Thursday, November 22, 2012

Moral Arbitrage

If you have ever asked, "Why me lord", here is a post.






Well all of us have our world view or as Germans will call it Weltanschauung, which tells us how to work around in the world, what will work and what will not, including if the world is going to hell. Most of it is based on 3 things

  • Parents
  • Books and Teachings, including religion
  • Our own observations.

All of the above make a core of your world view, which is your philosophy of the world. You might hate the term philosophy, but you have it.

So if you combine your answers to all the questions and the little rules that you follow in dealing with people, its a philosophy. collate all the knowledge you have that makes understanding people and the world possible, its a philosophy. Is there a GOD? Is there a heaven or a hell? What actions are GOOD? What happens when we die? Is the world fair? Why do we suffer? Was Sholay a good movie? etc.

If you are not a philosopher by vocation, You might be under two impressions

  • You have a unique philosophy
  • You donot have a philosophy
If you are a philosopher, you might have a name for your type which might sound something like "platonic existentialist  Jansenist fideism"




If YOU Are Not a Philosopher

if you are not a philosopher, In both the above cases, you might be wrong. Because most of your belief on what is good and what is not good has come from this world, and the society. 

So you might not even know it, but there is a label for it out there, as well as a big name associated with it as well as a big critique too, on why it is wrong. If it really was a new one, you would be too miserable to even carry on daily life, as you would be engrossed in your own thoughts trying to find answers. 

If you find these answers, then you will have followers. If you don't have answers, you might be sitting in front of a closed laptop, thinking what is the purpose of this laptop. why should i go online. what should i try to accumulate knowledge. what is knowledge.. what is the purpose of life..and so on. You can see where its going. 






It is very much possible that you are stuck somewhere in the above paragraph, and will never reach this sentence.

Because Philosophy is like the bacteria that lives in the gut. Its the good kind of bacteria, and we all need it. But if it grows out of control, you are sick, and if it cleans out, you are sick. In this case not physically but mentally. and virtually any kind of sickness is a sickness if it shortens your life span or obstructs the normal functioning of life.

If you think, you do not have  or follow a philosophy, thats easy. You are just poorly read, and a quick jog to the book store and a flip through "sophie's world by jostein gaarder", " The story of philosophy, by will durant", should fill in the gaps and let you find your label. But i would caution you that just read the labels, and not the critiques or else you might fall into an existential abyss, and not recover.

It will also make you feel good about yourself,as now you would be able to pepper your conversations with words like Utilitarianism, nihilistic, jurisprudence etc. This will sharply define your image as an intellectual (Good) as well as push people and chicks away from you (Bad).

And don't you worry as most of these philosophies are a lot of gobbledygook where the major differences in opinion are where should the comma be placed and likes. 

For instance a great deal of the centuries were spent over "if a soul exists". Now then a lot of very intelligent people will come up with every possible answer like in this case yes and no. Then they would go ahead and form two philosophical thought streams.

Once that was done with, the question came "where does it exist" and so on and so forth. Each of these answers would form a school of thought, and every answer is acceptable. So you can say "soul is in everything" and you would be following animism." you could say that our intellect is the soul, and you would be aristotle. You could say that the breath is the soul, and you would be a believer in "aatman" 

Since most of the learned people were following ideas from Greek and Latin  and continuing from there, they also wrote in these languages and so, a lot of terms were coined in these languages. So you have terms like "Psyche", "forms" "essence" ,"animism", "intellect", "substance" and many more.

Like if you believe in one god and based on geography you could be "abrahamic ", "vedantic" or something else. If you think there are many Gods then you might be following "pantheistic" philosophy and chances in all certainty are "pagan"

So most of you think that you don't have a philosophy because you don't know Greek. If you knew Greek, most probably phoenician would have been the language of philosophy, but thats another discussion. This is the same with sciences, where to put a layman off, we have terms like Homo sapiens. If these terms were coined in plain English, you would already know it! then why would you pay for knowing these terms? I mean there are people in western world taking courses and paying thousands to know words like "atman" and "dharma", while you got it for free. Isn't it? So its okay if you don't know sciences either which is more greek except sciences also use greek alphabets like "alpha", "omega" and sorts.

This was just done by early scientists to give credence to their scientific efforts in converting objects to Gold as a proper science. This idea of writing in greek alphabets was also picked up later by people with radical proposals like earth moves around sun, so that they are not clobbered to death by common people and clergy.

You might wonder how, but its pretty simple. Common people didn't read Greek.

Clergy read greek, but to them a formula like below, really confused them

\tau=\mu \frac{\partial u}{\partial y}.

You see, they simply read it as T=m(du/dy)...which looked like something written about some guy named Dudy, and not a formula relating to viscosity and so the scientists flew under the scanner. Some times some scientists were foolish enough to write in plain Italian or something, and at that time were promptly burnt at the stake.


Did you know that when Aristotle said physics, it actually came from "physis" which means nature. And talked of natural world. "Psyche" of psychology  actually means soul.

This was also a brilliant way in which scientists used to fool the clergy. So say a scientist would ask Galileo about his trade, and if Galileo said scientist, he would not have lasted long. But if he said Physicist  then the clergy would be on their way thinking he was a simple folk who loved nature and plants etc.


I mean if you look at management, which the Greeks didn't write about much, you will find that the Terms in management sound like "five forces model", "balanced scorecard", "Branding" where you can understand what they mean. I mean you at least have a vague idea, that balanced score card would be something to do with balance and a score card. right! Sadly now a lot of fight even in management is also about placing of commas, where some one would write a paper expounding why a "Value Chain" framework is Dead and instead they should go with a new methodology, where the same wine will be poured in a new bottle. 



 Since the older times didn't have television or radio, they had to write an awfully lot of books and letters to convince and tell people of what they thought. so the entire conversation happened over a lot of books and letters. Something like Blogs, which are the modern parallel. Imagine if you didnot have phone, and you had to fight with your girlfriend with a bunch of letters, and then some one was collecting those letters and publishing them in a book. something like that.

So by now you know that you follow a philosophy, and that it has some unpronounceable name, most probably in Greek and since you don't speak Greek and so you don't know its name.
By now you also agree that there are a lot of books and letters which are out there, which you would want to read but since there is a lot of greek and latin in them which you don't read, you are not reading them.





arbitrage ( /ˈɑrbɨtrɑːʒ/) is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.

simply put, you buy milk in mumbai for 35 rupees a litre, and sell it in delhi where the rate is 40 rupees a litre, and if your transport and other costs are less than 5 rupees, you will make a profit by arbitrage. That is you will make a profit because of the imbalance that exists between the markets. You can call it better sourcing. 


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