"Correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human decision-making in general, than the systematically deeper and deeper search for better moves—the number of moves “seen ahead”—that computers rely on.
[…]
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors."
— Garry Kasparov, The Chess Master and the Computer
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable."
— Helen Keller (via kareem)
Yup.

Yup.

"But the culture in which I and almost all whites were raised vainly imagines that hunger, sleeping, and excreting can be regimented. Amerindians have always mocked the palefaces for looking at clocks to know when they ought to be hungry. It is in the same clock-mad spirit that we are all supposed to “work” from nine to five on such preposterous projects as accounting for what we have done upon billions of square miles of paper derived from devastated forests, frittering away our time upon such dreary gambling games as playing the stock market or selling insurance in drab offices, turning out drillions of lines of chatter for people whose minds cannot be at peace unless perpetually agitated with information and misinformation, and manufacturing, selling, and advertising bizarre, noisome, and pestilential automotive contraptions for taking us all to and from these same projects at the same hours— thereby blocking the roads and jangling our nerves, presumably to give ourselves the message that we really exist and are really important."
— Alan Watts, in his autobiography In My Own Way. So far, it’s an excellent portrait of the inner life of what the NYT calls “perhaps the greatest Western interpreter of Eastern thought in the modern world”. While probably one of his most banal thoughts throughout the book, he resonates particularly well with me and my thoughts on impending post-collegiate life when he goes on to say, “Therefore, at the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a “regular job”“.

To state the obvious, while putting it bluntly: David Foster Wallace was a fucking genius. Apart from the man’s profound intellect, though, what really stands out is his sincerity. You can tangibly sense his feeling of despair/desolation at the state of modern America— the pervasiveness of irony, the eschewing of emotional depth because of our supposed superiority, overall, the basic aversion we have to truly confronting our human problems.

A long paragraph from Infinite Jest (which has been my most enjoyable reading experience in quite some time):

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip— and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naivete in this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J.O. Incadenza’s the American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.
Paul Buchheit on: Being Awesome

A good decision-making framework:

Will I learn a lot from the experience? (failure can be very educational)
Will it make my life more interesting? (a predictable life is a boring life)
Is it good for the world? (even if I don’t benefit, maybe someone else will)

In his words, “Evaluating risk and opportunity (as a human)”. Basically, is what you’re doing meaningful enough that whether or not you *succeed* in the traditional sense, you’re happy you did it?

"Let’s say that change is neither good nor bad. It simply is. It can be treated with terror or joy — a tantrum that says, ‘I want it the way it was,’ or a dance that says, ‘Look — something new.’ … I was in California. Everything is new, and it’s clean. The people are filled with hope. New York City is in decay. But Madison Square Garden — it’s the beginning of a new city on a hill."
— Don Draper from Mad Men. Part of a longer TrueHoop piece on the original opposition to create MSG. “Four decades later, it’s ironic that the building that was the bête noire of architectural preservationists has become the defining symbol of basketball preservationists — a receptacle for the sort of sentimentalism that fueled the opposition to its creation.” File under: Change, embrace it.
"The only way is to enjoy your life. Even though you are practicing zazen, counting your breath like a snail, you can enjoy your life, perhaps even more than taking a trip to the moon. That is why we practice zazen. The most important thing is to be able to enjoy your life without being fooled by things."
— Shunryu Suzuki, from Not Always So, an inquiry into the depths of Zen, his companion volume to Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind. He literally meant “taking a trip to the moon”, giving the speech on July 20, 1969, the day Apollo 11 made headlines by landing on the moon.
social media for good: how (not) to run a twitter campaign

A twitter campaign is one of the most effective viral marketing tools available; getting a trending topic can be the easiest and quickest way to get a message seen by millions of users. With that in mind, I wanted to run a simple experiment to see what the process of establishing and executing a viral twitter campaign was like. Though the campaign wasn’t nearly as successful as I would have liked, my methodology and results taught me a few interesting things about the makeup of viral-ity on twitter that are good to know moving forward when trying to promote campaigns for social causes.

Here’s what I did:

Step 1- picked a cause or topic to get people to support. As a big basketball fan and someone who interacts with members of the Lakers community on Twitter, I figured the current topic of Lamar Odom’s contract extension (a cause of much chagrin and angst among laker fans) would be an interesting subject. Could I get people to rally around the idea of swaying @TheRealLamarOdom to stay with the Lakers through sheer force of numbers on Twitter?

Step 2- created a content site that would ostensibly serve as the campaign hub. It took me about 15 minutes to create a simple Tumblr with some videos, relevant links to recent articles, and a Twitter widget pulling in posts about Odom. My intent was to promote the hashtag #keeplamar, and pull in those posts as a feed, but till that point I used “Lamar Odom” as the search term. Looking back, this might have been my key mistake— using a site that basically aggregates content as the “hub” of the campaign. Perhaps I would have better been served making my own content, or maybe even sticking to tweets as the primary message medium.

KeepLamar

Choosing as I did, I went with bit.ly to shorten my link. It’s an amazing tracking tool, and as feeble as my stats were, this screenshot gives you a good idea of the power it has in tracking links and trends by the minute.

Step 3- sent out a few tweets promoting the hashtag, making sure to interact with popular community members. I only have about 280 followers, which I’m assuming is a grab-bag mix of technology enthusiasts, basketball fans, and people I know in real life (mostly students). As a result, the success of my campaign hinged on connecting with influential twitterers in my field and getting them to rally support among their followers. I utterly failed in this step. My efforts to contact 2 of the more influential community members were as follows-

- One of them is the ‘unofficial’ Lakers twitter account with more than 20,000 followers. A DM to promote the movement was met with a negative reply saying he didn’t want to get involved.

- The other is a Lakers blogger with X followers, interacting with many Lakers fans as well. Similarly, he didn’t want to support the campaign, simply because he thought it was pointless- reports seemed to indicate that a resolution was immediately impending. Of course, even a week later, the situation was still ongoing with tons of speculation, but no substantive action from the public- just content to wait for the results of the ongoing private negotiations. This is an important point discussed later.

Twitter DM's

Due to the makeup of my follower group, failing to garner support from these individuals meant that my campaign simply didn’t have legs. I got a few feeble retweets from some friends on twitter, but that’s about it- no mention of the hashtag outside of my immediate follower network, let alone a mass movement.

Thoughts/Obstacles

  • One of the biggest hurdles to overcome is simple inertia- the lack of action, not due to apathy, but because people simply feel that they won’t make a difference to the outcome. as social media progressively spreads in reach and influence, I think this problem will diminish as more individuals see real examples of their voices being heard. Efforts like Lend me some sugar, that aim to influence corporations’ purchasing decisions by consumer voting, will help in this regard. [While my cause was obviously not that important, making apathy from the general public understandable, I was hoping to at least generate support among Lakers fans, who regard Odom as one of their favorite players.]
  • Reaching outside of your immediate network. As I found out, it’s difficult to amplify your voice when you don’t have a huge first degree network. I imagine it’s tough for individuals to do this unless they have a very focused theme to their twitter stream, serving as a voice for an entire community of people passionate about a specific topic. If that’s not feasible, it’s key to engage individuals who fit this profile to promote your cause.
  • Making your cause understandable and easy to participate in. In retrospect, I might have been better served focusing my efforts on marketing my message, making it more engaging for people to participate in. It’s important to align your interests with those of the individuals you’re hoping to garner support from; give them a chance to show how funny/smart/caustically witty they are while at the same time voicing support for something they care about.


What’s the Point?

So why does this all even remotely matter? The recent evolution of the web has demonstrated the power of motivated individuals or groups in the face of traditionally omnipotent policymakers, whether governments or corporations. As these tools get more refined and more people realize the power they hold, it’ll be easier to amplify an important message. In light of this, one of the more important facets of this new mode of interaction is that it’s all voluntary; you don’t have to listen to the loudspeakers or participate if you don’t want to- just unfollow someone. You’re only as effective as the level of engagement you show with those around you. I imagine seeing more platforms specifically dedicated to the promotion of large-scale movements that utilize the power of real-time networks. These social media sites hold a lot of promise of “individual empowerment” and the like; it’ll be fun to see how they live up to the hype.

kortina: msg: Stanley Kubrick on a Life worth Living found this great advice via Kortina who found it via Afrremble Quotes who didnt provide a source so I went to the Google which brought me to WikiQuotes which pointed me to this excerpt in Google Books which contains the Playboy interview Eric Nordern had with Kubrick in 1968.

kortina:

msg:

Stanley Kubrick on a Life worth Living

found this great advice via Kortina who found it via Afrremble Quotes who didnt provide a source so I went to the Google which brought me to WikiQuotes which pointed me to this excerpt in Google Books which contains the Playboy interview Eric Nordern had with Kubrick in 1968.

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    Themed by: Hunson