Category: Business

The Dictator’s Handbook is Self Falsifying

by doctormo

I’ve been reading “The Dictator’s Handbook” this week, a recommendation from CGP-Grey (youtube) and a damn good one. It’s a description of how people who want power, get power and how they keep it once they have it. I won’t go into the nitty gritty, but suffice to say that it has a lot of good things to say about murdering people to get what you want.

The idea I want to explore in this blog post is using understanding, and “Life the Universe and Everything”. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of listening to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; in the story we are told:

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory mentioned, which states that this has already happened.

This is why in the story the answer to the question of Life the Universe and Everything is “42”, but that the question itself was unknown. Knowing both question and answer would cause the above self destruction/recreation and it’s imperative that the characters never find out both.

The nature of understanding in that universe is thus that it is not just non-understandable, but deliberately evasive. The rules of the game will change as soon as you know the rules of the game. Not in some god like way of keeping you in the dark deliberately, as if the universe had agency, but because somehow what you know is tied to how things work.

So how does this relate to Dictators?

Well the book is so good at explaining the mechanics of the interpersonal relationships in ruling a country or business that it may change the behaviour of people who have read the book. It may change their behaviour enough to actually make the book’s premise false. Not that it’s false when you haven’t read the book, only that it’s false when you have.

But, this make one giant Saturn sized assumption. That it is possible to change how you act in a certain circumstance given this knowledge. If it’s not changeable, then knowing it doesn’t matter and no amount of self-help or ingenious insights into the human condition will change our society. But the book’s preface is that knowing the rules that rulers rule by can help improve society, so it expects behaviour to be changeable and if is then someone somewhere will figure out how to exploit this new behaviour.

Once you have the sort of second order exploit, you get a very complicated dance between people who understand, people who do not understand and people who want to exploit either group.

Hence the mechanism described in the book will “instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable”. Thanks Douglas Adams.

To drive this idea a bit further. This in my mind creates two quantifiably different types of truth. That which is understandable but unchangeable is solid or foundational truth. Like Mathematics, knowing 2 + 2 = 5 and why doesn’t allow you to change it’s truthfulness. Then there is mutable truth, where knowing how and why something is true allows you to manipulate it into falsity. This is especially true in biological and social sciences where adversarial mechanisms are in constant flux.

What do you think?

Short Text Alert Notification (STAN)

by doctormo

I recently got a new phone, and a new place to keep it. My previous phone was damaged when I sat on it and realized that keeping it in a back pocket was a bad idea. I’m keeping my new phone in a belt pouch with a Velcro seal and it takes me slightly longer to get at the phone than it would if it was in my pocket.

And so I was, a few days ago, messaging people using SMS and then putting my phone away. Several times my interlocutors would send me short affirmative messages which I would have to read by pulling out my phone from it’s pouch, turn it on with it’s (not always first try) security and then read a message that says “OK” or “Yes”.

So I thought; why not have the phone change it’s notification sound for simple messages? A table of possible short messages which would then translate into a different notification sound and allow the user to understand a simple message without having to pick up their phone, unlock it and read the message.

This would certainly make sending short messages slightly more polite as it can seem aggravating sometimes to have to read short messages. Even though it’s not the fault of the sender really.

  1. The idea would require a customized default messaging app for android, or possibly system configuration, I’m unsure how notification sounds are stored.
  2. A research stage where short messages on multiple phones was collected into a corpus of English messages. Each classified into what it probably means.
  3. An additional corpus of emoji messages that can be easily converted into sound. Example a kissing emoji into a kissing sound.
  4. A restriction on the time between the previous message to/from the sender and the notification. Say half an hour. This is to prevent an affirmative messages which arrive a week after the last correspondence from confusing the recipient.
  5. A secondary research phase where a group of people’s would have the app installed (replacing their messaging app) and would self report if the new notification sounds made any difference over a couple of months of use.

This is a sort of imaginary plan, but I could see this being useful. But the only way it would be come mainstream is if it was adopted by Google directly into it’s own messaging app. A stepping stone towards that would be adoption of the modified message app into after market android such as the Cyanogenmod project. The stepping stone would certainly allow more data to be collected about it’s functional use out int he wild.

Another alternative stepping stone would be to approach a manufacturer or telco network. But quite often apps these layers install are seen as bloat-ware and it might be better to avoid that route if possible.

What do you think? Good idea? bad idea?