Tag: psychology

An Intelligible Title

The amount of noise in the system seems to be at an all-time high right now. I wonder if this is just an externalization of what is going on inside my brain or the world is really in a bad shape right now. Almost everyone around me physically and virtually seems to be doing and thinking about things incorrectly. Unfortunately, the time is limited for everyone. The ultimate question is how does one make the most of this limited time?

What does approximately 900 hours of meditation teach one? I don’t know if there is some hidden meaning that will be unravelled after a given amount of time but I’m sure when I get to a point when the feeling won’t be one of sudden realization. Similar to the feeling after any hard endeavor there is a feeling of realization to which one can’t pin-point to and say that “here, this is when things started to make sense“. I think that my takeaway is going to be nothing special but something understood already like this that things eventually pass and that this too shall pass. At the very least I can say that now when I sit down to practice I sometimes instantaneously shift into a frame of mind which disassociates me from my physical presence. This seems mystical but it is not. It is probably most similar to how I feel when I am in a state of extreme pain, sadness or joy.

Looking at the internet and talking to friends and family it seems like people are lost and everyone is grasping at whatever seams seem to give them a semblance of meaning. Some find meaning in family, others follow people they admire for their lifestyles, their business, or some other aspect of their life. Net-net people are not sure about what their life should mean and they are grasping at things that help them give their lives some meaning.

I think first-principles can help in this case but one can quickly turn nihilistic if you look at things too objectively. I think you have to consciously pepper in some amount of emotion while being very conscious and cognizant that you’ve done that. One has to be mindful about how they look at things, events, occurrences, and situations around themselves. At any moment life will spin out of control. Those things that you hold very personal and close to your heart will disappear and shatter, what will all these things mean then? These might be the things that you expect are the things that are closest to your heart or you might not have realized that they were important to you. Is your brain as noisy as well?

The Tragedy of the Commons and Decentralization

The post yesterday wasn’t up to the mark. Unfortunately, I feel like I was probably under the influence when I wrote it. The truth is that I was not. That would be a romantic idea of how a blog or book could be written. The fact is that I was just under the influence of the noise that there exists because of the world around me.

What should be the public policy to regulate the dissemination of information? In my opinion, the answer to that question can come either from an expert or simply a person who is observant about the world around them. However one needs to be mindful of all the factors and drivers of such a decision. This is the question about a policy for a policy. As someone recently told me it’s not a unitary or binarily dimensioned problem but rather a multidimensional problem. That is a very accurate description of many challenges that need to be solved in the world today. Identification of those factors that make the problem multidimensional should be step one of problem-solving. That also means defining the problem so that it could be understood by someone not familiar with the subject. This is almost thinking like a consultant. Perhaps a part of me is happy about this realization.

The topic in question is ‘the dissemination of information.’ The first question that comes to mind is dissemination to whom? Is it the people of the nation, is it the people in authority who may or may not have a certain political affiliation (‘always‘ would be the answer to that wonderment). Dissemination for the purposes of my examination here will be the spread of information to the common public. Even within the common public, it is specifically that part of the population that lacks a sense of determination. I particularly call it determination because not only does that take some sort of fortitude but also a sense and skill of separating what needs to be evaluated from what doesn’t. In some sections of the audience reading this that specification could be applied in a meta way on this topic and one could almost apply that filter to the very question that I raised.

In order to understand public policy one almost needs to understand what impact certain regulations or laws can potentially have on the public. If not in a prolonged sense of time at least in the near future. That understanding in itself needs the discernment of people and systems. Interactions of these drivers and an understanding of those drivers independently. Maybe not an exhaustive understanding of Jungian and Freudian psychology but just what drives people to behave a certain way. The outcomes that people desire are another topic of consideration.

I am afraid to introduce any topic in most discussions because I find that people lack a basic understanding of most things. This of course seems very egoistic of me but here I will also admit that there are others with whom I would very much engage in such debate very willingly as well. Most of the people that I pull into a debate wither away at the slightest thought of what it would mean if they were wrong about the position they hold. I, on the other hand, enter into conversations with the utmost confidence in my abilities to derive a conclusion from a given set of facts. My position might be incorrect due to the number of facts that I have taken into consideration but that understanding can always be updated and I am conscious of that result. Drawing conclusions is not the hard part for me. Neither is the emotional turmoil of being caught on the ‘wrong’ side of the debate.

So how does all this relate to the dissemination of information? I many times have experienced people failing to draw conclusions from a given set of facts. It is not the failure of their awareness but the failure to be curious or draw conclusions once those facts come to light during a conversation. This leaves me with a sense of concern about people deriving accurate conclusions from the information when presented to them. This concern was raised out of something that is now also a promise of the decentralization movement. The decentralization of information, technology, and resources among other things. However, I think it’s a valid question to ask – Is decentralization of information a good thing or bad when one is aware about ‘the tragedy of the commons’. A resource of any type gets optimized for individual consumption when released to the commons. This conversation will continue, perhaps for a few more units of measurable time in my head, at the very least.