A Simple Plea To Chinese Manufacturers
January 10, 2010
I would respectfully and fervently ask of you, our Chinese Manufacturers, that when designing and making products you ask this one simple question:
“What would make the users of this product feel good about the product?”
And then seek to answer with sincerity, and act accordingly.
If I were asking such a question, as a manufacturer desiring to have a growing and healthy client base, I might find such answers as the following coming to mind, in order of priority.
1) Is this product safe?
2) Will this product work out of the box as claimed?
3) Will this product last?
4) Will this product give a feeling to the user that they will want to buy additional products with the label, “Made in China?”
5) Am I assuming, in even the most subtle way, that my buyer is a fool, or his/her interests don’t matter?
I think that if you answer all of these questions in a positive manner, so that your products do end up actually delivering safety, usefulness and satisfaction (much as American manufacturers once did), you will find greater prosperity and an active and healthy enterprise.
If you do not answer these questions well, then I am sure that manufacturing, once the pride of the United States, will soon come back to the United States, with great appreciation and thankfulness all around.
Cry “Havoc!” and Let Slip the Dogs of Uncertainty
December 30, 2009
We always knew this, intuitively, but Nassim Talib seems to have mathematically demonstrated it. Probability is not the science we want to believe it to be.
There are always assumptions, the most widely or stridently accepted of which we call “axioms.” I think Talib’s “proof” really is a representation of Goedel’s theorem in the language of probability. One statement of Geodel’s theory is this: “In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true,[1] but not provable in the theory.(Kleene 1967, p. 250). “
So, stated another way, there’s always something that’s true that can’t yet be proven (that is, it can’t be proven within the context of existing knowledge). That doesn’t mean it can’t be known to be true, only that it can’t yet be proven to be, but few accept “knowing” as a reality, and with good reason since so many who claim to “know” merely believe, are lying, or have deceived themselves in some way. Hence, the tendency to assume, and the perceived necessity to assume when you feel you have no choice in dealing with an immanent challenge but to make assumptions — challenges like, coming up with a statistical analysis for your boss if you want to keep your job, or writing that next paper/dissertation if you want to keep your job as a professor, or forming useful conclusions from government statements whose validity you don’t (maybe can’t) know, etc. The alternative is enlightened inner perception, but that’s another matter entirely — unfortunately, our science, and therefore our civilization, has yet to meaningfully investigate, much less accept, the reality of a consistently verifiable (i.e. common, real and knowable) inner (subjective) truth.
Nassim Taleb: How I Spent My 2009 — Thinking, Drinking Wine, Upstaging Kurt Godel, etc.
My friend Nassim Taleb has out a typically discursive, smart and did-he-really-say-that musing up as a year-end comment on his non-blog blog. He talks about the merits of a 4-hour-workweek, his increasing productivity now that he makes fun of politicians and spends less time on the Interwebs, etc. — and then there is this about upstaging that Kurt Godel guy:
Raphael Douady and I re-expressed the philosophical problem mathematically, and it appears vastly more devastating in its implication than the Gödel problem. At the time of writing, we produced a formal proof using mathematics, and a branch of mathematics called “measure theory” that was used by the French to put rigor behind mathematics of probability. The paper is temporarily called Undecidability theorem of probabilistic measures: On the inconsistency of estimating probabilites from a sample without binding a priori assumptions on the class of acceptable probabilities.
Take the basic question of probabilistic inference as follows: “given a set of observations, what are the most probable probability measures it was drawn from?” or else “what is the conditional probability that a given probability measure was the one drawn from, knowing the sample?” This question requires that an a priori probability measure be given on the space Ã(Â) of probability measures on Â. (a “probability measure” is a positive measure with total weight summing up to 1). In order to weaken this assumption, one can simply ask what is the “probability density function” (PDF) on the space Ã(Â)implicitly implied by a sample. Even this question requires a “natural” measure, such as the “Lebesgue measure” on Ã(Â), even though such a measure would not be finite (the total weight is infinite, but it is possible to compute a Radon-Nikodym density with respect to this measure).
The problem is that there is no “natural” probability measure on the space Ã(Â) because, this space being infinite dimensional; thanks to Riesz theorem, it is not locally compact, and this fact prevents the existence of a Lebesgue measure on the space itself. Consequently, unless one make a extremely strong a priori assumption that the set of “acceptable” measures is fully described by a finite number of parameters, the “basic” statistical question is meaningless.
What is “Work?” What is “Success?”
November 9, 2009
“If you were a baker, and you baked a loaf of bread and it fed somebody, then your life has been worthwhile. And if you were a weaver, and you wove some cloth and your cloth kept somebody warm, your life has been worthwhile.”
-Johnny Cash [source]
“I’ve got news for you,” he shoots back, eyes narrowing. “If the financial system goes down, our business is going down and, trust me, yours and everyone else’s is going down, too.”
-Lloyd Blankfein, CEO Goldman Sachs, just a banker, “doing God’s work” [source]
The Bubble-Blowing Bull
November 2, 2009
What’s happened on Wall Street is nothing new. And it was known that it was coming, which is why there’s been so much bold movement of wealth upwards. View the Bubble-Blowing Bull which Congress feeds.
Words’ Worth
July 10, 2009
“Words (Shabda-Pramana) should lead to an ‘understanding’ whereupon words have no more business there!”
Evidence of God – Who’s Asking?
July 7, 2009
The only possible evidence that God exists is one’s own existence. Anything else would be simply some fragment of reality that certainly could never encompass it’s own origin. The origin of any individual thing, and of all things, are ultimately the same one Thing.
The illusion of separation is completely empty because how could we perceive two things that were not in some way joined? Any two things that one is aware of must have something in common. It’s a tautology — at the very least, they have the awareness of the observer in common. Ultimately, the one Thing all things have in common is existence. In that existence alone is the reality of what we might name “God,” but which, of course, is way beyond any individual conception.
Nothing is more limiting to one’s own experience of the Ultimate Being of All Reality than the name, and associated conceptions, of “God.” When we look for proofs of God’s existence, we look for proofs of whatever we’ve associated with the name “God,” rather than seeking out direct experience of Ultimate Reality.
The fundamental contradiction of the search for proof of God’s existence, then, is that existence itself is “God,” the Ulimate Reality. The one seeking proof, obviously, exists — so, the quest for proof of God is actually a denial of one’s own existence! Who is asking for proof, but the Ultimate Reality itself, in the guise of a confused ego? God exists because you do. You exist because God does. Because of self-limiting thought, God is quite beyond the bounds of our conceptions, our beliefs, our faith, rooted directly in Being. In one’s own being, one will find the Ultimate Reality peacefully, confidently, completely presiding over All. ”The Kingdom of God is within.”
Flower Watch
July 2, 2009
Go to Flower Watch Journal
Enjoy Tao
May 12, 2009
Go To Enjoy Tao
Pink sky descending, yellow crow rising
April 24, 2009
Pink sky descending, yellow crow rising. Towers, black, glistening, mute, needles of glass from the crushed dome of night fallen to earth, waiting. Constellations, old gods, having lost their homes, whirl and wail in a colorless void. Now, red waters of darkened, fallen sky run in the dun prairie. Native souls sing by water’s ragged edge, heedless of debilitating grief. A tall blue sky stands firm inside the heart, filled by a relentless sun of warmth and grace.
Self-Sufficiency Minimizes Exploitation
April 3, 2009
Those needs or desires that cannot be fulfilled by one’s own effort but require the assitance or labors of others are what opens one to exploitation. Obviously, there are fundamental desires or needs that will never be autonomously fulfilled, and what would be the point of a world of co-existing beings within which individuals could fulfill their needs without interacting with each other? But as we reflect upon our industrialized society and how far it takes each person from the capacity to meet basic needs without dependency, we understand why exploitation and misery are so rampent.
Knowing one’s self, and providing for one’s self, again become the priorities of the day. Surrendering certain unnecessary dependencies is a great value in this world of exploitation and scarcity. Individuals and agencies that hold power will not want to allow that to occur, because it is the energy of their dependants that feeds them. But this is a necessary swing of the pendulum, in this time especially.
