Writing without any writing material

 Sounds like your fairly standard piece of writing, right? Recently I was just complaining to someone that stuff you find around yourself is simply so irrelevant and mostly just noise.

Noise. The universe is bursting with it. Our local universe, mostly. Otherwise what you find around is usually relevant to some extent.

Karachi is slightly less hot and something in my subconscious remembers that it is fall season. Fall triggers a sense of change, loss and transition. I remember discussing it with someone exactly three years ago. He diagnosed it as me being very sensitive.

Have I noticed something recently? Maybe that actions and reactions are mostly spent on completely useless things. But what is relevant then? The straightforward answer-whatever aligns best with your interest-is hard to parse and harder to implement.

In addition to these subtle ideas, fall also induces a session of allergy and fever, in which I am reveling these days. My low grade fever doesn't let me do anything useful, but doesn't garner any sympathy for me either. I just get scolded for being a drama queen everywhere, which I simply can't help.

What else? I have realized that all realizations have a cognitive component, as well as an emotional one. You can be aware of something cognitively, but if you do not emotionally pacify yourself, it is not going to affect you the way you want. It is not going to change the relevant set of ideas inside your head.

What is the human brain, but a set of emotionally imprinted ideas?

I have had another realization- I used to marvel at people giving other people emotionally laden advice in service of specific ideas, even though it would be insidious for the poor person under advice. Recently I've realized that it is plain stupid and people give such injurious advice because they don't have skin in the game. 

Our ideas in the real world so rarely get tested that it is nearly impossible to improve through external feedback. One can very easily get overconfident about the validity of one's own convictions.  In a way, it is useful too; having strong convictions drives you forward in life, and there are few substitutes for it. I guess one has to keep a balance.

Noise, baselines and chains of causality

 Noise is everywhere. Literally everywhere, and this is not just a Karachi problem. I mean I can hear the traffic noises all night long in my room but that is not the kind of noise I am talking about.

Recently I have had the chance to glance at the idiot box several times a day. We mostly have 'talk shows' on, but what boggles the mind is that these shows are no talk and almost all noise. You see these suited gents and ladies, in crisp suits and elegant makeup, moving their tongues and rolling their eyes, all in a very sophisticated fashion. However, there is seldom any signal in what comes out of their educated mouths. Most of it is repetitive-there are two or three points of view at any time and they get parroted back at you with rarely a nuance thrown in- and there are always a few debates that are in vogue. Ultimately these debates are so very pointless that even if they were settled, they would not benefit anyone, except for the debators getting hefty paychecks. To top it all, the points of view that are being debated are all equally useless. N sucks almost as much as P, and all these shouting matches are a way to district the viewers from the simple fact that they N is as useless as P. The age and experience of these gentlemen and ladies gives one the illusion that they are on to something, whereas in reality, they are not and they would serve society more by spending their efforts on something else, say, the pursuit of keeping a desi house clean. 

If people could test these people or POVs systematically, they'd see that it is all noise. This is true, unfortunately, for most elements of our culture. A writer? Turning out crap. A journalist? Exclusively turning out crap. A thinker? Either completely uninformed (like yours truly), or dangerously misinformed. I glanced at facebook after a very long time, and the sheer amount of hatred in an intellectual's post blew me away. Mind you, I wouldn't call this guy uneducated. Hatred however is not the topic of the day.

Baselines. Oh yeah, people should be evaluated according to them, and not absolutely. The deviance from baseline shows you what one is truly capable of.

Chains of causality. These need to be unearthed in a calm and rational manner. What impacts what is a superb way of arriving at a model of the world. How it operates and how it doesn't. Of course absolute answers are few in this domain, but it is a powerful tool. In fact this reminds me that I should do a causality chain analysis of my issues, which are quite a few these days.