23.11.06 The only reason we exist is because we have been reproduced; existence implies reproduction. We are vehicles for perpetuating genetic material and the only reason we exist is because of replication. If you draw any meaning without that fact you risk manufacturing absurdity through false context. Consequently, it only makes sense that so many individual decisions, such as self-perpetuation and self-magnification, are based on that fundamental (genetic) value.

The Lottery Logic

29.08.04 Lotteries appeal to a broad spectrum of the populace because no element of skill is required to play, unlike gambling games such as poker or craps that often do. Casino gambling games have far more favorable odds to the player, yet lotteries never lack for customers to buy the tickets. Gambling is different than the lottery in another way because no one seriously walks into a casino thinking they'll break the bank and walk out millionaires, yet most every lottery player actually does think this or they wouldn’t play. Indeed, the larger the payouts the more people buy tickets even as the statistical chances of winning decline! Even more ironic is the fact that if the lottery is done legally the results are completely random and completely unpredictable, yet the lottery playing public still expends an inordinate amount of effort on concocting predictive methodologies! Perhaps gambling is the new religion?

No one would run a lottery if they didn’t turn a profit from it. Fiscal Year 2003 sales by American state indicate that per capita lottery ticket sales vary from $1,194 in Rhode Island at the high end, down to an average of only $37 spent per person in Montana. But make no mistake, the state lottery is a multi-billion dollar industry. New York State made $1,780,360,000 in profit during 2003 on total lottery ticket sales of $5,395,960,000. To put this in perspective, the entire state of Nevada's casinos generated $9.6 billion in 2001. The majority of the profits from the public’s voracious appetite for lottery tickets are generally spent on education and other social services to deflect from moral arguments against gambling and this highly profitable monopoly that government exercises.

The odds of winning any given lottery game vary widely depending on the numbers in the pool, the required set of winning numbers, the order if any and so on. As an example given a pool of 50 numbers to pick from and the winning requirement of choosing all six numbers regardless of order the chances of winning are: 50/6 * 49/5 * 48/4 * 47/3 * 46/2 * 45/1 = 15,890,700:1. To put it another way, with one ticket you have 15,890,699 different ways of losing the jackpot! If you were to purchase 10 tickets all with different numbers in this same game your chances of winning (the jackpot) are not appreciably better, just 1 in 15,890,690. To guarantee winning one would have to purchase 15,890,700 tickets, but it’s unlikely that any given lottery would even issue that many tickets for one game. Besides, even at only a dollar a ticket the payout probably wouldn’t cover the cost of buying the tickets, and if you already have $15 million then why are you playing the lottery anyway?!

The marketing slogans tell us, "you can’t win unless you play", but buying more tickets does not increase the likelihood of winning unless it's for the same round. In other words, each game drawing is a completely discrete set with absolutely no bearing on any other – if you lost the last three (or 300) games you are no more likely to win the fourth.

So what about the argument that ‘someone has to win’ (and why can’t it be me)? It’s true that many people win in the lottery, but that doesn’t mean they get the multi-million dollar jackpot, rather $10, $20, $50 for a few correct numbers probably doesn’t even recoup the amount spent buying the tickets as evidenced by the per-capita averages mentioned before. The lottery, even more so than traditional casino gambling, is intentionally designed to create many, many losers and only a very few big winners, just enough to generate a motivated customer base and still remain very lucrative for the operator. For details on how the payouts are actually done read How Lotteries Work, Annual Payments.

I have to admire the insidiousness of the jackpot state lottery and how it plays upon the irrational weakness of the human mind.  As seemingly illogical as lottery behavior seems it’s rooted in the psychology of risk versus reward, the initial outlay is deemed an acceptable risk given the magnitude of the potential jackpot. The statistical facts are simply too large and abstract to have any significance to the average individual in making their decision. Crafty. Call me a cynic but the state lottery seems like Capitalism’s best defense and antidote against Marxist machinations because it sates the greed need without any fundamental shift in wealth or progressive changes to society. Regardless of the true intent, in practice the multi-million dollar lottery may well be the ultimate tool for pacifying the public's materialistic desires - it is the state's insurance against revolution.
Feelin’ lucky?

Something From Nothing (1/1=0+1)

October 2004

Random

13.07.02 Rational decision making processes are excellent means of arriving at accurate conclusions, but not always the best strategy within social interactions. This is because being rational means being predictable and being predictable means able to be exploited by a cunning opponent.

In this case random decisions are often superior to rationally planned ones, what's referred to as a mixed strategy in game theory. Irrational, unpredictable decision making would seem to be a luxury that only sentient beings (or a programmable computer) can enjoy. Even if the decision of an animal may seem irrational from our observational position this is never actually the case. The animal may be acting upon flawed or incomplete information to make a (poor) decision but it is nonetheless always, barring brain damage, perfectly rational.

Missing Memory or ...uh what was I talking about?

13.04.01 A noticeable inability to stay on task, to focus and get the job done is characteristic of modern living. Indeed the patience and concentration needed to see any strategic plan to fruition is largely lacking. My contemporaries seem quite unable to sit down and carry an unpleasant task from start to finish, or indeed any lengthy task for that matter. [Me I'm like a laser beam I focus until it's vaporized, usually unable to tear away until the task is completed like some kind of obsessive perfectionist. But that's perhaps why I notice this in the first place.]

Much of it I blame on television and similar cultural inculcations of incoherence, rapidity of alternating thoughts and the debasement of concentration. But also responsible is our cultural obsession with the chronological regimentation of daily life. And actually this trend is increasingly well documented.

Serious scientific researchers are discovering that modern people are losing memory, and the more computer-oriented the greater this loss is, likely due to the chronic use of planners and computerized appendages to organize life. And I've seen it too at work and elsewhere, often blamed on age or hectic schedule. I'm sure you've observed it as well if you stop to think about it, people forgetting because of lack of impetus for remembering because the machines do all the remembering for us. It's not a permanent disability just an atrophy of skills due to lack of exercise, but still no less serious.

Before writing, human memory was impeccable by our present standards. The equivalent of entire books of stories, rules, laws, and folklore were maintained solely in the mind. Hearing, learning and memory were exceptionally interlinked. For example, 1,000 years ago at Lögsögumaðr, the president of the Icelandic Althing, had the task to recite the entire code of law from memory. In other words, the Lögsögumaðr had to listen to the entire code of law spoken by the outgoing office holder, remember it in entirety, and then recite without flaw when needed months or years later. Today people are lost after a 15 second commercial! Don't tell me people are smarter today than 1,000 years ago! More educated perhaps but not more intelligent.

It's been stated that television, and to a lesser extent the Internet, are beneficial in training nonlinear thought processes. Or more succinctly, the belief is that rapid, alternating mental associations create fast thinkers, a necessary skill in our changing world. I contend this is just the apologist's position for the clearly detrimental effects of this affront to the critical ability to concentrate on singular issues until resolution. The myth of the new era, that because technology generates sudden changes that somehow every old rule and law of life is rendered spurious. Now we remember by proxy through technology from writing notes to electronic organizers to alarm watches. Yet much of the apparent advantage is illusory, for while it spreads memes and thoughts more rapidly, the duration with which those thoughts stay in the mind is weakened to the point of creating mnemonic invalids.

Living by the clock is unhealthy and unnatural, I don't recommend it and I certainly avoid practicing it myself; I have no cell-phone, no pager and no PDA (like an IPAQ). And at the price of seeming even more didactic than I probably already do, I would urge you to ditch the digital dog leashes too, if at all possible. Some people can't, or think they can't afford to do without, but they'll eventually realize even if they can't remember why, that an over-reliance on machines for mental processing only makes the individual weaker and less capable of productive thought and reason. The people that succeed in life aren't the ones that can entertain six independent thoughts a minute but the ones that can hold onto (the right) one long enough to do something with it. Success has two paths, dumb luck and long term planning, and for most of our TV-addled neighbors their only hope is dumb luck.

Y2K - Computers: 1, Humans: 0

Considering the fantastic hype and fear associated with the Y2K computer problem it seems somewhat surprising that it just totally drops off the radar screens come January 2. I think the authorities that magnified its significance want their faulty reasoning to be quickly forgotten and everybody else is too busy getting on with life.

Well, I’m not going to let it go away that easily. I knew people that were seriously concerned, even panicked, over what they felt was going to be a major crisis. People ready to hide behind the mattress with a 12-guage pointed at the front door. And I’m even talking about people in the (computer) industry that probably should have known better. But that wasn’t the only popular concern a lot of people feared Armageddon, global panics, nuclear war, the second coming of Jesus, which makes the lack of closure on the issue all the more glaring.

Personally, I felt that the U$ would come out fine but was more concerned about foreign nations like Japan or Russia. Not too many analysts really believed that nothing at all would happen, which is essentially what happened – or more accurately didn’t happen. Ironically the U$ appears to have been the worst hit (so far) given the failure of a military satellite system.

But when you add it all up I think it becomes increasingly clear that computers are more reliable than we give them credit for, and when errors do creep in inevitably it’s due to the humans. It’s the forgotten password or the null code, the hacker breaking into the network, and the flawed software. Computers do whatever they're told to do and will give the same answer over and over again – that's what they're intended for. If you program a computer to tell you 1+1=5 and then get mad at the incorrect arithmetic, who’s the real fool here? And of course who gets the blame for everything going wrong - the machine. Until our technology progresses to the point where computers are building other computers or writing code and neural networks are ‘thinking’ using non-linear algorithms, our computers are fairly reliable things - like a hammer or a screwdriver almost too dumb to break (but I’m over-simplifying).

I don’t feel that a computer-organized society is necessarily evil. It’s the people that control those computer systems that I worry about. A computer is a predictable system whereas people have weaknesses, loyalties, ulterior motives, emotions; the list goes on and on. I mean what would you rather trust your life to - a dialysis machine or some underpaid and overworked nurse to show up every 30 minutes at your hospital bed?

The point is that our society already depends on machines and computers for life support, both literally and metaphorically speaking. Neo-Luddite's don’t have the right idea; it’s not an issue of turning back and refusing technology, it’s an issue of how are we going to use it? 

Everyone’s A Machine

02.08.98 All human behavior is rational and thus predictable. Why human behavior is rational and logical I‘m not sure, but it is and let me explain how.

Every action is based on input data (facts) and the individual judges the best course of action from this data, If one can control, or know the data ahead of time, then they can accurately predict the behavior; i.e. behaviorism. Even insane people are trying to act rationally; they just have faulty data processing. They follow the voices or other wayward forces that seem odd to us, but not to them. Aberrant behavior is just conditioned by experience. These individuals are acting rationally within the framework they grew up in.

From this conclusion I believe that any one's behavior can be changed, i.e. to make them less antisocial, but the time, effort and money required to do it may often be too great to be worth it, especially as the persons age increases. Skinner was on to something.

I think the most mysterious part is why people don’t act more randomly or irrationally in the first place? Maybe it’s just inefficient, and unnecessary? No need to confuse predators? All cultures value trust, so it's evolutionarily profitable to be honest and rational.

Sometimes I throw people curve balls and do things differently then they expect (either intentionally or usually just because it seems right to me at the time and not out of malicious intent). They either get very impatient or just act perplexed and try to argue; in other words I don’t always like to do what I say I’m going to do or what I planned to do. But this is because I overanalyze everything and never have enough datum to get a clear picture of the situation.

Anyway, most if not nearly all, people are very simple psychologically and they have been conditioned to fit in socially. This entails doing what the group does and obeying the common laws. My point is that even behavior that seems nonsensical or irrational to the shallow observer actually is very logical in the mind of that person. No one intentionally tries to act randomly or senselessly. Maybe it's the conquest of impulses or maybe just life in a mathematical world of logical causality.

Characteristics and Consequences of the Machine Society

23.10.96 & 05.07.09 The machine society has performed a brilliant production of holistic reductionism. Religion has become quantifiable under the money morality and the individual ego pleasure drive. Art, music, anything reflective of spiritual energy, has been the unfortunate sacrifice for digital success.

As the laws of scarcity exert pressure on our consumerist regime the machine society will become increasingly efficient in extracting useful value from the individual. All values are based upon the fundamental economic utility of the object, we waste because we can afford to -- it's cheaper to throw away then to reuse. We're charitable because we can afford to be. One might rightfully ask why haven’t we begun to explore and mine the Moon, Mars, or the asteroids its almost 2000?! Because given our current technology even if Fort Knox was on the Moon’s surface we couldn’t turn a profit getting it!

Our digital civilization is utterly predictable because it's totally utilitarian and rational. The maximum level of individual pleasure for the least economic expense. If the cost of gas reached point X then people would use public transportation because the personal pleasure of owning and driving their own car will be uneconomical. Essential modern civilization is the triumph of the economist.

Truly this realization is utterly depressing because it takes all the mystery and wonder out of pondering modern social evolution! Humanity has attained rational perfection, the apex of the industrial Revolution. The clockwork society, just what science strives for, a predictable model, a repetitive computerized universe that provides consistent responses for similar stimuli. For the year 2000 H.G. Wells is more applicable than Nietzsche, in fact a good analogy is the dominance of English philosophy over German. Rational-practical over ambitious spiritualism; Cecil Rhodes would be proud.

History has shown that what men want is often very unhealthy for them. The mechanistic civilization is ultimately self-destructive because it has no foresight; it exists in the hyper-practicality of the moment and bets future technology will solve the problems created by immediate living. We strip mine the mountains and bulldoze the forests, exploit and degrade all for the economy of selfishness.

As the cost of maintaining the digital society increase due to the waste of tactical planning, sacrifices must occur. Eventually governments, much like huge Multi-National Corporations (MNC's) will spin-off separate governments to maintain economic equilibrium. After power and wealth are rearranged, what then? Fifty more years of tactical economics of selfishness? Perhaps when personal pleasure is too costly spiritualism will return, reflected in resurgent culture and nationalism. A synthesis of the old rational money morality and the new (old) spiritualism morality will find expression. Individual energy will once again have value. What kind of social politics will evolve out of a morality of utilitarian expediency and a situation of resource scarcity in 2050? Biological efficiency, true positive evolution? Inevitably.

It must be remembered that civilization is the human desire for something they shouldn’t have: an escape from biological evolution. Civilization isn’t the peak of human excellence, it's a monument to the human ability to create a 'Garden of Eden', or a 'Tower of Babel'. Historically, biological progress comes from outside of, or despite, civilization. The irony is that human nature strives for evolutionary stagnation as a byproduct of Eden. The most advanced race will subsequently create Eden and evolve the least, and vice-versa. What kind of biological dynamic is going on here? Since the genes use the biological organism for reproduction maybe their greatest propagation success is when the security of civilization protects individuals. The genes resist evolutionary change and desire Eden for the largest numbers to be procreated.

Someday we may live on silicon chips. By copying our neural patterns and placing them within a computer not only would we attain immortality but omniscience and omnipresence of sorts as well.

When trapped in a loop and frustrated the wisest course of action is to pause and consider the outcome you're truly seeking. Separated from the immediacy of the situation, reevaluate the methods and actions you're employing to reach that outcome. What am I really trying to achieve here? Do I really need to do this? Or could I do something else instead and still achieve the same outcome?