Original Cin

In my last post on personal time management, I presented time as a sort of “funnel of certainty” with events far in the future being very uncertain, events in the near future being fairly certain, events happening right now as being entirely certain, and events in the past becoming progressively less certain. I also gave a fairly broad definition of what an event is. I’m now going to present some thoughts on goals, and what makes certain events important for a person. Once again, I’m thinking as a write, and these ideas are still very rough.

A goal is a type of event. It is something that we want to happen in the future. While some people may indicate that a goal must have a measurable end result or tangible finish, or say that a goal must have some sort of psychological impact (”It must be realistic but still a bit of a stretch”), I consider anything that is desired to occur the future to be a goal. All of the following can be goals under this definition:

• Becoming an immortal god
• Eating dinner
• Washing the dishes
• Going for a walk
• The sun will rise tomorrow
• Playing a chess game

Note that the chance of a goal actually occurring does not change whether an event is a goal or not. Goals under this new definition are anything from certain to impossible.

Although humans have the ability to multitask, this ability is severely limited. The goals of “walking around the mall” and “chewing bubble gum” can easily occur simultaneously for the vast majority of human beings. But as mentioned in the last time management post, the goals of “vacationing in Las Vegas” and “vacationing in London” are mutually exclusive and contradictory. For completeness, it’s possible that some goals may be more likely to occur together without any cause and effect relationship between them – as a personal, I usually play a video game while exercising on an exercise bike.

Of course, dependencies do exist among goals. Suppose my goal is to become a famous actor. I might start by working toward the goal of taking theater classes, then being in some small live productions, and working my way up into movies and building a personal brand. On the other hand, I might just wait to be discovered as a great actor by a movie executive. Or, I could produce an amateur movie and post it online (YouTube?). Regardless of if I wait for a lucky break, produce a full movie, or start posting to YouTube, taking an acting class will probably help — but only if it does prior to completing those activities. Other dependencies are not dependent upon order: If your goal is to have a simple, four-legged chair, and you’re in possession of all the parts, all of those parts must be assembled, but it most likely doesn’t matter which leg is attracted to the seat first.

To summarize, here are the relationships that a goal may have to any other goal:

• Null – The goals have no or virtually no expected affect on each other
• Complimentary – The goals are more likely to occur simultaneously than separately
• Contradictory – The goals are more likely to occur separably than simultaneously
• Dependent – A partial or complete cause and effect relationship exists between one goal and the other; this may or may not make the “cause” goal a subgoal of the “effect” goal. It is not necessarily true that a dependent goal cannot also be complimentary or contradictory, and dependent goals can be either order-sensitive or order-insensitive.

A fascinating post just appeared on the Adam Smith Institute blog. It caught my eye due to the title, of course:

These traits [of humans to change their environment] have served them well, but the environment they desire to control includes other people. There is an inbuilt drive to control other people, as there is to tame the natural environment. This is, if you like, original sin, the desire to control others so they will meet our needs. It can be controlled by a moral act, one which recognizes that others are morally equivalent to yourself, and as entitled as you are to shape their own circumstances. A balance is reached in which each of us tries to improve our own circumstance, but trying not to impinge on the right of others to do the same. We restrain our inbuilt drive to control them, and they do the same in return.

- Dr Madsen Pirie, Original Sin

The full post is interesting and not too long at all. Definitely one of those things to think about.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of “King Corn” lately, and what it may mean to the U.S. For those of you not familiar with the situation, corn (”maize”) production is very subsidized by the U.S. government. Among other things, this makes high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) cheaper than it would otherwise be. Both of these statements are fairly mundane, and you’d need fairly strong evidence to dispute them. It’s widely accepted that soft drink producers tend to use HFCS instead of sugar in the U.S. because of such subsidies.

This leads to two complaints: first, there is a lot of ancedotal evidence that, contrary to the corn lobby’s claims, there is a noticeable if subtle difference in taste between soft drinks made from HFCS and sugar, and that the sugar taste is superior. Secondly, there is a correlation between overall obesity in the U.S. and HFCS consumption. Although the industry likes to point out that causality is not proven, it does seem quiet possible. Note that other industries (e.g. artificial sweeteners) would benefit from a decrease in HFCS consumption, and are actively pushing this issue (consider recent ads for sugar and the longstanding Juicy-Juice ads — although whoever makes Juicy-Juice wants soft drink makers to continue to use HFCS for as long as possible and then incur a heavy capital cost to switch, no switch right away, so that they can continue to malign them and their use of HFCS as long as possible).

All of this leads me to today’s musing: HFCS is available to consumers under the Karo brand (thanks Wikipedia!), but I have never seen it have the kind of marketing and shelf space that other sweeteners have. People just aren’t as inclined to put corn syrup in a drink that they’re making themselves. Although I’ve often seen arguments for either honey or sugar for tea, I’ve never seen someone seriously suggest corn syrup, HFCS or otherwise. As a side note, Wikipedia quotes Mark Bittman as indicating that even pecan pie, a recipe more or less cut from whole cloth by Karo by the company’s own admission, tastes better with sugar. This seems to be an indication that if consumers were going to make soda from scratch, they would use sugar, and not HFCS. To the extent that HFCS is used by soda companies but consumers think they are buying “carbonated sugar water” this represents a serious market distortion, akin to a bait-and-switch, if either complaint above regarding HCFS is true.

There have been some surprising changes and lack of changes with the recent debates. Here’s what FX says now, as compared to my last post on the topic:

First of all, note that the inferred and actual values for “Any Republican” and “Any Democrat” have not changed. There was, and still is, a 60% chance of a Democratic president and a 40% chance of a Republican one.

Now, on the Republican side: No changes for the long shots. Rice has gone from an unlikely possibility to a long shot. There’s been no change for John McCain, and virtually no change for Giuliani.

On the Democratic side, things are a bit more interesting. Oddly, FX is convinced that Al Gore is still a possibility (I think Osama bin Laden is more likely to be arrested for shoplifting in Kansas than Al Gore is likely to be our next President); he’s currently given a 8% chance. Clinton advanced from 25% to 30%. John Edwards remains a 9%. The inferred chance of another Democrat being elected, and the maximum chance for Barrak Obama, has declined dramatically, from 24% to 13%.

I was just thinking about electronic voting this morning, and I’m curious to know why a particular verification method isn’t used, or even talked about – displaying the total votes for the machine.

Here’s how it would work: At the beginning of election day, for every issue that’s being voted on, the machine assigns and prints a random, fake total number of votes so far to protect the anonymity of the first voter. This total is displayed on screen with that issue for the duration of the election. The number assigned is recorded by an election official, perhaps by securing a printout from the machine itself, and voting begins. When the first person votes, they can see the previous fake vote total, and that their votes incremented their respective totals by one. The voter receives a token indicating that they did, in fact, cast a vote, and the vote itself is stored electronic on multiple commodity storage devices. The voter token is taken to an election official and collected. Votes are tabulated in some sort of WORM system, so that it is possible to add committed votes, but not reduce them (this stops a malicious programmer from altering totals when someone is not looking at the device; the total number of votes must equal the total number of tokens collected). In order to prevent two people from working together to infer someone else’s vote, incoming voters should be randomly assigned to a voting machine. At the end of the day, the election officials subtract the initial random totals from the totals that machines are reporting, verify that the total number of votes equals the total number of tokens collected for each machine,

By no means easy or a complete plan, but it’s not rocket science either. It might be argued that displaying the total like this could cause a information cascade – this can be mitigated by making the initial random value very large within a narrow range, so that the percent of votes that appears to go to any option seems to be close to 1/n, where n is the number of options available to an issue — with an initial value of twice the number of eligible voters +-1% and only one voting machines, the final displayed value for an option would not exceed 68% for a two-option issue (1 part assigned for, 1 part assigned against, 1 real part for, and as much as 2% moved from the assigned against to the assigned for by chance).

I’m not satisfied with the current state of personal time management. I think it’s just fundamentally wrong, and something that could benefit from a probabilistic approach. So, I’ve decided to start from square one and create my own system of time management; I could certainly use one. The ideas I’m writing down are rough, untested, and unconventional; take them with a grain of salt until they’ve led somewhere useful, and bear with just a tiny bit of kookery until then, since I’ll admit that my knowledge of time management comes mostly from observing conventional time management tools rather than reading literature.

First of all, I consider time to be a finite resource into which events may be placed. I will define what an “event” is shortly. Time is not a tangible resource, nor is it a physical thing. Although modern physics tells us that time may be experienced differently by different observers, I take time as a constant, since people do not typically move at relativistic speeds relative to one another in every day life. Time can be measured by the passing of events.

An event is anything that takes up some amount of time. An exceptionally durable rock remaining motionless and unchanging for tens of thousands of years is an event. So is a person blinking. Events can be thought of as consisting of other, smaller events, such as the rock remaining motionless and unchanging for an hour, or the first twitch of an eyelid. The present can considered an atomic, universal event which consists of the state of everything. Events closer to the present are more certain to occur than those further way. If an eyelid goes down, it is almost certain to go back up next. If the rock is in front of me now, it almost certainly will not be halfway across the earth a minute from now. It follows that present actions have a greater potential to affect events which are further into the future. Past events are also uncertain, in that the further back in time an event is, the more difficult it is to determine the nature of the event; this is of less interest for time management, except to the extent that we can use a record of the past to inform future decisions. To this extent, we can take past events as recorded as they are observed, and consider this record to be “certain.”

Because events can be broken into subevents, the creation of such subevents makes those events more likely to occur — A seed planted makes a tree more likely to grow and live out its entire lifecycle in a particular location, for example. Because events do not occur in a vacuum, they may require a certain environment in order to occur with any reasonable probability, and may therefore require prerequisite events which are not subevents. The creation of Earth is a prerequisite to forests growing on its surfaces, but the creation of Earth is not a part of the trees growing (but the growing trees may considered be a subevent of the existence of the Earth).

Implicit in the above is that more than one event can occur simultaneously. However, some events cannot reasonably occur together. Others are simply unlikely to occur together. It is not possible for a person to spend a week vacationing simultaneously in Japan and Florida. These can be considered contradictory events.

All of this means that any system that assumes the certainty of future events cannot be satisfactory for time management. One of the things that has persistently annoyed me about Sunbird is that it assumes that future scheduled events inevitably occur (it also has a less than impressive concept of the present, limited merely to the current day).

Looking at the Wikipedia entry for event, one of the definitions given is an entry within the iCalendar standard, defined in the IETF’s RFC 2445. Although I’ve only given a quick glance to this specification, it does not appear to support an uncertain view of time. A new file format therefore makes sense given the current environment.

Browsing through various pages on project management on Wikipedia, the thoughts I’ve outlined above bear at least a superficial resemblance to the thinking behind Event Chain, but with a different emphasis.