Be An Epistemic Spoilsport

Well, it was learning; as I said, we know a lot; but the ratio between what any of us can know, and what we need to know in order to be competent in our knowledge, well, that’s like a big ratio, man, and not in our favor.

An alternative, and maybe one we can more ably manage, is to follow Herre Climacus and look instead for complications. I do not mean trolling. To troll is to raise unproductive difficulties for the vicious joy of making other people upset. That’s for losers. I’m talking about making productive difficulties for the virtuous joy of recalling ourselves and our friends to our own limitations; in short, being an epistemic spoilsport. What don’t we know? What don’t we understand? What doesn’t seem to fit? Why is it that we know more than ever, and yet, and yet?

Of course one can raise these questions as offensive maneuvers; we can play the part of skeptics to knock know-it-alls from their high and mighty thrones, or we can pretend not to understand one thing in the hopes of persuading someone to believe another thing instead. But I am recommending something more naive and genuine. Honest and reflective people might consider owning up to the fact that they really don’t understand what’s going on with this or that, and don’t have a sexy opinion to offer. And they can broadcast this expression of failing to others, who might at first seem surprised or bemused at such a flat refusal to play the trade opinions game, but after a few minutes they may recognize that good lord there is the possibility of a real conversation on offer here, and together we might express our befuddlements and share in our perplexities, and at the end of the night feel as if in our shared ignorance there is a shared humanity.

You don’t have to know everything in order to see that you understand very little, but a little bit of knowledge helps. And that’s all we are ever likely to have as individuals, even with 5G networks. This is why I am thinking we just might be able to pull this off. We can’t do full knowledge; that’s way too big. We can’t even reach a respectable level of knowledge. But a little knowledge, and some wonder, and some complications that we can meaningfully share with one another, that we can do. A little less confidence, if you please, and more honest talk. Tell me what you don’t know.

- More Here

Illusion of knowledge causes more pain and suffering than lack of knowledge. Instead, embrace epistemological modesty - it will change your mind and then heart. You will become a kinder human being who acts according to our impermanence, sees beauty in every living being on earth and mindful of every precious moment we have. 

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

- Mark Twain

What I've Been Reading

48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene (wisdom in nutshell here). Well as you can see, the education continues...


Law 1 - Never Outshine the Master:
Always make those above you feel comfortably superior.  In your desire to please or impress them, do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite – inspire fear and insecurity.  Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power.

Law 2 - Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies:
Be wary of friends-they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy.  They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove.  In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies.  If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Law 3 - Conceal your Intentions:
Keep people off-balance and in the dark by never revealing the purpose behind your actions.  If they have no clue what you are up to, they cannot prepare a defense.  Guide them far enough down the wrong path, envelope them in enough smoke, and by the time they realize your intentions, it will be too late.

Law 4 - Always Say Less than Necessary:
When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control.  Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.  Powerful people impress and intimidate by saying less.  The more you say, the more likely you are to say something foolish.

Law 5 - So Much Depends on Reputation – Guard it with your Life:
Reputation is the cornerstone of power.  Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once you slip, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides.  Make your reputation unassailable.  Always be alert to potential attacks and thwart them before they happen.  Meanwhile, learn to destroy your enemies by opening holes in their own reputations.  Then stand aside and let public opinion hang them.

Law 6 - Court Attention at all Cost:
Everything is judged by its appearance; what is unseen counts for nothing.  Never let yourself get lost in the crowd, then, or buried in oblivion.  Stand out.  Be conspicuous, at all cost.  Make yourself a magnet of attention by appearing larger, more colorful, more mysterious, than the bland and timid masses.

Law 7 - Get others to do the Work for you, but Always Take the Credit:
Use the wisdom, knowledge, and legwork of other people to further your own cause.  Not only will such assistance save you valuable time and energy, it will give you a godlike aura of efficiency and speed.  In the end your helpers will be forgotten and you will be remembered.  Never do yourself what others can do for you.

Law 8 - Make other People come to you – use Bait if Necessary:
When you force the other person to act, you are the one in control.  It is always better to make your opponent come to you, abandoning his own plans in the process.  Lure him with fabulous gains – then attack.  You hold the cards.

Law 9 - Win through your Actions, Never through Argument:
Any momentary triumph you think gained through argument is really a Pyrrhic victory:  The resentment and ill will you stir up is stronger and lasts longer than any momentary change of opinion.  It is much more powerful to get others to agree with you through your actions, without saying a word.  Demonstrate, do not explicate.

Law 10 - Infection: Avoid the Unhappy and Unlucky:
You can die from someone else’s misery – emotional states are as infectious as disease.  You may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster.  The unfortunate sometimes draw misfortune on themselves; they will also draw it on you.  Associate with the happy and fortunate instead.

Law 11 - Learn to Keep People Dependent on You:
To maintain your independence you must always be needed and wanted.  The more you are relied on, the more freedom you have.  Make people depend on you for their happiness and prosperity and you have nothing to fear.  Never teach them enough so that they can do without you.

Law 12 - Use Selective Honesty and Generosity to Disarm your Victim:
One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones.  Open-hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people.  Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will.  A timely gift – a Trojan horse – will serve the same purpose.

Law 13 - When Asking for Help, Appeal to People’s Self-Interest, Never to their Mercy or Gratitude:
If you need to turn to an ally for help, do not bother to remind him of your past assistance and good deeds.  He will find a way to ignore you.  Instead, uncover something in your request, or in your alliance with him, that will benefit him, and emphasize it out of all proportion.  He will respond enthusiastically when he sees something to be gained for himself.

Law 14 - Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy:
Knowing about your rival is critical.  Use spies to gather valuable information that will keep you a step ahead.  Better still: Play the spy yourself.  In polite social encounters, learn to probe.  Ask indirect questions to get people to reveal their weaknesses and intentions.  There is no occasion that is not an opportunity for artful spying.

Law 15 - Crush your Enemy Totally:
All great leaders since Moses have known that a feared enemy must be crushed completely.  (Sometimes they have learned this the hard way.)  If one ember is left alight, no matter how dimly it smolders, a fire will eventually break out.  More is lost through stopping halfway than through total annihilation:  The enemy will recover, and will seek revenge.  Crush him, not only in body but in spirit.

Law 16 - Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor:
Too much circulation makes the price go down:  The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear.  If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired.  You must learn when to leave.  Create value through scarcity.

Law 17 - Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability:
Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions.  Your predictability gives them a sense of control.  Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable.  Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves.  Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.

Law 18 - Do Not Build Fortresses to Protect Yourself – Isolation is Dangerous:
The world is dangerous and enemies are everywhere – everyone has to protect themselves.  A fortress seems the safest. But isolation exposes you to more dangers than it protects you from – it cuts you off from valuable information, it makes you conspicuous and an easy target.  Better to circulate among people find allies, mingle.  You are shielded from your enemies by the crowd.

Law 19 - Know Who You’re Dealing with – Do Not Offend the Wrong Person:
There are many different kinds of people in the world, and you can never assume that everyone will react to your strategies in the same way.  Deceive or outmaneuver some people and they will spend the rest of their lives seeking revenge.  They are wolves in lambs’ clothing.  Choose your victims and opponents carefully, then – never offend or deceive the wrong person.

Law 20 - Do Not Commit to Anyone:
It is the fool who always rushes to take sides.  Do not commit to any side or cause but yourself.  By maintaining your independence, you become the master of others – playing people against one another, making them pursue you.

Law 21 - Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker – Seem Dumber than your Mark:
No one likes feeling stupider than the next persons.  The trick, is to make your victims feel smart – and not just smart, but smarter than you are.  Once convinced of this, they will never suspect that you may have ulterior motives.

Law 22 - Use the Surrender Tactic: Transform Weakness into Power:
When you are weaker, never fight for honor’s sake; choose surrender instead.  Surrender gives you time to recover, time to torment and irritate your conqueror, time to wait for his power to wane.  Do not give him the satisfaction of fighting and defeating you – surrender first.  By turning the other check you infuriate and unsettle him.  Make surrender a tool of power.

Law 23 - Concentrate Your Forces:
Conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at their strongest point.  You gain more by finding a rich mine and mining it deeper, than by flitting from one shallow mine to another – intensity defeats extensity every time.  When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who will give you milk for a long time to come.

Law 24 - Play the Perfect Courtier:
The perfect courtier thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity.  He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the mot oblique and graceful manner.  Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.

Law 25 - Re-Create Yourself:
Do not accept the roles that society foists on you.  Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience.  Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define if for you.  Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

Law 26 - Keep Your Hands Clean:
You must seem a paragon of civility and efficiency: Your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds.  Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others as scapegoats and cat’s-paws to disguise your involvement.

Law 27 - Play on People’s Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following:
People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something.  Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow.  Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking.  Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf.  In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.

Law 28 - Enter Action with Boldness:
If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it.  Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution.  Timidity is dangerous:  Better to enter with boldness.  Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity.  Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

Law 29 - Plan All the Way to the End:
The ending is everything.  Plan all the way to it, taking into account all the possible consequences, obstacles, and twists of fortune that might reverse your hard work and give the glory to others.  By planning to the end you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to stop.  Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead.

Law 30 - Make your Accomplishments Seem Effortless:
Your actions must seem natural and executed with ease.  All the toil and practice that go into them, and also all the clever tricks, must be concealed.  When you act, act effortlessly, as if you could do much more.  Avoid the temptation of revealing how hard you work – it only raises questions.  Teach no one your tricks or they will be used against you.

Law 31 - Control the Options: Get Others to Play with the Cards you Deal:
The best deceptions are the ones that seem to give the other person a choice:  Your victims feel they are in control, but are actually your puppets.  Give people options that come out in your favor whichever one they choose.  Force them to make choices between the lesser of two evils, both of which serve your purpose.  Put them on the horns of a dilemma:  They are gored wherever they turn.

Law 32 - Play to People’s Fantasies:
The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant.  Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment.  Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert:  Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

Law 33 - Discover Each Man’s Thumbscrew:
Everyone has a weakness, a gap in the castle wall.  That weakness is usual y an insecurity, an uncontrollable emotion or need; it can also be a small secret pleasure.  Either way, once found, it is a thumbscrew you can turn to your advantage.

Law 34 - Be Royal in your Own Fashion:  Act like a King to be treated like one:
The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated; In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you.  For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others.  By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.

Law 35 - Master the Art of Timing:
Never seem to be in a hurry – hurrying betrays a lack of control over yourself, and over time.  Always seem patient, as if you know that everything will come to you eventually.  Become a detective of the right moment; sniff out the spirit of the times, the trends that will carry you to power.  Learn to stand back when the time is not yet ripe, and to strike fiercely when it has reached fruition.

Law 36 - Disdain Things you cannot have:  Ignoring them is the best Revenge:
By acknowledging a petty problem you give it existence and credibility.  The more attention you pay an enemy, the stronger you make him; and a small mistake is often made worse and more visible when you try to fix it.  It is sometimes best to leave things alone.  If there is something you want but cannot have, show contempt for it.  The less interest you reveal, the more superior you seem.

Law 37 - Create Compelling Spectacles:
Striking imagery and grand symbolic gestures create the aura of power – everyone responds to them.  Stage spectacles for those around you, then full of arresting visuals and radiant symbols that heighten your presence.  Dazzled by appearances, no one will notice what you are really doing.

Law 38 - Think as you like but Behave like others:
If you make a show of going against the times, flaunting your unconventional ideas and unorthodox ways, people will think that you only want attention and that you look down upon them.  They will find a way to punish you for making them feel inferior.  It is far safer to blend in and nurture the common touch. Share your originality only with tolerant friends and those who are sure to appreciate your uniqueness.

Law 39 - Stir up Waters to Catch Fish:
Anger and emotion are strategically counterproductive.  You must always stay calm and objective.  But if you can make your enemies angry while staying calm yourself, you gain a decided advantage.  Put your enemies off-balance: Find the chink in their vanity through which you can rattle them and you hold the strings.

Law 40 - Despise the Free Lunch:
What is offered for free is dangerous – it usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation.  What has worth is worth paying for.  By paying your own way you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit.  It is also often wise to pay the full price – there is no cutting corners with excellence.  Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating, for generosity is a sign and a magnet for power.

Law 41 - Avoid Stepping into a Great Man’s Shoes:
What happens first always appears better and more original than what comes after.  If you succeed a great man or have a famous parent, you will have to accomplish double their achievements to outshine them.  Do not get lost in their shadow, or stuck in a past not of your own making:  Establish your own name and identity by changing course.  Slay the overbearing father, disparage his legacy, and gain power by shining in your own way.

Law 42 - Strike the Shepherd and the Sheep will Scatter:
Trouble can often be traced to a single strong individual – the stirrer, the arrogant underling, the poisoned of goodwill.  If you allow such people room to operate, others will succumb to their influence.  Do not wait for the troubles they cause to multiply, do not try to negotiate with them – they are irredeemable.  Neutralize their influence by isolating or banishing them.  Strike at the source of the trouble and the sheep will scatter.

Law 43 - Work on the Hearts and Minds of Others:
Coercion creates a reaction that will eventually work against you.  You must seduce others into wanting to move in your direction.  A person you have seduced becomes your loyal pawn.  And the way to seduce others is to operate on their individual psychologies and weaknesses.  Soften up the resistant by working on their emotions, playing on what they hold dear and what they fear.  Ignore the hearts and minds of others and they will grow to hate you.

Law 44 - Disarm and Infuriate with the Mirror Effect:
The mirror reflects reality, but it is also the perfect tool for deception: When you mirror your enemies, doing exactly as they do, they cannot figure out your strategy.  The Mirror Effect mocks and humiliates them, making them overreact.  By holding up a mirror to their psyches, you seduce them with the illusion that you share their values; by holding up a mirror to their actions, you teach them a lesson.  Few can resist the power of Mirror Effect.

Law 45 - Preach the Need for Change, but Never Reform too much at Once:
Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit.  Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt.  If you are new to a position of power, or an outsider trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things.  If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.

Law 46 - Never appear too Perfect:
Appearing better than others is always dangerous, but most dangerous of all is to appear to have no faults or weaknesses.  Envy creates silent enemies.  It is smart to occasionally display defects, and admit to harmless vices, in order to deflect envy and appear more human and approachable.  Only gods and the dead can seem perfect with impunity.

Law 47 - Do not go Past the Mark you Aimed for; In Victory, Learn when to Stop:
The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril.  In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat.  Do not allow success to go to your head.  There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning.  Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.

Law 48 - Assume Formlessness:
By taking a shape, by having a visible plan, you open yourself to attack.  Instead of taking a form for your enemy to grasp, keep yourself adaptable and on the move.  Accept the fact that nothing is certain and no law is fixed.  The best way to protect yourself is to be as fluid and formless as water; never bet on stability or lasting order.  Everything changes.

What I've Been Reading

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. This is the first time I read Machiavelli - it's ridiculous to think of such a honest portrayal of humanity as... "Machiavellian". History is riddled with sugar coated version of our nature. If only we had more Machiavelli's in the past, we would have become that better angles of our nature. Given our delusion nature, for centuries we have been deluding ourselves of our true nature.
Was I disappointed & disgusted ? You bet.
Was I surprised ? Not a bit.

• He who believes that new benefits will cause great personages to forget old injuries is deceived.
• Fortune and women, and concludes that it is the bold rather than the cautious man that will win and hold them both.
• He who has annexed them, if he wishes to hold them, has only to bear in mind two considerations: the one, that the family of their former lord is extinguished; the other, that neither their laws nor their taxes are altered, so that in a very short time they will become entirely one body with the old principality.
• In conclusion, I say that these colonies are not costly, they are more faithful, they injure less, and the injured, as has been said, being poor and scattered, cannot hurt. Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.
• This it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen, they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them, there is no longer a remedy. Let us enjoy the benefits of the time— but rather the benefits of their own valour and prudence, for time drives everything before it, and is able to bring with it good as well as evil, and evil as well as good.
• The wish to acquire is in truth very natural and common, and men always do so when they can, and for this they will be praised not blamed; but when they cannot do so, yet wish to do so by any means, then there is folly and blame.
• Louis made these five errors: he destroyed the minor powers, he increased the strength of one of the greater powers in Italy, he brought in a foreign power, he did not settle in the country, he did not send colonies. From this a general rule is drawn which never or rarely fails: that he who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined; because that predominancy has been brought about either by astuteness or else by force, and both are distrusted by him who has been raised to power.
• Whenever those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you.
• A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if his ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it. Let him act like the clever archers who, designing to hit the mark which yet appears too far distant, and knowing the limits to which the strength of their bow attains, take aim much higher than the mark, not to reach by their strength or arrow to so great a height, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to hit the mark they wish to reach.
• Without that opportunity their powers of mind would have been extinguished, and without those powers the opportunity would have come in vain. It was necessary, therefore, to Moses that he should find the people of Israel in Egypt enslaved and oppressed by the Egyptians, in order that they should be disposed to follow him so as to be delivered out of bondage.
• Therefore, he who considers it necessary to secure himself in his new principality, to win friends, to overcome either by force or fraud, to make himself beloved and feared by the people, to be followed and revered by the soldiers, to exterminate those who have power or reason to hurt him, to change the old order of things for new, to be severe and gracious, magnanimous and liberal, to destroy a disloyal soldiery and to create new, to maintain friendship with kings and princes in such a way that they must help him with zeal and offend with caution, cannot find a more lively example than the actions of this man.
• Hiero the Syracusan - This man rose from a private station to be Prince of Syracuse, nor did he, either, owe anything to fortune but opportunity; for the Syracusans, being oppressed, chose him for their captain, afterwards he was rewarded by being made their prince. He was of so great ability, even as a private citizen, that one who writes of him says he wanted nothing but a kingdom to be a king. This man abolished the old soldiery, organized the new, gave up old alliances, made new ones; and as he had his own soldiers and allies, on such foundations he was able to build any edifice: thus, whilst he had endured much trouble in acquiring, he had but little in keeping.
• The wise prince, therefore, has always avoided these arms and turned to his own; and has been willing rather to lose with them than to conquer with the others, not deeming that a real victory which is gained with the arms of others.
• Yet it cannot be called talent to slay fellow-citizens, to deceive friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion; such methods may gain empire, but not glory.
• I conclude, therefore, that no principality is secure without having its own forces; on the contrary, it is entirely dependent on good fortune, not having the valour which in adversity would defend it. And it has always been the opinion and judgment of wise men that nothing can be so uncertain or unstable as fame or power not founded on its own strength.
• Therefore it is wiser to have a reputation for meanness which brings reproach without hatred, than to be compelled through seeking a reputation for liberality to incur a name for rapacity which begets reproach with hatred.
• Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated, which will always be as long as he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women.
• Among the wonderful deeds of Hannibal this one is enumerated: that having led an enormous army, composed of many various races of men, to fight in foreign lands, no dissensions arose either among them or against the prince, whether in his bad or in his good fortune. This arose from nothing else than his inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valour, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.
• Returning to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the conclusion that, men loving according to their own will and fearing according to that of the prince, a wise prince should establish himself on that which is in his own control and not in that of others; he must endeavour only to avoid hatred, as is noted.
• Hence it is to be remarked that, in seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits. He who does otherwise, either from timidity or evil advice, is always compelled to keep the knife in his hand; neither can he rely on his subjects, nor can they attach themselves to him, owing to their continued and repeated wrongs. For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.
• A prince, therefore, being compelled knowingly to adopt the beast, ought to choose the fox and the lion; because the lion cannot defend himself against snares and the fox cannot defend himself against wolves. Therefore, it is necessary to be a fox to discover the snares and a lion to terrify the wolves.
• He who obtains sovereignty by the assistance of the nobles maintains himself with more difficulty than he who comes to it by the aid of the people, because the former finds himself with many around him who consider themselves his equals, and because of this he can neither rule nor manage them to his liking. But he who reaches sovereignty by popular favour finds himself alone, and has none around him, or few, who are not prepared to obey him.
• I repeat, it is necessary for a prince to have the people friendly, otherwise he has no security in adversity.
• And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to fidelity, friendship, humanity, and religion. Therefore it is necessary for him to have a mind ready to turn itself accordingly as the winds and variations of fortune force it, yet, as I have said above, not to diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so, but, if compelled, then to know how to set about it.
• One prince of the present time, whom it is not well to name, never preaches anything else but peace and good faith, and to both he is most hostile, and either, if he had kept it, would have deprived him of reputation and kingdom many a time.
• The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws.
• That prince is highly esteemed who conveys this impression of himself, and he who is highly esteemed is not easily conspired against; for, provided it is well known that he is an excellent man and revered by his people, he can only be attacked with difficulty. For this reason a prince ought to have two fears, one from within, on account of his subjects, the other from without, on account of external powers.
• Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia by factions and Pisa by fortresses; and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily.
• Many consider that a wise prince, when he has the opportunity, ought with craft to foster some animosity against himself, so that, having crushed it, his renown may rise higher.
• We shall find that it is easier for the prince to make friends of those men who were contented under the former government, and are therefore his enemies, than of those who, being discontented with it, were favourable to him and encouraged him to seize it.
• The prince who has more to fear from the people than from foreigners ought to build fortresses, but he who has more to fear from foreigners than from the people ought to leave them alone. The best possible fortress is— not to be hated by the people, because, although you may hold the fortresses, yet they will not save you if the people hate you, for there will never be wanting foreigners to assist a people who have taken arms against you. All these things considered then, I shall praise him who builds fortresses as well as him who does not, and I shall blame whoever, trusting in them, cares little about being hated by the people.
• Thus it will always happen that he who is not your friend will demand your neutrality, whilst he who is your friend will entreat you to declare yourself with arms. And irresolute princes, to avoid present dangers, generally follow the neutral path, and are generally ruined.
• And here it is to be noted that a prince ought to take care never to make an alliance with one more powerful than himself for the purposes of attacking others, unless necessity compels him, as is said above; because if he conquers you are at his discretion, and princes ought to avoid as much as possible being at the discretion of any one.
• Never let any Government imagine that it can choose perfectly safe courses; rather let it expect to have to take very doubtful ones, because it is found in ordinary affairs that one never seeks to avoid one trouble without running into another; but prudence consists in knowing how to distinguish the character of troubles, and for choice to take the lesser evil.
• Further, he ought to entertain the people with festivals and spectacles at convenient seasons of the year; and as every city is divided into guilds or into societies, he ought to hold such bodies in esteem, and associate with them sometimes, and show himself an example of courtesy and liberality; nevertheless, always maintaining the majesty of his rank, for this he must never consent to abate in anything.
• But to enable a prince to form an opinion of his servant there is one test which never fails; when you see the servant thinking more of his own interests than of yours, and seeking inwardly his own profit in everything, such a man will never make a good servant, nor will you ever be able to trust him; because he who has the state of another in his hands ought never to think of himself, but always of his prince, and never pay any attention to matters in which the prince is not concerned.
• On the other hand, to keep his servant honest the prince ought to study him, honouring him, enriching him, doing him kindnesses, sharing with him the honours and cares; and at the same time let him see that he cannot stand alone, so that many honours may not make him desire more, many riches make him wish for more, and that many cares may make him dread chances. When, therefore, servants, and princes towards servants, are thus disposed, they can trust each other, but when it is otherwise, the end will always be disastrous for either one or the other.
• It is that of flatterers, of whom courts are full, because men are so self-complacent in their own affairs, and in a way so deceived in them, that they are preserved with difficulty from this pest, and if they wish to defend themselves they run the danger of falling into contempt. Because there is no other way of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you; but when every one may tell you the truth, respect for you abates. Therefore a wise prince ought to hold a third course by choosing the wise men in his state, and giving to them only the liberty of speaking the truth to him, and then only of those things of which he inquires, and of none others; but he ought to question them upon everything, and listen to their opinions, and afterwards form his own conclusions.
• A prince, therefore, ought always to take counsel, but only when he wishes and not when others wish; he ought rather to discourage every one from offering advice unless he asks it; but, however, he ought to be a constant inquirer, and afterwards a patient listener concerning the things of which he inquired; also, on learning that any one, on any consideration, has not told him the truth, he should let his anger be felt.
• Men will always prove untrue to you unless they are kept honest by constraint.

What I've Been Reading

The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. I started out this year keeping up my promise to read as much as I could on stoicism but now ending the year reading this book - go figure!!

One of the best books I have ever read, period. Each page is packed with pragmatic wisdom which directly corresponds to the ape that is still alive and kicking inside us.

From the preface:

"The world has become increasingly competitive and nasty. In politics, business, even the arts, we face opponents who will do almost anything to gain an edge. More troubling and complex, however, are the battles we face with those who are supposedly on our side. There are those who outwardly play the team game, who act friendly and agreeable, but who sabotage us behind the scenes, use the group to promote their own agenda. Others, more difficult to spot, play subtle games of passive aggression, offering help that never comes, instilling guilt as a secret weapon. On the surface everything seems peaceful enough, but just below it, it is every man and woman for him-or herself, this dynamic infecting even families and relationships. The culture may deny this reality and promote a gentler picture, but we know it and feel it, in our battle scars.

It is not that we and our colleagues are ignoble creatures who fail to live up to ideals of peace and selflessness, but we cannot help the way we are. What we need are not impossible and inhuman ideals of peace and cooperation to live up to, and the confusion that brings us, but rather practical knowledge on how to deal with conflict and the daily battles we face."


SELF-DIRECTED WARFARE

1: Declare war on your enemies: Polarity
You cannot fight effectively unless you can identify them. Learn to smoke them out, then inwardly declare war. Your enemies can fill you with purpose and direction.

2: Do not fight the last war: Guerilla-war-of-the-mind
Wage war on the past and ruthlessly force yourself to react to the present. Make everything fluid and mobile.

3: Amidst the turmoil of events, do not lose your presence of mind: Counterbalance
Keep your presence of mind whatever the circumstances. Make your mind tougher by exposing it to adversity. Learn to detach youself from the chaos of the battlefied.

4: Create a sense of urgency and desperation: Death-ground
Place yourself where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.

ORGANIZATIONAL WARFARE

5: Avoid the snares of groupthink: Command-and-control
Create a chain of command where people do not feel constrained by your influence yet follow your lead. Create a sense of participation, but do not fall into groupthink.

6: Segment your forces: Controlled-chaos
The critical elements in war are speed and adaptability--the ability to move and make decisions faster than the enemy. Break your forces into independent groups that can operate on their own. Give them the spirit of the campaign, a mission to accomplish, and room to run.

7: Transform your war into a crusade: Morale
Get them to think less about themselves and more about the group. Involve them in a cause, a crusade against a hated enemy. Make them see their survival is tied to the success of the army as a whole.

DEFENSIVE WARFARE

8: Pick your battles carefully: Perfect-economy
Consider the hidden costs of war: time, political goodwill, an embittered enemy bent on revenge. Sometimes it is better to undermine your enemies covertly.

9: Turn the tables: Counterattack
Let the other side move first. If aggressive, bait them into a rash attack that leaves them in a weak position.

10: Create a threatening presence: Deterrence
Build a reputation for being a little crazy. Fighting you is not worth it. Uncertainty can be better than an explicit threat. If your opponents aren't sure what attacking you will cost, they will not want to find out.

11: Trade space for time: Nonengagement
Retreat is a sign of strength. Resisting the temptation to respond buys valuable time. Sometimes you accomplish most by doing nothing.

OFFENSIVE WARFARE

12: Lose battles, but win the war: Grand strategy
Grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the present battle and calculating ahead. Focus on your ultimate goal and plot to reach it.

13: Know your enemy: Intelligence
The target of your strategies is not the army you face, but the mind who runs it. Learn to read people.

14: Overwhelm resistance with speed and suddenness: Blitzkrieg
Speed is power. Striking first, before enemies have time to think or prepare will make them emotional, unbalanced, and prone to error.

15: Control the dynamic: Forcing
Instead of trying to dominate the other side's every move, work to define the nature of the relationship itself. Control your opponent's mind, pushing emotional buttons and compelling them to make mistakes.

16: Hit them where it hurts: Center-of-gravity
Find the source of your enemy's power. Find out what he cherishes and protects and strike.

17: Defeat them in detail: Divide and conquer
Separate the parts and sow dissension and division. Turn a large problem into small, eminently defeatable parts.

18: Expose and attack your opponent's soft flank: Turning
Frontal assaults stiffen resistance. Instead, distract your enemy's attention to the front, then attack from the side when they expose their weakness.

19: Envelop the enemy: Annihilation
Create relentless pressure from all sides and close off their access to the outside world. When you sense weakening resolve, tighten the noose and crush their willpower.

20: Maneuver them into weakness: Ripening for the sickle
Before the battle begins, put your opponent in a position of such weakness that victory is easy and quick. Create dilemmas where all potential choices are bad.

21: Negotiate while advancing: Diplomatic war
Before and during negotiations, keep advancing, creating relentless pressure and compelling the other side to settle on your terms. The more you take, the more you can give back in meaningless concessions. Create a reputation for being tough and uncompromising so that people are giving ground even before they meet you.

22: Know how to end things: Exit strategy
You are judged by how well things conclude. Know when to stop. Avoid all conflicts and entanglements from which there are no realistic exits.

UNCONVENTIONAL WARFARE

23: Weave a seamless blend of fact and fiction: Misperception
Make it hard for your enemies to know what is going on around them. Feed their expectations, manufacture a reality to match their desires, and they will fool themselves. Control people's perceptions of reality and you control them.

24: Take the line of least expectation: Ordinary-Extraordinary
Upset expectations. First do something ordinary and conventional, then hit them with the extraordinary. Sometimes the ordinary is extraordinary because it is unexpected.

25: Occupy the moral high ground: Righteousness
The cause you are fighting for must seem more just than the enemy's. Questioning their motives and making enemies appear evil can narrow their base of support and room to maneuver. When you come under moral attack from a clever enemy, don't whine or get angry--fight fire with fire.

26: Deny them targets: The Void
The feeling of emptiness is intolerable for most people. Give enemies no target to attach. Be dangerous and elusive, and let them chase you into the void. Deliver irritating but damaging side attacks and pinpricks.

27: Seem to work for the interests of others while furthering your own: Alliance
Get others to compensate for your deficiencies, do your dirty work, fight your wars. Sow dissension in the alliances of others, weakening opponents by isolating them.

28: Give your rivals enough rope to hang themselves: One-upmanship
Instill doubts and insecurities in rivals, getting them to think too much and act defensive. Make them hang themselves through their own self-destructive tendencies, leaving you blameless and clean.

29: Take small bites: Fait Accompli
Take small bites to play on people's short attention span. Before they notice, you may acquire an empire.

30: Penetrate their minds: Communication
Infiltrate your ideas behind enemy lines, sending messages through little details. Lure people into coming to the conclusions you desire and into thinking they've gotten there by themselves.

31: Destroy from within: The Inner Front
To take something you want, don't fight those who have it, but join them. Then either slowly make it your own or wait for the right moment to stage a coup.

32: Dominate while seeming to submit: Passive-Aggression
Seem to go along, offering no resistance, but actually dominate the situation. Disguise your aggression so you can deny that it exists.

33: Sow uncertainty and panic through acts of terror: Chain Reaction
Terror can paralyze a people's will to resist and destroy their ability to plan a strategic response. The goal is to cause maximum chaos and provoke a desperate overreaction. To counter terror, stay balanced and rational.

How To Write

1. Show and Tell. Most people say, “Show, don’t tell,” but I stand by Show and Tell, because when writers put their work out into the world, they’re like kids bringing their broken unicorns and chewed-up teddy bears into class in the sad hope that someone else will love them as much as they do.
2. Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration.
3. Write what you know. Bellow once said, “Fiction is the higher autobiography.” Listen to your heart. Ask your heart, Is it true? And if it is, let it be. Once the lawyers sign off, you’re good to go.
4. Never use three words when one will do. Be concise. Don’t fall in love with the gentle trilling of your mellifluous sentences. Learn how to “kill your darlings,” as they say.
5. Keep a dream diary.
6. What isn’t said is as important as what is said. In many classic short stories, the real action occurs in the silences. Try to keep all the good stuff off the page.
7. Writer’s block is a tool — use it. When asked why you haven’t produced anything lately, just say, “I’m blocked.” Since most people think that writing is some mystical process where characters “talk to you” and you can hear their voices in your head, being blocked is the perfect cover for when you just don’t feel like working.
8. Is secret.
9. Have adventures. Get out and see the world. It’s not going to kill you to butch it up a tad. Book passage on a tramp steamer. Rustle up some dysentery; it’s worth it for the fever dreams alone. Lose a kidney in a knife fight. You’ll be glad you did.
10. Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t.
11. There are no rules. If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you do it, too? No. There are no rules except the ones you learned during your Show and Tell days. Have fun. If they don’t want to be friends with you, they’re not worth being friends with. Most of all, just be yourself.
    
    - More Here

Smorgasbord Of Courses On Coursera

For their initial launch, Coursera is partnering with professors at Berkeley, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania as well as Stanford to offer versions of their courses online. These will vary by discipline--unlike Udacity and MITx, they will include humanities topics like poetry and sociology, some of which will offer live video discussion.

"I would have to teach for 250 years to reach the same number of students that I did in one semester with this online course," says Andrew Ng, summing up the appeal for himself and the other professors on the platform: extreme impact. The pitch appealed to no less than John Doerr, the Intel billionaire and legendary Kleiner Perkins investor, who is underwriting their launch. He and other backers just invested $16 million in Coursera.

- More Here (Signup for Coursera)

Philosophy For All @ New Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Inspired By Sebastian Thrun

One recent Tuesday evening, nine twenty- and thirtysomethings gathered in the back room of Boerum Hill’s Building on Bond to discuss a crucial text for understanding our sociopolitical moment: Plato’s Republic. While a waitress brought dinner and $3 pints of Bud, their conversation meandered from the foundational treatise to related matters left unexplored by its author, like whether Ron Paul’s libertarianism is more deontological or consequentialist. (The consensus: probably deontological at heart, though voters demand consequentialist arguments.) Two hours in, the crowd migrated up to the bar, where the discussion continued in the same vein. They were still drinking and talking when the bartender announced last call.

What transpired that night just may represent the future of higher education—or at least one proudly low-tech vision of it. Politics of the City, the formal name for the somewhat informal gathering, is the first course offered by the new Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Its instructor, Ajay Chaudhary, dreamed up the institute while teaching in Columbia’s famed Core Curriculum, in which every undergraduate reads the classics of Western civilization. “Whenever I talked with people outside the university about what I did,” Chaudhary said, “they would tell me, ‘I want to do that. I want to read Aristotle and Augustine.’ ”

Continuing-education programs tend to be bluntly functional (professional-development courses like computer programming or bookkeeping), less than rigorous (culture “appreciation” classes), or flat-out silly (see “Transformers Star Tyrese Gibson: How to Get Out of Your Own Way—Tips for Making It” at the Learning Annex). More serious academic fare is proliferating online, but those classes are primarily for quants not quals. When Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig attracted 160,000 online students to an artificial-intelligence course last fall, instructional videos guided students through key equations, and assignments were auto-graded by computer. It’s hard to see how such an approach would translate for the humanities, and even Thrun hasn’t found the answer. His start-up web university, Udacity, plans to offer classes only in science and engineering."

- More Here (via Q3D)

On AI Class, Sebastian Thrun et al.

Six months ago while I was going nuts taking the AI-class, Steven Leckart (a freelance journalist) interviewed me about the experience of taking the AI class, my future plans on how to use the newly learnt skills etc. Now after 5 months his brilliant artcile  came out on wired magazine - The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever (the wait was worth it):

"After seeing Khan at TED, Thrun dusted off a PowerPoint presentation he’d put together in 2007. Back then he had begun envisioning a YouTube for education, a for-profit startup that would allow students to discover and take courses from top professors. In a few slides, he’d spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT’s OpenCourseWare—the university’s decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses—he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.

Thrun knew firsthand what it was like to crave superior instruction. When he was a master’s-degree student at the University of Bonn in Germany in the late 1980s, he found his AI professors to be clueless. He spent a lot of time filling in the gaps at the library, but he longed for a more direct connection to experts. Thrun created his PowerPoint presentation because he understood that university education was a system in need of disruption. But it wasn’t until he heard Khan’s talk that he appreciated he could do something about it. He spoke with Peter Norvig, Google’s director of research and his CS221 coprofessor, and they agreed to open up their next class to the entire world. Yes, it was an educational experiment, but Thrun realized that it could also be the first step in turning that old PowerPoint into an actual business."

Khan Academy - Future Of Education

Looks like Khan is using (or planning to use) machine learning to "customize" videos w.r.t a kid's learning speed.

Udacity - Alex Tabrrok On Sebatian Thurn's New "Gig"

"Thrun was eloquent on the subject of how he realized that he had been running “weeder” classes, designed to be tough and make students fail and make himself, the professor, look good. Going forwards, he said, he wanted to learn from Khan Academy and build courses designed to make as many students as possible succeed — by revisiting classes and tests as many times as necessary until they really master the material.

And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based.

So what I was expecting was an announcement from Thrun that he was helping to reinvent university education: that he was moving all his Stanford courses online, that the physical class would be a space for students to get more personalized help. No more lecturing: instead, the classes would be taken on the students’ own time, and the job of the real-world professor would be to answer questions from kids paying $30,000 for their education.
But that’s not the announcement that Thrun gave. Instead, he said, he concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udacity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a search engine — and of course it’s all going to be free."

- More Here

Elements of Math - Steven Strogatz

"There will come a time when mathematical ignorance, like public smoking, will become socially unacceptable."

- Jerry King, The Art of Mathematics

On that note, an excellent NYT blog on Math - Here

Viewed in this light, numbers start to seem a bit mysterious. They apparently exist in some sort of Platonic realm, a level above reality. In that respect they are more like other lofty concepts (e.g., truth and justice), and less like the ordinary objects of daily life. Upon further reflection, their philosophical status becomes even murkier. Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or discover them?

A further subtlety is that numbers (and all mathematical ideas, for that matter) have lives of their own. We can’t control them. Even though they exist in our minds, once we decide what we mean by them we have no say in how they behave. They obey certain laws and have certain properties, personalities, and ways of combining with one another, and there’s nothing we can do about it except watch and try to understand. In that sense they are eerily reminiscent of atoms and stars, the things of this world, which are likewise subject to laws beyond our control … except that those things exist outside our heads.

This dual aspect of numbers — as part- heaven, and part- earth — is perhaps the most paradoxical thing about them, and the feature that makes them so useful. It is what the physicist Eugene Wigner had in mind when he wrote of “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.”

Blogging the Stanford Machine Learning Class - Chris Wilson

Littler over 24 hours after the end of class, I am already feeling naked with so much time on hand. Chris Wilson induced a premature virtual nostalgia with his hilarious blog on ML class - here.

At Week 2 in Stanford’s machine learning course, the childishly simple homework assignments are growing more complex. Last week I wrote, “The great joy of learning new concepts in math and science is that they transport you into a simplified world, in which only a few things govern our lives and all problems can be solved—basically, a Richard Scarry book for the matriculating crowd.” In that case, we were making models of housing data based only on home size. Now we’ve got to worry about the number of floors and bathrooms, too. We’ve graduated from Richard Scarry to a more complex world that is beginning to get hairy.

So far, we’re still more occupied with student learning than machine instructing, though the path ahead is getting clearer. We’ve started learning a little programming in a language called Octave, which appears to be a graphing calculator on steroids, but it’s mostly to manipulate matrices, where we store data on all the values for the mathy part of this class. I understand that professor Ng has to introduce us into the really groundbreaking stuff gradually, once we have a strong command of the traditional ways that statistical modeling works, but right now I confess I feel more like I’m qualifying to be an actuary than a machine overlord.

My failure to complete the major, which I still regret, tuned me in to this peculiar divergence: You’re meant to be either a scientist or a fan of science, and you discover which one you are when the math gets rough.

The math is getting rough in this class. Matrix multiplication still twists my mind around, but it’s manageable with enough trial and error in the programming assignments. The larger lesson of the past week in Stanford’s machine learning course is that networks themselves possess a supreme intelligence, and developing one to treat your information well is not so different from allowing a computer to code itself. This is true of even very simple social networks in which no math need be applied.


The best analogy I have read in a long long time!! 

This brings us to the “lazy hiker principle.” The real name for this technique is the “gradient descent algorithm,” but like I mentioned last week, the machine-learning professors could use a little help in marketing their material.

The Sidney Awards 2011 - David Brooks (Part I)

Again this year I was able to read (& predict) only half the number of the essay's in the list; savouring the rest now. Complete list here:

Alan Lightman writes in “The Accidental Universe” in Harper’s that the existence of life is so incredibly improbable that there can be only two realistic explanations: Either there is a God who designed all this, or there exist many, many different universes, a vast majority of which are lifeless. Many physicists are gravitating to the latter theory. Our universe is just one of many. The universal laws of physics aren’t really universal. They are just the arbitrary arrangements that happen to prevail in our own little universe.

A Noble Laureate In The Waiting - Reinventing Education With Khan Academy & AI Class

It's been an honor to be a student of the first batch of AI Class and ML Class; a mind-boggling 10 week mental boot camp. I have learned so much in the past few weeks that it will be a long long time before I get to comprehend all these cumulative knowledge.

These guys have redefined education and there is probably a noble prize in the waiting. Last century, Norman Borlaugh saved billion of lives from starvation. These guys are the Borlaugh of this century; educating million minds out of scientific illiteracy (age no bar). Great work !!



The book that inspired me to join the AI class:

• The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne 

Books I am currently reading (learning):

• Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (3rd Edition) by Peter Norvig & Stuart Russell
• Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles Eric Leiserson & others

Alex Tabarrok's post which made me join the course:

• Coming Education Revolution - Thank you Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen for Marginal Revolution; you guys have been my purveyors of knowledge. 

"Stanford’s ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course will be offered free to anyone online this fall. The course will be taught by SebastianThrun (Stanford) and PeterNorvig (Google, Director of Research), who expect to deal with the historically large course size using tools like Google Moderator.
In 2003, I argued that professors were becoming obsolete, giving a 10 to 20 year time for a big move to online education. Later, I pointed out that the market was moving towards superstar teachers, who teach hundreds at a time or even thousands online. Today, we have the Khan Academy, a huge increase in online education, electronic textbooks and peer grading systems and highly successful superstar teachers with Michael Sandel and his popular course Justice, serving as example number one."

Consequences of attending these classes:

• Max officially hates Andrew, Sebastian & Peter for cutting down on his play time.
• Bought a Roomba vacuum cleaner and have already developed a profound respect for it. 
• My reading habits have dropped exponentially. 
• I feel lousy still driving my grey Prius (Google driver-less car was a grey Prius and here I am still driving it in the notorious NJ traffic). 
• It's been a humbling experience - made me realize first hand how much I don't know.
• It's been a humiliating experience - made me realize how difficult it is to learn something new even if I am good at something else.  I spent the entire thanksgiving weekend trying to understand particle filters. There is a very good chance that I wouldn't forget this thanksgiving until my last breathe.
• Most importantly the discussion forums has been a power house of ideas, debates, frustrations, fights, humor et al., a quasi-renaissance in itself. 
• For the n-th time, I have started looking at the world around me in a completely different perspective. 
• Bottom-line, in the past few weeks, I have been living that famous words of Leonardo da Vinci - "The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding."
• But yet there is that little voice inside me keeps reminding of another important words of wisdom from him... "I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."

Sebastian Thrun, AI class professor's TED talk on google driverless cars:



List of new online "free" courses offered by Stanford starting January 2012. Sign-up now!! I feel like a kid in a candy story :-)

• CS 101 by Nick Parlante @ cs101-class.org
• Natural Language Processing by Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning @ nlp-class.org
• Software Engineering for SAAS by Armando Fox and David Patterson @ saas-class.org
• Human-Computer Interfaces by Scott Klemmer @ hci-class.org
• Game Theory by Matthew Jackson and Yoav Shoham @ game-theory-class.org
• Probabilistic Graphical Models by Daphne Koller @ pgm-class.org
• Machine Learning by Andrew Ng @ jan2012.ml-class.org
• The Lean Launchpad by Steve Blank @ launchpad-class.org
• Technology Entrepreneurship by Chuck Eesley @ entrepreneur-class.org
• Design and Analysis of Algorithms by Tim Roughgarden @ www.algo-class.org
• Cryptography by Dan Boneh @ crypto-class.org 

A Simple Introduction To Bayes Theory

"The essence of the Bayesian approach is to provide a mathematical rule explaining how you should change your existing beliefs in the light of new evidence. In other words, it allows scientists to combine new data with their existing knowledge or expertise. The canonical example is to imagine that a precocious newborn observes his first sunset, and wonders whether the sun will rise again or not. He assigns equal prior probabilities to both possible outcomes, and represents this by placing one white and one black marble into a bag. The following day, when the sun rises, the child places another white marble in the bag. The probability that a marble plucked randomly from the bag will be white (ie, the child's degree of belief in future sunrises) has thus gone from a half to two-thirds. After sunrise the next day, the child adds another white marble, and the probability (and thus the degree of belief) goes from two-thirds to three-quarters. And so on. Gradually, the initial belief that the sun is just as likely as not to rise each morning is modified to become a near-certainty that the sun will always rise"

- More Here

What I've Been Reading

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne. Eloquent prose sans the technical jargon makes this an easy and inspiring read.

Fascinating and mind boggling history and application of Baye's Theorem from WII to every conceivable field which includes nuclear deterrence, H bomb accidents, social science studies, insurance industry (actuaries), astronomy, airline safety, medical research (lung cancer, heart attacks etc), presidential elections (FiveThirtyEight.com), submarines, coast guards in their search and rescue operations, fisheries, sports, ecology, psychology, coal mining safety procedures, genome sequencing, zillions of software (netflix to google) and of course economics, and neuroscience, and many more to come. Human brain is indeed Bayesian.

In the movie Training Day, Denzel Washington gives a brilliant piece to advice to Ethan Hawke which euphemistically goes something like this...  "Learn this shit brother, it will save your life one day."

Mastering probability is mandatory to step into the world of artificial intelligence, which is directly proportional to making a decent living this century. Probability probably would be the best bet to step out of the technological unemployment or great stagnation or whatever we want to name this jobless "growth". 

"Because humans can never know everything with certainty, probability is the mathematical expression of our ignorance: We owe to the frailty of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, namely the science of chance or probabilities."

"As long as you are set that the probability is going to be zero, then nothing's going to change your mind. If you have decided that the sun rises each morning because it has always done so in the past, nothing is going to change your mind except one morning when the sun fails to appear."         
 - Albert Madansky on Black Swans.

"If someone attaches a prior probability of zero to the hypothesis that moon is made of green cheese, then whole armies of astronauts coming back bearing green cheese cannot convince him."
- Dennis Lindley

"A good Bayesian finds himself carrying an umbrella on many days when it does not rain."
- Martin S. Feldstein

"Far better an approximate answer to the right question... than an exact answer to the wrong question."   
- John Tukey

"Bayes' rule is influential in ways its pioneers could never have envisioned. Neither Bayes nor Laplace recognized a fundamental consequence of their approach, that the accumulation of data makes open-minded observers come to agreement and converge on the truth."   
- Robert E. Kass of Carnegie Mellon

"I am not annoyed with Bayesian arguments per se; but with some of the Bayesians. Discarding Bayesian techniques would be a real mistake; trying to use them everywhere, however, would in my judgement, be a considerably greater mistake. The issue of knowing when and where. The greatest danger I see from Bayesian analysis stems from the belief that everything that is important can be stuffed into a single quantitative framework."
- John Tukey

Excellent introduction to be became a Bayesian.



and there is always the ever reliable KhanAcademy to learn probability from the  basics.

Prospect Theory - A Lesson

An educational post - Prospect Theory: A Framework for Understanding Cognitive Biases; must read:

"Imagine a prospect theory agent - let's call him Prospero - trying to decide whether or not to buy an hurricane insurance policy costing $5000/year. Prospero owns assets worth $10,000, and estimates a 50%/year chance of a hurricane destroying his assets; to make things simple, he will be moving in one year and so need not consider the future. Under expected utility theory, he should feel neutral about the policy.


Under prospect theory, he first sets a frame in which to consider the decision; his current state is a natural frame, so we'll go with that. 


We see on the left-hand graph that an objective $10,000 loss feels like a $5,000 loss, and an objective $5000 loss feels like a $4000 loss. And we see on the right-hand graph that a 50% probability feels like a 40% probability.


Now Prospero's choice is a certain $4000 loss if he buys the insurance, versus a 40% chance of a $5000 loss if he doesn't. Buying has a subjective expected utility of -$4000; not buying has a subjective expected utility of -$2000. So Prospero decisively rejects the insurance.


But suppose Prospero is fatalistic; he views his assets as already having been blown away. Here he might choose a different frame: the frame in which he starts with zero assets, and anything beyond that is viewed as a gain.


Since the gain half of the value function levels off more quickly than the loss half, $5000 is now subjectively worth $3000, and $10000 is now subjectively worth $3500.


Here he must choose between a certain gain of $5000 and a 50% chance of gaining $10000. Expected utility gives the same result as before, obviously. In prospect theory, he chooses between a certain subjective gain of $3000 and a 40% chance of gaining $3500. The insurance gives him subjective expected utility of $3000, and rejecting it gives him subjective expected utility of $1400.


All of a sudden Prospero wants the insurance."

Socratic Citizenship

Watch it on Academic Earth

What I've been Reading

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

LOVED IT!! Even the footnotes oozes with brilliance - "The best way to spot a charlatan: someone (like a consultant or a stock broker) who tells you what to do instead of what not to do."

For Cable News addicts: Sound bites loses information; aphorism gains.

few keepers...

• They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status -- but rarely for your wisdom.
• There are two type of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.
• The suckers trap is when you focus on what you know and what other don't know. rather than the reverse.
• True humility is when you can surprise yourself more than others; the rest is either shyness or good marketing.
• Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
• Conscious ignorance, if you can practice it, expands your world; it can make things infinite.
• I suspect that they put Socrates to death because there is something terribly unattractive, alienating, and nonhuman in thinking with too much clarity.
• The traits I respect are erudition and the courage to stand up when half-men are afraid for their reputation. Any idiot can be intelligent.
• We find it to be extremely bad taste for individuals to boast of their accomplishments; but when countries do so we call it "national pride."
• The classical man's worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man's worst fear is just death.

Udemy: A Free Online University for All

This is fascinating !! - University link here (via here):

"There are millions of experts everywhere, and we provide them with the tools to share their knowledge online. Udemy gives instructors the ability to use video, PowerPoint, articles, and blog posts to build rich courses. They can even host virtual conferences with students. People spend $9 billion on casual learning each year, and another $20 billion on continuing and professional education. We can catalyze that market to move online, and provide forums that create in-depth learning experiences about everything from Thai cooking to calculus to Esperanto. We launched in May 2010 and more than 2,000 courses have been created. We're introducing a pay platform so our instructors can decide if they want to charge for their courses, but we expect 80% will remain free. The education industry is very top-down, but this has the power to change that."