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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.
August 9, 2010
July 16, 2010
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.
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.
June 7, 2010
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.
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.
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