Back to where all begun, just this time looking things through new perspectives: Putting Server skills in the right direction.

It is interesting how all this blog started. The creation of my blog was just a reaction to a dream while I was sleeping. Maybe it was just a sign that:

• The way I thought and did things did not align from the observations of the external world.
• My thought and skills were inadequate to correspond appropriately and effectively to observations that I faced all the time.

What I ended up with this blog was to create a mental map where my thoughts could fit with my past observations I had trouble to cope with. I motivated myself to create the mental map by doing the following:

• I created a page on my blog named "Direction to this blog" which addressed that I wanted to transition my mental map from only fulfilling my profession to an interdisciplinary one where it could tackle any observations that were out of my professional skills.
• I tried to be more honest in one of my blog posts, associating my direction to align with the direction of my blog. After setting that direction to myself, even if it was not detailed enough, it promoted me to create a mental map (by reading and analyzing books, such as Executive Paradox) that it was impossible later for me to put that mental map down out of sheer low confidence.

Now I am trying in this blog post to motivate myself honestly to learn and apply server skills that fit with my mental map in order for "me" to become "part" of the mental map. However, learning any skills is not efficient. I have to set some rules and concepts that should be respected when learning and using skills. All of this will become clear soon.

But before looking on how we process things, let us start to address the 2 main problems of individuality: personal ease and development. If we use Maslow's Pyramid, we can self-actualize by fulfilling our personal ease and development. Personal ease corresponds to the basic needs of Maslow's Pyramid, such as basic and safety needs and being accepted as a member of society. Personal development corresponds to our self-esteem.

From Maslow's Pyramid, we classify Physiological, Safety, Belonging to Personal Ease and Esteem to Personal Development

Society in the past tried to fulfill both types of personal needs at the same time and it always created a stall. What eventually happened in almost all cases was personal ease was always an obstacle to society to have the free time to think clearly in personal development that forced people to ideologies of personal development that were inadequate, such as raging war by comparing other races inferior and classifying people wrongly in the days of eugenics and slavery.


I kind of agree that personal ease becomes a big bottleneck for personal development to have a clean mindset. For that reason, the inception of society to wear the attire clothes of professionalism, to ignore personal development ideologies and to instead attach fixated on improving society on its personal ease. The theory of evolution was created to support people to run their course on such direction. Ironically, this lead later for people to have a more clear mindset in incorporating concepts of personal development within organizations as described by the book Smarter, Faster, Better by Charles Duhhig. That was due to  people having most of their personal ease fulfilled with the help of science and technology . Now a lot of attention has been focused on the philosophy of the mind and artificial intelligence emulating the mind of our own species.

At the time of writing this, the latest magazine of "Philosophy Now" discusses Philosophy and Science merging together. Times are changing like the library of Alexandria in Egypt. Just this time, instead of books curated to our personal ease, there are books addressed to personal development.

Science branched out from Philosophy to study the objective world.
Why not use scientific thinking for personal development as well?

 
If we want to illustrate where personal development and personal ease location exactly are, we can demonstrate it by the bellow diagram. In contrast with personal ease, personal development has a long road left to still ride. One of the main problems is due to people not placing  personal development as their core strategy to the product. It is true that the new lab these days that effectively find insights to personal development have changed hands from governments to organizations. However, these insights are later long forgotten. These concepts are used only in peripheral ways throughout the organization in order to only gain competitive advantage. It is true that these principles can become the envelope of a company's culture. However, these forms of good can fall in tragic ways when they are not re-enforced to be more thoroughly developed. A platonic form of an ideology cannot sustain itself when we do not put enough effort on constantly getting more closer to it. That is an example of how hospitals ideal foundation (i.e. hospitals mission to save people's life) to become fragmented (i.e. the norms of the hospital on how they reacted to mistakes lead for hospital mistakes to be one of the top 3 causes of people's death). Shouldn't we embrace the attitude of improving our personal development as long as we can?


 
My thesis is that we should put personal development as our core strategy for adding value to our society. All these books I read and analyzed so far were supporting material on creating a mental map for my thesis. That does not mean though that I will ignore projects that improve our personal ease. There is always the danger that we won't have as much personal ease as much as we have today. However, I am sure we will recover those pitfalls faster as we embrace the paradigms of science and technology. In contrast, there is no much attention paid to personal development. There are chances that the days we live  is a period where personal development can blossom. One of my economy teachers always advised us to look at the diagram of the supply and demand. He told us that many people pay attention to exemplars of our world that consist of high demand. A smart person instead will focus his attention on exemplars that consist of low supply. If that is the case, should we not pay more attention to personal development? Profit companies need to think of being a non-profit organization with some of their leftover net revenue instead of giving it to charities or being socially responsible beyond their core product. They need to think how their product interacts in overall within the big picture instead of attracting people to their product limited to a specific domain.

Now let us use the diagram of mental symmetry and executive paradox to see how far I reached and where I have to go.

At first starting this blog, as an individual, I was an entity that used skills with no purpose. I consciously knew that there was a framework in life on how things work. However, since I didn't explore it myself consciously, it was easy to get drift apart from society's emotional pressure that other matters in our day to day life are more important to focus than to ponder deeply to that question. Whichever represents more emotional and the peer pressure from external self-esteem is what takes us in control in order to neglect anything beyond the normal boundaries of current social norms.

One of the things a Perceiver person has an advantage compared to other personality styles is it contains the starting bridge to personal development. In detail:

1. The Perceiver is the only mode that can see most clearly the Mercy cognitive style and at the same time not be attached to it.
2. The Mercy cognitive style contains the derived product of a Teacher's theory. For the Perceiver person, that figure is a state that needs to be measured on how close it represents to the ideal platonic form. The Perceiver person is at best at self-reflection.
3. The Perceiver person can force to create a new theory from an existing one and then Server mode will subconsciously aid in filling the required mental map.
4. The Perceiver person can force to use an existing theory that is not used to be applied to personal identity and then Server mode will subconsciously aid in integrating them together.
   

The interesting thing is while doing each of the steps discussed on point #3 and #4, the Perceiver can reflect clearly whether it is going farther or closer to those goals due to point #1 and #2. That reflection lets him adjust and improve the steps required for point #3 and #4 to become accomplished. Even when Perceiver has no direct contact or influence to Server mode, the results of Server actions are stored in Mercy mode which the Perceiver has access to. Unfortunately, I have no guide how other cognitive styles can gain the same results as I do. I think the Contributor person can achieve this path faster than a Perceiver does, but not as very accurate as the Perceiver does.

Contributor and Perceiver have a bigger flexibility on personal development in terms of speed and accuracy correspondingly

Forcing the Perceiver to be interested in creating a new framework from existing knowledge can lead as a strong motivator for the Perceiver to force itself to implement point #3. That lead me to create a mental map by associating the framework of mental symmetry with other self-help books.

So now this blog post is all about doing point #4. Eventually, the trigger of point #4 is when a mental map becomes so strong done from point #3 (the more connections or associations, the stronger the mental map becomes) that it can defy or make itself immune from being affected by existing social norms that oppose your views. In a matter of fact, why on earth would you approve existing social norms that have less correlation to the new framework you already have? At the same time, the Perceiver Person has the biggest horror to his own self: "All this time, I was deceived by wrong facts? I really do things still the old way. Does that make me a hypocrite? There is an alarm beeping me that I do not reflect the new framework I didn't pay attention before. Okay, I acknowledge the contradiction. Give me a break. This is too much for me to digest right now"

 
Whenever I have to give radical new orders to Teacher, I always do a rite of passage. I had to write an extensive blog in detail before I decided to leave my job. I had to make a detail explanation on how to approach point #3 and now I am doing a blog post again on how to approach point #4.  I expressed within my rite of passage that I am now a Philosopher and Theologist so I can now move on to be practical to these disciplines. I usually do a rite of passage associated to my internal self-esteem instead of my external self-esteem. For instance, I never celebrated my achievements of my university. Even when I received a CGPA of 3.95, I didn't attend the graduation ceremony because I didn't feel anything special yet on me that made me become radically different. Every rite of passage is created due to a self-crisis. We all deal with suffering when we walk mindlessly on a path with no deep thought until we end up in a mid-life crisis. There is another way to learn the same lessons faster by the virtue of patience. In this case, you create artificially the crisis to your own self to jump through the hoops within a safe environment. It takes a lot of time to see the benefits. It requires a lot of willpower and patience to stick to the plan when present life looks stable.
 
Does all the material look so familiar with you so far? Great, that was the main thesis of this blog: Our ultimate goal is for our identity be part of personal development. Now I have to give steps to Teacher on what recipe the Server should follow for achieving that. Ultimately, in some way or another, I am confident that I will be able to progress myself as I used to do before. However, this is an endless journey. I am not sure what awaits after that, but here goes nothing:

1. Do not re-invent the wheel yet try to break things down you don't understand.

One of my teachers in community college that taught programming languages had the mantra "Do not re-invent the wheel". The world is richer if we continue what others have left so far behind instead of doing copy work of others. Beyond understanding the work of others, we have to create new insights in order to make progress to our society. If we all only just copied each other, then what will be ahead 200 years will be the same as what we had 200 years before. We will be in a stall state within our civilization as we didn't establish closure and move on to progress beyond the existing stuff. Besides clarifying stuff, it is greater when we create more abstractions with the existing stuff, more achievements that get us closer to the platonic forms we want to ideally be.

In contrast, we should also break down things we don't understand, as illustrated in Chapter 8 "Absorbing Data" from the book "Smarter, Faster, Better" by Charles Duhigg. Absorbing data was a think I always did the first thing when encountering a new environment. As I illustrated the algorithm competition I entered in my previous blog, I avoided figuring out which algorithm I had to use to solve the problem and how it worked. Instead, I tried to figure it out myself. Although my attempts failed, I think I got a bigger appreciation of algorithms than if I just plugged and play with the algorithm immediately to solve my problem. Furthermore, I didn't use any libraries for my solution. Although my solution was not the best in performance, this helped me to understand very precisely what the algorithm did in detail. Another example is the ritual I do whenever I am in a new work environment. I always do the following for the first months: I open my notes or my text editor and write down how all the components of the system work. I try to make explanations and correlations with diagrams and notes out of my own context to grasp the material faster. Although for some people this may seem stubborn like I am re-inventing the wheel, I had known I could grasp the material more clearly and faster from just the usual observation. Lastly, I wanted to learn more about personal development. That is one of the main reasons why I kept contributing to this blog. That was the only way for me to grasp the material better. Besides that it is also to set goals for myself, I hope others can extract valuable information out of it.

In order for any material to be grasped, we need to have access of how all the components work together. The stuff that we create should be tools where anyone can see underneath how it works instead of being stuffed in a locked black box. For without being able to put the material in our context, how can we be sure when we do stuff, we do it in such a way where we didn't miss any of the stuff on how the model works in the first place? Let us also iterate that one of the ideological principles of the "hacker manifesto" is for all software to be free. Free not in terms of price, but in terms of able to access the source code.

2. Constantly aim the goal of personal development but in small risks

Obviously, the goal is to add some value to personal development. Of the variation of many paths that exist, re-inventing the wheel should only be considered on topics that have extreme importance, are underestimated, and for learning purposes. After all, we only live once. From our own willpower, we should strive to replace old work to be replaced with new ideas. Let's make a role model example of ourselves for others to see that people are more than just a commodity that runs only by values from our present times. However, this is a video game where you have one life, not a thousand. Thus, it makes sense to make risks with lower probability of failure or risks where failure can be easily recovered. We discussed in Black Box Thinking that failure is the only way to success. However, that does not mean to relentlessly do something stupid when you could have planned ahead to eliminate most of the risks. Secondly, although society ideally should not judge people mistakes as a dead end, current mindset of the average person does. For that unfortunate reason, it is ideal to do most of your mistakes in a safe environment. Lastly, risks that harm or neglect your body substantially cannot be recovered. You have "statistically" higher chances of having some success with your goals by placing a dozen of small risks within your lifetime instead of placing one or two big ones that can succumb your rest of your life. The importance is to constantly think about your goal instead of snapping about it on the last minute. For me, I will always appreciate doing works of personal ease. I cannot imagine the many benefits it brings and how critical it will be in the times where human resources become limited. However, I will always try to find small opportunities or how to turn things around in front of me on the attention of personal development.

3. It is very easy to lose track out of over-confidence and peer pressure. The last thing we want is being in a stall state or going backward.

There are two types of confidence: Perceiver Confidence (point #3) and Server Confidence (point #4). In point #3, we created a Teacher Mental Network as a separate independent entity so powerful that the Perceiver can see the contradiction with his own identity. In point #4, Server tries to do personal actions that correspond with such independent entity created in point #3, imposing new habits over old ones, affecting our existing identity. 

Perceiver Confidence and Server confidence can be confused with one another. They may think that their own version of confidence represents the only type of confidence that exists. Feelings behave the same way too. Feelings of external self-esteem (Mercy) can have the same fulfilling experience as internal self-esteem (Teacher). It is only when you explore and master the two type of feelings that you can explicitly sense they are different from the cause they are originated from. The same can go with Perceiver and Server confidence. It is easy to do generalizations that Perceiver and Server confidence are the same. However, if we look at the details on how they operate and where the confidence originates from, then it easy to distinct them apart. In the book review "Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by John Dewey", "But a problem arose when the medieval philosophers and theologians adopted the radical split between Plato’s higher (Perceiver->Teacher->Platonic Forms) and lower (Server->Mercy->Merging platonic forms with Identity) without recognizing the cultural cause of the distinction...They adopted the earlier model where all that was lower was fallen, and all that was higher was divine. Truth, beauty, and reality were to be found not in the fields or mines, but only in heaven (=our actions became irrelevant in most philosophy, it was considered unfeasible to reach closer to Platonic forms)." That is also one of the main reasons the scientist Feynman disliked much about the current state of philosophy entrenched only in Perceiver confidence. Without lower motives, we can never put more effort into reaching to a platonic form, to get things clearer, as I quote in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics Vol. 1", "We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into the paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers... one saying to the other: you don't know what you are talking about! The second one says: what do you mean by 'talking'? What do you mean by 'you'? What do you mean by 'know'?". Science is lectured only by facts, only by Perceiver mode. It does not have the process of Server mode, on unraveling better understandings of the universe by trying to comprehend uncertainties and unexplored territory. As in Issue 114 Philosophy Now article "Richard Feynman's Philosophy of Science" I quote "Understanding, for Feyman, is a much deeper relationship with the world than knowing what gets taught as facts... for science is a lived activity and has an inexpressible aspect. I can write down what it is for me to ride a bike - describe it terms of bio-mechanics or highway code rules - but none of this is how I do it, nor will it teach you how to do it...Science is not merely its form, method, past examplars, or the beliefs and knowledge it generates, for these change when great discoveries are made." Philosophy (Perceiver) lives in the abstract while poetry (Server) looks at the perils of actual life and expresses the day to day emotions. In the book review "The Philosophy of Poetry" I quote... "philosophy & poetry to be mutually alien...De Sousa outlines a project of bringing philosophy and poetry closer together, but this may be something of a forced alliance...the result may merely be more bad philosophy on the one hand and more bad poetry on the other." In overall, we see that Perceiver and Server confidence are completely alienated. We see that when Philosophy is stuck on Perceiver mode, they stray away from reality and the new paradigms that they have to stroll.

Last but not least, there is always the power of peer pressure for holding us back to get closer to our goals. Sometimes in life, we have to hold back and appreciate what civilization has achieved so far. We have to do small risks in our goals, not big ones. However, let us not be too comfortable from that where we forget our original goals.

Conclusion

We can have a more conclusive balance we individuals should aim in the world. I attributed before my vision of HPLR (Health Planning Learning Relationships) Ethics. More specifically, we can deliberately say:

• Health: Beyond that we learn scientific thinking is the most effective way recovering our maladies statistically, it is one of the most important elements to balance well our personal ease. As we have seen, keeping personal ease in an uncomfortable situation can create inadequate personal ideologies that keep personal development in a stall state. As the development of personal development only progresses with a clear mind, we should be pro-active and supportive on supplementing initiatives for learning and keeping healthy our well-being.
• Planning: Whether we will be controlled by the one that has the biggest force or we control to shift our perception for other less existing choices to control us is up to us. In many times, whatever is in front of us, it may not be the most optimal solution. It may just be a coincidence that it is in front of us to think it is the right thing or the a priori may be a dead end as we have seen from many mainstream ideologies throughout history that ended up to be proved as inadequate. Planning is a very powerful force and is the only path to achieve our actual effective personal development within the theory of this blog and according to the theory of mental symmetry. The plans I placed before aided me to create a mental map and my plan to associate it with my identity now requires to again also plan about it. We will see that planning a mental map is related mostly to learning while planning your identity to merge with a mental map is related to creating new relationships and changing your attitude on existing relationships. 
• Learning: We make better choices if we have a better mental map. The best mental map is created when you can create a framework on interdisciplinary sources that can apply to us. The best grand explanation that can bring the least contradictions to the way we do things in life, the better. As Einstein said, "A theory is the more impressive...the more different the kinds of things it relates and the more extended the range of its applicability". Our main goal is not to just find some finite content that can explain the meaning of life, but also having a great tool by forging it like a sword. It is having a mental map that creates a mental map, understanding how the mind works, as we have done in this blog, in order to create with our effort the best possible content in any situation. A meta-theory facilitates into creating new paradigms that can fit into specific variables of our current situation. That makes a meta-theory to be immune from any influence of existing variables. As in Issue 114 "Philosophy Now" article "Chaos & An Unpredictable Tomorrow" states, "A complex system evolves over time, each iteration of the system - each of the system's cycles or outputs - provides a new condition that feeds back into the system." However, this complexity can be handled by not having a fixed mindset on a particular paradigm, but relying upon a paradigm of a paradigm. If we reference a star as a theory and a dancing star as meta-theory, then this resonates well on the article "Nietzsche and the Problem of Suffering" article quoting "Zarathustra comes down and preaches... to become an Overman (Ubermensch). But 'One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.' One has to suffer anxiety in oneself to become creative. Zarathrustra fears that the day of the 'Last Man' is coming, a day in which men shall not want to give birth to a dancing star, men who will ask 'What is longing? What is a star?' They will just want to be a part of the herd. They will have their little pleasures for the day and those for the night. They will claim, 'We have invented happiness.'" This is more easier to grasp and more self-evident for people who read self-help books, do leadership, study social sciences. However, it is evident that many people are not motivated to learn more about personal development. In contrast, our motivation is captured by other things that look more entertaining to the eye that require less thinking. Even when people access to content which requires less critical thinking, most of us do not engage in depth, do not assert the feedback of others, and do not give helpful feedback to others. A huge progress will be made if people become more engaging critically on the content they see and start appreciating more on content that fastens their self-development. 
• Relationships: Relationships are the whole purpose our life is meant to be. That is no different with what Buber has said in "I and Thou". However, we all have a different interpretation on how we should approach relationships with others and when to step more away or closer in an existing relationship. For Perceiver people, creating new relationships start when they feel confident their mental map is stable and mature. A Contributor person can create these relationships at a faster pace. In all cases, creating new relationships means their identity is progressing to a different location than it used before. It is the same story when an individual hangs with a bad gang and then learns his mistakes and hangs with a good community. Thus, if we want our mental map to match with our identity, we have to match them with the proper organizations of subjects of interest, people, and social groups. Our relationship with the work we choose to contribute to our society must also fit in a role where the responsibilities match closely to our mental map. There is a lot of limitations based on our situation. It is impossible to find all or any of our relationships that match perfectly with our mental map. What all matters is to find the closest one and constantly do small risks on it. That shows you put all your effort on it and that is what all matters. What matters is whether there is high probability you did the best instead of whether you had bad luck. If all followed your path, society would have progressed more already. You should give a pat on your back for your effort. On the other hand, make sure the mental map you cover is one that is in short supply and adds a lot of value to society. In addition, there is always the temptation for your identity to feel safe in a constant location with existing people and groups that you are surrounded with. Do not let that safety make you forget to still aim closer to the mental map you embrace. Besides learning stuff relative to what you are doing in your day to day life, always re-evaluate your mental map on new insights that you may have missed before. I have to add that my next ambition I am focusing is creating the next social network prototype. I want to understand the current situation and to know more details about the many ways external and internal esteem work in order to have a better clear model of how I can incorporate a personal integrated system. All these are in my hopes that it will give us a concrete solution on how to improve the quality of relationships among society.

Some pictures I created on how to tackle Server:

And so the direction of my blog has steered to a new direction. I now have an interdisciplinary map where I can navigate wherever I want. My goal is to lift up personal development from its current trenches.

Right now, I set myself a goal to learn more skills in statistics and machine learning in order to derive conclusions of external self-esteem. That will help me to have a more clear picture of the personal integrated system I discussed before, which will be a component of the next social network prototype. My course can change over the course of time on what I will tackle next. However, whatever it will be, it will always be related to personal development in some way.

Expect my next blog posts to be technical related to data, as I venture to acquire the right skills to sail smoothly into new continents others haven't explored yet. As for now, I think this is the end of the main story line on transitioning from Phase 2 to Phase 3.