Visiting a book store this Christmas I was attracted by this title: “The no asshole rule” (Robert Sutton, 2007), since I see that assholes is a contemporary problem and the fact that the book had only 200 pages I bought it.

Sutton starts by defining what an asshole is, who is a person that, after interacting with you, make you feel somewhat humbled, and that attacks people with less power than him.

This definition is an input-output definition but later in the book specific asshole behaviors, with examples, are shown. In that sense one of the latest chapter explain the advantages of being asshole:

• Showing anger or evilness can be effective for gaining power and to defeat opponents, moreover it make you seem more clever and competent
• Mixing humbling and encouraging people can convince them you have more power

and some examples are given, Steve Jobs being the most famous one.

Of course a list is proposed to fight them, the assholes, I will cite a part of this:

• Assholes hire other asshole (this is an example of homosocial reproduction)
• Assholes should be considered as incompetents
• Power can trasform a normal person in an asshole
• If there is a hierarchy in your business make it appear as less than possible
• If you are right fight, if you are wrong hear (constructive confrontation)

Last but not least it is time that YOU think if you are an asshole, for example, do you think that after all your team would do nothing without you? Do you consider your work associates as contenders? And my favorite one: do people stop having fun when you arrive?

I think that this quick resume can save you to buy the book that in general I found boring and too much crusading against assholes (of course it is written for a general audience), and many explainations are so obvious, it is sufficient to understand that assholes are the rational agent of the prisoner dilemma that by paying attention to their own interest make the whole community be a big losing guy.

On the other side I like to consider assholeness as a mental disease camouflaged inside social behavior. It is a disease because it causes mental fatigue and damages (to others), it is transmissable (as a reaction to it), it is curable (if you realize it). Moreover I think that is a specific part of our mind that get ill, the one that is needed for interact actively in our world, in that part we have a lot of social patterns that are effective for realizing our goals, and in practice everything that happens to us is seen by one or more of these patterns. It is hard to watch ourselves but I invite the reader to wonder why we are satisfied when we understand a behaviour, I think that it is because a drug is released in the brain to reinforce the pattern used in the understanding.

The problems come out when these patterns make us an asshole.

This is a complaining post, I succed well in complaining, maybe it is a part of the culture of Genova.

The title is divided in two parts, with a common feature, common citizen is cheated by companies or state. Information hiding in random variable is a very simple concept, suppose you go to your bank and buy some of their product, that is sell with the random bonus, that is ‘probably we will give you back more money’; then after some year you came back and they give you exactly the same money(so you lose a bit), saying that you have been unlucky. The problem is that you may really think it is true because it was a ‘random’ bonus, but a random variable has a mean and I would not be surprised if every year for every ‘random’ thing the mean is always a little shifted in favour of the big company.

But how much can it be shifted? So we see the second topic of the title, the tight belt. In our economy it is not possible to be happy or quiet with money, we will always be a little complaining, why? Well, I do not see big companies interested we are happy, the only thing is we are no sad about them. Now imagine that in a room an employer of a bank is deciding an extra tax for citizen, it is ‘extra’ because the bank does not need it, but it happens that customers are happy with the bank! What a shame, they have no choice other than this bank! Why not stealing them 100 euros… too much, what about 20… yes, now they will be less happy, but not enough for leaving the bank…

Obviously this thing may happen for every price decision process, that is starting from above and then thinking if customers will accept the price. Between the variables there is also our happiness and a little complaining is a lower bound…

[16/12]: after watching this part of the video of story of stuff I realized that the tight belt principle is applied also to natural resources, that is that as long as people do not complain valuable and not renewable resources, like petrol, are squandered for bringing us to our holyday house, does have a meaning we pay for petrol? I do not think so, it is without any reason that we sell petrol, we are burning up our planet . I see only a reason for the single type of money economical system: we are too stupid for organizing ourselves and so accept the self organizing structure, on the other side it is one of the main and old natural social structure: the survival of the fittest. It is important to notice that the main characters of these changings are not humans! They are economical structures, an economical structure is a machine that take as input a bunch of money, human time, resources and produces something that is converted in other money, and waste, of course. I personally think that there is no direct solution, it is true, on the other side, that our technologies and engines are very advanced with respect to our society structures and knowlede of our psychology. Right now I think that all we can do is to keep information as more clear and available as possible, McLuhan said ‘the medium is the message’, we should try to ignore the medium and concentrate on the content, content, content, content, CONTENT. Lazyness of thinking is the same as being stupid.

What is free thinking? Maybe it is easy to say but it is not easy to do at all. Free thinking is to have freedom to think and state everything you want. This immediately leads to the violation problem, that is thinking and stating something that actually violates an other one free will right, and so there is a little smoothing of free thinking, until it stop to be free at all. WHAT IS HAPPENING? I think it is like when we try to move in a place without friction, it is not possible, unless we add up some handle that allow us to move in some direction. What can be our handles? It is more easy that it looks like,

zero handle:finding out to we are not right, our opinion is bad, we have been mislead is always a pain; our zero handle is to be brave enough to get naked and dive into ice water.

first handle: thinking with its own head is always a good idea.

second handle: state what you are thinking, because by stating that you will face reality and you will see what happen

third handle:test continuosly everything. Every software is plenty of bugs, why not our world? Bugs can be effectively found only through testing

fourth handle: by actual scientific discoveries it looks like we can move in three spacial directions; that’s not true in not geometrical life, we often do not realize that we can move in many direction, but we did not tried them, often they are wide open doors and it is only matter of stepping into.

pratical handles: Are you discussing with someone that can change its idea? If the answer is ‘no’ stop immediately to waste your time. Are you discussing with someone attacking you and not your idea?Ok stop talking and let’s fight. Does it exists a written text that explain general ideas and do you both discuss about that text? If it is not the case stop right now wasting your time (for example it seems that not so many catholics have read the whole bible, it is a boring book after all(apart from Gospels, of course)) Are you trying to convince someone? Convincing someone is like convincing ourselves, a very bad habit I think.

[edit: 23/10/2007]: propaganda model is very related to this discussion

- (((((number of letters in wikipedia)!)!)!)!)!

- computation time, in steps, for a turing machine to compute a tsp on all atoms of universe

- one over the probability that a meteor hits my car and bounces over your car

- 10 snowflakes fall on your hand: one over the probability they are all equals

Actually i am testing the following game, one player against an another one, wins who names the biggest number. Right now the rules are the following:

- natural and finite number

- definition in english language commonly accepted by both player that effectively describes a number bigger than the previous

- the same operation or concept of number can’t be used again (exception: number you said concept is always allowed).

So a possible running of the game is:

P1: 1 (so simply naming a number is not more allowed)

P2: e^10 (exponentiation is not more allowed)

P1: the number you said plus 1 (no more plus)

P2: (((((number of letters in wikipedia)!)!)!)!)! (no more factorization and number of letters)

P1: Number you said in decimal transcription but in base 12

P2: Time in second it takes to count a number of objects as the number you said

…

There are a lot of proof about Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, there is also an entire book on it.

This is a proof without many advantages with respect to others, rather being very mechanic, however it is the only way someone reached my blog

Cauchy-Schwarz inequality states that:

Let’ s see that this inequality comes shortly from axioms of a vector space and from definition of scalar product

and inequality follows.

The quality of this proof is that it comes out from the axioms of a vector space, unfortunately it does not bring an intuitive insight about this fundamental tool for analysis.

As a computer scientist i cannot delete the previous ‘Hello World!’ post! But actually this is my first post.

I am starting this blog by explaining its title. I can remember when i attended high school that our philosophy teacher proposed us different sort of paradoxes and that no one convinced me. For example one was about Achille and the turtle , it says that if the turtle have some metres of advantage Achilles (also know as “swift-footed“) cannot catch it, the reason is that before reaching it he has to cover a half of the distance, but then another half and so on, while the turtle is still moving.

At the time we were proposed this solution:

,

but i was not convinced because it looked like a trick (and does not work if we say that Achilles should cover a third of the distance and so on). Right now i think at it in a very different way, no tricks, no analysis, it is simply a bug in our way of thinking; unfortunately this notion of bug is an act of faith, cannot believe it?

Let’s look to another famous paradox, a slightly modified version of the Liar paradox:

“this sentence is false”.

If it is true it is false, but if it is false it is true, ok, we cannot say it is true or it is false. Let’s say it is a paradox, that is, it has no meaning. This bring us to the very unlucky sentence ” ‘ “this sentence is false” has no meaning’ is true”, but then it is also true that ” ‘ “this sentence is false” has meaning’ is false”. If something is false it has a meaning and so the sentence can be rewritten ” ‘ “this sentence is false” has meaning’ has meaning” and so we get a contradiction with the fact it had no meaning (proof of Karl Popper).

We could solve the problem by saying ” ‘ “this sentence is false” has no meaning’ has no meaning” is true… ops I did it again! It looks like this is an unsolvable problem, but, oh my god! Can i say that it is?.

Actually someone, Kurt Godel, saved us. He said that it is NORMAL. He proved that every logical formal system has a statements that are not provable inside the system itself. In particular he introduces two statements: “this statement is not provable” and “this formal system is consistent”. The proof is technical indeed, but logic is technique!

Godel and other logicians in Europe are not the only ones who faced the matter, this stuff has been studied also on the opposite side of the world in Zen Buddhism, they are called zen koans, and their science is explained here.

[EDIT 28/09]: I am realizing that this post is a bit mystical, while the interested reader would like a technical detailed reason for which we can not say that ‘this sentence is false’ is a paradox. Saying that is a paradox is not a solution at all because introduces a new dichotomy. When we deal with this sentence we are in this situation:

We define trueness as being where we pretend to be, and as falseness as not being as we pretend to be. For example the sentence ‘The word ’short’ is short’ pretends to speak about reality, and it is real, while the sentence ‘The word ‘long’ is long’ pretends to speak about reality, but effectively it is not! So we say that the first is true and the second is false. In the case of ‘This sentence is false’ we have a boiling potato, or something more similar to the china syndrom, that says ‘I can’t stay here’ by the definition of falseness, everywhere we try to put it. Even if we define a new set:

The problem is that the sentence is always in a wrong place and dividing the world, by default, is buggy.

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!