Since my fifth year of elementary school I have known that numbers are my thing. One way or another I have always identified myself with math rather than history, physics over literature, or informatics over geography. Apart from a couple of world wars, a few novels, or knowing in a map, where I am and where I wanted to go, I just found them dull, tasteless, insipid.
I guess from my early childhood, always tricked by how much my Dad knew (about everything), I start constructing the idea that the entire world, society included, could and must be approached in a precise numerical way.
After graduating from high school, and reading Carl Sagan day and night, I got myself involved in a Physics major. I could read from the best modern scientists concepts like: The Theory of Everything and so on. The world must be soon understandable, and approachable through mathematics....I thought. The straightforwardness of a mathematical definition, the simple yet devastating power stored in a rigorous mathematical proof, the reality offered by science in which there is only one way of being right and If you disagree, I can prove it. That black-&-white world was getting closer and closer to me.
After graduating from high school, and reading Carl Sagan day and night, I got myself involved in a Physics major. I could read from the best modern scientists concepts like: The Theory of Everything and so on. The world must be soon understandable, and approachable through mathematics....I thought. The straightforwardness of a mathematical definition, the simple yet devastating power stored in a rigorous mathematical proof, the reality offered by science in which there is only one way of being right and If you disagree, I can prove it. That black-&-white world was getting closer and closer to me.
In this poetic reality imagination, in embraced, envy, hate, corruption, racism even religious fanatism are all cast away by the purifying power of mathematics, every man is equal, reason, knowledge and truth prevail over any other human-like labels. This magnificent world was opening itself to me, everything went smooth....until The Southwestern Company.
The Southwestern Company is an American family of companies, based on Nashville, TN, USA. The company mainly recruits young students from all over the USA, and the world, to train them as door-to-door salesmen. Interesting concept.
On the autumn of 2008 I enrolled myself with them, and by the summer of 2009 I was 'ready' to go to the central valley,CA, and sell some god damn books....hell yeah!. At this point, as you can see, I had received the best motivation you can imagine.
By the end of the summer, I have had more than a 150 customers, I have worked under the worst circumstances you can imagine, but my spirit was stronger than ever, I mean....I survived it. My pockets were empty, but I felt I could achieve anything I wanted. I have learned ''the ways'' of a sales-man. I was sitting on the top of the world, and shooting for the stars....unstoppable.
A few months after arriving in Prague, my head cooled down, I went back to school, I had classes on GTR, and statistical physics, I learned about mathematical distributions and the Dirac delta function. I was back in the game, however, this time was different. That summer was like an infectious disease. I had been infected with it, I will only recover partially, the poison was already inside...it was too late. The whole poison was this: nothing was black and white anymore...the greys have appeared.
The grey tones first showed up in Atrium Way, Nashville, TN. where I was trained for my summer of sales. There, the best salesman will give you an impressive apologetic favoring the creation of needs. Do people need to buy books?..YES, sometime they don't know it yet, but they definitely need them. And of course this was just part of the psycho-training so we wont give up on asking, looking for them to realize that they DO need them. What really happened was that we would use a series of tricks to induce their thoughts in a box, where the only reasonable way out is through buying. The tricks were verbal tricks (offering a,b,c, answers to the questions we ask them in the first place...the thing was: a,b and c were all good for us, and left no place for them to express their true desires), body language tricks, my favorites (eye contact, the angle you face them while sitting, the way and time you break eye contact, the way and place you pick to sit down, etc). ....it worked like magic. I couldn't believe my eyes, I could only think about learning and mastering all these techniques...I was going to rule the world.
At the end of the day, all the trainees have been given the tools to get anything we could possibly need. We could go one morning to work for 13 hours or more, and only carry one sample book and that's all. If you wanted water, you could just ask for it. Hungry?...knock the next door and ask for it. Need a bike?...knock next door and ask for it, a ride?..a car?..a house?. We got all of the above, and more than once per month!.
I had learn that a NO, cant be turned into a maybe, and from there to a yes. (sort of like Facebook). Opinion could be twisted into my advantage, actions can be seen from different perspectives, and there is no rule against picking the best perspective for my particular case. Rights & Wrongs were not absolute, immutable....they were just there, waiting for someone to offer a new perspective, and a judgment based on that perspective. And this had a deep repercussion on my scientific life as well.
At first, I thought these things will never permeate science. Science was different, Science was greater than man. Truth is recognized using the scientific method, theories will be tested through falsifiability as described by Popper, and Science will be build upon pure and solid basis......humans were merely pawns, watching how everything happened. But after the summer, I start detecting these subtle tricks all over the history of science, all over my classroom, my classmates, my professors, my exams, experiments, conferences, 'scientific diplomacy', and so on. I realized that all the human-like labels named at the beginning of the text were not only present here too, but they sometimes ruled, or outlaw any other noble actions. Workers were humans first, and scientists later. Science was not greater than men, Science happens between us, at our same level, after all, we were the ones who created it. It shared our weaknesses, our passions, our emotions, our prejudices. Someone once said, ''a team is like a chain: as strong as its weakest element'', and so its true for science, and other disciplines with a pure and idealistic philosophy like Yoga, or any organized religion, where we are the weakest element. Since imperfect human beings are the ones practicing it, all our essence will impregnate that world.
We can do a great job at repressing those inconvenient facets of ourselves, but we can only do that for some time. We have evolved to become the dominant species on this planet, but the path we took to get here didn't really require for us to loose these characteristics. Envy, has always powered industry, is one hell of a motivation! Racism, can be use as a way to unify a disperse group for later leadership, which as apes, I'm sure we find that useful. Judging someone by they way the look on the outside is a primitive reflex that help us avoid potential threats, if a tiger eats my friend, no way I will stay still and ask the next tiger I see if he is the same as his carnivorous fellow or not....I will run as quick as I can, and trow rocks at him form the tallest branch in my tree!.
The world we would like to live in, the one we have imagined, embraced and had fiercely defended, is not for us. We are the result of evolution, we are the result of the infamous race of life, a race that is dynamic, changing all the time, improvising all the time, killing the weak, keeping only the strong. And here we come, thinking the race has stopped, thinking we can just leave aside all the evolutive-features that have shaped our place in the alimentary chain, and start living in a perfect world, a utopic one, with utopic rules, full of beauty, decency, honesty, ruled by mathematics. We cant.....but we must try.2
I personally think that, the fact that we have ruled the world, is something to be proud of. Our adaptability is amazing, our adaptation is also great. I think, that this pause from the barbaric evolutive race is a privilege that, as the ruling organism, we can afford to have. Ideas, philosophies, culture, spirituality, and so on, are things that we can start conceiving. It doesn't matter if we are prepared or not to live in the perfect world, under perfect rules, it doesn't matter that our primitive facets will permeate these utopic bubbles, it just doesn't matter. I mean, we are not on top of the world because we were the fastest, or stronger, or the ones with the best camouflage, we made it till here because we have bigger brains, and the advantages of that are limitless! . And that is why I believe that our effort to embrace such utopic behaviors is going to have fruits, tasty, delicious fruits. None of us might live to taste them, but I'm sure the future is written in the sublime language of mathematics.
By the end of the summer, I have had more than a 150 customers, I have worked under the worst circumstances you can imagine, but my spirit was stronger than ever, I mean....I survived it. My pockets were empty, but I felt I could achieve anything I wanted. I have learned ''the ways'' of a sales-man. I was sitting on the top of the world, and shooting for the stars....unstoppable.
A few months after arriving in Prague, my head cooled down, I went back to school, I had classes on GTR, and statistical physics, I learned about mathematical distributions and the Dirac delta function. I was back in the game, however, this time was different. That summer was like an infectious disease. I had been infected with it, I will only recover partially, the poison was already inside...it was too late. The whole poison was this: nothing was black and white anymore...the greys have appeared.
The grey tones first showed up in Atrium Way, Nashville, TN. where I was trained for my summer of sales. There, the best salesman will give you an impressive apologetic favoring the creation of needs. Do people need to buy books?..YES, sometime they don't know it yet, but they definitely need them. And of course this was just part of the psycho-training so we wont give up on asking, looking for them to realize that they DO need them. What really happened was that we would use a series of tricks to induce their thoughts in a box, where the only reasonable way out is through buying. The tricks were verbal tricks (offering a,b,c, answers to the questions we ask them in the first place...the thing was: a,b and c were all good for us, and left no place for them to express their true desires), body language tricks, my favorites (eye contact, the angle you face them while sitting, the way and time you break eye contact, the way and place you pick to sit down, etc). ....it worked like magic. I couldn't believe my eyes, I could only think about learning and mastering all these techniques...I was going to rule the world.
At the end of the day, all the trainees have been given the tools to get anything we could possibly need. We could go one morning to work for 13 hours or more, and only carry one sample book and that's all. If you wanted water, you could just ask for it. Hungry?...knock the next door and ask for it. Need a bike?...knock next door and ask for it, a ride?..a car?..a house?. We got all of the above, and more than once per month!.
I had learn that a NO, cant be turned into a maybe, and from there to a yes. (sort of like Facebook). Opinion could be twisted into my advantage, actions can be seen from different perspectives, and there is no rule against picking the best perspective for my particular case. Rights & Wrongs were not absolute, immutable....they were just there, waiting for someone to offer a new perspective, and a judgment based on that perspective. And this had a deep repercussion on my scientific life as well.
At first, I thought these things will never permeate science. Science was different, Science was greater than man. Truth is recognized using the scientific method, theories will be tested through falsifiability as described by Popper, and Science will be build upon pure and solid basis......humans were merely pawns, watching how everything happened. But after the summer, I start detecting these subtle tricks all over the history of science, all over my classroom, my classmates, my professors, my exams, experiments, conferences, 'scientific diplomacy', and so on. I realized that all the human-like labels named at the beginning of the text were not only present here too, but they sometimes ruled, or outlaw any other noble actions. Workers were humans first, and scientists later. Science was not greater than men, Science happens between us, at our same level, after all, we were the ones who created it. It shared our weaknesses, our passions, our emotions, our prejudices. Someone once said, ''a team is like a chain: as strong as its weakest element'', and so its true for science, and other disciplines with a pure and idealistic philosophy like Yoga, or any organized religion, where we are the weakest element. Since imperfect human beings are the ones practicing it, all our essence will impregnate that world.
We can do a great job at repressing those inconvenient facets of ourselves, but we can only do that for some time. We have evolved to become the dominant species on this planet, but the path we took to get here didn't really require for us to loose these characteristics. Envy, has always powered industry, is one hell of a motivation! Racism, can be use as a way to unify a disperse group for later leadership, which as apes, I'm sure we find that useful. Judging someone by they way the look on the outside is a primitive reflex that help us avoid potential threats, if a tiger eats my friend, no way I will stay still and ask the next tiger I see if he is the same as his carnivorous fellow or not....I will run as quick as I can, and trow rocks at him form the tallest branch in my tree!.
The world we would like to live in, the one we have imagined, embraced and had fiercely defended, is not for us. We are the result of evolution, we are the result of the infamous race of life, a race that is dynamic, changing all the time, improvising all the time, killing the weak, keeping only the strong. And here we come, thinking the race has stopped, thinking we can just leave aside all the evolutive-features that have shaped our place in the alimentary chain, and start living in a perfect world, a utopic one, with utopic rules, full of beauty, decency, honesty, ruled by mathematics. We cant.....but we must try.2
I personally think that, the fact that we have ruled the world, is something to be proud of. Our adaptability is amazing, our adaptation is also great. I think, that this pause from the barbaric evolutive race is a privilege that, as the ruling organism, we can afford to have. Ideas, philosophies, culture, spirituality, and so on, are things that we can start conceiving. It doesn't matter if we are prepared or not to live in the perfect world, under perfect rules, it doesn't matter that our primitive facets will permeate these utopic bubbles, it just doesn't matter. I mean, we are not on top of the world because we were the fastest, or stronger, or the ones with the best camouflage, we made it till here because we have bigger brains, and the advantages of that are limitless! . And that is why I believe that our effort to embrace such utopic behaviors is going to have fruits, tasty, delicious fruits. None of us might live to taste them, but I'm sure the future is written in the sublime language of mathematics.
