Two Kinds of People

While reading up for a paper I have the good fortune(sigh) of having to write, tucked away in a comfortable little inn on a corner of galle fort, I stumbled upon this quote,

“There are two kinds of people in the world, an old joke goes: those who believe that everything can be divided into two categories – and the rest of you.”  - Daniel Pink

I'm not sure how original a quote it is but it sums up one big problem I see in soft sciences' like psychology(another post on the topic). That is, It's insatiable need to define, categories and label things atomic. When I was reading up some of the papers and such that I had to read I couldn't help but think what a mess some of these people have made? Do they really believe all of what they have written or are they just like most of us who are doing the best we can do? I choose to believe the later, that they know that "everything" cant be made sense with a one size fits all mentality, that they are just doing the best they can with whats in hand.

Many truths have an "if" attached to them at the end. It's apparent, at least to me that the best of scientists are those who know this nature of science at heart.

the scientist 

Merovingian and the question of free will

The matrix trilogy is one of my favorites. Sure, it might have ripped off a few others like ghost in the shell and some comics that are not well known but at least in my mind there is no doubt that it was with the release of the matrix in 1999 that these elements/sentiments were brought to the limelight, to the consciousness of the popular culture. The movies played around with quite a few philosophical questions, one recurring question being do we have free will? Check this,

"Causality. There is no escape from it, we are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace is to understand it, to understand the why." merovingian

It turns out most of those who are interested in this question are either in camp “free will” or camp “determinism”. Both camps have their fair share of spokesman and enough literature to keep an army of scholars busy for a long while. 

Camp free will tells us that the trajectory of a ball released by the hand of a cricketer(baller) is determined, determined by the laws of physics but the cricketer's decision to release the ball to send it hurdling at the batsman in a particular way was one made of free will. In a very generalized sense, free will states that if an action was performed with mind it was done so with free will as the mind could have chosen to do otherwise. Camp determinism is opposed to this categorization based on the existence/non-existence of mind. They believe that every action is determined by some underlying law, even those made with mind, that it is not as simple as “hey man... I got pepperoni pizza instead of deviled chicken because i felt like it.. you know”. Yes, some of the residents of camp determinism tend to be mean spirited and seem to be looking for stones to throw at the other camp. 

Back to the matrix and the merovingian, It's clear that he is a determinist, a hard determinist at that. In a hypothetical scenario where computation has progressed so far(like in the movie) I could maybe entertain the possibility that an intellect could exist that could fathom the insane amount of knowledge/understanding that would be needed and then to actually gather it to be able to say without a doubt why a mind decided to make one choice and not another. Now I know that we have a pretty good idea of how our brains work, we can predict correctly what a mind will chooses to do sometimes but till we can predict correctly every single time without any constraints, it's still guesswork. The debate of free will vs determinism is one that will not be settled till another debate that is between holism and reductionism is resolved(onlyagame makes an interesting case for holism which I think makes sense) and it's foolish to think that it will happen in our lifetime. Meanwhile this armchair philosopher is just going to wait around for a kick ass reboot of the matrix without wasting too much time on questions that no one has found answers to. 

Psychology, a science with growing pains

Psychology is a science that can help us understand the drivers of human behavior(one more tool to help you examine a life, if you agree with Plato) but like any other science it should be taken with a grain of salt, after all didn't the greatest scientific minds at one time think the Newtonian physics were absolute and concise?

Psychology is a young multi faceted science with many inconsistencies and gray areas waiting to be colored in. A science with multiple varied answers to the same questions. Like the way a wise tech enthusiast waits for the hiccups of a new consumer technology to be worked on, before he/she goes out and splurge a pile of cash, it is this writers opinion that its best to wait for psychology to mature as a science, for its varied facets to blend into one clear surface before accepting all of it as truth.

nature vs nurture; a debate in psychology between biological psychologists and behavioral psychologists is a good example of how different schools of psychology are now converging to form a complete picture.

In the past, biological psychologists who believe behavior is attributed to underlying biological processes and factors, would explain the case of the fairer sex being comparatively more empathetic to biological processes/phenomena such as structural differences between the male and female brain, genetic characteristics passed on from prehistoric times, hormonal differences between the sexes, so on and so forth. Where as a behavioral psychologist would attribute the same to factors such as social learning; where a women learned to be more empathetic by observing how other women behave in their childhood and operant conditioning; where empathetic behavior in women were reinforced and disdain behavior punished, habituating a more empathetic world view. Of recent times psychologists have come to understand that rather than nature vs nurture it is nature and nurture where biological and behavioral factors work hand in hand to explain the full picture. In this case social learning and operant conditioning working to establish empathetic behavior heightened by predispositions(found to be a more attractive behavior from an evolutionary point of view and so passed on genetically).

Aside its inconsistencies, psychology is a powerful science with implications to all aspects of our life and so it is something we should all know a little more of. 

The Cave Man

If you see you have fallen into a ditch and you don't want to get out you are a fool. If you want to get out but accept every piece of advice given to you by those who are outside, you might find your self to have clawed out only to fall in again. Accept advice with caution, not all who supply it want to see you out or know what it takes to get out.  No one is better equipped than your self to see why you fell in, whats keeping you there and how when you are ready to come out.  Maybe one day you might see that you have already won that the only person who needed proving was your own. So tell me friend whats next? 

Snapped from one of my

favorites, Flowers For Algernon.

My beef with the proposed ETCA

Economic and Technological Cooperation Agreement(ETCA) is a hot topic in Colombo these days(specially so if your employed in the IT sector). As someone who is not too interested in happenings outside his immediate bubble ETCA reached my ear only a few weeks back. So during these last two weeks I looked into what how ETCA would impact the IT industry and the country as a whole so that I could make up my own mind about it.

As I understand(please do take into consideration that I have next to no education in economics, legislation or sociology) ETCA would benefit the economy. Companies who operate by volume could bid for larger projects and companies who are willing to pay the price of “real experts” (beef no .3) could do so with ease and these workers would increase these companies revenue. In the long run ETCA should increase the pay of the average IT employee as well(as a bigger IT workforce would build a bigger IT sector with more revenue driving the GDP higher)

So then whats my beef with ETCA?

1. From all information I've been able to gather professional bodies representing IT such as CSSL, SLASSCOM upto date were not included in making of it.

2. Have we looked into the social impact of the ETCA. Such as what would happen to those who might loose their jobs due to it.(Is there a safety net of sorts for these people?)

3. How do we ensure that the workers who come in are actually experts? Would a filtering mechanism be implemented? at least similar to that of Singapore where employees must have 2 or 3 years of work experience and have had a salary higher than a specific amount. 
   
   
4. How do we increase IT graduate production so that one day we wont have such a need to bring workers down.

ETCA can be good if its done right. Seriously Sri Lanka get your shit together, its affecting my bubble!