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.
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