Convincing. Transformation.

How can you convince people who are not convinced you can convince them?

The issue here isn't your or their capacity to reason correctly about your arguments, but their lack of desire to be convinced by such an unconvincing person, namely yourself, even though you just did provide a convincing argument.

Here's where a much appreciated Arab proverb comes really handy: 'Judge what is being said, not who is saying it.'

Arabic societies is living a transformation that will leave us with a lot more reasonable thinkers, free men and women who have the ability to be objective and seek their well being through their societies' well being. Being an intellectual, an artist, a philospher or a scientist will become the norm

Advanced C++ and responsibility

I was a really focused person. I didn’t pay attention to the people around me with all the interfering psychological elements of being a part in a group, except when I had to show some manners like when I was revising some of the concepts of that Advanced C++ class after the lecture: there was me and a guy (who wasn’t a friend at the time) and we were separately experimenting with the clunky Visual C++ 6 IDE, way before .NET, there was a girl sitting shyly with a smile looking at me and doing nothing. So I decided I will just keep her company since she so politely asked for it. The other guy joined the conversation and then I’ve let them enjoy it and got back to what I was doing. I really enjoyed that class and I’m not recalling some interesting moments.

Dr. M A, let’s call him so. He was an enthusiastic lecturer and I enjoyed his class. After the class finished I kept meeting people who were very interested in me (I thought it was because of some superficial reason) and then I would realize that they have taken that class with me. After a while I thought that interestingly, my behavior in that class wasn’t so common and commanded lots of respect from all those people that I don’t even remember (since I was so focused-but unfortunately I missed on many relationships that might have proven to be interesting).

I was the accurate kind. In one lecture the professor was giving an example when he said “let’s say we have ‘Seen’ [the Arabic letter that corresponds to ‘S’,] the ASCII code of which…” that’s when I interrupted (some of the lectures had a more casual interactive format) saying: “You mean Unicode, there is no ASCII for ‘Seen’”. He smiled saying that is if I want to keep track of such subtle matters and continued. I felt satisfied.

The lectures continued through the semester and one day he was late. So I’ve written on the computer which was connected to the projector something blaming him for being late. I was just joking, with the professor with whom I felt I started to become friends. But when he saw it, he got upset and decided to punish everyone saying that he is the one in charge of the lectures and no one had authority to blame him. I think he thought it was disrespectful. Feeling guilty, I was waiting for him to finish to apologize. And when he said that he was going to punish everyone by taking off marks, I stood up and said that I am ready to take responsibility for what I have done. He asked me to sit down, ignoring my admission.

I saw him after the lecture and I asked him why he didn't take it simply as a lighthearted joke. He told me that people here (in the University of Jordan) were the kind that takes the opportunity to disrespect and the kind the schemes and talks behind one’s back. There is rarely pure and simply honesty here. I apologized and we remained on good terms. It was easy for me, someone who loves what they study, to get along with his professors.

He also gave me one of the most important social interaction advice that took me years to understand: “dealing with people through layers of indirection, or interfaces.”

Now going back to my colleagues, I think they admired my readiness to admit and face the consequences. Another clue of having the incident attracting attention is one guy’s remark saying that the blame should be on the person who did it even after I have admitted it (the professor insisted on punishing everyone) and it was obvious who that guy to blame was. I don’t like to deal with people who just like to make provocative remark and my response was just mere short eye contact.

BSc times, I had to do lots of maturing up…

life and the people in it

Life is process through which a person learns and develops. Learning and development is something that could be done through reading books, interacting with others (talking, arguing, fighting, etc.) and experiences that could be rich or poor and from which we can learn things that we should and those that we shouldn't. This is why life is a series of experiences, a series of things happening inside one's mind.

There is one particular thing that I needed to learn since a long long time. The ideas, the way of thinking inside others and all of those things that make up a personality, a mentality, are greatly affected by one's psychology and this in turn is affected by one's biology. These things vary greatly from person to another and in the same person as his/her mood changes. If I knew this very complicated fact, my social life would've been much easier and I would've been able to get along with people better.

One of my friends once pointed out to something that I think has been all along in me, which is that I don't get emotional. Things that upset most people are totally irrelevant to me and unfortunately I find myself unable to detect them. People think I'm just afraid or too shy, but I wasn't even capable of detecting a stimulant to respond to. This also made it difficult for me to know when I'm making people scared, frustrated, freaked out or whatever.

I used to indulge myself with the idea that human beings don't need to evolve anymore since they've got everything that they need to achieve anything. Anything. We have minds, high-level thinking and ambition. We're aware of our limitations and building solutions for those problems. For example, we don't need to evolve our brains in a way that is able to effectively retrieve all information in the world; we can just use information management systems on our fast computers, which is a tool we built. This idea might be true for some, but is certainly not true for most. I think that most people are too attached to their body, their primitive impulses and emotions and rarely characterized by profound thinking and a desire to discover, invent, change the world and progress.

In my mind that changed, we didn't need to evolve. Human beings as a species reached something so great, I thought. We reached the point where we have complete control (at least intellectually, mentally and not necessarily physically) over the world. We just need more time to discover more and invent solutions that would show how great we are.

Those people whose minds are less attached to their bodies and their primitive biological impulses are evolutionarily more advanced than those who are. This is why I think that human beings aren't really one single species. I'm not a biologist nor am I a geneticist so I might be crossing the line here but this is just a thought. What I'm trying to say is that if two persons have a human body and are capable of doing the basic things that we consider a typical human being should be capable of doing; we are inclined to consider them as belonging to the same species. I think this view is too physical. Evolution isn't necessarily a 100% change in all genetic make-up and isn't necessarily a physical thing. In today's world, some people are evolutionary better than others; we're already split into more than one species. Nationalities, geographical and ethnic boundaries are irrelevant here.

Maybe it is more accurate to attribute all differences between the members of the human species to developmental and environmental factors rather than genetic. This is a safer option given the fact that human beings kill each other (violence would be much easier when those 'people' don't belong to the same species). But this also raises questions regarding how we could solve problems on earth if the issue isn't about genes that need to be upgraded. The abstract solution is easily stated: give people a chance to experience things that develop them in a way that serves humanity. Carrying out this simple thing is hard given all the selfishness that is somehow embedded in our bodies (or that is engraved in our heads as we live life).

We need to think about solving problems. We need to have free and independent thinking. We need more ideas and more projects. We need to keep thinking about the world because we're part of it, and the problems of the world are our fault. So before your emotions take over to shush someone who's saying something useful or trying to make a contribution, defer the biological and primitive emotions to the mind and be in control of yourself.