Follow Your Dream

I've been watching some presentation videos on TED.com from their yearly conferences and as I scientist, I've found them very inspiring. There was a demonstration of a cheap water filter that could be deployed across the entire globe and seriously reduce infectious diseases that billions of humans are currently in danger of. Deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie talks about music and listening. I watched a video of Elaine Morgan talking about the major differences between humans and other great apes. She makes a compelling argument for humans evolving from a species of apes that lived in water.

But most of all I appreciated this talk about living a passionate life. The speaker tells a story of a Yugoslavian Jew who escaped Nazi Germany and at every stage in his life found the resources to make a profound impact on the region he was living in. After watching these videos, I found myself very motivated to make an impact on the world at large. I believe that in several decades, I too could present something of value, and if I don't do that, then perhaps I'm not living up to my potential. But then I wondered if my motivation was misplaced. Michael Pritchard worked on a water filter because he was dismayed by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, not because he wanted to "make an impact on the world".

I rethought all the presentations, trying to find the common thread. What did these these people have in common that helped them accomplish their dreams? They all have some raw talent, but primarily I got the sense they were strongly motivated, and their motivation was directly for the the task they wanted to accomplish. Evelyn Glennie wanted to be a musician even though she is deaf. Through this she has become inspiring, but her motivation wasn't to be an inspiration.

Rather, I see these characteristics making up their stories:

• Be motivated by the dream itself, not the result of the dream
• Make plans on the scale of decades but don't follow them exactly
• Don't ever give up when facing opposition

All of these people are somewhat talented and have a clear wealth of motivation. There weren't any presenters who were totally brilliant but only somewhat motivated. Success is about persistence. Each person had enough motivation to focus on something that would take years or decades accomplish. They all got discouraged and did not quit. When something stood in their way, they changed their plans to get around that obstacle. This leave us with two questions to answer:

What things do I care about?

How can I increase my motivation?

No two people have the same answers for these questions, and I believe you can only find these answers through introspection. In general though, people are motivated by positive feedback, concrete objectives, and small, discrete tasks. Things get hard when there aren't any positive results, the objective isn't clear, and the tasks can't be easily divided into portions.

This suggests that successful people are intrinsically optimists with a healthy dose of realism. They need to believe things will work out even when there's no feedback suggesting that while remaining grounded enough to change plans to get around adversity. Too much optimism and you'll stubbornly try the same thing and fail. Too little optimism and you'll just quit.

The good news is that this provides a metric for determining what you need to change to achieve your dreams. If you try things and then quit, then you need to become more optimistic. If you keep trying the same thing and it doesn't work, you need a healthy dose of reality to see why your original plan didn't work and how to revise it. If you try different things and they don't work, expand the realm of your search. But don't ever give up on the things that truly matter to you.

Only When It's Funny

As I believe the purpose of life is to be enjoyed, making people laugh to be one of the most important things I do. That's ironic, given that this blog is particularly unhumorous. Don't worry thought; that's not a mistake I intend to correct today. Rather, I want to share a bit more about humor and what makes things funny.

When I was a kid, I saw the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit. While it's full of cliche and loaded with cheap slapstick gags, it also includes a surprising amount of sophisticated humor and wit. I'll always remember one line from the movie though. Roger Rabbit is wanted for murder and trying to avoid the police. He inadvertently handcuffs himself to detective Eddie Valiant. The two finally make their way to a safe location where Eddie gets his hands on a hacksaw to remove the cuffs. If you want to watch how the scene unfolds, here it is.

Roger just slips his hand out of the cuffs and asks if that helps. Eddie is clearly pissed and asks if Roger could have done that at any time. Roger responds:

No, not at any time. Only when it was funny!

I love the implication that the toons don't have complete and total power over reality. They can only break the laws of physics when its funny to do so. For example, Wile E. Coyote is only allowed to run off a cliff and walk on air when he doesn't notice he's not standing on solid ground anymore. Once he realizes that he's supposed to fall, he falls.

Furthermore, Roger's response speaks to the value of comedic timing. Things are funny in large part because of their context. If you watch any professional comedian, you'll see a clear difference between waiting one and two seconds before delivering the next line. Some responses would simply be less funny if the response was one second sooner. John Stewart of Daily Show fame is a particularly good example of this. Comedians with perfect timing learn just how long they need to wait before their audiance comes to a certain mental conclusion. The humor derives from constrasting the comic's next statement with your current thought, and if the line is delivered too soon (or too late), it doesn't provide the right contrast.

Of course, knowing that timing matters isn't the same as knowing what to say or when to say it. No two people laugh at the same things either, so humor is a very personal thing. What makes something funny anyway?

I believe all humor reduces to cognetive dissonance between expectations and reality. When you expect life to be one way and it's different, your mind has a few possible responses. You either get offended or you laugh about it. Which response you have depends on how much you care about the topic. For example, suppose you mention that you've been feeling a bit sick for the past few days and your friend deadpans, "It's probably swine flu." Whether you chuckle depends on whether you actually think you have swine flu.

Not to be pedantic, but it's worth analysing this joke in detail. The crux is that people overestimate the probability and danger of catching swine flu. Your friend is pretending to be one of these people who overreacts, pointing out the reality of these people. Rationally we know that the odds of actually catching it are extremely low-- more people die of the regular flu than swine flu. So in an ideal world, people wouldn't be worried about it, and that's the source of cognitive dissonence. The joke boils down to, "people are worried about swine flu but shouldn't be."

If you agree with that statement, you'll laugh with your friend. But if you think people aren't overestimating the deadliness of an epidemic which has claimed far fewer lives than car accidents have in the past six months, you'll be offended. Your friend's joke became a criticism of your own perspective.

And that's the beauty of comedy. Laughter is a reflection of what we consider unimportant, and the vast majority of our lives really don't matter. A 14 year old girl might be mortified for farting in class, but she would be a lot happier if she could laugh like the rest of her classmates. After all, no one cares as much as she thinks they do. If you want to be happy in life, you have to be humble enough to accept that you just aren't that important. Only then can you laugh at just how crazy and awesome this world really is.

Imitating Life

As a hobbyist game designer, I quickly learned a simple truth about game players:

Players always know whether they are having fun but rarely know why.

If you don't believe this, read the fan forums for literally any game you can think of. You'll see all kinds of suggestions, 80% of which would clearly make the game less fun. But when someone says, "I don't like it when this happens," then they're stating a personal opinion. It's not a debatable point-- they are certainly not having fun. This is a bit ironic. How can they know what they like but not why they like it?

The answer is that while humans are capable of self reflection, they aren't actually that good at it, nor do they usually enjoy it. Humans excel at pattern matching and general recognition problems. Not coincidentally, the vast majority of fun in games comes from what could be abstractly labeled "pattern matching".

Pattern matching is more than just seeing the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. In an abstract strategy game like Chess, it involves recognizing a board position as similar to one you've played before, so you have an idea for how to approach it. In Poker, you learn to recognize how a player's bids correspond with their potential hands. Basketball and football players need to recognize openings in the opposing team's defense. Party games like Charades and Apples to Apples are nothing but pattern matching: can you connect the dots between someone's gestures and a previously known phrase?

So I was intrigued after reading an article by Mark Rosewater on resonance in Magic: The Gathering. A game mechanic has "resonance" if it reminds the players of already known concepts. If you see that a dragon has the special power "flying" or giant has "trample", you don't even need to know how the game works to appreciate the design. We know that dragons fly, giants are large, zombies are slow, merfolk swim, and so on. It's just fun when a game does a good job of embodying its theme! And game mechanics with resonance are also easier to learn, since you can apply your standard intuition to situations they apply in. You would assume that a creature with flying is harder to attack and has an easier time attacking other people. A trampling giant probably causes more damage on average than another creature would. Zombies are probably weak overall, but easier to use as minions than something like a Dragon.

I confess this lesson took me a long time to learn as a game designer. The first games presented players with interesting decisions but totally lacked theme and resonance. This made them as entertaining as sudoku, which puts them the same realm as, "things I'm willing to do while in a train." Not exactly a rousing endorsement. But just because of how our brains are wired, humans just like seeing connections between abstract actions and known concepts. When kids play cops and robbers, "house", or pretend a doll is a real baby, they are taking enjoyment from resonance. Since even the very young participate in imaginary play, it suggests this enjoyment is somehow wired into our brains. Some people think of games as escape from real life, but it's specifically when games are connected to life that they are most enjoyed. A game doesn't need dragons, ninjas, aliens, or Roman emperors to be fun, but these things help a lot. Especially the ninjas.

Optional Law

Imagine there was a law that required everyone to pay a $100 tax each year. However, there is no way to find out who paid their tax and who didn't. All the government knows is the total amount of money that comes in and therefore the percent of people paying the tax. Is avoiding this tax ethically justifiable?

I don't mean to suggest that actions are only unethical if you get caught; I don't believe that is the case. When 10 people commit similar crimes and only 9 get caught, that doesn't make it right for the guy who got away. Rather I'm asking whether it's ethical to break a completely unenforceable law. I'm not sure, and perhaps it depends on how heinous the forbidden action is. But our perceptions of right and wrong change over time.

As a concrete example, consider the anti-sodomy laws that many American states had before they were struck down as unconstitutional. These laws restricted the sexual conduct of consenting adults and were virtually impossible to enforce. In the centuries since these laws were first passed, the majority public opinion no longer regards oral and anal sex as immoral.

The general argument against unenforceable laws is that they only punish people honest enough to follow them. In the tax example, both honest and dishonest people would get the benefit of however the nation spent the tax money, but only the honest people paid for it. This is not fair, though even unfairness does not necessarily make ignoring the law ethical. The argument also gets murkier when the law is more than 0% unenforceable, and when the prohibited action has a negative impact on society as a whole. Murder is wrong even if it could never be enforced, for example.

A more recent example is the set of laws against unauthorized music downloads. Music companies don't want people using the things they produce without paying for them, but modern technology has made it very easy for people to do this anyway. The basic structure of the problem looks like this:

• Party A (the music company) owns the rights to some information.
• They allow party B (the purchaser) to use this information, but not to distribute it.
• However, they cannot prevent party B from giving it to party C (the downloader).

At first, music companies tried to stop downloaders, but it's really too difficult to figure out who they are. So the latest tactic has been going after purchasers who distribute the music online. Even that has been very difficult, often requiring subpoenas to ISPs, and these tactics have not substantially increased music company profits or decreased illegal downloading.

The question is whether it's ethical to download music you haven't purchased. There is not much benefit to society from unauthorized downloading, but there is also not much cost. It's true that record companies lose some money from people who would otherwise have paid, but not every downloader was a potential customer. Plus the increased exposure from free downloads has in some cases turned into more paying customers, though I suspect the net effect is still a loss most of the time.

At any rate though, the real problem is that music companies are distributors who can no longer control their product distribution. No amount of legislation can make this business model profitable again; they need to find a new way to add value to customers before customers will give them money again. I'm undecided about whether illegal downloads are ethical. That said, music companies need to suck up the fact that it will happen anyway and stop trying to fix unsolvable problems.

Of course, it's easy for consumers to tell that to music companies, but harder to take that advice yourself. Here's the grand irony: The same people who support legalization of free online music are generally opposed to unauthorized government surveillance. When it's someone else taking their own words without permission, they strangely don't see freedom of information in the same light.

But the government's wiretapping program has clear parallels with music downloads:

• Party A (music companies or a citizen on a phone) is the owner of information.
• Party B (music purchasers or the telephone company) was given this information with the understanding it would not be given to people that A did not authorize.
• Party C (music downloaders or the government) was given the information by party B anyway.

Similarly, it's not clear what the costs and benefits to society are. The government might be making the country more secure, or maybe the information doesn't help. No one wants to have their privacy invaded, so clearly there is a cost, but I'm not convinced the cost is freedom. Using the information as a way to ferret out "unpatriotic citizens" isn't that practical given the volumes of data that need to be analyzed by hand. Government agencies only have so much money to spend, and the biggest threats to national security are not unpatriotic ideas-- they are crazy people with bombs.

The biggest societal danger is of high level politicians trying to access information from specific domestic adversaries and using it for personal gain, but you don't need a massive government program to cull information on just a few thousand civilians. While this danger is real, I suspect it existed well before the Bush administration set up this widespread surveillance program.

So just as I haven't made up my mind about music downloads, I also can't decide on warrantless surveillance of citizens. They seem similar enough that they should both be moral or both be immoral. It's possible to argue for one and not the other, but that's a difficult argument to make; I'm not sure what that argument would be.

But there's one thing I am certain of:

Like the music companies, we should worry about solvable problems, not unsolvable ones.

No amount of legal pressure will have any impact on warrantless wiretapping. If you really care that the government might find out that you're meeting friends for drinks, then don't tell people that over the phone. Certainly you should stop posting it on Twitter. Or alternatively, learn to care just a little less about privacy. In the grand scheme of things, none of us are really that important, so you might as well be happy instead.

Learning to Learn

As a child I didn't care for most kids my age, generally finding adults to be more interesting. As a teenager I realized that not all adults were interesting either. Some adults always had new stories and ideas to share and liked listening as well. Others adults were set in their ways, only repeating the same concepts over and over. In retrospect, I was measuring their open-mindedness. On average it seemed like older adults were more likely to be close-minded, but that wasn't always the case. I knew interesting people in their 50s and boring people in their 20s.

I eventually concluded that the capacity for learning was what made people interesting to me. Adults stopped being interesting when they stopped learning. Most high school kids hadn't learned how to learn. And many adults stopped learning after they left college. This also explained why I got along best with college students and professors, even as a 13 year old. College is the environment that most demands an open mind. As a teenager, I resolved that I would never stop learning, lest I become that same kind of close-minded adult.

Lately I've been reevaluating my for learning. I've been at my current job for close to a year, doing research into helping computers understand natural language. The median degree among my coworkers is a Masters of Science, and there are a number of PhDs working for the company as well. Having an advanced degree generally means you understand your subject matter well, but it has no correlation with your ability to teach the subject to others. Some PhDs are great teachers and some aren't.

In this work situation, there's a lot of opportunities for teaching and learning, and generally it's more challenging than learning in school. Even in college I typically understood things without much effort. I got excellent grades in hard courses while putting in half the study time or less of others. But at work, learning new concepts often takes much more effort than I'm used to. There are a few possible explanations:

• It's me: My capacity for learning has decreased
• It's them: Some people aren't very good instructors
• It's the subject: Research is harder to understand

I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I think the issue is the subject. Learning in school is very different from a work environment. In school, the information is well understood and presented in pre-digested manner. The instructors are paid professionals. Schools are supposed to be ideal learning environments, and while I have issues with the modern schooling system, it generally meets the objective of disseminating information.

Contrast this with learning in research environment. Innovation skill matter more than communication for researchers. And because the very topic is being researched, even the person explaining can have a weaker grasp on the overall concepts being explained. So learning in this situation can involve more than just figuring out what someone is saying. You must also determine what they tried to say and sometimes even what they should have said.

I'm convinced that I need to better learn how to learn. School is good for spoon-feeding information to masses of children, but it won't teach you the art of learning. A good university gives you the opportunity but it's still no guarantee. Learning is more than just obtaining information. It requires synthesizing new concepts from data and extracting data from concepts. A good curriculum draws clear lines between concepts and data, but most people do not. And that's why learning is difficult.

Bring The Future To Pass

I last wrote about the evolution of civilization and wrapped up by concluding that almost all world-changing inventions involve making it easier to move materials and information. The past century in particular has brought astounding technological marvels, far more impressive than the last several thousand years combined. It seems reasonable to conclude that this next century will put the past to shame, as will the one after that.

But what kinds of things can we expect of future civilization? Predictions of future technology are remarkably hit-and-miss. In the 1950s, people were predicting flying cars by the year 2000. But people in the early 1900s also predicted things like email and television. I think the lesson is that it much easier to move information than matter.

So at the risk of being wrong, let me make my own technology predictions for the future:

Abundant Electricity:

There isn't enough oil to provide for more than a few more decades of consumption at current technology levels. And while our coal and uranium supplies can last for a few centuries, they won't last for a few millenia. But since the use of electricity, every major invention has depended on it. The earth can support life for millions of years, but without a more efficient means of generating electricity, humanity won't be able to survive in its current state for long. Better use of nuclear and solar power will help this. But long term, hopefully humanity will develop some kind of new technology like cold fusion, if its even possible.

Artificial Intelligence:

I believe true AI, one that can pass a full turing test, is the ultimate goal of civilization. An artificial intelligence is essentially a thought generation machines. This is an incredible boon for any area of scientific research, as it enables the easy recruitment of able-minded researchers. Estimates on when this can occur range from decades to centuries, but most scientists believe it is possible. I'm in agreement that this is both technically possible and extremely difficult. There is also the distinct possibility that even after the first AI is created, it takes centuries before more than a handful can be created. The energy requirements for this kind of technology could be unimaginably large in today's terms. But if and when it happens, civilization will change forever. Hopefully for the best.

Matter Synthesis:

A large portion of new discoveries depends on very rare or hard to obtain materials. For example, most superconductive materials require extremely strange composites. Or consider the extraction of aluminum. It requires a crystal that can only be found in large quantities at a specific mine in Greenland. The mine is now empty, but a synthetic version of the crystal is an acceptable substitute. And these days, scientists can even turn lead into gold-- they just don't do it because the energy cost is higher than the value of the gold. A low energy method of creating arbitrary elements and basic crystalline structures will go a long way towards ensuring the technologies we develop can be deployed for lower production costs.

Space Elevator:

The earth can sustain life for millions of years, but eventually this planet will become inhospitable. If humans cannot learn to survive in space or on other planets, we will eventually go extinct. And while a few of the richer nations have space exploration programs, we are nowhere near having a real colony in space, much less the moon, mars, or another solar system. The issue is that the cost of even getting things off of Earth is very high. Each pound of cargo costs on the order of $10,000. There is research into cheaper means of propulsion, but the best hope seems to be a space elevator. Conceptually, a space elevator is a structure connected to earth that is high enough that the top is in geosynchronous orbit with the planet. Then goods could simply by hoisted up for a fraction of the current cost. Think of it as the world's largest dumbwaiter. There are some clear technical challenges to a construction like this, but it would mark the beginning of the industrialization of space.

Disposable Electronics:

For decades, people have talked about how extremely portable computing devices could change our lives. Many people have suggested the logical conclusion is the human/computer hybrid known as a cyborg. In other words, humans will be embedded with microprocessors. I actually think this concept is a bit farfetched. This is primarily because the mere suggestion of this technology offends the moral sensibilities of many people, so it has major political obstacles. But there's clear utility to having processing power everywhere, as shown by the popularity of Apple's iPhone. It's more likely that electronic devices will instead get so cheap and thin that they will be everywhere-- built into the side of a can of soda or on the cover of a book, for example. And all of it will have wireless network connections. This sidesteps the discussion of embedding technology in human flesh while meeting the objective of ubiqutious computer interfaces.

All that said, I'm sure there's another dozen things I haven't even considered. This is such a great time to be alive! Celebrate the extreme unlikelihood of having life at such a wonderful time in history and cherish it. When you think about it, each person's life is much better than they give it credit for, simply because it is life.

The Meaning of Life

When I was a Christian, one of the biggest comforts was having a well defined purpose to life. The greatest thing was to glorify God. That's easy to do on Sunday, but I figured that if God was as incredible as Christianity claimed, it was worth honoring God every day of my life. After thinking about this for a while, I decided God must care an awful lot about humanity, and seeking the advancement and peace of human civilization was the primary method of bringing God glory on a daily basis. This kind of thinking is supported by Bible texts such as "If you love me, feed my lambs", the parable of the talents, and the parable of the sheep and goats.

Psychologically, losing meaning in life was one of the three hardest parts about converting from Christianity to Atheism. However, I soon realized that removing God from the equation didn't have to change anything. I could still find meaning through the advancement of human civilization.

As a result, I've become interested in the origin and destiny of civilization. I consider a group of people to be a "civilization" when there exists a caste of the population that spends a large portion of time in activities other than the acquisition of food and reproduction. So a group of hunters living in caves wouldn't be a civilization until there is some kind of a chieftain or shaman who is supported through food from the other villagers. Civilization can't advance until people have leisure time to spend on art and science, so the beginning of civilization is when some people first have this free time.

Humans have made three major discoveries that were necessary for civilization to begin. They are language, fire, and agriculture. Language is required to share the complex, learned concepts that are the basis of civilization. Fire is required for cooking, which increases the nutritional value of food, thereby increasing the lifespan and health of the population. And farming is the most crucial of all. Through farming, a group of people can produce more food than they can consume. This both provides a buffer against years of famine and allows a segment of the population to spend time on things other than food production.

Once those three things were in place, the stage was set for the rapid advancement of technology, resulting in a far higher standard of living and population than humans had ever seen. The past 10,000 years of life on Earth have put the previous millions to shame. Of the many things humans have invented and discovered, however, I'd like to list what I consider the most important discoveries. All of these you use on a daily basis, probably without even thinking about it. They are:

Writing:

Creating a writing system is not as easy as most people would think. There's an excellent discussion of why this is hard in the book Guns, Gems and Steel. The basic issue is that pictorial systems (like the Chinese alphabet) require memorizing a different symbol for each word, so learning the system difficult. And phonetic systems require a stronger understanding of phonetic units than most people have, to the extent that most people learn English spelling without even understanding the phonetic backing.

The Wheel and Roads:

These two inventions together are necessary to move large quantities of goods over long distances, and is a crucial part of trade with other cultures. Trade is the mechanism by which different cultures share their discoveries.

Currency:

In trade and barter systems, it's easy for a baker who wants meat and a butcher who wants bread to work out a deal. But what happens when the butcher instead wants a knife, the blacksmith wants a table, and its the carpenter who wants bread? Now you have to orchestrate a four way trade. When you expand this problem even to a town of just 1000 people, its complexity as an NP complete problem becomes apparent. Money provides a linear time solution. Every trades what they have for money, then trades the money for what they want.

Mathematics:

Most of the time, having directions or instructions is meaningless unless they are precise. Understanding the relationships between numbers is required for measurements, trades, and general mechanics.

Plumbing:

Once you have even 10,000 people living in the same general area, getting fresh water and removing sewage becomes a genuine problem. Without a good system of moving water, the population is much more likely to contract and spread diseases. Sewers make cities less susceptible to plagues.

The Printing Press:

Even if you have a written language, the production of written documents is time consuming without a printing press. The press allows for mass production of books, which in turn puts written materials in the hands of the common person. That makes it the precursor of widespread education. Historically, the printing press was also one predecessor of the Protestant Reformation, as it enabled the Bible to be translated out of Latin and into a language the average person understood (at least if it were read to them).

Electricity:

Fire is a powerful source of energy, but it's difficult to use. Contrast this with electricity, a power source that can be transmitted over large distances and even stored for later use. Among its many uses, electricity provided more efficient means of lighting buildings. This in turn meant humans could be productive for more hours in the day. It also created more efficient climate control systems for buildings, which allowed humans to live in harsher climates. And it enabled the creation of more efficient factories using the assembly line for production.

Radio Communication:

Three thousand years ago, kings were happy that their exact instructions could be written down and sent to another place in the kingdom within a month or less. But due to the discovery of radio waves, encoded messages can be broadcast across thousands of miles in mere seconds. With radio communication, decisions require crucial information can be made in minutes rather than weeks or even months.

The Internet:

I am convinced that the internet is by far the greatest invention of our generation. While radio and television allowed rich corporations and governments to communicate quickly and easily, the internet has put that power in the hands of the everyone. Massive amounts of data can be send anywhere on the entire planet in a matter of seconds due to the power of the internet. It has brought about an era in which anyone with access to a computer can express their thoughts. And if Twitter is any indication, almost none of it is worth reading. But I hope that this blog can be one corner of the internet where the information is worthwhile.

When I see how far humans have come, I'm excited for the future. Some other week I'll write about some options for what The Next Big Thing(tm) might be. But given the increasingly rapid pace of technology development, it could be something we see in our lifetime. You might notice that everything on this list has to do with more efficient movement of ideas, matter, or energy, so that's a clue for what kinds of technology this next century could bring.