A Collection of Thoughts About Market Assessment

This article will probably never be complete and I'll modify it from time to time. I intentionally avoid the word "improve", because it's up to the reader to evaluate whether I improve or worsen the text. The last edit is from 08.2010. This article is just a collection of assertions and it's up to the reader to use his or her own understanding of this world to assess, whether the assertions hold or are contradictory. As assertions get added, edited, removed, their numbering is not meant to consist of intact sequences of whole numbers.

Assertion #1:
In case of products, where profitability is positively correlated with investment size, parties that are able to make a "relatively small" investment, are beaten in competition by parties that are able to make "relatively big" investment, unless the market is so small that the maximum profitable investment size is within the reach of the parties that are not able to make the "relatively big" investments.

A few wild Statements About Emotions and Memory

This text  is a quick and sleazy way to fast-note down one's thoughts, leaving the blanks for the reader to figure out, but anyway, I think that for the one, who can't figure out the blanks, this text is useless anyway.

So, I note down a set of statements, and leave the connections between them for the reader to figure out. :-)

My own hypothesis, the statement that is a bit of news to me at the time of writing this post, is:"Emotions are DATA that gets written into memory and the occurrence of emotion Y in situation X is just an ordinary memory retrieval event, where situation X helps to recall data in the memory, in this case, emotion Y."

Think of it this way: if one loses a thing, let's say, apartment keys, then by replaying the situation, where one might have lost the keys, can help to remember the place, the move, how/where one placed the keys.

The way I understand, in 2010, even one of the axioms of the Cognitive Psychology is that a situation triggers an automatic thought, which then determines human behavior and physical feelings. Think of it like, if one were to find oneself suddenly in the same room with a cobra snake, let's say, just 2 meters from it and with nothing but air between one and the snake, then probably it often takes just a fraction of a second to really get frightened and may be scream, startle and may be a few seconds or 10 seconds to start sweating from fear.

Another loose assertion, which is also present at http://brainrules.net, is that a presentation that touches peoples emotions, is remembered better.

Next loose assertion, from the book of http://brainrules.net , the way I understand it as of July 2010, is that memories are stored and enhanced in a region of a brain, where they were placed at the very first instance and that they are most easily retrieved if they are heavily linked to some data that is already, "firmly", there.

I'm not sure, I guess that if I consider a blog, specially this soap opera blog here, somewhat as my diary, then may be the reason, why I wrote all of this text here is to sort out my own thoughts a little bit. It seems to me that my conclusion, at the time of writing this section, is that fear is very often an unjustified, irrational, automatic thought that should be recognized and consciously ignored, because calm assessment, analyze, of the situation should always be sufficient. I acknowledge that fear helps rats and other animals to avoid their predators, but if there is nowhere to run or the situation is so fast that one knows for sure that one can not run, let's say, sufficiently far away from a bomb, then calm assessment does seem to me to be the most fruitful asset.

I admit that I was listening the following video in the background then writing this post. It seems to me that music helps me to get to get to inner memories, thoughts, in my mind where I would not get otherwise. The idea is that a music associates to me with something and then I'm able to think, what is it about that piece of music that I really like, why is it that I like this particular feature within that music, what is it this thing really that I'm dreaming about, what my heart yearns for. I guess that's it's the same thing that I just described in this post: the music creates the situation and brings out emotions that I can then analyze to get to know myself a little bit more.





For example, once I was walking home at night while listening to some of my favorite MP3 files and came to a conclusion that the reason, why I liked those particular pieces of music was that they associated to me with some of my earlier, childhood dreams of success. When I listed the features of success in my mind and thought it over a bit, I found that those dreams were naive and contradictory and started to think, whether I am at the "right path" in reality, how I should try to plan my career in reality, where to aim, what political stances I should have.

A Vague idea About a Tactical Voting System

Now, this post does not provide anything to anybody, except that it just describes, what's on my mind at the start of June 2010.

Namely, I really started to wonder, how to communicate, GET THINGS DONE together with others in a more effective way.

The background is that I'm part of a subgroup of the Estonian green party, and in a funny way one of the, so to speak, representatives, of the group in a way that I got thrown out of the green party with other, much more prominent, members of the group, and then, our party membership was restored due to a high demand within the party.

Well, anyway, what's on my mind is that smart and otherwise people that I want to cooperate with, tend to do two things that I really don't like.

First, they do things that are led from emotions.

Second, they don't consider different solutions, contemplate about them systematically, compare the pluses and minuses of different solutions.

They do ask for comments and are willing to cooperate, in general try to do things together with other members of the group, but the discussion is seriously hindered due to the lack of systematization. To me it seems that what they do is that they ask for comments and then try to pick something up from the comments according to their own best judgment, and merge that somehow into the existing text. The result is that the text is a huge mixture, which is systematized, but full of issues that don't work, but something that people emotionally voted for or tonally agree with. One can say that the result is a systematic emotional, polite, expression, but not something that can be used to get things done or clear things up.

I suspect that it has something to do with the structure of communication in general. Like, may be it has something to do with a fact that the structure of the communication is a graph, where if one person says something and something relates with it for some other person, then that other person says/writes his/her ideas about the related issue and so it goes. To me it seems that it is a very effective way to get the raw material, if done in a very small group, i.e. not more than 10 people, preferably with at most 5 people, but from there onward, I think that one should try to think of something.

May be the solution is that one of the people notes down ideas subject to evaluation and then the group adds statements about the ideas to evaluate and each of the group members can evaluate each of the statements by giving it 4 values: statement doesn't hold, statement supports the claim, statement is neutral, statement is against the claim.

It can be simulated in a spreadsheet by calculating the mark to a single statement given by a single person by HOLDS*MARK, where the HOLDS is in set {0,1} and the MARK is in set {-1,0,1}. The default value for HOLDS is 1 and the default value for the MARK is 0. The votes would be counted by finding a geometrical mean of the holds values and multiplying the sum of all MARK values with the geometrical mean. This would be done with every statement about the claim and the claim's sum of points would be the sum of the statements' points.

OK, I understand that the last section was not clear enough, I don't write technical documentation that way, but I don't want to spend too much time on this article. At least I self know, what algorithm I had on my mind. I think that it would actually take a bunch of mathematical formula anyway to explain it clearly and that's quite unpleasant to do in HTML, but even if different people interpret my last section differently, I'm sure that they can fantasize somewhat to the "right direction". :-) After all, it is a non-serious, soap opera blog.

One Vague Thought About the Emergence and Spreading of Social Knowledge

Well, I was listening to Enya's track called Boudica and from there I wondered to the Wikipedia page, where it said that the Boudica was a queen that led an uprising against the Romans.



It kind of occurred to me that in the medieval ages the queens and kings were practically local warlords, analogues to modern day corporate players, because if they were not waging wars against other kings/queens, they were suppressing the rest of the population, literally robbing them by using violence (so called taxes---to the local mafia boss).

On the other hand, some of them, after having enough tough times with equal matches,i.e. other warlords, seem to start doing "humane" things. Now, one of the questions that came to my mind is that given the state of medicine in middle ages, many of the people might just die before gaining the smartness, knowledge, how to live happily and in prosperity (in terms of health and wealth).

For example, if we look at average modern time humans, then given "enough" power,  they act like mini-dictators or just think that they can get away with abusing or bullying everyone else without suffering the consequences. I do not believe in God, but if he existed as an entity, then even he suffers the consequences, because he does have to cope with the result of his deeds. Screw things up and You have to use the screwed up things for attaining Your own goals..So, back to topic, some of the minidictator-humans are eager to actually implement their dictatorship ambitions by attending in corporate power-struggles and climbing the ladder, but the ones that do not, are no better.

Also, when one looks at what happens in the United States army(Iraq, Afghanistan), then the youngest ones make the most ruthless killers and torturers, probably, because they just don't yet fully understand, how their deeds look in the background of the rest of their lives, family members, etc., and then, when they arrive home from Iraq or Afghanistan, and have the moment of comparison, many of them are deeply depressed, etc.. But in Iraq, they don't mind that much. They just do what's told and feel good about doing a "good job".

It seems to be in line with a claim that it takes smartness to be "good". After all, one does have to know, what pleases and disturbs others in order to be good to them. Being delicate does take a mental effort.

Given a fact that it also takes time to get to know, and observe, social processes (think politics, masses of a given culture in a given time, etc.), then the knowledge about social processes diminishes quite easily. But isn't that the case with all knowledge? How many of You is able to understand Albert Einstein's theory of relativity?

A set of Weird Dreams Between 14.05.2010 and 15.05.2010

I'm not sure, in which order they were, but I remember 4 distinct sets. May be 5. Well, it is a description of dreams, so, it's obviously a mess.


One of those dream-sections was that I was on an island, something like the islands are in Estonia, Internetized, but naturally clean. It was winter and I was there with a mixture of people, whom I know from various places and who, in the real life, probably never even have met. It consisted of, kind of, multiple day scenarios and one of the scenarios was that it was pitch-black night, inside a forest (on the island) was a diesel generator powered AM-radio station, an old type of thing, with a huge mast, and everything, except that it was so old that one could only send Morse codes and some kind of Morse messages, which none of us could read, came in lousily to some ancient and noisy, mechanical, machine. The backdrop was that we were all STUCK on that island, INFECTED by a VIRUS that was a computer virus and a biological virus AT THE SAME TIME, 2 IN ONE. It's weird, that in a nice, well lit by the old fashioned light bulbs, and warm, office of the ratio-station we also had an ordinary phone and an internet connection.


We wanted to warn outside world of the biologically infectious virus and wanted to call for help, but the Internet connection and the phone system was taken over by the virus, which spoke with a voice of a small girl like the Red Queen computer of the Resident Evil movie and, as I said earlier, unlike the Resident Evil, where the computer limited the deadly virus from exiting an underground lab complex, in my dream, the computer virus and the biological virus were all the same, the same entity, fighting for its own spread and existence. As none of us knew, how to read the Morse code, we wanted to find it out from the Internet. After all, it was also vital for us for sending the message out through the old-fashioned radio station, which could not be taken over by the virus due to its simplicity, primitiveness, archaicness. So, we darn hoped, that the virus has not blocked the web sites that contained the info, how to use Morse code, and, with luck, we even got some of the info, but then, the virus figured it out, how vital that information is for us and blocked it.


One thing, that's funny about that section of the dream, is that even though it was cold, wet, pitch-dark night in a small opening of a forest, with the radio stations windows glowing from the light of the old-fashioned light-bulbs, it was not cold outside, at least none of us felt the cold, when we moved from the radio station to a near-by dormitory and, picked some berries up from under the snow along the way.


The other part of this dream is, that the virus has infected some people of a town so that they were obeying the virus. The rest of the population did not obey the virus, even though they were infected. So, in order to facilitate its own spreading, the virus used the ones, who obeyed, as a police force, military force, for keeping the rest of the population isolated from the rest of the world, just like at the soviet times the soviet elite kept the rest of the population behind the "iron curtain".


Oh well, one other scenario of my dreams involved my grandfather's garden, which is a mess in real life and which I, in real life, want to try to use for growing some herbs. In the dream it was even more full of wild plants than it is in the real life, but then there was one nice old lady, in my dreams, who explained, which of the plants in there are poisonous and which are herbs. In the dream, (just imagine, how spoiled I am) I started to think about, how to make a mobile phone software recognize the plant in the garden, so that I could practically note down the things that the old lady told me. In the dream I was thinking, that the main problem would be, how to make the phone recognize the plant of interest at the background of all other plants, and the solution that I came up with, (in the dream!!!) was that one might snatch the plant of interest, hold it in the background of the SKY, which is available everywhere and is very often almost uniform, or at least is without plants, and hold the plant of interest in the background of the sky, above ones head, for the mobile phone to recognize it. The only problem is that one can not identify poisonous plants and plants that are under protection, that way, because the "testing" means touching the plant and picking it from the ground also destroys the plant of interest.


Well, I guess that's it for this blog entry. :-D