The Not-Blog

I recently re-realized that I'm an opinionated person. My wife can attest to that. We both are. You can imagine the debates we have at home about the proper orientation of dishes in the dishwasher, or in the car about what the correct fan level is appropriate for a given temperature setting. Really, it's not a differential equation, but it might as well be. At least if it were, there would be a logically sound, mathematically proven answer that we could both agree upon.

One of the things I feel strongly about is that both partners in a marriage should agree on some set of foundational principles. It'd be hard to keep a mariage in good standing when you vhemantly disagree and constantly fight about who is right and who is wrong. According to Chaos Theory, it'd be virtually impossible to find someone who agrees with absolutely everything that you do and you never disagree about anything. In fact, Chaos Theory suggests that slight deviations in initial conditions tend to result in divergant solutions which deviate greatly from the expected results.

But we try very hard when it comes down to politics to come to a consensus so that we both agree, at least at large, one way or the other. It just seems absurd to have one of us vote one way, and the other vote the opposite, thus nullifying our voting power. Some people even go as far as just not voting since they'd negate eachother anyway. But when you agree, you get 2 votes whichever way you decide.

As the number of variables in any system increase, the probibility of desired results decrease. Take a binary system (or fair coin), where every situation can be represented as a true or false value, or a set of true or false values. Thus, as a new variable is added, the total number of possible outcomes increases by a factor of 2. The system can be represented as 2^n, where n is the number of things which are to be decided.

2^10 = 1,024
2^15 = 32,768
2^20 = 1,048,576

As shown above, exponential equations explode very quickly into large values, even at small values of n.

With the above data, assume you and your spouse would like to agree on 20 random topics. Where the value of whether you or your spouse view the topic favorably or unfavorably are completely random. There are 1,048,576 ways your spouse might view those 20 topics. Since your views are pre-determined, you want to know the probibility that your spouse belives the same way you do. In a completely random scenario, this would only happen 1 out of 1,048,576 times, or 0.00000095367431640625. Say that's far too low of a chance, so let's reduce the number of things you have to agree on down to 10. Now, your spouse only has 1,024 possible ways to answer thsose 10 topics, but they still have to answer them exactly the way you would. That's 1 / 1024 = 0.0009765625. That's about 0.1% Yikes, didn't think it would be that hard to agree with other people, did you?

Luckily, our decisions aren't completely random, but it's understandable why dating is so difficult. Trying to find someone that has the same core values and principles as you is not an easy thing to do. And, really, who wants to fill out a questionaire on your date, and be statistically matched with people who are "compatible"? So, we're lucky that we find spouses with somewhat-matching interests and beliefs. The family and friends relationship implies that there is some pre-existing mutual interest or belief system. But when you branch out beyond your immediate family and friends the element of randomness starts to increase.

This idea is closely related to Quantum Mechanics. When dealing with particles on the sub-atomic level, you quickly realize that Newtonian physics is really just an aproximation; a consistant and reliable average of the chaos of particles that make up a substance. Newtonian physics is very simplistic. The variables are few, and their values known. In a sense, we can predict future events because we know the variables. We know that a ball will roll down the slope, because we know the values of enough of the variables. However, when looking at the interactions molecules on the Quantum scale, there are thousands, if not millions or billions of variables that affect the result of a given equation. This gives rise to the Uncertanty Principle, and Binary Entropy.

When a fair coin is tossed, it's entropy is exactly 1. You need exactly one bit of data to represent the outcome. However, when using a biased coin, you need less than one bit of data to represent the outcome, because the data is compressible. Truely random data will not be very compressable.

People are very much the same as coins. Your spouse is a heavily biased coin, your family and friends are somewhat biased coins, and random people are probably far from the ideal fair coin as well, just that their bias may tend to be further from your beliefs. And, when viewed on a Quantum level, there are so many people out in the world, that it is highly unlikely that any two people would completely agree on any set of topics.

So it really doesn't make much sense for me to post my opinionated political viewpoints on a blog where random people might read them. I'm much more likely to find positive feedback when I simply tell my spouse, family and friends about my thoughts than other people who might happen upon my blog.