Pragmatism is not to be a goal, it is the last resort (behind the option of doing nothing). Pragmatism is the means of the lazy and the weak. Idealism provides the goals, goals that are to be pursued idealistically. Whenever a pragmatic choice is made, it must be made with the intent of fixing it in the future with a proper, idealistic solution. One is not to be happy at doing something from a pragmatic point of view, it must be done with sadness and regret: "I have no other choice, I must do it pragmatically. I am a terrible person to do so, but it is what the fate has rolled for me. I will dedicate my life to trying to do it idealistically later, but for now I yield to my fortune."

There is no worse luck than having to abandon your ideals.

What is the algorithm to fix a problem that some section of humanity possesses? How, for example, do we help the uninsured Americans who need health insurance? Or, how do we help those starving in Africa? On the surface, we could say pass universal health insurance and send them aid. Some (conservatives usually) say that that is unacceptable: we are stealing from the rich to help the unfortunate, those that are too lazy, stupid or unmotivated to rise up and stop being unfortunate. There is no 'fortune' or 'luck', there's only the fate that we make ourselves. Who is right here? I pose that neither is right. Conservatives just rephrase the problem, without actually moving very far in solving it. They construct a statement, that laziness implies being uninsured or whatever. In their worldview, then, we must therefore fix the 'laziness' and the rest will follow. Well, fixing the laziness is not necessarily an easier problem than fixing the hunger in the first place. The 'liberals' are also wrong, because they would only solve the superficial symptom, but not solve the underlying causes; causes that can and will return to cause more problems in the future that need to be solved too. The conservatives just rephrase the problem, and liberals replace one problem with another.

Conservatives have a point however: it is the underlying causes that must be fixed. Why are they wrong then? I too seek to fix the underlying causes, yet I do not agree with them. The reason is that they preach individuality without seeing the true conclusion of their philosophy.

Speaking of which, that's where Objectivism comes in. Rabid individuality, power of 'reason' over anything else. Unfortunately, whatever good intentions that particular philosophy has, they are ruined by its shortsightedness. "Reason" leads us to superrationality. Reason leads us to the abolition of individuality.

There is where the difference is. Conservatives/Objectivists want to solve the underlying causes indeed. But they want to solve them subject to the constraint of satisfying their individualistic whims. Others must be fixed, but not us! We are perfect.

"At last! All that I have ever imagined is now mine. I have become what no other could ever achieve. I am perfect."

And then he died a few episodes later. Perfection is not a state, it is a goal, it is the motion towards perfection. This is the greatest Evil of man, their capacity, their susceptibility to accepting the status quo as something that is desired... as something that must be maintained. Status quo is imperfection! Status quo must be movement towards perfection!

And how can you do that when you're dead? How can you do that when you are solving superficial symptoms? How can you do that when you are blinded by individuality?

You cannot. All those things must be solved: individuality, selfishness, death... all must be abolished for us to even begin to start moving towards perfection.

Why does this always happen to me? Why do I always have to stay up late, doing my homework (I didn't sleep tonight at all to do my homework)? Why can't I plan ahead, why does it never work out?

I hate my life, I hate my life! It shouldn't take 12 hours to read 20 pages and write 2 pages of text! It shouldn't take that long! And I'm not even done yet, I am not even done yet! Still a presentation to make! Still lots of excersizes to do!

Why is this happening? WHY!?

Am I overestimating the Evil of men, or underestimating it? I don't see people murdering each other all the time in person, but I do see them speeding on the highway and not following the traffic laws. Are minor infractions symptomatic of the flawed mind? Perhaps those infractions don't matter when the people that commit them are powerless, but what happens when those people are placed into positions of power? Do the infractions scale proportionally with that power? It seems that they do, one need only look at the corrupt company executives, or the congressmen. So saying that because the average human commits only the smallest, ignorable, forgivable crimes humanity is overall 'good' is incorrect, as when that average human is placed into a position of power, those cracks will expand and become huge ravines of corruption.

Thus, individually, it only makes sense to punish those that actually use their imperfections to cause great evils, since most average men only commit crimes that don't matter on the whole. However, the source, the kernel of Evil that bears those fruit is the same for the Sandy the Speeder, Andy the Adulterer and Eugene the Embezzler. Fundamentally, all crimes are the same. Thus, while it makes dubious sense (to me at least) to punish the casual speeder, and it makes a lot of sense to punish the casual serial killer that cannot be the true approach to the situation, if one wants to remove crime. You put one criminal away, but there's still billions that might have done the same thing in his position. Perhaps they would need more pressure or whatnot... but everyone has minute cracks that can be amplified by sufficient force.

So, on the whole, humanity is Evil, or at least, harbours a volatile seed of potential Evil. I pose that the way humans interact with each other necessarily creates the asymmetries that cause a lot of stress (or temptation) in some people relative to others. People are generally not egalitarian, they pick leaders... leaders can crack. Even in small groups, females can cheat on men and cause strife. Using that Biblical reference, it took only a single person (Abel) to convince Cain to murder. Tiny pressure combined with perhaps a big crack caused great Evil.

So, natural variation in the predisposition of humans combined with their society tending to cause asymmetries simply guarantees Evil to continue to happen forever as long as humanity exists.

What can be done then? You can't punish people who's only crime is their kernel of evil, that they might never live to see corrupt their being... and yet, all humans are the same, this same kernel fuels all Evil. Can this kernel be excised? Or does the possession of it a crime large enough such that it does not matter whether it manifests itself or not?

Whatever the case, the status quo must not continue.

I hate pragmatists.

Continuing from my defense mechanism blurb earlier... what grieves me a lot is how the humans that brave the perils of this imperfect world are lauded for persevering and celebrated for the strength of their humanity. Similarly, those that help those in need via volunteering at pantries or something... or even the police are regarded as close to heroic. They are the 'good' to counter the Evil of humanity, it is said.

What seems to be forgotten about this is that most (if not all) of those activities are glorified cleaning up of the barf of the other side of the humanity that commits crimes, abuses others, or, more generally, supports the capitalistic system that results in the creation of the poor. Those activities are not symptomatic of good, they are the direct result of the Evil of man. Using those things as somehow being proof that humans are not Evil is silly.

Perhaps those activities reflect more on the character of those that do those activities... "Sure", you say, "they are cleaning up the barf, but had those Evil men not existed, the good people would be doing less reactive stuff". That's nice, except that Evil men do exist, and those so called people of good character are not making them disappear. Arguably, they are slowing things down (in terms of things getting more and more evil) though. Still, and here I roughly quote the late Boris Yeltsin when he was speaking about the state of the Soviet Union immediately before its collapse, the metaphor he used was a bucket of feces... you can try to empty it, but it will keep filling up. The world is broken, and fixing the small, 'fixable' problems accomplishes nothing. You cannot drain an ocean of Evil with a spoon!

You find the drain, and pull the stopper.

Some days I just wish I never woke up. Life in a dream is far far far far far far far far far far far far far far far far far better than life in the real world.

Life in the real world is disgusting! I'd rather play videogames all day than live in this stupid real life! Real life sucks! It is a mockery of what it should be, it is so terrible!

I hate this life, I hate this world!

There will be no compromises! There is nothing, nothing that makes the world as it is worthy of anything!

I wish I could sleep and dream forever, and never have to wake up.

So yesterday I discovered wxMaxima, a GUI for the maxima CAS.

It's awesome. No more need to buy (pirate) the Wolfram Mathematica for me! It's user interface is even better than Mathematica's, and the fonts look much better. It can plot things fine, it can solve things fine. The syntax of its language is not bloody stupid like Mathematica's. I don't even remember how to define new functions in Mathematica, some weird thing with placeholders and Function[]. Here's how you do it in Maxima:

myawesumfunction(x, y, z) := x^2 + y^3 + z^4;

And if I want to solve the general quartic, wxMaxima does not fail me!



Mwahahahah!

Another one for cubic, since the previous thing kinda breaks the pretty printing a bit:



And best of all, it's GPL'd!

Yeah, it's awesome.

Talking to people is generally a waste of time.

You are either talking about minutia, sharing mindless stories that are absolutely irrelevant most of the time. Or you are talking past each other, since you both don't share enough common knowledge to understand each other. Or you do know enough, and are arguing. Or you agree, and are accomplishing nothing.

What use is that? It's a waste of time. Arguing is a waste of time. I'd rather spend it coding, or thinking, or creating art. Talking with people is a waste of time.

The only remotely useful speech is of query, answer variety. You pose a query, they pose an answer. That's that.

Gah.

Coping strategies, what peculiar things. The defense mechanisms the feeble human mind employs to keep itself sane, in an insane world. They cloud the mind, alter perceived reality such that the human becomes happier. Lack of care about things and people outside the little circle they created, actively ignoring things that disagree with the viewpoint of the world they fashioned for themselves... those two activities are common in many. Optimists are probably afflicted with those shadows the most. Some have been hurt in the past... but they manage to... move on, and forget the pain that was done to them. It doesn't hurt as much as the years start to pass after the transgression.

It's incredible! In the way the average selfish human sees the world, the world's problems go away if you just leave them be! They go away if you just forcefully ignore them! Ignorance is bliss, it's incredible how powerful ignorance at placating the human mind.

This arises because of selfishness, the shortsightedness of man. He sees nothing past his own life, or maybe the lives of several of his kin. Nay, he does not even see that far sometimes! He looks only forward, ignoring the misfortunes of the past. "You can't fix the past! Learn from the past, and move on!" they say.

That's all fine and dandy... but what most learn is wrong, or so I think. I have been hurt before, and I learned this: That this Evil must be stopped!

I was hurt one day, and it felt terrible. Millions, billions of people were hurt on the same day. Millions more were hurt the next day. And the next day, and the next day. And the next month, and the next year! And they were hurt for thousands of years before! This cycle of pain is endless! And it exists, only the blind deny it existence. There it is, happening all over, everywhere! Only the clouded mind does not see it!

It must be stopped.

There are plenty of sad people in the world, for them the world sucks somehow... they are somehow inconvenienced by the imperfection of the world. "Sucks for them" say some of you. "They should ignore setbacks, forget wrongs done to them and compete and compete! The strongest survive, the weakest perish! Natural selection in action!"

Yeah, it took natural selection billions of years to design something as imperfect as man. I love how people marvel at the power of evolution... ignoring the timescales in question. Man, curse the creature, has created in the past 100 years what it would take evolution tens of millions of years to create. Blind competition breeds nothing! It is an imperfect search algorithm, it finds the local minima surely enough... but try the global minimum and you'll never reach it, unless by some stroke of luck you land in its basin of attraction initially.

"But, SiegeLord!", you say, "aren't the evolutionary algorithms like differential evolution great at finding global minima?" Sure. That's not the algorithm that gets used in real life via natural selection, or capitalistic competition. Natural selection supports gradual change, unsuitable for finding global minima. The homeobox genes govern everything: you won't find annular organisms any time soon. Capitalistic competition supports radical change, but because of closed source software/algorithms and designs you cannot get the randomization part correct.

But no, people don't want to open source their designs. It makes them less competitive, they say! As if them winning was the point! The point is to solve a problem, not to enrich the winner! Competitive people miss the point, and thus reduce the power of the search algorithm that their activity portends to be!

This is the problem of individuals... they don't share, thus limiting the power of any algorithm they implement using themselves. Even if humans were good creatures (an oxymoron, really, as individuals can never be truly good) they still would be inefficient.

This... misunderstanding of the true purpose of competition is endemic to humankind... Humans are Evil.

It's bittersweet... not great for productivity though...

I am sad. No particular reason... just am...

I took a break from programming today. I drew a lot, thought a lot... accomplished little though. Some new ideas about CeleMesh. The angel painting is coming along too (she's looking rather attractive in it, hehe... I think I will have a nice picture when I am done)... and I basically finished the new icons for scioly also.

Tomorrow I am going back to programming however. Need to finish some stuff. Make that tilesheet editor work perhaps... maybe start on states (yeah right... :\)

I hate humans... they are very demotivating.

Stupid livejournal... this entry is actually from yesterday.

Well, this sucks. Yet another case of human stupidity... I hate humans. So much evil goes on inside people's private lives, out of sight of others... "It's none of your business!" they say, and continue doing evil to each other. "It's family!", the in-group association trumps inconvenience, pain, evil and stupidity for them. No matter how stupid, how irresponsible a member of kin is, the family connection makes it all excusable.

And like it stops there. It continues to larger and larger in-groups. Team loyalty, patriotism: all the same.

It is infuriating that this is allowed to continue. Sure, we have less wars now than we did hundreds of years ago (is this even true? would be nice to look up some statistics about death by combat over time... it might be constant anyway, hah!), but the wars have just moved a level down... less deadly, but just as damaging.

Humans are hopeless, there is nothing about them that warrants any sort easy treatment.

Oh, and here's some data on the deaths over the years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_disasters_by_death_toll

Dunno what it means (it's 2:42 AM) but at a glance, wars have become more deadly rather than less as time goes on (note the shorter durations of modern wars).

Humans are despicable, Humans are Evil! Those that disagree are blind or have selective vision!

There isn't enough time for me to do the things I want! I need more time! More time!

There's so much to do, so much to fix... and it's all interrelated! There's the big goal, and it depends on a set of smaller goals... those goals depend on smaller goals still! All those goals take time! Time I do not have!

Except...

It'd be less of a problem if I could use the time I have more efficiently... but I am so drained by my depression... being upset at the imperfection of the world. I go to bed late at night, and wake up late in the morning... I wake up tired. I am unmotivated. It's infuriation. I am so upset at things, and yet the upsetness does not fuel me to do great deeds.

I recognize this state... I had it before. I had it last summer. A state when I stay up late... too upset to go to bed because I have done nothing productive today. It is 1:50 AM now, and I am too upset to go to bed. To upset to go to bed even though my eyes are barely open, even thought my limbs feel heavy.

Doubly upsetting is that it reflects upon my interaction with other humans... humans that on a base level I despise, but humans that my human part still cares for. This upsets me even more... and makes my depression worsen.

I want it to go away!

I remember.... 3 years ago, I would face disappointment, I would face defeat, failure with an unmoving gaze, undeterred power! I called that state a state of Zeal! But that state is lost, I cannot seem to be able to recover it. I want it back.

I know there is the manic/depressive sort of thing in existence... but the cycles for that should be faster than this. I had a good cycle during highschool it seemed, and for the past 3 years it has been a downer. Will it return perhaps soon?

I feel the power of my mind... I really do. It feels as if I can do a lot. But at the same time, the depression is right there. Minor complications annoy me to no end. I want things to be simple, I am intolerant of minor imperfections in my plans.

I wish for my sake and for the sake of those I care for that this particular episode will be short.

Let me draw a bit before heading for bed...

I didn't like that 'isoevil' word from a two posts ago. I did some quick searches and now prefer 'isoscelerous' where scelerous comes from scelus which is Latin for Evil/Wicked.

So many acts I see are isoscelerous... it's all meaningless.

I read my yearbook from highschool today... I felt disappointment, regret... frustration.

Hate people that do not think, or think only about themselves. They take action on their imperfect reasoning, and make life worse for everyone, perhaps even themselves. The idiots! How hard is it to append a "what would happen if everyone did what I am about to do?" question to one's reasoning? Not hard at all. But it's like nobody does it. Everyone's special, everyone's above the law, everyone is above average. What nonsense. Plus, this is coming from humans, who can't think clearly even when they have good intentions! What idiots.

Anyway... in a day, I will leave Cornell for good. It's a tad bittersweet, I think. I am still very disappointed in that I seem to have accomplished nothing, did not get into the school I wanted etc etc. Still, it's a little sad leaving the lab... I had no friends in it, but I still liked working in it... my research advisor seems to think that I did a good job there. I disagree, the model I was working on basically did not move at all from my 2 years of working on it. I reorganized it, rearranged the shelves... but I did not make it work. That is a very disappointing failure, for me. Yet another failure added to my bag of fail that I carry with me.

I have many wants now. I want to play some games from my childhood again... I want to write my story, I want to program my game.

But my overarching goals are simple. One is to start working on Celemesh, a grand goal. Another is to become a master of computational neuroscience. A Master, I say! To do that, I will start by playing around with all sorts of differential equations that can be found in biological neurons. I will use the Izhikevich book as my guide.

Yeah...

I wanna be the very best
Like no-one ever was
To catch them is my real test
To train them is my cause
I will travel across the land
Searching far and wide
Each Neuron to understand
The power that's inside

%)

The blind, the shortsighted, they are the most infuriating of the animal called man! Those that strive to achieve earthly goals, those that dream of earthly goals, they are blind! They think they dream of something wonderful, something different, yet they dream of all the same... they dream of evil. "I wish I had a million dollars" "I wish I was promoted at work" "I wish there was world peace" All those, in the context of humanity, are meaningless. They are changes in the surface of the ocean, while the depths and foundation of the sea of Evil remain stationary and unchanged. There is no point in wishing in this horizontal fashion, one must wish above the current plane of existence for the wish to matter at all.

This plane of isoevil relates very closely to finding the vector for perfection. Wishing for things that do not result in non-evil things is stupid.

Only two wishes matter. I wish I knew what was Evil, and what is Good! I wish I could eliminate Evil!

Humans are not striving for either of those wishes... For one, it's because they are evil, and the culmination of both those wishes would mean their destruction.

Wishes don't come true on their own, especially when so much evil is abound. Yet, as a human, I am naturally limited at how much I can see the answers to those wishes... to do so, one must be very intelligent.

To achieve perfection, one must be very intelligent.

I hate being depressed. Something is wrong, but I cannot put my finger on it. Less DBZ tomorrow, and more programming.

That is... if the work goes well, which it won't... in which case it's DBZ until 9 to cheer me up...

What a bad day... nothing went well today. Gah. Hate my life.