sudo life

A week or two ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. We were discussing a situation she found herself in, something she had been quite excited about for quite sometime, though I have been less sure about. During the course of our conversation I was surprised to hear that she seemed to have started to share some of my reservations. I don’t want to go into specifics, in order to protect the guilty, but the abstract situation is this: my friend is apathetic about her own feelings, and continues to be in her situation because it makes other people happy. I wasn’t sure what to think about this, except to feel a profound sadness, coupled with the shock that someone could actually feel apathetic towards their own happiness. It was this conversation that started me thinking about apathy, and I wanted to share some of those thoughts now.

There is this phenomena where one hears a new word, or they discover something new, and then they suddenly start noticing it everywhere. This is called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. While this isn’t exactly what I experienced, once I had ‘apathy’ on my mind, I started noticing it everywhere. I was stunned at times to see just how proud people can be of it. It’s the attitude that shows as ‘look at how much I don’t care about anything.’ Of course, at that level, there is some self-referential ‘caring’ going on. They care about showing other how much they don’t care. True and complete apathy would leave someone little more than an unmoving shell. But let’s leave that alone.

I started thinking about how this sort of attitude could come to be. I’m not a psychologist, or a sociologist, so this is my lay opinion. I’m sure that there are other factors involved, but the one I struck on is this: perhaps there is simply too much to care about.

In our new globalized world, we have global problems. We are inundated with problems we feel we should care about every day. Here’s a short, incomplete list that I came up with on the fly:

1. Global Warming – Not only is this a global problem, but it’s one that individuals can’t really do anything about. They can live as ‘green’ as they can, but until you have most people doing this, not much will change, and perhaps it wouldn’t change even then. Global warming makes us face a deadly problem coupled with our own individual hopelessness.
2. Overpopulation – The planet can only hold so many people, and our population is growing exponentially. We have limited resources, which are dwindling everyday. This problem is coupled by the moral and ethical dilemmas of controlling population growth. Is it acceptable to limit the number of children someone can have?
3. Energy Consumption – This problem is tightly coupled with the first two. We have billions of people who need to use energy, and the way we’ve been generating that energy is through the use of fossil fuels, which [probably] leads to global warming. The issues of alternative energy are not clear. What is the average person supposed to do?

Here are some national issues for Americans:

1. The War on Terror – What does this even mean? It all seemed so simple 7 years ago.
2. Dwindling Rights – Coupled with #4. What are we supposed to do about our dwindling rights? It’s too surreal, why is this happening?
3. Guantanamo Bay – Human rights violations. Waterboarding. Torture. These words haven’t been associated with our country very much, at least not seriously. How can we take them seriously now?
4. Education Reform – Our educational system is far from perfect, but it’s too set in it’s ways to change. We’re stuck with it.
5. Value of the Dollar – What does it even mean to have the dollar valued at it’s lowest ever?

I have eight things on this list, and realistically, I could have spent the next month just adding to is. Is the average person capable of even caring about all these, let alone understanding the nuances involved with them? I care about all of them in some abstract sense, but I can feel pretty hopeless about most of these. Even if I spent all my time dedicated to one of these issues, it’s unlikely to change anything. But that isn’t even a possibility. I must work to make a wage so I can pay my bills and deal with my own personal life. I realize that’s a rather cynical attitude, but it’s also true. There isn’t much one person can do.

It reminds me of the prisoner’s dilemma, but on a much more massive scale. In the prisoner’s dilemma, you have a situation where a person can gain or lose something of value. Here’s wikipedia’s explanation, which is much better than what I could have come up with:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (”defects”) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

So basically, if everyone looks out for themselves, everyone ‘loses.’ If everyone cooperates except one person, that person ‘wins’ and everyone else ‘loses.’ The optimal solution for everyone is to have everyone cooperate. The problem is that when everyone is cooperating, the individual can start to think, ‘well, if I just look out for myself a little bit more, I can gain much more.’ It’s a very tempting thing to do. And so easy to do, especially when it can be done without anyone else knowing.

Hell, a whole book could be written about how this ‘game’ can be applied to just one of those issues listed above. But applying it to all of them, I think the answer is clear. It is simply easier to not care, and by not caring, there is nothing to worry about, and there is nothing to fail at.

Does this explain the prevalence of so much apathy? Maybe, maybe not.

But in any case, it’s something to be concerned about. Better add that to the list.

Philosophy apathy, current events, game theory, Science

Since it’s getting to be that time of the year for summer romances, I want to write something about the subject. I’m calling this a Game Theory Analysis, though I know very little about the subject, and am probably greatly misusing the term, and am not really doing Game Theory at all. But I’m going to stick my neck out and just go with it, and we’ll see what happens.

There is a specific sort of situation that I want to analyze, and this is for you guys out there that have a hard time asking out those great treasures of humanity – women. Let’s assume that you are friends with this girl, but you’re also strongly attracted to her, and would like to explore say, a more romantic approach. But there is a nagging fear that asking her out might ruin even your friendship, and your left off worse than before. So let’s see if we can setup a matrix that models this basic situation:

Ok, let me explain what we have so far. Basically, the guy has the top choices, or strategies, either to Ask her out or to Not Ask her out. The girl as the choices on the left, Yes or No. A yes would indicate that she is interested in pursuing a more romantic approach as well, and a no would indicate that she’s not interested in you.

The next trick is assigning values to each of these boxes. There will be two values in each box, one of each of the participants. In this matrix, the one of the left will be for the girl, and the one on the right will be for the guy:

Ok, now I’ve filled out a few values, and we can see what our best strategy might be. However, any conclusions would only be as good as the values I put in, so I need to explain those first. Obviously, the best possible outcome is if you ask and she is aggreable. So I put +10 to both to represent this. The others are perhaps a little trickier.

If you ask and she is not agreeable, then I give her a zero, and you a -3. Even though it seems hard at the time, a momentary rejection is relatively easy to get over in the long run. The friendship might suffer a bump in the road, but if it’s a true friendship, it ought to last. You might argue that the girl should recieve a negative amount here as well, but that is a judgement to make in your own situation.

The next possible outcome is if you don’t ask, and she is agreeable. Then you both lose out with neither taking the risk. The final possible out come is if you don’t ask and she isn’t agreeable, then she loses nothing, but you lose as you wonder ‘what might have been.’

Ok, so there are the explanations for the values. You might change them around however you want, but I’m going to jump right into the analysis now.

If we look at the over-all picture, we can see something interesting. The best you can possibly do by Not Asking is a -10, while the worse you can do by asking is a -3. If you don’t ask, there is absolutely nothing to gain, but if you do ask, you have the possibilty of gaining quite a bit. Obviously, for you, the best strategy is to always Ask. The same is true if you look at the situation from her perspective. The best outcome for her is your asking, and the worse outcome possible from from you not asking. In the middle, she neither gains nor loses, so it’s a pretty clean cut deal.

Of course, this is probably over-simplistic, not to mention the nearly arbitrary nature of the values for the matrix, but I think it is ‘reasonable enough’ to get your gears going.

The bottom line, guys, you should always ask her out. Quit pansying around and just do it.

Mathematics dating, game theory, math