Isomorphismes

Have you ever noticed that, even if you delete text from a Microsoft Word document, the file size doesn’t decrease? If you are writing a book in MS Word, you’ll notice that the .doc file grows ever larger as you add & delete paragraphs, move snippets around; even if you delete a chapter, the file doesn’t necessarily shrink.

If you copy-pasted a document which you’d been working on for a while into a new, empty Word .doc (can I call that the null document?), maybe you noticed that the new file — even though it contained exactly the same text — was much smaller than the older file.

• That’s because, mathematically, .doc files are semigroups. 

Typewritten letters are also semigroups — the thousands of possible binary operations would be “append from {letters, punctuation, whitespace}” — but with Word files, the operations include delete words, delete ¶ and replace ¶ with the word you just typed.

Whereas the state of a .txt file is the current body of text, the state of a Word .doc is the entire history of the document. (That’s why programmers use git|svn to remember the history of their directories: the IDE doesn’t do it for them.)

You can see this in the metadata. Open a .doc file in a plain-text editor (e.g., Notepad) and you’ll see snippets of things you thought you deleted. Hey, why are those still there?!

Microsoft keeps them there because you — and most Word users — want to be able to hit Ctrl+Z or Edit > Undo. If the pages of highlighted text you just replaced with an “a” were really gone, there could be no undo operation. And then you would screw yourself thousands of times with mistaken keystrokes and on sad days when you think most of your book is trash.

As a consequence of giving people what they want, Microsoft has also given some people what they don’t want. The US government has written instructions on how to really, truly delete classified information in .doc files. (One wonders what was accidentally disclosed before those instructions were written.) And Merck was blasted, after they submitted an article about Vioxx after Delete-ing a paragraph about the concomitant risk of heart attack. Apparently someone at the New England Journal of Medicine knows how to press Ctrl+Z.

Note to CMO’s: Never send an unethical MBA to do an unethical hacker’s job. \insert{LaTeX quip}.

Personally, I never send resumes or curriculum vitæ in Word, nor do I send reports to clients in Word. I always generate a PDF. When I’m writing something, I want it to be malleable. But when I give it to you, I want it to be locked down, uneditable, unable to be reverse-engineered. I make sure what you’re viewing is exactly how I want it to look, saying just and only what I want it to say.

Meaningless:

XXX is seeking a high-caliber, experienced YYY with proven research, development and application skills in the area of ZZZ. The selected candidate will have a track-record of creating innovative YYY solutions to industry business challenges. They will also enjoy working in a collaborative environment with multi-disciplinary research teams, service team, business unit and vendor partners, testing and applying new technologies for direct business impact.

So many job postings sound like this. Overly formal, clearly written by someone unfamiliar with the kind of work the sought-after employee would be doing, and filled with suggestive but vapid jargon.

Who does XXX think they will attract with this kind of language? I can think of two kinds of people who would sincerely respond, “Yes, that’s me!” to the above statements: unoriginal toadies and liars.

Plain English. Let’s use it.

Why do people publicly admit to reading Robert Greene’s books? That’s like saying “Hi, I’m manipulative and power-hungry. Want to work together?”

Several times I have googled people who publicly admit (e.g. on a blog) that they like one or more of Robert Greene’s books. So obviously my first thought is Don’t Trust This Person. Haven’t been wrong about that yet. And let me just add: all such people have been Republicans. I’m not going to say anything, but I’ll just leave this here…

It just seems obvious that the first rule of manipulating people has to be that they can’t know they’re being manipulated. Even if a tyrant wanted to rule with an iron fist (yang 陽), peasants will flee if they know in advance that someone’s going to subjugate them. And there is an obvious facsimile to business.

Machiavellian

Niccolò Machiavelli is (wrongly) pegged as the progenitor of the manipulative, skulky, suspicious, power-grabbing style of leadership … let’s call it the Skeletor School of Management. But no one trusts Skeletor. And no one would really follow Skeletor. A consummate Machiavellian would never be so dumb as to let on that he’s about to manipulate you. I don’t even think Skeletor was that dumb … and he’s regularly outwitted by a monosyllabic barbarian with a claymore.

Anyway … why do people admit to reading Robert Greene?

In Remembering the Kanji, James Heissig evokes a good point about power, force, manipulation, cause, and influence.

☯ 陰 Agere

“It is not sure whether the long slender object is seducing the small round one or vice versa.”

He’s making a point about pull versus push, yin 阴 vs yang 阳 as different ways of getting the same thing done. Who’s more powerful — Sampson or Delilah? Imagine a beautiful woman who asks a strong man to bend an iron bar. He can’t do it right away, so he trains for months under the pretense that bending the bar will curry favour with the beautiful woman. After 36 weeks of training, he’s finally strong enough to bend the bar and does so. Who “caused” the bar to be bent? Didn’t the woman get more done with less effort on her part?

But either way, push-ing, force-ing, cause-ing, make-ing, do-ing (yang 陽) isn’t going to result in consensual relations. Effective is to beckon, entice, engender, subduce, induce, or otherwise draw one’s desired partner into action (yin 陰).

(Why do you think it’s called “pulling” ?)

Coevolution

It’s like Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire (vid, ed). He observes that apples, tulips, marijuana, and potatoes have coevolved with humans so as to cause us to like them. Pairing with humans is an effective strategy for prosperity, since we weed out what we don’t like and plant megahectares of what we do like.

In a rough paraphrase of a lecture Pollan gave: “The United States has a second lawn: millions of acres of corn, which corn could not have conquered alone. By appealing to human tastes, corn has enslaved — or enticed 阴 — us into replicating its genes. We are corn’s nuclear weapon.”

Who is really domesticating whom? Dogs, cats, bees, bunnies, cows, and pandas have also thrived by enticing us (yin 陰) — whereas cockroaches, mosquitoes, rats, vermin, pests, and weeds have chosen Earth’s most technological species as their enemy (yang 陽).

Rivers & Lakes, Potential Wells, T’ui Shou & Management

There are many more parallels to Heissig’s point about “feminine” 阴 power.

In T’ui Sh’ou (scholar boxing), Sansh’ou, Aikido, Judo, and other grappling arts, fighters are trained to make use of, or redirect 陰, the efforts of their opponent (as well as to 阳 strike).

Say water is flowing into a lake. Is gravity 阳-forcing the water downward into the lake? Or did the digging of a hole 阴-pull the water into the potential well? When you build a dam in the lake, do you 阳-fortify the structure or 阴-reshape the walls so less sturdy materials are needed? These are dual optimisation problems.

In particle accelerators we can 阳 turn up the energy to 阳-push the electrons into higher orbitals; in a solar panel we’re stuck with the sun’s energy 阳-beating down on the desert at a bounded hν. We have to 阴-reshape our devices to 阴-harvest more of what’s already there.

In classical statistics, hypothesis testing is a bit like the potential wells. You can add more observations 阳 to strengthen the p value, or you can 阴 change the null hypothesis. As Bill Becker pointed out as expert testimony during a trial about wage discrimination based on gender: there is equal support for null hypotheses either above or below the observed (sample) mean.

In finance, imagine you have a trading signal. You want to improve it. You can either aim to bet more 阳 when your signal is most likely to profit, or you can try to bet zero 阴 when your signal is least likely to profit. Either will increase the expected return of your strategy, but getting out of the way 阴 has the added benefit of reducing transactions costs.

In romantic relationships, of course, there is a 阳-push and 阴-pull as well. Yielding 阴 and standing up for 阳 what you want are both necessary.  ”There used to be a fighting style called the 棉 cotton school 阴, but its practitioners are all dead.” And everyone who always said, “Whatever you want” no longer has that marriage.

Yanking 阳 an object out of a hole with as much 阳-force as possible requires more energy, might not work, and might destroy the hole — or the object — in the process. You won’t get Chinese handcuffs off that way either. Wiggling 阳阴 the object out, alternately pulling 阴 and pushing 阳 to find the easiest path, is less stressful to the structure and to you.

In management, not every battle needs to be 阳-fought. If you 阴-bring the right people in line with the right tasks, then they will 阳-expend their energy in a more productive way. 阴-Aligning teams that complement each other 阴-harvests more work from the same 阳-force. But that’s not to say that 阳-pushing back or 阳阴-guiding is unnecessary. Bullies need to be 阳-ejected from the ring, and the 阳阴-boss is still the 阳-boss.

There is a prejudice in society against people who wake up late.

Obviously, someone who wakes up at 3pm, eats and gets ready, then works from 5pm until 2am, can get as much done as someone who works from 8:30am until 5:30pm.

And there are even more nocturnal schedules for sure. I used to finish work at 4am or 5am. (EMT’s, I feel ya!)

You would think that a diverse economy like ours could support multiple time-lifestyles, without prejudice. And there are indeed 24-hour Krogers (thankfully) as well as convenience stores. But doctors’ offices, job interviews, government agencies, banks, and gyms are all difficult-ish to access when you get home from work at 5am.

What’s the deal?

Aren’t there profits to be made by keeping your store open later? Plus, drawing customers away from the busiest store hours would reduce stress, mistakes, and costs during peak operating hours. Not to mention, traffic congestion would be reduced if more people commuted at 11am, 2pm, 5pm, 5am, or other times.

Maybe it is the priorities of people with kids forcing the rest of the world to conform to their preferred schedule?

(Source: beckyrussoniello)

Technically the best business idea ever is the gift card. You take advantage of (or should I say, “leverage”) social stigma to get people to give you money. You don’t even have to deliver any products, you just get money. Maybe you will have to give up some inventory later; maybe the gift card just gets lost. Often you make even more money, if you price your cards at $20 and your merchandise at $22.99. (“You” here must generally be an incumbent brand.)

But, like, where’s the beef? That invention’s not really making the world a better or more interesting place — it’s just tweaking the vector field so that money flows toward you.

It might even make the world a worse place: think of those soul-less malls, filled with incumbent retail outlets offering pappy crap — but you’ve gotta get something and you don’t really know the receiver that well, and it’s going to be awkward if you have nothing…. Geez. Just make presents for the people you love and get everybody else chocolate or champagne.

NYT or Geico?

I have a question for every aspiring capitalist. Would you rather own a share of GEICO or the New York Times? I would rather own the Times. It doesn’t make money but it makes a difference.

I’m not saying that to put up the literary word. I would also love a share of Kentucky Fried Chicken. That sh*t is delicious. My point is that if I had tons of money, I would want to invest it in a business with a cool product. In fact, that would be probably the most fulfilling way to spend tens of millions of dollars. (Maybe this is the reason people invest in web start-ups.)

By contrast, insurance companies are practically demonic. They fight their customers. They’re propped up by statute (yes, who would buy insurance if it wasn’t required by law?). Then they try to get out of . And they suck the life out of their salespeople and claims adjusters — contrast that to journalists, who go into journalism on purpose.

Yeah, a well-run insurance company ought to make money, and serve an economic purpose to boot. A greedily run company ought to make money faster than they stuff it into their pockets. But — do you really want all that tar on your soul?