More things I love to hate

In one of my previous entries, I listed a few "things I love to hate", in an aside. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about the common denominator between them. But it's more fun to let you, the reader, try to figure it out yourself. Here are, in more or less random order, some of the things I love to hate.

filter cigarettes
alcohol-free beer
decaf coffee
sugar substitutes
sugar and caffeine-free cola
vegetarian hamburgers

perfume
high heels
make-up

breast implants
botox lips

OK, the last two are a bit of a give-away: everything on the list is about "faking it". The first set are all foodstuffs where we have taken out the key ingredient. This may be useful for those among us who want to stop smoking, drinking, going on sugar highs or getting too fat, but they should be temporary solutions, not permanent fixtures in our lives. If you want to avoid the risks of tobacco, stop smoking (I know it's hard, but it can be done), if you are worried about caffeine or alcohol, drink tea or water, and if you, like me, are worried about sugar, find a healthy substitute, not this artificial stuff with unknown side effects.

The second set are things women do - on purpose/consciously or not - to increase their attractiveness. Perfume, when used properly, can smell very nice, but does make it impossible to detect the natural smells, which can be quite important. According to a BBC programme I saw some time ago, smell is one of the most important crtieria for deciding on potential partners. High heels force the hips into a position that makes them look bigger, and big, tilted hips is interpreted as a symbol of fertility. Naturally red, enlarged lips and dark areas around women's eyes are also signs of fertility. In modern western society, we are bombarded by good-smelling, well-dressed women in high heels and make-up: more and more, this is standard office attire. I think this is a shame for several reasons, one also because it makes it all the more difficult to read the real signs when they are there. Personally, I prefer not be fooled, confused or manipulated.

As for the last two items on the list, all I can say is do it very, very well or not at all. There's nothing more disappointing than discovering how a trick works while the magic show is still on.

Not enough words to go round

Vocabulary, is what we need my friend
Vocabulary, is what we need
Vocabulary, is what we need, my friend
but there are not enough words to go round ...

The other day - for a reason that now escapes me, but definitely made sense at the time - I had to explain to my daughter of five what homonyms are. I find it very useful, explaining things to children, because you have to reduce things to their essence without oversimplifying. In the case of homonyms, my explanation basically came down to the observation that we do not have enough words to describe everything, so we often use the same word to mean very different things. The examples I gave to her included the Dutch word "zei" ("said"), which is pronounced exactly the same way as the pronoun "zij" (which means "she" or "her"). Luckily, she didn't ask why adults are so stupid as not to have language where each word means only one thing, and there is a word for each thing, because that would have been impossible to explain.

Take for example two very important words: "rule" and "law". Both can be used to mean "something that naturally happens more or less the same way repeatedly", such as in "laws of nature", or - more often in the context of human society - a behavior we would like to either impose or penalize, such as in "rules of conduct". How is it that we cannot invent some words without this built-in ambiguity? Or the word right, for example, which can mean quite a few different, including "correct" (as in "I am right") and "something you can lay a claim to" ("I have the right to remain silent"). And the list goes on and on. If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the 5000 most common words in the English language probably have an average of 2-3 meanings each, or more. The average is presumably a lot lower for specialist jargon, but even there, you will find this problem: the word "pitch", for example, has three different meanings in aviation alone.

So how do go about carving a masterpiece of meaning, if words are such blunt tools? The answer, of course, is by creating context, or combining words with other words. This does not completely eradicate the possibility of error, but it does reduce it significantly. In the case of the example I gave to my daughter, for example, I had to admit the theoretical possibility that someone hearing "hij zei" ("he said") might actually understand "he zij" ("he she"), but in most cases, the second combination of words wouldn't mean anything, and listeners would reject it as a possibility without even really thinking about it.

To be continued ....

A quagmire of grey in the land of right and wrong

This morning, I posted an entry with some pretty heavy life-and-death stuff on how relative right and wrong is, and how what is right for some may be wrong for the rest, and vice versa. Usually, once I finish something, it will leave me alone. But no this time. As I walked down to the park near my house, I was struck by yet another example of the conflict of interests between the individual and the society at large. What I saw was a car parked in a space reserved for invalids.

This space for invalids was created about two years ago, but merging two existing parking spaces into one and placing a sign. I suspect that the original reason for creating the parking space was to either make it easier for invalids to access the park (in which the prohibition should coincide with the opening hours of the park), or the hotel nearby (which is open 24 hours a day), or both. Whatever the intention, there are often car. But judging from the number of cars without invalid stickers that park there, it is obvious that many people interpret it to mean that it is prohibited to park there during working hours.

The car I saw this morning (Sunday) was presumably yet another example of this. Being a "good" citizen who normally respects traffic rules and regulations, I was very tempted (as I often am) to check with the parking police, to see whether or not it is acceptable to park there, knowing full well that that might mean that the car parked there now might be towed off. But I won't. Not because I have any sympathy for the owner - I can even derive a certain amount of glee from seeing a poorly maintained car with French license plates be carted off to the impound - but because (and here comes the ethical dilemma) every car parked there, legally or otherwise, means better chances for me of finding a space. The parking situation is not exactly dire in our neighbourhood, but every space counts.

Now I expect some of you will feel some righteous indignation: have I no sympathy or respect for invalids?!? Of course I do. But in the more than two years since the creation of the special parking space, I have not once seen an invalid park there. Nor have I ever seen an illegally parked car being hauled off, which suggests to me that it does not happen very often. So, rather than petitioning city hall (possibly in vain) for the removal of a parking space which is probably hardly ever used by invalids, I allow the situation to continue.

One last note: it is funny to see how emotional people (myself included) can get about traffic regulations. In fact, I suspect that people can actually get more emotional about small, "trivial" issues than about important ones, because they feel that the small ones should not be an issue in the first place. So in fact, they not only get upset about the issue, they also get upset about getting upset.

Post scriptum (almost a week later now): you know how it never rains when you remember to take an umbrella, or how the superslow supermarket cash-out line suddenly starts moving quite briskly the moment you change to another line? Well, this morning, there was an invalid parked in the invalid space. All I needed do was complain and - as Deepak Chopra puts it - the universe will take care of it.

Moral relativism

While reading Obama's "The Audicity of Hope" I came across the concept "moral relativism", a term I didn't know existed, but which is a nice concise description of how I see things. It's nice to find a glove that fits: I am definitely a moral relativist. In fact, in spite of my general aversion of any extreme or fanatical position, I would say I am such a relativist that you might start to wonder whether I can distinguish between right and wrong at all. I think I can, but to me, right and wrong only exist in context. I am not talking so much about how ethics change with time (although they do), but more about the fact that there are different levels. There is right and wrong for the individual, the family, the group or class, the nation, the species ... and we spend a good part of our lives trying to resolve the conflicts that arise as a result.

Of course, it would be much more convenient to have universal rules of conduct, but I have yet to find them. Take our attitude towards life, for example. As a general principle, we want to protect it. This is seen as "only natural", and the drive is so strong that I still feel bad about a few tadpoles that I caught with my daughter some weeks ago, and that died because I didn't know how to take care of them. But there are situations where the general "life is holy" principle might be justifiably suppressed. I have great deal of sympathy, for example, for rape victims who do not want to have the child of their aggressor, especially since in most cases, it will mean taking care of them for years. And I have even more sympathy for the mothers of children who are the result of incest, where - in addition to having a constant reminder of what can only have been a traumatic experience - there is a significant risk of having a child with serious health problems. And I am not at all sure that life should be prolonged as long as possible, no matter what the condition of the patient. So here we have a conflict between the group interest, and the interests of one or a few individuals.

Or the disagreement about immigration, which arises from a number of different conflicts at the same time, namely between the rich (who stand to benefit from cheap labour for menial jobs), the immigrants (higher income), the lower class in the receiving country (unhappy about the competition from the outside), both nations (evening out of the income differences), the human race as a species (mixing of genes, when the immigrants stay and interrmarry), etc. etc.

I have no solutions for the above problems, but I would like to suggest that we try to avoid being unduly swayed by our emotions when deciding on them. Not that I am against emotion per se: as a survival mechanism, it has served us well for millions or years. But there are at least three problems with emotions: they are very imprecise and error-prone (having been badly frightened by a clown as a child may leave you with a lasting fear of all clowns), and they are or can be "contagious" (which can lead to mass hysteria, for example), and, like everything that has been hard-coded by evolution, they are slow to adapt to changing circumstances. In fact, thought is the only survival mechanism that can keep up with change. Which is why we rely on it so much. But there is a problem with thought as well: it not only helps us keep up with change, it can actually cause it. But that is a different story ...

Body language and ethics

As an offshoot of a course I just did, I am reading the Definitive Guide to Body Language. I have some reservations about some of the explanations as to why we do certain things, but it does contain many interesting observations, and some advice that may prove very useful as well. On several occasions, the authors mention a cause-and-effect loop between a pose or gesture and the emotion behind it, and suggest that you can change how you feel by changing your body language. Research has shown, for example, that smiling can improve your spirits, even if you do it on purpose, without feeling particularly happy. It seems likely that similar relationships will also exist between other emotions and the accompanying body language (frowning, adopting an aggressive or defensive pose, etc.)

Of course, this is just a one-person version of a two- or more-person phenomenon that the authors call "mirroring", and which consists of - usually unconsciously - copying the body language and accompanying emotions of others. Of course, most people would associate this kind of behaviour with fluffy white scatterbrained animals that bleat but I don't mind much when the result is bonding and reinforcement of positive emotions. I am however much less charmed by the flip-side of this coin, namely lynch-mobs and mass paranoia.

But what I am really interested in, is this. If - like most things that have been around a long time - there is an evolutionary reason for this mechanism, then it means that, however much we may like to look down on it, copying the behaviour of others is beneficial in the long run (which is the time-frame within which evolution works). Of course, it is possible that the negative behaviour serves a purpose all of its own, but I suspect that it is just a question of the benefits of positive reinforcement outweighing the negative aspects.

I do see certain similarities with a theory described by Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene", about how a society of "sheep" can tolerate a certain number of wolves, but that if the percentage for whatever reason surpasses a certain threshold, the balance shifts completely to the other (baaaaahhhd) side, and you get a society of wolves, with only a few sheep. All of which brings me to a very convoluted conclusion, namely that what we normally define as "good" and "positive" corresponds, albeit roughly, with "the long run" and "the majority".

Of course, being an individual with only another 30-40 years to go, I would rather be a wolf than a sheep ...

Parallelisms and projection

I think I may have mentioned in an earlier blog entry all the parallelisms that I see between my personal and my professional life.

Now, I realize that in fact, there is something else going on: it is not so much that there are parallelism, it is my own brain, projecting elements from my professional life (which after all accounts for a significant portion of my activities) onto my private life. Knowing (or at least suspecting) that I was going to be appointed project manager of a small project, for example, I read some books on project management, and suddenly, I started seeing everything around me, including my kids, my hobbies, my social life, and even my life as a whole as projects, with a specific scope, objectives and time-frame.

Next, I started researching databases, to be able to converse with our database designers without looking like a complete idiot. And suddenly, I am at my home computer, happily creating a relational database, standardized to the 3rd normal form (and wishing I could go to the sixth) with the names, addresses, telephone numbers and family ties of my friends and family. And just this week, I went on a management course, and suddenly, I see my kids as staff members, in need of Belbin analysis, and who need to be coached and motivated.

Now some people might accuse me of "having a one-track mind" or of "taking my work home". I am much kinder to myself. I think this is simply my way of processing information. I discovered a long time ago that I learn much better not by trying to memorize abstract concepts or rules, but by applying what I learnt as quickly as possible and/or linking it up to my daily situation, which often means applying it in places other than where was originally intended. And doing this also helps me around another (admittedly slightly strange) hurdle, namely the fact that awareness of the learning process can actually make it impossible for me to learn anything. When I was trying to improve my French, I had to get books that I wanted to read anyway. Getting a book purely for the purpose of improving my French would have defeated the purpose.

The problem, of course, with getting books that I wanted to read is that on the whole, they are a bit more difficult than the book you might choose to improve your language skills. But I persist, and I have good hope that soon (that is to say, within the next five years or so) I will have finished the French book that I chose to improve my French skills.

BTW I have another defense against the accusation that I take my work home: I also "take my home to work" by which I mean that I also export skills and knowledge from my personal life to the office. Settling arguments between my kids, for example, has taught me how to remain calm and keep perspective when everyone else is upset and/or unreasonable, a very useful quality in meetings.

Enough for today. I am a bit tired.