To convince a non-believer

I think it's not for everyone to try to convince someone who believes in pseudo-science. It's possible, but not practical. Lets put some context: say you have a friend or a relative who saw a video explaining how science has proved the existence of a god x. Now of course, one choice is to gloss over the discussion and nod along. Another is to get offended and try to argue. Even a third recourse might be to engage in a meaningful discussion where you nudge the other to think critically and manage to reach the correct conclusion.

I propose that even the third option is not necessarily practical. Say there are 3 people A, B and C. C has created a complicated illusion through a lot of smoke and mirrors. Now B, believes this illusion to be true, each facet of it. Now of course, if A has to cancel that illusion, A must break apart, without mistake, each building block of C's creation. It's hard, but say A starts with one block, then the second and succeeds. By now A has spent a lot of effort trying to deconstruct these two blocks in a persuasive way particularly for B. As we all know, persuading someone on a logical topic is hardly easy. Something that is easy and obvious for one may not be for another.

So now in the tired state, it's likely that A can make a couple small mistakes. It's also just as likely that A is not an expert in some specific topics so that it's hard to deconstruct those ideas. A third roadblock is that deconstructing too many ideas becomes an ordeal for B so that they get either irritated or tired of the entire thing. At the end of this, the most likely outcomes are:

1. A makes a mistake and B uses that to escape the argument.

2. The argument becomes heated and no one is pulled in any direction.

3. The argument becomes tiring and both agree to disagree.

It's overall quite a useless endeavor, in my opinion. So, what's the recourse? I think there's two choices A has:

1. If not asked explicitly to opine, just unhear the topic and move on with life.

2. If asked explicitly, tell a polite short answer about what is A's position; if asked to elaborate, they can first be informed about the complexity of the situation and that there is only time to deconstruct one or two topics.

This gives a couple of advantages:

1. If B is indeed interested in A's arguments, either because they successfully got doubt or because they believe A, then they'll come back for more.

2. Both A and B will get the necessary time and space to carry forth the argument. A to formulate and B to ruminate.

Checkpoints

What are the points in my past where I'd go make changes if I were given the chance? I'm sure many of us think of this, some more than others. I've found myself completely lost in this kind of regret on a large number of occasions. Much more than I'd like. Nearly all of my regrets have come from one single source:

Not putting a 100% of myself in something I should have put it in. And the advice is fairly simple: If you already recognize your problem, all that is left to do is to give your 100%. Find ways of how to give your 100%. And if you still are unable to give your 100%, then re-evaluate yourself. Because, "You don't really want it. You just kinda want it..."

What they don't tell you is how big the cost of re-evaluation, re-consideration, change in life etc is. It's easy to not feel like this if one had more confidence to begin with. If one started early with the whole "making up your mind" thing that the world is enamored with.

The world eschews uncertainty. Statements like, "Well I'm not sure but, [...]" or "I think maybe that", or "Well I don't know exactly but " etc are just not as impacting as statements of surety, whether overall they be better than the unsure statements or not. And in this way, confidence feasts upon itself to actually make one a better person than if they didn't have the confidence. Lets look at both scenarios in detail.

On the one hand there we have A, who will not be quick to abstract, make simplifications, create a model, make quick simulation, judgments, move on, and come to quick decisions or conclusions. This leads to extremely broad search through the knowledge tree associated with the topic at hand. In the end, A gets a very broad and loose sense of a really really broad picture, which most of the times has nothing to do with the initial topic A started out with. A has no deliverables. A has such a wide scope of information that it's really hard to form interconnections in the data. Interconnections are important, because this is how our memory stores and remembers information.

On the other hand, there is B, who will not try to understand everything about the topic completely. B defers that process for later, trusts rote memorization for the time being (for the parts that B can't quickly comprehend), assumes some simplifications and forms an opinion. B now has the confidence to quickly make an impression upon whoever is depending on B for either this information directly or a product of this information. B also has a narrow enough scope of information that B can go deep into and make interconnections and remember everything. B now also has the memory of the knowledge gained, which will help B the next time they want to reiterate the knowledge search (wither wide or deep), without starting from the beginning.

Slowly, while A keeps being more and more unsure about everything at the same time, B starts becoming more and more sure about a subset of things. B has more confidence, more results, leading to more trust from other people, professionals who B depends on and slowly, who themselves will start depending on B.

Becoming someone others depend on is an ideal end goal. The reality of life is that due to its infinite complexity and our finite processing power, it's not wise to start swimming across the ocean, but rather master your backyard swimming pools first. Once you have certainty, you have confidence. Once you have confidence, you have conviction. Once you have conviction, you can better make and achieve goals in life. Once you achieve goals in life, you have less regrets that hold you back (unlike the regrets that don't hold you back). This is what is actually called giving your 100%. And the best thing is, once you have these above things, then even if you re-evaluate and make changes, you know that wherever you go, you'll be able to make it. Because you already have made it before.

Dear Diary

Well it's only been 3 days, but hey. I promised to write in you every day, but for now, is every weekday fine for you? Some people have dogs, some people have soulmates, some have relatives. Some don't need it. But some, like me have journal. You're my first/last resort I guess. The only place where I can be myself. You're my imaginary friend that has a tangible real life extension. You're the reservoir of all that, in my mind, is real. You're the lucid day dream that helps me organize my conscious brain; just like night dreams organize the subconscious. Is it because you don't judge me? Maybe not; you're an extension of my own mind, and I'm extremely judgmental of myself. But the difference maybe, is that I know that you only reflect my own judgments without proactively providing me any of your own. You're the intellectual version of me asking a flat mirror how I look.

You can tell I love you from the way I treat you just like my loved ones. There are days when I'm completely dependent on you. There are weeks when everyday I'm craving some moments with you. Then there are times where for many straight days I tend to just forget your existence (or so it seems) till I see your face again and feel so guilty for not paying attention before. You can tell I love you from the way I keep fidgeting with your customization settings so that I comfortably cocoon inside your warm personalization.

Yet every day, unlike the cliche, I struggle to tell you something. I always know I want to tell you something, I just am constantly unsure what, how, when, where to tell you. All the choices of words, of labels, of categories, of associated feelings, of timing and so on, confuse me. It's the paradox of choice. I choose to admonish myself, to carry my introspection, down all the various avenues. And suddenly, I'm so lost in creating the story that I forget the beginning and the end. I end up telling you something from the surface, rather than being honest with you, completely, like I should. I end up being dishonest with me.

I'm not making any promises. I have only casual intentions. I know recursion is key. I know every single broad and narrow aspect of personal improvement. You're not my avenue towards the goal. For now, you are the goal. For to find the world, one must first find oneself.

Communication Pt. 1

Since coming to my first corporate experience, I've learned massive amounts of common communication errors, both on the business and on the personal ends. Of the most desirable features are three razors:

1. Occam's Razor: Do not make unnecessary assumptions. If someone has told you one idea, do not generalize it across space and time. A particularly embarrassing instance of not following this rule occurred with me in my very first week. So there is this center table in my office and a co-worker said that usually the food kept there is, free for anyone to take. So I generalized this statement without making sure whether there were any boundary conditions, like people ordering food in a group. And that's exactly where I went wrong. There's also a system where people will start a discussion on a channel in Slack for ordering food together to save on delivery charges. This food is kept on the said table too, so that people can come pick it up when they want. And the idiot that I am, I picked up someone's order without thinking.

2. The distil-your-information-razor: Ruminate on what you want to say for a bit. Even if you instantly need to answer a question, quickly review in your head which aspects of the information are really essential to be communicated at the time. Verbosity is the worst when it comes to official communication. Even though they may say it multiple times, your boss and your senior colleagues are -NOT- your close friends. They have other people and their own social life to look at, so if you ramble on with unnecessary information, not just does it annoy them, it also dilutes the essence of your intention. When people think you're not trying to waste their time, it builds trust much quicker.

3. The compress-your-information-razor: Now this is more of a complex razor. For one, it relies on shared knowledge of language, terminology and jargon. If you try to express an elaborate idea by its niche title but the other person hasn't really heard of it then it's useless. If the language you're comfortable in is not the same they are, then compressing information is useless. However, even when introducing intentional errors and redundancy, one should keep in mind that its the necessary errors and redundancy that are brought in.

Why do you "need" errors?

Coming to work overseas (actually even before that), one can encounter people who aren't comfortable with some language, for instance English. So if you don't try to match your grammar and sentence structure with what they expect, even if their expected structure is incorrect, then communication becomes choppy and annoying. Better to do-as-the-romans-do.

Incremental Improvements

Innovation and Maintenance are two somewhat competing aspects of development. Investment in one requires compromise in the other. What then is the correct investment of time/resources in each?

Maintenance is about recognizing what you already have and maintaining it at a desirable level. But optimizing this requires at first recognizing what things are worth maintaining. Otherwise a lot of resources will be wasted. For example, if you have cultivated some relationships, are all of them worth maintaining? If not, then the unnecessary ones must be amortized.

Innovation, similarly is about recognizing the minimal set of the desirable qualities and behaviors one must have and then creating plans to achieve them.

There are many competing ideas in decisions we make for these aspects. On the one hand, as you grow, so do the things you need to maintain. Considering we usually have a fixed amount of time resource at hand, it would seem that the amount of investment in innovation would go down. And that is usually what happens too. Big old people are rarely the ones who come up with radical innovation. However, this doesn't eliminate incremental innovation.

There are two tools that can be used for help in this case:
--Subconscious automation: As you build more and more experience, it should take you less and less resources to do the same job as you did before. Especially for maintenance. This is similar to how we develop subconscious behaviors to handle some basic functions as humans (walking, driving, etc), or how athletes need to think less and less about the actions they've practiced for a long time.
--Delegation: As we develop more experience, we need to get better at thinking on an abstract scale. If we're able to do that, we're more suited to delegating (managing) things better. We can find the right people to take care of some things we would have had to personally take care of before.

Why are incremental gains important? Stagnation produces a loss of desire to become better. It's a vicious cycle. So escaping from stagnation even before we get into it is crucial. On the second hand, a crucial part of my philosophy is that as an atheistic individual, the worth of my life is equal to what I make of it. It is proportional to how much of what I do will have long lasting impressions. This ties in with the fact that I am a social animal, where community is an important player. Community built and produced resources, ideas etc are what have shaped me, helped define me and provided me basis for not just survival, but to thrive. Hence, people's happiness and respect is of importance in defining achievements.

Forming personal goals, then is a balance in finding the things we like within the subset of acceptable social achievements, behaviors and ideals. This set, generally is large. We're usually at the stage of having achieved some subset. Incremental gains is the most achievable algorithm to keep achieving more.

Excess

One of the starkest ironies of life is efficiency. xkcd I believe, has posted some comics on this issue, a prominent one being http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1445:_Efficiency

There is a cost to optimization. If we're trying to make one workflow efficient, optimize some measurable goal, then there's a whole plethora of costs that we willingly, unwillingly or unknowingly compromise on. Compromises in personal life vs professional life have been quite well explored in popular film media, but I think the less sexy issues aren't.


Lets take for example your personal computer. It's a popular meme that the PCs of today are far more powerful than the computers combined that helped send man to the moon. Lets think about it a little more. At my workplace we have 70 people, each using at least one Macbook Pro. This is a PC with 8 gigs of RAM, 500 GB memory many GHz (Or gflops if you like) of processing capability. Most of the time the processor remains at near idle rate. Most of the people are using the MacBook for Office applications like Text editing (which includes coding), making presentations, browsing, communicating and watching/reading stuff. Sometimes there's more processor intensive applications like rendering, video editing, designing and compiling code.

If you combine the requirements of everyone, you could maybe take 10 Macbooks, put them up as a cloud server, give everyone a simple terminal and even then you would not need more power even during high load times. What's a more striking number is that the total Hard disk storage used by everyone combined is not much more than these 10 PCs together.

Why then do we not have this system?

It's all about compromise. The jobs we perform are really complicated and require complicated machines which in turn means that there are a lot of avenues for failure. If there's some problem with the cluster, then suddenly most people's productivity dies. With distributed PCs, you have load capability at the same time as reducing risk.

But that is not to say that there are no avenues for cost minimization. If you have a big enough firm, one can still do a cost analysis to find the point at which a well setup cloud cluster, with enough backup capability and redundancy is more cost effective than personal laptops. There is still a tonne of avenues for innovation in the world. This is exciting.

Tessellation

This video is Geometry of a Scene by Tony Zhou from every frame a painting. In short, it highlights a facet of cinematography that a scene should have aesthetic geometric structure as a part of the visual storytelling. It captures the viewer just by it's structure and is thus far more engaging and rewarding. It made me think of where else one can introduce this artistic structure for similar effect.

An obvious extension is music. Sure it might not explicitly be a visual effect (unless you're synesthetic,) but it creates a similar feeling. For example, take 'The Real Folk Blues' by yoko Kanno. I use this example because if you watched the video above, you can easily correlate between the triangles used there to the triangles used in this music:

Notice that even though it deviates from this geometric structure only when it needs to highlight the rising element a couple times, you always have a tandem of three elements either moving forward together or ramping together. It's mind boggling fantastic how these artists have the inherent sensibility to come up with such a complicated balance.

However, art is not the only medium one can apply this aspect to. Think about an academic medium like teaching a complicated subject in a classroom. Can we still create a structure of this sort that engages the students' attention? Of course great professors tend to do this. What is the triangle (for example) that they use? The first element is the writing on the board. The second element is what they speak and their gestures. The third element might either be a model or demonstration, or it might be an analogy if you don't have a physical model available. They'll involve physical movement to lay emphasis on specific parts of this triangle when needed.

Tony Zhou talks about how to structure a video essay in a different video of his:

I believe a similar principle applies here.You have two or more elements in concert, but on a temporal dimension instead of spatial. Think of applying this concept to the art of great storytelling through text; you might even say good academic papers will follow this structure. You structure the story in parallel threads where you explore each thread till its peak interest is reached then you cut to the other thread(s). As you go forward, you start tying up these threads and have a big reveal near the end. It's the same principle of geometric hook that gives the reader more margin for interaction with your work.

This is something that I'm prioritizing as my must-inculcate-in-self from this point on. It's all about magic and deception, but in an honest manner :)

Different Perspectives

Well there's n-number of things to speak of for this topic. Just including some observations I'd thought about in last few days, I guess.

On bribes.



Thought about this recently while filing paperwork for driving license. It almost seemed like, along with euphemism, another sort of mentality drove the bribing. It almost seemed like, to some people, the ability to pay the bribe, as in showing some sort of "superiority" over the other was essential, in terms of normalizing the status. Because minus that, they were at a lower status as in asking another person to do something for them, but when they gave this bribe, they finally had that air of treating the worker as just someone serving them either as an equal or lower. But even here, they try to veil it under gratuitousness.

In fact, if you extend this mentality to other situations, it's not hard to make out that it's pretty rampant. One of the best visible examples is lavish celebrations people have. Weddings, Birthdays, Anniversaries. Even in some pretty impoverished communities, if you're not throwing a gala celebration, you're frowned upon. 

It's not hard to see the connection between this behavior and outright superiority complex if you actually have an abundance of resources. But I thought about another peculiar aspect of this while driving back today. It was one of those peddlers on streets, who sell something cheap, like toys, handicrafts, cloths for cleaning, tissues on the street. I try to buy it from them, rather than giving beggars money, because well, they're doing something a little more commendable. Yes of course, there's much more complexity to the situation, I know. For example, it's not clear how they obtained the material they sell. It's not clear how they use the funds and if they use it better than the beggars. But still, overall, the means seem just a tad more satisfactory, if you make some assumptions on both ends. Anyways, to come back to the point;

Chandler : Gee, Monica, what’s in the bag?
Monica : I don’t know, Chandler. Let’s take a look.
Phoebe : Oh, it’s like a skit.
Monica : Why, it’s dinner for six. 5 steaks, and an eggplant for Phoebe.
Ross : Whoo!
Phoebe : Cool.
Monica : Yeah, we switched meat suppliers at work, and the new guys gave me the steaks as sort of a thank-you.
Ross : But wait, there’s more. Hey, Chandler, what is in the envelope?
Chandler : By the way, this didn’t seem so dorky in the hall.
Ross : Come on.
Chandler : Why, it’s six tickets to Hootie and the Blowfish! The Blowfish!
Monica : It’s on us, all right, so don’t worry. It’s our treat.
Phoebe : So...Thank you.
Ross : Could you be less enthused?
Joey : Look, it’s a nice gesture, it is. But it just feels like--
Monica : Like?
Joey : Charity.
Monica : Charity?
Ross : We’re just tryin’ to do a nice thing here.
Rachel : Ross, you have to understand that your nice thing makes us feel this big.
Phoebe : Actually, it makes us feel that big. 

Charity may not always be or feel as innocent as it is supposed to.
It's really mind boggling trying to think about it from all the possible points of view. The same aspect may be construed in totally opposite ways depending upon how you think.

This mouse is wireless, no wires to meddle with.
This mouse is wired, for no battery requirement.

Knowing better on getting to know better

At what point do you know if the new people you've met are going to stay in your life or not? Another chicken and egg situation that I have had a hard time resolving. On the one hand if you assume that they won't, you won't invest your best and that is the first self enforcing assumption. But of course if you do assume that they will and you make a better impression than they expected, it's equally likely to be the other self enforcing assumption. Of course the other two trivial possibilities being, where both of you assume symmetrically.

It's somewhat annoying that I think about it more often than I'd like. Over many years too. This is something that in my opinion should be figured out in your teenage years or maybe in early 20s.

Anyhow, random trivial thoughts on the matter:

It's not out choice to come into this world, it may be our choice to go away. Best is to give it all you got. To make a parallel, one can talk of various opportunities. It's not your choice for an opportunity to chance on you. You best be prepared to capitalize. Opportunity could be a person.

Opportunities, like any other things may be false positives or false negatives. How does one tell whether the person you're about to --want-- to let into your life is rather of the class of relationships that are best kept ephemeral? It's a hard problem.

The best solution, like always that I find is: Hope for the best, in each instance.

Experiences vs Material (Stuffocation)

Consider a society where material happiness is relatively easier to find. People may likely start to feel that they have or are vying for too much material.

A few of important points of thought I gleaned from the talk:

• Experiences make an individual happier than material. It may seem at first (and research may point to this on the outset) that a well off modern society is required for stuffocation to take root. While this seems intuitively true, I can't argue with the logic that experience, will still bring more happiness even to someone who can't afford an expensive tablet, but can spend tea time chatting and laughing with friends. 
• Your experiences matter more than what you own. This seems like a pretty old concept, so can't argue much here. What you do defines you much more than what you say. Your words are just something you own. Your actions are something that can only result from what you are, what you have experienced.
  It's about the journey, not the destination -- another related phrase, more on it in next point.
• People regard status, local as well as global to some extent, very highly. They want to be at least as good as the neighbour if not more. While James (from the video) mostly only talks about experiences and happiness, I'd go so far as to include bad experience and contentedness into the picture. Even if it's because you're working that much harder to buy what your neighbor bought, in the end, what you enjoy, what you learn from are either the process of acquisition or the end result of using said item; whether you do the latter or not is up to you of course.
  Bad experiences that teach us, are equally as important in shaping not just your knowledge, but also character.
• Consumerism has it's place, without abundance, having a perspective of stuffocation is lost and we are still left with many easily tractable problems.
  The more you have may lead to more experiences worth having. But defining this sentiment in more exact terms, is I think very hard. Because just like information (or food), it's mostly about how well you digest that information rather than how much of it you have. Which requires experience, bringing us back to the original point.

Despite the evangelical appearance of the talk, it was quite thought provoking.

Some reading material:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/597049

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1024409732742#page-1

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/85/6/1193/

Behavior is 1% direction, 99% recursion

"Practice makes a man perfect" -- The famous 10,000 hour rule states that to achieve success in any specific field, one needs to go through, basically a large number of repetitions before it becomes a habit rather than a task. It`s no new information, we see similar adage in sports where they always advise you to "just feel and react" without thinking. What they're saying is actually an outcome of the same philosophy. It needs to be a habit (built into your muscle memory) rather than you having to consciously think about it. But to get there, sports persons go through tremendous number of repetitions---going back to the 10,000 hour rule---that programs their subconscious.

Interestingly, we can see that just because the information is redundant doesn't mean that it is unnecessary. Why else would people go to self help books, watch motivational videos, and so on, which basically expound the same rational crap that everyone inherently knows already? It's about ingraining a philosophy into your subconscious. To an extent, it seems plausible that if you repeat a "factual" statement to yourself a hundred times, you may start believing it. Especially if it is on a more subjective manner. Like, if you have a low confidence level, you are advised to speak repeatedly to yourself, 'I'm good, I can do this', or something to the effect.

In my opinion this method continues to a meta level as well. Not just for academics, habits, sports, philosophy or attitude, the method can be applied towards motivation, organization, optimization and justification of the same activities.

Recently ran across this interesting nugget:

(and then I ran across a few hundred more...inspired me to go download and watch 'The Pursuit of Happiness') It's not difficult to argue that there's a lot of crap in most of these stories. From propaganda (subtle or flamboyant) to fictional anecdotes disguised as facts to unnecessary generalizations. But like most other source of information, we can just as easily filter through the noise and get to the signal. One signal that really struck me---and has stuck to me since---is the following line:

You don't really want it. You just kinda want it.

Really, that's just it. In my opinion, the most succinct way to get motivated is the driest way. 'Get over it'; because that line up there. Anything significant or worth being proud of in life requires hard work and effort beyond the point of tiredness/boredom/hopelessness etc. because it's that point where you need to remember the corollary to this message:

...If you want (this) as bad as you want to breathe when you're drowning, only then will you find a way to get it done.

We can convince ourselves, through repeated attempts, to want to achieve greatness as bad as we want to breathe. Then the struggle to achieve it will---and should---become nothing more than a habit. It's what I will strive to from now on.

-------------------Aside(1)

There are some other asides to look at this philosophy at. My favorite one comes from one of the best series of lectures I've found on the internet, the graduate course of Principles of Digital Communication-I by Dr. Robert Gallagher. Here he brings up the point that struggling through theory and toy problems are not what engineers do. However, that's exactly how great engineers are made. One needs to spend enough time getting their theory right and then understanding how the different parts behave using toy problems so that looking at a system from an architectural point of view becomes second nature. Greatness is achieved when a person knows how to break the problem down into its essentials and then how to add the 'nasties'.

-------------------Aside(2)

As another aside, I wanted to talk a little bit about the fact that some people don't need to go through as many failures as others to learn the same number of things. In my opinion as a member of the latter group (more failures), I think that's just how the world is. Maybe the reasons that we aren't as good at induction as the former group; but at the same time, the repeated attempts show us more facets of the same problem than the ones who have better induction. In my opinion of course. I chalk my reasons to the relatively statistically indeterminate nature of the world. There's always some things one can't foresee.

Guilt and Breaking the Rules

SO this incident some time back got me thinking, what's the moral behind breaking the rules? Do these people feel guilt when they so so brashly break them and bother not a bit about who they are hurting in the process? What IS guilt? And the most important point was, [i]I felt kind of guilty in the aftermath...[/i] which led me to thinking, [B]Is there any logic behind following the rules when the general behavior around IS to break the rules?[/B]

So,
[Read1] [Read2] [Read3]
The links only helped confuse me in that they all seem to base guilt on going against a collective opinion based on a feeling of empathy. If that is the case though, it explains why I see so many incidents where I think guilt should be a factor but it is not.

For instance breaking of rules of the road here in India. It's so common and widely practiced and unenforced to a large extent by the police (who themselves can be seen breaking the rules blatantly) that doing so becomes almost a habit in everyone. No one thinks for a second that they are being disorganized and may be inconveniencing others. The traffic is in turbulence and even small errors create quick blocks and traffic jams where no one is willing to back off.

I do have a wondering that makes me think if this actually is as non-optimal as it seems but I'll get back to this later [...]

Now when we have established that there is already no guilt, it's easy to see that moral dilemma is overcome, which means that the edict of the system of rules is inconsequential to a large extent. Now what remains is whether it should matter to me or not.

Another example that I can cite in related subject is that of bribery. This is rampant at low and high levels in the bureaucracy in this region. One needs to bribe for the most basic needs. For instance water supply. Each area has it's own main tank which provides water on a alternate day basis and each house or apartment complex has it's own underground storage tank where this water is supplied. This is the water that is mostly used as the ground water obtained from digging a bore well is very hard and filled with mud.

Now there is a person assigned to open the valves of this tank and he is to make sure to keep the valves open for a period of time. Now it is up to his discretion how long; so as to have the underground storage tanks of these houses and apartments fill up properly. But the dude makes it a point to not do so until and unless we go and bribe him with a certain amount of money per month.

Point is,
Is it practical to enforce ethics and "moral" values upon oneself when the system is not compliant? Is it important to do so when we are already being hypocrites as we participate in piracy (although it mostly is because we lack the financial means to obtain equivalent material otherwise)?

I have found that doing so is causing an inconvenience to not just me but others too. What I've started doing is trying to find ways of obeying the law where I can while not interfering with the rulebreakers and breaking the law where it is (at least immediately) of a humanitarian interest. It seems to me to be a more practical approach. I do not know how ethically right I am in doing so though. I do not know why I should go out of my way to obey the law but still not hinder others. in any case it's an inconvenience to me because either I feel guilt for breaking the law or I feel guilt for bothering others or I feel frustration for having to look like a fool or anger at people not having civic sense.

Appendix:
On the streamlined nature of traffic and what is an optimal traffic flow. This seems to be of a real interest to me as it involves a great study of social patterns, data mining ect. IF anyone has interesting reads on Traffic flows and how to optimize them I'd love to read them.
[Read1]

As I had pointed out, I observed traffic jams arising at very sensitive regions with high frequency in a very disorganized yet densely populated region such as here in Indore, India. But apparently (and I do not know much about this) there are very random reasons but similar does happen in the more sophisticated traffic flows like New York and Washington and such areas as well. So we do not know how much worse of this chaotic flow pattern unhindered by regulations is. For all we know it might turn out to be better (I hope not, I hate it because it [I]looks[/I] so inelegant and I've heard so many times that in mathematical systems, inelegance is very much associated with the "bad solution".

In his book, [B]Between Inner Space and Outer Space[/B] (Oxford University Publication), Author John D. Barrow says in an essay about complexity [Chap. 17] about traffic jams where he likens them to hourglasses of sand where as sand is poured on top of the pile in the chaotic fashion it is (like traffic flow) and just like in the sand pile where when it reaches a critical state of height/size then there are avalanches (traffic jams) that help the pile get into it's equilibrium state again. And just like that problem, the problem of why traffic jams are caused is not yet solved (I think...)