• Beliefs that aren’t rationally justified should be roundly ridiculed if the person who holds them asserts even their slightest applicability to a real problem.  Irrationality is not just silly, it is dangerous and the number one thing holding back human progress.

  (This isn’t intended to be an epistemological assertion about the merit of rationalism or empiricism. It’s a pragmatic assertion about everyday life.)

• Disregard the law.  At various times and various places, within the recent past, female rights of any kind, drinking alcohol, freedom of religion, the right to live if you happen to be of a certain ethnic group, and homosexuality have all been severely punished under the law.  Many not immoral things, notably drug use (the criminalization of which, if you think about it at all, amounts to thought-crime), remain illegal even in the most free countries, and many immoral things, such as state-sponsored murder (i.e. war), are legal.

  Morality is not a collective endeavor.  Even if the state has pragmatic reasons to outlaw some things, it doesn’t reflect their moral status.  The only defensible meta-ethical stance is for each individual to come to their own reasoned conclusions about what is moral and what is not, and then act according to them, considering the law only with regard to the risk and severity of punishment for breaking it.

  A high percentage of people who think legal=moral causes totalitarianism.  It is the duty of every good citizen to disobey unjust laws to prevent this.

• Voting is stupid.  The paradox of voting is uncontroversially true.  Unless you are voting in a local election with perhaps a hundred voters, if you really consider the difference (to your, or anyone’s, life) between your preferred outcome and the other possible outcomes, in combination with the infinitesimal chance that your vote will be the deciding vote (which is the only time your vote could be said to have mattered), it never warrants spending a few hours of your time to vote.

  You might say, “but if everybody did that, democracy wouldn’t work.”  Well, that’s true, but it’s irrelevant to what one person should do. Have fun blindly heeding your evolved instinct toward group cooperation, aided by “civic duty” groupthink, uttering platitudes like “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain”. I will enjoy my Tuesdays and say that if you vote, you can’t complain, because you consent to the status quo.

• People are not born equal.  Some people are better at some things than other people no matter how how much the other people try, and there is also no a priori reason to suspect that this fact doesn’t extend to groups of people. Some incontroversial examples include: Ashkenazi Jews are almost a standard deviation more intelligent, on average, than average; East-Africans are better at running marathons; and among both geniuses and the mentally retarded, men are more common than women.

  I know that oftentimes environment can actually explain most differences between people, even those listed above.  But to hold as an article of faith that people are identical in ability, is stupid.  People evolved in different environments, and will be good at different things.  And there is genetic variation among all individuals.  It’s a shame that people like Larry Summers and James Watson get fired for even questioning the politically correct orthodoxy.

  By the way, this is in no way a normative statement about whether people should be treated equally.

  (Not to mention, you know, the inequality of being born into wealth or poverty.)

That’s all for now.  You can’t judge me unless you do this too. And if you don’t have any controversial beliefs, it’s probably a bad sign.

Then I realize that there’s really nothing special about book-length writing. I think most ideas can be expressed within a few thousand words. Even when I have occasionally read books in the past few years, books that are well-reviewed and carefully chosen as a likely enjoyable read, I have found that everything important is said in the first half or two thirds of the book, in fact often with a decent amount of redundancy.

The book is really a relic of the pre-Internet age, when people didn’t have easy access to background information about every topic imaginable and publishers’ business models centered on selling physical media and only secondarily the content they contained. It was sensible to include a lot of background information and redundancy to ensure that a book was accessible to the widest possible audience and to pad the size of the physical product, increasing its apparent value. Today, this is no longer the case. I feel that I have been much more broadly and better informed by reading thousands of blog posts, articles, and essays online than I would have been by reading a similar amount of writing in book form.

(I’m mostly talking about non-fiction books written for a non-specialist audience. I stopped reading fiction years ago, and academic tracts serve a different purpose.)

It is the Sixth Epoch, “The Universe Wakes Up,” that is a truly fascinating idea. Essentially, after the singularity occurs (the exponential intelligence and technology explosion after Seed AI is created and replaces organic intelligence as the dominant form of intelligence), Kurzweil predicts, the new super-intelligent civilization (machine or machine/human hybrid) will expand throughout the galaxy and eventually the universe, turning matter into computational substrates, until the entire universe is one giant computer.  Quoting Wikipedia, by 2199, “with the entire universe made into a giant, highly efficient supercomputer, A.I./human hybrids (so integrated that, in truth it is a new category of “life”) would have both supreme intelligence and physical control over the universe. Kurzweil suggests that this will open up all sorts of new possibilities such as doing the infinitely impossible and beyond.”

It is clear why some consider this brand of futurism akin to a religion.  Nonetheless, the staggering implications of this possibility are worth considering.  For instance, if consciousness is just an artifact of sufficiently complex systems, when the universe “wakes up” will it be a conscious being?  A woken up universe would surely bring a new meaning to the word pantheism.

But why has this not already happened?  Just as Fermi asked why, if intelligent life is (as we suspect) abundantly common in the universe, we have not encountered it, it seems puzzling that we are not enveloped in Kurzweil’s sixth epoch now.  This fact leads to the conclusion that at least one of the following must be true:

• We are the most advanced intelligent life in the universe.  If we are not the only intelligent life, then this is statistically highly unlikely, because if there are any other civilizations in the universe, even if they are vanishingly rare, we are only one of countless such civilizations.
• Faster-than-lightspeed travel is impossible.  Perhaps the most likely, but unless the above was true, we might expect to see astronomical evidence of civilizations that have already reached their singularities waking up their home galaxies.
• Technological civilizations which approach or reach the singularity never last long enough to start waking up the universe.

It is undeniable that Facebook offers many benefits in a time in which the network is ubiquituous, devices are always on, and people are always connected.  The benefits can mainly be categorized as features that allow us to maintain a larger social circle than we would otherwise be able to.  I have 460 Facebook friends, and probably at least 450 are people I remember, know how I know, and can put a name and face to.  I would say that having anywhere from 350 to 600 Facebook friends is about normal for most college kids I know–some high school friends and some college ones. Many of these people are people I have not interacted with much in a year, two, or more, and would probably have forgotten had I not occasionally seen their name on my Facebook newsfeed.  Sociological research indicates that the human brain is naturally limited to about 150 contacts, but this is a consequence of our ability to have only that many relationships, not our ability to remember only that many people.

My first issue with Facebook is that it favors breadth over depth in social relationships, and this leads to a reduction in quality in our relationships.  I would not argue that by having hundreds of Facebok friends we are necessarily cheapening our relationships with our true friends, but it certainly introduces a lot of noise that we have to filter out to get to what really matters.  Also, any time we spend communicating with friends online, whether it be realtime or not, is time that could be spent having real interaction with our friends, in a physical setting, which is surely much more healthy and naturally satisfying.  Online interaction tends to be much more fragmented and have much less meaningful discussion.

One example of the cheapening of real social interaction that I was reminded of today is the birthday wishes users commonly post on friends’ walls.  While there is nothing wrong with posting such a message, I think these posts are largely meaningless and I refrain from making them.  You have a list of people who have a birthday today, so you don”t have to actually remember your friend’s birthday, and it takes only seconds to post a short message on their wall.  If I want to say happy birthday in a meaningful way, I tell them personally (as many people do in addition, of course).  If they are someone who I wouldn’t have the opportunity to tell personally, then either they are someone who is a good enough friend that I would call to wish a happy birthday, or, frankly, they are someone who I don’t need to be wishing happy birthday to.

There is a lot of noise, but I think we still pretty effectively filter it out to get down to the important things.  However, it is still a major waste of time, and that is my second major issue with Facebook.  Of course, people, myself included, who spend too much time on Facebook (the sort of people who always have Facebook open in a tab), have none but themselves to blame for any wasted time.  It’s just such a perfect time sink, because it plays into our natural human desire to connect with people, but, that connection, as I said, can be somewhat superficial, and certainly Facebook rarely results in any productive output.  (Though I must say that Facebook groups and events are an amazing effective way of mobilizing committed groups of people when you have such a large pool to draw from.)  We should all consider how much we use Facebook, and if it seems that we spend an amount of time on it disproportionate to the real benefits we derive from it, we should limit our usage.  It seems to me that the most effective usage pattern is to check Facebook maybe once or twice a day, respond to messages and wall posts, and then sign off.

Perhaps the most troubling impact of Facebook is that it fosters a disregard for privacy.  I think we have seen a remarkably rapid change, mainly generational, in societal attitudes about privacy due to the large proportion of high school and college-aged kids who seem to put their entire lives on facebook.  Think about it: if you had told someone even just ten years ago that many people would be posting frequent status updates about their lives and nearly every photo they take for every one of their hundreds of “friends” on Facebook to see, I think that they’d have thought you were describing some far off future.   This is not even to mention the significant minority who make their profiles available to the thousands of people in their college network, or even in their entire geographical network.

Most people have recognized for a while that it is highly inadvisable to make their information, most importantly photos, viewable by anyone who they are not explicity friends with.  Kids are worried about stalkers, parents about child predators.  But I think by focusing on this we are overlooking the fact that there is something wrong with even just making all your photos public to your friends.  Likewise, the mere existence of a “Wall” on which your friends can write and their messages can and will be viewed by any of your other friends seems fundamentally wrong to me.  There is no reason one wouldn’t send most wall posts as private messages using that feature on Facebook, and yet people don’t.  It’s as if there’s peer pressure to make everything public, or that by making a message public you want people to be privy to all your mundane or not-so-mundane personal communications.  Doesn’t anyone value privacy any more?  We are living in an orgy of publicness, and I think we are taking the natural human tendency to tell people about ourselves too far.  It’s better to keep some parts of ourselves private.  At the moment I can’t think of a good way to expand on this sentiment, but it’s something that I feel strongly.

Lastly, Facebook is bad because it is a proprietary walled garden.  You can’t generally access your profile information, photos, or statuses from outside of Facebook.  This stifles competition and innovation when one company, as Facebook does, controls a virtual monopoly on the social network market in some demographic markets.  Facebook is the only service that everyone is on in many places in the U.S.  Many people still have MySpace profiles, and in some areas of the country, MySpace is still more dominant, but Facebook is basically ubiquitous among young people right now.

As a consequence of the walled garden, for example, it is, as far as I am aware, impossible to backup your content on Facebook in compliance with the terms of use, which are also subject to change at any time.  Facebook also owns the copyright to much of the content published on it.  This whole arrangement could lead to a very troublesome situation in the future.  If people, as they perhaps already do, come to trust a private company to control all of their social graph and content, then it could be very bad when, in the future, more important things start being digitized within the context of social networks.  It would be much preferable if everyone could host their own profile and content on their on website or on a provider of their choice, and the people in their social graph could be on any service, since there would be a universal standard.  A user’s social home page could then pull in updates from friends on multiple servers.  In the microblogging arena, this sort of thing already exists, with laconi.ca being an open-source implementation that can pull in status updates hosted on another server; the proprietary Twitter, though, is and will remain the monopoly in microblogging because users aren’t technical enough and don’t care enough, and the same will go for Facebook.

So, in summary, Facebook has undeniable benefits, but I believe that the negative effects outweigh them, and we should really think about limiting our Facebook usage.

• Read 50 books.  Recent discussion about the effect of web-surfing on the brain’s text-processing made me realize that I don’t read books much anymore.  The ability to quickly skim one-page articles online and gain a brief understanding is good, but I think it is important to retain the ability to process the in-depth arguments of book-length writing (and plot, but I won’t be reading fiction, except perhaps for a few classics if I’m in the mood).  Books are still the best method for conveying big ideas and supporting them with great detail.  I’m starting off with On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot, Blown to Bits, about privacy in the digital age, and The Bill of Rights by Akhil Reed Amar, who coincidentally seems to have originated the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  I will be posting reviews of the books I read.
• Increase my content and software production.  I have, so far, been mainly a consumer of information (RSS junkie, etc.) and a user of software, perhaps with the exceptions of my relatively unimportant Wikipedia articles and several-year-old calculator programs.  In 2009, I resolve to blog regularly, even if only book reviews, and to get involved in free software in a significant way, be it creating GNOME themes, writing a small application based on one of my frequent ideas, or contributing to a free software project that I use.

Unfortunately, tonight, I was writing a paper, and when I had finally got working for an extended period of time, and when I switched to my browser to look something up, I involuntarily was sucked into Facebook because I had the tab open.  This also happens a lot with Wikipedia; you can read chains of linked articles and end up reading about something entirely irrelevant.

To remedy this, I envision an application, possibly a browser addon, that, when you have a word processor open (and it could do some checks to see whether the document you are editing is likely a paper, such as by seeing whether you have a standard MLA header, for example), compares the text of your document to the text of the tab(s) you currently have open, and closes it/them if there is insufficient relevancy to indicate that what you are browsing is related to your paper.  I believe this is necessary because one can unconsciously procrastinate when web-browsing, so a strategy or tool such as this is a useful counteraction.

This post was a method of procrastination.

I think much of the media narrative about the minimum wage is framed as whether to prevent corporations from exploiting their employees if there is no collective bargaining or if they are undocumented and thus fearful of asking for higher wages, but we should more often consider the possibility that some jobs which today do earn minimum wage could never pay minimum wage in a free market.

• Amazon to Target $5.5 Billion Textbook Market with New Kindle?, TechCrunch
  
• E-Textbooks — for Real This Time?, Inside Higher Ed

I would tend to think that new formats and distribution methods for textbook e-books are more important than new devices to view them on, considering most college students use their laptops a lot, probably even in class often.