I love meeting engaged people when I’m drunk because it allows me to ask my most drunkly assholish question ever:

“So, are you guys going to sign a pre-nup?”

Roughly two thirds of the time, they give some version of an acceptable answer:

• Yes
• No because we have no assets
• No because, while it minimizes the fallout from a divorce, we feel it increases the chance of one by starting the marriage off on a wrong footing so we’d rather not risk it.

But about one third of the time, I get my absolutely most favorite answer of all which is

• No because we don’t believe it’s likely we’ll get divorced.

It’s my most favorite answer of all because, after many years of experience, I’ve found that it’s the best way to force people to actually grapple with the ego dilemma.

The ego dilemma goes something like this:

“So, why don’t you think you’re going to get a divorce? Nobody enters a marriage expecting a divorce yet many of them do”

“Well, sure, other people get divorces but we have X & Y and that makes our marriage special”

“Well, yeah, but there were plenty of people who thought they were also X & Y at the start of their marriage but they eventually found out that didn’t help them much in the end”

“OK, but did those people have Z-which-is-so-uniquely-rare-only-we-have-it?”

“You’re right, they didn’t have Z, but when asked a similar line of questioning, they had the same reaction except they put in Z* which was unique only to their marriage, it didn’t help them much”

“Look… we’re just SPECIAL, OK?”

It’s the “Look, we’re just SPECIAL” which is the hallmark of the ego dilemma, it might not ever be as blatantly obvious as that but it’s always hidden in there somewhere.

The ego dilemma is the belief, against reasonable evidence, that there is something unique contained in your ego that challenges previous historical experience. In short, the ego dilemma would be a perfectly reasonable assumption if you lived in a movie where you were the main character but a deeply tricky one in the real world.

Other example ego dilemmas include believing you’re of significantly above average intelligence, setting aside your life so that you can “make it” as a famous actor/musician/sports star/writer, thinking you WILL get the girl with that desperately creepy romantic gesture or, if you’re coming here from Hacker News, assuming that your startup has a reasonable chance of success commensurate with the effort you’re putting into it.

The truly frustrating thing about the ego dilemma is that it tells you nothing of any value. Recognizing that you’re caught in an ego dilemma doesn’t mean that you’re wrong. You could, after all, be the next Mark Zuckerberg. Someone has to be after all. But also likely is that you’re a clueless idiot who’s utterly convinced at your own fallacious arguments. We know this intellectually because we’ve all experienced the ego dilemma from the outside, you’re trying to convince someone that they’re just plain wrong but they keep on returning back to what makes them SPECIAL. And if you’re experienced it from the outside, it’s meant that someone’s experienced it from the outside at you.

When confronted with the ego dilemma, there are two wrong reactions and one right reaction.

The first wrong reaction is to aggressively try and deflect yourself away from an ego dilemma: “Oh, yeah, I probably SUCK at programming but I just don’t know it yet”. STFU: That you can even concieve that you suck at programming is proof positive that you’re above average and your sanctimonious faux-modest attitude isn’t fooling anyone, including yourself. Deep inside, you still think you’re an awesome programmer and so you still have an ego dilemma.

The second wrong reaction is to instantly assume the question is futile and throw your hands up in the air. “Who can ever KNOW if I’m smart or not?”. Obviously, you don’t live in a world where you believe that to be true. You still think and act like a person who believes they are smart.

Unfortunately, the right way to deal with the ego dilemma is tricky and complex and deserves an entire post of it’s own. It really involves revamping your entire belief structure into something deeply probabilistic with a much finer and more nuanced representation of ignorance which I promise to write at a later date when I’ve fully processed what I’m actually doing.

But the absolutly most fascinating thing about the ego dilemma, and the reason why I so love torturing the almost married is that, even if you fully agree with and accept the argument and logic behind the ego dilemma, even if you’re an otherwise intelligent and reasonable person who doesn’t commit the obvious errors against rationality, when confronted with an actual ego dilemma from the inside, knowledge of the ego dilemma helps you barely at all.

The ego dilemma is what I call an unthinkable thought, you can almost see it slip around people’s head, evading capture. It’s so fascinating to me watching otherwise intelligent people utterly unable and unwilling to grapple with the ego dilemma set in front of them.

Back to our married couple:

“So you understand what an ego dilemma is now?”

“Yes, it all seems very logical and well thought out”

“So you see how it applies to you signing a pre-nup?”

“Oh? No, that doesn’t count, our pre-nup is special”

“What? But saying it’s special is how you RECOGNIZE it’s an ego dilemma”

“It is… but this is a special exception to the ego dilemma because of…”

“ARGH”

I said to a friend last night that the first thing I would do when I became rich would be to hire someone to walk around with me and write down every word I uttered and then ritually burn every page as soon as it was filled. Truthfully, I probably wouldn’t do that if I were actually rich. You wouldn’t do it either but you get why it should be done. Now, I could intellectualize about how it’s all about male dominance rituals and signaling relative status but the truth is that if you don’t understand this on a gut level, you might as well move on, the rest of this post is going to be nonsense to you.

In ancient times, it was practically expected that the emperor would have a harem. After all, what was the point of power if not the ability to impregnate many fertile women? And yet, just 10 years ago, the most powerful person in the world almost got impeached for engaging in an act of non-procreative sex with a not particularly attractive woman. The power of life and death over slaves got morphed into the power of hiring and firing of servants which morphed into the worry that perhaps the domestic assistants wouldn’t be fully self actualized if you weren’t on a first name basis with them. Even the glutton is gone; as recently as 1917, you had the likes of Diamond Jim Brady who represents himself admirably in the gallery of great historical gluttons but who today could fill his generously sized shoes? The conspicuous consumption that remains today has sublimated into a form of simpering conformity that’s oh-so-dull to watch. Houses, Private Jets, Watches, Art & Wives… yawn (or, if you’re black or secretly want to be black: Cribs, Bitches, Bling & Cred). None if this inspires the poor to feel the visceral self-loathing of inadequacy nearly half as well as the obnoxiously creative rich of the past. Where did the panache and the admirable fuck you attitude go?

Understanding the no obnoxious rich people paradox may be the key to also understanding the no evil geniuses paradox. In both cases, the paradox is that it’s so easy to imagine these people existing that it’s difficult to imagine them not existing. Why, the only difference standing between you and an obnoxious rich person (apart from the money, duh) is your innate goodness and lord knows innate goodness is in short supply. So where did all the obnoxious rich people go?

Here’s my new stab towards an answer: Wealth used to represent a certain kind of freedom that it doesn’t now. A rich person today can usually get around most of the controls put there by society but a rich person in the past could also get around all the controls that we put on ourselves. In short, wealth allowed for one to enable the purest expression of the id. The reason why you can even imagine the obnoxious rich person is because, deep down, your id is kind of a douchebag. If you were a rich person in the past, you would have not only the desire but also the permission to act on your douchebag impulse. Fortunately, modern society has been set up so that even if you are rich, you’re not allowed to express your douchebag id in an unadulterated form. Instead, rich douchebaggery is channeled safely into much more innocuous channels such as fraternities which encourage conformity, not experimentation.

In short, the proles have won the invisible war that neither side was even aware they were fighting. It might have been possible, a long time ago to imagine an organized conspiracy by the powerful but today, it properly belongs only as a paranoid fantasy used by those who don’t want to take responsibility for their own failings. We, as a society, have managed to turn the rich from a bunch of hard nosed bastards into a set of navel gazing neurotics, largely harmless to everyone, except in their clumsiness.

I’ve decided that, for this next week, I really want to focus on writing and so I’m going to do an experiment of weaning myself off the internet. Starting from 1AM Tuesday, July 28th, I’m going to try and go for one week without the Internet and see how it goes.

The ground rules are as follows:

I’ll be disconnecting the ethernet cable from my desktop & disabling wifi from my laptop.

I’ve disabled both safari & facebook from my iPhone but I can still use it for maps & to reply to urgent email.

If I need to use the internet for whatever reason, I am allowed to crawl under my desk to reconnect my ethernet cable but I can only use it for a maximum of 1 hour.

I will presumably be posting something about my experiences at the end of the week.

Everyone’s all atizzy about Amazon’s recent decision to removed unauthorized copies of 1984 from the Kindle. All of a sudden, we’re reminiscing nostalgically about the freedoms inherent in paper and how the new digital era represents a grave threat. Seriously?

When we were all napstering and torrenting away, digital information represented us sticking it to the man and a sign that RIAA was so desperately out of touch with the changing media landscape. But as soon as the same phenomena hits us, we end up responding exactly the same way that RIAA did, desperately trying to preserve the institutions of print media despite arguments from first principles about how such a thing is impossible.

I hope there’s some dude at RIAA right now who is fully appreciating the irony of all this.

In this recent TED talk, Arthur Benjamin talks about how we should have our High School math classes directed towards statistics, not calculus, as an end goal. I’ve been a heavy advocate for this ever since I wrote my post about how statistics is a philosophy subject.

One lesser mentioned feature in the new iPhone 3.0 release is the ability to listen to songs at half, normal or double speed. Last night, I experimented with listening to my podcasts at double speed and, while it took a bit more mental load, I found that I could reasonably keep track of the conversation. Given the amount of podcasts I listen to, this feature is shaping up to be a serious productivity boost.

A few days ago, I wrote about a case of a seemingly fascinating graph which I felt was used inappropriately. I was rightfully castigated in the comments for being too harsh but, to me, it gave the impression of a pattern when there really was none. In reply to some of the comments, I made the observation that

The only reason I wrote about it was because, I was surprised that even I as a reasonable trained statistics guy was momentarily caught off guard by it. Clearly, you meant nothing malicious by it but it’s a technique that could be used for malicious purposes so I wrote about it.

Now, in the wake of the Iranian Elections, it seems like my speculation has been somewhat vindicated. Andrew Sullivan posted what he claimed was the red flag that proved the Iranian elections were a fraud. And it seems eminently convincing. Luckily, Nate Silver produced a null hypothesis graph based on the US elections and demonstrated that the “red flag” was just a case of the exact same statistically fallacy I wrote about a week earlier.

One of my close friends, when asked if she would read my latest post, replied:

Not really sure I want to be enlightened in that way, but since I’m such a motherfucking glutton for punishment, I’ll read it. How does it make you feel to know that many of the things you say and write are punishing or cruel to other people?

My instinctual response is that I view pain somewhat akin to how a personal trainer would view it. Yes, there is bad pain but there is also pain that leads to growth as well and if it wasn’t at least a little bit painful, I don’t think I did my job right. But to be honest, I’d never really considered it all that closely before. It forced me to confront a world view I was somewhat alien to and, in the process, define my own world view a little more closely.

To me, pain is how you know you’re alive. Pain is thrilling because it’s transformational and without transformation, what else is there beside marking time? Pain is integrity, the prospect of pain is where you prove to yourself who you really are. Pain ties deeply into notions of masculinity and what it means to be a man. The masculine concepts of courage, cowardice, stoicism & loyalty all have to deal with reactions to pain and fear. This is not to justify this world view, merely to explain it.

A lot of my writing stems from these premises. It’s confrontational and brash and requires a bit of heavy lifting to get. Until now, I’d never thought it could be any other way. Part of the reason for me starting this blog is to find a community of like minded thinkers who view the world from that same lens of intellectual masochism. It’s been a frustrating process for me that I’ve been at this for almost a year with so little to show for it from that regard but I’m going to keep on plugging away at it.

I first discovered this obviously wrong truth when I was doing my honors thesis. Time and again, I would come up with a novel idea or a neat algorithmic trick. Some of them, I would discover had already been invented 3, 5, sometimes 10 years before I came up with it. But the ones I was absolutely sure nobody had published before because I had scoured the literature and covered every approach. Well, all of those original ideas turned out to have some hidden, unforeseen flaw that rendered them either trivial or actively stupid. This lead me to formulate the belief that “anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both“. Like all obviously wrong truths, it has the paradoxical property of being obviously wrong and also true.

The premise for the statement comes from the simple observation that good ideas survive and bad ideas die. This means there exists an entire class of awful ideas that people come up with time and again only to eventually discover their wrongness and then abandon them. Every person who discovers them believes themselves to be wholly original since nothing of the sort exists in the world and each of them is met with disappointment, sometimes after many years of sweat and toil. But because failures are almost invisible, they leave no warning signs to future generations that this is an awful idea that should be avoided*.

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both” is an acknowledgment of your own stupidity. Your first instinct, when you come up with a new idea, should be to try and find out if anyone else has done it before. Your second instinct should be to try and find out if anyone’s done it before. Your third, forth and fifth instincts are to ask how come everyone else figured out this was a dumb idea and I haven’t? If you’ve gotten this far and you still haven’t discovered anything useful, you should start feeling a little bit uneasy, it probably means you weren’t smart enough to discover how wrong you are.

If you have discovered the prior art or the fatal flaw, then breathe a small sigh of relief. Unoriginal ideas are GOOD, wrong ideas are GOOD. An unoriginal but right idea is still valuable to all the other people who’ve never heard of it and chances are, if you’ve never heard of it, there will be a significant fraction of the population to which bringing this idea contributes value. Wrong ideas do more to teach you more about the world than right ideas because they teach you about some discrepancy between your expectations and the world, The corrective force of wrong ideas is what allows you to deftly cut to the core of any issue and tease out just where assumptions are weak and likely to fail.

But if you’re lucky, over the course of your life, you’re going to stumble across many ideas which are both original and right, in which case it’s still better to treat them as unoriginal and wrong. Believing an idea is unoriginal and wrong makes that idea do more work. You attack it more fiercely and from more angles. You keep on asking people if the idea sounds familiar and you’re eager to seek feedback because you’re so damn curious to discover why it could be so wrong yet elude you for so long. In doing so, you disassociate the idea from your ego so that you can take criticism about it calmly and dispassionately. Eventually, that drive of curiosity will force you to action, just to finally prove how this idea is flawed. Treating an idea as unoriginal and wrong means that the only standard you’re willing to accept is success. This brings a clarity or purpose that cuts through the confusion when executing upon that idea. Other people may be willing to make excuses or caveats that salve their ego but, as far as you’re concerned, if an idea is not successful, it’s not right**.

“Anything you think is either unoriginal, wrong or both” is an idea that also applies to itself. I’ve been slowly chewing over this idea for almost four years now and it’s been frustrating to me that so far, I haven’t been able to find someone else that’s expressed it as a similar sentiment which by de facto, makes it wrong. I’m putting this out there to invite the embarrassment of someone pointing out the obvious source or the obvious flaw that I’ve managed to miss for so long. Please, tell me how I’m stupid, it would be a welcome relief.

*Some people, when first discovering this problem, come up with elaborate schemes of recording all of these common awful ideas so that future generations can avoid them. This, unfortunately, is a common awful idea.

** not right and wrong are different concepts in the same way that not being a millionaire is different from being homeless.

This advice has no basis in anything but intuition but as this recession is deepening and more and more of my friends are facing the prospect of un or underemployment, I have one piece of advice: Figure out as much as possible about how one thing is produced. The actual details don’t matter so much, what’s important is to gain the holistic, birds eye view of the entire production process.

What do I mean by the entire production process? I mean try and look at everything. If it’s a physical product, figure out where it’s manufactured & what the manufacturing process is. Figure out the logistics of shipping it from the factory to the store. Figure out how vendors relations and the sales process works. Figure out the task of marketing, what are the various channels it’s marketed through. Figure out the corporate philosophy, both as it’s stated and as it’s applied on the ground and understand the impact that this has on the final product. Figure out the R&D stage and how the idea for it was shaped. Figure out all the design constraints and internal politics that lead to in looking like it’s final form. Figure out the legal landscape that it lies in. Figure out it’s competitive market and how it’s situated in the context of similar products. Figure out how the users think and feel about it, what narratives they’ve built up around it and if there’s a culture around this product. Figure out how the social mores of different cultures and socioeconomic classes play into differing amounts of acceptance for this product. Figure out how the internal accounting rules work and how that impacts the budgets for various departments. In short, just go exploring.

The choice of product is largely irrelevant, what I think is important is to see the diversity of effort that needs to happen for something to be produced, the complex web of connections that constitutes a modern economy. What’s more, it forces you to step outside of the box of abstractions and deal with real, concrete scenarios in all thier glorious messiness. But focus on one product and one product only so that you achieve another limited, but far more useful form of blindness. Of course, even with the tightest scoping possible, you’re still looking at a lifetime of work so it’s up to you to define you’re own personal stopping criteria but I can say for myself I’m nowhere near to stopping. Each step leads to a new step to explore, it adds another hundred things to my already massive to-understand list. Someday, I’ll assume I’ll stop breathing and that’s the day I’ll stop doing this.

What’s the benifit of this? It’s hard to express to someone who hasn’t already done it. Figuring out the entire process gives you perspective and context. It situates your own tiny role within a larger context. I know a lot of bright, enthusiastic, dedicated people who are leaving school and the thing that most frustrates me about them is that they just don’t *understand*. They’ve been trained within their particular discipline and culture for their entire schooling career and they’ve lost the ability to see the forest for the trees. What’s more, it’s given me a certain peace and groundedness. The modern economy is abstractions piled upon abstractions. There’s something viscerally solid about understanding an entire process. Before doing this, I felt like I was floating in a sea of clouds designed to insulate and protect me. Those clouds were great but there was something insubstantial about the entire thing. Now, with the feeling of at least one foot on secure, stable ground, I feel more confident in pushing my head much further into the clouds and maybe that’s the most important reason of all.