The Seinfeld Rules of Lies & Self-Concept Maintenance Theory

Here is George’s list of 14 justified lies:

1. It’s not a lie if you believe it.
2. It’s not a lie if it doesn’t help you.
3. It’s not a lie if it hurts you.
4. It’s not a lie if it helps someone else.
5. It’s not a lie if it doesn’t hurt someone else.
6. It’s not a lie if everyone expects you to lie.
7. It’s not a lie if the other person knows the truth.
8. It’s not a lie if nobody can prove it.
9. It’s not a lie if you don’t get caught.
10. It’s not a lie if you don’t need to tell another lie to cover it up.
11. It’s not a lie if you were crossing your fingers.
12. It’s not a lie if you proceed to make it true.
13. It’s not a lie if nobody heard you say it.
14. It’s not a lie if nobody cares.

Mazar, Amir and Ariely (2008) put forward a theory of dishonesty—individuals behave dishonestly enough to profit but honestly enough to maintain a sense of their own integrity. This is what they called the ‘self-concept maintenance theory’ and possibly explains Costanza’s rationalization.

At the end of our survey we asked participants to indicate what other situations they wouldn’t consider lying, and they came up with a lot of creative suggestions such as “It is not a lie if you miss the important details”, “It is not a lie if it is a joke or an irony”, “It is not a lie if it makes someone happy” and “It is not a lie if your salary or job depends on it.” Everyone could come up with at least one or two lies that are justified! Can you?

- More Here

Buddhist Philosophy is Full of Contradictions. Now Modern Logic is Learning Why that Might be a Good Thing

 Let’s start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

We know that the catuskoti was in the air because of certain questions that people asked the Buddha, in exchanges that come down to us in the sutras. Questions such as: what happens to enlightened people after they die? It was commonly assumed that an unenlightened person would keep being reborn, but the whole point of enlightenment was to get out of this vicious circle. And then what? Did you exist, not, both or neither? The Buddha’s disciples clearly expected him to endorse one and only one of these possibilities. This, it appears, was just how people thought.

That is why Western thinkers – even those sympathetic to Buddhist thought – have struggled to grasp how something such as the catuskoti might be possible. Never mind a third not being given, here was a fourth – and that fourth was itself a contradiction. How to make sense of that?

Well, contemporary developments in mathematical logic show exactly how to do it. In fact, it’s not hard at all.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The world clings to its old mental picture of the stock market because it’s comforting; because it’s so hard to draw a picture of what has replaced it; and because the few people able to draw it for you have no interest in doing so.

The markets were now run by technology, but the technologists were still treated like tools. Nobody bothered to explain the business to them, but they were forced to adapt to its demands and exposed to its failures—which was, perhaps, why there had been so many more conspicuous failures.

- Michael Lewis, Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt

Tweetcred - Can an Algorithm Solve Twitter's Credibility Problem?

The Twitter commons have a credibility problem, and, in the age of “big data,” all problems require an elegant, algorithmic solution. Last week, a group of researchers at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (Q.C.R.I.) and the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (I.I.I.T.), in Delhi, India, released what could be a partial fix. Tweetcred, a new extension for the Chrome browser, bills itself as a “real-time, web-based system to assess credibility of content on Twitter.” When you install Tweetcred, it appends a “credibility ranking” to all of the tweets in your feed, when viewed on twitter.com. Each tweet’s rating, from one to seven, is represented by little blue starbursts next to the user’s name, almost like a Yelp rating. The program learns over time, and users can give tweets their own ratings to help it become more accurate.

Tweetcred is built on insights that researchers have gained from studying massive databases of tweets surrounding major news events. In 2012, the I.I.I.T. researcher Aditi Gupta analyzed more than thirty-five million tweets from fourteen major news events during 2011, ranging from the U.K. riots to Steve Jobs’s resignation to the uprising in Libya. Gupta wanted to see if she could use certain characteristics of a tweet to predict its credibility. Human analysts ranked the credibility of sample tweets in the database. Gupta then correlated the tweets’ score with a number of variables to see of what made a Credible Tweet: tweet length, whether the tweet included a U.R.L., the number of followers of the user who tweeted it, and so on.

She found, for example, that longer tweets were more credible, whereas tweets with swear words were, unsurprisingly, less credible. Tweets with pronouns were less credible because, Gupta writes, “Tweets that contain information or are reporting facts about the event are impersonal in nature.” From these results, Gupta developed an algorithm that could be used to automatically determine a tweet’s credibility, much as Google’s PageRank judges a Web site’s relative importance. Tweetcred pairs Gupta’s research with findings from a team that conducted a similar study of tweets surrounding the spread of rumors following the 2010 Chile earthquake. The Tweetcred algorithm uses forty-five different characteristics to calculate its credibility score.

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What Would Happen If Everyone In The World Gave Up Meat

• At least one research team has run the numbers on what global veganism would mean for the planet. In 2009 researchers from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency published their projections of the greenhouse gas consequences if humanity came to eat less meat, no meat, or no animal products at all. The researchers predicted that universal veganism would reduce agriculture-related carbon emissions by 17 percent, methane emissions by 24 percent, and nitrous oxide emissions by 21 percent by 2050.
• A second major ramification of global vegetarianism would be expanses of new land available. Currently, grazing land for ruminants—cows and their kin—accounts for a staggering 26 percent of the world’s ice-free land surface. The Dutch scientists predict that 2.7 billion hectares (about 10.4 million square miles) of that grazing land would be freed up by global vegetarianism, along with 100 million hectares (about 386,000 square miles) of land that’s currently used to grow crops for livestock.
• A third major ramification of global vegetarianism would be that the risk of antibiotic-resistant infections would plummet. Currently, the routine use of antibiotics in animal farming to promote weight gain and prevent illness in unsanitary conditions is a major contributor to antibiotic resistance. Last year the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that at least 2 million Americans fall ill from antibiotic-resistant pathogens every year and declared that “much of antibiotic use in animals is unnecessary and inappropriate and makes everyone less safe.”

 - More Here

Quote of the Day

It is clear to you, I am sure, Lucilius, that no man can live a happy life, or even a supportable life, without the study of wisdom; you know also that a happy life is reached when our wisdom is brought to completion, but that life is at least endurable even when our wisdom is only begun. This idea, however, clear though it is, must be strengthened and implanted more deeply by daily reflection; it is more important for you to keep the resolutions you have already made than to go on and make noble ones. You must persevere, must develop new strength by continuous study, until that which is only a good inclination becomes a good settled purpose.

- Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius

What I've Been Reading

The One Hour China Book: Two Peking University Professors Explain All of China Business in Six Short Stories by Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel. Excellent read sans any bias; an hour well spent.

Our big assertion is that six mega-trends are driving most of China’s business today – and its interaction with the West. This is our simple framework. If you remember one thing from this book, it should be this chart.

Urbanization:
If you are building cities at a breakneck pace against a huge urbanization inflow, sometimes your supply gets ahead of your demand. That, plus some real estate speculation, gets you a ghost city. And sometimes your demand gets ahead of your supply and you get congestion (e.g., crowded Beijing). Sometimes you get it about right (e.g., Shenzhen). These things should be expected and are not as significant as newspaper headlines would have you believe.

Manufacturing Scale:
This is what investors call economies of scale. It is the point when you are so much larger than your competitors, relative to the market, that you can outspend them on research, factories, fixed assets, marketing and other fixed costs. It’s the point where you are very difficult to dislodge as the leader due to your scale. It’s what Warren Buffett calls the “survival of the fattest.” What we see in China today is exceptionally large manufacturing scale that is actually creating a stronger and stronger competitive advantage over time.

Rising Chinese Consumers:
Because when you look at actual incomes, it is clear that the future of the global economy is China and Asia. Middle class incomes in Asia will dwarf everything else. Forget Latin America (no offense). Forget Africa (same). It is the middle class of Asia that is the biggest economic growth engine going forward – similar to how the American middle class was the growth engine of the past century. Over the next 15 years, Asia will go from 20 percent to 66 percent of the world’s middle class.

Money and Lots of it:
The mega-trend here is not just the amount of money. It is the volume, efficiency and sophistication with which it moves within China. We are interested in the financial architecture itself. And how money moves between projects, companies and financial institutions. Also, in light of recent credit concerns, the system’s stability is a big question.

Ask a simple question like “who controls the Bank of China?” This should be a simple question to answer. Bank of China is, after all, publicly traded. It is certainly run like a banking corporation. And we know who the managers and shareholders are. However, it turns out the CEO does not really report to the shareholders and is not actually appointed by them. He is chosen by the Organization Department of the Communist Party, which technically owns nothing.


The Chinese Internet:
For example, Chinese has already replaced English as the primary language of the Internet. Another is that the money involved has become very large. Chinese e-commerce will likely surpass US e-commerce in total dollar terms within the next two to three years.

It’s not a coincidence that China was the first country to designate Internet addiction as a disease.

Forrester Research classified 47 percent of the online Chinese population as “creators”, meaning they actively create their own content online (blogs, web pages, videos, articles etc.). In comparison, only 21 percent of US Internet users create such online content.

The Brainpower Behemoth:

Chinese children often start their formal education at age two. Having tutors and taking extra classes on Saturdays is the norm. Becoming fluent in English is a given. And math and science skills are all far better than in the West. Right up until entering college, the whole system is very effective at developing valuable skills. 

There is, however, a lot of valid criticism that this system is too demanding. But this is not just a result of the educational system. It’s cultural. It’s historical. It’s something you see in family after family. Education in China is aggressively sought after and highly respected. Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Peking University High School said, “Chinese students love learning. They go to class and they have a real attitude that ‘education can change my life.” 

This is, of course, a big generalization. But some generalities are true and this is one of them. Underestimate it at your own peril.

Quote of the Day

Humanity amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure— which, and not labor, is the aim of man— or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight.

-  Oscar Wilde, The Soul Of Man Under Socialism

Decoding 4008-517-517.com

Why the preference for digits over letters? It mostly has to do with ease of memorization. To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for “Internet,” 网络, is spelled wangluo in pinyin). And yes, Arabic numerals (1-2-3) are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman alphabet (A-B-C). But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than letters, especially those who didn’t go to college. To many, “Hotmail.com” might as well be Cyrillic.

This kind of number-language has become an infinitely malleable shorthand among Chinese web users: 1 means “want,” 2 means “love,” 4 means “dead” or “world” or “is,” 5 means “I,” 7 means “wife” or “eat,” 8 means “get rich” or “not,” and 9 means “long time” or “alcohol.” The numbers 5201314, for example, mean 我爱你一生一世,or “I will love you forever”; 0748 means “go die”; and 687 means “I’m sorry.” (See here for more examples.) Chinese has plenty of other number-based slang, such as erbaiwu, or “250,” which means “idiot,” or “38,” pronounced sanba, which means “bitch.” And of course there’s the association of certain numbers with good or bad luck, and the subsequent demand for addresses and phone numbers with lots of 8s (“get rich”) and minimal 4s (“die”). Back in 2003, a Chinese airline paid $280,000 for the phone number 88888888.

- More Here

How Forests Think

Review of the new book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn:

Semiosis is at the centre of Kohn’s framework for explaining how the forest “thinks”. Kohn relies heavily on Charles Peirce’s notion that signs should be defined broadly to include those with and those without linguistic properties. Peirce’s tripartite division of signs is well known. Icons are signs of likeness, reflecting the properties of that to which they refer, in the way that a photograph is – or as the sound tsupu does, representing a peccary who slips into a pool of water in the forest. (Kohn writes: “Once I tell people what tsupu means, they often experience a sudden feel for its meaning: ‘Oh, of course, tsupu!’”) Indices, by contrast, point to something else, as when a palm tree crashes down in the forest and a monkey understands that something dangerous may be happening and that it needs to move. All life, for Kohn, participates in icons and indices, whereas the third type of sign – symbols – involve convention and are unique to humans. When we link signs with all of life, we break out beyond “the conflation of representation with language” that characterizes most of anthropology and even “posthuman approaches that seek to dissolve the boundaries that have been erected to construe humans as separate from the rest of the world”.

The semiotic framework grounds Kohn’s conclusion that thinking goes on not only where there is language, which, following the anthropologist Terence Deacon, is “an emergent dynamic” but one that deserves no special privilege. The forest around Ávila “thinks”, and not because of human agency: “The world beyond the human is not a meaningless one made meaningful by humans”, Kohn argues. “Rather mean-ings – means-end relations, strivings, purposes, telos, intentions, functions and significance – emerge in a world of living thoughts . . . . These forests house other emergent loci of mean-ings, ones that do not necessarily revolve around, or originate with, humans. This is what I’m getting at when I say that forests think.”