Chris McCormick

On December 27th, 2010 something awesome exploded into our lives. Welcome to the world Scout Matilda June McCormick!

I now posses an immense awe for anybody who has given birth. Mums are just the most incredible people for what they go through for each of us. Wow.

Scout, sorry to be a dorky dad already, but I have made a list of things that I have learned in my 32 years of life so far. You probably won't need these for a couple of years, but here they are anyway. Hopefully they will be useful when you do need them most.

Life tips for Scout

• When you don't know what to do, think of the person you most respect and imagine what they would do in the same situation.

• Life without risk is not living.

• If you feel down, fix these things first: eat good food, excercise, get some sleep, catch up with a friend. In 99% of cases your problems will evaporate.

• People trust people who are honest. Be honest.

• Be skeptical but not cynical.

• Inside every respected person is a confidence trickster. Be a confidence trickster. Act like the person you want to be.

• The only argument you ever really need is to ask "why?" again and again. This is a minimal form of Socratic questioning.

• "I am wrong," are the finest words in any language. Realize them often and update your mental model based on new evidence.

• Probably 99% of people on the planet want the same thing - peace, prosperity, and a continuation of their line. Most people are basically alright (but some very few people will screw you over for a penny).

• Have plans and goals, but be flexible. Things won't go the way you wanted, but they could go better.

• The more love, sincerity and positivity you give unconditionally, the more people will like you, and reciprocate generously.

• Iterate. That's how nature does it.

• Rules are made to be broken. It's when rules are broken that the really interesting stuff happens (but it only works if they aren't being broken all of the time).

• Practice makes perfect. You can get good at any damn thing if you just practice it long enough. Seriously, anything.

• When you get stuck, talk to people. Seek the advice of those who love you - your family and friends.

• Manufacture your own luck by chasing opportunities.

• What goes on in the world is filtered by your mind. If you feel positive, the whole world will seem positive, and visa versa.

• People will try to convince you of a universal right and wrong. They don't understand the world. Right and wrong vary according to context.

• Follow the advice of Atticus Finch. To get and give the best of people you need to understand them, so use your imagination and put yourself in their shoes to understand their motivations.

• In love, it helps to be a fatalist.

• Earning a living from your hobby is a blessing and a curse, but it sure beats working in a coal mine.

• Guilt is the stupidest emotion of all. Don't bother with it. Just do better.

• Be interested, be involved, use the gift of life and hack the world.

• You are an animal.

• Those possibly mythical people buddha, jesus, mohammed, etc. had a couple of good ideas. Find those gems and discard the large quantity of hogwash that makes up the rest of it.

• Looking at your fellow humans it can be easy to feel elitist, but just remember that the only real difference is education and wealth. Most people are just a couple of beers away from being best friends.

• An authority is a concentration of power to benefit its members. Sometimes the people who think they are beneficiaries actually aren't. If you are not a beneficiary, don't bother respecting an authority.

• Probably the most worthwhile and satisfying way to spend your time is engaged in acts of creativity.

• Probably the most worthwhile and satisfying way to spend your time is helping other humans.

• Probably the most worthwhile and satisfying way to spend your time is in pursuit of a better understanding of everything.

• Everybody has imposter syndrome. Remember that their confidence is less real to them than it is to you, and visa-versa.

• Persistence is fertile.

• Make mistakes.

• Give way so as to conquer.

• Romantic love is the most exciting and fun mental illness there is. It destabilises your brain chemistry and makes you do the strangest things. Enjoy this gift from the universe whenever it occurs.

• At some point you realise that even your biggest hero is fallible, and makes mistakes. Don't put anyone on too high a pedestal, and don't be surprised when they do stupid things.

• We tend to blame people for their ignorance, but it's not always their fault. Sometimes they are just the victims of a lacking education.

• Witness the stars, suck the night air deep into your lungs and feel the thrill. It's great to be alive.

• Most conspiracies can be easily explained by greed, stupidity, ego, or a combination.

• Buddah's Middle Way was probably put best by Mark Twain when he said "everything in moderation, including moderation itself."

• We are basically monkeys with cognition slapped on top.

• The scientific method is the finest tool available to a sentient being in our world. Know it and you will more successfully navigate your way.

• Anyone who has been in a war will tell you to avoid them. The people who start them are never the ones who fight in them, and the reasons are never worthwhile. Steer clear of them and survive.

• Learn to let go. Being good at letting go will prevent a lot of hurt and hardship.

• See the world. The more cultures and places you encounter, the better your brain will understand the deep truths of human existence.

• Your gut feeling and instincts are excellent in some situations, and terrible in others. Learn when to use your rational mind and when to trust your gut.

• You can't avoid your cognitive biases, but you can at least learn to recognise them. You can also use evidence, maths, and data to balance against them.

• Follow the fun.

• That "do unto others" thing Jesus said is a pretty good formula for functional, friendly communities. Find the communities that practice it.

• Don't define things as successes or failures, just actions and consequences. Then choose the actions that will most likely lead to the consequences you want. Correct your model when they don't.

• Your brain chemistry will trick you into doing stupid things. Sometimes they will be fun. Sometimes they won't.

• Goverments, corporations, mafias - there are more similarities than differences.

• The paradox of creativity is that a blank canvas is a hindrance. Impose tasteful rules upon yourself and your work will flourish.

• Let trust be earned, don't give it away.

• You will be best at the things you enjoy. Do those things most and you will probably end up profiting from them.

• Mature, but don't ever grow up. Adults are assholes who hate themselves and their lives.

• There is almost always a reason why somebody is being a jerk, and often it's not their fault. Knowing that will help you realize why there is no point in being a jerk back.

• The universe is full of complex wonders that defy explanation. There is no need for flying spaghetti monsters (but sometimes spaghetti monsters can be fun to think about).

• Your own imagination is one of the best ways to have fun. Let it run free.

• The complexity paradox is that you should use Occam's razor and choose the simplest explanation that fits, but be aware that there is almost always a slightly more complex explanation that is more correct.

• Follow the advice of Bart Simpson; do what you feel like.

• Hedge your bets but don't reveal your hand.

• Economists think humans are a resource, but human intelligence and knowledge are actually a meta-resource.

• It is completely rational to be a good person.

• Evaluate ideas on their own merits, not on who is for or against them.

• Play is an excellent heuristic for understanding different systems. Play as often as possible.

• Keep your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground.

• Take advice from many people at once. The number of jellybeans in the jar is probably close to the average of everyone's guesses.

• Ask people about themselves first, how they are, what they are doing, what they like. If you are interested in someone a) you will learn something useful b) they will like you.

• Generous use of long silences will cause your adversaries to argue against themselves.

• The only real test of love is time.

• Darwin's theory of evolution is incredibly robust. Many more systems are subject to it than just the biosphere. You can rely on it (Just don't get it backwards or anthropomorphise it).

• Embrace paradox.

• Laziness is just efficiency in disguise. Make sure you slack off sometimes.

• Forget everything above and just practice critical thinking and unconditional love.

• Have fun!

Here are a couple of interviews I did in preparation for playing squeakyshoecore at the Seriously Sound System festival at Hyde Park, Western Australia, this Saturday the 18th of December, 2010 at 12:40pm.

This is an mp3 of the radio interview I did with Peter Barr for local radio station RTRFM

This is a magazine interview I did for Drum Media Perth; sorry it is a graphic. here is the Flash applet source of this excerpt.

Enjoy!

More links:

• Listen to squeakyshoecore here

• GarageAcidLab is the set of patches I use to play the music from squeakyshoecore. There is an Android app too which you can purchase at that link.

• You can find some other squeakyshoecore articles and interviews I did previously here.

Hello! I've uploaded two new tunes to the squeakyshoecore album of algorithmic acid. They are called ring singularity and prolate spheroid. Get yr rave on here. Incidentally, you might like to type the names of the squeakyshoecore songs into the search bar of Wikipedia. They are all named after fascinating science and mathematics topics.

On the 18th of December, I will also be playing a live gig in Hyde Park, Perth. I will be using the GarageAcidLab algorithms that I use to make squeakyshoecore here in Perth, Western Australia as part of the Seriously Sound System music festival organised by the local radio station, RTRFM. I am on just after midday at 12.40 in the afternoon. It should be a lot of fun!

Leading up to that I will be interviewed on that radio station at 8am local time this Friday the 10th of December. If you are not awake for it (like me), or you don't live in Western Australia, you can listen to the podcast, which I'll post here afterwards if I can figure out where it is.

Kampai!

Now that Moose and I have settled back in Perth, Western Australia, a place where citizens, teachers, and employees are encouraged to spy on eachother, I had to come up with some kind of antidote to the slightly ridiculous legislative overcompensation which goes on this particular utopia, despite clear evidence that it's already one of the safest places in the world and the crime rate has been falling continually for at least ten years.

So I came up with a philosophy of responsible citizenship which allows me to do the things I enjoy doing, as and when I like, without feeling persecuted. I call it The Europe Tax and it works like this:

• I behave as I would if I lived in a liberal European country, enjoying such activities as drinking a beer whilst walking down the street, riding a bike on the footpath without a helmet, carrying a laser pointer, a pen-knife, or a marker pen.

• When a police officer stops me for doing one of these things, I pay the fine issued to me and I say to the officer, "ah, time to pay The Europe Tax, thank you." Instead of thinking of it as a fine and a punishment, I consider the payment a tax that I must pay periodically to continue enjoying my life the way I want.

• I feel much happier paying this periodic tax than I would if I had to feel like a criminal for engaging in what are actually completely harmless activities.

Hopefully this will help others who live under over-zealous, rich, conservative, interfering local governments, to mentally re-frame their own place in the system of legislative over-optimisation.

(For the record I have not yet had to pay The Europe Tax in the twelve months since our return despite enjoying the freedoms I had become used to travelling and living in the EU. So far The Europe Tax has proven to be quite economical.)

Diaspora is the new social network effort by a group of hackers who are building a Free Software implementation of something like Facebook, or Google Buzz, but in a decentralised, open source, privacy aware way. Here are the things that I think are really promising about it so far:

• Your people are organised into 'aspects' which are logical groupings like in real life e.g. "family people", "work people", "people I send rude jokes to" etc. so that you won't ever post a picture of yourself drunk and naked for your grandmother to see by accident. This is baked into the interface in a completely natural way that feels right and fits with your existing mental model of your social groups. To me this is the number one killer feature that might encourage people to use it over Facebook. I was convinced that this is neccessary by the slides from this talk: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2. I think that Mark Zuckerberg's everyone-should-over-share-with-everyone-and-get-over-it philosophy of privacy is at odds with basic human nature.

• Your 'seed' (user) is portable. If you don't like the pod (server) you started with you can easily move to a different one. This is great as you aren't locked down to a particular provider. If your social service provider stops maintaining their code, or their service is bad, or they try to snoop on people, then you can get up and leave and find a better provider and take all of your data, posts, contacts etc. with you.

• It's decentralised. There isn't a single server or point of access like there is with Facebook and Google Buzz. This might sound like it would not work, but it does because you can friend people on other servers and it works exactly as if they were on the same server as you. You can even be the only person on your own privately run pod (server) and still network with, and see what your friends on other pods are up to. It's like email in that respect, except without the spam. Your address at a particular pod looks like an email address, so that is a concept that people already understand well.

• It's going to link up with other social networking services like Twitter, Buzz, Facebook etc. I guess the update posting will be based on the "aspects" idea too so if you post publically then it goes out to social networks, but otherwise not. This bit isn't done yet, but I'm excited about it as it means I can stop using the other services by visiting their sites. Instead when I post something on Diaspora, I can elect to also have it tweeted or fb updated, or whatever. I am not sure if it will be two-way so that you could also read your friends Facebook status updates from your diaspora instance, but that would be very cool if they can pull it off. That would provide a big incentive for people to switch as they can maintain their existing networks.

• Encryption of your data keeps it away from snooping sysadmins. You don't have to completely trust whoever is hosting your account, and the fact that Google and Mark Zuckerberg don't own your data and they can't "mine" it for their own benefit, is another big feature for me. My social graph is not a corporate asset.

People have said to me "but nothing can kill Facebook now, it's too big." I beg to differ for two reasons:

• I've had internet access since about 1995, and I have seen a ton of protocols come and go, even ones that literally everyone on the internet used. Remember BBSes, Gopher, Archie, news groups, ICQ, IRC, etc. etc.? Yes, most of them are still around, but the majority of internet users don't use them any more. There is no doubt in my mind that the same thing can happen to Facebook.

• Facebook is not the only social network. There are a ton of others and some of them come close to rivalling it in size. In some countries other networks have a larger presence than Facebook does. I think that people will follow two things to new software: a) their friends b) features. I think that privacy features are important to people, good ideas spread virally, and friendship groups will stick together across networks.

• The internet is built on competition between software and protocols. It's a thriving environment in which the most evolved software is selected by users and survives in the long run. I believe that even if Diaspora is not it, something better than Facebook will come along and unseat it. Historically speaking it's the open and free systems and software that survive the best and longest in the network environment.

Because it's Free Software following the "release early, realease often" development model, Diaspora is buggy and insecure and lacking in features right now, but I think it holds huge promise. In the few days I have had it running I've already seen bugfixes and features going in at a tremendous rate. I'm going to continue hosting my own pod and fingers crossed, maybe I'll meet you in the Diaspora universe one day soon.

"They trust me - dumb fucks." -- Mark Zuckerberg