Most who know me, know my obession with the Renaissance period – when people like Leonardo Da Vinci defined the ideal man. A man who strived to improve himself, to better himself. (Ladies, forgive me for not using the more politically-correct “person” here, because I speak in the context of the age.) These men were certainly different. They were different from their peers. They strived to excel in multiple human endeavours, ideally simultaneously. Math, literature, painting, sculpting, music, poetry, to name just a very few. It therefore goes that to strive to improve oneself, if followed through better than others, certainly elevates you to a position of distinction. I’ll shortly get to the judgementalism of this statement.
My obsession with Star Trek represented the same ideal. It showed characters who worked to “improve themselves”. Characters who strived to explore the unknown, to excel in diplomacy, warfare (should the need arise), but the biggest objective of all – to gain understanding. Whether it be planets, or civilizations, or warp technology. Understanding is more than just knowledge – it reflects acceptance and peace.
Some of you will argue, I’m sure, that my definition of what “elevates” a person isn’t necessarily the one they must live by. While I will give a rational and tangible answer below, you know my standard response in case you do not care to present a rational argument: “This is my blog. If you disagree, go write your own blog and see who’d read it.”
Let me explain what I mean by “elevation”, when I say that the Renaissance Man was ever-attempting to elevate himself from his peers. From childhood, my dad always reminded me that the normal curve has two narrow points, and it can be very simple to not realize that you are on the wrong tapering end. A person must remain ever-vigilant to this possibility.
We all have intrinsic objective functions we use to evaluate and judge things – situations, people, objects, value, worth, etc. I’m not defining the objective function in any way, I must remind you. Regular readers know that I never insist upon defining the rules of the game myself, but do insist that when someone does define the rules of a game, that they not break those rules themselves.
Based on these objective functions, it is not difficult to measure the quality of a person. Sure you’d say, “But what’s important to you, may not be important to me.”, and boy am I sick and tired of repeating myself but must refer you to the paragraph above. I’m not speaking of what’s important to me, I am indeed speaking of what you claim to be important to yourself and whether you are being truthful, if not to me, at least to yourself. So yes, given what you claim is important to you, it is not difficult ot measure the quality of any process, person, object, whatever. I’m not saying an objective function has to be necessarily simple, but I do insist that it exists (if it didn’t exist, then you are not acting with a purpose, and by definition are not intent on improvement.)
If I find enough squealing pigs repeating the same hashed out point about what I define as improvement is not what they define, I’ll add an edit to this post later. For now, what I am saying is that if you were on a number line, and if you stepped to your left, and the number decreased, then it must increase if you step to the right. This change is called learning (almost all AI, statistical, modelling, game-theoretic, and optimization problems work off this definition.) So a change with a direction as determined to be that which brings you closer to your objective function is what we know as improvement or learning.
Getting back to what this has to do with the Renaissance Man. So the Renaissance Man, was above all, a functional man. Someone who contributed to his objective and struggled to improve upon it. If Leonardo were a great painter, then any painter who might make paintings of equal quality as that of Leonardo, but who could possibly make more of the paintings would be known as a “better” painter. And for the third time, if you were about to say, “who are you to say making more paintings makes for a better painter?”, I must send you back a few paragraphs. See we’re already talking about Leonardo. That means he’s a big deal of some sort. If he’s not, you shouldn’t be arguing against me, so go home. Having accepted that he’s a big deal, we might agree that he’s a big deal because he made some pretty damn popular (be careful now, I didn’t comment on the quality) paintings (I’m not saying only paintings, but paintings being one of the things that made him a big deal – yes I must be excruciatingly precise because some people get on my nerves with idiotic responses.) Now intrinsictly we are stating that paintings that were made of his quality are desirable. If they’re not, he’s no longer a big deal, so go home and leave me alone. If you can agree that paintings are desirable, then logically, we are left with no other conclusion than that anyone who made more paintings of equal quality would be an improvement.
In short, “If Leonardo is a big deal”, then, “Anyone who made paintings of his quality, but more than he made, would be better than him.” If you refuse statement two, you reject statement one.
So that, not by my definition, but your own definition, is what “improvement” means. With improvement comes difference. Change. Deviation. Departure. A man who makes paintings of equal quality of those of Leonardo, but can make more of them must be different in some way (basic math). A few (but not exhaustive) possibilities are, he may be a faster painter, have some kind of tools not known to Leonardo, have magical abilities, more dedication to painting, less interest in any activities other than painting, to name a few. We may not agree on what that difference is, but we must agree that there is a difference.
So far I would expect most people to follow and agree with me. We can agree that somewhere the above logic is intrinsic in our brains and perhaps instincts. Whether it is a modern feature of a man is debatable, and irrelevant. Being more functional is to be better. Being better is to be different.
Now we come to the kicker. How many people do you know who do things just to be different? When did this tendency arise? Is it a sign of too much prosperity and having nothing better to do? I’ll bet you’ve had the following version of a conversation with someone in the last… say… week?
Bob: Hey, I need a phone with features a, b, and c.
Alice: Yup. Those are pretty much the needs of every person I know. Phone X is what you want.
Bob: Yeah… no…. everyone has phone X, so what’s the use?
And there we have it. The decline of a set of philosophies that were in vogue a hundred years ago. Bob doesn’t say, “I wish I had a phone that did 2a, 4b and 6c.” Instead Bob’s objective function is to be different. Yet somehow, it is a tendency for which Bob feels, if not is in actuality, rewarded socially. Once more, if he weren’t rewarded, he wouldn’t do it, and the tendency should die out. Instead I see it growing day by day. Whether its televisions or phones or gaming consoles. I know classic Linux fanatics who have a custom-tweaked Kernel, for what purpose, I don’t know. (Nope, not that I don’t understand their reason, but I’m never told the reason – under the cowardly blanket of telling me I wouldn’t understand.)
At what point did we forget functionality? When did we stop looking at what we need out of an object, process, method or entity, that the entity in question fulfills? At what point did we stop caring for a good piece of music, but more for the adamantium alloy that forms the strings of the guitar on which it was played badly? At what point did we stop caring about whether a phone could do what we need out of it, and instead decided to survive with a few lacking features just so we would be different? At what point did we lose sight of the fact that to be different does not necessarily constitute an improvement by even a long shot?
What surprises me most is that at least ten years ago, people would take the trouble to fake improvement. At least they’d display the sour-grapes syndrome. If they wanted a “different” phone that didn’t have feature ‘c’, they’d take the trouble of claiming they didn’t want or need the feature anyway. Today they’re so blunt as to tell me they can’t perform so-and-so task because they don’t have feature ‘c’, and if they had it, what’s the difference left between them and others? Yes, seriously, I’m not kidding. I’ve been in situations with people where they actually boast about being sub-optimal, because, if they did what everyone else did, how’d they be “cool”? Da Vinci was different because he had an extra feature “d” that nobody had, not because he lacked something everyone in the world had.
It’s like saying, “Whats the big deal? Everyone eats food. I need to be different. I don’t have the faintest idea what makes gourmet food, but I’ll bet not many people eat out of a trash can. Wow, I’m so hip – I eat out of a trash can, that’s so different from what anyone in the world does!”
Where did the Renaissance Man go? What happened to being different by being better, by striving, by struggling, by achieving? Not by someone else’s objective function, but at least by your own? What happened to the guy who bought the phone with all the features they need, and then adding some more of their own, making them different from all others?
This trend is all the more common in a supposedly highly-educated class of engineers today. Most often I find myself dragged into unnecessary discussions about my choices of furniture, or televisions or phones, or anything I do. A lot of times some of the most highly educated people would advise me to act in a sub-human manner. Now I don’t claim I wouldn’t want something functionally superior. If there were Sofa A, but then there were Sofa B which was a superset of functionality of Sofa A, I’d certainly take advice to choose B. Such an argument is painfully difficult to find these days. People tell me, “Sure, Sofa B doesn’t have all the comfort of Sofa A, but it comes with this other thing that others don’t have.” We see this with bad drivers on the roads too. These guys would suck if they were to go on a race course. A man attempting to improve fast driving would go on a race track and improve upon their speeds there, instead of one-upping gentle old ladies who just want to get to the grocery store. Leonardo didn’t compete with kids throwing finger paint on the walls.
The conjunction for indicating improvement is “and”, not “or”. Improvement does not mean degradation of something more fundamental and basic. Improvement, elitism and pretentiousness have their place in this world. They come after basic necessities have been satisfied, not in their stead. The I-have-something-you-don’t-have thing does work, and does command respect or envy, but only when you truly have everything else I don’t have. Otherwise, it only goes to show why techies are ridiculed and laughed at.
I grew up in a village in India where most homes had a refrigerator long before my family had one. From the front, you could see a lot of fancy decorated openings into those houses too. If you ever showed up you’d probably not know why that place was a village, until you found out that none of the houses had toilets. People did their “business” so-to-speak on a large open ground. Sure, they apparently had all the comforts of someone living in the city, but did they? If I’d have started with this story, I’m sure many elitists would have laughed at the “obvious” deficiency of the villagers’ reasoning, and yet, are we any better with our fancy degrees from big universities?
