How to argue on the Internet

Rule #1:

Do not argue on the internet, unless you absolutely have to, or unless you know your opponent personally. (or unless you are a troll).

Why? Because:

1. Unless you know your opponent personally, you will be trying to prove your point to a stranger you probably won't ever meet. In general, no matter whether you win or lose, nothing will change.
   
2. Writing takes time. A lot of time. Good, cold-blooded, intelligent argument, supported by research (or at least by the Google search) might take from 30 minutes to a few hours to finish, even if you are typing 400 characters per second. In general, your time isn't worth the result - you in most cases you won't get satisfaction, even if you "win". Also, eventually someone else will join the discussion without reading your arguments first. So it will be a waste of time.
   
3. Arguing sometimes takes emotions. If discussion becomes "heated", you might start to feel angry, etc. This also isn't worth the result.
   

Exceptions from rule:
It makes sense to argue, if one of following conditions applies:

1. Your life is directly affected by result of argument.
   
2. You have warranty that your opponent(s) is sane, is not a troll, and can provide good arguments.
   
3. You truly enjoy the process.
   

Of course, it is easy to say "do not argue", but how to deal with annoying/insane arguments? Here goes

Rule #2

Add "I think" ("He/She thinks") in front of opponent's arguments before reading them.

Why?

Because every argument on the Internet is an opinion. However, people very frequently forget to mention (by adding "IMHO") that what they write is merely their opinion. And some unique individuals will truly believe that what they think is some kind of absolute truth. The problem is that when you see something outrageous that doesn't fit what you know/believe in, and this thing presented as a fact (or some kind of absolute truth), your brain (mine, at least) for some reason wants to prove that your point of view is right, and this argument is not. However, for some reason, opinions of other people are easier to dismiss/ignore than something that is presented as a fact.

How to use it (example):

You log into forum. The user XYZ posted a message saying (keep in mind, this is just an example) "The universe was created by a big purple pipe-smoking rabbit with a pitchfork!" Now, it doesn't fit your religious beliefs and makes you enraged (keep in mind, it is still an example). Before starting a flamewar, add "I think that" in front of original sentence, and read it again. Now the message turns into "I think that the universe was created by a big purple pipe-smoking rabbit with a pitchfork!". Now for some reason it doesn't feel enraging, because If this dude thinks so, it is his problem with his head, opinion of some random dude (you never met) doesn't matter for you, and he will not be able to provide interesting discussion anyway. So you ignore this guy, and move on instead of wasting next hours in flamewar.

Rule #3

Avoid discussions about religion at all costs

Why? Because:

Faith frequently blinds people, and makes them think they are right affects both atheists and believers) and their opponents are not. There are very few(less than 1% of population, I think) people that can easily analyze/and change their beliefs when they are trying to prove they are right. During my life I never saw any religious that didn't end in flamewar. I also don't remember anyone in such discussion ever convincing someone else. So, in general, it will be a waste of time (unless you are troll, of course). Of course, there are always nice people that calmly follow their religion (or atheism) and don't bother anyone. However they normally don't have a need to participate in discussions about religion.

Rule #4

Unless you are dealing with science, any opinion (including yours) can be wrong and is not a universal truth Best applied to discussions about religion, in case you skipped Rule #3.

Why? Because:

Imagine that you live in a city and know that population of your town is 5000000. The problem here is that you do not know, but believe that population is around 5000000 people. This is because information about size of population was given to you by some kind of authority you trust(which is supposed to provide correct information), and you cannot really verify number of people yourself. If this authority gave you invalid information, your knowledge about city population will be invalid. The problem here is that nearly everything you know comes from some kind of trusted authority. Perhaps you never been to South Pole, but you believe that it exists, because someone told you so. The bigger problem is that first trusted authorities you use are your senses. So if you think about it, entire world around you could be an illusion or result of your imagination, without any way to be absolutely sure that anything besides you is real (that's where "Cogito ergo sum" comes from). If we skip philosophy part, and return to simpler terms, this means that both you and your opponent most likely have incomplete or invalid information about the subject. For example, you or your opponent may refer to online resource that is not guaranteed to have valid information, and so on. Yes, it is possible to at least try to make sure that your information is valid, and trace/verify all sources you are using, but people rarely do it. So it makes sense to keep in mind that anyone can be wrong. And if you want to make things more fun, add Murphy's law to that ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."), which will mean that in any discussion is probably wrong at one place or another.

Rule #5

Remember that you don't have to agree with someone.

Why? Because:

There are many people in the world, and they all have different opinions, believe in different things, follow different religions, etc. And there is no absolute, universal truth, at least it isn't easily accessible. It is not possible make everyone agree, and it is not necessary. It makes sense to argue in situation when something serious depends on result - life of millions, perhaps. Clearly most Internet arguments and flamewars doesn't qualify as such situations, so participating in them is nearly always a waste of time (well, unless you are a troll and enjoy provoking other people). In most cases it is perfectly fine to disagree with anyone, as long as your position looks valid to yourself. And it makes sense to ignore "incorrect" opinions of other people, unless your life (or life or friends, relatives, etc) is directly affected by them. It makes sense, because people
don't like being told that they are wrong, proving something to someone takes time, and doesn't always provide useful result.

End of article.

Hope this helps someone.

The meaning of life and everything

Well, this time it isn't about programming or computers, but this was bothering me for a while. Warning: this text might be depressing, because I have no answer for that question.

Have you ever thought about this: everything you see around you eventually will disappear. Think about it. Many human-made object will be broken within 100 years. People last less than 200 years, so in a 200 years there probably will be no you (well unless you are lucky enough to find or invent immortality cure). Buildings last longer, but most of them won't survive even a few hundreds of years. In a few billions of years sun will explode and destroy the planet. And in a few more billions of years universe will collapse back to the single point it appeared from. So there will be nothing left at all.

"Daisy Owl" nicely illustrates the problem(here).

This makes me wonder - what is the point of everything? Every single thing that exists will eventually disappear. And in the end there will be no one left to tell the tale or remember anything. As if nothing ever existed at all.

I guess happiest people never run into that question.

The problem here is not that all matter will disappear. Some of the theories about the end of universe suggests that matter will remain (but temperature will drop to absolute zero). The problem is that every object or person (including yourself) around you already doesn't exist anymore - at some point in the future (or there is no longer any observer for this object), which is hard to accept simply because it doesn't feel "right".

Another problem is that human mind wants a meaning for everything (well, at least mine does). The most logical answer is that life has no meaning and is an accident. However, this idea is incredibly hard to accept. I guess that it is easier for religious people to face this question - after all, at least in some religions you are immortal (your soul, which is basically you), or you are reborn, and at the "end of times" you will meet all other people and you will live happily ever after. On other hand that eternal life in heaven/hell might not be that different from "end of time" in one of scientific theories - everything kind of "stops" and remains same forever.

If you think more about all of this, you can notice one interesting thing: the more advanced technology becomes, the less chances it has to exist for long time and less chances it has to be comprehensible for next civilization should humanity disappear. Think about it. As far as I know, writings on the stone can exist for a lot of time. Paper is more convenient, but requires extra care in order to persist for many years. And in order to make all information in your computer inaccessible, all you need is to cut the power. Also, the way information is stored is incredibly complicated, which means that should humanity disappear, the next civilization won't be able to get much from remains of our computers. Digital info is incredibly fragile itself, this article illustrates some problems. If you think about this, our civilization suddenly looks incredibly fragile, like a card house - just lose a few key technologies, and you are back in the medieval times.
This returns me to original problem:

• Our world is fragile, and should something serious happen, many things we know will be lost forever.
  
• In fact, nearly everything (on earth, at least) is going to disappear eventually hardly leaving the trace. Organic creatures die. Machinery rusts. Buildings are being destroyed by the elements. Eventually, Sun itself will "blow up" and burn the earth down, or it will eventually stop producing light.
  
• Most of those events cannot be avoided.
  

Perhaps I'm missing something, but for me all this combined together doesn't make any sense.

So, what is the point of all this? What is the meaning of everything? The purpose?

Ideas, anyone?

Time management: how to get things done (if lists doesn't help you)

Although this blog is supposed to be mostly about programming, I decided to post one "self-improvement" tip which was useful for me.

Standard approach

Everyone(or most people know) know that normal way to deal with tons of things you should do today is to make a "to do" list for every day. In ideal case you should have several lists - list of long-term goals (lifetime), mid-term goals (several years), short-term goals(several months) and list of things that should be done right now (today, during this week, etc). Every day your to do list should contain several items from each list (or items that will bring you closer to reaching goal from each list), that should be written down according to their priority. I.e. if your mid-term goal is to learn new language, and immediate goal is to buy food, your daily to-do list should have one item for each of those goals. This looks neat, easy enough, however as I found out, there will be several problems.

Problems

Typically with standard to-do list, following problems arise:

• One item from the list takes too much time or even all your time.
  
• You don't really want to do that right now.
  
• One of the items on the list looks like it will take too much time today, so you decide to do it tomorrow. Tomorrow, same things happens again. As a result task is not being completed within weeks or months.
  
• You have too many long-term goals, and can finish anything, because they all take too much time, and can't be finished during one day.
  

Part of those problems arise from natural laziness - your consciousness (or subconsciousness) will invent various excuses to prevent you from doing anything useful. It is hard to understand why your own mind is against you, but this thing happens. Another part of problems will happen when you will incorrectly estimate time required to finish the task. Also, life is full of surprises, and it is quite possible that something will get in your way and you won't be able to finish some important task today because of external events.

Solution

There is a very easy solution for those problems (I haven't seen it written anywhere, which is why I've decided to post this thing here): when you make your daily "to-do" list, for each task write down how much time you will spend on it today. For example, if you are learning new language, (to my opinion) you will learn a lot if you will exercise for 30 minutes every day.
When you start your day, for each task spend as much time as you wrote down in your to do list (Unless you finish the task faster than you expected). Of course, this time you should seriously work on the problem without fooling around, without being distracted, etc. If you won't finish task in time, proceed to the next task, and put unfinished task on tomorrow's "to do" list (you might want to adjust time according to today's experience). If you have a lot of tasks for today, you can spend 30 minutes for each. 30 minutes isn't much, but you still can do a lot during this time.
This approach is incredibly useful for a very long goals (write a large program, learn language, study something huge, etc). At least it works for me, so I think it will be useful for someone else.