Chasing money vs. Creating value

This is such a cliche topic, but I don't care, I want to write about it anyways. It seems these days that a lot of people do not differentiate between value and money, and this leads to problems.

A young person my age should focus on creating value, that is, something that is useful to other people. This thing of value that is being created should be something that is more valuable to the person buying it than to the person selling it. So for example, as a young strapping lad, doing physical labor is something that is easy and rewarding for me. As long as my belly is full, and I am hydrated, I can go for hours and it is a great stress relieving workout. But to an older person, digging a hole is tantamount to digging their own grave!

Other people can create value through other avenues. One person might be a really good artist, another person might be a great teacher, whatever. The most important thing is to create things, whether tangible or intangible, that benefit the lives of other people. If you can figure out what exactly you can do to improve other peoples' lives, the money will chase you instead of the other way around.

This is because money is simply a measure of value on an imperfect "ruler" or "scale". By chasing money you are essentially grasping at the ethereal and abstract versus the worldly and concrete. In chasing money, your thoughts and energy are focused on the measurement of value instead of value itself, which is something that I believe is not very fruitful in the long run.

So to summarize: Focus on creating something that will improve the lives of other people. Whether this is through making artwork, providing entertainment through athletic ability, mathematical acuity, interpersonal skills, or anything really, as long as it improves people's lives, and as long as you can do it consistently, you will not have an issue with money. That is because money follows value. By focusing on creating value, you create a sort of gravity field that will pull money towards you....

I am still a young buck, and I have not accumulated enough wealth so that I can let it speak for itself yet. But hopefully in a couple of years I will be able to read this post and say to myself "you were right!"

Exploring the Concept of Privacy

With the hubbub in the media about the issue of privacy these days, many may wonder why exactly it is such a big deal. The following section will examine the social and historical determinants of the concept so that the reader may understand why privacy is so important and how it relates to the modern issue of electronic health records and mobile health.

“Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the scared precincts of private and domestic life; and numerous mechanical devices threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the roof-tops’. For years there has been a feeling that the law must afford some remedy for the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons”  (Warren & Brandeis, 1890).

The author of this excerpt is not talking about social media when he mentions the “unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons” because he wrote this in 1869 before computers and the internet existed. The mechanical devices which he refers to were some of the first commercially available cameras being used by journalistic reporters at the time. As such, we see that the issue of technology and privacy is not something that is new to our society. While it is true that the information landscape has changed a great deal since the late 19^th century, many of the issues remain fundamentally the same today in the 21^st century.

From a psychological perspective privacy is seen as a form of social control which enhances the autonomy of the individual (Margulis, 2003). It allows the individual to differentiate between what is the ‘self’, what is outside the ‘self’ – family, society, environment, etc. – and the relationship between the two. In this way, privacy is seen as an essential feature of the human experience in achieving healthy psychological functioning (Margulis, 2003). In studies of psychiatric settings, some of the consequences of a lack of privacy included: stress, diminishment of voluntary control, dehumanization and the inability to reintegrate and operate normally in society (Goffman, 1961) (Johnson, 1974) (Margulis, 2003).

From a societal perspective, privacy is important for three main reasons (Margulis, 2003): (i) there is a common interest among members of society to maintain privacy; (ii) privacy is essential to the proper functioning of democracy; and (iii) privacy is seen as a commodity because “technological and market forces make it increasingly difficult for any one person to have privacy unless everyone has a similar level of privacy” (Regan, 1995).

From a legal perspective, the concept of privacy is understood as being a product of the individualistic Western ideal ( Nagenborg, 2006) known as the “right-to-life” (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). The “right-to-life” consists of three fundamental components (Warren & Brandeis, 1890): (i) the individual’s right to be free from violence and other forms of bodily injury; (ii) the recognition of the individual as an active agent capable of making choices free from unwanted restraint – also known as freedom and liberty; and (iii) the individual’s right to own property – also known as the right to private property (Warren & Brandeis, 1890) (Greaves, 1975). The right to private property is the “dominion which one individual claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual” (Greaves, 1975). Property that is worth owning is usually something valuable that improves the owner’s quality of life in some way. The right to own property set the foundation for the development of the more abstract Right to intellectual property and Right to privacy (Warren & Brandeis, 1890).

The right to privacy is closely related to the right to intellectual property in that they both protect intangible products belonging to an individual (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). Intangible property is different from tangible property in the sense that it does not have a physical presence and cannot be touched or grabbed in the same way a concrete object like a chair or baseball can be touched. But just because something does not have a concrete presence does not mean that it does not have value and cannot improve the quality of life of its owner. Intangible property are ideas and abstractions that are usually expressed by mean of words, painting, music and other forms of artistic production (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). The Right to Intellectual property grew out of the individual’s right to earn profits from the publication and dissemination of the ideas found in their literary and artistic productions (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). Its legislation served as a protection and encouragement of the conscious production of labor (Warren & Brandeis, 1890). The Right to intellectual property set the legislative foundation for the Right to privacy (Warren & Brandeis, 1890).

The right to privacy is different from the right to intellectual property in the sense that not only does it recognize the individual’s right to immaterial property – through the expression of ideas and information – it also recognizes the individual’s right to decide freely, without authoritarian interference, which of these intangible materials can be appropriately expressed in public and which ones cannot. In other words, The Right to Privacy is the individual’s freedom to choose what information about themselves they wish to divulge to others and which information about themselves they do not (Margulis, 2003). For example, the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution^[1] protects individuals from unwanted police searches without the presence of a probable cause – an individual’s privacy may not be invaded unless a good enough reason has been determined through the issuance of a search warrant by a judge (McWhirter, 1994) (Margulis, 2003). This protects individuals from institutions which may not always have the citizen’s’ best interest in mind. It solidifies the concept of the individual as an independent entity capable of making decisions with his/her own best interests in mind free from the coercion of an outside authority.

The importance of individual privacy to psychology and society is recognized in the legal framework of Western Democratic nations today (Margulis, 2003). But due to the rapidly evolving modern technological landscape, the law is often several steps behind in ensuring that the individual’s right to privacy is well protected (Barrows & Clayton, 1996) (Tene, 2008). Furthermore, the definition of privacy and what type of information should or should not be disclosed, is constantly undergoing change according to evolving societal norms and it also varies greatly from individual to individual (Barrows & Clayton, 1996).

The emergence of inexpensive information storage technologies have allowed for the creation of vast databases containing an enormous amount of information about individuals (Tene, 2008).With this, has come the development of a swath of confidentiality and informed consent issues that remain unaddressed by our current legal framework (Tene, 2008). For example, Google, the internet search behemoth, collects information on all of its users’ internet activities – whether this is through its search engine, e-mail service or any of the many internet tools that it offers “free” of charge – and compiles the information in databases on its servers (Tene, 2008). With data mining techniques, Google claims it is able to enhance the internet experience of its users by creating personalized and targeted advertisement (Barrows & Clayton, 1996) (Tene, 2008). However, due to a lack of clear protective legislation of personal information in Canada and the U.S., “third parties such as financial institutions, insurance companies, online service providers, and government agencies, [may have access] to databases with massive amounts of personally identifiable information, including in certain cases information not known to the individuals themselves”  (Tene, 2008). Great psychological and financial harm can come to individuals if their personal information falls into the hands of the wrong people, especially information relating to personal health (Barrows & Clayton, 1996).

This is known as the problem of user informed consent and confidentiality. Informed consent dictates that the user of the service (Barrows & Clayton, 1996): (i) must be made aware of what information is being disclosed and the significance of this information; (ii) must be made aware to whom this information will be disclosed to; (iii) is capable of making lucid decisions; (iv) willingly gives consent without coercion. In the case of Google, or Facebook, these criteria are not met, since it is not clear what and to whom this information is being disclosed to (Barrows & Clayton, 1996). Furthermore, in a sense users are being coerced because the only way to refuse consent is to forgo using the service.  Confidentiality is the notion that a user’s personal information should only be used for the purposes of the service being provided and should never be disclosed to a third party without the user’s explicit consent (Harwood, 2006).

References:

Nagenborg, M. (2006). The Dichotomy of the Private and the Public. Privacy and Surveillance Technology - Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (pp. 1-10). Bielefeld: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research.

Barrows, R. C., & Clayton, P. D. (1996). Privacy, Confidentiality, and Electronic Medical Records. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 139-148.

Goffman, E. (1961). Asylums. Garden City, NY: Anchor.

Greaves, B. B. (1975). Free Market Economics: A Reader. New York City: Irvington on Hudson.

Harwood, I. A. (2006). Confidentiality Constraints within Mergers and Acquisitions: Gaining Insights through a ‘bubble’ Metaphor. British Journal of Management, 347-359.

Johnson, C. A. (1974). Privacy as personal control. In D. H. Carson, & S. T. Marguilis, Man-environment interactions: Evaluations and applications: Part 2, Vol 6. Privacy (pp. 88-100). Washington, DC: Environmental Design Research Association.

Margulis, S. T. (2003). Privacy as a Social Issue and Behavioural Concept. Journal of Social Issues, 243-261.

McWhirter, D. A. (1994). Search, Seizure, and Privacy. Pheonix: Oryx Press.

Regan, P. M. (1995). Legislating Privacy: Technology, social values, and public policy. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Tene, O. (2008). What Google Knows: Privacy and Internet Search Engines. Selected Works of Omer Tene (in press), 1-61.

Warren, S. D., & Brandeis, L. D. (1890, Dec 15). The Right to Privacy. Harvard Law Review, 4(5), 193-220.

---

[1] The American Constitution, ratified in 1787, had an enormous influence in shaping the legislation of Democratic countries around the world, including Canada.

Youth Unemployment

Comment on the post "19, and My Generation"

I am 21, turning 22 in two days.

I am wondering... I have just graduated with a B.Sc. in Psychology (lol) and I am working a manual labor cash job while I apply to medical school.

The employers that I've worked for this summer tell me that they cannot find enough guys who can actually work. It seems nobody wants to put their back into their labour.

So far I have not had any problem finding work. One day in June I got into an argument with my boss and quit, only to find a new job that very morning. Right now I am using this apparent scarcity of good workers in the market to my advantage. This week I will be asking my current boss to raise my hourly wage to $18/hr from $15/hr or else I will find somebody else who pays better.

Meanwhile, I have a bunch of buddies who smoke weed all day and play Call of Duty all night, complaining that they cannot find a decent job. Also, there seems to be some sort of a negative stigma surrounding manual labor jobs, almost as if it is below status work. I don't care though because money is money, my body is robust, and obviously I will not be doing it for the rest of my life.

So, my question to you Evan is: Is there some sort of a labor demand mismatch that is responsible for this high youth unemployment? Is my intuition, that a lot of guys my age are just too lazy to "man-up" and gain a few calluses on their hands, correct?

I suspect something funny is going on when I see reports such as this on one hand, and the deficit of workers on the construction yard on the other.

What's your take? What does the data say?

Great blog by the way!

Empathy, Sympathy and Psychopathy

During discussions I find that a lot of people seem to get the words “sympathy” and “empathy” mixed up, or use them interchangeably as if they mean the same thing. For today’s blog topic I will explain the important differences between Sympathy and Empathy.

Empathy is the ability of an individual to take on the perspective of another person. It allows one individual to imagine how another individual is feeling, acting and thinking. I hypothesize that empathy is an emergent property of the neural mechanisms described by motor neuron theory.

Our capacity to be empathetic is due to the fact that all humans are physiologically and neurologically similar to one another. This is because all humans arose from common ancestors whose bodies and minds evolved under the same selective pressures and dealt with the same types of experiences. These experiences shaped our neural machinery over several generations so that now, the structure of our brains is fundamentally the same among members of our species. Of course, due to our inherent uniqueness, the structure of one individual’s neural machinery is never identical to another’s, but it is similar enough so that most individuals’ experiences are concordant.

For example, my perception of the color red might be very different from yours, but we can both agree that a particular stop sign is red. The idea that I can put myself in your shoes and imagine what you are experiencing is empathy. The fact that my brain and nervous system are structured fundamentally the same way as yours, allows for this possibility.

I can empathize, and thus understand and appreciate, a broad range of the emotions and experiences that you are feeling, whether it is happiness, sadness, anger, excitement, suffering, etc. I can even "empathize" with your thoughts through different forms of communication. For example, when I am reading an essay, I am essentially empathizing with the author’s thoughts and ideas regarding a particular argument or topic. By reading the essay, I am recreating my own version of the neural activity that was originally developed in the author’s mind. Therefore, empathy is the recreation of neural activity which can correspond to a broad range of human experiences, whether they are emotional, intellectual, or physical, from one individual’s mind to another.

Sympathy, on the other hand, is fundamentally different. It is an emotion which elicits a nurturing response from somebody who is witnessing somebody else’s suffering. Suffering is a necessary prerequisite for sympathy. I can only feel sympathy for you if you are suffering. As I witness you in pain, “suffering patterns” in my brain are activated which then causes me to feel what you are feeling and encourages me to nurture and care for you to alleviate this distress that we now both feel.

If I am walking downtown and I see a bum, I empathize with the bum’s suffering and may feel a need to help him by giving him some extra change (or some extra crack). In essence, upon seeing him I may, consciously or unconsciously, imagine myself in his shoes (or grocery-bag-tied-with-elastic-bands-footwear) and suffer vicariously through him. This suffering which I feel then elicits a nurturing response from me called sympathy. Thus, we can reason that empathy is a prerequisite for sympathy. We cannot experience sympathy without experiencing empathy. But is the reverse true? Is sympathy required to experience empathy? The following example will help illustrate. Say you’ve made me so upset (i.e. by insulting my mother) that I punch you in the face. Having been punched in the face several times in the past, I can empathize with what you are currently experiencing. I know that your face is going to be sore for a couple of days and that you will suffer. However, since it is something that I felt you deserved, I will not feel any sympathy for you. After all, you were insulting my mother, and NOBODY is allowed to insult my mother! Therefore, I reason that sympathy is not required for empathy.

This brings me to the topic of psychopaths. If you did not discern between empathy and sympathy before reading this article, you should not feel stupid! It is a distinction that has been overlooked by mainstream academic psychologists with PhDs! For example, the DSM-IV, which is essentially an encyclopedia of disorders that mental health professionals use to diagnose patients, defines a psychopath as such: “Psychopaths possess a general lack of empathy. It includes deficiencies in comprehension and appreciation of others’ experiences and motivations, lack of tolerance of differing perspectives and diminished understanding of the effects of own behavior on others. At an extreme they are simply unable to understand the emotional states of other people, except in a purely detached, intellectual sense. Other people are thus little more than objects for their personal gratification. They are not disturbed by the suffering of others, nor do they take pleasure in making others happy. This callousness extends to everybody, family or strangers alike. They neglect other people's needs and desires and can casually inflict cruelty.” [Emphasis added]

Having just clearly differentiated between empathy and sympathy, it is difficult for me to accept this definition as being true. I argue that some psychopaths have an excellent ability to empathize. I would argue further that the ability to empathize has nothing to do with being a psychopath; rather it is the lack of sympathy which is the defining feature.

A good psychopath has a very intimate understanding of how his (or her) victim’s mind functions. By understanding the goals, motivations, desires, emotional and cognitive patterns, and everything else that makes a person tic, the psychopath gains great leverage for manipulating his victim’s emotions, thoughts and behaviour. Without this intimate understanding, there is no leverage and the psychopath is powerless. Thus, the psychopath is an expert at a “complex form of psychological inference in which observation, memory, knowledge, and reasoning are combined to yield insights into the thoughts and feelings of others." [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19283568] The psychopath is essentially an expert empathizer.

The successful psychopath is able to manipulate people with ease, and this is something that requires a lot of emotional and social intelligence which can only be achieved through high levels of empathy. What psychopaths are lacking, which can be troubling to other members of society, is sympathy, pity, remorse, or any other “nurture-inducing” emotions, which is probably why men are more prone to being labelled psychopathic than women. This is because women are naturally inclined to be nurturing due to their biological role as mothers.

I am sure most of you know this already, but contrary to popular belief, psychopaths are not crazy people who go around killing others for fun. Psychopaths are simply people like you and I who want to achieve their goals in the easiest way possible. Some of them just happen to have an intimate understanding of the way emotions function in humans and view psychological manipulation as a valid tool to achieve their goals. They may appear to be “unable to understand the emotional states of other people, except in a purely detached and intellectual sense”, as the psychologists put it, but how else is it possible to understand something fully without being detached and viewing it intellectually? The good psychopath places himself above the storm of his emotions to view things objectively and to make decisions in a calculated and rational way.

To sum it up, empathy is the ability to share an experience with another person. Sympathy is the feeling of distress upon witnessing another person’s suffering and the nurturing reaction that it elicits. I hope this cleared things up.

Graduating Undergraduate

I am almost done my classes.

That means I can devote some time to spewing out some of the ideas from my head, onto this keyboard, through the copper wires and fiber optic cables of the internet on to your computer screen, straight through your iris and into your mind. Unless of course you are blind. In that case fuck you.

So whoever is reading this (that is if anybody actually reads this blog), get ready for a veritable onslaught of critical information to keep your curious mind satiated with delectable topics ranging from: micro¯o economics, human psychology, philosophical liberalism (my narcissistic perversion of it anyway), critical reasoning, scientific understanding and my (keen) observations on life in general.

Basically this blog will be an online diary for the public to explore the methodically insane thought processes going on my mind.

Deleting facebook

I am still young but I am starting to appreciate the value of time more and more every day. The time I put into facebook does not produce anything tangible. I get no value out of it. I can find different means to contact and interact with people i actually want to see. I don't care about other people's lives and the pictures they take. I don't care about what other people look like, what other people are doing. I just care about me, (and a select few people). Browsing through pictures and videos just feels wrong. It makes me feel like a stalker. Stalkers are lame.

T.V., internet video surfing, playing video games are all just a waste of time. I don't want to be a mindless drone who does what he is told. I'm not impressed by flashy shit. The stuff worth having in life are not just dropped onto your lap. Anything worth having must be wrestled with and taken. Life can be a tough mother fucker. I live a more comfortable and secure life then 99% of the people on this earth. So i most definitely should be taking risks. I want to explore and learn, create and conquer.

So, instead of Facebook and Twitter, and T.V, internet surfing and video games in my free time, I will:

Read books to gain different and valuable perspectives.
Continue writing my blog to improve my English writing skillz.
Pick up a hobby that will help me earn money down the road (programming, new language, martial art...? More brainstorming on this later).
Look for different kind of work I could do. Gain skills and experience so I can be a kick ass entrepreneur. I don't want to worry about money. I want to be able to live freely, without somebody telling me what to do, telling me what hours to work, telling me where to go, telling me how to act.

emotions

Emotions must have played an important role in our evolutionary past. Emotions guide our most primal behaviors. I hypothesize that animals whose cerebral cortex are less developed, live a more emotional life.
I believe our emotions were very useful in the more primitive environments in which we evolved: the hunter gatherer society.

Emotions range from fear which prepares an organism for fight or flight.

Hunger is for signaling lack of nutrients.

Horniness signals the need to find a mate and to reproduce.

Sadness could signal to members of the tribe, some sort of distress. The sadness attracts the attention of caring family members who give the sad person attention, which makes them feel better.

Happiness signals a good situation (i.e. enough food, water, mate selection) and denotes high social value.

Many people let their emotions govern their behavior. I think to thrive in today's society it is better to be in control of your emotions as much as possible. To be cool as a cucumber, calculating, precise. Our emotions were designed for simpler times. Its our job to use our intellect to shape our emotions to help us get ahead.

In my case, I would like to show loving compassion to my family and close friends as much as possible. Everybody else is one among many, anonymous. Treat these people in a way that benefits you the most. Be polite with everybody but do not tolerate their bullshit. Remember that people are a commodity in great surplus. If they give you trouble there are literally millions of people out there who can replace them...