The wet is floor

Capitalism and Supernanny lessons

2012-01-09T12:07:00.004+02:00

In a TV showcalled Supernanny, Jo Frost visits troubled parents and teaches them how to gettheir kids back in order. Usually, as you would expect of reality TV drama, thesituations look hopeless at first, but the Supernanny intervention gives theparents the tools they need to gain control of the situation at home. And thenthey lived happily ever after.

The would-bereality of the show aside, most of the episodes focus on pretty much the sameissues: the mother or father is unable to discipline the kids, resulting intotal chaos and mayhem at home. The kids punch the parents, beat each other up,throw stuff etc. The parents look like an ambushed pack of new recruits – they haveno idea what they’re doing and what they should do. The remedy is always thesame: teaching the parents to say NO to their child. No, you can’t do that. No,that’s wrong. No, you can’t have that.

What arethe parallels for our society? It seems to me that capitalism is one of the fewtruly global phenomena in our world. Capitalism is the system of distributingresources so that we can survive. Sounds like a mother to me. Our world, too,seems not too unlike a Supernanny visit to Crawley: the peace and quiet is continuouslypierced by screams of “But I WANT that!” The demands never end.

InSupernanny the solution is to teach the parents to discipline the kids. In oursystem that would be to teach the “mother” – capitalism – to tell us no at somepoint. The problem here lies at the heart of capitalism. It is a philosophy ofsaying yes always, when there’s enough wanting. If enough people in the worldwant purple apples, we’re soon enough going to have purple apples.

Thesolution in this case could be analogous to the Supernanny show: teach theparent to say no. In our case, that would be teaching capitalism to say no. Tosay no, when we want too much or wrong things.

Now, I don’tknow how to do that. A start could be including actual environmental costs inthe cost of products. But to take such schemes further would be very complicated.As an example, think of a burger. To an overweight person that burger is lessof a good choice than to a balanced-weight person. But to reflect this in thepricing seems impossible. There are infinite variables to take into account.

Unfortunately,we have no Supernanny to call on. There’s nobody to help us from the outside.There’s only us, and we have to take care of this mess ourselves.

Therefore,another alternative solution would be that we, the child in this situation,develop and learn to have more sensible wants. We could try do develop out ofthe phase in which we feel jealous of everything somebody else has and we don’t. We could try to learn to want “the rightthings”. That means wanting to want, or meta-wanting. But then again, I don’tknow how to do that either. Dammit.

Learning Narratives

2011-12-14T19:22:00.000+02:00

We humansare creators of stories, and learning makes no difference. Everytime I succeed –or fail – I receive some feedback about who I am. That feedback I use, often unconsciously,to create a narrative, or story, about who I am. This can sometimes createproblems: too many failures in a row at math and I might create a narrativeportraying me as a student, who is bad at math. If I start believing that I’mbad at math and therefore I failed, I’min the risky area. The problem is thisnarrative can become self-fulfilling. For if I failed, because I suck, thereseems to be little light regarding future tests. My inability of doing math startsto look like a static quality of myself. You can notice this happening if youhear me saying “oh, I’d so love to ace my next math test, but it’s hopeless - I’mjust bad at math”.

But, thecritic might argue, doesn’t a bad result show that, in fact, you are bad at math? In a way, it does. Butit does not show that I’m permanently hopeless. A horrible result sure proves Ididn’t get it all right – but there’s no reason it couldn’t change next time.Maybe I can create a narrative portraying me as bright math student who justwasn’t paying attention, therefore failing a test. Perhaps the next exam isgoing to be a turnaround leading me to a future where I’m superb at math! Whoknows what will happen?

Now, I don’tknow if all this made any sense, and frankly, just now I’m too tired for anyrewriting. Blame the end of the exam period, if you will. I hope you gotsomething out of it.

Tomorrow:last exam of this semester and then off for some well-earned Christmasholidays. Hopefully I’ll have more time and energy to read something besidesexam stuff. Maybe I’ll manage to crunch a post or two on the way.

A Blog with Substance

2011-11-13T19:47:00.001+02:00

As small as my blogosphere network might be (although, mind you, quality makes up for quantity) last week something besides just posting happened: my blog was labeled as “A Blog with Substance” by Siiri. Especially as
1) I value my Siiri’s opinion rather highly (as a PhD student in Durham, UK, I feel she can more than pull her weight in intellectual discussions) and
2) substance is definitely the most obvious label for my blog

All in all, I am most grateful: thank you Siiri! After a dry spell because of my Bachelor thesis writing this definitely was the perfect time to nudge me to keep churning out blog texts.

The protocol concerning “A Blog with Substance” nomination is that I should nominate eight other blogs and tell eight random facts about myself. However, due to my very small network and encouraged by Siiri’s example, I shall only nominate two blogs. Not because there aren’t any good blogs out there, just simply because my network is so small that eight blogs would be pretty much everything that I follow regularly.
So, eight random facts:

I’m writing a Bachelor thesis about “Using criteria of indoctrination in analysis of mentoring” (or so I would translate the Finnish title). As you may know, I study Industrial Management and will major in Work Psychology and Leadership. Despite being thought of as the “major for the hippies” my subjects is too philosophic even for most of that lot. This is what happens when I’m told “yeah, you can choose your theme yourself, just has to be something related to mentoring”.
Next year, I will be applying to study Applied Philosophy in Helsinki University. Philosophy is a long-time passion of mine. After three years at a technical university, I’ve finally managed to accept the fact that this is not what I want to do. I’m somewhat amazed at my own stubbornness.
I really hate calling people. Email and Facebook definitely has saved me, as I rarely am forced to call anyone – sending email is just easier. Then again, if we didn’t have email maybe I would’ve learnt to like phones…
One of my mottos is “People are more stupid than evil”. If anyone wrongs me, hurts me, or does anything I really dislike, I always try to remember it’s really because they thought of the situation differently, they didn’t have all the facts or they forgot something. It’s never because they were deliberately evil and were really trying to piss me off.
I’ve had a leg injury for 3-4 months. I like to run and would be training for the Berlin Marathon if it weren’t for the leg. Have I seen a doctor yet? Once, yes. Did it help? Not really. Have I tried again? No, of course not. I’ve been sitting on it and complaining for the past two months. Talk about stubbornness. Or procrastination. I think I’m seeing a theme here…
I’m a very introverted person. I love books and can spend countless hours curled up on the sofa with a book in my hand. It’s not that I don’t like people, it’s just that I seem to prefer classic, well respected texts to drinking or small talk. But a good, interesting discussion will get me from my hole.
I love mountains. And sunshine. (yet I obstinately live in Finland!) To be honest, the views I’ve seen in Austria, Slovenia and South America still take my breath away. I have a recurring dream of climbing a mountain. One day…
I’m terrible at seasoning food. I mean, it has reached the point of being weird. I can cook alright, but my food mainly tastes really bland. It’s almost as if I were scared of those damn peppers!

And now for my nominations for the next “A Blog with Substance”! *Drum roll*

The first has to be Herra Gägä (http://herragaga.blogspot.com/) . This blogger, who writes in Finnish, will blow your mind away with interesting thoughts about the society, politics or whatever that seems interesting. A blogger whose posts will leave you wanting for more and admiring the length and breath, yet consistency, of his posts.

The second nomination goes to ribbonfarm (http://www.ribbonfarm.com/). This blog is well noted in several reviews and will spark your creativity about technology, business, sociology et al. At times the breadth of different subjects means the occasional article is beyond my interests, but I guess it’s good to go outside the comfort zone for a change.

More X is good

2011-11-05T20:38:00.000+02:00

A lot ofdecisions about things in life is about optimization: how long should I studyfor this exam, in which order should I do things a,b, and c, how much poundswill I need to exchange when going on a trip. Now, those things aren’t terriblyhard to decide. The longer you study, the less free time you have – simple rule.You probably have an inkling as to what kind of questions the lecturer prefers,and you have an idea of your strong and weak points. Cash exchange is a problemalready framed in numbers, so that’s even easier. The problems start, however,when we’re facing larger problems with multiple variables.

To take anexample, let’s think about an example questions, say “How much time should Ispend per week to improve my career prospects?”. Let us define “improve careerprospects” as anything that goes beyond the pareto rule and your standardresult – basically anything that is extra effort aimed at making you better offcareerwise. Depending on your career, it can be anything from networking toprogramming to reading articles or magazines, to name a few. I’m sure you knowbetter than I do, what that would be in your career.

So, whatkind of optimization problem are you facing? What are the relevant variables?The input side seems straightforward enough: time. No worries there. The outputside, too: career prospects. What’s my problem, then? Well, mainly the fact,that there are a dizzying number of interdependencies here. A lot of other stuffis influenced by your decision on this problem. To name a few: time spent withyour family, time spent on hobbies, energy available for other things, physicalfitness, etc… Pretty much anything, that involves time in one way or another.Those are the hidden output variables.

In thesekinds of situations, our brain fails us. You know that your time is limited.You know that the time you cannot spend all of your time on improving yourcareer prospects. You know that you want to have hobbies and a family, too. Butinstead of supporting the decision you’ve made about splitting your time, yourbrain goes completely haywire.

As you dosomething that you intrinsically enjoy, for example advance your career, youbrain releases dopamine. And dopamine makes you feel good. So your brain goes “Ohyeah! Feel so good, gimme more of this!!” But you can never fulfill thatexpectation completely – because you want to do other things, too. And whenthis happens with every enjoyable thing…you’ll be left with a crave for more, acrave for more of everything that you desire.

It doeshelp to realize that your brain works like this. Because next time, when youfeel like you haven’t spent enough time with yourwife/spouse/kids/work/hobbies/whatever, maybe you’re right – maybe you’ve beenslacking off. Or maybe it’s just your brain talking.

Learn what you are good at

2011-10-10T20:07:00.000+03:00

Cross-scientificwork is in some ways one of the buzzwords of our times. And for good reason:meeting other scientists gives a lot of new ideas and teaches things you’dnever come across inside the walls of your department. And the same goes forbusiness, too. It never hurts to get a sense of what else is out there, whatyou still don’t know but would want to. Just now, I’ve realized there’sanother, very important, reason to be with people from other fields.

It teachesyou what you’re good at.

If you’reeven a semi-pro in something, chances are you spend a lot of time with peoplefrom the same field, industry or whatever the classification. Chances are thatyou have a passion to improve your skills. And if you want to improve, who doyou look up to? The best of your field, of course.

This allcan often result losing sight of how good you actually are in doing that thingin reality. Humans are notoriously bad in judging their skills subjectively. I’msure a lot of people have heard the joke (well, it's really a piece of research¹) that all drivers think they are betterthan average. But it doesn’t work only that way: we often underestimate ourskills, too. This happens especially in situations where the reference group(i.e. the people that surronund you most often when doing that activity) is moreproficient than your average Joe.

Thishappens to people in sports. They spend years training for something, and afterquitting on the pro level it can be hard to realize how good they can becompared to regular citizens. The same goes for studying: I often feel veryinadequate about my math skills, since our university happens to be a technicalone, hence housing hundreds of very bright people who seem to eat Riemann-Cauchyequations for breakfast. But I once came across a language student, andsuddenly found out there’s a lot of math that I’m good at. And she found out,too, that speaking six languages is abig deal.

For thisreason alone, I recommend from the bottom of my heart to go out there and meetpeople. Knowing what you don’t know is important for your development. Butknowing what you do know is asimportant for your belief in yourself.

¹ McCormick, “Comparative perceptions of driver ability— A confirmation and expansion,” Accident Analysis & Prevention 18 (June 1986): 205-208.

How Startups Differ: Dreams of an Employee

2011-09-28T22:58:00.000+03:00

The other day I was thinking about what separates us humans from animals. I won't go through the whole discussion that happened inside my head, but only the result: dreams. Animals have needs: eat, sleep, reproduce. Repeat ad infinitum, or at least until you die. We are a bit more complex in this respect. We have dreams and thereby goals which are ends in themselves. Someone might claim that all the wants and goals we have eventually collapse into the previously mentioned biological goals. I'm not so sure - I can't see somebody looking for a career in formal logic reduced to his biology. At face value it makes more sense to accept his want to understand logic as an end, not as a means to impress the ladies.

As the previous anecdote shows, dreams can play an important part in our careers. It’s not just the normal professions of a doctor, firefighter or a police officer that have dreams as their fuel. I’m very confident that any profession or job can have the same quality. This does not necessarily mean that the sales clerk has a dream of being a sales clerk, but he or she may dream of being a respected, trustworthy individual who eventually progresses at the workplace and then ending up as a sales manager in another company. Who you want to be is everything to who you are today.

If I think about the stereotypical large company or organization, dreams don’t seem to be of exactly very high importance there. You have a job, and your development goals are to be linked to your proficiency in that task. What, you want to improve, only to leave your post here? Not going to happen! Now, companies have training programs. Some of them even ask about your career goals. But this is not enough. A person is not just a career. Career goals cannot operate in isolation of all your other goals. I say it’s time to move from a paradigm, in which the employee is a repository of skills and knowledge, to a paradigm, in which he is a holistic person with dreams outside his career, too.

This is something at which startups excel. Everybody has heard the standard comments about the dynamic nature of startups and how they penetrate even the tiniest niches in the market. Well, sure, the Titanic hardly maneuvers in the same way as a speedboat – they are very unlike in size. But it still doesn’t mean you can’t feel good and whole in both.

What I’ve gathered from the startup experiences of my friends is that the startup culture is very multifaceted and you’re generally approached with interest. People are keen about stories or narratives, which explain who you are, what you want and why. In a large corporation gatherings can at worst be at the “I’m Jack, an accountant” –level. I mean, defining yourself by your position or profession is hardly the best way. I’d guess this has a lot to do with the fact startups rarely have very strongly identified or differentiated employees- everybody does everything. There’s no chance to identify with a role you don’t have. But still, even though we have roles in larger organizations, we don’t have to identify ourselves primarily through those. It would make sense to define ourselves through ourselves. And to do that, we need to make room for dreams.

Tolerance is not binary

2011-08-05T18:28:00.000+03:00

Following these discussions between social conservatives and liberals has made me think. Ever since the True Finns stomped to a landslide victory at the election, talk of immigration, culture issues and tolerance have been plentiful. That’s a good thing.

However, there has been a thing that regularly drives me to the boundaries of approvable behavior. The thing is the current concept of tolerance (or permissiveness, if you will). The current discussion has mainly revolved around trying to distinguish the tolerant from the intolerant. The idea seems to be that you are either tolerant, or you are intolerant. Liberals and conservatives have joined the fray from both sides eagerly. If it weren’t for our modern legal system, I’m quite sure advocates from both sides would have been burnt at the stake. The liberals are claiming to be tolerant for being more positive about immigration, gay marriage, or whatever the issue at hand. Painting their side as the tolerant essentially implies that conservatives are the intolerant. That, of course, is often an euphemism for ‘a bunch of crazy skinhead thugs’, as most of you probably have realized. Just don’t think conservatives get off the hook, either. A common argument is that since liberals don’t tolerate the intolerance of conservatives, they are intolerant themselves. This plays into the conservatives’ hands by implying that since the liberals are the intolerant, the conservatives must be the tolerant. If we stick to a definition that labels tolerance as “allowing any opinion one doesn’t like” we get exactly this kind of paradox hassle.

Both above strategies rest on the assumption of binary tolerance: you are either tolerant or you’re not. Since the parties disagree about some things, and don’t agree on what is tolerable, it must follow that one of them (i.e. the others) are the intolerant. From the liberal’s perspective the conservatives are socially intolerant – and from the conservative point vice versa. Tolerance functions as a useful weapon to bash your opponent with – after all, nobody in the audience wants to be intolerant, do they?

Now, this whole mess started because of a bad variable class: tolerance as a binary variable. In retrospect it should be obvious it is not such, rather tolerance ought be cast as a continuum. There are very few binary variables in our personalities, and I can’t see a reason why tolerance would be an exception. To give an example, consider kindness, for example. Is that person nice or not? I’m sure people would agree that some of us are kinder than others. But still, it’s not as if there are only two classes of people: kind and unkind. Oh no, there’s everything in between, too. The same should go for tolerance, too. Most of the people I’ve met are rather tolerant of others, yet most of us wouldn’t be ok with everything. For some, the limit is gay marriage, for others it’s something else. But for most of us, such a limit exists. A tolerance of anything and everything is hardly a sound basis for a society.

A good reason to throw away this stupid binary tolerance definition would be the hope of having actual discussions. Instead of going around shouting intolerant! – essentially the equal of heretic 500 years ago – we could be having proper talks about who can tolerate what, and why there are differences. The realization that we all are more or less tolerant would hinder the division into two camps. There are very few problems that can actually be solved with a us-vs-them rhetoric.

It’s time to stop using the 0/1 scale. Even turning it into just a 0-5 scale would help.

First impressions at EGOS conference

2011-07-07T18:05:00.001+03:00

Going to my first scientific conference is one major step towards my dream of being a researcher. Naturally I jumped at the chance of coming here, especially with accommodation and flights paid by the university. Never mind that I’m just in a mere assisting role, observing how to organise the event and thereby making our organising next year easier. It’s still a scientific conference and an important milestone.

Everyone must have heard that you can make a first impression only once. This trip is going to me my first impression of the scientific conferences. Are they exciting or boring? Relaxed or formal? Useful or useless? Drunken feasts or groups of introverts staring at their computers all day long? Something in between the extremes?

With the first 24 hours behind me, I won’t try to make a mountain out of a molehill and claim anything too drastic. Nevertheless, there are some things I’ve noticed while being here:

Scientists are normal people.

Well, duh. You’re entitled to say that in reply, really. But I’ve always had, to some extent, and idea of a successful researcher being a cool, level-headed character capable of observation and not too interested in social games. Someone, whose passion is in a sense the abolition of passions. Someone, who makes the most effort to get out of their own way to ensure objectivity.

That, of course, is a stereotype with hardly any relevance to reality. Even if they are objective in their work, the researchers I’ve met seem to resemble normal people so much I wouldn’t notice their difference without knowing beforehand. They dislike some people, take revenge and form cliques just like everybody else. They drink and have parties not suitable for children. They can even talk about soccer as soccer, not as a social game of behaviour-execution to ensure genetic fitness in a Marxist society.

Scientists bitch about people they don’t like.

If you think about it, it kind of makes sense. Whereas in normal working life, you might get angry about someone hoarding unnecessary cash in their department, being slow to react to your proposals or just failing to do their job the way you wanted them to, in research it’s all the above problems - plus the theoretical fights. If a table loses a leg, and the resulting three-legged abomination fails to stand upright, is it still a table? Neither camp would balk at any sacrifice to gain the final upper hand. The race is still on, after several hundreds of years.

Despite the realisation of scientists being as vicious as the next guy in the street, I’m having a blast. To be in an atmosphere, where the fact you’re sitting with a brick-shaped Foucault in your hand results in a fierce debate rather than a look of “I think you ought to be locked up”, is a fantastic experience. I hope there's more to follow.

Erasmus year comes to an end

2011-06-11T21:14:00.000+03:00

As I was sitting at the Graz Airport on Wednesday, I slowly came to the fact that my Erasmus was one homeward journey away from being over. Often I’ve heard stories how the last days of Erasmus are a time filled with sadness and tears over losing friends and freedom. Certainly, even my last weeks and days had seen a lot of people go, and I had the possibility to say “oh, last time in this café/restaurant/wherever before I go”. But still, am I sad it’s over?

To be frank, not really. It was great, no doubt about it. I did a lot of things and saw a lot of places I never had before. Not being sad about going back is not a sign I had a bad time – it’s a sign I expect good times back home in the future. I’m really looking forward to moving together with Sonja into our beautiful new flat. I’m excited to see my old buddies again. I have ahead of me a summer of writing my bachelor thesis – and getting paid for it. Next semester I’m starting as a project assistant and helping to organize EGOS, a big scientific conference in Helsinki in July 2012.

So, both personally and professionally, things are looking quite promising. In comparison Graz offered courses a bit on the easy side. Also, we had to juggle our long-distance relationship as before – even though this time around we at least managed to stay within the same continent. Unsurprisingly, it’ll be a huge emotional boost to be able to stay in the same apartment.

The Erasmus was always more or less a kind of project for me. The rough goals for the year, in order of importance, were to

improve my German
broaden my perspective and gain a better understanding of who I am and what I want
travel inside Europe

All the above was achieved, I think. My German is way more fluent than ever before, and I feel much more confident about my communication. A clear improvement is that I currently speaking German with natives, rather than reverting to English, something I always did before. I read dozens of books and had a lot of time to write and thinks. The effect of that can be seen in all the posts I wrote in Austria. Even if I still am not sure what I want in future, I feel much more confident about the general direction. Travelwise the year was a resounding success. I got to see a multitude of places new to me: Graz, Wien, Hannover, Bratislava, Salzburg, Venice, Klagenfurt, Berlin, Liverpool, Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Paris. Ljubljana and London, both of which I had already visited before, were amongst my trips, too. So I got to see and do what I wanted, which is why I’m not sad about the end: I think more time would’ve just meant stagnation. It’s nice to be moving forward again.

Of course, there are always a few grumbles and could've-would've-should'ves. For example, as a fan of hiking and mountains I regret not visiting Innsbruck or Switzerland. But then again, I favored seeing friends who lived abroad, and thought the emotional return on those trips was well worth them. This time mates beat mountains.

As a summary, it was an awesome year. A year I wouldn’t want to change. A year I’ll always remember wit fondness. Still, as every year, the year has reached its inevitable end – to make way for an awesome future! Personally, I want to thank everyone who helped to make this year an unforgettable experience. My deepest thanks go to all my closest friends in Graz, whether still there or already back home. Also thanks to all my friends here in Finland, who kept writing and were glad to see me whenever I was here.

The Art of Not Running Away

2011-05-10T18:57:00.000+03:00

I remember how back in our university, almost all the first year students that have the high-level math (the “laaja”) keep asking older students questions like “Was it worth it?”, “Did you learn anything?” and “Will it be hard?”. My answers to these would be yes, yes, and yes. But that’s not today’s point. More interesting would probably be asking “Why? especially related to the first two.

As background information, I didn’t come from a math-specialized high school. I felt confident about math and had some successes in high school, especially towards the end. I was invited to participate in the higher math at our University – as you might know, it’s not mandatory for automation students – so I got to choose if I wanted to do it or not. After some deliberation, I resolved to do it. Mainly, I was curious about how I’d do inside that peer group and how I’d feel about “proper math”. Secondly, I thought I could always switch back to normal math if I didn’t like the high-flying version.

To cut a long story short, it was a hard track. I remember sitting with friends and doing exercises late into the evening. I remember spending about 50% of my studying time just on math. It worked and my results were pretty good, although in no way top class. Solid 4s and a 5 Three courses were enough for me, as switching to Industrial Management meant I didn’t need the 4^th course, so I dropped it as unnecessary.

Anyway, what was the learning experience? Honestly, I don’t think I remember half of the stuff we went through. The pace was fast, exercises were not always so plentiful – or understandable – and most of the stuff I haven’t needed since. Maybe it’s somewhere in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t recall it without some supporting material.

The most important thing for me was to learn not to run away. I remember staring at problems that seemed completely incomprehensible and thinking there’s no way in hell I’ll figure this out. But in most cases I finally got it. Actually, we got it. Since I was almost always solving the stuff with friends, and that was also a key ingredient to success. Four minds thinking along slightly different lines made for a better solving process, and naturally decreased erroneous calculations.

Anyway, if you think don’t run away is an obvious principle, you’re probably right. It’s not the principle that was hard for me, it was – and sometimes still is - applying it. The math courses were a valuable experience in the field of really confusing problems. Problems, which make you think “the solution must be really hard – how will I ever think of it?” Normal problems don’t do that. The confusion leads thoughts into a sort of meta-level, thinking that since you can’t see the outline of the solution right away, it must be something outside your current knowledge. This naturally induces a thought that if the solution is outside your knowledge, how on Earth can you come up with it in the first place? Needless to say, you start focusing more on freaking out about the problem than solving it, which is a terrible spiral to get into.

In retrospect, freaking out about a problem is very unnecessary – never mind useless. For every problem, there’s always a solution. The problem might not be solved by the end of the night, but slowly you’ll get there. Every step is a step towards the solution. Just keep taking those steps.

A practical application of the don’t run away principle are my German skills. Since high school, my German skills had started seriously deteriorating. In active vocabulary I’d already fallen down to the “Ich bin” level, meaning I couldn’t really have a decent conversation anymore. At some point, I realized the situation would only get worse with time. The vocabulary wasn’t going to magically pop back in my head. Improving my German would mean I’d need to, you know, actually try to learn it. It was time to face the issue and stop running. So I decided to plan an Erasmus year in Austria (to combine language with beautiful sights), which worked as a motivation pump to take some German courses in university before the Erasmus. Well, now I’m here in Graz with the year nearly behind me, and my German is better than ever. Problem solved.

These days, whenever I face a problem, I remind myself: don’t run away. If I feel imprisoned by the problem, I just think oh well, just have to start chipping away with this spoon. The wall will crumble eventually.

The career pyramid

2011-05-08T15:52:00.000+03:00

The conventional way to think about one’s future career usually is to simulate the career as

1. Learn basic skills

2. Specialize

3. Profit

This is a very intuitive way to think, as everyone agrees that advanced skills are based on more basic skills. Therefore, a career is like building a pyramid – you have to start from the foundations and gradually work your way up. So your career might look like this:

A common implicit derivation from this is that you have to commit to your chosen career in the early stages. After all, you can’t build a pyramid by chance – you have to know what you’re doing! This leads into the idea that the sooner you know what your thing is, the better you’ll be. This is a useful, yet a potentially very dangerous thought. How so?

To look at usefulness first, it is obvious that you need certain skills to succeed in a given profession. If you want to become a physicist, learning proper math skills is highly recommended. On the other hand, wanting to be a cook hardly requires any understanding in the subtleties of Laplace transformations. Building a large enough toolbox – yet one with enough punch per tool – is a necessary requirement for success. It doesn’t matter if you’re the brightest person in the field if you’re missing the necessary tools to solve the problems (although being smart admittedly makes it easier to learn stuff as you need it and make ad hoc solutions on the go). Still, often you simply don’t have the extra three months to learn a new methodology, but you must solve the problem with your hammer and screwdriver – even if a chainsaw was the perfect option. So, it is a rather good idea to think about the tools you’re going to need in the future.

The dangerousness of “the sooner the better” view is that it implicitly assumes that your interests cause the need for tools, and that the relationship never works the other way. This is, according to my experience, simply not true. There are two reasons for this: firstly, we humans have an uncanny ability to increase our interest in whatever we are focusing on. Personally, I’ve often only gotten really into something as I’ve started doing it. Keeping this blog would be a prime example of that effect. Secondly, sometimes you need to master a set of tools before you can even answer why you need them in the first place. Thinking about examples, I believe quantum mechanics would qualify for this (even though I’m not a physicist and possess hardly any knowledge in the quantum field).

In university everybody is taught the basic toolkit for a field. If we never recognize the existence of non-standard career paths most people are just going to aim for the standard track with the standard toolkit. Definitely a good way to suppress innovation! To exaggerate a bit: how are we ever going to think outside the box in other contexts, if we can't do it even in the context of our own career future?

As such, this issue is not really a hard problem. A lot could be done with simple cross-scientific socialization (to realize there are actual people outside one’s own field), mentoring (to exemplify out-of-the-box careers) and other methods that promote the existence of a non-standard toolkit.

So what is the grand realization, in reality? Depending on the person it could be anything from a simple “not every business student works in banking or a consulting” to a good understanding of possible problems outside the basic university skill set, finding them as interesting – or even more! Whatever the exact formulation, it could be characterized as an insight that not every career is like a pyramid. Nor should it be. To sum up graphically, your career pyramid might in the end instead look something like this:

Maybe the specialization helped you discover something even more important than before and you ended up doing something outside the standard track. With life, that’s actually quite likely to happen. I’m looking forward to it.

The Finnish Parliamentary Elections 2011: True Finns romp to landslide victory

2011-04-18T14:46:00.000+03:00

This time around the Finnish Parliamentary elections certainly were interesting. On the face of it, several historical things happened simultaneously: the Centre Party has never fared so badly since 1972 in terms of seats, and since 1917 in terms of votes. The National Coalition Party emerged with as the largest party from the election for the first time in history – despite losing six seats. The Greens also got a bloody nose, losing five seats and ending up with ten. The 42 seats going to Social Democrats is the worst result in the party’s whole history. The defining, and most historical, factor naturally is the rise of the True Finns. Ending up with 19% of votes and 39 seats (in comparison with 4% and 5 seats in 2007) is sensational. Personally, I belong to the group of people, who are pretty much against most of what the True Finns stand for. But I’ll forget about that for this analysis, and focus on the implications of the result.

Interpreting the result and especially its meaning for the politics for the next 4 years certainly is intriguing. A good starting point is to try to analyze, which parties might end up forming the coalition government.

As the above table summarizes, instead of the normal “the big three” Finns have now a quirky “the big four” on their hands. After the election the largest party (eg. NCP this time) starts talks with other parties about forming the coalition government. Traditionally this has often meant two of the three big ones, supplemented by some smaller parties to achieve majority. This time it won’t be even mathematically that simple. The aim is to get a majority government, but it’s going to mean several concessions from the coalition partners.

The bashing of the Centre Party and the Greens means these two are already out of the picture. NCP with just Social Democrats would rack up 86 seats, needing still at least 15 to achieve a theoretical majority. The SPP and the CD would bring just that, but a majority that slim would not work in reality. And the Left Alliance I can hardly see in coalition with the NCP. That leaves only NCP with Social Democrats and True Finns as a viable option from the NCP point of view. That would make already a majority of 125 seats, even without the help of smaller parties. A coalition of these three would undoubtedly be very odd, consisting of the most pro-EU and the most anti-EU parties of the parliament.

Admittedly, another option would be a coalition of Social Democrats, True Finns, Left Alliance, Swedish People’s Party and the Christian Democrats, but they would only have a majority of 111. Also, the True Finns are advocating for the abolition of mandatory Swedish in the upper secondary school, something the Swedish-Finns are naturally heavily against. Another factor against this option is the simple political reality that NCP won the election and is understandably rather keen to stay governing. However, if the differences with them and the True Finns are deemed unsolvable, there might be a slight possibility of the NCP throwing in the towel and going to opposition. Although, last time the winning party has not been included in government was 1958, when the Democratic Union of the Finnish Nation (SKDL) was not accepted in government due to Soviet Union pressure.

Regardless of the actual composition of the government, the True Finns are likely to be involved anyway. I can’t see other parties having much choice: a landslide victory of this scale cannot be left unnoticed. The obvious issues with the True Finns are first and foremost EU-related. The True Finns are very eurosceptic, against Euro bailouts and even at times using quite harsh language even considering Euro itself. The challenge of the upcoming government will be to find a line all the governing parties can tread more or less comfortably. That means either True Finns have to forget about their euroscepticism (or at least play it down) or other parties have to harden their line. With the pro-EU NCP going head to head with True Finns I’ve no idea who emerges victorious when the dust settles. Social Democrats are somehow caught in the crossfire, as they have traditionally been quite pro-EU, especially in the Lipponen era, but have just now gotten more critical about the bailouts. A possible solution might be to advocate debt restructuring, as the German Foreign Minister Werner Hoyer did earlier this month. Restructuring Greek’s debts and forcing bondholders to a haircut might be a solution that both True Finns and NCP could swallow, especially with support from Germany and other countries with a big role in the bailout decision. I don’t think the key agenda of the True Finns is to make EU pay, it’s more to avoid EU making us pay. Therefore, I believe a bondholder haircut would suffice for them.

Immigration laws are another thing the True Finns have popularized. That has already affected the main parties’ views, and in a recent interview with German journalists True Finn leader Timo Soini said “we will follow the same line” [as previous government] on immigration. Although I must admit there has been some discussion in the blogosphere whether it was just an attempt to play down the xenophobic image before election or a genuine policy promise. I guess we will see the answer soon enough.

Following the explosion of commentary in Internet yesterday I saw a lot of mixed reactions. Responses ranged from “I’ll move abroad – really” to “The tables are turned! Down with the old behemoth parties!”, portraying the divisions over True Finns’ policies. Despite – or maybe because of – that, there is one clear victor in this battle: democracy. Personally, I don’t like this result, but I still have to accept it: 70,4 % of Finns voted, being the best percentage since 1995. I’ve seen, read and heard more political debates than in a long time (well, a long time for my age, at least) and noticed increasing interest in young people, too. I hope this will mark the reversing of young people’s interest in politics. This time nine under 30-year-olds were selected into the Parliament, but the average age of an MP hardly nudged. Still, there is hope of that changing in the future, if the young are getting more into politics. The baby boomers are getting older and it’s up to the young to pull Finland back together. Democracy will be the only way to do it.

Lecturer, where's your faith in theory?

2011-04-12T21:50:00.000+03:00

Agenda for this week: yet another block course at the institute of Production Science and Management at TU Graz. Topic: Operational Risk Management. Yet another course, where the morning session after introductions starts by the lecturer's so-called motivational input:

"We will go through some theory for the morning. I'm sorry, but it's always like this, the first session of the block has always the biggest part of theory. I know you find it uninteresting, but we'll get to the case study in the afternoon."

I must say, nice going with the speech! If I didn't know better, I'd think the speech is saying "fall asleep now, wake up for the afternoon". I wonder how the students are to motivate themselves for the theory part, if the attitude of the lecturer, who in Austrian culture is more of a formidable authority than in Finland, is already at this point acting apologetic. This wasn't the first time a lecturer seems to be conveying the message that theory is an annoying obligation, only to be completed because of some higher decree. Never is the usefulness or the applicability of the theory mentioned. No lecturer says out loud that understanding theory is a necessary part of understanding practical methods.

The sentiment behind the courses seems to be: rush through theory and then throw the case study to the students, let them learn with it. One could call this a swim-or-sink strategy. There are a couple of problems with this approach. Firstly, too often the case study starts with students looking like living question marks. If confusion was a gas, there would be so much of in the air you could actually just carve block of it with a knife. The insufficient basic theoretical knowledge is a big issue, especially if one is to start analyzing a deep and complex problem. Secondly, raising students into a culture of practical application without proper methodological structure is just plain stupid: it makes us believe all methodologies are as good as others. It makes us use mostly methods we are already acquainted with beforehand. It decreases the learning achieved by using a new method. Applying without knowing what to apply is trial-and-error, not structured learning.

Sure, if you are blindfolded and then try to distinguish the important features of an animal by touching it, you'll achieve it at some point. But if you're first told that the animal in question is large and can be climbed upon, you'll figure out that much faster that instead of tree trunks you're actually hugging the legs of an elephant. It doesn't take much to get a head start in comparison to blind searching.

The "student is a customer" culture has several benefits. Lecturers need to be made aware of the fact that satisfied students learn better. But sucking up to the students is not the right way to achieve that.What should be taught is the important stuff, not just what the students like.

Learning presentation in Graz

2011-04-10T08:37:00.000+03:00

So, as I’ve previously commented, my studies in Graz have been very block course intensive. Whereas last time I focused on the structure of the courses, there’s something important that I forgot to mention. Something I’ve only found quite useful with more courses under my belt. That something would be the art of presentation.

Up to this point I’ve had nine block courses, of which all bar one had presentations. Usually there are 3-6 presentations per group of around five. Depending on the course, the presentations are most often done alone or in pairs. This would mean a total of about 1,5 presentations/person/course, totaling to 13-14 presentations. I’ve luckily had more, largely thanks to my enthusiasm to step to the stage – and my classmates lack thereof – I’ve gotten the splendid chance to make around two presentations per course, equaling to a total of 17 presentations, if I recall correctly. This is a considerable amount of practice in comparison to the amount I’ve had in Aalto, for example. So what have I learnt?

First of all is the impression frankly all of us have from university: not all people make great presentations. That’s the case for professors and for students even more so. Luckily, there are ways to improve, and rather fast, too.

Language fluency

Okay, this isn’t actually something you can improve overnight, but it’s one of the most important, thereby earning its spot on the list. I’ve heard the most terrible lectures and presentations in here, and I have to say that no matter how interesting the content, all is spoiled if the presenter is unable to pronounce words somewhat correctly. I’m not too keen if I have to guess what the lecturer is trying to say, it makes me feel like a waste to be in the class. Then again, you don’t have to be a native to make a good presentation: I’ve witnessed wonderful presentations by Spaniards, Norwegians, Austrians, Germans and the likes. Most of them weren’t native fluent, but all of them were fluent enough, especially with the content involved. This brings me to my second point:

The content in your head

You don’t need to remember the presentation content off the top of your head – that’s one of the reasons you have the slides. But you should know your rough structure. You should remember after a glance on the screen, what a given slide is about. Standing and reading from the slides and calling it a “presentation” is just silly. I can read for myself, sir, thank you very much. What I want the presenter to tell me is not what the content is, but why it is there in the first place and naturally why it is important.

Face the audience

You’d think this to be obvious? Well, I did too, until I witnessed a couple of dudes presenting with their backs turned on us. That was mainly because they failed the previous part and hadn’t a clue what was in their presentation, but they could’ve still worked this one out. Even if you don’t remember what’s in there, never turn your back! Take a look, then turn your head back in the right direction and speak. Repeat until end of slide. If you can’t remember the whole slide with one look, take it one bullet point at a time, there’s no point in rushing.

Walk the talk

I challenge you to do an exercise: try to stand in one spot in your room for half an hour. Feels stupid, doesn’t it? Now think about what most of the lecturers do? Exactly, they just stand there and never move. Sometimes it makes you feel like they’re trying to audition for the band Talking Heads! Seriously though, moving around makes your presentation that much more interesting. It’d be fascinating to hear the explanation of a psychologist why it is so, as this is just my personal experience. Also, moving is very useful. You can change the slide and then move to the other side of the room, giving your audience time to read through the slide.

Graphic design

This is very important, but I’ve got to say I’m no pro on the subject. Ask a designer or someone, who actually know stuff about it. Well, one rule I can give: never use just black text on white background without pictures. Never. Ever. Neverevernever. That’ll only make your job as a presenter at least twice as hard.

All in all, the above list could still be expanded a lot, but I’ve found at least these to be important in presenting. There’s hardly any systematic discovery process behind the result, and certainly no knowledge of presentation theory, so if anybody has their two cents to throw in, I’d be happy to hear. Especially if anybody feels I missed something important.

Needless to say, the above factors shouldn’t be too hard to remember, as long as one thinks about them consciously. Getting even the basics right would improve many a presentation tremendously. And as the old adage goes, it’s not just what you say, but also how you say it.

The usefulness of an action

2011-03-14T14:08:00.000+02:00

Lately, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about classes of actions, and how we decide or define what we want or what we should do. A major part of human life consists of making decisions about how to spend a given time frame and then executing the relevant actions following the decisions or choices. But how do we actually make these choices? How do we actually decide what to do? There are several possible ways to classify actions and the decision criteria, but this time I’ll look into just one of them: usefulness. I think it’s a very commonly accepted proposition that one should focus on doing things that are useful.

What is usefulness, and when can something be called useful? Dictionary.com defines the word useful as

1. being of use or service; serving some purpose; advantageous, helpful, or of good effect: a useful member of society.
2. of practical use, as for doing work; producing material results; supplying common needs: the useful arts; useful work.

It is clear from the dictionary definition that a thing is useful when it promotes achieving a certain goal or result. The useful is a means to obtain something that we hold to be intrinsically valuable. To put it in different words: the useful action is the way towards the goal, whatever it is. The goal is of intrinsic value.

There are some variables to consider in deriving the usefulness of an action. These would include at least

magnitude of effects
mixture of effects
division of effects
effort expenditure
considered time frame

Magnitude of effects

This means that the larger the effect on promoting the reaching of my goal, the better an action is. Naturally, the ultimate best action would be one that instantly makes me reach my goal (unless the journey itself has intrinsic value, of course). The effect can be divided into several subcategories, as there are effects on personal, social and society level. Especially the two latter are often key to understanding the ethics of an action.

Another very important point in effects is that they are in no way limited to the normal business understanding of value creation. Unless one’s goal is strictly economic success, there are beneficial actions, which on the outer layer seem to be totally useless. In its extreme form, this would reduce friendship to networking and relaxing to recover strength for economic endeavours. But just a not: this is not the only way to think about it, and not the only possible goal.

Mixture of effects

An action, which only has positive effects, is better than one with also negative ones. This is psychologically an interesting category, since we have a habit of deciding in favour of alternatives with no drawbacks, even though the end effects might be greater and the net result better with the “worse” option. This is even more so in the case of positive effects in the future, yet negative effects in the present.

Division of effects

An action which benefits several people is often more worth my time than an action benefiting solely myself. Negative effects are not so bad if they affect only me, as I know already how I feel about those. Bu negative effects on other people are unpredictable, since I will hardly ever know for sure how those people feel about something. So to impose negative effects on others is a risk.

Effort expenditure

Clearly, an action is more useful if it consumes fewer resources and leaves the possibility to do something else too. But it’s not so easy to know, what constitutes as a big effort. What’s the standard of comparison? A further complication is that not all resources are equal: time is not money, or at least not in a linearly translatable way. So a question of its own is to devise a scheme to be able to make decisions about different resources: what are the connections of time, money and mental health, for example? I’m sure everyone has their own answer to that.

Considered time frame

Last, but not least, one variable not to forget is the considered time frame. It is very different to analyze actions in the scope of a day than in the scope of several years. Going for a run makes me feel energetic in the short term, but in the long term it promotes health and lengthens my lifespan. Studying, for example, is a good example of something, where most of the important effects are considered to be long term. I’m not sure if I agree with that, but still, I agree there are actions with which most of the positive effects come only later, and the effort is still linear right from the start (or is it really?).

Even after this framework, there are still many unresolved problems in deciding, whether a given action is useful and in what degree. Some of these problems go very deep into philosophy or psychology, and I am definitely not expecting to come up with a magic solution. Problems such as

How much do we give weight to others’ feelings?
What is my goal in the end?
What is the difference in wanting something in itself, or wanting something to prove a point in the social ranking, and how can I know which one applies to me wanting something?
When will I know an action is the best possibility? Could there have been better choices?
How much does it make sense to “sacrifice” for possible positive effects in the future?

The list is not in any way comprehensive, and I definitely don’t know the answer to any of those questions – if any of them. Nonetheless, I believe that a structured framework is always beneficial and at least it does help to try to formulate thoughts and decisions properly.

Finding the point in pointlessness

2011-03-11T22:56:00.000+02:00

One of the reasons to go for an exchange exactly this year was to get a bit of breathing space. I have some formidable, even a bit scary, changes coming up in the next years. I’m thinking about my future studies, career and all that stuff and planning for some big things to happen. Thinking that through requires some effort. That’s why the idea was to escape my previous surroundings and get out of the oh let’s just go for a beer and stop worrying mentality. I’m not meaning this as any accusation towards any of my friends. It is a normal way of coping with the status quo of everyday life. For these questions, however, I felt I needed to be somewhat alone to be able to question my life properly. The distortion and noise from the normal life would just have been too big to really concentrate. Surprisingly I never expected was how hard it would be to try to do nothing.

Normally, I’m so used to running the gauntlet of everyday life that not having all those essays, exams, deadlines, meetings, projects and parties now seems somehow quite weird. Here, I have an enormous amount of free time and I deliberately try to avoid filling it with all the normal stuff. I’ve tried to be, abnormally for an exchange student, very picky about my time to savour those free time moments. I made a decision early on in here, which was that if I plan to have time to think, I can’t spend every night hanging around in clubs until 5am. Well, I couldn’t take the smoke here anyway. Goddamn Austrian smoking laws! But I digress.

I’ve got to admit I’m still not very good at this emptiness. Quite often it leads to hours spent watching TV or listening to the same old music I always listen to. So I’m blocking my train of thought with all that stuff that hardly can be called important. And that makes me feel like I’m letting myself down: instead of thinking or educating myself, I’m watching some neverheard dude do some I-don’t-even-care stuff on screen. Time well spent. This heavily Lutheran influenced work ethic of a previous competitive sportsman is a problem in its own right, but I’ll get back to it some later time. So far I’ve mainly ben bypassing dealing with that and tried to develop myself (whatever that means) a lot. I’ve tried increased my book intake: I now spend around 10% of my time reading. All fine and well, except force-feeding somebody else’s thoughts doesn’t help much if I’m supposed to be thinking my own stuff. I find most books very fascinating, but only a minority of them will help me with the issue What is it that I want to do? Especially as I’m not even deliberately seeking books related to that issue, I’m just reading stuff that I find generally intriguing.

Thinking about life, the universe and everything is a very subconscious process and probably that’s why I’m having some trouble with it. It’s not something that can just be decided to be solved in an evening. I can’t just sit down and force myself to think about it. The process just needs to drag along, run its own course and then, sooner or later, I’ll feel like I’m done with it. There will never be very concrete results. All the ambiguity about future career prospects, where I’ll live or how many kids I’ll have or when will surely be there. The future will never look like a single determined pathway. But that is exactly the point: the ambiguity of I have no idea what to do with my life should be replaced by the I know what I’ll do and stuff will happen kind of uncertainty. It’ll still be uncertain and that is to be embraced as a part of life – not regarded as something negative.

Language experiences in Austria

2011-03-06T19:23:00.000+02:00

For me, like for so many other exchange students, language was one of the main reasons to select my location. Therefore, it is obvious my development in acquiring the skills needed to comprehend this Austrian dialect of German is critical to my happiness level. If I'd fail at improving my German (or Austrian) during these 10 months, I would feel very disappointed. Every time I talk to somebody auf Deutsch I have an internal radar on, analyzing my performance. As with any learning, the success has been mixed.

I fondly remember one encounter from my first week here. I went to open a bank account and Henry decided to tag along. He went in first, and the very nice bank clerk seemed to know English well enough to manage the opening of the account in short order. I was next in line, and told up front that I'd prefer to speak German, if she only would speak a bit slower than normally. I can still recall the look of relief on her face. If I wouldn't have known the context, I'd thought he was praising some higher power for uplifting her from hell. She did tell me that her English wasn't that good and that she was already really tired - it was late afternoon - and was happy to speak German again. That really got me into a good mood about my German and I approached every situation thereafter with even more confidence. Successes make learning a new language that much more pleasant.

As for the not-so-successful stories, I have a hard time choosing. Possibly the low point was on a train ride from Vienna to Graz. I'd just returned from a weekend in Hannover, and was pleasantly surprised of the ease I could communicate with the locals over there. You see, they speak the most perfect Hochdeutsch one can find. In here, well not so. In the trains you're normally only asked once for your ticket, and I had already presented mine. For some reason this time there had been a change in the train guard personnel, and a woman was going through the train and checking tickets again. I, however, didn't know what she wanted and thought that it can't be the ticket, as it had already been checked. So, I asked her to repeat the question, but really could not make out any discernible words. After the third time, she just retorted: "You don't speak very much German, do you?", which earned my not-so-grateful response "Sure I do, but not your damn dialect!". I wasn't feeling too good about myself after that...

Oh, and yesterday in a bar, I was trying to order a drink, and the waitress kept continuously addressing me in English. I found that really offensive, as I don't think my German is that bad! (Even though I've once been asked by an Austrian if I'm Swiss...) Anyway, the situation resolved itself, and I found out that the waitress couldn't speak German - she was Swedish! So, for the rest of the orders it was time to practice my Swedish skills, which undoubtedly have seen better days.

The whole thing about languages is very central to the general feeling I have around here. All in all, I'll admit that I could've improved more, but I'm still fairly satisfied about how it's gone. And, thanks to Henry, my English is actually in the best shape it's been for a while!

Making personal changes work

2011-03-04T18:41:00.000+02:00

Change, one of my favourite words. Change stands for a challenge, a chance to turn something into a better version. A chance to make the transition to 2.0. Of course, change is also something that disturbs the pattern. So it's okay to be a bit nervous about it. After a change, you can't keep doing things the same way - that's the definition of change. On the other hand, changes make life more interesting and in that way contribute to our happiness.

The opportunities for changes in life are relatively easy to detect, and not only because the multitude of flaws in personal action patterns. With an honest outlook on one's behavior, it shouldn't be too hard. Personally I rather often feel a twinge about something that I do, and I know that it could be much better. I can do it. Yes I can. I just need to make a bit of effort.

Well, often that's exactly how far I get, and no further.

Too often, the actual change never happens, despite my strong disposition that it has to change. Thoughts never transfer into actions. Frankly, that bugs me a lot. It seems like a pretty stupid thing to do: deciding that you want to change and then not making it happen. Why is that? More importantly, how to make it work? How to change the changing?

I used to be very confident about my strength of willpower. I used to think that I just need to decide for a change and it'll happen. True enough, sometimes it does, but mostly not. Mostly, I get stuck between the action and decision phase, not because the change is so complex, so difficult or so frightening, but because I just don't make it happen. It's like there would be something wrong between the neurons transferring the information from the decision-making centre to the "let's do this" branch of my brain. What's even more stupid: I know the change is supposed to be happening, but it's not. And I know it's my fault - who else could I blame for failing to change? So, in the end I feel sad for disregarding my own instructions and not changing, making the situation worse, not better! Not very smart.

Fortunately, I've discovered a way to reroute this blockade in my mind. One trick I've learned over time is to not try abstract leaps.The change needs to be tied to something concrete. The change needs to happen with some concrete thing. Sometimes I've focused my idea of the change and focused it on an object, so that whenever I see that object I immediately think of the change I want to achieve. Quite naturally, this works best with an object you perceive positively and somehow associate with the change. For example, as I was trying to increase my levels of writing and reading, I focused it on my coffee mug. Now whenever I see the coffee mug, I go "well, I should probably read or write something now". And lo and behold, during the last months I've been reading and writing more than ever - and my instant coffee jar has emptied, twice!

Another trick is to change in parts. If the upcoming change looms too large, divide it to subprojects. This is a piece of advice told to me several times at organizational development lectures, but only now have I learned to apply it to myself. As an example I can tell about a research project that I'm doing. The goal is to a) get to know the business ethics field, b) see if there's a connection between the position in organizational hierarchy and ethical decision making. This project will last for a good 6 months, so I divided it into subprojects. So far, I'm mostly in schedule, meaning about halfway through. Will sure be interesting how the end part goes.

An exchange year has been a good way to make changes and take chances, exactly as I had hoped. I'd recommend it as a way to escape the current environment if big changes are what you want. Go abroad and discover yourself in a new way. Discover yourself in a new way - that could be a motto for most personal changes. Or at least it should be.

Cheer for career nondevelopment!

2011-02-22T14:28:00.000+02:00

In our TU, we are often told stories about careers, both previous and prospective. Pretty often managers and engineers come to visit, hold a guest lecture, and answer questions of students. One of the most common ones is the question of career development: students are keen to hear what the person in question has done to enhance his career, what he has studied and so on. All fine and well, but sometimes I get the feeling that the people giving these guest lectures just make their career seem too smooth.

Quite commonly those people either have very direct careers with few sidesteps - or at least that's how they make it seem. It conveys a sense of determination and target-mindedness, whether that is meant or not. I believe that this is not in the best interest of students. Most students grapple with quite common fears: fears such as "Will someone hire me?", "Am I working hard enough?", "Is working in student organizations sensible or not?". I feel very strongly that these fears will only get worse, if the picture presented to students is that of a target-minded career rocket. Most of the business people I have met actually value free time activities and personality highly, but this is rarely very explicitly conveyed in the lectures held to students.

Personally, I don't want to see students abandoning their hobbies just to favor ones more valued in business circles - unless there is actually an interest per se in those. Optimization of hobbies may help, sure. It's just that the chain better hobbies -> better job - > more happiness is affected by a lot of factors. There's so much ambiguity about a future career, that sacrificing five years of satisfaction in hobbies to create a tiny effect in the equation is not worth it. After all, every employer values motivated employees best. And the happier one is, the better the motivation. Oh yeah, and I've heard that happiness brings positive results outside the work environment, too!

NFIMBY: No Finns In My Backyard!

2011-02-13T15:59:00.000+02:00

Lately there's been a lot of talk about multiculturalism. There is, however, one group that has been wholly forgotten: the notorious Finns. Forget about the Turkish, the Chinese, or any inhabitants of your favourite Islamic nation. Here come the biggest and the meanest - enter Finns.

I'll start with their unsocial nature. Whereas a representant of a more civilized nation would be happy about the daily meet & greet, an invitation for a cup of coffee, or just some stress-relieving small talk, the Finns are from the Down Under in this respect. Don't expect to be greeted by them. Actually, more likely the Finn will just avert his gaze and avoid eye contact completely. Even though their language skills are better than average, their inclination for discussions with any weird people is limited. And to a Finn, everyone but himself is a Weirdo.

Which brings me nicely to my second point: complaining. In a world filled with weirdos, the Finn can always conveniently find a source of unhappiness, discontent or just general annoyance in someone or something other than himself. And as a rule loving nation, they are quite adept in picking the most diminutive details in anything. Also, they seem to have a knack in knowing the rules of anything inside out, visible especially due to the aggressive way they relate to breaching them. So you'll be hearing about what's wrong. All the time.

As inhabitants of a cold, northern land, Finns seem to have get stuck in an era way back in some ways. This holds true especially for alcohol and aggressive behavior. The aggressive behavior has been somehow integrated in the Finnish gene, and it still is to this day held up in their society. There's even a famous song where they sing "työttömyys, viina, kirves ja perhe" (joblessness, booze, an axe and a family) and the song goes on to tell about how the father drives his family out to the snow with an axe while being completely wasted. Does that sound like normal behavior to you?

The consuption of alcohol in large amounts is also related to the unsocial nature of Finns. They can never talk without a drink. That would be fine, if the Finns wouldn't overdo this too. To them, one drink is nowhere near enough, and throughout the night consuming even a 12-pack per person is quite normal. This means that if you really want to talk to a Finn, you have a time frame of two drinks - he has already the courage to open his mouth, but isn't too drunk yet. Naturally, as they get ever more drunk, the Finnish parties get real loud. And if you, dear reader, happen to make a comment about this, you'll just be blown off and told to mind your own business. But if other people have parties when the Finns want to sleep, well, that's just wrong! Have some manners! Think about the sleeping people! So, welcome to a world of double standards.

I remember this one politician advertising, how an inhabitant registry of a building would look like, if it was full of Arabic people. Well, with Finns it gets equally bad. It'll be a building full of people, whose last name you will not be able to pronounce, ever. Just try it with "Kämäräinen" or "Pääskysalo". Yeah, I thought so.

To sum up: if you'd like drinking and complaining socially incompetent people with incomprehensible names in your neighborhood, fine. Otherwise, join the Basic Foreigners front against Finns!

Morning thought freeze

2011-02-11T16:32:00.000+02:00

It's morning. I clamber myself out from bed, eat breakfast and start to work. Or so it should happen. Most often my breakfast is very short, a yoghurt is all there is to it, really. And since my "workplace" for my projects happens to be in my room, the travel to work is not a very long one. Meaning the "recovery time" from wake up to work is short. So, I sit in front of the computer and - nothing happens. My brain freezes.

No thoughts at all. Nothing. Njet. Nichts. Nada.

The cogs and flywheels inside my head are stuck. There's no oil to facilitate interactional movement. This situation can, unfortunately, last for a while. According to previous experience - anything between 10 minutes and a full day. One solution is to restock with coffee. It certainly helps, but I'm hoping to avoid this problem mentally, and not just cheat my way out of it.

I'm most definitely not a morning person, so I've never had the advantage of waking up with my brain buzzing at full speed. My brain is not an early bird - it's more like a snake, which hardly moves if you look at it daytime, but strikes like lightning when you least expect it. Once I get the cogs rolling, my thoughts zip around fast enough to make the laptop's AMD processor sorry for its performance. If I don't, however, even a snail would beat me, even with hands tied behind its back.

Naturally, there is always the possibility of helping my neurons by designing my schedule to be more evening-focused. That works, but more commonly there's always the problem, that evening hours are when all the main social stuff is. That's when people go out to eat, drink and discuss the stuff of the day. I don't want to be stuck with my computer/books and miss all the social fun!

Well, I know there really is no perfects solution to this. One good tip is to avoid procrastinating and just brute force the brain to output. With most stuff that works. 90% of work (in my field, at least) does not require full levels of creativity, so it doesn't pay off to wait for the peak hours. Reading articles is possible without making new connections to previous knowledge. It may even be better to read first and think later.

Tomorrow I'll focus on a better start to the day. It'll help. It must help.

Are movies and books competitors?

2011-02-03T10:40:00.000+02:00

I'm a book geek, no doubt about it. I love learning new things and getting new points. Often they come from books. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just that I have started to develop this quality common to many book enthusiasts: I criticize movies and TV, and sometimes my arguments rest on a level of "I think most of it is just crap." Even I know that's not an argument, that's stupidity! All this got me thinking that maybe I just don't get it right. I've always felt that books and movies are somehow each others' competitors or replacements. Are they?

If we stick to fiction for a while, a book is a story with the structure attached, but the details missing. So, one ends up filling in the details and picturing the landscapes on the go. This makes it easier (at least for me) to mentally transport myself into the story and hop into a character's shoes. That way, I learn better and can learn easier to the emotions of a character. Due to the relative freedom of imagination in visualizing the book, I can always imagine myself into the story.

With movies, the situation is quite different. What's written in the script is played on the screen, and there's no way of denying that the story is situated in the Rocky Mountains, if that's what one sees on the screen. I have to enjoy a movie as it is, whereas a book I can enjoy more just as an idea creator.

That was the familiar part, me displaying movies as somehow "worse" than books. I shall now dive into the part how they are also "better".

I've been to many movies, which I've enjoyed thoroughly. The best ones have been always been able to create a wave of emotion at some point. I even remember crying, or at least almost, in some movies. The wave of emotion is something I've never been able to achieve with books. Books can be exciting, to the point that I spend a night reading instead of sleeping. But at best, they stimulate my intellectual brain parts.

Also, not many books make me laugh like a maniac. That's why I love comedy so much. A good episode of the Simpsons is really all I need to get over a bad day. It would be almost comedy just to video me watching the episode alone, laughing like I'm crazy. How often does that happen with books? Quite rarely. So it's not just about the deep messages. Hear what Mike Royko said:

“I never went to a John Wayne movie to find a philosophy to live by or to absorb a profound message. I went for the simple pleasure of spending a couple of hours seeing the bad guys lose.”

All in all, I guess I have to admit that these two forms of entertainment are not from the same sphere. Both tell stories but with a different focus. And they both have their uses. Seems like reality bested my literature-biased sense once again. Maybe, one day, I'll write a book about it!

Chance doesn't exist - and then it does again

2011-01-28T12:38:00.000+02:00

When planning my own projects, thinking about the future, or just generally trying to picture the results of my actions in some future state, I've found it generally useful to think that chance doesn't exist. For sure, this is not true, and borders on the fallacious logic that I so hate - but it still helps. Convincing myself that success is not dependent on chance, but only on my own performance, widens the horizon of possibilities that seem achievable. I quote here Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State Univeristy:

On one hand it's encouraging: it makes me think that even the most ordinary among us should be careful about saying we can't do great things, because people have proven again and again that most people can do something extraordinary if they're willing to put in the exercise. On the other hand, it's a bit overwhelming to look at what these people have to do. They generally invest about five times as much time and effort to become great as an accomplished amateur does to become competent. It's not something everyone's up for."

I guess this is the key note I'm looking for, that basically the world is open to everyone. With practice and dedication, great things can be achieved. This is also the key reason why I'm always saying that people should do what they like best. Sure, it's no easy task focusing on something, but I feel confident it'll pay off sooner or later. (Looking at the text behind the link, I'm not sure if I can call the belief for no chance a very rationalist belief...)

After having done something, however, the concept of chance is quite important. It would be psychologically too much to try to find the fault always in oneself, so it's useful to have a concept to explain not-so-wanted results. In some discussions I've experienced, that some people claim the concept of chance gives us a chance to escape bad result and not improve ourselves. Well, in a way, it does.

But there is still a fundamental difference between analyzing what you could have done better, and then saying you found nothing, or on the other hand blaming chance right from the start. It is after the self-reflection when chance can be brought into the picture, not before. If you've honestly done your best, there's no way to make it better that time. The point here is that chance will help you psychologically to accept that nobody's a Superman. Development is incremental, and there's no point in trying to see all the deficits in one go, it'd just make one feel terrible. Better to improve all the time in small steps. That's what the concept of chance helps me to do.

The Graz block courses

2011-01-27T10:23:00.000+02:00

One more exam and I'll be finished with all my winter semester courses here in Graz. Levels of difficulty of the courses have ranged from a joke to one of the hardest things I've done. I have to say that the railroad design course, with its 500 pages of German material, an oral exam and a ~100h project work - for which I had to learn AutoCAD - was the benchmark in the latter section. At the other end of the scale would be some of the block courses I've attended.

A block course is something I've only got accustomed to in here. Usually it's a three-day course from 9 to 17, followed by an exam a week later. These courses generally have a small amount of theoretical content supported by several group assignments completed at the lectures. Usually the course has a maximum of 25 students, as these group assignments are generally presented in class, and any more students would make the concept impossible. The key is that the assignments should arouse new points of view in the students and hence help to create a culture of discussion. Success rates have varied from course to course.

The joke for me is that I usually get 3 ECTS for a course like this, and even with all my good faith could I defend the proposition that such a course is worth all those credits. But still, for an Erasmus it's a good way to hog up credits and save time for travelling! Despite its uses, the above is not the only (or even the main) reason why I enjoy such courses. It is the fact that it's possible to get really into something, even just for a couple of days. And I've enjoyed thoroughly the discussions with students and professors that I've had, both in and out of class.

I've toyed with the idea of incorporating similar courses in the Finnish system. Replacing any mandatory courses with block would not work, but maybe in the Master phase these could be used to provide some basics especially to minor subject students. In my experience sometimes people just have to work way too much on minor subject courses in comparison to their interest level. Surely it would be best for all to be able to concentrate on what really drives them.

Another option would be to have small courses that try to give light to a certain viewpoint or methodology to have such courses. Especially it could work for contemporary topics, or topics which still lack enough scientific background research to be included in the present day course books. I'm sure that in Aalto we have enough skills to know what those kinds of topics are.

Rediscovering the joys of literature

2011-01-22T22:16:00.000+02:00

Halfway through my present university education, I've noticed a worrying side effect of my education. I've lost a lot of my literary sense. Powering through thousands of pages of course books has taught me to try to remember the main factual content right away. Skimming the pages of management books requires a good sense of what the key content is, at least if one wants to save a lot of effort in the learning process. This is a useful skill, especially when reading other factual texts. It never hurts to discern the main arguments of a writer right away, and skipping - or rather skim-reading - the extra stuff certainly is a valuable timesaver.

The problem is, I seem to have lost the sense how to read more emotional literature. Well, serious literature, at any rate. I can still pick up any thriller and read it with the same ease as ever before, but with the more heavy novels I'm in trouble. These books owe their effects to a process of identification and affection with the characters and/or situations. The point of such a book is to make one feel, and that feeling then provokes thinking. Trying to see behind the story while reading results in nothing sensible, since one needs to read the story first and think about it afterward. Trying to do these simultaneously makes no sense, since the story is a whole not reducible to its parts. The same thing is with movies, the scenes are part of a story, and in a good movie few scenes would make that much of an impact on their own. At the moment, with my course book reading style I get stuck, trying to see the idea behind some character way too early. It's as sane as trying to analyze the motives and desires of a person you've just met and hardly even know at all.

The books of this limbo world of sorts are not everywhere. Books, which are very literary, yet have a lot to say. This includes some obvious works in philosophy, like Nietzsche, but also a lot of classics. Not the kind of books to pick up amidst a tight schedule and stress. Exactly the kind of books I've previously avoided and am only now filling my shelves with. I guess that is why I've managed to avoid noticing this obvious lack for so long.

Luckily, now I have a lot of time to read, and besides a share of factual literature I'll pinch in pieces of the aforementioned genre. According to my high school Finnish and literature teacher, one can never go wrong with classics. Time to see if she was right!

Life as investment: the stock of shortsightedness

2011-01-17T19:41:00.000+02:00

Life - a long and fuzzy thing. Something, that most of us feel is quite important. We all want to be happy and satisfied. That's fine by me, but there's something about the viewpoint, the philosophical stance that bugs me. It's the view of investment and return.

With the rise of capitalism and financial security the language of economics and business has invaded into the personal sphere. I've seen countless self-help books and heard many a discussion, where we are investing in quality time, marketing ourselves or developing our assets (eg. skills). Before I could have shrugged and said that sure, it sounds stupid, but they're just words, and calling learning asset development doesn't really change anything. I don't think so anymore.

I've really seen people of my age do ROI calculations about various careers to decide, which line of work to get into. Usually they've been the same way, get the average yearly salary and then calculate, how much the difference in, say, 10 years is. Some have even took into account investing this 10 year surplus into shares and then found out to be loaded at the promising age of 70! Yes, I'm telling the worst examples, but I'm devastated that even a single person would seriously consider the above as a career choice method. Well, maybe I just came across somebody who really values money first and foremost, and I guess there's not much to say if that's a conscious choice.

Money, however, is just the tip of the iceberg. We are investing a lot of other stuff too. Ever heard of the concept of quality time in parenting? Have you ever been told how a PT can make your training so much more effective? Have you ever heard how just that one orange juice makes you so much more energetic in the morning, saving precious time?

All the above things can have a grain of truth, and actually make your life more effective. But to think that it actually increases your happiness, that's the key issue. The belief seems to be that the more time and effort we put into something, the better the results. Sure, it works for a lot of things: if I spend a lot of time studying real good for an exam, my grade is a lot more likely to be at the upper end of the scale. But, seriously, to apply this framework to life?

First of all, there's the problem of not being able to increase the time used. You're alive all the time already! Secondly, what's the return in this context? Why does more effort inescapably make you more happy? What does happiness have to do with effectiveness?

Well, you don't really need to be a philosopher to work it out. More effort makes us more capable and more effective. That in turn makes us do tasks better, which means promotions, a bigger paycheck. That enables glamour and style, which in turn facilitates rise in social status. If one believes that happiness stems from the position in the social scene the right track is in increasing effort. I, however, happen to believe that happiness comes from my disposition to the outside, not the other way round. For me happiness is very closely linked with intrinsic motivation, as a kind of gut feeling of "how much I like doing this", using an example of having a hobby.

There's a lot more to be said about this subject, but I'll let it go for now, lest this post become monstrously long!

Note on teaching

2011-01-07T14:22:00.000+02:00

I think everybody has heard the following famous quote from Abraham Lincoln:

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

Today I suddenly found myself reflecting on all the different courses and lectures I've been to. The differences are huge: the best lectures have been phenomenal, whereas the worst ones have made me feel like I'd rather be deaf to avoid any similar experiences. I know the lecturers try their best, but teaching is really not that easy. It should be informative, compact and easy to understand. But still, the key ingredient is to not make it boring! So, I thought of an application of Lincoln. Maybe the golden rule of teaching should be instead

You can bore all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot bore all the people all the time.

We are terrible in systems thinking

2011-01-04T10:03:00.000+02:00

Well, you've probably heard at some point this famous statement:

"Correlation is not causation."

It works, sure. The fact that both ice cream and swimsuit hit top sales at summer does not mean that one causes the other. This distinction is especially important in scientific research and reporting about it. I've seen a lot of reports by newspapers failing to make the distinction explicit, causing a huge amount of confusion on the discussion boards. Just remember the distinction and so far so good.

Larger than two unit systems make things a lot more intriguing. In a large system, causes produce effects which are causes to other effects etc. At some point you've probably heard or read that everything is connected. I'd be hard pressed to find a more compact and revealing description of a network-like system, where a change in a single node causes effects like waves; everything is linked to everything.

Looking at a standard analysis of such a system (referring to a layman's analysis, not a scientific one), usually at a point when we have observed several causes and two dozen effects we just usually seem to give up. We put up our hands and just pick the most important causes in our opinion, and advocate that they explain the effects. If not all of them, at least well enough, so forgetting the other causes is in order. Unfortunately, at times this behaviour is more like reversed stupidity, not intelligence. In systems even minor effects can cause large ripple effects, as per the famous butterfly effect. It's just that we find analyzing such a system cognitively so difficult, that we usually end up reducing it to a simpler form. With this method the system unfortunately ceases to be a system. We are trying to analyze a car, thinking it's just a cart without a horse. Not a very good idea.

Going to the other extreme, sometimes we conclude that everything is connected - and leave it at that. So what are the effects? How big are they? This viewpoint doesn't really help a lot either, does it? If we want to analyze a system, we need some orders of magnitude in the effects. Otherwise anything can cause anything, making us revert back to guessing instead of an actual analysis. It seems clear that we need the best of both worlds, not just one extreme. Our vision is just as bad with an eyepatch, no matter which eye is blind.

So what's the corrective step? To try to combine the two above viewpoints, it should probably be a point that everything is connected, correlation is not causation, but also that effects and causes can be in the same phenomenon. In a system, the effect of something is very often the cause of something else. A first degree change can raise a vital unit above a threshold, which in turn causes an effect in another node. A system cannot be analyzed by first finding the causes and then deducing the effects, as they both can coexist at the same time, and not all effects arise directly from the original setting.

Reflections on an accident

2011-01-03T15:39:00.000+02:00

Long time no see! Alas, on this occasion the reason for the silence is of a real sort. In the middle of December I experience an accident: I fainted in a grocery store and hit my head as I crashed to the floor. Result: a small skull fracture and a minor brain bleed. So I got to spend two weeks in an Austrian hospital with CT and MRT scans and pain killers, but luckily also got loads and loads of messages and support from concerned friends, relatives and loved ones. I thank all of you with my deepest gratitude and consider myself very lucky to enjoy the presence of such magnificent people! Healthwise I'm pretty ok now, and should not experience any lasting effects. Present day symptoms are mainly an enhanced need for sleep and rest and some minor headaches. So all in all, the future looks very bright, no worries.

Hitting one's head for real makes some weird stuff happen. I can't really remember that much from the first three days after what happened, but I'll tell you all the fun parts. The first thing I remember is being lifted into an ambulance. The first discussion between me and the paramedic was about this:

"Where are we going?"
"Well, you are in an ambulance so what do you think?"
"Oh yeah, when you put it like that... So has something happened?"

Yeah, I didn't really know what was going on, but they briefed me on the way. When we got to the hospital and the doctor interviewed me, it didn't really go any better. I can't remember much from the actual exchange, but the wife of another patient told me some days later that I was really speaking in tongues when I arrived. I'd talked mainly English mixed with some German words and some she couldn't understand at all. Well, I told her that was probably my subconscious talking in Finnish. After this mishmash of languages, you can imagine the nurses' surprise next morning, as they discovered I spoke rather good German!

Fast-forward two weeks of resting, eating and physiotheraphy and I'm here, sitting in front of the computer, looking back at the accident. What has changed? Not much, really. Of course, it made me respect the people close to me even more, but apart from that I don't feel I had a lot of revelations. Sure, in a way it was a case of Reductionism Strikes Back, a reminder of how our cognitive skills are eventually based on physical phenomena. A reminder of how you and your brain are inseparable. So best to take good care of them both.

Research conclusions in novels

2010-12-09T13:47:00.000+02:00

Science presents arguments that coherently lead to a conclusion.These arguments follow a (well, more or less) logical chain of reasoning. Many see this as the best way to share knowledge of the world's workings. Might or might not be, but for sure it is not the only way.

Think about novels. A novel is the result of a writing process. To achieve this, the writer might have travelled, talked to people, read stuff, or whatever he has thought appropriate to develop an understanding of the subject. We can call this background research. This research develops the writer's understanding of the subject matter, until at some point he knows it well enough to formulate the central finding of research in his mind. This we can reaching a conclusion.

In that sense, novelists and researchers are not that far apart: both study phenomena and make findings about them. Apart from the obvious methodical differences, the aim and presentation involve differences, too. Scientists always look for causal relations and are trying to answer the question "why?". A scientist could say that he has discovered how rainbows work and then present evidence on the refraction of light.

A novelist, on the other hand, isn't very often answering "why?" but more so "what?". He's focusing on the phenomenon itself, without necessarily trying to explain it. His conclusion is the existence of the phenomenon itself. As for presentation, a novelist does not necessarily present his conclusion in a very concise form. That is for the reader to find out. It is a sort of intelligence challenge, where the reader is invited to try to find out the conclusion with the help of some clues and thematic guidance.

Clearly this analysis of novels does not fit all types, but for me it's sometimes been helpful to ask myself "what's the conclusion here?". Books invite us notice something with the help of intuition and emotion. Moreover, we have a habit of seeing the world as interplay of narratives. We have a certain built-in story detector. Then, intuitive conclusions may stick better, because they play on our sense of stories and it may feel like you discovered the conclusion with your intuition. And in a lot of cases, the stickiness is definitely not a bad thing.

Not just getting an education

2010-12-07T20:47:00.000+02:00

My choice to switch my focus from engineering to applied philosophy has, quite unsurprisingly, raised eyebrows among some. "It's a good education and you'll have a nice living as an engineer", some say, so why change? Even not going into how I feel about money, I have my reasons.

You see, I don't want to just "get an education". Getting an education is short for showing up at exams, forgetting most of the stuff right thereafter and finally ending up with a piece of paper enabling a nice job with a nice pay in a nice company. Not my thing. No, instead of "getting an education" I want to learn how to understand the world. I want to know what this is all about, where we came from and where we're going, and why a lot of things are like they are, instead of something else. A lot of these things would never come up in your regular Joe's engineering education.

Admittedly, you can achieve deep learning in a technical university too. It's just that the focus there is a bit off for me. I'm not into the details of robot control or the the best practices of companies. I'm a paradigm questioner, and that's got me into all kinds of trouble at courses already. I have a habit of asking a lot of annoying questions that to most of the engineering guys seem irrelevant. So it would seem nonsensical to continue along the previous path. Better save my time for my interests, and as a bonus I'll save other people's nerves as well, not arguing about all the paradigm at the engineering lectures.

Simplicity and complexity

2010-11-30T00:10:00.000+02:00

The greatest thinkers are able to grasp ideas of serious complexity and yet explain them in a relatively simple manner. I've always been in awe of these people and admired their brain power and presentation skills. Today, however, I was seriously bored at a lecture, arguing that "it's so simple, I keep falling asleep!" But later I thought, how could I know if it truly was a simple thing that was being taught? What if it was instead a highly complex issue, and now because my lack of concentration I will not grasp it?

Should be striving for simplicity or complexity? Too simple things are usually a bit boring, but once you get them they're easy to remember. Too complex ideas, however, are hard to get. Surprisingly, even they can be quite easy to remember once you just need them often enough. But if you don't, well... For example, I can't really remember very much about a lot of math stuff I've had the pleasure of doing before.

“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
- Henry Louis Mencken

Mencken, as a satirist, was quite rightly referring to the complexity of human life and society. Nevertheless, it serves as a nice remark for researchers and thinkers as well. No matter how much you like Occam's razor, sometimes simple might just be too simple. Simplifying and generalizing too much will lead to conclusions being non-descriptive and self-evident. By not categorizing and just generalizing, you'll do away with all the distinctive argumentative power. Having said that, I'd never advocate for the kind of this-stuff-is-nonsense-so-I'll-just-make-up-bucketloads-of-concepts-and-hope-nobody-notices research. Concepts are important, but trying to confound deliberately, that's just intellectual fraud.

In the end, I guess the same approach we use with business works with explanations too. If it's too cheap, I mean simple, it just might be too good to be true. If it's too expensive, screw it - you can do better if you look beyond the first marketplace.

New outsides, new insides

2010-11-27T21:29:00.000+02:00

Hey, new layout! I got seriously bored of the old, boring brown layout that made me feel like I'm watching something made in the 70s, hastily digitized by the original creator. Pure horror. So, enter new slick layout, which seriously tested both my HTML and photo editing skills. Hope I can coerce somebody to draw me a new logo in the future, too. I can't even draw a stickman myself.

Layout is just the perceptional layer, however. And my ramblings have never been about changing the outside, I strive to write about changing the inside. Every once in a while I get asked "why do you write?". It's quite simple, really. I want to change my inside layer, too. I want to think better, think more clearly. I want to argue better. I want to know, how I really feel about something.

And if anybody reads my text and feels a tinge of improvement, gets a new idea, a new perspective or has a laugh, I already feel I've justified the trouble. Regardless if that anybody is just me, just one other person or 5000 people, even one mind on the way to more clarity, better arguments and - hopefully - a notion of happiness is a victory.

Trust your instinct, obey your thirst of knowledge

2010-11-24T14:23:00.004+02:00

I've tried to keep myself on the track of gathering knowledge, reading, and what you, I guess, could call "self-improvement". I have to say, that I've discovered it's a damn load of work.

Somehow, back when I got this idea that I need to read more, write more and think more, I thought it was going to be quite a straightforward business. I mean, how hard could it be? Read a couple of books, write some stuff - and hey presto, you're a much better person!

Well, it was a fallacy to think that, obviously. First of all there's the time issue: countless hours are spent on WIkipedia, on LessWrong, on reading various books. Secondly, some of the stuff I've come across in books, blogs etc. is just so damn complex, that I end up thinking about it for days, feeling just even more confused afterward! But still, I've got the same feeling that it's good for me.

It's really hard to rationally justify all this effort. The progress (if it exists) seems to happen in infinitesimal steps. But still, I know that there was a day, when I couldn't write. There was a day, when I knew nothing about Aristotle's political theory. There is a change, but it's just so slow that I end up forgetting it's happening.

However, there is no knowing if all this will lead to me being "a better person". I embarked on this Quest about 1,5 years ago, and have felt a lot better since. But does feeling better equal going in the right direction?

I guess I just can't know what I will know in the future, and how it will profit my growth. I'll have to trust my instincts in being a rationalist.

Hike-life parallels

2010-11-21T16:30:00.004+02:00

I went for a hike up and over the "home mountain" of Graz. Schöckl, peaking at 1450 metres, has some rougher terrain testing your physics but also rewards the effort with some really beautiful sights. This time, however, the weather was extremely foggy, with visibility dropping sometimes to less than 10 m. Luckily, the clouds in the air seemed do make the clouds in my head vanish for once.

I reflected some bit on the weather and realized, how much the hike actually resembled life in general: at times you work extra hard and still it seems that the steep incline is endless. At times you're completely in the fog and can't really see at all where you're going. You might even take a wrong turn and wander in the fog for a while before figuring out how to get to the main road. Feeling adventurous, you might also get off the main highway, just to discover a beautiful forest path almost unused.

And just you're getting back down, damning the cursed fog to the depths of hell for spoiling everything: a gust of wind and the fog clears, revealing some of the most beautiful sights you've ever seen. And you instantly know remember why you chose that path - because you knew the sights were there. You had hoped for the fog to clear. And then it did just that.

That's what the lecturer said

2010-11-03T23:21:00.025+02:00

Key:

What he said
What he meant

"This subject is very important basic information for anyone looking for a career in business."
"You won't learn anything useful, but it's a mandatory course so you'll just have to sit through it."

”This course will be a lot of work, but it will also be rewarding once you learn all of it.”
"I cannot understand that students have a life outside this classroom.”

”Even though the lecture notes are available on the Web, I still encourage you to read through the course book.”
”Hey, even I haven't read it. But I'll still put a question in the exam regarding one nitpick piece of it, just to force you to read it.”

”I hope you will ask questions and comment as much as possible.”
”I don't really know what I'm talking about so I hope you'll do the teaching for me.”

”I will keep the theory part as short as possible.”
either ”You are idiots and wouldn't understand it anyway.” or
”I don't really understand it myself, so I can't teach it to you.”

”That's a good question, but in the scope of this course we won't go further into that conversation.”
”I don't have a clue how to answer that.”

”I think you have an interesting viewpoint into this.”
”I think you're an idiot.”

”I think we can agree to disagree.”
”I think you're an idiot – besides, I'm right.”

”That question cannot be answered with the knowledge of this course.”
”Hey, I'm the one with the PhD! Who's criticizing who here?”

Trains, pendulums and jets

2010-10-18T22:47:00.004+03:00

Today I had my mind on people and motivation. After the last text I tried to form a couple of more discriptive, but in no way scientifically researched, analogies. What kind of people are there amongst us? Here comes:

Trains
These kind of people are the single-minded locomotives of the human universe. They do their thing steadily, formidably and they will always get there eventually (unless they're owned by VR). They might not be the fastest ones to achieve it, but they have a distinct sense of the direction - they really know how to get there. Of course, in itself this is a blessing and a curse. Someone with the tracks laid already can hardly change the direction very fast. A new destination will require new rails - and that means several rounds of complaints from the little inhabitants called your brain cells.

Pendulums
These people have usually more key areas of interest, between which they alternate periodically. (I'm thinking Foucault pendulum here, so more than two equilibria positions are allowed). Their life may be one consisting of projects, or at least something in the way of those. Characteristically, once they delve deeper into something they really get into it, but after a certain period of time the interest starts to wane, until it's time to change the direction again. I feel like a pendulum guy, personally.

Jets
These people really can motor. They're the fastest ones around. Before you've even formulated your approach regarding a problem they've already halfway to the library with 27 different solutions running in their heads. As a cheetah of intellect, however, jets usually need more time to rest and gather energy after a completed quest. I mean, have you ever seen trains idling for days? (again, excluding VR trains) Another problem for the jets can be either speed limits (working in groups where not everyone wants do dedicate their life to the project) or alternatively too long distances, causing them to run out of steam (projects with too distant goals and too long a span).

Quite obviously, this is hardly a comprehensive analysis of anyone's personality. But it might make a useful tool, help you think about yourself from a new perspective or just give you a few laughs. And every one of those reactions is a good one.

Driven interests

2010-10-16T23:16:00.002+03:00

Okay, I've been very lazy the past weeks - sorry about that. There's just something that life in a foreign-spoken world with courses that make you have a 80-hour work week do to your writing. To remedy the situation, here's a piece I gathered from my backpack, finally typed in digital form now:

I admire people with drive. With passion. I admire those of you who can put in hour after hour for their cause. I would want to be one of you. I'd like to find that mental state, where you're prepared to go to hell and back just for the sake of it. Just for that small step forward.

On the other hand, I know that kind of single-mindedness isn't just for me. My problem is I want a piece of everything. Like no in Graz, I'm currently studying how to design railroad tracks, how much camber you need to have in a curve and why two single-track tunnels are better than one with two tracks.

So far my studies have sure been interesting, but for different reasons than usually. Sometimes I feel like a detective out of a Stieg Larsson novel as I weave, twist and google my way midst the course material, online dictionaries and every even remotely helpful website I come across. Sometimes a page of study material auf Deutsch feels like a two-mile crawl in mud, but once you make it through - oh, the euphoria sometimes resembles that of actual sports.

It sound like I'm a 6-year-old at a buffet table and frankly sometimes I feel like one too. But hell, I'd rather be an excited kid than a bored and depressed "grown-up", whatever that euphemism stands for.

But still the question remains. Something isn't everything, but can everything be something? Maybe you can be driven by variety as well? Maybe a piece of it all is as good as all of one piece.

Postmodern society

2010-09-17T14:25:00.005+03:00

Jameson views a number of phenomena as distinguishing postmodernity from modernity. He speaks of "a new kind of superficiality" or "depthlessness" in which models that once explained people and things in terms of an "inside" and an "outside" (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected.
Second is a rejection of the modernist "Utopian gesture", evident in Van Gogh, of the transformation through art of misery into beauty whereas in the postmodernism movement the object world has undergone a "fundamental mutation" so that it has "now become a set of texts or simulacra" (Jameson 1993:38). Whereas modernist art sought to redeem and sacralize the world, to give life to world (we might say, following Graff, to give the world back the enchantment that science and the decline of religion had taken away from it), postmodernist art bestows upon the world a "deathly quality… whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content" (ibid.). Graff sees the origins of this transformative mission of art in an attempted substitution of art for religion in giving meaning to the world that the rise of science and Enlightenment rationality had removed - but in the postmodern period this is seen as futile.
The third feature of the postmodern age that Jameson identifies is the "waning of affect" - not that all emotion has disappeared from the postmodern age but that it lacks a particular kind of emotion such as that found in "Rimbaud's magical flowers 'that look back at you'". He notes that "pastiche eclipses parody" as "the increasing unavailability of the personal style" leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.
Jameson argues that distance "has been abolished" in postmodernity, that we "are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates". This "new global space" constitutes postmodernity's "moment of truth". The various other features of the postmodern that he identifies "can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object". The postmodern era has seen a change in the social function of culture. He identifies culture in the modern age as having had a property of "semi-autonomy", with an "existence… above the practical world of the existent" but, in the postmodern age, culture has been deprived of this autonomy, the cultural has expanded to consume the entire social realm so that all becomes "cultural". "Critical distance", the assumption that culture can be positioned outside "the massive Being of capital" upon which left-wing theories of cultural politics are dependent, has become outmoded. The "prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity". (Jameson 1993:54)

(text source: Wikipedia on Postmodernity, paragraph Postmodern society)

Old endings and new beginnings

2010-08-22T20:25:00.003+03:00

Today I had a strange feeling. I had my last orienteering race of this season. And it's only August! This year, no Finnish Champs, no races in cold rain and swearing why the hell I do this actually. And for the first time in years I actually had a good ending race of the season. For some reason never achieved that before. Maybe this time it was because I quite couldn't grasp the idea that this is it, the last race for a long time.

On the way home from my parents' I started thinking about all this in a more general perspective. The next following weeks will be mostly the same: the last time eating in Otaniemi, the last night in my flat here, the last time I see my friends. All that will be out of my life for some while.

Of course it feels at least a bit strange, even slightly depressing. I mean, I'll be giving up much by leaving the ever-so-friendly atmosphere of Otaniemi. I've really liked it here. It is very convenient: you can find almost everything you need very close, and there's always a party if you need one!

On the other hand, Otaniemi is almost too convenient and comfortable. Life isn't always like that, nor should it be. Troubles, mistakes, new views and different ways of doing stuff are really the situations that teach you most - especially about yourself. I think one can never know who one is without first looking at others. Isn't it the differences, not the absolute qualities that define us? Isn't a "mathematically attuned" person just better at maths than the average Joe?

The upcoming 10 months in Graz will surely offer a lot of new ways to grow, to learn and explore. I'm really looking forward to that. Even though the future looks uncertain, I'm very confident it's all going to be just fine. I mean, the uncertainty is exactly why I should be going. Going to a safe, previously known place would not really teach me anything. (Although one can never know what might happen even in the most homely place, just thinking back about Sonja's exchange period here)

I will definitely miss a lot of things and people from here - and I like it. It is better to miss them than having nothing to miss.

How much money is enough?

2010-08-16T15:26:00.005+03:00

You know, some decades ago people suffering from a shortage of food wasn't all that uncommon. In the Western countries, that's all changed. In the past 30 years money has taken the place of food in that sense. Working was all about getting money. More money. No matter how much you had, you still needed more.

Unfortunately, as with food, enough is enough. Most of the people in the West have really more than they need. So, they want to drive a BMW instead of a Toyota - need to have more money. Want a bigger house - need more money. I mean, when is it going to stop? Is anything ever enough? Or are we going to consume ourselves to oblivion, much like mr. Creosote in Monty Python's "The Meaning Of Life"?

On the other hand, is it really about the amount? Or is it more about how you use it? Does it matter why you need a huge pile of money, or is the problem just the amount?

A couple of days ago I started thinking what I needed money for. First, the obvious things came up: food, a decent home, clothes and all that must-have stuff. Well, that didn't seem to cover it all. I'd need some hobbies, right? So, on the list went orienteering and running equipment expenses, a bit of traveling and books. Oh yeah, music equipment, too. But that was it. I mean, that's not an enormous amount of income I'd need. And if I split housing between two people, it's not like I'd need to be Governor of the Entire Universe to see it through.

If I think of it, most of the things that make me happy are very cheap - or even free. Love, friendship - can't buy those from Stockmann. Sure, you'll want the occasional movie night or dine out, but that's all really. Nature - well, all you need is a bike and you're ready to go, really. Get a camera if you feel really into it.

But then, alas, disaster struck in the way of critical thinking. What if somebody has more expensive hobbies? Is it ok to have driving as a hobby? How about horse riding? The intuitive solution would be to claim that if you have expensive solutions, you just have to work more. But somehow I feel the need to draw a line between what's ok as self-actualization and what's just too much in the way of vanity. So far, however, the solution is nowhere to be seen. So for the time being, I guess I'll just have to accept that some people need more money than others.

Philosophy: a theory of anything - or a theory of everything?

2010-08-13T15:01:00.005+03:00

What is philosophy about? What really is the subject-matter of philosophy? With other sciences the questions seems to be so much easier: usually we don't have a lot of trouble deciding on the subject-matter of physics, for example. But with philosophy it is so much harder. Philosophical questions are everywhere, some claim. There are only very few valid philosophical questions, other argue. To some, philosophy as a whole is meaningless gibberish. After all this, the young would-be philosophy student is surely feeling nauseous and decides that a career in bureaucracy actually sounds quite intriguing.

Let's take a closer look at the statement, that philosophy is a theory of anything. And bu anything, I really mean anything. It can be about politics, moral, the chair you're sitting in, Donald Duck, or a five-legged venom-drooling monster from the planet 'Czazch. Now that's one hell of a field to cover. According to this view, philosophical questions are everywhere. By chaining questions about being one always ends up with a philosophical question. To demonstrate:
"I see a table."
-> "What is a table?"

"A table is a flat-surfaced object."
-> "What is an object?"

"An object is something hard and three-dimensional that you can touch."
-> "What means that it is something?"

"That it has these qualities."
-> "What means having qualities?"

And so on. This ensures that we always end up with a question regarding being, meaning or some other final principle. To some extent this can be thought of searching for the final cause. But how can we decide, when the question is philosophical? How do we know that we've reached the edge of, say, physical explanations and need to divert our attention to philosophy? I mean, if philosophy can be about anything, then what is philosophy, really? Is the explanation of subject-matter really useful in any way?

On the other hand, philosophy can be a theory about everything. Whereas every branch of science tries to explain its own piece of turf, philosophy goes beyond the lawn and tries to explain the big picture. This holistic view often tries to tie the knots together and for example explain what questions we can actually answer, or how we interpret the phenomenal world. But can we have a theory of the whole? If its pieces consist of partial theories of the world, shouldn't the "theory of the world" be actually outside the world? Isn't that at least outside our understanding, if not a logical paradox altogether?

All the above shows that there are really no clear answers as to what philosophy really is. But as any philosopher knows, usually asking the right questions is more important than answering them.

------------------
This text was heavily influenced by Roger Scruton's Modern Philosophy. For more insights on the subject, see chapter 1 "The Nature of Philosophy".

The sale of moral equity

2010-08-09T21:14:00.002+03:00

A scapegoat is what we need
as we ourselves are innocent
the crisis that wants to feed
like a brother after lent

In a world of wealth and money
like bees to honey
we flock to golden values
and paper money

Handling checks and balances
surely they're just after fame
it's not us, it's them
they're the ones to blame!

So we sell our moral equity
because we just don't care
outsourcing ethics like IT
and we just pay our fare

Nicaragua: there and back again

2010-08-05T09:59:00.015+03:00

Hey-ho, I'm back and still alive! Well, actually I've been back for a week now, but I was too lazy to write about it. After 10 days of rain, various illnesses and all other hassle it feels good to be back here :) However, the trip itself was very eye-opening, hence my interest in sharing some experiences from the land afar.

The first thing that struck me in Nicaragua was the poverty. Ok, that's really a bit of an overstatemen: the first thing that struck me was the annoying immigration, the second thing was my lovely girlfriend, the third thing was the darkness and the fourth was the jetlag. But the first thing the next morning was definitely the poverty!

To rewind a bit, my first trouble was with the Nicaraguan immigration. I was happily standing in the line for the immigration after some 20 hours of traveling. Looking around, it struck me a bit odd that a lot of people had dollars held between their passports. "Wow, is the corruption really this bad that people speed up the process at the border already", I thought to myself. As it turned out, upon arriving to Nicaragua you have to pay a tourist fee of 5 dollars. Naturally, I didn't have any dollars at hand, nor did I have any cordobas. So the immigration officer confiscated my passport and told me to get some cash for the fee. Well, I trudged dutifully to the exchange office, only to discover that they didn't accept cards! Curses! So, a frantic search for cash was in order. After raiding my wallet and all my available pockets I managed to gather around 7 euros, which just about was enough. So, I managed to exchange it for cordobas, got my passport back and got through the whole hassle, tired and annoyed.

The next morning I was wandering around Leon with amazement. Coming from a country like Finland the poor state of affairs was really something. The infrastructure was pretty bad which contributed to a feeling of insecurity and general untrustworthiness towards other people. Well, I got used to it gradually, but that's how I felt in the beginning. After two days of jetlagging (and avoiding the storm that was flooding the streets) we climbed to Cerro Negro and volcanoboarded downhill from the 400m. It was fun, even though the storm that hit us at the top of Cerro Negro was quite annoying - you couldn't hear anything from three metres afar, let alone see anything, as the rain was hitting us basically sideways.

Driving through a local horse fair in Nandaime

A regular long-distance bus in Nicaragua

The bus control panel was seriously high tech

After that it was time to travel around Nicaragua: we spent time at Isla de Ometepe, climbing Concepción (1600 m, went up to 1000 m) and not seeing much of a view due to some weather (again!). A day was well spent at the amazing beaches of Santo Domingo, after which we took a day to review a nature park near Moyogalpa.Climbing up to Concepción

The smug look of disappointment as we realized the clouds
were going to spoil the view from Concepción.
(oh btw, this guy was actually an Austrian from Graz, who we met
by chance on the way up - you can imagine my surprise!)

A moment of perfection in Santo Domingo

Then we left Isla de Ometepe and went to Granada for a boat trip. Almost immediately after that I got 39 fever and was forced to spend the remaining day in bed. Next morning at 3.30 we left for Managua to take a flight to the Caribbean side, to Corn Island. The plan was to go from Corn Island to Little Corn Island for snorkeling. But as it turned out, my body had quite different plans. I felt nauseous all the way to Managua, and my suspicion was confirmed as my previous dinner made a reappearance right after the 1 hour taxi ride. My body seemed to be enjoying this show, since encore throwing up resulted with 3-hour intervals for almost the rest of the day. Somehow I managed to survive to Corn Island, but we decided that a 1-hour trip to Little Corn in an open boat in sunshine would be too much for me - which indeed it would have. So, we booked a hotel in Big Corn and I collapsed in a heap on the bed, just trying to stay alive and keep the rest of the liquids inside me.

At 4 pm I finally gave up trying to get better with our own medicines and Sonja convinced me to go to the local hospital. I have to say that the treatment at the hospital was very good, despite the poor conditions and ridiculous pay - doctors and nurses earn about 800 $ / month. After an afternoon in there with 2 l of saline dripping in my vein I started to get gradually better. Combined with antibiotics, the excellent treatment of doctors and nurses and two days of rest got me up to shape just in time (talk about being on the receiving end of JIT!) for the flight home. Still, the annoyance of missing four full days was pretty big.

Some very strangely shaped rice fields in eastern Nicaragua

Anyway, I hope the pictures tell you more than my ramblings. Due to technical difficulties with my camera, most of the pics were taken with Sonja's - I might upload some of those later on. For now, though, you'll have to stick with my documentation :)

Stem rust - a serious threat to wheat production

2010-07-14T12:12:00.008+03:00

Stem rust is threatening the production of wheat in Africa and Middle East, according to a recent article in the Economist. To summarize the content briefly: stem rust, a devastating plant disease that was the worst wheat disease in the first half of the 20th century, is back and badder than ever. It was thought to have been wiped out in the 1970s as Norman Borlaug discovered a gene that resisted the aforementioned disease. Unfortunately, stem rust evolved to another form, now dubbed Ug99 by FAO (Ug for Uganda, the country of origin; 99 for the year). Ug99 bypasses the previous gene protection and has destroyed even as much as 80-100% of crops it has afflicted in Africa.

So far, it has spread to Middle East and advanced to southern Africa as well. As the picture below portrays, there is a severe risk of stem rust jeopardising the entire wheat production in Africa and severely afflicting Middle East, being a threat even to Pakistan, one of the top 5 wheat producers. With time and a little bit of bad luck, the spores might even be carried with the winds to Australia, the third biggest wheat exporter in the world. Clearly, something most be done to 1) stop this crisis and 2) to prevent future disasters.

Labs around the globe are putting in hours to develop any kind of cure for Ug99, but so far there has been limited success. Even though nine rust-resistant breed have made it into production and distribution, the problem of logistics remains.

Producers in Africa and Asia are poor families with little or no leverage to invest. The cure has to be distributed to them in some way. They cannot afford to buy it from the private sector, and in many places there really aren't any public organizations capable of administering the solution. So far, only 0.1% of wheat area in countries FAO has deemed to be under threat has been planted with rust-resistant varieties.

This really calls for multinational action. Perhaps FAO could organize the distribution itself? After all, Borlaug's new breed spread relatively fast, so it should be possible to achieve a similar result this time. Stem rust threatens as many as 26 countries at the moment - countries that make up about 1/3 of the wheat production in the whole world. I don't care who does it or how it's done, but this crisis has to be stopped before it escalates into full-blown hunger!

Preventing future disasters is a completely different matter. There have been claims for more diverse farming. It is true that the current monoculture enables fast spreading of such diseases, as cops usually involve the same grain and are very large areas. However, there have been also some contradictory opinions especially regarding the development of Ug99. Reader northoldmoss expressed this view in the discussion regarding the source article:

"While Ug99 was discovered in Uganda, it almost certainly did not evolve there. Most probably it originated in the hotbed of wheat variation in traditional farming in Ethiopia - long known for its rich crop genetic resources."

However, the research (that I know of) is not yet decided on the matter. Personally, I'd currently vote for diversity but I guess that's not really a very educated opinion. If anyone has any insight on this matter, I'd be delighted.

The attic of my mind

2010-07-05T13:59:00.002+03:00

The attic. The place where we take all our junk. All the things that now seem so useless, so unworthy of our care. We don't want to look after them anymore, because they have been replaced by something else. Something, which glimmers betters in the sun, smells nicer or looks less rugged. We grasp that new shiny wonder and throw our old stuff away from sight, away, to be forgotten.

But sometimes we climb up the stairs to the top floor, take the ladder from the closet, open he hatch and climb up to the attic.

We casually browse the contents of the boxes, occasionally picking up something. Almost everything reminds of something and brings back a wave of memories. Look, there's the old tea set you got from your aunt, and there's that old toy you played with as a kid. Sometimes we can't remember why we tossed something away in the first place. "This shouldn't be here, I can still use it", we catch ourselves thinking. We keep it in our hand, holding on to it tightly almost as if it could run back to the box and lock itself in. Carefully, we carry it back down and place it in our favorite spot above the fireplace, where we can see it every day.

The same is true of ideas.

Science has paradigms, too

2010-07-01T09:57:00.005+03:00

Yesterday I was following a big debate on the web about the claim that school doesn't teach us enough about how to distinguish science and good reasoning from fluff, unscientific mumbojumbo or pure fraud. I agree with the notion, no question about it. But in the debate, there were quite a few comments which portrayed science as a paradigmatic system that leaves out something. Not quite so sure what to say about that.

Comparing science with religion there are some obvious differences. In science things are pretty much open for debate. You can try to topple any theory, but you're going to need some proof. An opinion is just an opinion, there's got to be serious evidence. In religion, this isn't the case, more or less. There is some room for debate (consider the relation of church to gay rights, for example). And there are some acceptable arguments, like the Bible, for example.

Religion has a clear paradigm. In Christianity, it is the Bible and other texts from the past. The paradigm includes the idea that religion makes sense (even though not explicitly rationally) and is useful. In science there are paradigms too. Scientists always assume, that for something to exist it must be measurable. If we accept the fact that telepathy is a good explanation of our world, it must be measurable in some way, for example by putting a telepathic person in a room and making him move objects that are not going to move in any other way.

Now the realization that science has paradigms as well is very important. That so, because the paradigmatic foundation always has to leave out something. The paradigm of linear causality leaves out phenomena that work (or could work) with nonlinear causality. It's very hard for me as a scientist to accept, but this is the only logical conclusion. It is possible that there is something outside the world of science. I'm not saying that there certainly is, I'm just saying that it's possible.

One final note: all the above does not mean that science doesn't work. Science is about linear causality and probabilities. When linear causality can be established between two events, it is almost sure that it will go as it's supposed to. But I guess there's always a tiny chance of God intervening...

Construct your life

2010-06-23T15:21:00.005+03:00

Is there such a thing as the world as itself? What can we experience purely as it is by nature? I know, hitting your head hurts and the table you bumped into is obviously real. I'm not aiming for solipsism or claiming that you can make the pain disappear by simply deciding that it doesn't exist.

What I'm claiming is that we can never truly purely experience anything without distorting it with our perception. Even physical pain is subjective. We have different pain thresholds, what is excruciating pain to someone is just a flesh wound to someone else. Even more we distort mental and social phenomena. A person is a friend only because of our perception of her, there is no objective existence as a friend without our perception.

Why care? After all, friends are still friends and a punch in the face still hurts - what changes with this perspective? The key idea here is that by accepting constructivism one opens up new possibilities and sees more clearly the underlying forces that shape one's life. It's no good to fall in despair over bad events. Better just to accept the fact that they're bad due to our perception, due to us not liking that event. That opens up two possible solutions: 1) change the event or 2) change one's perception. Both are useful in various situations. For example, if a stranger insults you and you get annoyed, it's probably easier to change your perception of the insult than the behavior of that stranger.

Another good thing to realize is the fact how much other people affect our perception. And by affecting our perception they also affect our life. Simply knowing that fact will make it much harder for someone to manipulate you. I claim that it's a lot nicer to do one's own decisions and then see who your true friends are, rather than try to do it the other way round.

The Valley of the Shadows

2010-06-15T14:26:00.003+03:00

I'm standing in a field. the sun is just about to rise above the horizon. I can see the mist coiling at my feet, see the drops of morning dew ready to glister in the rays of the day. I take a deep breath of fresh air and feel myself strong enough to face any challenge, almost fearless.

Suddenly, I see a glimpse of a shadow in the corner of my eye. Something moves in the edge of the forest.

I wander after the mystery. just as I'm about to give up the chase, I see it again. A grayish, shadowy creature. It is almost colorless and looks like the Animator forgot how to use the paintbrush and applied only the basecoat. It has the shape of a person. What the hell is that? A ghost?

I pick up speed and try to catch the thing, but it just runs ahead of me. It always seems to be that same thirty feet ahead of me. I see it disappear behing the edge of a hill and put in my best effort to run after it, reaching the top of the hill in a mere moment. As I look down, a strange and scary sight awaits me:

Similar grayish, ghost-like figures running in all directions in the valley below me. Even more horrific is the fact that they all look like me. Some are dressed like scinetists, others like hunters. Some resemble businessmen, some cavemen. There are firefighters, teachers, students - almost all professions I can think of. I waver in confusion.

What the hell are all those creatures? Why do they look like me? As I look down at my feet, I see that my boots' colours are fading and I'm starting to look grayish too. What is going on?

Who am I?

The fear of narcissism

2010-05-31T20:09:00.004+03:00

I hate status seekers. I can't stand people who want something just because that'll make them more successful in someone else's eyes. Those people are narcissistic only looking for attention. I mean, it's fine if you want to be a pro athlete, play the piano like Mozart or gather a pile of money like Uncle Scrooge, but if you just want status don't goddamn try to disguise it in some other form! Narcissistic people only care about their own success and not for others' wellbeing. Hence, I don't want to be one of them.

On the other hand, aren't we all just like them? Don't we all want to be accepted by others? Is ethical behavior truly altruistic, or is "being ethical" or "being nice" just one disguise of narcissism, only a method for gaining attention? In the past 30 years money has become the most accessible means of gaining status and prestige. Could it be that ethics and soft values are the new money?

Is it really so that nice people are just as narcissistic as investment bankers? Is it impossible for us not to treat other people as a value in themselves? Are we destined to want their approval and blessing? Is it possible to act without hidden motives?

Bah, I this is starting to feel like a question that's not going to get an answer today. I guess I'll have to swallow my fear of narcissism for a while. Think I'll go home and watch an episode of House, suppose I'm more ethical than that guy. At least I'm nicer.

CSR and the amorality assumption

2010-05-26T13:30:00.005+03:00

Business is generally not thought as a very moral field. The business of business is business, not ethics. The recent (or perhaps even ongoing) crisis hasn’t actually raised the image of business as a morally sound way of acting. Rather people associate business with concepts such as self-interest, survival of the fittest, “kill or be killed”, fraud, bribery and other dirty tricks. According to a survey made a couple of years ago, only 9 % of Germans trust business leaders. (Jörges, 2008) I wonder what the percentage is nowadays, as the survey was before the financial crisis.

Even though the public largely may regard business people, or at least some of those, to be immoral that may not be the actual case. Business people themselves often think of business as mainly amoral. Amoral means that business is indifferent to moral issues. It means that companies do not have to take ethical issues into account per se, it is not up to them. This statement is usually followed by the explanation that it is the government’s business to define a law system that supports ethical ways of doing business and the companies are responsible for staying within these guidelines. In corporate social responsibility (CSR) this is usually labeled as the laizzes-faire model of CSR. Traditionally CSR models also define other possible models of behavior. The relation to ethics varies from the amorality of the laissez-faire model all the way to the social shaper model in which stakeholders and ethical issues, instead of sales and profits, are the primary concern of an organization. Most non-profit organizations fall into the social shaper category. (Johnson, Scholes, Whittington, 2008)

From a philosophical perspective, however, CSR has its flaws. It still assumes that there is an inherent trade-off between profit-making and ethical behavior. With the exception of the social shaper, most CSR models justify ethical behavior with added value and hence increased profits. In other words, most companies behave ethically not because it is right, but because they earn money. Recalling Kant’s categorical imperative it doesn’t qualify as ethical behavior, because ethical behavior is there an instrumental value.

If the end result is ethical behavior anyway, why care about the principles behind that? I find the answer quite obvious: for safety’s sake. Firstly, if our systems for valuing ethical behavior (such as preserving the environment) fail, companies would start to behave unethically again. Secondly, it is very hard to try to put a price tag on everything. The public image of a company would crumble instantly if knowledge of major unethical behavior would spread. Such knowledge is, however, not very easy to obtain and spread to consumers. There are just too many companies out there, we can’t (or at least I can’t) memorize every fact I’ve read about their labor usage, materials or environmental controls. And that’s where ethics comes into play. When the time of choice between good and bad behavior arises, an ethical person (or company) chooses the right thing whereas the CSR driven one, aware of the information asymmetries chooses the wrong one. And that’s bad for us all.

References
Johnson, G. et al. (2008) Exploring Corporate Strategy. Prentice Hall/Financial Times.
Jörges, H.-U. (2008). Die Knute der Rendite. Stern 36, 56.

The five cornerstones of wellbeing

2010-05-23T21:12:00.005+03:00

Today I started to think about things that make me tick, things that make me happy, things that I enjoy. In general, things that bring me satisfaction and enjoyment in one way. I could think of several such things: most sports, philosophy, studies, close friends etc. They all fit this category. But they also are very unlike each other in some ways. Could these be fit into some kinds of categories? After some consideration, I could think of the following list:

Affection
Physical body
Intellect
Imagination
Playfulness

Affection
No surprise really that I considered relationships to be important. I'm sure that everyone knows that relationships to family, friends and especially a significant other are paramount to our wellbeing. But this category goes beyond just those. I feel that the importance here is on our ability and will to share and receive love and affection in general. I include things such as charity work, helping out friends and simply not being a jerk in this category.

Physical body
Ok, probably not everyone agrees with my view of the importance of bodily action. I've always done a lot of sports and feel very strongly the need for physical action. I have to shake that stress off to switch into a state of relaxation. This category encompasses physical action beyond sport, for example playing drums, skateboarding or dancing would belong here.

Intellect
I need to think about stuff to stay interested. I hate things that are non-challenging and include only following some preset guidelines. I want to use my mind. Intellectual actions are anything from puzzle-solving or philosophy to reading the newspaper or a novel.

Imagination
I'm a dreamer, that's no secret. I've read countless fantasy books in my youth and are still a big fan of imaginary stuff. Movies, books, poems, music, they all spark my imagination and cast visions of a different future, present or past. It can be useful in many ways: therapy, creativity facilitation or just being simply fun. Which brings me to the last and maybe most controversial category.

Playfulness
I believe that being a child and playing is vital to one's mental health. Some people think I'm an geeky idiot (not necessarily a false statement for other reasons) but I've always loved games, be they board games, video games, roleplaying, boffer fighting or whatever. It's really relaxing, you should try it out sometimes :) Playing is another sort of escapism, really makes me forget about my worldly troubles.

The Quest for the quest of understanding

2010-04-16T11:41:00.002+03:00

I look out of my window and try to look between the tree branches to see a glimpse of the sea. No success. The sight out seems as blocked as my vision of my future. I can see about a year ahead no problem, but after that it's all cloudy. And even that year of clarity is all thanks to the upcoming Erasmus exchange period. Without it I'd be really confused right now.

I have the classic student problem: I'm not sure if this is the right field of study for me. ”You'll get over it”, people say. Fact is, I don't want to get over it. Getting over it would mean silently accepting that life is just what it is, and there are things you just can't change and you just have to accept. I don't want to ”get over it” and accept the proposition that it's more important to study something leading to a good job with a nice paycheck than do something you're really interested in.

All this angstyness is linked to my increasing boredom regarding my studies in the field of business and technology. It's all work and no play. Meaning, that it's all very much directed into teaching what you need at work: budgets, thumb estimates, generalizations and various PC applications. There's no room for playing with ideas, no critical assessment of the theories and their implications. We're taking too much for granted in the world.
Call me and idealistic leftist fool wanting to avoid real work if you will, but I feel all the above makes my studies at times utterly dull. What I'd want is ethics, trying to see the big picture, trying to understand what ”it's all about” and whether the direction the world is heading makes any sense.

I always get a nice, warm feeling inside me when I hear someone mention philosophy. It always gets me all fired up. It's precisely the same feeling I got out of it (maths and physics, too) in high school. I want to understand, I want the world to make sense. I'm too naive to accept the world has no sense or meaning. I want to know. And frankly memorizing lists about the various ways of segmenting a market or analysing company performance seem of very little help in gaining that
understanding.

As for now, I'm trying to overcome my doubts for a brief period. From September onwards I'll spend 10 months in beautiful Austria, which will be an awesome experience. No need to waste that in fear of the future. I don't know what'll happen after that, but at the moment I feel like it'll involve completing my Bachelor here and applying for Practical philosophy (meaning ethics and philosophy of societies) in Helsinki.

I feel I'm ready for a quest of understanding.

The two-faced coin

2010-02-07T15:19:00.005+02:00

One upon a time, there was a young man. He was the son of a farmer, but wanted to be a goldsmith instead. But everyone insisted that to be a goldsmith would be folly, since you can't really eat gold, so it would be of no value. To get guidance, he went to see a local wise man for advice.

The wise man asked: "What is it that you want?"
- "I need guidance about my future. I want to be a goldsmith, but everybody keeps saying it's a silly thing to do. But I like it, and I can't decide who is right on this."

The wise man tossed a coin to him and spake: "Look at this coin, it will tell you all you need to know."

The young man looked at the coin. Carved on it was an image of a man, cowering in front of a giant. Above the picture was the word timor, which was the Latin word for fear.
On the other side of the coin was a picture of a ship in full sails. Above the picture it said spes, the Latin word for hope.

Fear and hope, two sides of the same. Two balancing forces. Brother and sister - so unlike each other, yet originating from the same source.

Finally, he understood that if he wanted one, he was also destined to face the other.

The Six Blind Men and an Elephant

2010-01-30T13:09:00.003+02:00

I came across this fabulous poem by John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887). It is based on an old Indian legend.

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approach'd the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
"God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!"

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, -"Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me 'tis mighty clear
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!"

The Third approached the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a snake!"

The Fourth reached out his eager hand,
And felt about the knee.
"What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain," quoth he,
"'Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!"

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said: "E'en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!"

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Then, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
"I see," quoth he, "the Elephant
Is very like a rope!"

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

MORAL.
So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

The Burkha Dilemma

2010-01-26T14:35:00.005+02:00

A recent publication in France recommends the option of banning the use of islamic burkhas in public places, BBC reports. Why would they want to do that? Let's see what a French politician had to say about it:

"This divisive approach is a denial of the equality between men and women and a rejection of co-existence side-by-side, without which our republic is nothing."

"It is the symbol of the repression of women, and... of extremist fundamentalism. "

- Bernard Accoyer, President of the National Assembly of France

In the report itself it is said that the use of burkhas is "against the French republican principles of secularism and equality" (BBC).

Looking at the above statements, it is not still very clear what the actual reasons are, or what they're trying to say when talking about burkhas being against equality. Shouldn't it be everybody's right to wear what she chooses to? The second statement by Mr Accoyer reveals, that the matter of equality rests on the assumption that the burkha is a means of repressing islamic women. Anyway, in my humble opinion the reasons for banning burkhas can be summed up in the following way:

Secularism
Equality
Public safety
Nationalism

Secularism
Secularism is the belief that state and church should be separated. The ideas of secularism can also be applied in the spirit that everyone's beliefs (or the lack of them) are an entirely personal matter. Stretching the argument a little further, it can be argued that it is wrong to preach to others about one's own beliefs. The use of a burkha or a hijãb is interpreted as preaching or "bringing religion too much in the open". Some who advocate the banning of islamic clothing also want to ban other religious clothing and adornments as well, making a coherent secular argument from a mainly atheist viewpoint.

Equality
As I said before, the equality argument rests primarily on the premise that traditional islamic clothing is mainly used for repressing women. They make communication much harder and force the woman to live inside her own clothing as a prisoner would, cut off from the rest of society. There is no reliable data on how many islamic women wear the traditional outfit willingly. Therefore, this makes for a pretty unreliable argument. And even if some are forced to dress in this way, what about those who do it willingly? Are we not restricting their lives with the ban, thus reducing equality? For me, the point is that if the repression of women is the problem here, it must be dealt with separately and not be connected to islam directly.

Public safety
Ok, here's an actual reason for once. Dressing in a burkha and covering one's face makes identification impossible, pure and simple. How can we give passports or any other documents to people not willing to reveal their faces? Or even if they have a passport, how can we trust it? For the moment, we can't. The use of biotechnology may change that however, as an retinal scanner might be a good solution to this, though an expensive one. Another option would be the use of fingerprints in all documents with a picture.

Nationalism
A reason that is completely left unnoticed in public media is nationalism. In Europe, nationalism has been on the rise throughout the first decade of the new millennia. The Al-Qaedan terrorist attacks conjured a backlash of nationalism, especially against islam, that is felt today in Europe. I've seen even arguments against islamic immigration because "they are bad", "they're evil" and "they want to conquer Europe". I mean, what the hell? Who are "they" anyway? And I really don't feel that the islamic people I come across in Helsinki are of any significant threat - even if they're wearing burkhas.

As a conclusion, I'd say that this burkha-ban is another case of intelligent dishonesty, where the real agenda is preventing islamic immigration. There are approximately 2000 burkha-wearers in France, and I'm not really confident about French politicians being so sympathetic for them as to be concerned about their (alleged) repression. Secularism, even in France, is not a coherent reason either, as they haven't called for a ban of all religious clothing. Public safety is the only plausible reason, but that wasn't even mentioned in the BBC report. Not sure about the original French report though, since I haven't read that. But still, I feel this is mostly a clear case of religious backlash.

Adventures

2010-01-06T12:59:00.005+02:00

During my Christmas holidays I read Juha Vakkuri's book Afrikan poikki (Across Africa freely translated). In the book Vakkuri describes his journey across Africa from Dakar to Djibouti, using almost exclusively "public transport", meaning the transportation available to normal African citizens. That is mainly buses and so-called "bush taxis", which, I gather, are just people driving their cars and offering rides to other people. Kind of illegal taxis, I guess, except they go from city to city.

Anyway, reading the book made a deep impression on me. As much as a journey across Africa and into the African culture, it was a journey into my own mind. I realized that I'm an adventurer at heart. Looking back at the best experiences I've had I could see a clear pattern: I've most thoroughly enjoyed things that have made me see or experience something new, something maybe a bit uncommon - something I wouldn't come across naturally.

The trips to Slovenia and London last summer, orienteering in Spain, being at the cottage in summer 2008, they all have the adventure aspect in common. All those trips were more or less foolhardy, idealistic - or just plain odd. Some of those have made people question my sanity (which I do daily) but hey, you only got one chance in this world! Better make the most of it now, while I still have the chance! :) And to be honest, all those trips have marked the high points in my life, and I definitely wouldn't change a day!

Applying this adventure aspect theory further into learning seems to work as well. I love to learn new things, and don't care much for delving very deep into one subject. I guess I'm one of those people who'd rather know something about everything that everything about something. And all the adventuring fits into my interest for philosophy as well. After all, philosophy is just one big adventure - you venture out into the world of ideas, thoughts and theories armed with nothing except your own reason.

So, after discovering my inner adventurer, what is going to change in my life? Well, I can't be sure, really. All of my previous adventures have been a little unexpected, they've been the end result of pure luck and a bit of opportunism. To improve my chances, I think I'll just try to see more opportunities around me and embrace them in an even more foolhardy manner :) Whatever the result, an experience is usually worth all the trouble!

P.S.
Obviously this is what I mean:
http://xkcd.com/167/

Human Development Index - What is it?

2009-12-22T21:24:00.003+02:00

Some months ago, I had an argument with a businessman about the importance of GDP growth. He claimed that it is fundamentally important to a nation's wellbeing, whereas I claimed that after a certain limit, extra GDP really doesn't create more wellbeing. More sharply, he seemed to think that material wealth and wellbeing were pretty much the same thing. I couldn't have disagreed more.

Anyway, the whole confrontation got me thinking about measuring wealth and wellbeing, especially regarding socio-economical circumstances and the equality of citizens. As a result, I started thinking about HDI, as I remember that it was the abbreviation for Human Development Index. However, apart from the name I had no idea what it was about. So, a little research was due. The point of sharing this is purely the fact that I found this a very interesting subject, and hope to spark someone else's imagination as well.

What is it used for?
HDI is, as the name suggests, an index, valued from 0 to 1. UN makes yearly calculations of the index and publishes the list of countries sorted by HDI. It serves as a rough estimate of the socioeconomical situation in the country and can be used to evaluate, how good the circumstances in a given country are for the purposes of having a long, healthy and economically stable life.

How is it computed?
HDI is a composite index, consisting of three components:

life expectancy index
education index
standard of living index (GDP index)

The subindices are computed as below:
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

Life Expectancy Index =
LE = Life Expectancy (in years)
Education Index =
- Adult Literacy Index (ALI) =
  ALR = Adult Literary Rate (in percentage)
- Gross Enrollment Index (GEI) =
  CGER = Combined Gross Enrollment Rate (in percentage)
GDP =
GDPpc = Gross Domestic Product per capita (in USD)

After the subindices have been calculated, HDI is established simply by taking the arithmetic mean of the subindices, meaning

HDI = (LEI + EI + GDP) / 3

Further applications
As a single idex value, HDI is not really all that informative. It only measures the average human development in a country, and reveals nothing about problems relating to socioeconomical inequality related to race, gender or place of living, for example. That's why UN calculates also disaggregated HDI values, meaning HDI indices that are calculated for coherent groups in a country, separated by race, for example. Obtaining the disaggregated HDI values for groups separated in different ways can reveal a lot of useful information about the equality in a country, and can potentially tell which groups are left outside the social security system and which are doing better.

Problems
Naturally, HDI has its problems. Unless the disaggregated values are computed, it reveals nothing about social equality. Neither does it take into account environmental development in any way. The exploitation of the environment usually only increases a country's GDP, as environmental protection incurs costs on businesses and therefore lowers GDP. As most environmental exploitation is (thank goodness) not dangerous enough to affect the life expectancy of citizens it completely avoids HDI analysis.

Time to think!

2009-11-22T21:11:00.003+02:00

I have to say, that I'm really surprised and happy the way my autumn has been timewise. No programming courses and a more sensible allocation of my time has meant, that I've had the most free time in the past couple of years! It has really made me see things from a new viewpoint, at least to some extent.

I've noticed that more free time allows me to process things more deeply and thoroughly. Regarding school courses, it means I can, if the subject interests me, devote more time to course projects, thus actually learning something in the process as well. Previously, I had to do projects in a rush, never really getting into the subject. That meant that it was mainly a waste of time and resources, as I never had the time to actually learn about it, I just completed the task, handed out the paper and got back to other coursework.

This time, the Stanford Prison Case, for example, was a totally different deal. I had the pleasant opportunity do devote about 8-10 hours to that project, and it meant I actually learned the concepts along the way, and got at least a decent understanding about the Prison Experiment as a whole. Math has also been more fun than last year, as now I can go back to interesting parts if I feel like it, and don't just have to complete the excercises to pass the course.

To recap, more free time equals more free thinking. Really makes things a lot more interesting and rewarding! And life in general more fun and relaxed :)

Entertainment for the masses

2009-11-09T22:09:00.006+02:00

We're living in a very normative world, have you noticed that? Just look at the society: everybody wears the same clothes, reads the same news, watches the same TV programs. It took me a long time to realize it, but this autumn has really revealed how bad the situation is.

Take almost any TV series, and you'll quickly note a couple of things. Firstly, the show is probably made in USA. It's probably comedy. And it probably lacks any real meaning. Yes, I like Friends as well, but can you really claim that it has any deeper meaning, that it really teaches anything? I can't. Or how about reality-tv? The same bullshit, but with a reduced level of fun. Watching people I've never heard of before getting wasted, taking a shower, embarrassing themselves on stage or whatever does sound pretty stupid, when you think of it. Isn't it a bit cheap to laugh at other's mistakes, because we're really all the same! I do stupid things as well when I'm drunk, I shower, I make a fool of myself - it's all the same! But suddenly, when you're doing the 'acting', it ain't that fun anymore...

The world is a mystery, and the human nature is that we want to make sense of that mystery. Have you ever seen a 5-year-old asking all the time "Why, mother?". Have you ever wondered, why we lose that ability? I blame it on society. Our daily life is filled with TV soap operas, magazines telling stories nobody really cares about, all that stuff - I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. They all create a steady stream of information that our brain keeps processing, thus eliminating the possibility of actual creative thinking in our everyday life. It's easy, and it ensures the survival of the status quo. It's all just bullshit that keeps our brains running on low capacity, so we won't start questioning anything.

I'm really not a conspiracy theorist; I don't think that it's an evil governmental ploy to keep us in line. It is a cage we have built for ourselves; I really believe that it hinders our capacity to look beyond, to see what's going on in the world. Why live the relationships in soap operas as a bystander instead of getting out and having a life of your own? Why care so much of the characters inside that big box (or even a flatscreen) and so little of yourself?

Despite all of the above, I don't think TV or even TV series are all just crap. There are some good ones, that actually have a message to tell. They can even be funny! I can't tell which series to watch, because it all depends on the person. If you like history, watch a historical show and pick up a few little details on the French revolution. If you like ethical dilemmas, watch House and try to see the moral guidelines behind the decisions. But more importantly, change the way you watch TV. Don't just let your brain doze off! Keep asking "why?" even when watching TV. Try to see the reasons behind the characters' actions, learn a new expression in a foreign language, whatever suits you. But please, don't become another mentally mummified victim of the entertainment industry.

My most hated school subjects

2009-10-06T21:35:00.003+03:00

So, as I promised, the three subjects at school I've hated the most:

1) Art

I've always royally sucked at drawing, painting, and everything that is more or less a creation of art. I really can't express myself in pictures, I prefer words. I think I've had only one art exercise which I found interesting, and that was geometrical drawing. Very geeky, I know :)

In the past few years, my exposure to the visual arts has been pretty small. I haven't gone to any art galleries or anything, usually they're not my kind of thing really. But I still think, that I've learnt to appreciate art more than I used to. People who are able to express their inner selves visually, and also convey some of that to the public, are true masters. I admire their creativity, for I can never achieve feats like that.

What is art anyway? Why is that important? I'm puzzled by these questions from time to time, but am still unable to answer those. Is there really something in our world, that is only possible to be expressed in art? Is it really possible to transcend some borders of our rationale with art?

2) History

Yup, I really hated this as well - and these days I'm not very proud of it. As I was younger, I was really focused toward the future, and didn't feel like there was anything useful history could teach me. Another reason for me disliking, even hating history lessons was the details. The courses were all about remembering names, years and details. I found that prettu easy to achieve, but really unmotivating. I mean, what use is there to know that the longest piece left of the Berlin Wall is East Side Gallery, if you're unaware of the impact of the Wall on society, and the causes that led to it?

These days, I approach history with a completely different attitude. I don't even bother trying to remember details. If I can remember the correct century it's enough. What I'm looking for is patterns. Patterns in thought, ideas, and analogies derived from those patterns. All that is actually quite interesting, and it's nice to see what have been the worst pitfalls in argumentation throughout history. You'd be surprised to see how little things have changed over the centuries! For my reborn interest in history I owe a huge amount to my dear friend Martin R, who taught me what history of ideas is - thank you for that :)

3) Geometry

Now, people who have known me as a math geek in high school or before might find this surprising, but I've never really liked geometry. For me, it's way too visual, hands-on - and therefore, difficult! I can appreciate the beauty in geometry, but am unable to reproduce it myself. I get very easily stuck in geometry, and really don't "see" some things and implications that are obvious to others.

Of the three subjects, my relation to geometry has probably changed the least. I still dislike it! I remember when we had cylindrical and spherical coordinates last year at uni, I was all the time like "oh, dammit". It was really hard to figure out how you change from one coordinate system to another, 'cause understanding it required a lot of geometrical thinking! Guess I'm just one of those guys who prefers his math to be mostly equations and their applications. Not too much theory, that's pretty terrible as well - really makes you miss all those pictures in geometry!

Looking at my list of three evils, I still laugh at a web-test, which tries to figure out what is the best profession for you. My result - architect!

Clean(s)ing the mind

2009-09-26T21:38:00.002+03:00

To my horror, I've actually found this period of cleaning my apartment quite inspiring and refreshing. Throwing away bagfuls of paper and making room for more books (and more papers as well) is somehow symbolic. Like throwing out old "been there, done that" -ideas and replacing them with new ones.

The whole mind-cleansing project is still going strong, albeit with a little less momentum than during summertime. Alas, I still have to take care of my responsibilities regarding my studies, and cannot commit myself to full-time philosophic meditation :D Well, to be honest, I've really liked my autumn courses so far: maths, probability & statistics, German, automation technology and work psychology. I find it a good mixture of different kinds of things, with all their different paradigms.

For example, on mornings I attend math lectures, where everything is determinate, and a result of a certain case is completely derivable from the premises. Whereas in psychology, you can only make statistical guesses, but cannot really make any forecasts on a single case, say, the behaviour of a certain worker, for example.

Outside school, I'm still trying to wade through that book about history of ideas, and also reading a bit on the American food industry. Oh, and for a snack I read Paulo Coelho's Zahir, which I found as inspiring as his books before.

As a final note, I'll encourage you to think about something regarding your own personality:

Name the three subjects, you've hated most at school. Why those? What kind of contact (if any) you've had with those in the past few years? Has your attitude changed in any way? Should it?

I'll reveal my own answers next time :)

Media and objectivity

2009-08-27T18:25:00.003+03:00

I'm downright disappointed with the present-day media. I read the web version of the biggest Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, daily and I have to say that the level of journalism is simply appalling.

A couple of months ago, they discovered that one of the government parties, Keskusta, had gotten serious amounts of money from a corporation called Nova Group, plus also an organization called KMS. People were daunted by the fact that one of the biggest political parties got a lot of their financing from more or less shady sources. Some even claimed Keskusta to be corrupt.

Helsingin Sanomat published news about this whole incident pretty much daily and reported all the major discoveries in tracing the background of the so-called "election money". That was good. But, people were thinking to themselves, how about the other big parties - where does their money come from?

Helsingin Sanomat didn't even bother commenting on the other parties for weeks.

Clearly, the just ran after the scent of blood like dogs. The newsaper lacked even the slightest hint of mere reflection of the fact, that it even might be at all possible for the other parties to have equally shady sources. Doesn't sound that objective to me....

To take this to a more general level, I'm asking the following question:

Shouldn't a newspaper (or media in general) be committed to objectivity, insted of just hunting for shocking headlines and mobs of readers?

How could we justify not being objective? Ok, the media company needs to make profit. Can we argue that it can be unobjective in order to attract more readers and thus make more profit?

I think not. I mean, where would it end? Being unobjective means basically not actively looking for, or even trying to hide, all the possible connections. Doesn't that pretty much equal lying? If we accept that, we would also have to accept making up nonexistent news, shouldn't we? Besides, lying and ripping off people's money in the process doesn't really sound very sensible, does it?

What's the point of media companies anyway? Is it to spread the news as objectively and fast as possible to the general public? Or is it making as much profit as possible? Are these two somehow connected? Should they be?

Definitely they should be. One could argue, that readers flock to the paper with the fastest and most objective news, but in Finland it doesn't really work that way. The media market is an oligopoly. There's hardly any good alternatives for YLE and Hesari, are there?

At least I can have some solace in the fact that Internet is creating opportunities for different viewpoints, and we don't have to blindly trust what the newspapers are telling us. On the other hand, isn't there even less chance of a simple freelance writer being objective? After all, he's got his ass and persona on the line, so isn't it harder for him to escape his subjective viewpoint?

Perhaps you just can't really trust anything blindly anymore. I guess you just have to read several sources simultaneously, and make up the conclusions yourself. I guess the reader is the one with all the responsibility these days.