Google vs Facebook: Humans should always be above technology and here’s why

I’m a Google guy. I ignore Facebook as hard as I can. Long story short: Facebook is a mess. It tries to nudge me almost all the time. From the start when I a second ago logged in to until I log out. You too probably have a Facebook account and may be you are having a great experience with it. Nothing personal but I’ve observed that things like Facebook is for those who used to spent excessive amount of time watching television and the like. Like Facebook, television seems so useful. You can watch movies, listen songs, check out news and stuff. But in reality it’s unbelievably irrelevant. Eventually, by sitting in front of the television you’ve watched what you didn’t want or needed to watch at all. We stick to technology like Facebook or Television not because its gonna be fun or its useful in my life but just for the sake of pastime. And of course they nudge you to do so. It’s not their fault, its our fault. Company are here to give what we want, not what we or they think we should have.

Of course there are people who take the first small step towards improvement even when the world is trying to nudge them to do the opposite. Companies cannot customize their products for every damn people they connect with based on their wants or needs. So it’s our responsibility to customize our life and what we do with our time. But how? By the choices we make. We shape our time by the choices we make. Their nudging affects us less than the choices we make. There’s something which comes before the act of making choices. Willingness to do something different and new from our daily routine work. The first and the smallest step in making change is a slight willingness to do it. Like when it happens after you’ve solved a lot of math problems, the solution to the next problem clicks in your mind in  fraction of seconds.

I prefer using Google over Facebook even for pastime. Because of its elegant home page. When I go to Google I have a particular purpose in my mind, a task, even when I don’t know what should I search. But at least I know that I’m gonna do the task of searching whereas in applications like Facebook where I have no idea what’s worth doing. I suspect that when people log in Facebook they have little control over their activities. Facebook tell you what to do next but from inside we know that its purposeless, we are about to just waste out time.

Now some words on Technology overall. If technology is telling us what to do next we are about to either waste our time or make ourselves irrelevant or both. If technology can think (tell what should we do next) better than human and perform all the tasks in the world which is impossible for humans to do why do need humans then to make something happen. We need humans because the claim that technology knows better than us is wrong. It can provide us with data but data alone is not enough to make good decisions. Technology should be the slave of humans, not the other way around. Though, what technology cannot do is that it can’t think, feel, or dream great ideas. It can’t detect our desire, purpose, and attitude better than us.

For instance consider this. I made the decision of starting a blog. why. Not because some technology suggested me to start a blog at certain date or month if I want to gain maximum benefit. Just because technology came to know the best time to start a blog doesn’t mean that I am really gonna start a blog. This much reason is not good enough. When making decisions other thing are necessary to consider like desire, purpose, level of need and the like which technology is unaware of. Using only data while making decision is like saying ‘just because you have the money to buy a golf kit means you have to learn to play golf’. It doesn’t matter if you care about the game at all. Data matters but far less than desire and passion. Take this: just because data says that 90% of the business fail means that no one should start a business even if they care about it. You see how stupid it gets.

At last this is what I think “Technology is a friend, not a boss. So treat it that way”

Openly believing

There are a lot of things I don’t believe in and things that I believe in.

The good thing is that I am not afraid of believing things openly. After all there is always a reason behind every belief. And its very important to have a growth mindset rather that fixed mindset.

Like I don’t believe in arrange marriage. I believe in love.

I don’t believe in schools education. I think schools should be transformed into something else or burnt right away. I believe in self-education. I believe self education is the only kind of education there is. Any other kind of education is nothing but an illusion. So I believe in reality.

I don’t believe in patriotism. I believe in humanity.

I don’t believe in god. I believe in atheism and science.

I don’t believe in religion. I believe in truth and liberty.

I believe in extending freedom of people as much as we can without spoiling the moral of the society. I am a bit more libertarian than I am an egalitarian. I seldom believe in mixing religious custom and believes into every moral arguments of the community.

Its very important to believe things fearlessly without any pressure of opinions of our surroundings. Difference in thinking about social structures in inevitable. In fact, societies are free and, at the same time, stable because of the diversity of human imagination and their awareness of the fact that diversity is part of the human nature, we should get used to it.

There is a difference between believing and practicing your believes. In each case (circumstances) the level of difficult in believing something or actually practicing it vary. So it is important (for the integrity of the community) that people should weight the peril and virtue of personal freedom and moral duty of the circumstances in which they have decided to practice their believes. Like I wrote in my post Justice. Justice is the art of weighing personal freedom and moral obligations we are bounded with.

Problem is in the root, so is the solution

I’ve noticed that almost all the problems in the world are caused by these three problems.
People’s ignorance of how really the world should work, what really life is and how should you live it, what’s right and what’s wrong morally.
The ignorance of their ignorance and;
Their unwillingness to change (after all how can we agree to change if we don’t there’s a need to change, and right now, not later).
Solving these problems take only one thing. That is I believe one of the most difficult things in the world: changing people’s mind, raising their consciousness, educating them, inspiring them to change to something new and better.
Solve this and you’ve solved almost everything. But how? You might ask. Well, I’ve written a post on how to change the world.

Getting rid of Slavery

A slave is someone who had been kept unaware of what life can be if he do what he care about and like doing. Kept unaware of the real nature of living.
In school, kids feel something is wrong but can’t justify or reason for it. After all who in the world find it easy to challenge the status quo. Especially if the kids are trained for years not to ask the questions their teacher or parents don’t know the answer to. Assume everything question only what they tell you to question. This is what they teach in school. Its very easy for teachers or middle-class parents to trap kids into the logical traps. But the true is students know more about the reality of school than anyone else. Because they have been there for years. They have the field notes. So when your kid come home yelling at schools. Believe them, not their teachers.

A part of being a slave is to be afraid of being caught in the undertow.

If you find yourself in here. You know it is time to change.

Justice

Justice is the fight between human liberty and moral obligations.

More specifically,
Justice is the art of weighing personal freedom and moral duty of the community.

We need a revolution in education

I convinced one of my friend (topper in his class) to came to my home to check out a Ted talk given by Seth Godin on school education. Watch it here before you continue.

But changes are that you will not have enough time to watch the video. So let me tell you what’s in it. Seth starts by telling how and why and for what reason public schools were introduced in the early nineteen century. Then he goes on to talk about the limitation of the education system: what’s wrong with them and what can we do about it. In the talk he reveals 10 things which he thinks are going to change completely in this 21th century. At last he gave us two myths to think about. He want us to ask yourselves what is school for and if we don’t what is school for then he suggests to have a conversation in order to answer the question “what is school for”.

After watching the video, me and my friend had a very short conversation on this topic.

I asked him “So are you convinced that schools are not just silly but too harmful to waste our time in there or you disagree about something Seth said”.

He told me that he was very well convinced. He was among the topper in his class.

Then I insisted  “if you understands the limitation and harmfulness of school why don’t you ditch the school and start your self-education”.

The answer I got opened my eyes.

He said ” There has to be something to back my life on. I completely understand you and I’m aware of the real nature of schools and their defenders but I alone can’t go against everyone even if I am pretty sure that I’m right.

(Now you know why schools strive. The Existence of School is based on only one thing: fear of uncertainty. If there is even a bit less fear in people’s mind they shall come to realize that the theory on which School is based is not just stupid but harmful in the 21th century. Now we are at the crossroad because technology is too here.)

It takes guts to try something new and right. Without much resources with us to make things happen. I think there are more than enough people in the world like my friend who know the right thing but doing the wrong thing only because the people surrounding them are doing the wrong thing. Rather then find their tribe as Seth say in his book Tribe: we need you to lead us they are trying to fit in and compromise.

The best way to complain is to make thing.

– James Murphy

There are two very effective things I learned from Seth Godin first: This isn’t for you, it’s for her. If people didn’t like your art or admired your choices, two things are possible, one, your art suck or, your audience suck (the one you showed your art to). Make better art or change your audience. Second thing which I learned is that leadership is not difficult but if you are trained by school for years to avoid it. You can put almost any word like equality in place of the word leadership, the sentence won’t lose its value.

Thank god (though I don’t believe in God) Gandhi didn’t gave up just because their was less certainty in what he was doing compared to what he might have done: compromise.

Thank god Luther did not gave up just because he had few resources to make things happen compared to what he might have done: compromise.

I firmly believe that the reason people stick to school is not because there is any kind of lack of resources or skills or fear of change or even desire to do something interesting and impact the world and the like. But I think there is only and only one thing which is stopping us from doing something interesting and generous: a hand full of people and their fucking opinions, the jerks.

Be silent and get rid of the jerks. That’s what Bob Tobin says in this PDF.

People will say what you are doing is the wrong thing because they have to justify their own crappy decisions                                                 – Till H.Grob

The Led talk by Till H.Grob. Truly worth watching.

If fear is the obstacle then I have this thing to say:

We don’t have to go it alone as long as we agree to go together and go first.

How-to books and books that change the world

A couple of days ago I read a book titled Modern Minimalism: How to Live with Less and Experience More in Today’s Hectic World: Minimalist, Minimalist Living, Minimalist Lifestyle, Minimalist Budget, Minimalism Books. Its a how-to book which teaches you how to live a minimal life (if you really want to). These kind of books are much easier to write compared to the other books, I think they rarely make big difference in our life, personal or professional. They are still worth reading if you care about knowing how to do things they are trying to teach. But they rarely spend any time convincing, much less influencing us to read what they want us to teach. They don’t answers questions like why you should read the book. What’s in there for you. For whom this book is written. If its for everyone, its for none. It’s noticeable that the how to books are practical and the books written to change things are theoretical.

The burden of work of persuading sits on the head of the great books. That doesn’t mean that I’m ridiculing those other kind of books. Its just that everyone has a taste in their mind when they decide which book is great and which not- they justify their decision and make their points. No book is bad.

The most difficult book to write is the one whose aim is to change people’s mind. Changing the mind is in other words called conscious-rising. Seeing the world with different lenses. Rethinking the core of your believes and seeing if theirs a better way to do the same thing or theirs the need to completely change the stuff we are doing. Its the most difficult thing to do in the world. But still there are examples of how change happened inside people’s mind in order to bring prosperity, but at the same time their are examples about how the events backfired because of the fixed mindset of people.

This is for those who want to change something in this world: After all this do we stand a chance. Of course we do. I tell you how. Change is possible if you are willing to do some work people do (while they are trying to find new ways, only if they care about it) on behalf of the people. By ‘people’ I mean those who (most often they are few in number but they do care enough to take the first step) are open to the desire to change.

Now, I am gonna recommend two books. If you care about changing something the book titled Switch: how to change things when change is hard by Chip and Dan Heath is the best match for your needs followed by the book titled The Tipping Point: how small change can make big difference by Malcolm Gladwell. You will understand the lesson of doing some work on behalf of people after you’ve read Switch. And the idea of what I meant by ‘people’ earlier in this blog will be clear to you after you’ve read The tipping point. The practice of change can happen anywhere where the practice of persuading can happen. We can write a book. Launch an Event. Talk to people. And the like. Its easily said than done but its far easier than I used to imagine. Most of the things about change I want to tell you are already by Heath brothers and Mr. Glad well in their books. Its time wasting to write what’s already written by someone and you know where to find it.

But there are few things which you will not find in those books, things that I noticed in the real world. This is very important: Only the makers of the opinions of people have a good chance of changing those opinions and ideologies (which of course are outdated, may be because when those ideology came alive among the people no one told them that those like almost every other ideas which are introduced to the world were mortal except few universal stuff. No one taught them how to have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. But no worry. We can. So will we.)

For example: I conform my points by reading books related to the subject I am thinking about and give opinions, sometimes, only if I am able to, make conclusions. Like that only a vast majority of people in this world rely on their neighboring people’s opinion to conform their findings. These are just two examples. Some people care more about scientific methods, some respect philosophy, some like new untested ideas, some search for conformation and certainty, majority of common people believe in what I call mass batch opinions which I firmly believe never works unless they won a lottery. I believe in customization (think yourself for yourself but go together only with people you care about). Find what the people you are trying to change care about. Its also very important to work out which people are you trying to change. And work accordingly.

Into a new habbit

When we are trying to do something new which we think is better than the old, we have to think before we acting in a certain way to remember that we’ve decided to do it our way (the new and better way). Because old is a habit we don’t have to pause to think why are we doing it, unlike when we are trying to grow new habits. The old bad habits are already ingrained in us by, may be, schools or parents (after all they take the responsibility to teach us stuff) or sometimes yourselves.

Couple of years ago I used to use the pronoun ‘he’ to represent any profession or anything except if its a female name because that’s how I’ve been taught for years by my school and community. But as I grew up reading books I observed that the writers also used ‘she’ which was a pretty new habit for me back then. Then I came to know the story behind it. So it very important to pause before acting if we really care about catching better habits. Its about getting better at the old by improving on it or sometimes transforming it completely. The act of getting into the new habits can be seen anywhere including feminism.

It all goes well if you’re on the right road

But how to know if you are on the right road. Just one thing. Do what you like or care about. When you don’t know what you care about, sit idle or try every different stuff possible, for few days. To see where your mind is going. I’m sure you’ll end up on the right road. Do it as long as you care about it. Change things if you feel there’s a need. There’s no law which restricts us in doing one thing all life. Trust that everything will go well if you do what you care about.

What ‘really’ do you want

This eye-opening story from the book titled The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman I found under the subtitle Sufficiency on page no.167 which changed the way I think about change, business and world.

I won’t waste any more time. Here is the story, its a conversation between a fisherman and a powerful executive of a company.

Once, a powerful executive went on vacation- his first in fifteen years. As he was exploring a pier in a small coastal fishing village, a tuna fisherman docked his boat. As the fisherman lashed his boat to the pier, the executive complimented him on the size and quality of his fish.

“How long did it take you to catch these fish?” the Executive said.

“Only a little while,” the Fisherman replied.

“Why don’t you stay out longer and catch more?” asked the Executive.

“I have enough to support my family’s needs,” said the Fisherman.

“But,” asked the Executive,”what do you so with the rest of the time?”

The Fisherman replied,”I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children,take a siesta with my wife, and stroll into the village each evening, where is sip wine and play guitar with my friends. I have a full and busy life.”

The Executive was flabbergasted. “I’m a Harvard MBA, and I can help you. You should spend more time fishing. With the proceeds, you can buy a bigger boat. A bigger boat would help you catch more fish, which you could sell to buy several boats. Eventually, you will own an entire fleet.

“Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you could sell directly to the consumer, which would improve your margin. Eventually, you could open your own factory, so you’d control your product, the processing, and  the distribution. Of course, you’d have to leave the village and move to the city so you could run your expanding enterprise.”

The Fisherman was quiet for a moment, then asked, “How long would this take?”

“Fifteen, twenty years. Twenty-five years, tops.”

“Then what?”

The Executive laughed. “That’s the best part When the time is right, you’d take your company public and sell all of your stocks. You’d make millions.”

“Millions? What would I do then?”

The Executive paused for a moment. “You could retire, sleep late, fish a little, play with your children, take a siesta with your wife, and stroll into the village each evening to sip wine and play the guitar with your friends.”

Shaking his head, the Executive bade the Fisherman farewell. Immediately after returning from vacation, the Executive resigned from his position.

How much does advise matter

An advise is more like a suggestion without much reasoning. It doesn’t take time giving an advise. But it rarely works compared to philosophical reasoning. Now I am giving you an advise that advise rarely works but my advise doesn’t have to be taken too seriously because as I said an advise is something with less than good enough reasoning to convince someone to believe it. But if now I shall start to try to convince you that ‘advise is overrated’ by philosophical reasoning then its worth considering and thinking about. So this is exactly what I am going to do Here.

Philosophical reasoning is something you can find in your daily life. You can check if what I am saying works or not. Or are there any exceptions to my claim. That’s what Socrates used to do. He used to search find exceptions in people’s philosophical claims. Now its a pretty interesting exercise. Find exceptions in whatever people say. Questioning the quotations of great person. The great persons are very good at throwing advises but too busy to disclose their reasoning on why they said what they said. I agree that there are some exception to my claims too. There is something which can only be felt not reasoned.

If Bill Gates recommends you a book without explaining why and for what reason you must read it, whats in there for you not others. For that he has to know what you are looking for, what interests you, what are your needs and the like. Just because Bill gates liked the book doesn’t mean that you will too. In fact changes are that you will not. Just because the decision he took in those circumstances doesn’t mean that its gonna work for you too. But there one way to make advise work. Find people who have almost everything common with you. Then do what they are doing (be as specific you can be. But its an advise so don’t take it too seriously. Think yourself for yourself). Two problems here, one, I have least idea who are you going to find these kind of people. Two, thinking that you are same as the other is insulting yourself. I do agree that it works but I firmly believe that it works right rarely. Its nothing more than a gamble if it’s just an advise without reasoning.

And then comes the scientifically proven stuff. The most certain and reliable in all three. There might be an exception to this also. But again I have little reasoning or evidence to prove that scientifically proven stuff too have exceptions. So the point is ‘assume nothing, question everything’. I read somewhere this quote ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’. I am in the process of exploring more so I have to dig deeper to make sense of my reasoning. No body has a perfect right answer (again a claim without evidence). But at least I don’t have any perfect right answer to any question.

Learning Teacher

I always wanted to be a teacher. I always wanted to teach something and see if what is know or understand is good enough to make important stuff happen. A very significant part of teaching is to try to not let the students think too much in the wrong direction of the argument. There are two ways to learn. Learning by Discovery. Its really hard maybe next to impossible to learn everything by means of discovering which happens through experimentation. Learning by instruction and discussion. My advise works in the second type of learning.

The more I try to understand…

The more I tried to understand the world the more complex it got. But before I started to seek how really things happen I used to think that I am too stupid and ignorant to know everything or anything which my older siblings knew. That’s why I respected them. As I was seeing things with a different point of view unlike the people I was surrounded with I started to realize the difference between intelligence and stupidity. I started to understand why some people are the way they are. I was starting to know why some people are rich and the others poor. Why people behave differently. Why people think differently. Why people care about different things. Later is come to realize the difference between understanding the world and knowing everything. People say that one single person can never know everything and I agree with the thought. But I don’t believe knowing everything is any valuable. May be because it’s not possible. Does it matter if a single person knows every fact in the world? And can memorize tons of books.

There is difference between knowing how to do it step by step and actually having the skill to do it in the real world. There are things that require different amount of knowing and skills. Now the first thought come is my mind after write the last sentence is ‘knowing everything has become of less value because of the digital technologies which can memorize all the stuff and are getting better day by day in skills and tasks which are next to impossible for humans to do the way machine do things.’ But again I asked myself is my claim timely or universal. I think our digital age has very less to do with this. Even before the computer age knowing everything makes very little things happen.

Because even if someone claims to be the most intelligent person in the world, knows everything darn thing in the world and can do anything will not be able make all the change, improvement, transformation that the world needs. There’s a limit to everything. Why? Because she (or he or the other) is a human.

( Nothing can be more elementary and universal than the fact that choices of all kinds in every area are always made within particular limits. For example, when we decide what to buy at the market, we can hardly ignore the fact that there are limits on how much we can spend. The ‘budget constraint,’ as economists call it, is omnipresent. The fact that every buyer has to make choices does not indicate that there is no budget constraint, but only that choices have to be made within the budget constraint the person faces. What is true in elementary economics is also true in complex political and social decisions.’ – Amartya Sen)

Humans have only two hands, two legs, one mind, one heart, one body which cannot be omnipresent. And the most important humans are mortal, they have very limited time compared to work of changing the world in order to make it perfect which might never end (or who knows it can end). Knowing everything isn’t worth less its just more impossible. I don’t know any person who knows everything so I can’t write about the consequences in concrete words, I can only imagine. But it’s worth imagining. In fact right now I am going to change my mind and say that knowing everything is far more valuable than I wrote before. It’s just that human are not to know or memorize the past and present to do the routine stuff presented in front of them but to understand the past and the present to imagine the future and the next thing of the present. That’s why humans created computers and nature created humans.

Now let me come to the understanding part. Understanding is not about knowing every step in the world but to thinking what to do next, the difference between right and wrong, to feeling things. When you know everything or anything you don’t understand it, it just has to be memorized properly. But when you understand something you will be able to imagine what to next. That’s the difference. It’s far more complicated than I used to think before. But thankfully I didn’t gave up there. I have to confess that the more I dig deeper the more I feel that there’s something very important that I am missing – this is what a part of my mind thinks. The other part of my mind says that I understood everything there is. This is the end. Nothing more is left to consider (very specifically). It’s very important to realize the difference between ‘need to understand all’ and ‘want to understand all there is’. There are infinite stuff in our mind imagine and are unresolved. But is there a need to resolve them all. We need to sort out the most urgent and most important thing to resolve in this world because we have limited ‘everything’.

I cannot write everything at once. If I even tried to give justice to all my thoughts and questions pop up in my mind while writing I might never stop writing till forever ( maybe there is an end to something if I am able to consider everything there is to consider). Here it seems that it’s a virtue that I am human not an immortal vampire. The world is not just complicated, its complex.

I’ll continue from here later.

Thanks for reading.

Who deserves more:

The one who figures out what she really want and will love doing, what she cares about, her passion. Does it without any pain or hard work. After all doing what you love is fun, not work.
Or
The one who don’t care about knowing what they are good at or what they like doing. Thinks there’s no need to figure out their passion. But can endure extreme pain and tolerate high and long boredom hours. After all when you are doing stuff you don’t really care about everything is work, real hard but unnecessary work; this is the time when five minutes seem like an hour.
So what do you think:
Who deserves more.