Gender Stereotypes

I was hearing a conversation amongst colleagues bout how a girl would react in particular situations, like say being cheated on. It's funny because there's basically a behavior template for "appropriate" responses to particular situations. Given how its internalized, I would not be surprised if the girl responded in that precise same way.

Of course, what I am thinking about is stereotyped behavior. Guys often talk about how girls would behave, and it irks me when they're right. Are they really all that predictable? Yet, it is true, and ultimately it's the social license that helps people behave in those specific ways. Then comes the inevitable spurious attribution when the people conclude that girls are just wired that way.

Same old nature vs nurture debate that I shall not belabor. Sadly, part of the problem of why gender stereotypes exist is that both sides just tacitly conspire to uphold them one way or another. I can see the social purpose of such predictable responses (heck it used to be fashionable to faint) in that it ultimately allowed people to get laid and fire off their useless spawn, but it just seems like a selling out of individuality in favor of something that I can only classify as animal behavior.

Those Lucky Scammers

When I read about the epic scams pulled off by the psychopathic lot, I start thinking about just how such schemes are hatched and how I would do one better. On hindsight, each of the schemes seems just so amazingly well crafted and could've only been the work of a genius mind. Yet, as one who does project development for a living and having a basic understanding of fundamental attribution error, I question that first impression.

Firstly, no idea is born out of nothing. Typically, someone starts off with a seed of the idea, and it is slowly built up layer by layer. Most ideas fail along the way and collapse, while others somehow manage to build up till they're mature. It's these mature ideas that come across as brilliant and it's easy to assume that it was designed that way from the start. I suspect it's simply that we only really hear about the brilliantly executed ones and miss the minor ones that simply result in police reports and arrests of small-time crooks.

And then there's the luck factor, where one simply manages to escape discovery for long enough that the scam can actually mature. Sometimes accounting fraud gets discovered early, and then its nipped in the bud. Other times it manages to turn into Enron. However, I have my doubts that Enron started off as a scam, but rather as an operation that was conducive to a profitable scam and it basically grew from there. It's very tempting to overestimate the skill involved, but like with any business I just think it's the matter of being in the right place at the right time.

The magic piece of the puzzle is actually the psychopathic impulsiveness. Lady Luck loves a gambler: If you don't even try, you'd never have a chance of striking the lottery. If the seed of a scam idea should show up, it takes a risk taker to even consider trying it out. Someone who's too honest or too hesitant would'nt even think of trying in the first place. It's the iterations that come after that make the idea really work. Basically, when all of the above come together at once, one has the makings of a scam of epic proportions.

The Seed Of An Idea

I've learned in the course of my work that every great idea comes from an acorn. An idea must first have a seed, which is then grown and developed upon until it works. That means multiple iterations and exploration of different implementations until a suitable solution is found. That is where the great idea comes from.

When I was younger, I was wondering how brilliant designers like Will Wright are somehow able to consistently deliver those wonderful games. They must've made these grand roadmap documents listing features A to Z and then masterfully weaving the lot together till a blockbuster title emerged. How wrong I was...

It's easy to forget where the oak came from. Basically, it's not all that uncommon for a game to turn out rather different from the initial vision that was set out. One of the magic ingredients is the willingness to try new things, such that the vision is allowed to grow and realize itself. Yet, it is equally easy to lose one's way and endlessly try random things until the project runs out of money. It seems to be the duty of the great designer to set the pace somewhere between the two such that the vision is allowed to develop, but is also pruned at appropriate times to allow for healthy growth.

The Croods

The Croods are a typical Stone Age family, very much like the Flintstones. Minus all the awesome Stone Age tech. They're cave-dwellers. Very timid cave-dwellers. Except for the spunky daughter. One day, they were forced to leave their cave because it was bashed in, and thus begins their adventure.

The film is basically a children's film (take it as you will) where there's a strong parable of carpe diem and the usual tale of change/redemption. It is a simple (possibly trite) concept executed in a parallel Stone Age world that superficially challenges our scant understanding of the time period.

There's not a lot to say about the film. It has its touching moments and is visually pleasing, yet it lacks the kind of sophistication that would've made the film grow from trite to truly memorable. There were many missed opportunities for unexpected endings, but the show just wound up going along the utterly predictable path that such kids movies tend to go. As such, it gets a 6.5/10. Not great, but at least it didn't suck.

Faking Works

I hate fakes. I'm talking about the two-faced Janus's that plague the general population. While they appear to present a particular front (usually cheerful, even gregarious), they're really just hollow inside. The smiles are wide and fake, and it's often rather obvious that they are. Yet, it seems that the faking actually works.

I've come to realize that the average human is actually a horrible detector of fakes. Someone with the ready smile just seems to disarm them, making them think that they're dealing with a really nice person. There's something to the niceness that puts people off their guard and even makes them feel the same sort of rapport that the other person is spoofing.

My take is that the average person is prone to projecting their feelings. That means that they are quite likely to read a fake smile as real, because it looks like a smile. This recognition of a smile leads to extrapolations of the smiling person's intentions and personality, which leads to an incorrect reading of the person's intentions. It leads to a premature evaluation of a person's character, which is notoriously difficult to read as a first impression.

Case in point: This is a trap that my dad is especially susceptible to. He clings to the belief that a person's character can be read at a single glance: A most dangerous fallacy indeed. (Conversely, my assumption is that a person can only be truly evaluated from approximately 6 months of close observation. It's a view that he despises as insensitive.) In his evaluation, seeing a gloomy person leads to the conclusion that the person's cold, aloof or just generally unhappy. Seeing a smiling person means friend, liking and other similar such. Yet, it simply led to him having a sadly mistaken assumption of the person's reliability and general disposition.

The side effects of this easy evaluation are interesting as well. The general unreliability and shallowness of the person are subsequently attributed to personal problems and family issues, typical of the sort of strange extrapolation that people are prone to doing when they feel that they like the person. The tendency to conflate feelings of friendship with the goodness of the person seems quite prevalent.

Overall, it's just interesting to note that faking works in general. I've seen it happen time and again, where people are taken in by a friendly face and take a painfully long time to figure out that they've been duped. Happens in the office, with family, with other acquaintances on the road and such. Faking works, and will probably continue to fool people for centuries hence.However, it's always good to be educated so that one knows how to see the signs of a fake and protect oneself accordingly.

Why Not?

I've been asked by friends about how I always seem to manage to find odd corners of the city where nobody ever goes. It's an interesting question. On my end I just wonder why they don't. Then I realize that they're ruled by the concept of "Why" rather than "Why not?"

There's always a decision to be made when going places. Should I visit that part of town which I've never been before? For my friends, the answer is a query: "Why would I? What could possibly be there?". My response is...well why not? I simply go where my urges take me, and there's usually something new/interesting to be experienced. Heck, without that, I'd probably have been bored to death ages ago.

I think the same concept can be applied to the execution of ideas and such. The great endeavors of humanity seem to be powered by Why Not's. Hey what's there on the Moon? Maybe we should go up there! Were it such that humans were curious about the moon but never thought it worth their while to actually go through the expense to visit it (Space race and Cold War reasons aside), it may well be that we're still philosophizing about it without having actually set foot on the lunar surface.

I've always subscribed to the view that one needs only try in order to see if something's feasible. It may be a great opportunity, or it may be a bust, but one just needs to be desensitized to failure and just get out there to Do Something. I find it strange that people can be held back by their fears and inhibitions, and just sitting around thinking up What If's. They have things they want to try, and if there's an opportunity to really go for it...just go with my first thought: "Why Not?"

The Christian Smile

There is one thing that constantly bothers me is what I dub the Christian smile. Perhaps something of an unfair title for a phenomenon not limited to Christians, but I have personally observed it most frequently on the faces of Christians. Hence the name.

The appearance of the Christian smile is quite distinct. It's a rather vapid blissful smile that appears out of nowhere. In fact it appears at the drop of a hat, making one very suspicious as to the provenance of such an expression. Now, I generally have nothing against people being genuinely happy. However, there is something very wrong with the way certain people smile, and I've been trying to figure out what that was.

After some thought, my conclusion is that the smile I see is simply too exaggerated and too readily available to be real. Ordinarily, a smile of pure enjoyment ramps up some, reaches maximum intensity for some short moments, and then settles down into a happy looking state that is not quite the sort of ecstatic looking bliss that was glimpsed when the smile was at its most intense. It's quite natural, really.

In contrast, the Christian smile goes off like a flash bulb, shooting straight to max intensity and staying there for an unnatural period of time. Now, that's not saying that it's fake. I can't read minds so it may well be real, and to all appearances it does look real. The whole smile reaches the eyes thing. But, the bothersome thing is that it just looks like a sustained exaggeration of what a smile really is. And of course, virtually everyone who has that particular smile is a Christian. Oddly enough. And not just a regular faithful, but the sort that's really quite involved in church activities.

I shall refrain from speculating as to the exact nature and/or provenance of the smile in question. However, I do maintain that at a personal level I find it unnatural and it does make me wonder as to the mindset that underpins the creation of this rather curious expression.