Ojisan Seiuchi

The anti-polarizing effect of keeping one's identity small.

January 14, 2016

Several years ago, Paul Graham, of Y Combinator fame wrote an essay entitled “Keep your Identity Small.” The premise is that discussions of religion and politics almost never result in anything resembling the give-and-take around other subjects. Two people can have an intelligent conversation about the pros and cons of certain brands of rice cookers^[We happen to use a Zojirushi and like it a lot; but I’d never introduce myself as a Zojirushian.]; but if the discussion turns to religion or politics, it’s essentially over. Graham’s conclusion is that religion and politics both engage a person’s identity. Once a conversation turns to identity, it’s hard to separate issues from people^[The best-selling book “Getting to Yes” by Fisher and Ury on negotiation techniques touched on this issue with it’s first principle of “Separate the people from the problem.” Emotions are a source of real problems in negotiation because people respond with anger when their personal interests are at stake. By treating issues as entities separate from the people that involve them, holiding them, inspecting and debating them on their own terms, it becomes easier to have conversations about them.]

Perhaps the widely lamented political polarization in the U.S. is a product of over-identification. Sentences that begin with “I am an x.” shut down the fuller understanding of x, y, z, and others that you haven’t even heard of yet.

Take time to read Graham’s essay. .

Properly understanding ISIS

January 14, 2016

Politics

An interesting piece from The Atlantic on understanding ISIS on their own clearly-stated terms.

“We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al‑Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it…Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it.”

Bin Laden also had no qualms about promoting his ideological interests while easily living in an increasingly secular world. ISIS

“In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately bringing about the apocalypse…Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it. We’ll need to get acquainted with the Islamic State’s intellectual genealogy if we are to react in a way that will not strengthen it, but instead help it self-immolate in its own excessive zeal.”

Perhaps in their ideological zeal, a form of which eclipses every other form of Islamic fundamentalism, their own historical and cultural contradictions have escaped their attention. They reject modernity and wish to restore a seventh-century world order; but apparently see no incongruity in employing modern weapons in hopes achieving their ends. When Muhammad lived^[The historicity of Muhammad as an actual living figure is still debated. One of the problems with gathering evidence on this subject is that pre-Islamic Arabia is a “black box” with little historical record. It’s worthwhile reading about the subject; but it’s far from conclusive.], weapons largely consisted of sharp things, stones, and shields. Bringing down airliners with IEDs packed with PETN or RDX and triggered by electronic timers is an anachronism.

That’s the problem with anti-modernity campaigns, it’s hard to do without involving yourself in the modern.

I recently migrated this and my other blog to Hexo which is a very fast static blogging framework built on node.js. As when I used Octopress, this blog is still hosted from an AWS S3 bucket. However the deployers that I tried with Hexo failed because of dependencies that were incompatible with the OS X version I was running. Not being a node.js expert, and having no time to delve into node.js internals, I wrote a new deployer:

I have a hypothesis. The wider the scope of your attention to social media and the popular press the more material goods you consume.

Having had too many hobbies and pursuits in my own life, I’ve noticed that the more diverse my attention, the more I ended up consuming. Is it that one’s physical environment (how much stuff you buy and surround yourself with) reflects your mental environment? Or is it the other way around? Maybe it’s really both. The less focused you are on meaningful, low consumption pursuits, the more you buy; and the more you buy, the more distracted you are by all the stuff around you. A vicious circle.

I’ve been moving to a tag-based system for organizing content in DEVONthink. All of my content for each database goes into a single group called “reference.” If I want to find something, I search the hierarchical tag structure instead of diving into some arbitrary list of groups.

But I still have groups that I’d like to collapse into the reference group. So I wrote an AppleScript to perform this action. Notably, most of the action is in the processGroup() handler which is recursive because we do not know how deep the group hierarchy goes.

To deal with the explosion of information available to us, we’re told to avoid the filter bubble by seeking out a variety of sources. Or we’re told to pursue a low information diet. But we’re also told that to be informed is one of the duties of citizenship. What are we to do? Here are some other options:

Stop caring about what doesn’t affect you. There’s apparently a Syrian refugée crisis in Europe. It’s unfortunate; but I won’t read about it. What good does it do? Nothing. So why bother reading about it? My sphere of interest should coincide with my sphere of influence. I feel bad about their situation; but all I can do it live my own life as simply as I can.

My main organizational tool DEVONthink Pro Office, a tool I’ve used for many years. I’ve written previously about it and how I use it to find things and how I synchronize databases across machines.

I’m a relative newcomer to Hazel though. Hazel’s tagline is “automated organization for your Mac.” Hazel works as an agent to keep folders organized on the Mac. It’s an engine that applies per-folder rules to take actions on files and folders. Actions can include tagging files, moving them to other folders, running AppleScripts, deleting them, etc.

If you’ve lived in the U.S. for any length of time, you realize that we have a national obsession with home ownership. Yet I’m beginning to wonder about this bit of American orthodoxy. I’ve owned 4 homes and none of them seemed like much of an investment to me. The last home that we sold was an enormous loss. We are now in a transition, anticipating our new move; so we are house-free (and debt-free!) So it’s an ideal time to unpack the complexities of home ownership.

In the popular sci-fi movie series “The Matrix”, a handful of humans discover that the perception of reality has been artificially engineered by computer software. By taking the red pill¹ a person can be released from the deception, thereby seeing things as they truly are. About material “stuff”, I’ve had the same sort of epiphany.

Three years ago, we decided we needed to build a house. We weren’t pleased with our previous neighbourhood; and we happened on a piece of land that seemed to fit our needs. We began working with a builder to design a house. Despite our intent to build a smaller house, the design ended up being considerably larger than the house we were already in. Everything was to be custom-designed and fabricated. All of the fixtures were selected. We had spent hundreds of hours thinking about the designs, going to meetings, reading books, looking at photographs. It was an enormous investment of time and a significant investment of money.

I’ve been a DEVONthink user for many years; it’s an amazing piece of software. Currently I’m using DEVONthink Pro Office because I use all of the higher level capabilities. Over the years, my database structure and workflow have gone through many changes. In this post I’ll describe my approach to finding things in DEVONthink.

Databases

At first, I dumped everything into a single database. Over time, however, I realized that finding things was difficult because of the number of false positives when searching. I roughly divide my databases between areas of responsibility. For example, I’m a director at two local music organizations; so I have separate databases for each of those groups. However, most of my material goes into a single database. It’s where all of the items of daily living go - bills, receipts, bookmarks, web clips, etc.

The anti-polarizing effect of keeping one's identity small.

Properly understanding ISIS

Islamic weapons

A new hexo deployer for Amazon web services

Scope of attention and consumption

Collapsing DEVONthink groups via AppleScript

A minimalist mind

Working with DEVONthink Pro Office and Hazel

Why is the U.S. obsessed with home ownership?

The Art of Just Enough

Finding things with DEVONthink

Databases