Rumination 8 October 2022
Alright I will consider this as carefully as I possibly can. I have been making attempts to research Edge Computing for a while now. I don’t really understand why, but for some reason my life has improved significantly ever since I decided I would give myself to the discipline of research. Now I still do suffer from a certain amount of mental health problems, that are a consequence of eating poorly and not exercising enough, but hey I don’t really feel like committing suicide on a daily basis. I do sometimes though, but I have been successfully evading it by having conversations with people once in a while and by thinking about the effect it would have on my family.
I often put myself on social media to gain an understanding of the thoughts that currently consume the collective consciousness. There are two ideas I found worthy of noting. I think it is absolutely amazing and fantastic that there is a sizeable audience my age that wants to improve their lives. They make attempts to do this through becoming more fit, making more money, formulating a purpose for their lives, making influential friends and establishing intimate relationships. I do have a certain complaint about the context this takes place in. While self improvement is definitely a win, I think it should take place only following an expansion of what you are identified with. For example a person who is deeply identified with his community or country will probably spend hours in the gym raising his fitness and his muscle mass so that he can defend his country at the border should an enemy strike. On the other hand, a person deeply identified with only his own body will probably spend hours in the gym only to end up competing in a male beauty pageant. While I don’t really detest body builders who want to put their bodies on display, I just think it would be put to better use in a fight to defend the honor of someone or something you love. The same could probably be said about intellectual pursuits.
That being said, you will probably ask the question about how you must go about expanding what you are identified with. I think the simple way of answering that question is to pay regular attention to the problems that possess the world, or to follow the dictum : “fake it till you make it.” There are a number of problems you could make an attempt to solve. In fact, if you are working for a job right now or if you have made some money, you are playing a role howsoever infinitesimal in bringing the world to a state where it is free from its problems provided your company or enterprise is operating in a reasonably ethical manner. But let’s say you wanted to take the problems of the world in your hands and take a look at them head on. Here is a simple taxonomy I have come up with to classify the world’s problems. The problems of the world in my opinion boil down fundamentally into the following categories(there obviously is a certain amount of overlap among all of them so you probably would have to study one in the context of another):
- Resource Management
- Genetics
- Security
Resource management is a relatively easy one to understand. How would you go about distributing the resources the world has to offer in a fair and just manner to entities requiring those resources to maximize its utility. There are entire fields of study that make attempts to answer this question. Economics, Operations Research, Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Numerical Analysis to name a few. To give an emotional angle to this problem, you could try to understand why one of the biggest slums in India, Dharawi has not managed to progress financially despite it having had existed for nearly 138 years. You might be able to make an argument for the cold-heartedness of the people of Mumbai, but it fundamentally is an incentive design or a resource management problem because it is irrational to expect resources to flow to such people in the volumes they require simply out of the kindness of the people’s hearts. Kindness or Joy will never be as intense and persistent as suffering.
The problem of Genetics is something that almost everyone without exception faces. I will put my attention on the facet of people’s lives where it probably has the greatest say i.e. dating. There are a number of factors about your body that you have next to no say in that determine your attractiveness. These include your height, your frame and your facial attractiveness. If you fare poorly even on any two of these metrics you will most likely face extreme problems in your dating life, to the point of being absolutely unable to attract women, despite your intelligence, social skills or money. A guy with a lanky frame who is 5 feet and 2 inches tall who also has an ugly face is probably going to die alone. He may be able to avoid this by trying to finance a divorcee with a child but his relationship is almost always going to be in trouble unless he is capable of maintaining this income stream. This problem isn’t limited only to those belonging to the extreme ends of the genetic spectrum. Even a person who you could consider average in the metrics mentioned ie. height, frame, facial attractiveness has next to no avenue of improving any of these characteristics beyond a certain age or limit. Hence if they were to feel attracted to someone of the opposite sex outside their attractiveness level, they would almost definitely without exception be heartbroken in an instant if they fail to understand the dynamics that their genetics has on dating. I have seen this happen to a number of people including myself and frankly it is extremely disheartening. It is in this context that the hopeless romantic is conceived. Or in other words someone who is unable to accept the limitations of their genetics and pursues someone way out of their reach.
There is much consolation that happens in the domain of this problem. There are a number of dating coaches who believe that even an extremely unattractive man is capable of landing a Swedish Victoria Secrets model, if only he would raise his status and learn how to talk to women, but we all know that Danny DeVito is probably never going to land Margot Robbie, unless he reincarnates (Btw I think he is a very talented man, I don’t mean any disrespect to him). I don’t really want to discount the positive impact that going to the gym or improving your hairstyle or having great social skills can have on your dating life, but you most likely have to genetically cross a certain minimum threshold for these methods of increasing attractiveness to be of any value and even then they can only help you to a limited extent, as was ordained by God when he blessed or cursed you with a certain amount of attractiveness. By the way, you can kind of evade this problem a little bit, if the attractive woman you are into, has a certain type eg Vegans, Intellectuals or Rockstars etc, although I don’t know how far this can take you.
Now there are other domains where someone’s genetic limitations also have a huge say. For example a person with a low IQ is probably not going to be an eminent researcher in Algebraic Topology or Compiler Design. In addition to this, business leaders at the top of multinational companies who need to mentally process large amounts of information on a daily basis are most likely not going to come from parents of low IQs. This however is a lot more malleable, because a lot more can be done by a person to raise their skill level and a person who is incredibly hardworking can beat out someone with talent who is lazy, unlike in the previous case wherein women basically fall in love with men who they have never spoken to just because the guy has an attractive face (ie the man puts in zero effort) as opposed to the unattractive guy who they have been speaking to for days. (You can argue that industriousness has a strong genetic component, and you will be right but it must also be said that industriousness can be positively impacted very strongly until late in your life by setting up goals and building up habits to achieve them). You will probably be able to solve these problems by bringing about a deep understanding of the genetics that underlie such constructs.
Gosh I wrote too much about this problem. Damn, I didn’t know how much writing about this one hurt. But hey on to the next one.
Once a person has managed to acquire the resources that their genetics, their environment and their effort has allowed them, it is imperative to maintain them. You probably have wondered in the past, what the basis of the longing for a person to go out and unethically acquire someone else’s resources are. Although the problem is nuanced, it can be looked at very simply like this: Should we as a society fail to optimally solve the resources problem, it is only natural that we will find actors who want to acquire resources in a manner that is unjust. A poor man who hasn’t had a good hot meal in days will be motivated to steal a rich man’s wallet. This might look like a generalisation, but the highest amount of crimes in the world have been seen in societies with the highest income inequality. I can honestly make this a billion times darker. But it will hurt. We can also see the requirement of security on biological levels as well. We often get vaccinations on a regular basis to be able to nib disease causing bacteria in the bud. In addition to this, we can probably liken all the work taking place in medical research and in hospitals to that of the defense sector because second to them, no industry saves more lives than the medical industry.
Thus, a rich man has to go about investing large sums of money in security systems, while a bank has to go about constructing buildings and investing in armed men to store currency. This is limited not only to physical means of creating security, but even security on the computational level has very large investments. You can probably also include the case where people take out insurances to cushion themselves from these disasters. Another example is technocrats developing medical technology eg bionic arms and legs to be able to address or help people who have already been victims of attacks in the form of diseases or disability. Maybe you can capitalise on this problem and eventually be able to address this on a large scale.
This is a very depressing essay. I didn’t envision that it would turn out like this. It is obvious that we won’t be able to solve these problems completely in our life time. But maybe our children someday will give us their gratitude for eliminating diseases the way we give our ancestors gratitude for absolutely eradicating diseases like small pox or polio. Or maybe our children will thank us because they are able to be with the love of their lives because we cracked the genetic code and were able to make them as attractive as they wanted to be, winning the adoration of their love interests. Or maybe some starving kid in Somalia, a terrorist infected country is able to eat a hot bowl of Chicken Biryani on a regular basis because we perfected our Operations and Supply Chain Management system.
I don’t belong to the community of delusional people that believe we as a human race have a near infinite life span. We are in all likeliness not going to be able to colonise planets and make them inhabitable before the sun engulfs the earth. And even if we do manage to colonise the entire universe because our society gave birth to a billion people of Elon Musk’s caliber, I am pretty sure the universe has a life span. It is not going to let us live in it longer than that unless we invent or discover an entirely new dimension of existence. Maybe if we managed to come to a point where all of us were able to live lives of absolute joy, the death of the human race will be meaningful.
Aah well, enough for today. Good night Beloved Reader. If you’re wondering, I write these largely for the other parts of my personality that lay dormant within me right now.
