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The Result of Force Feeding Morality

Hader wrote an interesting piece about how he observes the changes in the Egyptian society over the past 70 years and how he sees it since he left two years ago to Amsterdam.

It is a courageous piece. It will draw a lot of noise due to the openness by which Hader discusses how things changed. Which makes me break my rule of silence about Egypt and voice what I also see.

For me the biggest change to the Egyptian society, which was the deal breaker by which I decided to leave, is the change in the moral landscape of Egyptians and what they consider moral or not.

Egyptian kids — including myself — are never taught to think. We were force fed everything from our parents, the society, and the state media.

We were taught cheating is wrong, but most parents would be ok if their kids cheated and became the top of their class. We were taught not to bribe, and then we see our parents bribing others to get things done or escape a driving ticket.

You might argue “force feeding” is the same in every society, but there are three main differences between Egyptian/Middle Eastern societies and the west.

  1. Our education system didn’t teach us how to think to reach a conclusion.
  2. Those who think and disagree are not allowed to speak their minds for the fear of being despised by the society that’s dominated by conservatives.
  3. Egyptian parents stay involved in their kids’ life until they get married, others still have the same involvement even after their kids marry, which makes breaking the chain harder.
  4. The fundamental changes in the society starting from the 70s, led to a big divide in the moral landscape, which later resulted in the loss of common middle ground that was untouchable before.

This contradictory saying vs doing dilemma made most of us unstable when it came to moral judgement and decision making. Everyone was ok with it until two big things happened, the internet, and the revolution.

The internet made us realize what we are taught is not exactly right, and there are many others who are just like us.

The revolution made us distrust the people we used to admire and get inspiration from. The also used to establish the foundation/escape from which we derive our moral judgements.

We — as Egyptians — found ourselves suddenly in front of a big moral challenge. We had to make up our mind for really tough questions. The biggest one for me — which resulted in the decision of leaving the country — was:

Is it ok to kill people with whom we disagree on political issues on the basis we think they threaten social stability? Is it ok to arrest them? Torture them?

We were told “The wiping away of the world means less to Allah than a believer to be killed unjustly”, but we saw thousands being killed unjustly on the street in one day and other “believers” cheering and asking for more.

If someone would have told me this will happen, I would have said they are crazy. Sadly, many people were ok with that, more than I imagined, they were spread across almost everyone’s circle. I decided I don’t want to live with those people. I left.

We didn’t learn or got the freedom to think and decide. When you discover what you are told is wrong or not working anymore, without an alternative or a methodology to find an alternative, you get the extremes we have today, and the rest — such as my self — stay silent, or leave.

This cultural force feeding of morality led to where we are today. And it will get worse.

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Thought Experiment: The end of trains in Europe

As someone fascinated by self driving cars, I keep thinking about a future where all cars are autonomous and people no longer own them. At the same time, I am working on helping customers book trains, buses, and flights for intercity transportation in Europe.

Trains are very limited in capacity, you have to build specific expensive roads for them, they have to run on specific times to transport as much people as possible, and they are very expensive (Many intercity journeys in Europe are cheaper by flights than trains, and much cheaper by carpooling using for example BlaBla Car).

In a world dominated by autonomous cars, part of the changing dynamics will include

  • Cars getting significantly cheaper, because car manufacturers won’t have to build and sell tens of models per year since people will no longer have to own them.
  • Hailing a car will get significantly cheaper as well, due to the elimination of humans, and the high utilization of the car. Currently cars are only utilized 1-2% of the time. Imagine a 50-60% utilization. That’s 6000% improvement.
  • Cars will get faster, you no longer need speed limits because of the possibilities of human errors. Networked machines will handle everything.
  • Roads: There are two theories about roads, one theory is roads will get more crowded since significantly more cars will be running and transporting people. The second theory is more people will be on the move which also means roads will be more utilized, and you don’t have the limits of train tracks.

All of this makes me think, by the time we reach this, trains will look as something from the past, something very old that you have to wait to get in it, something that needs high maintenance cost and high management cost to manage all the bottlenecks on the tracks. Something that looks very slow, and very inconvenient, in such a fast moving world.

Mercedes is the new Deutsche Bahn.

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Bad days

I am having a bad day today. I am not sure if it is because I am feeling sleepy, I am stressed because of work, I had a bad meeting, or all of this.

Before I sat on my bed and started writing this, I saw my Kindle. I remembered that I am currently reading Nassim Tulib’s book, Antifragile.

The book idea is simple, yet powerful. Nassim argues that the opposite of fragile isn’t robust or unbreakable, the opposite is antifragile. 

Antifragility is a property in a system – natural or man made – where the system instead of breaking, it gets stronger the more stress you apply to it.

One of the main conditions of antifragility is giving the system enough stress to get stronger but not so much that it collapses. 

Think of the flu shot which contains a small dose of the virus. Too much will kill you, too little won’t create enough stress for your body to create the antibodies.

I think bad days are like flu shots. They apply enough stress to make you stronger – as long as nothing very bad happened – but too many of them can kill you.

I think I had a flu shot today.

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Autonomous thoughts

I am taking the Udacity full stack developer Nanodegree program to refresh my memory. The autonomous cars Nanodegree ads are all over the website, so I can’t stop thinking about our autonomous driving future. 

Here are some of the thoughts

As much as it is important to make a car able to drive itself and follow the rules, it is also important to make the car able to understand the human signals that can not be directly inferred by sensors. Like someone signaling to a pedestrian to cross, a driver signaling to another driver that they are going to pass, or a driver telling the other I am waiting for you.

If you want to build an autonomous car that can drive on the streets of Cairo, one of the most important inputs is sound. Egyptians are crazy about using the horn.

In Cairo some drivers use the horn as much as they use the gas pedal, we have a tone to tell someone to cross, another to tell them to get lost, we have a tone for different swear words (yes we do), we have a tone to celebrate a new marriage (crazy?), and we have a tone to tell other drivers or pedestrians thank you!

For a car to recognize this in such a noisy environment, it has to not only interpret different tones, but also filter them based on distance and which one is relevant for the car’s situation.

With horn sounds, there are also visual cues that car makers never built their cars for, like drivers getting their hands out of the window to signal turning left, sometimes the passenger next to the driver also does that to signal turning right.

Luckily, no one is trying to build an Egyptian autonomous car.

Another thought that came to mind while climbing up the street where I work with the wheelchair on snow, what inputs do we need to build an autonomous wheelchair?

My thought of autonomous wheelchairs come from the need to text while walking like everyone else. It is not a matter of comfort or laziness but rather satisfying my smart phone addiction. That’s why I hate the experience of having of tap and hold to record video because I can’t push my wheelchair while recording.

As a start, we need a camera to identify humans, cars, and obstacles. We also need radars that can build a 3D image of what’s in front of the chair to identify distances. 

We then need another radar at the front bottom to estimate heights of different obstacles so the chair can decide whether to try climbing up a step or jumping off one without its user falling.

I think one of the challenges will be identifying cross points. After all the lowest place on a side walk isn’t always in the same location, sometimes it is to the right, other times it is to the left, sometimes it is visually distinct so that visually impaired users can find it with their sticks, other times it is not.

Sometimes the lowest point is blocked by a car, or two cars, and the chair has to decide whether the space between them fits.

Another thing I am obsessed with is which route to take in a square to move to the opposite corner, would I go straight then left, or left then right? My heuristic is to go with whichever light open first, but how a chair would see and decide?

Indoor navigation will be a challenge. GPS has limited accuracy and won’t work well inside malls. However the conditions are easier. Keep going straight, avoid colliding into people and objects, avoid falling off stairs, and when there is a decision on whether to go right or left, just ask me.

Welcome to the future.

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Algorithms to live by

The object of study in mathematics is truth, the object of study in computer science is complexity. – Algorithms to live by

I just finished this book. I never thought I would enjoy an algorithms book as much as I enjoyed this one. It has a unique perspective combining history, real world problems, and deeply technical topics in fun, simple English format.

If you studied computer science, it will give you the history and the why of many of the things you studied as well as expand your knowledge to other areas you might have heard of but never worked on.

If you didn’t study computer science, it will help you understand computational thinking, why things the way they are, and surprise surprise, you will learn about the limitations of computers and the trade offs software developers have to make to reach a working solution.

In all cases, you will learn how to use computational thinking to make decisions in life, and some of these will be your algorithms to live by.

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My 2016: The year of willpower

As 2016 is coming to an end with all its ups and downs, it made me reflect on what really happened in my life during that year and what’s coming for the years ahead.

I don’t look at life in years, I look at it in milestones. I have an idea of where I want to go next but I don’t put specific time frames tied to years or my age. After all, goals are dependent on many factors, some we can control, others we can’t, and that’s why I believe one shouldn’t tie goals to a calendar. Calendars can act as a guidance, but not as milestones.

If I had to pick one theme for my 2016 with all that happened, I would call it the year of willpower.

I once heard Ahmed Al Shugairi talking about the book “The willpower instinct” and how it changed his life to become a better person. He quit smoking completely after more than 10 years. I had the book on my list for long but finally managed to listen to it few months ago while I was in the middle of many willpower challenges.

My biggest willpower challenge was a compulsive behavior I don’t like talking about that took me long to overcome. It wasn’t easy but I finally managed to overcome it.

My second biggest willpower challenge this year was information control. Deleting my Facebook account was a huge challenge with lots of deactivation and reactivation. Deleting Snapchat, Twitter, and Nuzzel from my phone came only recently. It wasn’t easy. Every time I deleted one of the apps I cheated by logging to the mobile web version. I can’t even say now that I completely got rid of them as sometimes I itch to download twitter or nuzzel out of my fear of missing out.

My third challenge was to write consistently. I wrote more than 50 blog posts this year, and I hope to get better and write more.

My biggest learnings going through this

  • Willpower is one of the most mentally consuming tasks, that’s why our brains always give it up to reallocate this mental power for other tasks.
  • Things take time. This reaffirmed my point of view of not tying milestones to calendars.
  • One shouldn’t beat themselves up or restart every time they fail in the willpower challenge. If you cheated once don’t wait till next day to start over, just move on.
  • Environment, environment, and environment. Big part of willpower failures come from not changing our environment. Sometimes changing the environment isn’t possible, however being aware of its influence on a behavior is crucial to resist its triggers.

I can’t say I mastered willpower, no one can. I still have many willpower challenges on my list like eating healthy, reading books daily, allocating time to learn about new stuff, not to fear trying something instead of just getting the theoretical knowledge about it, and many more. Let’s see what 2017 will bring.

Happy new year!

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Man’s Search for Meaning

Yesterday I finished the book “Man’s Search for Meaning”. I heard of the book first time from a tweet by Keith Rabois.

It is the story of a psychiatrist who survived four Nazi concentration camps during world war II. Perfect time to read while just arriving to Germany!

The book is not the typical WWII horror story type of book. It rather focuses on the psychological aspect of being a prisoner in one of those camps, and the difference between those survived and those gave up to let themselves die.

Then the author talks about a new approach to psychiatry which he calls “Logotherapy”. Logos is a greek word which denotes “meaning”. Here is an excerpt from the book

Logotherapy, or, as it has been called by some authors, “The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man’s search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power on which Adlerian psychology, using the term “striving for superiority,” is focused.

 

Logotherapy regards its assignment as that of assisting the patient to find meaning in his life. Inasmuch as logotherapy makes him aware of the hidden logos of his existence, it is an analytical process. To this extent, logotherapy resembles psychoanalysis. However, in logotherapy’s attempt to make something conscious again it does not restrict its activity to instinctual facts within the individual’s unconscious but also cares for existential realities, such as the potential meaning of his existence to be fulfilled as well as his will to meaning.

Any analysis, however, even when it refrains from including the noölogical dimension in its therapeutic process, tries to make the patient aware of what he actually longs for in the depth of his being. Logotherapy deviates from psychoanalysis insofar as it considers man a being whose main concern consists in fulfilling a meaning, rather than in the mere gratification and satisfaction of drives and instincts, or in merely reconciling the conflicting claims of id, ego and superego, or in the mere adaptation and adjustment to society and environment.

I have few highlights from the book, but here is one that I really liked.

Edith Weisskopf-Joelson, before her death professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, contended, in her article on logotherapy, that “our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.”

Although the book was first published in 1946, this is so true to our current world!

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How do you know?

When I was at Booking.com, John Elabd was one of the best product owners. He used to challenge every assumption and take the leap to test ideas that were never tested in the company before.

One of the things I learned from John when someone gets too biased toward their argument on whether something is good or bad for customers, he would reply with a simple, yet powerful question

How do you know?

Every time he asked me this question I had to go back and think. Many times in product organizations people fear testing new ideas because of internal resistance, or fear of messing things up.

The culture at Booking.com is to be fearless, they have no problem someone screws things up and cost the company thousands or maybe millions of Euros, because they know at this cost people move fast, then you find the breakthroughs that cover up for all the mess.

So far it is working. That’s how I know.

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Why I see Brexit as a good thing for Tech?

Since the Brexit, I heard countless arguments about British startups moving to Berlin. I tend to think most of these arguments as clickbaits for the tech media to feed on, now with TechCrunch Disrupt London, these arguments resurfaced. Here is my opinion about why Brexit doesn’t matter for tech or even contrary to popular sentiment, it could be a good thing:

  • It is not that simple. You can’t easily move a startup from a country to another because of something that didn’t happen. Up until now, the only direct result of Brexit is the devaluation of the pound which is not an enough motive for a startup to leave UK and come to Berlin. Not to mention the Euro itself is losing its value because of strong dollar and the other Euro zone problems.
  • Tech in principle is global. Being in UK doesn’t have a big difference from being in Berlin. Unless you are doing something very specific to the German or British market, you don’t have to be there.
  • Europe was fragmented, and will stay fragmented post Brexit. Each country has its own language, culture, and laws. Being in or out of EU doesn’t matter for the most part because the fragmentation is still there.
  • British entrepreneurs still have access to EU. They can still move any way they want and open offices anywhere.
  • The fact that UK speaks English gives it a huge advantage over Germany. Immigrant entrepreneurs can’t easily start a company in a country where they don’t speak the language, and have fears of falling victims to legalities they can’t even read.
  • The big players doubled down on UK. Amazon is expanding and hiring like crazy. Facebook is adding 500 new tech jobs in London office. Google is opening its biggest space in Europe and adding thousands of jobs in London.
  • Tech is the last industry affected by regulation, until UK finds out what Brexit means they will have a very long list of problems to solve before coming to what Brexit means for tech. Until then, everything stays the same.
  • In fact, Brexit could be great for the tech scene in UK. Being out of EU will allow the UK to move fast and away from stupid European laws that are preventing many startups from being started here. Less decoupling means more agility, and more competition between EU states and non-EU states, which makes things better for everyone.
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Scrum in one picture

I am attending an agile training. I like this picture which summarizes the whole scrum flow. I took the picture myself but the drawing is by our trainer, Anton.

Take a moment to figure them yourself. The answers are below.



The answers