Earlier I thought that mainly upper class persons have status. Marketing men take advantage of people's natural drive to improve their lot. Lower and middle classes buy status symbols because companies like to sell overpriced goods by associating them with high status. Status is a ruse to separate the gullible from their money.
There is an old saying that money does not bring happiness, but it's better to be unhappy in a Lexus than in a Lada. When we consider status as a ruse, it would be better for those people to sell their Lexus and save or invest the money, Ilkka style. If they retain the Lexus, they are bleeding money when its price depreciates month by month, while getting only hallucinations in return. The only exceptions are people who are so dirty rich that the cost of the car is neglible.
Seen this way, status matters only for persons who need to make a good impression on many others, like salesmen or celebrities. The 1% of people who get 50% of visibility benefit from status symbols. This strengthens the illusion that status is more important than it really is.
New opinion on status
Reading Roissy and paying attention to the Game of Talking has made me realize that there is a special kind of status, psychosocial dominance, which is tightly vowen to everyday interaction and orthogonal to economic status. If I want to have a sex life and settle down at around age 35, I must learn the ropes of these status games.
This does not make the old opinion obsolete. Rather, I need to complement it so that I can express status enough to come across as a desirable sexual partner, while still being able to avoid getting stiffed by marketers.
Summary: Programing work can be seen from two angles. The "economic" angle is that programming aims to produce software. The "status" angle is that in any big bureaucracy, the internal dynamics make status the primary aim.
Economic view
Alistair Cockburn defined software development as a co-operative game of invention and communication. The primary goal is to deliver useful, working software. The secondary goal is to prepare for the next game.
In this naive view, programming is just one type of work which aims to deliver customers something they are ready to pay for in order to keep the organization afloat.
A good software developer should know technology and economics and to have earlier experience about similar software.
This view is in line with transhumanist ideology, where technological progress is a driving force which enables new and better things, when people get more tools to implement their will and can afford more and more slack.
Status view
The status view emphasizes hierarchy and influence inside a bureaucracy. The primary game is how to gain influence through office politics.
From status view, programmers have two millstones in their neck. They are at the lowest level of their hierarchy. Secondly, they have a bad reputation for not being experts in gaining Roissy-style psychosocial dominance by talking.
In status view, shipping working software is irrelevant, unless failure to do so threatens the very existence of the organization. The only relevant question is if your back is covered if something goes wrong.
A good developer should know marketing, be extroverted and slightly narcist.
Technical knowledge is important only to the extent that you don't lose your face. Technical knowledge has a half-life while social skills don't. Therefore technical ways to solve problems are inferior to other ways. People who know too much technology are losers who play the wrong game.
The four post-Marxist social classes
Half Sigma divided people into 4 social classes. The two higher classes are the college graduate class and the value transference class. Here, the economic view uses the values of the college graduate class and the status view uses the ideals of the value transference class.
This post was about the conflict between economic and status-based worldviews. The video is about the conflict betwen scientific and religious worldviews. In both cases, reality can be interpreted in two equally justified ways.
Genetic testing tells some people that they have a high risk of disease. They can prepare for it if they hear about the illness years before its onsalught.
FuturePundit predicted in 2007 what actions people will take when genetic tests reveal information about their future:
But which risks will be worth testing for? Those you'll be able to do something about. Suppose a genetic variation makes Alzheimer's inevitable at middle age and that diet has little influence on when you'll get it. Well, I guess you could decide to avoid taking on family responsibilities that you won't be around to fulfill. But initially the biggest potential for doing something about a risk will involve risks that can be influenced by diet or exercise.
...
What you should do when you discover 5 or 10 years hence that you have high genetic risk of a disease: Write your elected officials and argue for more research on the disease you are on course to get. Lobby for cures for diseases that will otherwise kill you and your loved ones.
This is exactly what Sergey Brin did when he discovered by genetic testing that he has a hereditary risk for Parkinson's disease.
The article also contains a description of social democratic attitude, where people are considered helpless victims rather than players who execute moves to improve their position in the go board of life:
In the study, a team of researchers led by Robert Green, a neurologist and geneticist at Boston University, contacted adults who had a parent with Alzheimer’s and asked them to be tested for a variation in a gene known as ApoE. Depending on the variation, an ApoE mutation can increase a person’s risk for Alzheimer’s from three to 15 times the average. One hundred sixty-two adults agreed; 53 were told they had the mutation.
The results were delivered to the participants with great care: A genetic counselor walked each individual through the data, and all the subjects had follow-up appointments with the counselor. Therapists were also on call. “People were predicting catastrophic reactions,” Green recalls. “Depression, suicide, quitting their jobs, abandoning their families. They were anticipating the worst.”
Thursday, June 24, 2010
This is a wrong place to debate Nokia's technology policy, since NDAs make it impossible to recite evidence.
The previous post got a lot of attention, but unfortunately you won't see similar topics in the future. This blog will continue to be about my private life and interests.
Summary: Nokia gave a profit warning, because their high-end phones do not sell well. This post compares the problems of Symbian, Nokia's high-end phone OS, to Steve Yegge's analysis of why Geoworks went bankrupt.
What Geoworks?
Geoworks was a software company which wrote a windowing system and applications in assembler. In the end, it went bankrupt in the end of nineties. When Steve Yegge wrote about the benefits of high-level languages, he used Geoworks as an example how using low-level languages takes a toll on business.
His argument is that low-level languages make optimization impossible and implementing features slow. After the system reaches a critical point in complexity, usability starts to suffer. User see sluggishness, bugs and lack of features.
...But it's because we wrote fifteen million lines of 8086 assembly language. We had really good tools, world class tools: trust me, you need 'em. But at some point, man...
The problem is, picture an ant walking across your garage floor, trying to make a straight line of it. It ain't gonna make a straight line. And you know this because you have perspective. You can see the ant walking around, going hee hee hee, look at him locally optimize for that rock, and now he's going off this way, right?
This is what we were, when we were writing this giant assembly-language system. Because what happened was, Microsoft eventually released a platform for mobile devices that was much faster than ours. OK? And I started going in with my debugger, going, what? What is up with this? This rendering is just really slow, it's like sluggish, you know. And I went in and found out that some title bar was getting rendered 140 times every time you refreshed the screen. It wasn't just the title bar. Everything was getting called multiple times.
Because we couldn't see how the system worked anymore!
Which is higher-level language, C or C++?
One benchmark of language level is how many lines of code are needed to implement a feature. In high-level languages, the compiler does more work. The programmer has to write less code. This means that implementation is faster. There are also less bugs, since the lines of code which were not needed don't contain bugs, and because debugging is easier in small haystack.
C language is infamous for being low-level. Therefore it's paradoxical that Symbian Open C is a advertised as a productivity tool. But sadly it really is a productivity tool compared to Symbian C++.
The examples below demonstrate why. The snippets below read a configuration variable from a file. The scenario is that we want to run automatic system tests on a communication protocol and to automate the selection of an access point. It is stored in format "accesspoint=Winsock". The important thing here is the length of the listing, not the exact content.
// Connect to file server User::LeaveIfError(fs.Connect()); CleanupClosePushL(fs);
// Open file for reading if (file.Open(fs, aFileName, EFileWrite) == KErrNone) { CleanupClosePushL(file); // Read the file to memory (we can't use line-by-line // reading with TTextFile, since it can't handle 8-bit text) TInt size = 0; User::LeaveIfError(file.Size(size); HBufC8* content = HBufC8::NewLC(size); User::LeaveIfError(file.Read(content->Des());
// Find the start and end of the access point name. TInt start = content.Find(KAccessPointId()); if (start > KErrNotFound) { start = start + KAccessPointId.Length(); TInt end = start;
// Find the next newline. do { end++ } while(end < content.Length() && (*content)[end] != '\r' && (*content)[end] != '\n'); }
// Save the result. aResult.Copy(content.Mid(start, end - start)); apNameFound = ETrue; }
// Read a configuation variable with 20 lines of code. const char* access_point_id = "accesspoint="; char* read_access_point_name(const char* file_name) { char* result = NULL; // Open file for reading. FILE* file = fopen(file_name, "r"); if (file) { char line[200];
// Read line by line and search for access point variable. while(!result && fgets(file, line, 200)) { if (strstr(line, access_point_id) == line) {
// Remove newline. int len = strlen(line); while (line[len - 1] == '\r' || line[len - 1] == '\n') { line[len--] = 0; }
// Get the value of the variable. reuslt = strdup(line + strlen(access_point_id); } } fclose(file); } return result; }
Symbian C++ was written before people really knew how to do object-oriented programing. They completely botched all the APIs. The horrible descriptors were designed to counter memory overflows, which C functions don't check. Nowadays they just clutter the code. Symbian takes pride in being a microkernel OS, so they require the programmer to connect to servers to start sessions. This adds further lines. The exception handling with cleanup stacks vomits more useless lines. And if you think this is ugly, you haven't seen anything, like the use of active objects in the socket interface.
One C++ selling point is the syntax for classes. Well, Symbian has a 68-page coding convetions which gives very explicit rules how to name classes and which functions they should at least have. This nitpicking makes classes heavy structures, and decimates any advantage from syntactic sugar. Virtual functions are the only part of C++ which wasn't assaulted. Even templates were banned as too error-prone.
So Posix C really is a higher-level language. Just for comparison, here is the same in Ruby.
# Read a configuration variable in 9 lines of code. def readAccessPointName(fileName) file = File.open(fileName, "r") file.each_line do |line| if (line =~ /accesspoint=(.*)/) # The (.*) in regular expression caught # the access point name to $1. return $1.chomp end end raise 'No access point name in file ' + fileName end
So it is unsurprising that App store contains 225000 appplicaitons while Ovi store contains just thousands.
GeoWorks attempted to get third party developers but was unable to get much support due to expense of the developer kit — which ran $1,000 just for the manuals — and the difficult programming environment, which required a second PC networked via serial port in order to run the debugger. (source)
But it's the user experience that counts...
Symbian phones are famous for having equal features but lower usability than iPhone. To demonstrate how difficult programming is visible in usability, I'll tell you about usging the file browser to read log files. The plain text viewer has several defects. If you open a large log, it announces out of memory error and shuts down. It underlines randomly some content which it thinks might be a link. It can't choose a small font to show lots of content, so you only see a few lines at a time. Luckily, there has been some progress in plain text viewer. Earlier, it used to crash with medium-sized files. Now it either shows it or announces error.
The way I see it, these defects reflect the difficulty of the programming platform. Usually programmers have some professional pride, which makes them fix errors and usability defects with time. What could be stopping it? We can only speculate.
Customizing the UI component which shows text would require too much work, since platform doesn't support dynamic loading and presentation.
Low level language necessitates big project sizes. This dilutes responsibility so that no one is responsible for the plain text viewer in the "buck stops here" sense.
There is a culture of fixing only showstopper bugs and leaving others there, since there isn't time to fix all bugs, as fixing a single bug is slow.
This way, we get "multimedia computers" which can't display plain text.
It doesn't have to be this way
Nokia does fine in low-end phones, which use the closed Series40 OS. Also the Maemo/Meego platform is promising, however the phone in N900 is still fresh software, creating issues in sound quality and usability. They haven't had time to finalize the phone. In compatibility with major desktop operating systems, Maemo's Linux kernel runs circles around Symbian. This will show up in usability sooner or later. You can always strip down the user interface to produce a simpler phone which is easier to use, but you can't put the solid Linux infrastructure to a Symbian phone.
In the long run, I'm optimistic about Nokia's future. Once they finalize the phone on Maemo and scrap the Symbian platform, they'll be fine. If you want to capitalize on this, the right time to buy Nokia shares is just before they start selling their next Meego phone. However, make sure that the press agrees that Meego has good phone, battery life and usability - if they botch them on Meego, they won't recover. However, I'm not putting my money where my mouth is, because I have enough economic Nokia risk in my life already.
Naturally, people who advertise iPhones aim to associate different images with their product, and they are very successful at it since it sells so much. Don't ask me what it signals for those who buy them.
Neither group is "countercultural" in any way. They are both as mainstream as it gets.
People are similar in their vulgar tastes and different in their refined tastes. Below I list 5 things which are common to most people. The viewpoint here is how people can connect by talking, or alternatively to appeal to masses, despite knowing little about each other.
1) Humans are physical beings. They eat food to get fuel and nutrients. They must exercise to stay healthy and fit.
2) Humans are sexual beings. We are sons and daughters of people who fucked.
3) People are social beings. Most of us can imagine ourselves to other people's shoes. Few prefer solitude to other people's company in the long run. We have instincts which analyze our status and role in the group.
4) People are thinking beings who imagine, anticipate, analyze and read and write texts.
5) People are mystical beings who have tendency to search answers to religious, spiritual and supernatural questions and experiences.
Unifying and separating spheres
Sphere
Role
Physical
Unifying
Sexual
Unifying
Social
Mixed
Thinking
Separating
Mystical
Separating
In unifying areas of life, people undestand and believe what you say unless there is sepecific reason to doubt. For example if you say "I don't want to do it since it makes my back hurt" or "I'm horny" or "It would be so embarrassing", others believe unless they have specific reason to doubt you. For example, if a stripper wears a shirt saying "Mun tekee mieli", people know that she's doesn't mean it but manipulates you to separate you from your money. Social sphere is mixed, because it is common to question social evaluations ("There's nothing embarrassing in it").
When I say that thinking is a separating sphere, I mean that people doubt you if you say "believe me since I know this thing better than you do". Appeals to Thinking are credible only if the others agree already or the person has high social status, and even then they provoke resentment. Thinking filters people to narrow tranches which are on the same wavelength - for example most text-only blogs have few readers, and they appeal mainly to Thinking sphere.
By mystical exprience I mean a sense that some supernatural being is sending you a message or channeling itself through you. Believers do this when they aim to channel God by implementing His will on earth. You may interpret this metaphorically to mean a state of increased mental clarity or perception where your brains send positive feedback for getting into right condition. Outside religion, people have hard time even describing their mystical experiences, and those who can describe them have trouble interpreting what they mean.
Balance between spheres
Unfortunately blogs concentrate too much on Thinking and this may produce illusion that it is somehow more important than the other areas of life, more deserving of attention and analysis. During last years I have grown to hate this bias.
You are missing out much in life if you don't do any sports, if you don't have a sex life, if you don't have meaningful weekly social interaction, if you don't have any intellectual hobby or if you vehemently deny the possibility of mystical experiences. Two of these 'lacks' are pretty unavoidable: In the sexual sphere, not all men are needed, and nobody is interested in old women. In the mystical sphere, the experiences are rare.
There are lots of insults on people whose development is uneven in various spheres. "Meatheads" concentrate too much on physical. "Wankers" neglect sexual. "Wierdos" don't have their social instincts in place.
Je Ne Sais Quoi by Hera Björk has very good opening, where intensity rises gradually during the first 60 seconds. The facial gestures and hand gestures are exactly right, expressing newfound joy and self-confidence after life takes a positive turn.
The music oscillates between serene synth parts and energetic beats, which combine at 00:38. Beats reach their maximum vital force at 00:50, after the dramatic revealation that the singer has found love.
After 1:00 the songs just stops and nothing happens anymore. But 60 seconds of excellence is exceptional for an Eurovision song.
Apricot Stone by Eva Rivas is the most balanced combination of music, vocals and message. The message is basically more feminine and greeny version of Satakunnan kansa. Maybe the other songs are devoid of message or maybe it's a matter of wavelength that I'm not getting any message from other songs.
Milim by Harel Skaat is the kind of music which I don't listen and don't really understand, but it sounds like the performer knows what he's doing.
Sweet People by Alyosha, the Portishead of Ukraine, wallows in emotions like no other.
Playing With Fire, a duetto by Paula Seling and Ovi, concentrates on stage peformance and looks like a scene out of some Bollywood movie.
Kreikan tukitoimien arvioimiseksi pitää muistella, miksi euroalue luotiin. Euro tehtiin ison talousblokin vakaaksi valuutaksi, jotta investoijat olisivat valmiita lainaamaan matalammalla korolla. 5 miljoonan asukkaan Suomi on altis taloudelisille shokeille, kuten Venäjän kaupan romahdus, joka tuhosi 13% bruttokansantuotteesta. 300 miljoonan asukaan euroalue on vakaampi eritysesti, jos maat tukevat toisiaan poikkeustilanteissa. Myös valuuttariski poistuu, kun Suomi voi etsiä isolta alueelta lainoittajia, jotka lainaavat euroissa.
Euron ansiosta Suomen valtionvelan korko on pudonnut n. 7%:stä n. 4%:iin. Vuonna 2009 Suomi maksoi 2.3 miljardia euroa valtion velan korkoja. Jos emme olisi euroalueella, valtion täytyisi verottaa vajaat 2 miljardia euroa enemmän.
Kreikan signalointiongelma
Jos muut euromaat eivät tue Kreikka yhtään, niin sijoittajat katsovat jatkossa pienten eurotalouksien olevan oman onnensa varassa. Tällöin Suomen velalle vaaditaan korkempaa korkoa vastineeksi korkeamasta riskistä. Tämä on huono lopputulos. (Mahdollisesta pankkikriisistä myöhemmin.)
Jos muut euromaat antavat Kreikalle kaiken ja katsovat säästöohjelmasta lipumista sormien läpi, niin särmien maiden rahoille riittää ottajia kunnes ne loppuvat. Tämäkin on huono lopputulos.
EMUn haaste on löytää keino signaloida sisäistä kuria ja ulkoista vakautta. Tällöin euromaat voivat jatkossakin nauttia ison valuutta-alueen vakauden suomista eduista joutumatta maksaman tolkutonta laskua muiden sikailuista. Ongelma on siinä, että jos-suhteiden signalointi on hankalaa, ja signalointi tulee uskottavaksi vasta pitkällä aikavälillä. EMU on uskottava, kun Kreikka on monen vuoden kuluttua leikannut alijäämänsä pois ja alkanut vähentää velkaansa. Se on uskottava myös, jos Kreikka laitetaan monen vuoden elvytysyritysten jälkeen velkasaneeraukseen toivottomana tapauksena. Joka tapauksessa ukottavuuden hankkimiseen menee vuosia.
Suurusluokka
Suomi on hyötynyt eurosta. Jo pelkästän matalammat valtion velan korot ovat maksaneet Kreikan lainasumman moninkertaisesti takaisin.
Toisaalta pelotellaan, että Kreikan velkasaaneerauksesta seuraisi pankkikriisi ja lama. Viime vuonna Suomen bruttokansantuote supistui laman takia 13 miljardia euroa. Tämäkin on paljon Kreikan lainaa suurempi summa.
Kreikan laina on vasta ensimmäinen näytös pitkässä gambiitissa, jossa testataan euromaiden kyky puhaltaa yhteen hiileen ja laittaa sikailijat ruotuun.
Each Finnish taxpayer is lending 300e for the Greek government without guarantees. Others are better informed to write about the loan itself, so I offer a few positive notes about the debate.
Greek voters have double handicap on future time orientation. Firstly, they are a Southern country. Therefore memories of long, harsh winters and the need to prepare for them are not circulating in their bloodstream. Secondly, their average score on a specific list is the lowest of all Euro countries.
Usually such nations get preferential treatment in public debt debate (example). Scrupulous Western imperialists and capitalists get the blame. With Greece, the blame for nonpayment is finally placed where it should be - on the borrower who refuses to pay. Finally the common taxpayer walks on the loaner's shoes.
The Greek have darker skin color than Finns. Despite this, the racism card has not been played. Finally skin color does not give people freedom from the consequences of their actions.
Many people say that Greece should not have joined Euro in the first place and the banks should not have given them loans, and these financing options prolonged the crisis and made it worse. When we talk about Finns, it is acceptable to say that instant loans and credit cards cause trouble for some, although for the majority they provide a valuable service. Finally we can say that some countries are too immature to handle loans like grown-up Western democracies.
Media is full of reports about demonstrations and strikes where the Greek people oppose the cuts on their benefits and tax evasion options. These get nothing but condescension and laughter. Usually there is a double standard where the feeblest complaints from victim groups are valid and should be accommodated. Finally the double standard is breaking down.
Despite the cost to the man on the street, we are not seeing attacks or hate speech against the Greek people. Finally the public debate contains a recognition that despise towards some group's lower performance does not mean hate, violence nor discrimination.
In short, when Finns deal with their own money their public debate is much sharper. Let's hope that these same honest attitudes spread to rhetoric about developing countries, ending the monopoly of the compassion industry.
Learning Diary of an Israeli Water Engineer. Some of his posts are about his work in various water engineering projects, and some are about his investments and economy. This gives the whole blog a nice no-nonsense "thoughts have consequences" attitude, and it spills out to his general commentary.
Dear John tells about a soldier named John who falls in love with a college student named Savannah during his vacation from the army.
This chick flick is the first sob story which I have seen on the silver screen. The audience was 3/4 female, with a few token boyfriends in tow. In the most intense scenes of loss, you could hear sniffs from several directions.
Why did I pick this film? I just walked in the theater and chose the least descriptive film name. "Haikein terveisin" won. If I try to choose a 'good' movie I usually end up watching crap.
The best part of the movie is the beginning where John and Savannah meet. John has just finished a day of surfing in the beach and is walking topless. OkCupid profile picture research supports that males showing muscles is attractive.
From Mystery Method's three big value-demonstrating character traits (leader of men, preselected by women, protector of the loved ones) John hits heavily on protector of the loved ones from the very beginning. There are no other women involved. His absence of leadership is balanced by painting him as a lone wolf with dark and mysterious background.
From the game perspective, John does not demonstrate much psychosocial dominance. Others talk more and Savannah decides the next steps all the time. However, there are many scenes where other men crumble when placed in conflict against John. It is not about John having great character, rather it is about other men around Savannah having terrible character. John is a bit simple athlete who has gone through rough places and made it alive.
One theme in the movie is the autism of John's father. Frankly, the person who is supposed to play autistic seems merely introverted to me. There is only one scene where he loses his nerves and escapes and is clearly crazy. Then again my own standards may be twisted, since I had very weak emotional connection with my father when I was young.
If I could change one thing in the movie, the final hour would contain more scenes where communication breaks down and characters can't agree on a common frame of reference. Instead, they would laugh at each others, question their views, change the subject and blame the other for overreacting. It would have been better acted by amateur actors who can't deliver a single line of dialog right, since people under strong emotions can't punch straight verbal blows either.
The newest addition to my collection of bodyweight training toys is a dancing pole. It is an order of magnitude more versatile than a pull-up bar - that's why there's no such thing as pull-up bar dancing.
It is also much heavier. If you don't exert any force against the pole, you will be sliding downwards. By contrast, to stay on a pull-up bar you only need to keep your hands curved.
Thus far, I've been mainly climbing the pole upwards - and it took months before my hands learned to use the force they already have for this purpose. As expected with new moves, I've found some 'pole dancing muscles' from my body, which don't get much exposure during regular gym training and get sore when gripping the pole puts disproportionate stress on them.
My weightlifting book is written by a coach, whose profession is to train university athletes in the weight room. The book aims at thoroughly strong, functional physique. During training, 'realistic' moves like shoulder press or pull-up are preferred, so that the strength is functional. The point is not to get as strong as possible, but to get moderately strong and train away all weak points. This brings resistance to injury when your body is strained from an unusual angle. The main ingredients of it's recipe are: - Favor free weights and positions, where you don't get too much artificial support. This way, you can exert comparable force in real situations. For example bench press is just barely kosher - it is good for training strength but has too much artificial support to be a valid measure of strength. Practical situation where your back is against a wall and you press with hands are extremely rare. Shoulder press or squat are paragons of functional strength. - Upper body exercises are not divided by muscle groups, but into 4 categories - vertical/horizontal push/pull. The individual muscles will get trained on the way. If weightlifting is not you main sport, exact muscles don't matter. What does matter is that the muscles are used to working together. - Exercises are variated, for example between narrow and wide grip, between pronated and supinated grip, and between dumbbells and barbells. This way, choosing a wrong basic exercise does not leave any point of your body untrained.
If I manage to avoid all injuries with the pole, I can thank this piece of advice afterwards. Now they are just hypotheses which sound reasonable. In one year, I'll have experimental data about the validity of the hypothesis in one case.
Societies develop institutions which enable the majority to live their life well. Good institutions take advantage of the average man's stregths and alleviate his weaknesses. Different ethnic groups have big differences in average ability. Different groups need different institutions to enable daily life.
In Andhra Pradesh, a state in South India, the literacy rate is 60%. This is a weakness to be alleviated by traditions. The country is also quite overpopulated: it has 15 times more people for every km² than in Finland. Also even in the countryside people like to live near each others: while Finns like to scatter their houses and surround them by plains, the farmers in Andhra Pradesh live in central villages which are surrounded by uninhabited plains. This further concentrates population. This is a strength which can be exploited.
If a Finn wants to go to a new place, he uses a map. Maps are widely available and people are trained to use them during physical education classes when people go to forest to orienteer.
If an Indian in Andhra Pradesh doesn't know the way, he asks a bypasser. Even professional taxi drivers who earn their living by driving do so. Thanks to warm climate and dense population, there are always locals in the street, walking or idling. Therefore asking the way is possible thanks to the strength of dense population. Also since maps are hard to find (for example in Hyderabad, we had to find a big bookstores before we found one; by contrast in Budapest airport a free tourist leaflet contained a map) and many people couldn't read them anyway, a different way-finding institution is necessary because of the weakness of illiteracy.
In literate Finland, there is a stigma attached to talking to strangers. People don't do it naturally. If a stranger in the street comes to talk to you, he probably tries to sell you stuff, beg money or convert you to his religion. The stigma is useful, because it discourages interaction where you can only lose and where there isn't even any reciprocal advantage. The reciprocal help scenario, for example begging money to a bus ticket back home, is too rare to make it to the top three of stranger interactions.
In Andhra Pradesh, people are in general frighteningly extroverted, because they simply have to do more stuff by talking as writing isn't an option. There is less stigma attached to random talking.
This is one reason why Finland should be careful not to let in large numbers of third-world immigrants. They may seem like us hen you talk with an individual person for a few minutes, but they are not like us. Our institutions won't be able to handle large colonies of people with very different average abilities. The institutions (for example fire-fighting) will break, and will be replaced by something we don't like.
The biblical golden rule, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", is the simplest way to justify development aid with reciprocality. Now I'll develop two improved reciprocality arguments, which are rigorous enough to say what policies are not justified by reciprocality. The golden rule has large cultural impact but it is too vague for supporting or opposing policy decisions.
John Rawls and the veil of ignorance
A way to justify development aid is to say that the gap between the rich and the poor countries is unjust. In Theory of Justice, John Rawls estimates the justness of social organizations with the veil of ignorance. We imagine ourselves as souls in heaven who have not yet born. We don't know in which country we will be born. What kind of development aid policy would we formulate? I'll use Finland and Nepal as examples.
It does justify aid which increases economic growth. Finland and Nepal have 30-fold difference in GDP per capita. If Finland gave 1% of GDP for development aid, it would add 10% to Nepalese GDP. If this is invested for growth with reasonable ROI (for example, better education enables the Nepalese to work in higher-value jobs) we can get 20% difference in 20 years. Surely the souls in the sky who don't know where they will be born would prefer to be 20% richer Nepalese or 1% poorer Finns.
It does not justify aid which does not have effect. Why would the souls in the sky choose to shed 1% of their income as Finns, if the Nepalese can't build lastingly better society with it, instead using the money for corruption?
Now we notice that we need an assumption about people before we can deduce if the veil of ignorance justifies development aid or not.
If we assume that people are fundamentally the same everywhere, then the differences in the standards of living are historical coincidences. With proper education and economic opportunities, the Nepalese will become just like Finns in a few generations.
My opinion is that the people in different nations are fundamentally different. If you meet a Nepali, he is probably polite and his behaviour is within the range of variation which you have seen among Finns. However, if you take 10000 Nepalis and Finns and look what kind of society they will build in 20 years of freedom and democracy, the results differ like night and day.
In a way, Finland is 'fully developed'. This means that there are no low-hanging fruits which external benevolent institutions could pick to cause permanent growth in Finland. Finns further their own interests and the interests of their loyalty groups effectively, since Finns have enough education, access to information, freedom and ability to raise capital for genuinely profitable pursuits.
The 'people are different' assumption can be taken forward to oppose development aid even under veil of ignorance by saying that the Nepalis are fully developed in the same sense. The differences in standards of living originate from the fact that society consists of people, and with people like the Nepali you can't build a society like Finland.
Nepalis in fact do get 10% of their GDP as remittances from Nepalis working in foreign countries and also as development aid. Still, they continue play in the bottom league of the poorest countries. This is strong data to support that they just can't build better society even if given more money.
Alien civilization
A problem with the veil of ignorance is that we can't imagine what it's like to be an illiterate goat herder. Therefore we need to imagine ourselves as the inferior race. Let's imagine an alien civilization with average IQ is about 150 and less measurable character traits like emotional maturity, future time orientation and language skills just as developed. Their behaviour is comprehensible for our xenoanthropologists, and their xenoanthropologists have learned to read and write factual sentences (which are not dependent on human intuitions) in English. For the sake of universe's biodiversity, they let us live, and some of them consider it a fun pasttime to uplift us. What would he want from them?
We would not want them to build us schools or hospitals. That's something that we do quite well ourselves. Better buildings wouldn't even improve the quality of services.
We would not want to copy institutions from them. Institutions which work for them would rest on assumptions which are not valid for us.
We would want their science and technology, preferably packaged into easy-to-use tools. The closest comparison is exchange students who come to Western countries to study, Western companies which sell tools and infrastructure to countries with otherwise low level of technology.
We would want them to decode our genome with their super tech. The closest comparison is malaria research, etc.
We would want to maintain monopoly of violence on Earth, even if we knew that they could blast us to extinction with antimateria bombs anytime. They may be too indifferent to care if, say, Iran used it's nuclear arsenal, or too enthusiastic to meddle, or probably both.
Saw Inglourious Basterds in the weekend. Can't recommend it to anyone, though. Like Kill Bill, it was a purebred genre movie which didn't reference anything real, just other movies in the same genre. While Kill Bill was fun, Inglourious Basterds was just filled with cruel violence that was unnecessary for the plot.
There was one good scene in Inglourious Basterds though - the opening scene. It includes a long conversation during which nothing happens except two people talk politely with each others, but which is full of suspense anyway.
One criteria for good art is that it tells facts about reality. In this sense, realistic, long conversations can be art. Many important things depend on vapid chit-chat in small groups. The devil is in the details and in subtle signaling. The blogs of pick-up artists tell stories how vapid chit-chat determines the success of seduction, and also deal with relationship game. Families are one fundamental building blocks of society, and their formation and stability depends much on vapid chit-chat. It also determines very much how various professional and hobby groups get stuff done or don't.
The only TV program which takes vapid chit-chat seriously is Big Brother, and it is hugely popular around the world.
Death Proof is another Tarantino a movie, where the first hour consists entirely from vapid chit-chat. It even lacks proper suspense, as things start to happen only afterwards. It is both boring (nothing happens!) and ingenious (at last they film the stuff that social reality is made of!) at the same time.
The video describes the challenges faced by embedded tactical trainers (ETTs). ETTs are American soldiers who are training the Afghan army to mind their own backyard. The video mentions complete lack of discipline, rampant drug use, corruption in promotions and wrong kind of soldier material as main problems.
When the Finnish or American soldiers exit Afghanistan, in five years the locals will revert back to their own ways. It's insane to believe that you can just train them into Finnish ways like any Finnish conscript. Their background, culture, institutions and genes are very different from us.
The foreign military presence will hopefully give them enough time to establish stable institutions and rebuild infrastructure so that Afghanistan will continue as a democracy, instead of sliding back into being a fundamentalist totalitarian state (or was it feudal warlord anarcy?), and that's a huge improvement. But they are going to stay half illiterate, corrupted, drug-addled and poor no matter how much military support and development aid is wasted on them. Western presence is a light, passing breeze compared to the internal logic of 30 million Afghans.
Those who oppose wasting taxpayer's money should remember that there are less than 200 Finns there, so multipliers stay small. Also, they will be brought back to Finland - it's not a permanent black hole for taxpayer's money like suggestions to raise development aid to 1% of GNP.
