Freedom: Sometimes less is more

Here in America, we celebrate individual freedom. “I know my rights!” is an almost mundanely common catch phrase we hear in TV shows and movies. We know our individual rights, and we're surrounded by a culture that encourages celebration of (or even flagrant misuse of) individual liberties. We have the right to say whatever we want, buy whatever we want, eat whatever we want, and to some extent do whatever we feel like doing. But freedom is a double edged sword. For example, because of freedom of speech, corporations are allowed to market their products by lying (or making deliberately deceitful claims) about their products or about their competitors’ products. This limits individuals’ freedom to make informed choices about the products they buy. Having the freedom to buy liquor or other mind-altering substances opens up opportunities for substance abuse and addiction, which can be severely freedom-limiting for those who experience it. If a psychopath had the freedom to fire a loaded weapon into a crowd of innocent bystanders (and in many ways we do have this freedom in America), some of those bystanders would be severely limited in their basic freedom to live. For any given freedom, there is always another freedom (or possibly more than one) that is at odds with it. Sometimes it will be someone else’s freedom pitted against yours, but sometimes it will be another one of your own freedoms. Freedom is not a the-more-the-merrier type of thing. It’s always a tradeoff.

Consider this. Often times, restricting freedoms in one way opens up the way for other more meaningful kinds of freedoms. Sometimes giving up freedom is the only way to really be free at all. After all, gravity severely limits our ability to soar through the air, but without gravity, walking and running would be impossible. In fact, without gravity, the entire universe as we know it couldn’t exist. Without conforming to the rules of pitch, rhythm and consonance, Schumann would never have been able to write his heart-wrenching piano compositions. Without adhering to the rules of a government, we could never have a society, and without subscribing to a creed or moral code, life would just be survival. It’s the rules and the restrictions we pick that allow us to choose better, more meaningful freedoms. Could this be what King David meant when he wrote “I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free.”(Psalms 119:32)?

No such thing as first to market

Lately I've been hearing a ton of people talk about this thing called the first to market advantage. The idea goes that if you're working on a product and your competitor is working on a competing product, a significant market advantage will go to the one who releases their product first, since by the time the second company releases their product to market, many of their prospective customers may have already purchased the product from the first company. In theory the argument sounds reasonable, but its effects have been wildly overstated in such industries as computer software and consumer electronics. Those who espouse the first-to-market doctrine would have you believe that once one company has captured a certain percentage of the market share, it would be nearly impossible for that company to lose ground to a competitor. They say that Windows tablets are simply too late to market and that everyone who wants a tablet already has an apple or android tablet. But history will show us that the technology industry is full of dramatic turnovers and surprising upheavals.

If first-to-market advantage really had as strong of an effect as some say, maybe we'd all still all be using the Xerox Star (since it was, in fact, the first computer to incorporate a windowed graphical user interface), and maybe we'd still all be using MySpace instead of Facebook. You might say that Google+ will never take over Facebook as the #1 social media service since Facbook has already captured some 800 million active users, this view underestimates a wealth of other factors that come into play. Most notably, Facebook has reached a point where it doesn't have many more prospective users. It can't grow its market share much more, so the only way to continue to grow in revenue is to find new ways to monetize its current user base. This means more advertising, targeted ads, paid content, and potentially more questionable use of its one main asset, your personal information. These kinds of changes could easily motivate current Facebook users to jump ship and go somewhere else.

History is full of other market share upheavals. Microsoft and Nokia had touch-screen smart phones long before iOS and Android ever made it into the picture. So iPhone didn't gain market share because they were the first to do something that no one else had done. Microsoft's Xbox was generations late to the video game console platform market share war, and naysayers in 2001 said it would never gain traction in the market against Sony and Nintendo, as even the established Sega was beginning to lose the market with its Dreamcast. But only a platform generation later, Xbox is now the best-selling video game platform of all time. Even the runner up Sony's Playstation is relatively new to the console industry, and long time players Nintendo and Sega are struggling to stay relevant in a changing market.

The main point here is that first-to-market advantage is only one of many things that factor into success in the marketplace, and its role is vastly overstated. The main reason is that new products are always coming out. In a sense, there's no way of being first to the market when new technology is coming out. Maybe Amazon releases the first good 7-inch $200 tablet, but 6-months later, the game has already changed, and Google is releasing a 7-inch $200 tablet that blows Kindle Fire out of the water. When the typical smart phone user gets a new phone every two years, each release is a chance to gain market share back. If your competitor was the first to provide 4G, maybe you can be the first to provide NFC, or 1080p, or hands free, or mind control, or whatever. When there's always new features to provide and old ones to improve, the question of who made it to market first gets a little fuzzy.

There's a lot of talk about how late is too late in terms of releasing a product to an established market. It only takes a look at the past to see that if you can provide a high quality product and convince your prospective customers that you're worth the price you're asking, there's no such thing as too late.

My Portrait of Sergei Rachmaninoff

I drew this while listening to Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. Looks like I need some work on my facial proportions.

I can't stand click bait!

You know the drill. You’re on your favorite tech blog and you see the headline, “Nokia will go out of business if they don’t fix this” or “The lawsuit over patent XYZ will be the end of Microsoft”. Immediately you recognize what it is. You know even before you click the headline that the following article is going to be a total exaggeration, chocked full of sensationalized and wildly unfounded claims about things that probably have no basis in real life. You know it’s all lies. You know it won’t provide you with any perspective worth having. You know you’ll be disappointed at the shoddy attempt at journalism. You know it’s a trap. You click the headline anyway. That’s click bait.

Click bait, as far as I can tell, is the new currency of internet journalism. It arises mostly out of the fact that advertisement revenues are largely based on site traffic, which means blogs can make more money by tricking you to stay there longer and click on lots of things. Naturally, news blogs are torn between generating quality news content and making more money. Real journalism is expensive. It requires time and effort, careful fact checking, unbiased perspective, and dedication to the truth, regardless of popular opinion. The sloppy alternative, click bait, gets more rewards at half the cost. The bloggers know that humans have a weakness for fantastically scandalous stores and that we’ll always have a need for resolution once we’ve read the cover. Click bait works for the same reason that grocery stores put tabloids right in your face in the checkout line. They know that even though you really know their wild claims are true, once you read the headline, you just have to know more. At the end of the day, why bother doing real investigative journalism when you can make more money making up things that aren’t true? Some may say that news blogs would have an incentive to keep their roots in real journalism because smart consumers will notice the lack of real content and decide to go somewhere else, but even I keep going back to engadget and businessinsider daily, even though I know enough about the rampant click bait on those sites to be motivated to write my own blog entry about it. Clearly click bait just works.

Click bait is proof that natural selection is not always a good thing, and that sometimes the thing that survives isn’t what’s best for us but is actually what indulges our subconscious desires the most (which is often the opposite of what’s best for us). Some say that “survival of the fittest” should more aptly be redubbed something like “survival of the most viral”. If natural selection was really a force of positive progress, it seems it would propel us in a radically different direction, and "survival of the fittest" lends itself easily to misunderstanding what the term 'fittest' really means in that context.

Human-powered Gym

Every time I spend time on a rowing machine at the gym (it has been a pretty frequent occurrence lately), there's a number of thoughts that go through my head. The first one has to do with Viking slaves. I think to myself, "wow, hundreds of years, the Vikings went through a lot of trouble to enslave entire villages in order to force them into the involuntary rowing that powered the Viking ships. The Vikings had to force people to do this thing that has now become a voluntary activity that I do for enjoyment. I'll admit that in my case, there isn't some demanding overlord standing over me with a whip in his hand, but I find it striking that a lot of people pay good money for that service now in the form of personal trainers! After all, it's part of the fun of going to the gym to have someone pushing you to your limits and beyond.

The other thing that comes to mind when I'm sitting on that rowing machine is just the sheer pointlessness of gym activity in the grand scheme of things. We pay the gym good money for the right to visit their facilities and expend energy that could have been used doing actually productive things. Even the Vikings, despite their questionable motives, were at least resourceful with the human resources they requisitioned. The rowing done by their slaves actually made their ships go somewhere. But what does anyone get out of my rowing activities? Other than my own personal satisfaction of having beat my 4km speed record, nothing!

I think gym activities are actually part of what's wrong with America. Don't dismiss this as unfounded or slanderous, and don't think I'm somehow against personal improvement or don't love my country. Just hear me out. When we look at the world we live in, we balance the results we see against the effort we're putting in. When there seems to be a disjoint between how much effort we put into life and how much we have to show for it as a country, we start looking around for people to blame. Maybe the financial sector is making risky investments or making dirty money gambling with the retirement accounts of the hard-working middle class. Maybe those middle class guys are actually not pulling their weight, maybe they're dragging down the economy by stretching their credit and living a lifestyle that is actually beyond their means. Or maybe those lower-class people are sucking all the money out of the economy through expensive government aid programs. Somebody has to be not pulling their weight because we're all in massive debt together and that just wouldn't be possible if everyone was putting in as much as they take out.

So where does the gym factor into it? I think my gym activities skew my perspective of how much of the pie I think I contributed. When I look back over a long hard day and think of all the effort I put in today, I subconsciously factor in that 45 minutes of intense physical activity, even though I really know that it doesn't factor in as something I contributed to the world. But since I'm so used to seeing the world as a balance beam between the effort I put in and the results I reap, it makes me feel like I contributed more than I really did. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone on this one. If you ask any American, you will probably find that they will say they put in more than get. Everyone will say that it's someone else dragging their feet and bringing down the economy, and we're so sure it can't be us. I wonder if gym activities (and other personal activities) trick us into thinking that we give more than we get.

I think we should take a lesson from the Vikings. Not from their barbarism or twisted sense of superiority, but from their resourcefulness. It would be cool if gyms were a place where you could go to get a decent workout and also make a meaningful contribution to the world. I'm not sure how that would work. Maybe all the treadmills should power the electricity in the gym, and maybe there would be some left over to sell or give back to the city, which would reduce power costs and transition some of our power dependency onto a more environmentally friendly power source. I wonder how much power could be harvested if every treadmill and elliptical machine in the country were used to generate electricity rather than consume it (the ones at my gym consume a lot of electricity). It's got to add up to something pretty substantial. Or maybe we could make exercise programs that involve building homes for the homeless or cleaning up public parks, or building bridges or doing construction or any number of other physically demanding activities that also yield a productive result that can be enjoyed by many. I wonder how many forms of public service could be marketed back to the public as an exercise program. The gym could stop being a place where I pay money to get rid of my energy and it could start being a place that finds resourceful ways of putting my manpower to work. But hey, that's just me.

Manual Espresso

This morning, I ordered a short latte from a local Uptown Espresso. I was shocked that after the barista took my order, she did everything by hand. I watched as she ground the beans, dosed them into the portafilter and tamped them down. She attached the portafilter to the machine and timed my shots by hand. And how was the coffee? It was delicious.

I really appreciate when things are done by hand. Almost every other coffee chain I know has fully automated machines. You push a button and the machine grinds the beans, doses and tamps the grounds in the same precise way each time, and pulls shots that come out more or less exactly the same each time. The automatic method is obviously popular for lots of reasons. It enables chains like Starbucks to achieve s sense of consistency across all their stores. Whether you're walking into a Starbucks on the upper east side of Manhattan or in downtown Seattle on Pike St., you know that the beverage you order will taste exactly like the ones you've had at other Starbucks establishments. It also renders a major factor of barista training unnecessary. Pulling good, consistent espresso shots is an art, and it's a lot easier to train new employees how to push a button than it is to teach them how to time shots. This also allows them to spend more of the employee training process on other things like customer service or individual recipes (i.e. how many pumps of what goes in this or that drink). It also enables them to service more customers with a smaller staff. I've read somewhere that a single Starbucks store can serve hundreds of customers in a single hour. That wouldn't be possible without automatic espresso machines.

But still there's something that really draws me to the manual approach. On most mornings I pull my own espresso shots. I prefer my own espresso to the ones I could get at my local Peet's or Tully's or Starbucks. Do manual shots always taste better than automatic ones? Not at all. There's plenty of things that can be done wrong. I'm always trying new kinds of beans too, which means I constantly need to adjust the fineness of the grind, the pressure I apply to the tamper, and the duration of the shot. Sometimes, when getting used to new beans, the result of all my hard work doesn't even taste like coffee. But when you get it right, it makes everything worth it.

Some enthusiasts claim that the best manual shots are consistently better than their automatic counterparts. I don't know if that's necessarily true. A lot of time is spent fine-tuning the automatic machines to produce the most consistently high-quality espresso possible. Of course, there's a little bit of a tradeoff between consistency and quality, but in general, they can make decently good coffee. But then again, it's not necessarily the quality of the brew that draws me to the manual process. Like all manual processes, it's the personal aspect it introduces. You can curtail your espresso to be exactly the way you want it? Do you want a lighter brew or a heavier brew? Do you prefer it to have a hint of bitterness or would you rather shoot to extract all the aromatic flavors of the beans without the bitterness that comes toward the end of the extraction? You won't find any buttons on an automatic machine that'll let you make any of those choices. If you don't want to make those choices, it's fine. You can keep your Starbucks. But there's something about my coffee every morning that says it was made specially for me, just the way I like it. That's why manual espresso will never go out of style. Not because it's better than the automatic kind, but because it's more personal.

Thrasymachus's Claim

At the heart of Plato's Republic lies a question that is never really answered. This question, originally put forth by Greek Philosophers thousands of years ago (and likely even earlier by others) has still not been satisfactorily answered even to this day. The question comes in many forms, but at its root, it is simply this:

Why be moral?

Socrates puts forth the question in a little bit different of a way:

What is the benefit of being Just? Why choose a virtuous lifestyle over a non-virtuous one?

To which Thrasymachus (no doubt a politician) replies:

There is no benefit of being Just. The only  benefits that appear to come from being Just really come from appearing to be Just.

According to Thrasymachus, Justice means compromising ones own personal gain for that of the State, choosing someone else's gain over your own gain. He does admit that there are cases where it seems  like there is a benefit to being virtuous. For example, Others may not be interested in doing business with someone with a bad reputation. Virtuous appearances can make it easier to get other people to trust you, which is of utmost personal advantage. However, Thrasymachus argues, the benefit doesn't come from actually being virtuous but only from appearing to be so. Thrasymachus and Socrates agree that being virtuous and appearing to be virtuous are two separate things. In order to separate the benefits and drawbacks of each one, they propose this thought experiment:

Imagine two men. One of these men is purely non-virtuous and yet appears to be purely virtuous. He is held in high esteem by all people. He is daily praised by the general public for his virtue. He gets the seat of honor at all the fancy banquets. Everyone wants to be his friend and do business with him. But in reality, his actions are purely self-interested. He deceives everyone. He stabs his friends and business partners in the back to the full extent that he can get away with. He is very good (almost supernaturally) at covering his tracks and putting on appearances. Anything he wants, he steals from others, and yet he is loved by all.

The second man, on the other hand, is purely virtuous and yet appears to everyone to be purely non-virtuous. He spends his days looking out for the general welfare of all people. He doesn't have much in the way of worldly possessions, because he gives much away to others in need. And yet he is despised by all people. He lacks what the first man has: the ability to appear to be virtuous. As such, all his good deeds go unnoticed. Even worse, he is suspected of dishonesty, treachery, and the worst of things. No one trusts him. No one will do business with him. Even his family has abandoned him. He is thrown in jail, beaten, and forced to live out the rest of his days in a dank dungeon, where even in the depths of his despair, he continues to do good for anyone he can with whatever little means he has left.

How many of us would honestly rather be the second man?

In this light, Thrasymachus argues that since the non-virtuous man is obviously much better off than the virtuous man,  all personal gain clearly comes through appearing to be virtuous and not from actually being virtuous. He admits that sometimes it is not possible to appear to be virtuous without doing virtuous things, so in this case, sometimes virtuous deeds are a necessary evil that one must perform, thus giving up some personal advantage in return for a good reputation that will continue to pay dividends.

This is the disturbing problem which Socrates sets out to solve at the beginning of Republic. He wants to show that there is reason to pursue virtue (not just the appearance of virtue). Although disturbed by the possibility that Thrasymachus might be right, he clings to the hope that the virtuous man still has something priceless that the non-virtuous man still lacks, something still more valuable and worth pursuing than all the riches of the non-virtuous man. He never quite reaches a satisfactory answer.

There have been a ton of answers to the question of morality over the years. Maybe doing good makes you feel good and that makes virtue worth it. Maybe God knows the good things you've done and rewards you for them. Maybe you will be rewarded in the next life for the good things you've done in this one. Maybe you'll be tortured for all eternity for the things that you've done. Maybe we were designed to do good things and this is how we reach our true potential. Or  maybe Thrasymachus is right and we should all be more concerned with how we appear than with what we do.

The problem with the question of morality is that it wants a non-moral answer. It asks for a rationally self-interested reason to participate in morality. No wonder it lends itself well to the type of answer that Thrasymachus gives. In a lot of ways, Thrasymachus is right. You don't get anything for being virtuous. But at the same time, the benefits of being rationally self-interested are vastly overstated by the above thought experiment. Ultimately, any way you look at it, living entirely to please yourself is a limited and fruitless existence. For me, anyone begging the question of morality is starting off on the wrong foot. It is just not the right question to ask if you want to end up somewhere compelling. The real question is "how do I live a life worth living?" or "How do I live a life that is part of something bigger than myself?". This is the kind of language to which discussion of morality is actually accessible, to which compelling answers can actually be given. Regardless of whether discussing morality in a religious or secular perspective, if you don't start out with the right questions, you'll easily be distracted by the perspective of rational self interest that often dominates modern thought.

To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions.