Now imagine if he was wrong. If you only had one life, the one you are living right now. This means you live your life and you have almost everything you need. However, you will never ever get to feel how some of the luckiest people in the world feel. How it is to be them.

Which world would you prefer to live in?

1. Your freedom shall not infringe the freedom of others
2. Freedoms/rights cannot be decoupled from corresponding duties/responsibilties
3. Whatever rights and freedoms you are giving yourself, you should be willing to give others also.
   

1. I was once thinking about three laws of freedom. Thinking it was trivial, I never bothered to write it down and now I can’t remember the third law no matter how hard I try. It also seems that the thought was original because it seems not to be documented anywhere on the web.
2. This post is also for those who need to see the math to understand anything

So the content I am mentioning below is entirely hypothetical. However, it would be useful to understand the concepts at a theoretical level.

So imagine that someone discovers an instrument that can measure happiness of an individual. This, by itself is a questionable concept. What constitutes happiness ? Is it contentment ? Is it bodily pleasures ? Forget all that and think about it as an abstract ‘something’ that we are all constantly looking for. Furthermore, let us assume that happiness can be added, subtracted, multiplied etc once we bring it to such a system. Now, it would be possible to measure the happiness of all the people in this world. Let it be : ΣHp ( Net Happiness )

We can plot the Net Happiness over time of all the people in this world in the graph as shown:

Here t1 is the moment under consideration and t2 is the instant at which all sentient beings ceases to exist ( Big Crunch ? ). Now assume that t1 is the only point you have free will and based on the decision that you make, the Happiness Graph can change to f(t) or h(t). g(t) is the graph if you have no free will. I argue that, that action which maximizes the net happiness of every sentient being in this world [shown by shaded region for f(t)] is the right action. Every other action is a wrong action. That is, we need to take that action at t1 that maximizes the area under this graph (action that corresponds to h(t)) . That is, the value that needs maximizing is this :

Net ΣHp = 

I also argue any action that causes this Net Hp value to be lower than the area under g(t) is an evil action. Any action that causes the happiness graph to have an area greater than area under g(t) is a good action.

Implications :

1. Clearly good actions can be wrong actions. For example, assume a scenerio when you learn that the whole world is going to end in a few minutes. You see a beggar on the street looking for a days food. You realize you have about 100 bucks on you. Giving the begger 50 bucks would be a good action. But the only right action is to give him all your 100 bucks (assuming happiness increases linerly with money given).
2. It must be understood that inaction can also be an action. For example, suppose one nihilist has trapped himself in a room where you cannot enter. He has access to a nuclear bomb that if activated will destroy this entire world and kill everyone in this world. Your only option is to kill that person. Here, your inaction will result in the death of everyone in this world. Assuming that if the world goes on there is more happiness to be had for everyone it means you are being evil with your inaction.
3. I have assumed here that one unit of happiness given to one person is same as one unit of happiness given to any other person. For example, one unit of happiness given to one man, woman, black, caucassian, hispanic, aryan, jew, hindu, muslim, christian etc is the same as one unit given to any other.
4. While it is possible for two view-points/philosophies to be equally valid, it is not very probable.
5. Assuming that human beings cannot see all the possibilities ahead, the simplest approach we can take is a greedy approach. For example, it is believed that Helene Hanfstaengl persuaded Adolf Hitler away from suicide after the failure of his first revolution. Afterwards, he went ahead and killed many million people. It is unclear what would have happened, if she had chosen at that point not to do that. However, it may not have made any sense for her not to save someone’s life given the information she had.

The smartest people in the world will have the Zoom In and Zoom Out ability which is to understand the nitty-gritty details without missing the big picture. Usually what happens is that either

1. people get focussed on the details ( and gets lost in the details ) or
2. they forget about the details

Both are equally bad and can cause failure. If you miss the Big Picture, it is very much possible that you may miss the impact of external forces that might apply to your system which ultimately results in failure. If you miss the details, it is equally possible that you do not have an accurate understanding of what is possible given the constraints.

Management folks encourage mostly top-down thinking (Big Picture) and engineering schools teach bottom-up thinking (Details oriented). This is one of the reasons for tensions between management and the worker ants in technical companies.

To understand this principle in detail let us take the example of Iridium Communications Company.

The founding company for this firm went bankrupt because it developed the technology for satellites, mobile phones etc, however the cost of putting the satellites in space was in the order of billions which the company was not able to raise. They wasted an inordinate amount of money because they failed to see the external effects of their business plan, the Big Picture.

To explain the concept of attention to detail, take the example of IBM deciding to incentivise developers on number of lines of code they wrote (sorry, can’t explain this without knowledge of some detail and code and technology are details I understand). This caused many problems within IBM as people wrote code that introduced subtle bugs which they rewrote to fix (more lines), they started writing code in a verbose manner and introduced unnecessary complexities etc. What went wrong here ? The root of the problem is that not all lines of code are equal.

When a factory worker has to put in X amount of work to produce N units of stuff, then when he produces 2N units he has put in 2X amount of work. Unlike mechanical jobs (like the above case), this is not true for creative and innovative jobs like software development, journalism etc.

So you can see that the best decisions are made by people who can refrain from getting caught up in the details, take a step back and look at the big picture from multiple perspectives and at the same time see how the details fit together to form the whole system. Further, you will also note how there is considerable overlap between the two types of thinking; meaning it may be easier to explain the above principle to people who think either way.

When you understand the above principle you start to understand the idea behind a lot of quotes that go around the world, like:
“Complex systems that work evolve from simple systems that work”
“The devil is in the details”
“Details often kill initiative, but there have been few successful men who weren’t good at details. Don’t ignore details. Lick them.” — William B. Given

1. All elements of class X has Y and Z property.
2. All elements in the world with Y property must belong to class X and hence have Z property

No other post explains this idea better than this one : http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_noncentral_fallacy_the_worst_argument_in_the/

However that post is too specific to errors of classification with respect to logical arguments. It applies very well to other domains. Moreover errors of classification has bigger problems because the classification itself can be wrong.

I will give you some examples:

Everyone knows that a smart person will talk well about what they are good at, barring artificial constraints such as language or mental illness. But we incorrectly assume that everyone who talks smooth is smart which in retrospect looks ridiculous.

I have also heard of people claiming their employers trying to build slides and provide bean bags for them because companies like Yahoo, Facebook, Google etc seems to do them. After all bean bags and slides are what makes these company cultures so great, isn’t it ?

Another example is exams. Here is where the problem of loosing detail can really be problematic. Most people who are good at understanding the basics of what they study can score reasonably well in exams. However, everyone who scores well does not have to be a good student. They don’t even have to be very smart. It is possible to tune the your study habits specifically to beat the system.

This creates a negative incentive system. If you consider plaudits from other people as an incentive ( which in most cases is a reasonable assumption for most mortals ) then there will be a lot of people trying to tune their study habits to beat the system than do what is profitable to the whole world, i.e, students who go into schools should try to gain knowledge and improve their analytic skills.

This would be an interesting problem to solve : to create a culture that values detail and makes correct classifications.

Now let me first of all say that I do believe that there can be extra ordinary stuff happening in this world that science cannot explain.

Some stuff he said was right. But they were too general to have impressed me.  Some of them were:

“Your hand says you are technical”

Well, I was wearing jeans and a shirt that people usually wear in technical field. I doubt if he would have made that statement if I was wearing more traditional attire.

“Three letters in name of mother in Malayalam.”

This was correct, but it was too general. If he had named the exact name of my mother, I would have been impressed.

Then there were some random statements:

“Looking at your forehead, you studied LLB. You just did not complete it by action.”

Erm… What?

“You will live till 85 years. Have 3 Kids”

Now, it was when he started trying to predict stuff that I caught his bullshit.

“You are living in a house, which is under construction.”

This was not correct. First of all, I am living in a flat in Bangalore, which is fully constructed, and I am living at my home in Kerala which is also fully constructed. When I informed he was incorrect he asked how many floors it was. I said one and he said that is what he meant. It will be reconstructed to add more floors. Well, then he should have said that shouldn’t he? At this point he correctly predicted that the house occupied a large piece of land, but define large? How large is big enough? Does he mean the length of the house is big or breadth? That statement would simply statistically have worked on a large number of people.

“Tell me a number greater than 7”

I said “2 00 000”

“Now think about a number between 1 and 5. Is it 3?”

When informed I thought of 1, he said he wanted a number not including the limits (?)

Now be very careful of the deception here. First he asked me a number greater than 7 and here I unfortunately gave away my intentions by saying a number that goes beyond what would usually be said. So he realized that I was going to test him and reduced my intervals to 1 – 5. If I had just said something like 10 he probably would have given me a longer interval. Also I think that first he asked me to tell him a random number to test how my mind works. He probably could have got some information that would have improved his chances of guessing my number correctly.

“Think of a flower. Is it Rose?”

Now here I was careful to think of an exotic flower. When I said no and told him the name of the flower, he emphasized he was correct in his guess and said something about colors. Here he really blew it. I don’t think he knew how many colors my choice of flower came in and quickly moved on to something else trying to invoke my Confirmation Bias.

Now here comes his masterpiece.

“You loved a girl, but the hearts never matched.

Some girl is watching your moves and she wants to make contact.

If I say her name will you happily pay me Rs 1000? Other boys like you would usually give 5000.”

I said “No” and he said “You do have the money, but it is set aside for something else”.

I said “No. I just don’t believe in all this”.

Now he was very careful to add more details and advice to his deception like “Do not tell anyone when you call her over the phone, exchange letters etc”.

Now look at the deception here. First he notices my unshaven chin, my loose clothing and takes a guess about my life that would have fit well with a lot of folks that dress like me: love failure. Many of my friends and cousins have joked this about me. Now, he adds hope into the equation by saying that all is not lost; some other girl is watching me, longing for me and wants to make contact. Then he asks for Rs 1000 for her name, but it’s OK, because others would already have happily given him Rs 5000. Ha!

He said that he knew I was not an atheist. Well, duh. I was wearing my rosary and it was visible through the top of my shirt.

Now when all this failed he tried to extract at least Rs 100 from me by using a Bible. He realized that he was in a Christian majority district and had a Bible ready for use when needed.

I probably came of as an easy prey when he saw me walking by: with my loose clothing, unbuttoned shirt, rosary, unshaven chin and everything.

He probably wasn’t expecting someone with least bit critical thinking.

Well, at the end of the day despite losing 20 bucks I learned two things

1. These kind of very smart deceptive people exist.

2. I am not conventional

I have recently been involved headfirst into a project to create a download box for myself. Ever since I was in college I wanted my own server to run my own IRC bot, queue up downloads and forget about it, and do programming from say a mobile phone. Some kids dream about bikes, cars, new clothes etc when they get a job. I dreamed about a server. The past few months I have been working on that and finally I have completed it. It works as a download box for now and I will continue to irk out the flaws in it in the coming months. So, how have I achieved this, you ask? First off I bought a TP – LINK MR 3220. I wanted a computer with a processor, USB port and Ethernet port/ Wifi card with low power consumption. Unfortunately, everything I looked at, cost a lot more than Rs 10000. I think this is because since these computers are not bought by many people the companies that make them are trying to recoup their research costs by charging people more for their devices. Finally I realized that a router with USB port would do my job. Hence I arrived at the TP – Link router.The router cost me Rs Rs 2290 and I bought an 8GB pen drive for Rs 370. Now I am going to explain how I set up my router from my point of view. But if you have and idea about the fundamental stuff you can also build one yourself. This time, I am not going to explain the very basics of everything.

• Install openWRT on your router

First, you need to flash the router’s firmware with the latest version of openWRT

• Now install support for USB devices.

You need to enable support for USB. I also had to install iso and cp437 modules to make it work. I used FAT filesystem.

• Now mount it and add the directories

mkdir -p  /media/usb
mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb
mkdir -p /media/usb/router/packages

• Edit package manager to add USB as a destination

See the Configuration  : Adjust Repositories section of this link
Add the following line to /etc/opkg.conf

dest usb /media/usb/router/packages

• Now install lighttpd, PHP-CGI, ctorrent to USB and configure symbolic links

For example to intstall lighttpd to usb use the following command

opkg update
opkg -dest usb install lighttpd

When you install the binaries and try to run them it will complain that it failed to load shared libraries. Just find them one by one at /media/usb/router/packages/usr/lib and create a symbolic link to them at /usr/lib.

• Configure lighttpd, PHP-CGI and ctorrent [lighttpd webroot must be /www_1]

Instructions can be found here.

• Now extract rapidleech stuff onto /media/usb/router/rapid and fix the bug

Since we have no X11 on our router we need to automate clicking through forms, verifying captchas etc through another mechanism. Rapidleech is a leech script for downloading from a variety of downloaders like Rapidshare, Hotfile, Fileserve etc. It can be found here. Extract it to a folder named /media/usb/router/rapid. Now there is a bug in the script at /media/usb/router/rapid/templates/plugmod/header.php

<!--?php // You can do some initialization for the template here @date_default_timezone_set(date_default_timezone_get()); ?-->

These geniuses realized that this is a function that can throw an error and decided to suppress that error message. Which means after configuring the rapidleech for the first time, you will get a blank page the first time you visit the page. Just comment the line which sets the default time zone and the site will start working normally.

Now create a symbolic link to this folder on lighttpd webroot

ln -s /media/usb/router/rapid /www_1/rapid

• Now copy the ssh generated key file to /media/usb/router/ folder

My ISP does not provide me with a public IP address. It gives me an IP address 192.168.x.x and forces me behind their router. At work I am obviously behind some router of the company. This gives rise to an interesting problem where both the machines have to initiate the connection since they are behind routers. Neither system can directly connect to the other. The solution I have found is to tunnel the connection through an Amazon EC2 instance. For this you may need to enable incoming connections on port 2500 besides the default 22. Since the default key provided by Amazon is not accepted by dropbear and you need a new key. Copy the id_rsa key to the folder : /media/usb/router/scripts

• Now compile and copy spectranet binary to /media/usb/router/packages/usr/bin

My ISP also has the annoying habbit to log me out every 30 minutes or so. I had to understand how the log in mechanism works and write a program to automatically log me in. If anyone else is trying this they might need to do a different set of steps to log in to their ISPs. I also added the startup stuff for lighttpd and to open ssh tunnels to this program so that I dont have to manage different things. The code I am publishing here:

main.c
Makefile
spectranet.c
spectranet.h
tcp.c
tcp.h

You need to build openWRT to obatain the toolchain to cross compile to MIPS. After compilation the tool chain will be available at openwrt/trunk/build_dir/target-mips_r2_uClibc-0.9.32/OpenWrt-Toolchain-ar71xx-for-mips_r2-gcc-4.5-linaro_uClibc-0.9.32/toolchain-mips_r2_gcc-4.5-linaro_uClibc-0.9.32

After compiling the binary you need to copy it to /usr/bin/ directory of the router.

• Now write a startup script for running the /media/usb/router/packages/usr/bin/spectranet if it exists on startup and enable it.

Instructions can be found here.

File : /etc/init.d/download
#!/bin/sh /etc/rc.common
# Copyright (c) 2012 Joji Antony
# All rights reserved
# Licence Affero GPL V3
START=15
STOP=15
start() {
mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb
if [ -d /media/usb/router/packages ]
then
export HOME=/root
/usr/bin/spectranet &
fi
}
stop() {
umount /media/usb
}

Enable it:
root@OpenWrt:~# /etc/init.d/download enable

• Set secret key in /media/usb/router/rapid/configs/accounts.php and create /root/.profile

This is needed for rapidleech to work properly and setting PATH variables.

Add the following line to /root/.profile
export PATH=$PATH:/media/usb/router/packages/usr/bin:/media/usb/router/packages/usr/sbin
Now you are ready. Just switch on the router and it automatically becomes your download box.

simula67@prometheus:~$ ssh -i /home/simula67/Temp/AMAZON\ KEYS/aws_key.pem ec2-user@ec2-12-110-209-183.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Last login: Fri Jan 13 17:51:57 2012 from 180.151.42.251
__|  __|_  )
_|  (     /   Amazon Linux AMI
___|\___|___|
See /usr/share/doc/system-release/ for latest release notes.
27 package(s) needed for security, out of 44 available
[ec2-user@ip-41-196-83-37 ~]$ ssh root@localhost -p 10000
root@localhost's password:
BusyBox v1.19.3 (2011-12-31 21:23:18 MST) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
_______                     ________        __
|       |.-----.-----.-----.|  |  |  |.----.|  |_
|   -   ||  _  |  -__|     ||  |  |  ||   _||   _|
|_______||   __|_____|__|__||________||__|  |____|
|__| W I R E L E S S   F R E E D O M
ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT (bleeding edge, r29631) ----------
* 1/4 oz Vodka      Pour all ingredients into mixing
* 1/4 oz Gin        tin with ice, strain into glass.
* 1/4 oz Amaretto
* 1/4 oz Triple sec
* 1/4 oz Peach schnapps
* 1/4 oz Sour mix
* 1 splash Cranberry juice
-----------------------------------------------------
root@OpenWrt:~# cd /media/usb
root@OpenWrt:~# ctorrent -e 1 -C 20 -dd KunfuPanda.torrent

Screenshot of Rapidleech running off download box

I feel strongly that the three temptations of Jesus are a depiction of the three powerful weapons that Satan possesses over us.

After 40 days of fasting in the desert Jesus was hungry.

1. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”

Here we see that the despite being the Son of God, Jesus was tempted on account of his human nature and weakness. Whence he was hungry and desperate the tempter asks him to commit a sin to escape his misery. Jesus says : ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’ and refutes the tempter.

2. Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ⁶ “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:

   “‘He will command his angels concerning you, 
   and they will lift you up in their hands, 
   so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’

Here Satan uses his powers of confusion and does not even hesitate the Scripture in the hope to cause Jesus to commit sin. This refers to false ideologies that can take control over our brain and cause us to transgress. But the solution is also clear : “Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” There is enough and more written in the Scripture to cause you to believe. If your  heart is pure and  free from ego, hatred and in search of truth as opposed to personal vendettas or  crusades you are destined to find the one and only Truth.

3. Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ⁹ “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

Here Satan hopes that the Son of God would commit sin in the hope of attaining earthly pleasures. This is a huge advantage for Satan as he can promise us immediate pleasure and only path for us to take is focus our eyes on the prize and soldier on for delayed gratification.

I find some commonalities with most of them.

The following are some of them. I mean this as a mere thought excersice and not as an attempt to offend anyone.

The religions under consideration are Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Jewism and Budhism.

1. Prophets

Every said religion teaches that there were a set of awesome people who did some awesome stuff.

For Budhism they are called “Buddha“s (Gauthama Buddha being the one who gave birth to ‘Budhism’, but he would be by no means be the last).

For Christianity, Jewism, Islam and Islam they are called ‘Prophets’.

2. Second coming

Every religion requires people to look forward to something.

For Jewism it is the coming of promised ‘Messiah’.

For Christianity and Islam it is the second coming of Jesus.

For Hinduism it is the tenth Avatar of Vishnu : ‘Kalki’.

Unfortunately, I do not know about Budhism.

3. Why you are screwed if you believe in the currently trendy religion.

When Jewism came into being, the dominant religion was paganism.

Hence Jews preached that anyone attributing Godly attributes to inanimate objects are screwed. Salvation rests with those who convert to Jewism.

When Christianity came into being, Jewism was the trendy religion.

They preached that the only name given under the Sun for salvation was ‘Jesus’. Hence everyone who does not believe in Christianity is screwed.

When Islam came into being, the trendy religion was Christianity.

Hence they preached that everyone who attribute Godly powers to human beings (Jesus) are screwed. Hence only way to salvation was convert to Islam.

No subsitute for Hinduism and Budhism.