Beliefs and Values

I just thought that the rigidness with which one holds his values and beliefs journeys through three phases in his life.

The first is when one is young and mindless, at that time the beliefs are not fully formed and there is no solid base on which they can be he supported, to put it simply, at that phase we don't yet know what to believe and we are not very strict about it either.

The second phase of a thinking mans beliefs is when he starts growing up and develops critical thinking, at that time we all try to solidify our beliefs and values, it looks as a parallel effort to solidify our own existance, so we try to have firm beliefs and (at least the sane of us) try to back them up with logic and reason.

The third phase is, I think, When someone realizes he is almost done if not completely grown up, this is the point at which we realize that more and more of our values and beliefs are a matter of negotiation and context sensitive.

If there are more phases to come, I do not know. Maybe the next phase is the "I am close to death, the hell with beliefs and values, I want just to live my life". Maybe this is the last one, only time will tell!

P.S: I read somewhere something that sounds much classier in Greek than it sounds in English, is goes like: Don't be a prisoner of your beliefs,do not try to solidify them as you deny yourself the chance to grow. Wise words I say, it must have been someone in the third phase described above... or maybe a next one.

SWAY - complexity and evolution and egg prices, all with a hint of determinism.

The world, and when I say "the world", I actually mean humans in the most physical sense, is not programmed for all cases, at least this is what comes to mind as an afterthought after reading part of a book called "SWAY - The irresistible pull of irrational behavior". In short this book deals with the -we would like to think- rare irrational behavior of people in a variety of cases.

Something that caught my attention was an empirical study that showed that people react more to something worse than they do to something equally better, in this case it was egg prices, and the result was that people bought less eggs when the price increased than less eggs when the price equally decreased.

As I recalled this while answering trivial undergraduate students question at a class mailing list, I thought that the outcome of this type of studies could not possibly be defined beforehand by the way the human body or mind is shaped through evolution, It weirdly or not brings to mind something I heard in a movie sometime that went like "behind every blade of grass there is an angel that whispers 'grow, grow' to it".

Maybe I don't have a point to prove, or even a concrete one to show you, future reader, or more likely, future me, but when designing a system you can design it by stating its behavior for any given input, but the above kind of study shows how complex it is to design this world. I think that besides my hidden faith in determinism, for which I have not yet written anything, but soon will, nature plays it by ear when it comes to the outcome of this kind of studies.

PS: Even if there is a god and he designed us all from scratch, configuring the outcome of such studies would be too much work, even for a God. :)

PS2: I also thought of something else to write, but I forgot, It must have been a lie! Or maybe I will add it later.