Crowdsourced Reputation: Facebook Likes as a Monetary System for the Future

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Lex

I’m intrigued by the question of “what form the world’s monetary systems will take on in the 22nd century?” I’ve read it suggested in a few places that a “Facebook like” or its equivalent could potentially become a central holder of monetary value. So in such a world, presumably, information is king. I would earn “likes” by providing useful information, and would then spend those “likes” to gain other useful information.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, a “facebook like” often incentivizes not the exchange of valuable information but the exchange of entertaining information. While truly informative, useful, or insightful content will sometimes gather a lot of “likes”, most of the time the popular stuff is just witty silliness or something with shock-value. News networks and newspapers suffer from the same problem. Most of the time, good old-fashioned investigative journalism just doesn’t sell.

Wikipedia and StackExchange are two sites that give me hope that a crowd-driven reputation system can grow a solid knowledge repository. The incentives on those sites are centered around the quality of information. Anyone interested in having a trollin’-good-time is somehow naturally driven away from those sites. In a way, it’s the very kind of “democracy” that we have in America. We elect a group of “elites” that in theory are supposed to be the most capable in representing our needs as a society. In that same way, StackExchange elects moderators that in theory represent the interests of the community and the knowledge that community is seeking to gather.

YouTube, in particular, has some of the most educational and fascinating content (lectures, documentaries, tutorials, etc), but at the same time it welcomes the random, the offensive, and the absurd. To me nothing represents that better than the #1 video on YouTube is 1.6 BILLION views:

The Isolating Experience of Reading

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Lex

The image to the left made me chuckle. I can certainly relate to the experience. As a person who probably reads about 100+ times more words than I speak, I live a lot of my life on the pages of a book.

For example, I recently read a few books related to Nazi Germany and World War II, and had to resist bringing those topics up in conversation with friends and colleagues. I lived in that world (via imagination) for several months, and was profoundly moved by the stories of evil, weakness, heroism, etc.

I think reading is similar to traveling in that, for example, it’s a little douchy to say “When I visited Chichen Itza last year, I was amazed at the depth of civilization that existed in North America over a thousand years ago.” There is a fascinating discussion there, but it might drown in the fact that most people don’t know what or where Chichen Itza is, nor do they need to in order to have an interesting conversation with me about the rise and fall of great societies in history.

The challenge of “traveling” through books is to take from those travels what I can, but return back and live fully in the present day reality.

There is No Medication for Life

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Lex

“Psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is particularly subject to fads and undue drug company influence because judgments are still based on subjective data that cannot be confirmed or disproved by laboratory tests.” - Allen Frances, Professor, Duke University

The statistics on people who suffer from depression are staggering. For example, according to the National College Health Assessment of college students (carried out by the ACHA):

86.8% of students felt that they were overwhelmed with what they had to do.
86.1% felt like they were exhausted.
61.0% felt very sad.
57.3% felt very lonely.
46.5% of student felt hopeless.
31.3% felt so depressed that they found it difficult to function.
7.1% seriously thought about committing suicide.
5.5% intentionally bruised, burned, cut or physically hurt themselves.
1.2% attempted suicide.

A significant percentage of people in the above survey undoubtedly suffer from a clear-cut chemical imbalance that can be helped by (and only by) medication. By significant, I don’t mean 61%. I mean fractions of 1%. Everything else is the ups and downs of life. Part of being human is learning to ride through that rollercoaster without falling off.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to determine whether a person requires medication, or if a more proactive life-oriented action would be more productive, such as change of diet, lifestyle, career, relationships, etc.

Steven Rinella on Joe Rogan podcast mentioned the counter intuitive notion that when you’re camping and you’re freezing, you don’t want to move, but the right thing to do is to start moving and in so doing you begin to feel great. I think of the state of depression in the same way. It’s a dark place that you get out of by doing stuff you don’t want to do at first.

Some cultures treat people suffering from major depressive disorders as weak whiners that just need to suck it up, while other cultures treat anyone who is sad with a daily dose of medication and multiple therapy sessions a weak. There must be a healthy middle ground erring on the side of prescribing medication only when all else fails.

Love Versus Principle in a Time of Moral Chaos

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Lex

A friend posted a link about the passing of Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist. He was a German soldier and one of the participants of the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. One of the reasons I return to this period in our history often is because of how many brutally raw moral dilemmas and tests of will it contains.

The story of Von Kleist is yet another moving example. As a young man of 22 at the time of the assassination plot, he volunteered to wear a “suicide vest”. The fascinating part of that is that he discussed this idea with his father (a longtime member of the German resistance movement against Hitler). In the above article: Von Kleist remembered explaining the suicide plot to his father, who paused only briefly before telling his 22-year-old son: “Yes, you have to do this.”

That, to me, is a dark and disturbing window into the moral chaos of Hitler’s Germany. Just imagine the weight of those words in the moment they were uttered and in the years after.

Relative Absence of Constructive Criticism in Polite Society

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Lex

People are polite, in general. I find that it’s very rare to get criticism from friends and co-workers on work I do that relates to a field they have some expertise in. The feedback I gather up usually has to be from indirect cues. What I get is a stream of compliments of various degrees of sincerity and it’s my job to decipher the actual state of the person’s mind. I guess that’s the way of the polite world, but I wish it was was more direct and clear. Constructive criticism is an art form that most people are not very good at (including myself). It’s hard to tell someone what essentially is just one opinion when that opinion has a potential of hurting their feelings.

My close friends will tell me when I’m full of shit, but there’s not enough of that. I don’t mean that I would change my actions based on people’s criticism, but I would like to be aware when I’m swimming with the stream of opinion or when I’m swimming against it. In the latter case, I would need to put a little more effort into the swimming.

The internet, as it evolves, is changing all that. As people are putting their real identities online, platforms for providing critical feedback are popping up all over the place. Facebook is one example, but their are more niche sites like StackExchange where experts can gather to disagree in a constructive (albeit heated form) while backing their comments with their real-world identity.

Anyway, this is an official notarized request for people to call me out on things I say that may be stupid, ignorant, misinformed, or just confusing, and I’ll try to return the favor.

Imagine Losing Everything

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Lex

The Holmes and Rahe stress scale lists 43 stress-inducing life events assigning a stress level number to each. If more than one happens to you within a year, you’re supposed to add their numbers up and the resulting number will help determine whether the stress level will likely break you.

I learned of this scale when I was a wee lad of 19 or 20 and remember being profoundly moved by the (obvious) fact that the big traumatic events were still all ahead of me. It put the troubles that concerned me at the time into perspective. By the way, the scale itself, like most things in psychology and sociology is a generalization that makes a point but obviously is not some universal meter of trauma applicable in all cases. It’s a mix of science and philosophy, kind of like well-run political polls.

I think trauma of any kind has a silver lining in that it puts all our “problems” into perspective. It’s a punch in the face that reminds you that life is precious, finite, and sometimes shitty. So, you should enjoy every non-shitty bit.

I’ve changed in the last few years in my relationship with material goods. I’ve come to put less value in inanimate objects like cars, books, furniture, apartments, etc and more value in people and ideas. One of the ways I’ve arrived at this way of thinking is the simple thought exercise: imagine losing everything you own. And then try to imagine what you will miss most. At first, the material goods might seem valuable, but if you honestly spend time thinking about it in the context of your life, I think their value will quickly erode. It did for me at least.

I don’t mean to sound all hippy-like. I think that the pursuit of money and material wealth can be an exciting one, and provide meaning and pleasure, and in many ways is the kind of pursuit that is at the core of the capitalism. But for me, in a world where nothing is permanent, I like to roam in the realm of ideas not things. That’s why I have gravitated towards the “things” I can’t hang up on a wall: a challenging book, a heated debate with a stranger, or a simple conversation with a long-time friend.

For the record, here are the 43 traumatic events from most to least stressful:

Death of a spouse 100
Divorce 73
Marital separation 65
Imprisonment 63
Death of a close family member 63
Personal injury or illness 53
Marriage 50
Dismissal from work 47
Marital reconciliation 45
Retirement 45
Change in health of family member 44
Pregnancy 40
Sexual difficulties 39
Gain a new family member 39
Business readjustment 39
Change in financial state 38
Death of a close friend 37
Change to different line of work 36
Change in frequency of arguments 35
Major mortgage 32
Foreclosure of mortgage or loan 30
Change in responsibilities at work 29
Child leaving home 29
Trouble with in-laws 29
Outstanding personal achievement 28
Spouse starts or stops work 26
Begin or end school 26
Change in living conditions 25
Revision of personal habits 24
Trouble with boss 23
Change in working hours or conditions 20
Change in residence 20
Change in schools 20
Change in recreation 19
Change in church activities 19
Change in social activities 18
Minor mortgage or loan 17
Change in sleeping habits 16
Change in number of family reunions 15
Change in eating habits 15
Vacation 13
Christmas 12
Minor violation of law 11

Expand You Knowledge of the Possible by Reading History

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Lex

Joe Rogan mentioned that DMT is a drug that expands your “database of possibilities”. DMT (aka dimethyltryptamine) is a psychodelic drug that’s popularly reported to lead to hallucinations that are life-like in that you feel not as if you’re imagining things but are actually living in the world of your imagination.

Rogan was describing the fact when you are introduced to an alternate reality, your view of the possible expands, and it humbles you in your approach to the non-drug-induced reality.

I don’t personally know anything about the world of drugs (outside of what I learned from Hunter S Thompson), but I do know that this mind-expanding aspect of psychodelic drugs can be achieved through any kind of learning. One example is traveling and interacting with people from other cultures. It can open your eyes to the fact that your moral standards are much less absolute than you imagined. A second, and more powerful, example of portal into alternate reality is reading. In particular, reading historical accounts of periods of turmoil in the 20th century. It’s recent enough to be life-like and real, and distant enough to be approachable with the objective calmness of reason.

Reading about the rise of Hitler in 30′s Germany has been a very moving experience for me (especially in the account centered on an American in In the Garden of Beasts). I gained a sense of the thin wall between normalcy and chaos, and the animal nature napping patiently behind the polite veil of middle class peaceful existence.

By the way, my reference to DMT in this post is just for fun. I know nothing about this drug from personal experience. For me, the only drug I need is a Kindle and a coffee.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Fear Itself (and 150 Other Things)

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Lex

My longtime friend Ryan, sent me a thought-provoking list of things “we should be worried about” as answered by 150 top scientists and scholars from a variety of fields. Most of these have many books written about them, so it’s not anything new but because the list itself is made up of quotes from these insightful minds, the list does have a certain charm and mystery to it with a pinch of wit and humor mixed in.

A lot of the concerns are straight forward and like economic collapse, low probability black swan events, the declining status of scientific reasoning and knowledge in society, etc, so I’ll just mention the ones that caught my eye and comment on them…

“Funding for big experiments will dry up”

Since most of the comments came from scientists, there was a recurring fear that our society is de-valuating science to a point where it’s almost becoming anti-scientific. Not only does that have implications for funding and social support of the scientific community, but it has broader implications about how the average Joe thinks about the world. The less inclined we are to use scientific reasoning, the more susceptible we become to the many forms of propaganda (any kind of information campaign not grounded in rationality). But this particular concern is not about funding for research in general, but about funding for BIG projects. I think that’s a real concern because one of the side effects (exciting but burdensome) of scientific development is that we uncover more and more mysteries, thus leading to a thinning of “focus”. Of course, things like a world war or a cold war tend to focus us back up. Fundamental science is important, but so are huge engineering projects that make us look up to the sky and dream.

“We will stop dying”

I read, talk, and think a lot about death as the driving force behind human development on an individual and societal level. So, given that, the “concern of immortality” phrased in a pragmatic way caught me off-guard. Over-population is a constant worry for resource hawks (isn’t everyone a resource hawk?), because the trends are scary when taken out a few decades in to the future. Of course, you can do the same thing with the trends in medicine, where exponential growth can make even immortality seem like a possibility. I don’t see this as a realistic concern, but it is just another reminder that science can do some awfully bad things in its search for furthering the good things.

“We will literally lose touch with the physical world”

Just in the last decade the online world and the technology that connects us to it has grown by leaps and bounds. While it may seem impossible for those who are 20+ that our brains become more computer and less human, people who are born today will grow up in a world that may have more computer-based interaction than “real world” interaction. Depending on where our current technology trends drift, the “real world” may have to drastically change its definition. I think this is a concern only for those who are afraid of uncertainty. Technological advances (or any kind of change) are often a source of concern for a large fraction of the population. This kind of concern fades with time and evolving habits.

In general, I’m optimistic about the 21st century, the questions it will answer, and new questions it will ask.

A Good Rule by Which to Live: Be The First to Act

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Lex

One of the saddest displays of common-place cowardice among people is the social phenomenon of diffusion of responsibility. A crowd can observe a crime take place and remarkably no one will step up to stop itt. This is due to the assumption that someone else surely will take action so I don’t have to.

There are many variations of this situation, with different “effects” named after them by sociologists, but the bottom line is that it’s difficult for a person to ignore his social environment and instead follow the cold rationality of his values. We are much better followers than leaders. I think this is not such a bad thing in most cases, but on matters that you are truly passionate about, you need to be the first person to take action, not the second.

Even outside questions of morality, being the first to act is the best way to get ahead of the competition. If you have an idea that you believe is a good one, but no one else does, that’s you opportunity to take the big plunge and go with it. You will likely fail in the short term, but if you succeed, you will be rewarded greatly for being the first. And even short-term failure, if not taken to heart, will lead to the kind of improvement that will assure long-term success.

Here’s a video of someone stepping up and saving the life of a man who almost gets run over by a train:

And in a completely unrelated note, when I searched “be the first” on YouTube, the following music video by Hankat came up. I don’t know who they are but I’ve never seen such a uniquely emotional vibe in a music video. Great work:

Lex's Socratic Dia-Blog

Some thoughts on politics, history, philosophy, and science. All hopefully with an open empathetic mind.

Category Archives: Psychology