an agency detector you say? If you understand what a yokai means based on the context of the show (no, not its literal meaning), then you know all what an agency detector means. It really perplexed me and I am kind of convinced that the show really linked the "agency detector" from the "cognitive science of religion" as its main message in a subliminal way. What is an agency detector then? Okay, so this not entirely something new, but it tries to find the reason why in the past and why currently people still believe in God. It does not go to much in the context of religion as much as the reason why people believe in religion and they put the culprit to our "agency detector", a component of our mind which does the following: If there is an event that we cannot describe or understand ourselves, then we need to put responsibility of that event to some sense of variable. The mind in most cases does not like to set an undefined variable, it usually in most cases prefer to set it on "something". In the past and in certain cultures, when a big earthquake or tsunami erupts out of nature, we put the blame to god (an authority physical figure) or to some higher entity. This is much better illustrated within Lorin Friesen two concepts of agency detectors: one that is formulated out of an authority and another formulated out of a theory. If you have watched the show, does it sound all familiar? It is, because when an event is happening and it is strange and we can't know why it is happening, the main character says the same phrase again and again "It must be a yokai". It is what it is, we activate our agency detector on those triggers when something unexplained happens to us. For most adults this sounds ridiculous, but in childhood development, that is the world we all start from before learning the actual truths from elementary and high school. If you believed in santa claus, then that is what an agency detector or a yokai is all about. You believed you had to be a good kid and not naughty because there is an entity up there that watches you to determine whether he should put christmas gifts on your christmas tree or not. As the story of yokai illustrates, yokai are what yokai are and they do not have a concept of cause and effect. You blurted out much that you didn't know why you said it? It must be Tattletell. You are eating more than you should actually be eating? It must be Hungramps. It only focuses on the effect and not the cause of it. In a sense it is an authority figure instead of a theory and we cannot explain or understand it because it lives in a different realm. This is something hard to forget as only people who have the yokai watch can see them.

But why an authoritative figure to put a blame on it? Because like I said previously, the mind cannot set it to an undefined variable. It wants to place things into categories. To map which effect correspond to what variable and then up to the individual whether to allow that effect to be set within an authoritative figure or to some cause and effect theory. At that stage the kid is developed, he may not be able to grasp the cause effect until later in school, the only thing that needs at this moment to survive within the laws of nature and be a fit member within the society, is to map each unexplained event with an agency detector of authority and bridge the gap later to something more sensible to that with normal thought. What is normal thought? Normal thought as opposed to technical thought is something that you learn from common sense through the concrete variables of the world instead of the abstract variables in the world where you learn in school through philosophy and math. It is an element that we will see later yokai watch bridges the gap to some extent on that. In conclusion, unlike pokemon, yokai watch enables the mentality of children to be more ready, fit, and act appropriate to society, as opposed to have an executive mindset to be the best trainer in the world. We can see that the main story-line is to resolve social tension of inexplicable events children face often each day, a tension we adults rarely experience it except if we go to different countries and have symptoms of culture shock. Unlike the adult mind which is mentally prepared to tackle any unexplained event, the childhood mind at its primitive form is not so ready to tackle the same challenges as an adult would do easily.

What are the benefits of this show? The benefits of this show is that it saves a lot of time from parents to kids questions on inexplicable events. The parents will usually tie those inexplicable events with something down to earth (normal thought) kids would understand or some form of deity or religion that we should abide of. Yokai watch is something that is not offensive at all to any individual as it ties all those unexplained events to the childhood individual in relative terms where everyone can accept, not affiliated with any religion or theory. Furthermore, we can see that the show also tries to tie in some normal thought behind those mythical creatures deities. For instance, tattletell may be seen as a "bad" or "evil" category at first that the main character had to confront because there was an incident where it possessed an individual to blurt out something inappropriate. However, at other times, Tattletell was used by the main character because blurting out something made sense when an individual tried to hide the bad high school grades from her mom. In here, we can see that each yokai is like a piece of foundation in our life and we see a lot of elements where the main character has to decide when it is appropriate and when it is not appropriate. The way this is done is by the main protagonist always having the third perspective of things, something that other secondary individuals that are possessed do not have a clue or are blind that they act in inappropriate ways. However, unlike blaming the cause of the individual for its wrong doing, it is usually the cause of the yokai. This is kind of perplexing, as I understand that the main story is to alleviate the tension for kids of something unexplained to the secondary character and instead putting the blame on a yokai instead, but maybe it goes too far. There is one episode on the show where an individual was eating more than average due to a yokai called Hungramps. Usually, an individual that eats more is usually due to a substitute of satisfaction for our own experience or to alleviate depression. In some countries that are very small, the limited space limits us to gain satisfaction from exploration, as there is little novelty in a small space. In such countries, that novelty of space can be substituted with novelty of food. Just to not side track a lot, the problem was solved by confronting Hungramps. Hungramps was actually having the normal symptoms of hunger for good reasons: He was depressed cause he didn't see her grand-daughter for a long time. However, it makes us assume that his cause (depression) and effect (hunger) is possessed to an individual that was never hungry in the first place. The show is calling it as "possessing" a spirit. In other words, it brings agency detectors called yokai in an indirect way with the form of possessing to normal individuals and our goal is to purify them. For that reason, I expect the story to not have a very main strong story plot as it approaches things in an indirect way while its message is more for kids to learn the different varieties of what is appropriate as parents teach to children in novel ways. We can also see that this show main campaign targets children as its ending has an exercise drill for children to dance with it.

The show is very entertaining and amusing in the way it does things. We can also conclude that society in some terms has already accepted that agency detectors really exist in our mind and it is one of the starting stages for the development of a child. Later, the child has to bridge those agency detectors to a more solid foundation of a bridge. Besides normal thought, to incorporate technical thought through the means of education.

However, the behavior for our current generation to be more obedient or conform to an agency detector is not something that we should be stuck with, at least for some stuff in life, we should not black box things. For that reason, we should incorporate technical thought into it. But will it be more easier or harder for us to do that incorporation? My assumption is that there may become more obstacles than facilitation to do this, as we are starting to have the emergence of the new generation that is called digital natives.

Digital Natives: Our agency detector as an intelligent digital system

Okay, so now we come to make a stand to the future. Let us admit that we use less common sense in our daily life. Not because we want to, but we don't have the time to. You let others do your job for you. You don't need to cook, buy groceries and create a mess in the kitchen. You can eat at a restaurant instead. Even in a matter of a fact, now you don't even need to go outside to order the food and you can do it by the phone. Or maybe you have very poor communication skills to articulate what you want to an individual or its too much effort for you to do that. Instead, you tap with a few thumbs from your hand on your mobile device what you want to eat through their official mobile app. Oh wait, you don't need to even have to care what food you want to eat. The app has a recommendation engine that knows what is best fit for you to eat and you just click that recommended item they told you without giving it a second thought because you have other more important matters to think of. That last part may be too exaggerated, but it is actually not an exaggeration for our new generation called digital natives. We are more and more driven to let others do the decision for us so we can be more efficient and productive to actually do what we are specialized, but that skill of specialization, is it actually good for the lack of having a general inter-disciplinary view of how things work?

What happens here is we lose our individuality and set whatever the collective mindset of the intelligent system is appropriate, but is it actually appropriate for you? Let us take the examples of people blaming doctors for something going wrong. We expect professionals are the ones that will solve the problem in and out from A to Z. But in actuality, they are no more there than being the best supporters and advisers to your problems, not being the full liability of your tasks that you need in help. We have to set our own individuality into proposition, because it may not always fit with the collective answer that exists. In other words, let agency detectors be there as they be as they be, but we should not be succumbed at them, but influence them. That requires a society that practices revolutionary feedback that does not punish people but instead evolve people within their journey on aligning ourselves and them on the correct path. However, this cannot be done if we look things as an authoritative figure and approach it in an indirect way. Instead, we should be seeing the mechanisms through cause and effect and approach it directly where we transform our problems into solutions in order to become better individuals to society than we were before. This in practice requires the bridging of the existing normal thought we practiced with technical thought. This requires these type of communication channels to accept feedback and give feedback back to others. Some details are okay to black box to ourselves and ignore where we don't find it useful in our own context of our life, such as how to manufacture a semiconductor. However, not to the point where we black box everything, such as leadership skills, communicating and managing personal problems within society, and making a world a better place. These leaps for people to dive in may be harder for them when everything is around their shoulder. Especially with cheap entertainment these days as a main motivation for many individuals, it is much easier these types of skills to be lost in our next generation, the main skills that drive the main engine that drive our world today, like pulling a train to do the next iterative step to make our society embodied with a strong purpose.

The point is, I am pretty sure that digital natives will become a trend soon and big data and intelligent systems that live within our context of our life will be the next multi billion dollar thing. However, most who are old and are not digital natives understand that these systems are there to support us and not be the agency detector we should call for help that will solve our problems or blame them if they did something wrong. No, we are adults and we have created already that bridge to transition those agency detectors to a theory, to a cause and effect, with the help of bridging our previous normal thought with some technical thought. But for digital natives, that may not be the case. They will treat those systems like some of our present individuals who treat doctors as being their full liability if they screwed something up (which in some cases it makes sense, but not in all cases, when the patient is mostly passive to his own health). However, all this can be changed if digital natives have a direction and purpose in their life, that they at least not let some components of their thought be directed or swayed, to place the most important matters in their life with common sense and technical thought instead of just leaving it all up to an authoritative figure.

It is easy to overestimate or overlook at the big picture of things

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Nov 2015 22:32:00 +0000

This article will be short and brief, but it will make a very strong point & the future direction of this blog.

Why we lock ourselves into problems

My past articles expressed some stuff, but they didn't talk about the context and situation that I have been. In addition, I have only observed that I just stated a problem & solution but did not give a final execution to that end. To illustrate, look at what I have expressed so far in my last previous blogs. I think many would have lead to the same direction: Blurting out something that you feel unacceptable or wrong (which may have some seasoning flavor on some points), but stopping there intermittently there and doing what you always are usually doing. And that is the problem: The reason we ended up being in a problem in the first place is usually doing what we are already doing and we will endlessly like an infinity loop have this unchanged problem in our minds. We expect by doing the same stuff like we used to before will change things if we keep looping in our heads the problem in our mind. I guess it fits to quote Albert Einstein popular quote "Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". And most people may not be by nature insane, but become temporary out of their minds, if they think keeping their daily routine jobs will solve an existing problem the more they worry or express about it. When we only focus specializing doing what we actually routinely do, it becomes a sense a part of our identity and capacity. In other words, we are creating a tunnel vision to ourselves.

Changing routine is not consistent, but we must have to

The problem why people lock into problems is because universally we want an environment where everything is standardized, consistent, within our budgets, etc. You do not expect employee A to do out of his routine tasks in month of December when he did his routine tasks in the month of November because you allocated all the production development to be done on employee A. But thinking in such terms of consistency and standardization is counter intuitive in situations.

Example

To illustrate the problem, there were points that I found things could be done better or there were existing barriers of communication or sharing knowledge in my environment due to a very competitive environment in one of my working environments. These requires skills that you need to be more communicative to people, more leadership and managerial aspect of coordinating the people to add the best value to the organization, more retaining staff and keeping happy, and so on. In other words, you need more time allocated to spend on leadership or visionary skills instead of development work. However, like I said before in my previous blog, we were running out of people for maintaining and improving technology X. So I had no other choice but to spend 90% of development and 10% of leadership/visualization because I had no other choice to keep the technology X still running. In other words, I was still doing what I was already doing. However, I self deluded that I was not. You see, the brain can self delude itself when it thinks things that do not exist in the first place. To illustrate, a person that is a big fan of a baseball star with a high RBI, may attach himself and feel he is already that baseball star without putting his own effort self to see the perils and injuries of a real baseball player. Self deluding ourselves is very easy and it starts thinking of problems everyday without doing any action about it. The thing is it is not enough to think of a problem and already having a solution or best tactic to get away for it, but also have the time to allocate on getting rid of that problem as quickly as possible. Keeping a problem to ourselves, may delude myself that I am doing leadership 50% and developing 50%. But that is not the case, that if that was "actually" true, the technology X I was working (as most of the team working on that left) would have been sinking already and the direct stakeholders I worked with would already tried to find alternative solutions. So what was the solution for my end? My solution is different compared to others as it is based on situation. I would had to stop worrying about the existing problem and focus only on developing stuff because there is not enough resources to maintain technology X. I could say, "yes I want to talk about the problems that worry me and I am the only one that knows most what troubles me, but if I can't dedicate 50% instead of 10%, then that will not be enough to self align myself and others on how to approach eradicating the problem, it will instead aggravate it more". At the same token, I started to under appreciate my development work. I always feel like everyday I am doing small victories, but given the limited resources of our team and little support we had, regardless whether technology X is the correct approach or not, based on just that capacity, the context of work behind technology X was kind of astounding. So others may perceive I am doing nothing because I act or feel like I do nothing, but in actuality, I did a lot of stuff and should take just a break for only that matter. If there were more people already in my team, then I would have reconsider to spend more time allocating the things I feel worried about. So there is 2 ways to solve the problem: If you have the capacity then solve it. If you don't then outweigh the sacrifices you have to make and weight the benefits over the costs. If the costs are too much, then you have to accept that the problem is not so important over what you are already doing and you have to set it in lower priority. For me, I had to think: If I really want to change something, I really have to change my routine. Is it worth it? For now it is not. However, can I do later? Yes, once things are 1. more automated 2. I remove most of the technical debt/refactoring 3. Stakeholders do most of the development stuff - then I can focus less on the development. However, there is still a long road to reach there before I reach to that destination. At the same time, I am not sure if my development is really productive as I don't have someone else on my shoulder that has a second non-bias opinion whether technology X is viable and what things or practices we are missing that we can optimize technology X to be faster. It is a risk that I took the plunge ever since I focused working development on technology X for more than a year, my routine daily job that took 90% of my time everyday.

From the above example, we can make conclusions that

1. Management worried when employees are not doing consistent work

There is a problem that management will not understand what an employee does when he shifts direction if he has the capacity to. There should be no worries if he dedicates a lot of time and does not make a huge deficit impact on the assets he currently develops. However, worries should arise if he only spends 10% of the time on it because it is easy to self-delude ourselves and our management that we spend or act like we put much effort on it.

I have to add that management

Cares with mediocrity people who only do routine stuff
Prides with people that besides finding a problem and a solution, executes it and eradicates the problem as soon as possible
Does not tolerate people who: Do nothing or change routines without solving problems and instead aggravating problems by being self deluded to themselves

This is just a rule of thumb, but in most organizations its sensible that mostly this is how things are approached. The point is if there is a problem you think that exists in the organization, I still support that there is no point of leaving a company due to that, as from past experience and from patterns I have seen, most likely, all companies face the same trivial problems everywhere.

The point is tackle the problems, but tackle the problems only if you are capable of and understand currently your needs, skills and mindsets within it. The only sensible reason to leave an organization may be if you have strong ideologies or skills that you think it does not fit within this organization, but fits in another organization that you want to work for. Or that the organization is substandard to other organizations on making employees happy, work productively, and doing something ethical or helpful to the world. Even if those are the main reasons for leaving a company, evaluate and give it a try on changing the company before making assumptions. In addition, your expectations how other companies are better than your current company may be an overestimation, so its better to evaluate yourself on such matters more better.

2. Before changing routine, weight the benefits over the costs

Do not plunge in unless you are sure what you are doing. If you don't know what you are going through, its better to just cross the bridge they give you instead of swimming underwater because once you want to solve a problem, your aim is to eradicate it as fast as possible, not aggravate it on, because that will also sink yourself into it too.

3. Remember that you are changing yourself, your "me" and you will not be ready from day one

Changing yourself on stuff you never tried before has two implications: One is that you are changing your own identity and that translates to making some of your habits/brain muscles weaker as a substitute on creating stronger habits/brain muscles on other matters on your identity. There will be a strong conflict on yourself when you are used to do things only in a certain way. The other thing is your expectations cannot be the same as you used to before. When you allocate skills A and B to weight 50% and you score 100 on A and 0 on B, your performance is actually 50 and not 100. However, we expect that we should be treated or be in the grades of 100 when we are on the grades of 50. It seems changing roles in ourselves always means we can have the same pride, responsibility, and ownership as we used to the same day as before. However, that cannot be the case and we have to align our external environment in lower expectations of "me" to us and others than we used to before because we take a plunge on a transition, not on something we actually already are. We have to know and identify that our skills on B is to how much time we spend on skill B "actually" instead of imagining or stretching that percent number to 50% (when in actuality is just 10%).

4. Consider the problem in terms of priority: "Do it" OR "Archive it".

The final point is after you find the problem, you have to figure what you will do about it in the end. Whether it will be your first or second priority. Because there are other problems that you may have overlooked easily: our own self routine. Our own self routine is already solving a problem. So do we have time or space on solving a second problem realistically by allocating enough time on it? If not, then just forget it, because the more you think about it, the more you think you are already doing something about the problem, which in the first place, you do not. When archiving or ignoring a problem, make sure you make it transparent to yourself and others why you archive that problem and why that problem is less important than what you are currently solving, and whether there are any plans on the future on solving this problem (because obviously there are a lot of stakeholders affected by this problem).

Conclusion

So now I hope you all guys know how easy it is to overestimate or overlook at the big picture of things. I, myself, admittedly, became a victim out of it. But hey, I am bringing you my journey with you so you may not fall in the same trap as me.

From my previous blogs, it is admittedly right that one of the lessons I learned is that you have to think about the problems of a company very early and try to find a solution instead of just blaming it and then leaving a company. It is better to stay unless the company is substandard to the average company.

The second lesson to learn from this blog post is that having a problem and solution is not enough, it is also to see the existing problems you are already solving. You have to see which is more a priority to solve right now and how can you change the priority of plans for later. It is also important to not delude ourselves on the trap by being obsessed with a problem we don't put much effort as that only aggravates it. Instead, we should see ourselves how we can eradicate the problem as fast as possible.

How we overestimate or overlook stuff is by locking ourselves in a problem instead of executing it and be done with it. By locking in a problem without putting much effort into it, we self delude ourselves, we overestimate and overlook how things are, expecting we are doing something tangible when in fact we do not. In order to get out of the lock, out of the misconceptions, we have to also look our own perspective as well. Everyday in our lives we do something, we solve problems. We have to see and evaluate whether the things we do today are the most important problems we can solve based on our capacity. If it is, then we have to admit that this problem is not so big or beyond our means to able to tackle to it at this moment . We have to self-prioritize that problem by setting a plan for how it will be easier to tackle for it later - in a sense that it does not aggravate us anymore. If it is a problem that we are able to tackle ourselves, then we have to make the transition on allocating enough time to solve the problem and align our external expectations with our current skills. To keep focused on your goal, keep in mind that you are only doing progress the more the problem gets eradicated as compared to still float abound.

Special Edition Blog: Principles of Software Engineering (Introductory Use Case included: "Digging holes for creating graves to newcomers")

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 Oct 2015 17:12:00 +0000

How I Feel of the sickness of the software developer world

Its been 3 months I have written a blog post. The reason of the delay is due to that I experienced a lot of crazy stuff lately by people who are just incompetent. Its like I am a wife doing the housework while my husband is cheating behind. I am a software developer by nature like a wife doing their own housework. But like a wife sees stuff like cheating, main housework is not the only important thing anymore. Instead, keeping the integrity of your husband is more important. And yet your husband may tell you to ignore what he is doing and tell you to keep focusing on your housework and make sure the meals come on "time", do you think you can still abide to that husband and trust after all what he has done? That is what I am experiencing. It would have been okay if this happened only once or twice, but this happened a dozen of times. It has reached to a point to scream out and say "This has been gone out of control! I cannot see my husband daily cheating on me!". And although this is metaphorical, this has become in a literal sense in real life (i.e. Tiger Woods).

A general prescription you should follow in your software developer life

Take the above story to a literal sense: In most software companies, software engineers will work on teams where their work is not integrated to the company culture productively because nobody cares about the company culture. Instead, they only focus on the technical aspect and ignore the people aspect of things. Add to the fact that most management also focuses only on the technical aspect, they have two paths which they can pick and do:

A. Focus on the technical aspect. They become unhappy later on but they don't know why. Then they voluntary leave and they leave the company's culture intact.
B. Besides focusing on the technical aspect, focus later on the people's aspect and make an impact on the company's culture and live with the consequences it brings.

Most do not do "B". They only do "A". And the only way to live "A" is being less cynic. I have seen those negligent fools. They only talk about "anything besides work" on their lunch hours because they know their company culture workplace is a mess. How long they can stay on that job depends of the degree how much less cynical they are (or to say to some degree: how "psycho-pathetic" they are to the externalizations they neglect based on their responsibilities). I think many will not disable a part of their minds. Instead, they will have their integrity and leave to another company after 2 years after following "A". However, they will never know "why" they left that organization because they never tried "B". "B" is the solution I propose for anyone to try it out as it is the best choice for your personal growth and for the growth of others while still retaining in a company for years.

While retaining "A" is on your best interest in order to grow your technical skills, you cannot grow your people skills well enough if you only follow "A". The many turnovers and failed projects that exist in corporations today makes the demand of "B" staggering important while the demand of "A" the least to the interest for you to pursuit too much. Although "A" to an extent of degree is important to know adequately enough to bring on deliverables, "A" is not enough "because to whatever you are doing" has not been analyzed whether it applies well in the current context and situation your company's problems is facing. I repeat, it ignores whether is approachable, appropriate, practical to the current maturity of the people behind working on this project and the helpfulness on the current context of the organization. Many heavily followed only on "A" and I have seen its perils.Within a year I worked on one organization, two big projects that were put for production and have retained for long have heavily been failed: One project was on the front end initiated a year ago and another project was on the back end initiated around the start of this year.

Given from that, over the past 4 years working as professional software engineer, I am a more distinct software engineer compared to others. I put emphasis on working on path "B" to the point my technical skills are not so good as others who follow path "A", but they are bare enough to bring deliverables while at the same time bringing value to the corporation that others can't match with people that only follow path "A". I tell you and I repeatedly tell you that I am very confident on what I am saying and the reason why all my blogs talk software engineering in the principles of path "B" is this: There is a huge demand on solving the so called "political problems" in the organization, as they create huge inefficiencies, high turn over and a lot of dozen failed projects. It is most likely that management has a lot of stuff on their shoulders and they cannot solve all those "political problems" by themselves or most likely neglect them to the point of only caring their own responsibilities and hurting the whole organization in the end. That is why organizations started to create cultures that are flat and approach an organization that follows "holocracy" (because it is "holy"? Yes, to some extent it is). That is why I am telling you that even if your organization is all hierarchical, you can still follow those practices that I have mentioned so far in my blog. In other words, to follow path "B".

I am not sure how the future of software development world will be, but I have seen that currently there has been a huge negligence in the management world to follow path "B", that is, to bring a balance, to follow the "executive paradox" mindset. Instead, management focuses a lot on path "A". At the same time, IT employees focus on path "A" religiously. I don't know how our society created a ridiculous culture. Maybe it is due to the pace of the technology where each improvement saves us more costs and is more efficient (some do not explain the gruesome complexities behind those technologies), maybe the bombardments daily to learn new hacks you can use of a specific technology, maybe that our kids can play all day for free on the internet learning new programming languages (it is not "free" et al, it is so they can "convert" themselves and the future companies that they will work to use "this" type of technology that the employer has to "pay" licenses for). I have an anathema for the ones that follow religiously on path "A" all the time. It is not good for themselves or for part in society. In the long run, it will not be your best sale point on your career as there are already many supply who follows that path. The only way to make the distinction apart from the others is to follow path "B".

Let me tell you briefly why I converted myself to path "B". After I graduated, I never thought that I would have to face path "B" in my entire life. I thought management could cover that. I thought just doing "A" will be enough and get rewarded on my efforts. This does not happen in the corporate world. In fact, after my first 2 years working, being negligent willy happy on my own lala world, I noticed I got punished instead of being rewarded. What consequence could it be that when I followed my duties that I got punished? It is not attitude or other stuff people tell you. Ironically, they are just excuses so you never need to explore path "B". I started following path "B" from the day I started my own blog. I started path "B" after 2 years of working on my first job. By that time, it was too late for me to fix my ineffectiveness to the organization I worked before. Yes, I say "ineffectiveness", yet although my boss told me to follow Path "A" and I followed Path "A" extensively, I should have followed Path "B", even when bosses would start to dislike it at first. One of my first blog posts was describing a dream I had before, a dream that told me to either listen to bosses telling you to follow path "A" or you are out. Of course, this is not the correct remedy to work efficiently on your organization, especially with management that do not handle the company culture effectively. As long they ignore following Path "B", no matter how hardworking or experienced your employees are on following Path "A", it will not really solve your business problems. On my second job, after working for more than a year, I started to follow path "B". I started to take initiatives that contradicted the advice of management and even lately raised my voice. For as those who followed meticulous the advice of management, they lost their moral and resigned in the end. That if I followed the advice of management, I would have worked on a project that is now considered a failure. However, following path "B" is more of an adjustment or being adaptive to the current situation of the organization. You cannot follow it immediately. You can only follow it after you know the corporation well enough and can make progressively adjustments to that end. It is a slow pace transition from thinking in terms of the people aspects of things within this organization instead of just only the technical aspects of the organization.

Lastly, because we are living in an unbalanced world, like the "unix manifesto", I think there is a huge demand for organizations to work as follows:

Management to focus 80% on Path "B" and engineers to focus 50% of their time on Path "B"

However, once more people have a correct mindset, it can go back to equilibrium as to

Management to focus 50% on Path "B" and engineers to focus 25% of their time on Path "B"

But on these times, it tell us that the demand is huge for people to follow Path "B", on solving those problems that organizations face which are not entirely technical, that instead are problems which I described mostly within my blog posts.

This prescription has no sides

An important thing to mention is that this prescription has no sides. This prescription does not say to follow to communicate all the time with customers (agile) or to follow a project until its full completion (waterfall). Actually, both of those practices if followed by word are not effective and it is usually somewhere in between that you are the most effective (i.e. Complete stuff on time but read your environment for new opportunities and threats daily and adapt as quickly as possible).

In any case, let me tell you my story. I "switch" political sides. I do not retain on the same political side forever. Some organizations are too agile (like my previous company) and some are too structured (like the one I am currently experiencing). The aim is to put a balance and do what you have to do to change political side to the one that fits more appropriate. That is why many job descriptions these days tell you to have experience both on agile and waterfall methodologies, as they both have its huge pitfalls if followed solely (when I mean "agile" here, I term the bad acronym of "doing agile" instead of "being really agile"). And although some management think again that changing political side means only changing the technology, it is usually instead changing the people that you are tagging along with, as usually most people stick only to one political side and they don't change no matter what new technological revolution managers embrace. Some people are very hard wired creatures, embraced to only one side of coin of things inherited by culture or upbringing. It is very hard to tell them to stretch instead of snap, such as the executive paradox book describes. However, you can always tell them about it that they are doing it wrongly, and although they may be effective currently, statically, for most of them, they will take your advice by word later on, as rolling those dices again and again will not make them effective or they may have contributed to a less greater good to society within their career line if they played it psycho-pathetically.

On my previous job, before I quit, I played as an extremist to put structure into place. In my company that I currently work for, I played as an extremist to care about the collective level of people needs into place. I changed roles. Although others may feel like I am a traitor, like when politicians switch from one party to another, that is not the case. It is reading the situation. Here is an example: The current prime minister in Greece was a strong socialist not accepting any of the reforms set by the European Union. However, all of a sudden, he changed his mindset and agreed to the reforms after huge pressure with capital controls. Why he changed his mindset? He read the situation. He knew that if he didn't followed the demands of the European Union, he will lose his political leadership and any substitute of any other political leader would do worse to care for the collective level of the people. After that incident, re-elections came and besides all the losses he did to his country due to capital controls, he got re-elected. He got re-elected not for his strong socialist ideologies, but placing his strong socialist ideologies before others to the current situation of things, to bring balance back to society.

But most of all, I can give you examples that this prescription has no sides from my own experience and from my own doings.

You can look at the side when I was embracing structure on my previous job and embracing agile in the introductory use case I just written today bellow Digging holes for creating graves to on board crew and newcomers

Introductory Use Case: Digging holes for creating graves to on board crew and newcomers

I had known the whereabouts of companies that do a lot of stuff for their customers, but not a lot of stuff in planning ahead of how to retain their own assets. Specifically:

Planning ahead on scheduling a time frame where they appreciate others fixing technical debt.
Planning ahead whether their business model is sustainable or not in order to fund themselves and especially their employees to the average market salary.

Although I spelled a lot of truth about my previous company that I worked about the "the minefields (bargaining mode) of my previous tech job", I only reasoned it due to its technical debt. In contrast, I totally ignored the concept that their business model was also not sustainable. And without good business model, even a good work culture will not make employees happy to work well in the long run. Besides lower salary and more expectations from the average employer in the deliverables you are bringing, the employee knows they can contribute with same effort on better goods to society. This will be discussed on another blog in very detail. In that blog, I will detail how my previous salary on my first job was just "peanuts" on a "location" that is "inappropriate" to do that. While living all independently single on myself with high rent, high taxes, and no benefits - it was just the tip of the iceberg to make my whole body sink slowly like a ship of titanic.

Today, I am going to talk a different story. Today I am going to talk about companies that fix technical debt too much without caring the people's needs. To put it in real words, I am pretty outraged some companies have a mindset that does not care about the people of the organization. Their attitudes and looks may all be corny with good will and faith only to just boost their self esteem.They act that they actually do care about people, but honestly they do not. Over a year, I lost contact to a lot of direct and indirect employees that I worked with closely within the organization either by themselves voluntarily leaving and in few cases being fired. I am going to classify the people into two type of categories: what type of technology they worked mostly with (back end or front end) and how much related they were to me (same department or different department). In either case, all of them where very closely affiliated to me.

#1:Back End/Different Department (Left September 2014): This person was in a different department from mine and worked on main reports that still retain or were derived a little bit to this day.
#2:Back End/Same Department (Left October 2014): This person worked as the main lead in a lot of insights and pushed people to develop intelligent systems that still retain to this day
#3:Back End/Same Department (Left December 2014): The main person that created a sustainable data-warehouse with minimal staff that is still in use today and is expected to be replaced by a new one.
#4:Front End/Different Department (Fired January 2015): Was working alone on a new restructured/refactored front end database architecture that could be used as a replacement for our main service.
#5:Back End/Same Department (Left June 2015): Was working on a main portal infrastructure that generated and uploaded small reports for external third party business partners.
#6:Front End/Different Department (Left July 2015): Was mainly in charge as the lead of the operations within the front end.
#7:Front End/Same Department (Left August 2015): Main guy that configured the intelligent systems to be run on the main service. Worked later on Quality Assurance.
#8:Back End/Same Department (Left October 2015): Main guy that worked on improvements on the architectural and server part of the data-warehouse that is expected to be replaced by a new one.
#9:Back End/Same Department (Left October 2015): Mainly did a lot of supporting technical tasks for the back end.

I do not have to say a lot of words, but yikes! Seeing 9 people that "you know directly" are leaving makes you really discouraged to work no matter where you are from. Imagine how many people that "I do not know too much" have left? I do not know, but definitely, these are not numbers any organization can hardly digest.

Why this happened? Obviously, like I said before, they ignored people's needs. They focused on two projects that were too ambitious where in the end failed disastrously. They made the rest of the employees who worked there be frustrated. Their main problem management focused is "How X technology is going to replace technology Y". They put the least funds, care, or appreciation of Technology Y which made employees who worked on that technology to voluntarily leave. These employees have the domain knowledge and it cannot be replaced easily be pen and paper. Any new employee will not have the same confidence as the ones who voluntarily left and worked in that company for years. Let mind you the turnover costs of retraining new employees. On top of that, that X technology they funded so much ended up currently to be a failure. So if you worked on that type of technology, it would have been a waste of time. Either path you take was a dead end for a period of a year. Instead of learning their lessons and caring about the people needs, they now are planning to create technology X to the power of two to replace technology Y. This is why I have an anathema of people who only think in technical aspects of things. Their habitual instinct is to neglect the people's needs. That damage they have already done and will do by feeding this cannibalistic habitual pattern will lead them to create an inefficient leadership.

So for a year, if they did not deliver effectively technology X, what did they deliver at least?
They delivered digging holes for creating graves to on board crew and newcomers.
Congratulations!

Why this happened will be elaborated on another blog post as it is too complicated, but the main points are:

The reason for technology X failed was because of the ideologies of people on technology X was very hierarchical, structured, following a waterfall methodology.
They cared everything to be perfect instead of having a working thing for people to use. They would never give something that was not complete which could have met some of the requirements to the stakeholders.
They didn't trust the people that could use the product could be responsible or competent enough on committing to the main product. Everything was decided and communicated within internal developers, not within the people.
They felt reward for owning the product instead of open sourcing the product and managing everything to run smoothly. Instead, they never shared their work to internal stakeholders.

There are a lot of other things, other things that I don't want to disclose (discrimination, favoritism, etc.). Because the story is not over yet, I will finish it after what the company does after a year. As for now, let it be a cliffhanger for you and me.