skynet loves you

communicating process

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:23:22 GMT

In terms of journalism and the challenge of accurately representing science, the thing I struggle with is capturing the process. Too often there is this tendency to say, what makes this science story interesting? What's the payoff? Is there a new drug in the pipeline? Have they published a big new paper in Nature that's going to solve where human language comes from? We’re so focus on the result, on the conclusion, on the abstract of the paper and the last paragraph in the paper, but really what a science paper is is the methods section, it’s the process. And that is incredibly hard to actually translate to the public, partly because it can be pretty tedious but to get inside how a scientist thinks, to show that what makes science such a valuable, essential and crucial modern institution, is that there is this process. Someone had to struggle for years, someone had to sift through, parse through ambiguous data and come up with a good tentative answer, and that's incredibly difficult to translate to the public.

It's not simply that we need more science coverage. Really what we need absolutely more of, starting now, is to give people a better sense of the scientific process. A lot of the scientific illiteracy I see out there and the scientific misunderstanding of the American public, and the reason many people find it so easy to brush aside science or to simply believe that science is unweaving the rainbow, is because they don't understand the scientific process and the struggle and what a beautiful romantic process it often is. What we need more of, and this is a challenge to the writer, is to convey to people the excitement and the drama of a man or woman trying to take these big, big questions and come up with a new answer. It’s a noble pursuit.

Jonah Lehrer

it's funny because it's true

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 04:04:50 GMT

in which I feel sorry for a politician

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 04:48:56 GMT

outsourcing the truth

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:58:24 GMT

From Rick Joyner's comments on the revival currently happening in Florida and North Carolina:

When I first started ministering in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, I was disconcerted by the level of skepticism. Then I was told by the Lord that it was good skepticism and not bad. When I asked for understanding, I was shown that good skepticism wants to believe, but you had better have the goods because they will thoroughly check you out. This is the "faith of the Bereans" who resolved to listen with openness to the teachings of Paul, but checked out everything by the Scriptures. On the other hand, bad skepticism wants to doubt and will gladly accept a mole hill of evidence that confirms their doubts, while rejecting a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Those with good skepticism are worth working with. I noticed after many visits that those who seemed to be doubting my teaching were actually deeply pondering it, and years later they could not only tell me in great detail what I had taught, but after checking it out and confirming it, they were now living it. Contrary to this, I have had many people who seemed to be the most excited about my message in a meeting but were unable to tell me one thing that I said right after the meeting. Years later these people would be just as excited in meetings, but in their lives you could hardly tell any true spiritual maturity. What audience would you rather have? It may be more fun to preach to the excitable, but for lasting fruit I will always take the deeper ones. Of course, there are some who can be very demonstrative and still be deep and have great faith...

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found.
Miguel de Unamuno

I feel Rick's pain here, I really do. But after reading this less than half-hearted endorsement of carefully circumscribed critical thinking, is it really any wonder that this is the way things are? His distinction between good skepticism and bad skepticism is, sadly, an improvement over many people's desire to shut down questioning well before the questions get the slightest bit interesting, but the rest of what he says makes it clear that he values the 'want to believe' part a lot more than the 'checking things out' part. 'Bad' skeptics aren't going to be convinced by checking, so apparently there's no reason to do it at all:

Because of what I have learned about the good skeptics and the bad ones, we are not going too far out of our way to verify miracles. Some miracles we have experienced have been undeniable because they happened right in front of our eyes. However, some have doubted these, even when they saw them! Go figure. They are so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out of their darkness. To be overly concerned about convincing such people can be as deadly a trap as falling into their black hole with them. When it is convenient, we may take the verification of medical records and such, but we have resolved to keep our focus on pursuing the Lord and His work, letting the good skeptics check it out and prove them and the bad skeptics believe what they will.

So let me get this straight: You prefer to preach to good skeptics, but you have no interest in being a good skeptic yourself and see no value in encouraging anyone else to be one when it comes to revivals in your own backyard? What happens if someone else actually does do some checking?

From a 2003 D Magazine article on Benny Hinn, made available by the good folks at The Wittenburg Door (they named themselves after Luther but are now bigger fans of Erasmus, so they can't be all bad):

Sometimes he knocks them over with his coat, sometimes by blowing on them, sometimes by pushing their forehead with his hand – but when he touches them, they fall over. As he does this, he calls out the healings – a brain tumor, a cancer, a crippled left leg – as though he's watching something occurring that the rest of us can't see. And then, one by one, various people are brought up onto the stage, and an announcer describes their affliction so that Hinn can lay hands on them and pronounce the disease vanquished. On an average night he'll heal about 80 people, in addition to the ones he shouts out in a sort of "wherever you are, you're healed" way.

No wonder Hinn needs bodyguards. Very few, if any, of these people are actually healed. And when they die, or their disease becomes worse, their relatives tend to become angry. For the past ten years this has been demonstrated over and over again by various investigative reports conducted with the resources of the Trinity Foundation, beginning with an Inside Edition show in 1993 hosted by Bill O'Reilly and reported by Steve Wilson.

He healed a case of brain cancer on stage, even though Inside Edition followed up with tests that showed the tumor was still present.

He pronounced a woman cured of heart disease, and she was so convinced that she threw away her heart medicine. Questioned about it, Hinn said, "It's not my job to call their doctor."

The "cure" of a deaf woman turned out to be a woman who, according to her doctor, was not deaf in the first place.

The cure of three deaf boys turned out to be bogus. A Houston woman who thought she was cured of lung cancer ("It will never come back!" Hinn told her) rejected her doctors' advice and care – and died two months later.

The heavyweight boxer Evander Holyfield, banned from boxing because of a heart condition, went to a Benny Hinn crusade in Philadelphia, had Hinn lay hands on him, and gave Hinn a check for $265,000 after he was told he was healed. In fact, he passed his next examination by the boxing commission, but later his doctors said he never had a heart condition in the first place – he had been misdiagnosed.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Even sadder than the people who think they're healed are the ones so sick that Hinn's employees never allow them to be seen on stage. People suffering from paralysis, brain damage, dementia and the like – people who couldn't possibly make any "demonstration" on stage – are rejected at a screening session held backstage.

In two cases journalists have tried to verify all the healings at a particular crusade. For an HBO documentary called A Question of Miracles, researchers attended a Portland, Oregon, crusade at which 76 miracles were claimed. Even though Hinn had agreed to provide medical verification of each one, he stonewalled requests for the data, then eventually responded 13 weeks later – with only five names. HBO followed up the five cases and determined that a woman "cured" of lung cancer had died nine months later, an old woman's broken vertebra wasn't healed after all, a man with a logging injury deteriorated as he refused medication and a needed operation, a woman claiming to be healed of deafness had never been deaf (according to her husband), and a woman complaining of "breathlessness" had stopped going to the doctor on instructions of her mother.

So what happened to this bad penny?

Ten years later, Hinn has become something of a media master. Whenever he's investigated now, he simply ADMITS his "mistakes." He's especially fond of going on The Larry King Show at any time of crisis. He's also refined his view of what he does. He doesn't heal anyone, he always reminds the interviewer. He just creates an atmosphere so that God can heal people. By the time people get to the stage, they've already been healed by God, he says. If the healing turns out to be bogus, then the person was self-deluded. Besides, hope is a great thing.

He also says he has a doctor backstage now to counsel the miracle cases and encourage them to continue with their medication until the healing has been verified. This seems to satisfy the media, even though it amounts to an admission of his own inability to know whether someone is healed.

The image he presents to the faithful is the opposite, of course. To them he's a man possessed of special wisdom. He sees things no one else can see. He has conversations with Jesus that no one else has had. He witnesses the presence of God when no one else would be aware of it.

Do you want to believe? It's easy, really. Just let someone else take responsibility for looking behind the curtain. Don't doubt; that's just he-who-would-deceive-even-the-elect whispering in your ear. Relax, good skeptics know the answers before they even start looking, so why look at all? Hearing from God yourself is hard, but that's OK. Faith means you don't have to actually hear God, you just have to believe that you do. Besides, you already know where to find God, don't you? That's right, baby: me. My name is Legion, because, quite frankly, there are quite a lot of us. Wide is the gate, and so on.

Re-reading Robert Ingersoll, I am reminded of how his writings encouraged me when I was struggling to hold on to what I believed was right:

Through countless years he has groped and crawled and struggled and climbed and stumbled toward the light. He has been hindered and delayed and deceived by augurs and prophets -- by popes and priests. He has been betrayed by saints, misled by apostles and Christs, frightened by devils and ghosts -- enslaved by chiefs and kings -- robbed by altars and thrones. In the name of education his mind has been filled with mistakes, with miracles, and lies, with the impossible, the absurd and infamous. In the name of religion he has been taught humility and arrogance, love and hatred, forgiveness and revenge.

But the world is changing.

Nothing is greater, nothing is of more importance, than to find amid the errors and darkness of this life, a shining truth.

Truth is the intellectual wealth of the world.

The noblest of occupations is to search for truth.

Truth is the foundation, the superstructure, and the glittering dome of progress.

Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles, and purifies. The grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.

Truth gives man the greatest power for good. Truth is sword and shield. It is the sacred light of the soul.

The man who finds a truth lights a torch.

How is Truth to be Known?

By investigation, experiment and reason.

To love the truth, thus perceived, is mental virtue -- intellectual purity. This is true manhood. This is freedom.

To throw away your reason at the command of churches, popes, parties, kings or gods, is to be a serf, a slave.

It is not simply the right, but it is the duty of every man to think -- to investigate for himself -- and every man who tries to prevent this by force or fear, is doing all he can to degrade and enslave his fellowmen.

The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world.

Nothing but falsehood needs the assistance of fame and place, of robes and maitres, of tiaras and crowns. The wise, the really honest and intelligent, are not swayed or governed by numbers -- by majorities.

They accept what they really believe to be true. They care nothing for the opinions of ancestors, nothing for creeds, assertions and theories, unless they satisfy the reason.

In all directions they seek for truth, and when found, accept it with joy -- accept it in spite of preconceived opinions -- in spite of prejudice and hatred.

This is the course pursued by wise and honest men, and no other course is possible for them.

tragicomedy: the only way to fly

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:47:18 GMT

Gwynn did not hold the orthodox view of his profession that they were instruments of divine justice. For a moment he allowed himself to imagine that he had been an instrument of humour, sans the appellation of divinity. He mused, not for the first time, that if the putative divine claimed all territories of sense and significance for itself, it fell to comedy, with its bifurcations, reversals and annulments of sense, to destroy that claim. The existence of the comic viewpoint, even if it was only an interpretation placed upon the tragedy of a world where death was king of kings, might prove the absence of an absolute divine authority.

The Art of Dying, K.J. Bishop (via). Now I really want to read The Etched City.

in which I am impressed by a politician

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:21:37 GMT

I know I should really try to find out what McCain's positions are and stuff before I vote, but damn.

pseudo-liveblogging spring finals, take 3: finis

Sat, 03 May 2008 02:14:16 GMT

Well, the Economics final was the easiest final ever. I did the fifty multiple choice (seriously now) questions in an hour, and was maybe the fifteenth or twentieth person out the door in the class of about four hundred (and that's why they were machine graded, multiple choice tests). Sadly, despite the fact that the class was so easy and the A+ line is 95(!), it's going to be a B+ or A- for me, thanks to a few missed online assignments and some points taken off for a few skipped classes and labs. I'm really getting to dislike attendance policies, because, once again, nothing was in the lectures that wasn't in the textbook, and the labs were a complete waste of time, but... yeah.

Finals are over. This afternoon I went and did the paperwork for my apartment, paid the security deposit and the rent, got my key, took a look (it'll do, it'll do), hauled myself back to eat some lupper, draaaaaaaaaaagged myself back to my dorm and crashed with a headache. It is possible to go without a certain amount of sleep, but it is really not very fun. I kind of did it just because I could, but I think that's out of my system. This whole semester has been the one where I learn by experience just how much nicer it is to eat enough and sleep enough. You might think that I should know this already, that I would not have to go through this cliched college experience, but no. One consequence of living as if nothing worth paying attention to existed below nose level - I would seriously just sit and read and soak in the world through the internet and books forever if I could. I really need to start exercising again - another thing on my shortlist of things to do. Part of the reason why I went to college, and a big reason why I got a job, was to get myself out of that rut of not actually doing anything. I need to meet some people too; it's been a whole year, and it was kind of lame not to be able to give anyone within a three hour drive as my emergency contact. Some people from the philosophy club were in my philosophy of language class and they seemed reasonably cool, so I think I'll start there.

The next two days will go to moving and cleaning up my dorm so I can check out. Need to get some Iron Man in there too. Then five week summer physics, thirty hour work weeks, and getting ready for fall. But first, sleep.

pseudo-liveblogging spring finals, take 2: it's the economy, stupid

Fri, 02 May 2008 04:39:41 GMT

Stay up late again. Get up earlier than I've had to get up all semester to make my Introductory Java Programming final. Blow some basic questions about arrays and linked lists. Good thing I did pretty well on the tests during the semester and perfectly on the programing assignments, but that's probably a B. Also, I have no respect for this class whatsoever. Why do they teach you the rudiments of a stupid language like Java when they could go through SICP or something instead? Why haven't I just done that myself already? (Because I didn't know what I wanted to do. This is changing.) This is why I cannot do an undergraduate CS degree; better to underachieve at something like math. Bleargh.

I have spent most of the afternoon on hulu.com discovering just how easy it is to fritter away time on stupid American television when I'm tired (at least I tell myself it's because I'm tired). In particular, comedies about infantile members of the middle-middle and upper-middle class. (And House. Wank wank wank.) I can't place myself (or my immediate family for that matter) in this breakdown, but TV writers certainly seem to be having fun with characters for whom money is a means to status, status is everything, and excellence is not on the radar. One wonders if real world factors into this somewhere, but I guess that's why it's funny. Not because it's true. Right? Tonight, I will fall asleep listening to a talk entitled "The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class." The future looks grim-ish. Tomorrow, even earlier than the test this morning, is the Intro to Economics final. Intro, intro, intro. Next semester: Intro to Modern Algebra for Math Majors. Now that's an intro class.

pseudo-liveblogging spring finals, take 1: posting while sleep deprived

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:10:12 GMT

I, being the disgusting procrastinator that I am, put off writing the final paper for Intro to Philosophy of Language until the very last day. It was only five pages, I knew I could do it in a day. Of course this means I stayed up until 0530 getting it finished, but so what? I got it done, right? It was pretty good, right? I mean, it wasn't especially insightful and it didn't tie anything in that wasn't in the paper I was summarizing, but that wasn't required was it? It's probably ten times better than most of other papers, right? My first summary was given to the rest of the class as an example of how to do it right - half the class couldn't even remember the desiderata for what they were supposed to write about for the final! Notes? What? I don't take notes, but I still remember that stuff! (OK, I wrote that down). I didn't read the papers very thoroughly and consequently I'm pretty sure I bombed the final, but I pretty much planned to do that, didn't I? I don't care how I do on tests as long as I feel like I could understand the material if I wanted to (because I do well on assignments where I have time/am forced to sit down and figure things out) and I did that, right? And who cares about formal models of some stunted subset of language - that whole research program is probably going nowhere anyway, right? Clearly I have special insight that these, brilliant, careful, highly trained people lack! What is rigor in philosophy anyway? I'm such a lazy idiot; what is wrong with me? Why do I think next semester will be better? Because, somehow, beyond all reason, I do. Nothing makes sense!

Stay tuned for tomorrow's newstainment coverage of this train wreck, already in progress.

i need a new blog format

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 05:59:19 GMT

I lied again! But I have learned something at least: now I promise only to write about how I got my job sometime in the more or less near future, not necessarily the next post.

Edge.org is one of the most interesting intellectual "portals" I've encountered so far. Every so often they ask their members a question, and it's often interesting to see the answers. This time the question is what have you changed your mind about, and why? Here are some of the answers that stood out to me.

COLIN TUDGE
Science Writer; Author, "The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter"

I have changed my mind about the omniscience and omnipotence of science. I now realize that science is strictly limited, and that it is extremely dangerous not to appreciate this.

Science proceeds in general by being reductionist. This term is used in different ways in different contexts but here I take it to mean that scientists begin by observing a world that seems infinitely complex and inchoate, and in order to make sense of it they first "reduce" it to a series of bite-sized problems, each of which can then be made the subject of testable hypotheses which, as far as possible, take mathematical form.

Fair enough. The approach is obviously powerful, and it is hard to see how solid progress of a factual kind could be made in any other way. It produces answers of the kind known as "robust". "Robust" does not of course mean "unequivocally true" and still less does it meet the lawyers' criteria — "the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". But robustness is pretty good; certainly good enough to be going on with.

The limitation is obvious, however. Scientists produce robust answers only because they take great care to tailor the questions. As Sir Peter Medawar said, "Science is the art of the soluble" (within the time and with the tools available).

Clearly it is a huge mistake to assume that what is soluble is all there is — but some scientists make this mistake routinely.

Or to put the matter another way: they tend conveniently to forget that they arrived at their "robust" conclusions by ignoring as a matter of strategy all the complexities of a kind that seemed inconvenient. But all too often, scientists then are apt to extrapolate from the conclusions they have drawn from their strategically simplified view of the world, to the whole, real world.

[He gives examples of the damage done by behaviorism, and the potential damage that could be caused by GMO food engineered to increase yield at the expense of flexibility and robustness.]

Behind all this nonsense and horror lies the simplistic belief, of a lot of scientists (though by no means all, to be fair) and politicians and captains of industry, that science understands all (ie is omniscient, or soon will be) and that its high technologies can dig us out of any hole we may dig ourselves into (ie is omnipotent).

Absolutely not.

The fact that not all scientists understand this is kind of scary.

RUDY RUCKER
Mathematician, Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer; Novelist; Author, "Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul"

Studying mathematical logic in the 1970s I believed it was possible to put together a convincing argument that no computer program can fully emulate a human mind. Although nobody had quite gotten the argument right, I hoped to straighten it out.

My belief in this will-o-the-wisp was motivated by a gut feeling that people have numinous inner qualities that will not be found in machines. For one thing, our self-awareness lets us reflect on ourselves and get into endless mental regresses: "I know that I know that I know..." For another, we have moments of mystical illumination when we seem to be in contact, if not with God, then with some higher cosmic mind. I felt that surely no machine could be self-aware or experience the divine light.

At that point, I'd never actually touched a computer — they were still inaccessible, stygian tools of the establishment. Three decades rolled by, and I'd morphed into a Silicon Valley computer scientist, in constant contact with nimble chips. Setting aside my old prejudices, I changed my mind — and came to believe that we can in fact create human-like computer programs.

Although writing out such a program is in some sense beyond the abilities of any one person, we can set up simulated worlds in which such computer programs evolve. I feel confident that some relatively simple set-up will, in time, produce a human-like program capable of emulating all known intelligent human behaviors: writing books, painting pictures, designing machines, creating scientific theories, discussing philosophy, and even falling in love. More than that, we will be able to generate an unlimited number of such programs, each with its own particular style and personality.

What of the old-style attacks from the quarters of mathematical logic? Roughly speaking, these arguments always hinged upon a spurious belief that we can somehow discern between, on the one hand, human-like systems which are fully reliable and, on the other hand, human-like systems fated to begin spouting gibberish. But the correct deduction from mathematical logic is that there is absolutely no way to separate the sheep from the goats. Note that this is already our situation vis-a-vis real humans: you have no way to tell if and when a friend or a loved one will forever stop making sense.

With the rise of new practical strategies for creating human-like programs and the collapse of the old a priori logical arguments against this endeavor, I have to reconsider my former reasons for believing humans to be different from machines. Might robots become self-aware? And — not to put too fine a point on it — might they see God? I believe both answers are yes. [...]

It'll take a long time, but it'll happen.

ARNOLD TREHUB
Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author: "The Cognitive Brain"

I have never questioned the conventional view that a good grounding in the physical sciences is needed for a deep understanding of the biological sciences. It did not occur to me that the opposite view might also be true. If someone were to have asked me if biological knowledge might significantly influence my understanding of our basic physical sciences, I would have denied it.

Now I am convinced that the future understanding of our most important physical principles will be profoundly shaped by what we learn in the living realm of biology. What ha[s] changed my mind are the relatively recent developments in the theoretical constructs and empirical findings in the sciences of the brain — the biological foundation of all thought. Progress here can cast new light on the fundamental subjective factors that constrain our scientific formulations in what we take to be an objective enterprise.

One of the reasons theoretical physics doesn't interest me as much as it might. But see also Max Tegmark's explanation of why biological understanding is not strictly necessary.

HAIM HARARI
Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science

I used to think that if something is clear and simple, it must also be provable or at least well defined, and if something is well defined, it might be relatively simple. It isn't so.

[...]

When you hear about a new perpetual motion machine or about yet another claim of cold fusion, you raise an eyebrow, you are willing to bet against it and, in your guts, you know it is wrong, but it is not always easy to disprove it rigorously.

[...]

Richard Feynman in his famous Lectures on Physics provided the ultimate physics definition of Energy: It is that quantity which is conserved. Any Lawyer, Mathematician or Accountant would have laughed at this statement. Energy is perhaps the most useful, clear and common concept in all of science, and Feynman is telling us, correctly and shamelessly, that it has no proper rigorous and logical definition.

How much is five thousand plus two? Not so simple. Sometimes it is five thousands and two (as in your bank statement) and sometimes it is actually five thousand (as in the case of the Cairo tour guide who said "this pyramid is 5002 years old; when I started working here two years ago, I was told it was 5000 years old").

The public thinks, incorrectly, that science is a very accurate discipline where everything is well defined. Not so. But the beauty of it is that all of the above statements are scientific, obvious and useful, without being precisely defined. That is as much part of the scientific method as verifying a theory by an experiment (which is always accurate only to a point).

To speak and to understand the language of science is, among other things, to understand this "clear vagueness". It exists, of course, in other areas of life. Every normal language possesses numerous such examples, and so do all fields of social science.

Judaism is a religion and I am an atheist. Nevertheless, it is clear that I am Jewish. It would take a volume to explain why, and the explanation will remain rather obscure and ill defined. But the fact is simple, clear, well understood and undeniable.

Somehow, it is acceptable to face such situations in nonscientific matters, but most people think, incorrectly, that the quantitative natural sciences must be different. They are different, in many ways, but not in this way.

Common sense has as much place as logic, in scientific research. Intuition often leads to more insight than algorithmic thinking. Familiarity with previous failed attempts to solve a problem may be detrimental, rather than helpful. This may explain why almost all important physics breakthroughs are made by people under forty. This also explains why, in science, asking the right question is at least as important as being able to solve a well posed problem.

You might say that the above kind of thinking is prejudiced and inaccurate, and that it might hinder new discoveries and new scientific ideas. Not so. Good scientists know very well how to treat and use all of these "fuzzy" statements. They also know how to reconsider them, when there is a good reason to do so, based on new solid facts or on a new original line of thinking. This is one of the beautiful features of science.

It's also one of the thorniest problems in AI. Or it will be, when we can even begin to address it seriously.

ROBERT PROVINE
Psychologist and Neuroscientist, University of Maryland; Author, "Laughter"

Mentors, paper referees and grant reviewers have warned me on occasion about scientific "fishing expeditions," the conduct of empirical research that does not test a specific hypothesis or is not guided by theory. Such "blind empiricism" was said to be unscientific, to waste time and produce useless data. Although I have never been completely convinced of the hazards of fishing, I now reject them outright, with a few reservations.

I'm not advocating the collection of random facts, but the use of broad-based descriptive studies to learn what to study and how to study it. Those who fish learn where the fish are, their species, number and habits. Without the guidance of preliminary descriptive studies, hypothesis testing can be inefficient and misguided. Hypothesis testing is a powerful means of rejecting error — of trimming the dead limbs from the scientific tree — but it does not generate hypotheses or signify which are worthy of test. I'll provide two examples from my experience.

In graduate school, I became intrigued with neuroembryology and wanted to introduce it to developmental psychology, a discipline that essentially starts at birth. My dissertation was a fishing expedition that described embryonic behavior and its neurophysiological mechanism. I was exploring uncharted waters and sought advice by observing the ultimate expert, the embryo. In this and related work, I discovered that prenatal movement is the product of seizure-like discharges in the spinal cord (not the brain), that the spinal discharges occurred spontaneously (not a response to sensory stimuli), that the function of movement was to sculpt joints (not to shape postnatal behavior such walking), and to regulate the number of motorneurons. Remarkable!

But decades later, this and similar work is largely unknown to developmental psychologists who have no category for it. The traditional psychological specialties of perception, learning, memory, motivation and the like, are not relevant during most of the prenatal period. The finding that embryos are profoundly unpsychological beings guided by unique developmental priorities and processes is not appreciated by theory-driven developmental psychologists. When the fishing expedition indicates that there is no appropriate spot in the scientific filing cabinet, it may be time to add another drawer.

[More about researching laughter]

Whether embryonic behavior or laughter, fishing expeditions guided me down the appropriate empirical path, provided unanticipated insights, and prevented flights of theoretical fancy. Contrary to lifelong advice, when planning a new research project, I always start by going fishing.

See also Irene Pepperberg. If there is such a thing as the scientific method, we don't know what it is.

KEITH DEVLIN
Mathematician; Executive Director, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford

What is the nature of mathematics? Becoming a mathematician in the 1960s, I swallowed hook, line, and sinker the Platonistic philosophy dominant at the time, that the objects of mathematics (the numbers, the geometric figures, the topological spaces, and so forth) had a form of existence in some abstract ("Platonic") realm. Their existence was independent of our existence as living, cognitive creatures, and searching for new mathematical knowledge was a process of explorative discovery not unlike geographic exploration or sending out probes to distant planets.

I now see mathematics as something entirely different, as the creation of the (collective) human mind. As such, mathematics says as much about we ourselves as it does about the external universe we inhabit. Mathematical facts are not eternal truths about the external universe, which held before we entered the picture and will endure long after we are gone. Rather, they are based on, and reflect, our interactions with that external environment.

This is not to say that mathematics is something we have freedom to invent. It's not like literature or music, where there are constraints on the form but writers and musicians exercise great creative freedom within those constraints. From the perspective of the individual human mathematician, mathematics is indeed a process of discovery. But what is being discovered is a product of the human (species)-environment interaction.

This view raises the fascinating possibility that other cognitive creatures in another part of the universe might have different mathematics. Of course, as a human, I cannot begin to imagine what that might mean. It would classify as "mathematics" only insofar as it amounted to that species analyzing the abstract structures that arose from their interactions with their environment.

This shift in philosophy has influenced the way I teach, in that I now stress social aspects of mathematics. But when I'm giving a specific lecture on, say, calculus or topology, my approach is entirely platonistic. We do our mathematics using a physical brain that evolved over hundreds of thousands of years by a process of natural selection to handle the physical and more recently the social environments in which our ancestors found themselves. As a result, the only way for the brain to actually do mathematics is to approach it "platonistically," treating mathematical abstractions as physical objects that exist.

A platonistic standpoint is essential to doing mathematics, just as Cartesian dualism is virtually impossible to dispense with in doing science or just plain communicating with one another ("one another"?). But ultimately, our mathematics is just that: our mathematics, not the universe's.

I've thought this for a long time, but have not yet spent time looking for real evidence that would support (or better, could falsify) it.

ROBERT SAPOLSKY
Neuroscientist, Stanford University, Author, "A Primate's Memoir"

[He talks about coming to grips with the fact that the brain apparently does create new neurons during adulthood after all]

The other change concerned my life as a primatologist, where I have been studying male baboons in East Africa. This also came in the early 90's. I study what social behavior has to do with health, and my shtick always was that if you want to know which baboons are going to be festering with stress-related disease, look at the low-ranking ones. Rank is physiological destiny, and if you have a choice in the matter, you want to win some critical fights and become a dominant male, because you'll be healthier. And my change of mind involved two pieces.

The first was realizing, from my own data and that of others, that being dominant has far less to do with winning fights than with social intelligence and impulse control. The other was realizing that while health has something to do with social rank, it has far more to do with personality and social affiliation — if you want to be a healthy baboon, don't be a socially isolated one. This particular shift has something to do with the accretion of new facts, new statistical techniques for analyzing data, blah blah. Probably most importantly, it has to do with the fact that I was once a hermetic 22-year old studying baboons and now, 30 years later, I've changed my mind about a lot of things in my own life.

Hmm....

TOR NØRRETRANDERS
Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, "The Generous Man"

I have changed my mind about my body. I used to think of it as a kind of hardware on which my mental and behavioral software was running. Now, I primarily think of my body as software.

My body is not like a typical material object, a stable thing. It is more like a flame, a river or an eddie. Matter is flowing through it all the time. The constituents are being replaced over and over again.

A chair or a table is stable because the atoms stay where they are. The stability of a river stems from the constant flow of water through it.

98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced every year. 98 percent! Water molecules stays in your body for two weeks (and for an even shorter time in a hot climate), the atoms in your bones stays there for a few months. Some atoms stay for years. But almost not one single atom stay with you in your body from cradle to grave.

What is constant in you is not material. An average person takes in 1.5 ton of matter every year as food, drinks and oxygen. All this matter has to learn to be you. Every year. New atoms will have to learn to remember your childhood.

These numbers has been known for half a century or more, mostly from studies of radioactive isotopes. Physicist Richard Feynman said in 1955: "Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in your mind a year ago."

But why is this simple insight not on the all-time Top 10 list of important discoveries? Perhaps because it tastes a little like spiritualism and idealism? Only the ghosts are for real? Wandering souls?

But digital media now makes it possible to think of all this in a simple way. The music I danced to as a teenager has been moved from vinyl-LPs to magnetic audio tapes to CDs to Pods and whatnot. The physical representation can change and is not important — as long as it is there. The music can jump from medium to medium, but it is lost if it does not have a representation. This physics of information was sorted out by Rolf Landauer in the 1960'ies. Likewise, out memories can move from potato-atoms to burger-atoms to banana-atoms. But the moment they are on their own, they are lost.

We reincarnate ourselves all the time. We constantly give our personality new flesh. I keep my mental life alive by making it jump from atom to atom. A constant flow. Never the same atoms, always the same river. No flow, no river. No flow, no me.

This is what I call permanent reincarnation: Software replacing its hardware all the time. Atoms replacing atoms all the time. Life. This is very different from religious reincarnation with souls jumping from body to body (and souls sitting out there waiting for a body to take home in).

There has to be material continuity for permanent reincarnation to be possible. The software is what is preserved, but it cannot live on its own. It has to jump from molecule to molecule, always in carnation.

I have changed my mind about the stability of my body: It keeps changing all the time. Or I could not stay the same.

This is an idea I have re-discovered a few times times, most recently by reading Steve Grand. It seems like it should be at the core of our understanding of biological systems, but currently seems to be superfluous. Either it's not as important as it seems, or there will be a huge paradigm shift around it at some point.

RODNEY A. BROOKS
Panasonic Professor of Robotics, MIT, and CTO, iRobot Corp; author "Flesh and Machines"

Those of us who are computer scientists by training, and I'm afraid many collaterally damaged scientists of other stripes, tend to use computation as the mechanistic level of explanation for how living systems behave and "think". I originally gleefully embraced the computational metaphor

[...]

The metaphors we have used in the past for the brain have not stood the test of time. I doubt that our current metaphor of the brain as a network of computers doing computations is going to stand for all eternity either.

Note that I do not doubt that there are mechanistic explanations for how we think, and I certainly proceed with my work of trying to build intelligent robots using computation as a primary tool for expressing mechanisms within those robots.

But I have relatively recently come to question computation as the ultimate metaphor to be used in both the understanding of living systems and as the only important design tool for engineering intelligent artifacts.

Some of my colleagues have managed to recast Pluto's orbital behavior as the body itself carrying out computations on forces that apply to it. I think we are perhaps better off using Newtonian mechanics (with a little Einstein thrown in) to understand and predict the orbits of planets and others. It is so much simpler.

Likewise we can think about spike trains as codes and worry about neural coding. We can think about human memory as data storage and retrieval. And we can think about walking over rough terrain as computing the optimal place to put down each of our feet. But I suspect that somewhere down the line we are going to come up with better, less computational metaphors. The entities we use for metaphors may be more complex but the useful ones will lead to simpler explanations.

Just as the notion of computation is only a short step beyond discrete mathematics, but opens up vast new territories of questions and technologies, these new metaphors might well be just a few steps beyond where we are now in understanding organizational dynamics, but they may have rich and far reaching implications in our abilities to understand the natural world and to engineer new creations.

In a not entirely unrelated note, I dropped my Intro to Cognitive Science class today (I'll be taking a Philosophy of Linguistics class instead).

LAURENCE C. SMITH
Professor of Geography, UCLA

[...] The sea-ice collapse, however, changed my mind that it will be decades before we see the real impacts of the warming. I now believe they will happen much sooner.

Let's put the 2007 sea-ice year into context. In the 1970's, when NASA first began mapping sea ice from microwave satellites, its annual minimum extent (in September, at summer's end) hovered close to 8 million square kilometers, about the area of the conterminous United States minus Ohio. In September 2007 it dropped abruptly to 4.3 million square kilometers, the area of the conterminous United State minus Ohio and all the other twenty-four states east of the Mississippi, as well as North Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Iowa. Canada's Northwest Passage was freed of ice for the first time in human memory. From Bering Strait where the U.S. and Russia brush lips, open blue water stretched almost to the North Pole.

What makes the 2007 sea-ice collapse so unnerving is that it happened too soon. The ensemble averages of our most sophisticated climate model predictions, put forth in the IPCC AR4 report and various other model intercomparison studies, don't predict a downwards lurch of that magnitude for another fifty years. Even the aggressive models -the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) CCSM3 and the Centre National de Recherches Meteorologiques (CNRM) CM3 simulations, for example — must whittle ice until 2035 or later before the 2007 conditions can be replicated. Put simply, the models are too slow to match reality. Geophysicists, accustomed to non-linearities and hard to impress after a decade of 'unprecedented' events, are stunned by the totter: Apparently, the climate system can move even faster than we thought. This has decidedly recalibrated scientist's attitudes — including my own — to the possibility that even the direst IPCC scenario predictions for the end of this century — 10 to 24 inch higher global sea levels, for example — may be prudish.

What does all this say to us about the future? The first is that rapid climate change — a nonlinearity that occurs when a climate forcing reaches a threshold beyond which little additional forcing is needed to trigger a large impact — is a distinct threat not well captured in our current generation of computer models. This situation will doubtless improve — as the underlying physics of the 2007 ice event and others such as the American Southeast drought are dissected, understood, and codified — but in the meantime, policymakers must work from the IPCC blueprint which seems almost staid after the events of this summer and fall. The second is that it now seems probable that the northern hemisphere will lose its ice lid far sooner than we ever thought possible. Over the past three years experts have shifted from 2050, to 2035, to 2013 as plausible dates for an ice-free Arctic Ocean — estimates at first guided by models then revised by reality.

The broader significance of vanishing sea ice extends far beyond suffering polar bears, new shipping routes, or even development of vast Arctic energy reserves. It is absolutely unequivocal that the disappearance of summer sea ice — regardless of exactly which year it arrives — will profoundly alter the northern hemisphere climate, particularly through amplified winter warming of at least twice the global average rate. Its further impacts on the world's precipitation and pressure systems are under study but are likely significant. Effects both positive and negative, from reduced heating oil consumption to outbreaks of fire and disease, will propagate far southward into the United States, Canada, Russia and Scandinavia. Scientists have expected such things in eventuality — but in 2007 we learned they may already be upon us.

Hold onto your butts, 'cause all we really know about this one is that it's not gonna to be pretty.

DIANE F. HALPERN
Professor, Claremont McKenna College; Past-president, American Psychological Association; Author, "Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities"

Why are men underrepresented in teaching, child care, and related fields and women underrepresented in engineering, physics, and related fields? I used to know the answer, but that was before I spent several decades reviewing almost everything written about this question. Like most enduring questions, the responses have grown more contentious and even less is "settled" now that we have mountains of research designed to answer them. At some point, my own answer changed from what I believed to be the simple truth to a convoluted statement complete with qualifiers, hedge terms, and caveats. I guess this shift in my own thinking represents progress, but it doesn't feel or look that way.

[...]

Like all complex questions, the question about why men and women achieve in different academic areas depends on a laundry list of influences that do not fall neatly into categories labeled biology or environment. It is time to give up this tired way of thinking about nature and nurture as two independent variables and their interaction and recognize how they exert mutual influences on each other. No single number can capture the extent to which one type of variable is important because they do not operate independently. Nature and nurture do not just interact; they fundamentally change each other. The answer that I give today is far more complicated than the simple truth that I used to believe, but we have no reason to expect that complex phenomena like cognitive development have simple answers.

Life is simple... except when it's not, which is most of the time. (I'm sure that's a half-remembered quote from somewhere...).

ROGER C. SCHANK
Psychologist & Computer Scientist; Engines for Education Inc.; Author, "Making Minds Less Well Educated than Our Own"

When reporters interviewed me in the 70's and 80's about the possibilities for Artificial Intelligence I would always say that we would have machines that are as smart as we are within my lifetime. It seemed a safe answer since no one could ever tell me I was wrong. But I no longer believe that will happen. One reason is that I am a lot older and we are barely closer to creating smart machines.

I have not soured on AI. I still believe that we can create very intelligent machines. But I no longer believe that those machines will be like us.

[Why? Because we are very complicated things, you and I, and we don't know how we do what we do.]

What AI can and should build are intelligent special purpose entities. (We can call them Specialized Intelligences or SI's.) Smart computers will indeed be created. But they will arrive in the form of SI's, ones that make lousy companions but know every shipping accident that ever happened and why (the shipping industry's SI) or as an expert on sales (a business world SI.) The sales SI, because sales is all it ever thought about, would be able to recite every interesting sales story that had ever happened and the lessons to be learned from it. For some salesman about to call on a customer for example, this SI would be quite fascinating. We can expect a foreign policy SI that helps future presidents learn about the past in a timely fashion and helps them make decisions because it knows every decision the government has ever made and has cleverly indexed them so as to be able to apply what it knows to current situations.

So AI in the traditional sense, will not happen in my lifetime nor in my grandson's lifetime. Perhaps a new kind of machine intelligence will one day evolve and be smarter than us, but we are a really long way from that.

This is more or less my current view on the future of AI in the medium-long term.

PATRICK BATESON
Professor of Ethology, Cambridge University, author "Design for a Life"

[He explains why he considered himself an agnostic... until he met a creationist]

My creationist dinner companion was not worried by such trivialities and dismissed my lack of politesse as the problem of a scientist being too literal. However, being too literal was not my problem, it was hers and those of her fellow creationists. She was hoist on her own petard. In any event, it was quite simply stupid to try to take on science on its own terms by appealing to the intelligence implicit in natural design. Science provides orderly methods for examining the natural world. One of those methods is to develop theories that integrate as much as possible of what we know about the phenomena encompassed by the theory. The theories provide frameworks for testing the characteristics of the world — and though some theorists may not wish to believe it, their theories are eminently disposable. Facts are widely shared opinions and, every so often the consensus breaks — and minds change. Nevertheless it is crying for the moon to hope that the enormous bodies of thought that have been built up about cosmology, geology and biological evolution are all due to fall apart. No serious theologian would rest his or her beliefs on such a hope. If faith rests on the supposed implausibility of a current scientific explanation, it is vulnerable to the appearance of a plausible one. To build on such sand is a crass mistake.

[...]

I snipped the part where Bateson actually talks about changing his mind because I don't really find it interesting or insightful; but he's dead on about the fatal mistake that creationists, and all fundamentalists, make of trying to get things out of their scriptures that just aren't there. The big surprise (to me) is that this kind of fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon. For most of it's history, religion did not make this particular mistake.

AUBREY de GREY
Gerontologist; chairman and chief science officer of the Methuselah Foundation; author, "Ending Aging"

The words "science" and "technology," or equivalently the words "research" and "development," are used in the same breath so readily that one might easily presume that they are joined at the hip: that their goals are indistinguishable, and that those who are good at one are, if not necessarily equally good at the other, at least quite good at evaluating the quality of work in the other. I grew up with this assumption, but the longer I work at the interface between science and technology the more I find myself having to accept that it is false — that most, scientists are rather poor at the type of thinking that identifies efficient new ways to get things done, and that, likewise, technologists are mostly not terribly good at identifying efficient ways to find things out.

I've come to feel that there are several reasons underlying this divide.

A major one is the divergent approaches of scientists and technologists to the use of evidence. In basic research, it is exceptionally easy to be seduced by one's data — to see a natural interpretation of it and to overlook the existence of other, comparably economical interpretations of it that lead to dramatically different conclusions. It therefore makes sense for scientists to give the greatest weight, when evaluating the evidence for and against a given hypothesis, to the most direct observational or experimental evidence at hand.

Technologists, on the other hand, succeed best when they stand back from the task before them, thinking laterally about ways in which ostensibly irrelevant techniques might be applied to solve one or another component of the problem. The technologist's approach, when applied to science, is likely to result all too often in wasted time, as experiments are performed that contain too many departures from previous work to allow the drawing of firm conclusions either way concerning the hypothesis of interest.

Conversely, applying the scientist's methodology to technological endeavours can also result in wasted time, resulting from overly small steps away from techniques already known to be futile, like trying to fly by flapping mechanical wings.

But there's another difference between the characteristic mindsets of scientists and technologists, and I've come to view it as the most problematic. Scientists are avowedly "curiosity-driven" rather than "goal-directed" — they are spurred by the knowledge that, throughout the history of civilisation, innumerable useful technologies have become possible not through the stepwise execution of a predefined plan, but rather through the purposely undirected quest for knowledge, letting a dynamically-determined sequence of experiments lead where it may.

That logic is as true as it ever was, and any technologist who doubts it need only examine the recent history of science to change his mind. However, it can be — and, in my view, all too often is — taken too far. A curiosity-driven sequence of experiments is useful not because of the sequence, but because of the technological opportunities that emerge at the end of the sequence. The sequence is not an end in itself. And this is rather important to keep in mind. Any scientist, on completing an experiment, is spoilt for choice concerning what experiment to do next — or, more prosaically, concerning what experiment to apply for funding to do next.

The natural criterion for making this choice is the likelihood that the experiment will generate a wide range of answers to technologically important questions, thereby providing new technological opportunities. But an altogether more frequently adopted criterion, in practice, is that the experiment will generate a wide range of new questions — new reasons to do more experiments. This is only indirectly useful, and I believe that in practice it is indeed less frequently useful than programs of research designed with one eye on the potential for eventual technological utility.

Why, then, is it the norm? Simply because it is the more attractive to those who are making these decisions — the curiosity-driven scientists (whether the grant applicants or the grant reviewers) themselves. Curiosity is addictive: both emotionally and in their own enlightened self-interest, scientists want reasons to do more science, not more technology. But as a society we need science to be as useful as possible, as quickly as possible, and this addiction slows us down.

It's not hard to see how this supports Aubrey's argument for devoting resources to solving aging, but I have to give him props for not simply being a crusader for his idea, despite the huge moral imperative that I know he feels drives it. He seems to have the patience (and curiosity/empathy) to think seriously about why more people don't see things the way he does, instead of just becoming frustrated and/or shrill.

As someone who tends to worship curiosity, I take his point very seriously. It's why I don't want to be a pure academic: I want the stuff I work on to make a difference in the world, and the question of what we should be working on is at least as important as the question of how we go forward in working on it.

I think Nassim Taleb is saying something similar in his answer, but in a more technical way. I'm a big Taleb fan already, but I really need to learn a lot more about statistics.

crippled minds

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 02:02:20 GMT

I lied. Next time I'll write about how I got my job. This time I'm just posting a section from near the beginning of Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase, the story of how she came to write so much about religion after trying, and failing, to be a nun.

We were doing a little course in apologetics, which explained the rational grounds for faith. I was set an essay: "Assess the historical evidence for the Resurrection." I had read the requisite textbooks, could see what was required, and duly produced a discussion of the events of the first Easter Sunday that made Jesus' rising from the tomb as uncontroversial as unproblematic historically as the battle of Waterloo. This was nonsense, of course, but that did not seem to matter in apologetics.

"Yes, Sister, very nice." Mother Greta, the pale, delicate nun who was supervising our studies, smiled at me as she handed back my essay. "This is a very good piece of work."

"But Mother," I suddenly found myself saying, "it isn't true, is it?"

Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. "No, Sister," she said wearily, "it isn't true. But please don't tell the others."

This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict one another, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta, I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it.

It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day.

Yet how could you behave like that indefinitely, without inflicting real and lasting damage on your mind? I remembered the moment, a year or so later, when I had realized that my mind no longer worked freely. We all sat around the long table in the community room with our needlework , Mother Walker, our novice mistress, presiding. That night we were talking about the liturgical changes that were being introduced by the Second Vatican Council: the Mass was being said in English instead of Latin, for example, and that morning the children in the adjacent boarding school had played guitars to accompany a song they had composed themselves. Mother Walter had not enjoyed that song. She was devoted to the Gregorian chant and had taught us to love it too. ... "Of course the council is inspired by the Holy Spirit," she was saying, "but it is hard to see how we can replace a musical tradition that goes back hundreds of years." ...

"But Mother" - Sister Mary Jonathan, a novice who was a year ahead of me and who had been my guardian angel when I had begun my novitiate, spoke up eagerly - "surely the changes needn't necessarily be a disaster? After all, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with playing a guitar at Mass, is there?"

Mother frowned. "I should have thought," she replied coldly, "that this is a matter we need not discuss." We all bent our heads over our needlework, distancing ourselves. ...

"But some people," Sister Mary Jonathan continued to my astonishment, "might go to church initially to enjoy the guitar because they like that kind of music. We've learned to love the chant, but lots of people can't understand the Latin, and the music is so different from anything they are used to that they can't make anything of it."

Mother Walter laughed shortly. It came out as an angry bark. "Anyone who needs a guitar to get them to Mass must have a pretty feeble faith!" ... The tension in the room was almost palpable. Nobody ever answered back like that, and the rest of us were sewing as though our lives depended upon it. But I found myself looking hopefully at Sister Mary Jonathan, willing her to go on. I used to be able to do that, I thought wonderingly. I used to like exploring different points of view, building up an argument step by step, sharpening an idea against somebody else's mind. But I could no more do that now than run naked down the cloister. Not only would I never have dared to cross Mother Walter - and indeed, I hastily reminded myself, Sister Mary Jonathan was breaking several rules at once - but I wouldn't be able to think like that anymore. I no longer had it in me. ...

Somehow [Sister Mary Jonathan] had held herself better than I. I was quite sure that she would not find it difficult to tell anybody what she thought. My problem, as a wrestled with my highly unsatisfactory essay for Dr. Brentwood Smyth, was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come anymore. True, at the end of my religious life I had argued with Mother Praeterita, my Oxford superior, but the ideas I used against her had not been mine. I was simply parroting books and articles that I had read. It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent. You can probably abuse your mind and do it irrevocable harm, just as you can damage your body by feeding it the wrong kind of food, depriving it of exercise, or forcing your limbs into a constricting straitjacket. My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman, and I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. The restraints had been removed too late, and she would never walk normally again.

Armstrong writes remarkable book length surveys of the grand topics in religion: so far I've read most of A History of God and all of The Bible: A Biography and I've got another of her books waiting for me after I finish The Spiral Staircase. She has almost single handedly reignited my interest in religion as a powerful, relevant, and important force in the world today. I highly recommend her work to anyone seriously interested in the topic.

semester over; leave a message at the sound of the beep

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:04:43 GMT

The last final is in the bag, and all the other grades are in. Time for some retrospection!

In short, this semester turned out to be a minor disaster, academically speaking: my GPA will end up around 3.5. This is mostly due to spending lots of time thinking about, and reading about, subjects of personal interest instead of studying for classes. All in all I'd say it was worth it, but I think I've figured out most of what I need to figure out as far as that goes - next semester should be better. Let's look at classes:

HI 205 - History From 1400 to the Present: A
More like English kings and queens from 1400 to 1918, but OK. (I kid, sort of.) This class covered a lot of ground and didn't (couldn't) go into much depth at all. It would have been nice to do more economics and less royal lineages - as it is, this is the class I will probably forget first. The best thing about it was the teacher's offhand recommendation of Marius's book on Luther, which turned out to be a pretty interesting read. Barely touched the textbook, as all tests were directly from lecture notes. I added this as a fifth class at the last minute, and it turned out pretty much as I expected: a nice easy A with very little work outside of class. Compared to the history class I took in community college, the overall experience and educational value was essentially the same, and, while the tests are harder, the grades were "curved" (read: scaled) up, eliminating most of the difference.

PHI 340 - Intro to Philosophy of Science: A
This was ostensibly a large lecture hall class, but the instructor did everything online: textbook (compiled from years of lecture notes), tests, everything, and used lecture for question and answer sessions. He made it clear that there was no need to come to class if you didn't have any questions, and after the first two I didn't go. I actually really like this format. I think lectures are a terribly inefficient way to teach in general (and educational research suggests that most people learn little from them), and doing it this way allows the instructor to spend his or her time working directly on the things that students need the most help with, while allowing those who don't need as much help the maximum amount of flexibility. Since most of the stuff I have read about over the last several years pertains more or less directly to the philosophy of science, this class was a breeze, and I spent almost no time on it at all. About the only thing I got out of it was a greater appreciation for how hard it is to make a sharp, simple, and accurate distinction between science and religion. This seems to be an "intro to philosophical (read: careful) thinking" class for a lot of people, since, despite the fact that all tests were multiple choice (they were not, however, easy) and lasted twenty-four hours, the median score ended up around 55. Fortunately for those people this class was also heavily "curved," so 55 was a passing grade. I ended up with the highest score in the class at 91.7 (before the optional final, which I did not take and which replaces a lower test grade, if there was one).

MA 242 - Calculus III: B+
This class was a disaster. I quit going after a while, since I wasn't getting anything out of the lectures that I couldn't get out of the book more easily, and the fact that the instructor was working through all the hardest homework problems and giving the answers was sapping my motivation to do them at all. I did well on the tests, which were easy, but completely lost motivation towards the end of the semester, failed to submit the last several homeworks, and had a truly awful final. Somehow I came away with a B+ - no doubt "curving" was involved again. I learned less in this class than any other this semester, including HI205 and PHI340, which was mostly my fault, as I never put in the necessary effort.

MA 405H - Linear Algebra: B+
This was an honors class, so it had a fair amount of proofs to go along with all the calculations. I came away with a better grasp of the subject than with the calculus class, but still don't feel like I have a good handle on it. If it weren't for another math book I'd been reading on the side, it would've been even worse. As it is, having this class under my belt will mostly make it a little easier to pick up linear algebra when I really need it (and I will). This was also a standard lecture class, but for some reason I didn't mind it as much. Maybe it was because the material was new and different, or because I sat in the front row, or maybe it was because the instructor's handwriting was so good it was a pleasure to read the board - I don't know. Another case of doing little work outside of class and suffering the consequences.

MA 225 - Intro to Advanced Mathematics: B
Aka "Intro to Proofs," or "Now You Get To See A Bit Of What Mathematics Is Really Like, For The First Time Ever" (at least for most people). I deliberately picked the instructor with the most difficult reputation, and proceeded to turn in good homework and the worst test grades ever. Oh well. I think I got a pretty good handle on the material in this class, although not good enough to perform reliably under a time limit. It didn't exactly convince me that I couldn't cut it as a mathematician, but it remind me that I didn't really want to be a pure mathematician, and that that would be the direction of least resistance if I continued in mathematics. On the other hand, I did experience my first real impression of what it really feels like to be a mathematician, on the last day of class, when the instructor outlined Cantor's diagonalization proof of the uncountability of the real numbers. For the non math-people out there, this is a result from the late 19th century that shows that there is more than one kind of infinity. I had seen it before, but this time I actually understood the main point, and, and the end, for about a minute or two, I was overcome with the sensation of being on the threshold of a new world of austere beauty, made accessible only by formal argument. It's rather hard to describe, but I would compare it to first learning how to read. The fact that this did not immediately convince me to drop everything and become a pure mathematician surely proves that my real interests lie elsewhere, but I do hope to return to that world in the near future, and learn to see it and move around in it better (OK, at all). Overall I was reasonably happy with this class.

Now, on to the real grades:

Education: C-
This covers actually learning and understanding useful things. Good grades in good classes gets me up to C. Higher than that requires real understanding, and ideally applying and/or teaching.

Meta-Education: C
Learning about how I learn, how to learn better, how best to motivate my learning, etc. Little to no progress in study skills sunk this grade.

Grade Awareness: C+
On my scale, F means "thinking about grades all the time, because otherwise I'm not going to make it," C means "got out the calculator," B means "spent a significant amount of time thinking about the grading system of one or more classes," and A means "didn't think about grades, because I knew I understood the material."

Personal Awareness: A-
The high point of the semester, as much progress was made here. I should be able to make A's here in subsequent semesters without nearly as much time and effort.

Relationships: D
You can't get an F if you don't have any. At some point I will have to do something about this.

Administration: B-
The logistics of everyday life: taking care of the body and other property, mostly. I did OK here, but not great.

Fun: B-
What's the point if you're not having fun? This kind of summarizes everything else. I learned a good bit about myself (and saw some good movies), but the semester was more frustrating than fun.

Next: How I got a job.

possibly the best video on youtube

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 22:27:05 GMT

via, also

welcome to the future

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:23:15 GMT

studying for finals is for squares

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 03:00:18 GMT

Attention conservation notice: What follows is an idiosyncratic and somewhat sad little collection of subjects I've been thinking about for the past, oh, five years or so, and some working conclusions I've come to that might, might, let me get on to more interesting and productive things. Believe it or not, they are much more focused and useful questions than the ones I used to ask. A lot of it seems pretty common-sensical now, but for a long time I either did not know all of it, or did not really believe all of it. I have spent a tragically large amount of time reading about this stuff this semester, and not studying for classes. They are probably mostly of personal interest, but it's my blog, gosh darn it.

What is science?

A collection of methods for understanding the world that have been developed over the centuries. A lot of them have come about fairly recently, but some go way back, almost to the beginning of history. Probably the main ones are abstract formal reasoning (Plato et al.) applied to descriptions of observable phenomenon (Galileo), and the use of experimental techniques, like controls and random sampling, that can provide powerful tests of explanations. To some degree, science might also be identified with some of it's more important discoveries, like the atomic nature of matter, Newton's laws of motion, evolution by natural selection, or quantum mechanics. The practical effects of science have been a huge increase in our understanding of the world and big changes in life and society over a relatively short period of time as a result of applying that understanding. Some of the changes are good, some not so good, but the higher rate of change (whether or not that change represents progress) may itself be the biggest difference.

What is religion?

A collection of methods for understanding the world that have been developed over the centuries. Religion is much older, bigger, and more complicated than science. Perhaps the defining religious concept is the Absolute, or God. God usually is understood to represent the mysterious unified completeness of the world that lies beyond human comprehension. Different religions have represented God in many different ways throughout history. God is usually claimed to have aspects, emanations, or effects that can be understood or even observed. Often God's aspects are said to have personal characteristics like human beings. Sometimes God itself is seen as having personal characteristics. Sometimes religion is seen as a mystical attempt to grasp some part of God's higher emanations in some way that is very difficult for most people to achieve, but more often God is interpreted in a way that makes God's aspects more accessible to humanity and provides guidelines for how to live and behave in everyday life. The practical effects of religion have ranged from the creation of moral codes that promote love and bind societies together, to parochial views of God or God's aspects that exacerbate mankind's tendencies towards xenophobia, hatred and war. All religions have had very different opinions at different times about the value and importance of science and its various methods and discoveries, and most other things as well.

What is the difference between religion and science?

The biggest difference is methodological: science focuses on what can be known reliably (not all that much, especially at first), and then works up to a more comprehensive world view, while religion starts with perhaps the central fact of life - the presence of the absolute and unknowable - and works down to social policy, and sometimes the details of how the world works. Religion starts with what's important (or at least what seems important to most of us); science starts with what can be known at the moment (which can change).

Why do I like science so much, and what do I think about religion?

I like science because I think working up from reliable knowledge through disciplined thinking and clever experiment is the best method yet discovered for improving our understanding of the world, making progress, and improving the human condition. I think religion is at it's best when it focuses on the unknowability of God and uses that to strip people of their harmful prejudices, but over all it seems to be less effective and more prone to abuse. Science has more limited goals, is more understandable, and is easier to accurately teach. Not that science isn't still massively abusable, frequently abused, and poorly understood by most people, but in my opinion religion is even worse off in all of these areas. We have a long way to go before living well is as easy to understand as, say, sports. And sports is not necessarily easy to understand, let alone do well, so... yeah. Miles to go before we sleep.

What is the role of formal abstract reasoning?

It provides maps of the landscape that have several nice properties. When used properly it is extremely powerful, but like any powerful technique it is dangerous when used improperly. There are many areas where we still do not know how to usefully apply it, and it is those areas where it has the potential to do the most damage.

What are the advantages of formal reasoning?

Abstract ideas can be beautifully general, and can therefore have impressive size to usefulness ratios. Formal arguments can be communicated very reliably, helping to clarify similarities and differences. They can frequently be manipulated by machines, allowing bigger ideas to be explored. Some deductions within a formal system can be known with very high degrees of certainty.

What are the disadvantages?

Widespread abstract thinking is relatively new, and can be hard to understand for humans who have not adjusted to it, or been trained in its use. The usefulness of formal ideas tempts people to forget that not all reasoning is formal, and to formalize too early. They then make deductions that appear to be highly certain but may not reflect the system being modeled. The map is mistaken for the territory, and its apparent certainty can come to be seen as foundational, leading to a complete disconnection from reality. Then the world explodes.

Doesn't this just boil down to "it can be abused by people who don't understand it or get sloppy?" Doesn't that apply to pretty much everything?

More or less.

Is there an upper bound on intelligence (understood here as Flynn's "mental acuity," the ability to solve novel problems) that a person can achieve that is set by genetics? In other words, am I in danger of wasting my life by trying to be in science or whatever, because I can never be smart enough, no matter how hard I try?

Almost certainly not. Parrots can learn sophisticate abstract concepts and express them in language, and language is the best candidate for the single thing that makes humans intellectually superior to the rest of the animal kingdom. (The other candidate is social organization, but this is largely enabled by language). Is there a really hard barrier between even parrots and humans? The brain seems to be extraordinarily plastic, and mostly continuously variable, even across species, barring obvious forms of harmful genetic mutation. Remember the chess player who could still play chess, although not as well as before, even after his brain was savaged by Alzheimer's to an extent that would incapacitate most people. It takes a lot of work to teach a parrot the rudiments of language, and genetics obviously produces significant variation in humans even after taking the powerful multiplicative power of the environment into effect. But based on tests, it's clear that I am a human being, and probably above the 95th percentile [edit: based on some of what I think are the better online IQ tests, but who really knows] in terms of genetic endowment for intelligence. The chance that there is a discontinuous genetic component to the thinking of many of the geniuses that have had large impacts and that goes beyond what I (or any other reasonably intelligent person) have seems unlikely. The difference for nearly all, if not all of them, is probably almost entirely environmental.

So does that mean I have a good chance of being recognized as a genius?

Almost certainly not. First, I have not had a great environment and have not developed my intelligence all that well by the standards of the most successful scientists, and time is ticking. Second, being recognized as a genius involves a huge amount of luck. On top of having a top tier intelligence and consistently feeding it, one must be at a time and place where one can put the capstone on a theory that will have a large impact. Most of that is luck, and does not necessarily require much more actual intelligence than a significant amount of the prep work. It's a little like winning a championship in the NBA - you aren't going to do it without sufficiently good teammates, even if you're as ridiculously good as Michael Jordan (yes, I know, I'm dating myself...) - except that in science you have a lot more teammates, and their inputs are much harder for non-specialists to see.

So does that mean I have a good chance of being a successful scientist at least?

Not necessarily. That takes a lot of luck too, since jobs and funding are scarce compared to the supply of smart workers. Making useful breakthroughs in research takes a great deal of luck as well (although picking a suitable field can help), although not as much luck as a capstone breakthrough.

Wait, why do I care so much about being famous? I thought I was in it for the pure joy of knowing!

It's the genes, baby. Showing off is probably why they keep intelligence around in the first place.

So is that why I blog so much, even though I have no good reason to believe that what I write is useful or informative for anyone else?

Hmm.... Next question?

How is thinking done at the very top end? How do people think intelligently in completely novel situations? How does someone reason in a formal environment if they have no intuition?

There is no such thing as a completely novel situation. Old methods are applied in new situations, and adapted as they are observed to fail and more is learned. This is the only way it can be, unless you count random guessing (and that may be necessary, in limited situations). It is probably not possible to reason effectively in a formal environment if one has no intuition for it at all, but there is probably not much overlap between formal systems that are interesting, and those for which no one has any intuition at all.

Will there be a singularity type takeoff of intelligence?

It is entirely dependent on the layout of the undiscovered knowledge "landscape," which is unknown by definition. We can only guess that it will be like the past: jerky progress, but no real singularities. In the absence of information, a long period of stagnation is as likely as a short period of hyper progress.

Why can't we bring about the singularity by improving general intelligence?

Because there is no such thing as perfectly general intelligence, any more than there is a perfectly general survival trait. It all depends on the fitness landscape.

So what should I then do?

Work as hard as I can to be as smart as I can, work on the most challenging and interesting problems that I can, and always look for ways to improve. Put myself in situations where I will have the opportunity to learn the most and am still able to contribute something. Start as high as I can and climb as high as I can from there - don't be afraid to change fields, but keep moving up. Always keep my eye on what I want to achieve, and never forget that results and recognition are only imperfectly connected to doing things right - don't let them become the goal themselves. Pick important problems that have promising attack vectors. Take all the good advice I can find.

What field should I go into?

One that can benefit from formal reasoning, but where most people use formal reasoning incorrectly. One that can potentially make a big difference in the world. One that I can usefully contribute to. There are a lot of options.

How do computer science and cognitive science score under those criteria?

Pretty well, I think. Programming can benefit a lot from formal thinking, but many people who use it seem to do so in ways that don't help very much. There is still lots of room for making machines smarter and more useful to people. But maybe something better will turn up.

Are we bloody well finished? Can I start working on gnarly problems now?

Gettin' closer.

movie talk month

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 06:41:37 GMT

I'm back from spending a great Thanksgiving break with the family. Finals are approaching and the next three weeks look to be full of studying (or, in the case of classes I don't care about, cramming for the last tests), so I'm going to get a blog in now while I'm doing laundry and waiting for a "very mandatory" suite meeting.

Forget everything I wrote about spring classes and future plans in the previous post. I'm switching majors to computer science, and have changed all my classes to reflect this. Now I'm sure you're just dying to know all the details of why I would switch away from mathematics, especially after having delayed college for years in part because I thought that undergraduate CS degrees were such a waste of time, but I'm going to keep it short. I'm switching because it's what I was interested in in the first place and I've decided, amazingly enough, that it's best to go directly at what interests you (assuming that you have that luxury). I realized that, not only can I teach myself computer science, I can, and in fact must teach myself essentially everything. Learning is 90% about the time and effort the student puts in and has little to do with what classes one happens to be taking. In fact taking classes can be detrimental, because being forced to earn a grade saps the desire to put in the time and effort it takes to actually understand the material, as opposed to just getting the stupid grade. (I've noticed this for myself, but apparently it's a pretty well known, if very counter-intuitive, psychological phenomenon. More about it here.) I'll feel a lot better about doing the minimum required work for lame CS classes than math classes that are actually important, plus they'll be easier, meaning more time to concentrate on the classes that might be worth while (I can now take AI and cognitive science classes that relate directly to my interests) and other studies/projects. The only real downside is that I'll probably be around for an extra semester, but an extra semester is far better than wasting two years.

My new schedule incorporates these new goals, as well as related insights I've gathered from this semester: I like to sleep in, I do as well or better in the class I skip (by sleeping in) when I don't go, and I really like the format of my philosophy of science class, which is essentially taught over the internet, that I don't go to at all. With all this in mind, my new spring schedule features only five class meetings per week, despite having six classes, one more than I'm taking this semester, none earlier than 1200 hours, and none on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. This magic is achieved by taking three distance education classes. One of them is the required physics class, which means I don't have to go to lab, either. Sweet!

Hmm, haven't done any movie reviews in a while.

Offside | 4/5
This is the story of some Iranian soccer fans attempting to sneak into an Iranian national team's World Cup qualification match. They are sneaking in because they are girls, and the Iranian government has decided that soccer stadiums, being full of rowdy cursing men, are not appropriate places for women. Well, not Iranian women anyway. It would not be very politic to tell visiting Korean soccer fans that they can't see their team play just because they are female, for example. The movie is shot in a straightforward "realistic" style, allowing the political implications of the on-screen events to remain subservient to more the interesting, and even more universal, story of passionate people figuring out how to subvert the system. Good stuff.

Live Free or Die Hard | 3/5
I ended up leaving this movie at the end feeling impatient with myself for wasting time on it, but this is more of a commentary on me and my changing priorities than it is on the movie itself, which is a perfectly serviceable action movie. If you enjoy perfectly serviceable action movies, you'll probably enjoy this one. And that's about all I have to say about it.

The Kingdom | 3/5
There is a strong "U.S. showing the rest of the world how it's done" vibe here, but the main foreign character, a Saudi police officer, pulled me in and made this one work. The writers manage to get a "violence mostly just begets more violence" message into a film that is essentially about Americans going into a foreign country that doesn't really want them and solving their immediate terrorist problems with a hefty helping of good 'ol fashioned gunplay, so I guess it's up to the viewer to decide what lessons, if any, to come away with.

The Machinist | 3/5
Not quite on a level with Memento or some of my other favorite movies with similar themes (another case of too many things that don't quite make enough sense), but not bad and hey, it's Christian Bale. Maybe it would be better if I'd read more Dostoevsky. Maybe it would be better if I thought more like Dostoevsky. As it is, it seemed kind of... thin.

The Mist | 2/5
After watching this, I read a review that said that the Stephen King book this movie was based on was one of King's earlier works, written back before he developed whatever subtlety he has now, and in retrospect that makes a lot of sense. There are a number of plot elements that seem more strained than is typical, and several of the characters are completely lacking in any kind of subtlety, none more so than the nightmarish fundamentalist Mrs. Carmody, who believes that the monsters in the mist are the judgment of God on a world that has denied Him. In just a few days, she is able to get couple dozen people so convinced that she speaks for the Almighty that they are willing to knife their neighbors if she but asks. I guess that works as horror in the same way that the very unreality of a dream is terrifying, but I think it's actually counter-productive as a commentary on the insanity of extreme fundamentalism.

Director Frank Darabont apparently stuck close to the book until the end, flaws and all, but he did change the ending and I'm not sure it was for the better. As I watched it unfold, it reached a point where I thought to myself "well, if it finishes straight it will be pretty dark, but it would be even darker if they did this," and Darabont did it. Some reviewers have praised him for his "daring" while others have said the ending was like a slap in the face, and betrayed what came before. (It's amusing to read different reviewers praise him for understanding what makes horror work and criticize him for not understanding how horror works while talking about the exact same elements of the film.) I like dark and darker endings as a rule, but this one immediately put me on the fence, and I haven't been able to shake the impression that Darabont chose it for the same reason I thought of it: just because it was darker. Like a number of other things in the movie, it just seems too arbitrary.

Rescue Dawn | 3/5
I guess this could be a standard survival/POW story, but I can't help but think of it as a Werner Herzog, quirky-people-in-a-jungle story. Quirky people in jungle seems to be enough for him, but I guess it's not quite enough for me. Still, not a bad movie. Christian Bale is fantastic as always.

Beowulf | 3/5
I'll happily cop to never having read the poem, so I can't say how much of the story belongs to Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and how much to the original anonymous writer. There are certainly elements of family dynamics, Shakespearean drama, and conscious recognition of, and obvious fascination with story itself, that are also clearly evident in the Sandman series (the only Gaiman work I've read), so I'm guessing some of them drew Gaiman's interest and others he added himself. However it came about, the story is surprisingly engaging, which helps to pass the time between the cool looking action scenes and makes it easier to overlook the waxy, dead-eyed CG characters. Worth the extra it cost to see it in IMAX 3D, but the fact that I'd never seen a 3D movie before probably helped too.

Sunshine | 4/5
The basic idea here is that the sun has gone dim for some reason, and mankind has spent a huge chunk of its resources to launch two missions to try to save Earth and relight our star by dropping a huge bomb into it. Supposedly there is a more or less plausible scenario where something like this actually makes scientific sense. I dunno. The movie follows the second mission, launched after the failure of the first one. In a plot twist that throws some reviewers for a loop, the ships rendezvous, and a psycho survivor from the first mission sneaks onto the second ship and begins killing people. Like The Mist, Sunshine is a horror movie with plot elements that seem frustratingly arbitrary, and both movies seem to be more about the themes than the characters. The difference is that Sunshine might work. The following are somewhat random notes I took while watching the thing a second time, trying to decide whether it works or not. It'll make a lot more sense if you've seen the movie, and spoil you silly if you haven't.

There really is no excuse for the computers allowing the ship to be put in a dangerous angle of attack without automatically reconfiguring the shields, or at least giving a warning.

What the *expletive* is oxygen lady doing during the oxygen garden fire? Setting up a nice visual? She certainly doesn't seem to care about the mission vs. her precious plants. She really goes nuts for those things, loves plant life. First one to lose hers to the psycho. Like Cassie, too caught up in the immediate appreciation of life to make good long term decisions. But also like Cassie, can shut that off when the plot requires her to be the normal, well adjusted, rational crew member that we would expect mankind to put on this kind of a mission.

Kaneda's death has got to be one of the coolest visuals of a man being annihilated by unknowably powerful nature, ever.

Cassie is *really* annoying, like a mournful little puppy dog. "Yes I know we have to kill the guy, but I'm still going to act like I'm scandalized that you would even consider it." Slashes at the psycho, revealing herself and putting herself in danger, merely to keep him away from a corpse. It also results in her leading the psycho to the bomb, which nearly causes the mission to fail. Really has her priorities in the wrong place.

There is *really* no excuse for the computer not telling them they have an extra unknown "crew member" for so long. Srsly, WTF?

Two major arcs: repeated forced hard choices, like sacrificing to save the group, and horror themes of people being killed by terrible, powerful, mysterious forces: the sun and the psycho. Not "how are we going to be smart and figure this situation out" but "I know what has to be done and it involves me dying; am I gonna sacrifice myself to save the mission?" because that is the only choice the plot allows. It is the question the film cares about, apparently. Except for Capa; he always furthers the mission by surviving. He dies at the end, but until the mission succeeds he is a typical horror survivor character.

By the end everyone has sacrificed themselves, Capa last of all, to complete the mission and save the rest of mankind. At the end, Capa, surrounded by his glowies, touches the sun (or possibly it is the edge of the explosion which represents the birth of the "new" sun?) and is not burned. By completing the mission and dying he has overcome the sun and it no longer threatens him.

The psycho refers to the sun as God, and his God has made him stronger, but also corrupted him body and soul. He thinks that he knows God and that God speaks to him because he has been so close to God/the Sun. In the end he is essentially the same character as the Sun: a mysterious, terrifying, awesomely powerful force that may or may not be personal (most of the time it certainly doesn't seem very personal) but is definitely going to incinerate you if you are not extremely careful, and also happens to be more or less the source of life. You can be careful and you can be clever and you can be scientific, but not even science can get you very close to the sun without dying (or going insane, and then dying).

[I once had an image of God like this - so inhumanly holy and pure that any mere human would be destroyed by approaching simply as a law of nature, in exactly the same way the sun would destroy anyone who came close to it as a simple consequence of the laws of physics. It's a deeply ancient view of God as the most important and powerful source of our existence, and it has no place for the cuddly Christianized tame God that some people pretend to understand. I still think sun worship is the most sensible religion.]

Whatever else can be said about the movie, the visuals and the atmospherics are great, and almost make it worth watching by themselves.

The Scorpion King | 3/5
I am a big fan of Dwayne Johnson's acting career. The Rock is in this movie. This movie is fun. That is all.

G.I. Jane | 3/5
Demi Moore's Lt. O'Neil is just too compelling for this to be a bad movie; how can you not like someone so willing to get down in the mud, so instinctively and uncompromisingly scornful of special favors, so committed to what she wants to do? It's so... so... American, in the best way. According to jasp0002 on the IMDB it's even pretty realistic, so there you go. Probably not a movie I would have gotten as much out of a few years ago, and there's not too many movies I can say that about.

drizzle

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:57:13 GMT

So it appears that I haven't updated in very nearly an entire month. Is it all over? Is this the fat lady's swan song?

Nothing like a good mixed metaphor.

No dear friends, fear not. The blog is not dead. Even though I'm the only one who reads this thing, it's far from dead. I've just been... busy. Sort of.

It would be nice to say that I've been spending all my time studying for classes, or perhaps doing something even more useful. It would be nice and it would be partially true, but only partially. Still working on that. Old habits die the way cement feels. Hard. Remember kids, you are your habits. Develop good ones, 'cause they're a pain to change later.

This is going to be a tips and fiddles kind of update though, because in fact I do have some stuff that needs working on. So, attention conservation notice: the following is entirely random and probably of no interest whatsoever.

It's been overcast and raining here in Raleigh for several days without letup. This would be great, since I love cloudy, rainy weather and goodness knows we need all the water from the sky we can get, but the humidity gets to be annoying.

Apparently there is a website that allows people with absolutely no drawing ability to make webcomics by dragging and dropping some pre-made art. I had a go at it.

Well, it's no Perry Bible Fellowship, that's for sure.

I've finished the process of registering for spring classes. Fourteen credit hours, which is less than this semester, but one of them is a masters level math class. On the other hand, it's basically just an introduction to calculus with complex numbers. I don't know why that stuff is a 500 level class; it should be included with the regular calculus course in my opinion (at least for math majors). Not that I've been learning it.

I had to get advised before registering, and the advisor asked me how different State was from the community college I'd been at previously. I said it wasn't as different as I had expected it would be. He said it was somewhat surprising to see how many other places were comparable to State in that sense. I think he meant it more as a compliment to those places, but I took it as not saying much for State. On the other hand, he also said lots of people come here and have a hard time adjusting to the difficulty, and I've seen that too.

A preliminary plan of classwork is in place for finishing up by the end of spring 2009. It involves summer classes, wall to wall math, and three 500 level courses in operations research. With a name like that (or worse, "management science") it sounds like horribly dull stuff, but it's actually a branch of applied mathematics that has a lot of similarities and overlap with artificial intelligence concepts, so it's actually something I'm pretty interested in. The single artificial intelligence class State offers has too many computer science prerequisites to bother with, and there's nothing whatsoever about statistical machine learning as far as I can see. That'll have to be self-taught and/or in the masters degree, if I go that route.

I haven't been to any talks on campus since that philosophy one I blogged about previously, but some schools actually tape their talks and put them on the internet - imagine that! The Stanford EE department has a nice computer systems colloquium with videos of the talks available for streaming. A few days ago they had a guy from some group called Self-Aware Systems. The title of his talk was "Self-Improving Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Computation," which sounded interesting, but unfortunately he turned out to be one of those guys. You know, the kind of starry-eyed AI advocate who likes to talk about how vitally important Drexler-style nanotechnology and self-improving AI is, how we can (must!) program them to be perfectly rational economic actors, and how this means that, programmed with the proper values, they can always be counted on to do the to the Smart Thing, which of course is the Right Thing. I didn't hear him mention in the singularity, but it's right in that vein. Incredibly speculative, nerdily myopic, and pretty much a complete waste of time. I only listened to some of the discussion after the talk, but I thought John Nagle had the best, and most direct question. He named some people who had been working on self-improving AI for decades and outlined the basic problem they had run into. Solving just this first problem was a Nobel Prize worthy accomplishment, said Nagle. What had this guy discovered that made him so confident in the prospects for self-improving AI that he didn't even feel the need to discuss minor issues like how to actually create such a thing? 'We're working on it, but we've got nothing to show you at this point' was essentially the answer. [Edit: To be slightly more fair he says self-modeling is the magic sauce, but he never goes into the details of what this means or how it is different from work that has already been done on self-modifying software. Later another guy asks him straight up if he's got any working code at all, and he says it's a secret; his company isn't releasing information at this time. Not a great way to get other people interested in your work, especially academics. I originally quit watching halfway through the questions, but on watching the whole thing there are some other pretty good ones later on, which mainly serve to highlight how speculative the whole enterprise is at this point.]

Of course, the fact is that the idea of rationality that so many of these guys are so eager to program into a computer is a pale shadow of what goes on in a human mind, and what must go on in the thinking bits of any machine that must make complex decisions in the real world. There are some very intelligent people in possession of seriously limited views of what intelligence really is. Fortunately they are not in the majority. There are plenty of people working in AI and related fields who have a much better grasp on the true size and shape of the problem space.

I'm not sure anyone has a good grasp yet. AI is still mostly about taking little bites out around the edges.

I know who John Nagle is because in he gave a colloquium talk himself, on Overbot, his entry in the 2003 DARPA Grand Challenge. He apparently attends some colloquium talks, and sometimes I'll recognize his voice when he asks a question. They're usually 'show me the money' types of questions from an informed computer science perspective. Good questions. They always make me think, anyway.

For the uninitiated, the DARPA Grand Challenge is a sort of obstacle course contest for computer controlled vehicles, sponsored by the U.S. military. The idea is to offer several million dollars in prize money to spur the development of autonomous vehicles, so the army can eventually run all their supply shipments without human drivers to fall asleep at the wheel and get blown up by roadside bombs. The current state of the art is following a path in the desert using GPS while avoiding stationary obstacles, and in fact the winner of the 2005 Grand Challenge was built (if sticking computers and sensors in a stock touring car counts as "building") and programmed by a team from Stanford University. Starting yesterday and continuing through next week, vehicles without human drivers are attempting to complete obstacle courses that include moving traffic, as part of the 2007 Grand Challenge.

To butcher Neil Armstrong: That's one small step for mankind, and one small leap for Skynet.

Meanwhile, the meat machine that is me is still trying to work out what to do next, what to do in general, and what it means to make such decisions well. Currently, this involves reading Roman Catholic philosophers with Marxist backgrounds. Next thing you know I'll be reading Hegel and talking about narratives like a true post-modernist. Or not. But it's a new way of thinking, one that offers ways out of some of the more common cul-de-sacs in contemporary thought, and that's what philosophy is for. "[For] enlarging our vision of the possible, for breaking bad habits of thought" as Daniel Dennet says in Elbow Room. It's not absolute truth, or optimal rationality, or even science, but it's worth having.

Such philosophical disciplines also make it much harder to get caught up in your own bullshit.

The other book (via) I've been reading is about the real technical singularity, the one that happened in the late nineteenth and pre-WWI twentieth century. Turns out that things like electricity, internal combustion engines, and the Haber-Bosch process have played a far larger role in creating the modern world than nanotechnology, computers, or anything that is likely to be accomplished with either of those things in the near future. Who knew?

luther

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:00:22 GMT

Random Feynman sighting: This picture, pinned to a cubicle wall, in some ground floor office by a walkway, seen through the window, on the way back from the library.

T-shirt spotted in the wild: "Genius by birth, slacker by choice." It may be cool in some circles to brag about how little work you need to do to get by at the undergraduate level, but no one who cares about what those circles think is any kind of genius. See #1 and #2 here (via).

Overheard on the way to the dining hall: Getting hit by a Wolfline bus gets you free tuition. One could test the veracity of this claim by stepping in front of a bus. I haven't done the calculations, but I think this might be a bad idea.

I finished Richard Marius's study of Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death. It is the story of a forceful man driven, like many other intelligent persons throughout history, to seek a resolution to the conflict between his personality and aspects of the spirit of his age. He just so happened to be more forceful than most, and in the right place at the right time to swing the tiller of history.

Marius views Luther as being driven primarily by the fear of death (meaning annihilation; Luther almost never mentioned eternal suffering or punishment) and the need to believe in a God who could and would raise the dead. For Luther this meant a completely omnipotent God who predestined only a few for salvation. Man was in himself incapable of any good whatsoever, and even the desire to do good was itself a manifestation of the sin of pride. The Catholic church taught that man had a tiny bit of free will, enough to desire to do good and to have the faith necessary for salvation, but for Luther salvation by faith alone meant salvation by God's grace alone: no work could earn salvation, not even faith. This tenacious focus on Christ's unmerited gift to the Christian was the inspiration that allowed him to believe that God could and would raise the dead. It did not prevent him from doubting from time to time, but it freed him from the fear that those doubts might damn him.

I say it was an inspiration and not a revelation because Luther never claimed any divine revelation beyond the guidance of the Holy Spirit in the reading of scripture. He did not really trust claims of revelation, or prophecy. He felt that anyone who heard directly from God would be shaken to their core, and he did not see evidence of it in those who in his day claimed to receive revelation directly from God.

Famously, he declared that scripture was the only authority for the Christian. The traditions of the Catholic church could be contrary to scripture and thus in error he said, and he pointed out many such errors. This might not sound especially surprising to a born Protestant who, like myself, never really studied Christian history, but at the time it was a direct challenge to the core of Christian authority. The Catholic church was the Church with a capital "C," the only Church, and had been since the beginning of Christianity (conveniently ignoring Eastern Orthodoxy). Its traditions were orally handed down from the apostles and were as important as scripture. Moreover, the view was that God had promised to watch over the Church and protect it from error. To say that great tracts of tradition were mistaken was to suggest that God was not who he said he was. But it was vital to Luther's position.

All of the following quotes are from the book:

[Luther claimed that t]he true church was the company of faithful Christians known with certainty only to God and thus hidden on earth.

Luther's rhetoric against Catharinus is at times so radical that he comes close to sounding like a Manichaean, rejecting the physical, the visible, as unworthy of the divine, spiritualizing the true church to the point that no one could recognize its presence or its absence.

The consequences for Christians in Luther's time were immense, as Marius explains:

All this turned the history of the church and indeed God himself into a terrific mystery. What kind of God allowed the Catholic Church to flourish for so many centuries as the one true light of salvation when, if Luther was correct, it was infested by the powers of darkness? Luther's doctrine of the church drove him into making God more unfathomable than ever before...

The theologians of the via moderna who had emphasized the absolute power of God were on this track long before Luther was born. But to them the mystery was made negotiable by the certainty that the institutional Catholic Church and its traditions threw a beam of unquenchable light across the centuries and that within this divinely illuminated pathway the Christian pilgrim could be safe and secure in faith. Now Luther was shouting that for much if not most of of its history that church had been the devil's instrument to delude. What kind of God would play such a game with his creation?

Luther's belief in the hiddenness of the true church and of God was reflected in his attitude towards reason, which he believed was unable to even demonstrate the existence of God:

Luther admits freely that in the "judgment of human reason" a belief in divine predestination means that "you are bound to say either that there is no God or that God is unjust." He knew the classical tradition well enough to proclaim that "here even the greatest minds have stumbled and fallen, denying the existence of God and imagining that all things are moved at random by blind Chance or Fortune."

It was not an opinion he ever softened, either.

Throughout the homilies, the frequency of attacks on natural reason in matters of faith is striking. Luther personified reason, making it an expression of Satan.

Natural reason is, said Luther, "Frau Jezebel." For Luther the gospel was as contradictory to reason as circumcision was when it was first announced to Abraham. His frequent utterances on the subject sound defiant.

Catholic teaching also held that reason alone could not demonstrate the truth of Christianity, but for Catholics this showed the necessity of Church authority:

Like Luther, Eck recognized the weaknesses of reason standing alone, the impossibility of assuming that to observe the world without the light of revelation was to find a mirror of God's action in creation. Against the danger of unbelief, Christians needed a sure authority, and that authority was the Catholic Church. In Eck's view that authority stood on the sacred and unbroken tradition running back to Christ himself. It was sacred history, and in the history God had revealed himself by never allowing the church to err.

In Catholic Christianity the only way to define truth was to say that it was a teaching or a practice that did not contradict another teaching or practice that had enjoyed consensus throughout the centuries. God could not be God and allow his people to fall into error.

Luther's rejection of reason in spiritual matters, along with his forceful personality (driven, in Marius's opinion, by the fervent need to assure himself of the existence of a God with specific qualities) gave him little way of convincing those who disagreed with him. All he could do was quote scripture and pile on the rhetoric:

We become students of scripture only by listening to an inner voice, heeding enlightenment from above, not by reasoning our way to understanding by logic alone. Luther thus limited his arguments to quotations from scripture—the interpretations of the quotations certified by the authority of the inner voice speaking in the heart of the true Christian. His method of interpreting meant that he would always be unable to accept any major disagreement from his convictions.

Luther would quickly discover that his three infallible signs of the church's presence were subject to disparate interpretation. Should children be baptized? The Anabaptists would infuriate him by pointing out that no children were known to be baptized in the New Testament. What exactly was the Eucharist?

And what was the gospel? For the rest of his life he quarreled fiercely with other dissenters from the Catholic faith—many of them beginning as his disciples—over the definition of this most treasured of his signs. How could God be in charge of all this confusion? Increasingly Luther fell into dark ruminations on the almost infinite branches streaming from this ultimate question: Where was God discernible in history? The ferocity of his assault on Catharinus may be taken as an indication of his frustration that the mystery was so deep. It does not require much insight to infer that he countered this frustration with a barrage of vehement language, railing on and on for page after ugly page as if he could hold all his fears and doubts at bay only by pouring liquid fire onto his foes, dissolving them and his doubts in one mighty holocaust of rhetoric.

Luther would eventually justify his defense of infant baptism by a supremely ironic appeal to history and tradition. It was practiced everywhere he said; not even heretics spoke against it.

In the midst of this gigantic labor lies a paradox: Only those who already accepted at least the outline of Luther's concept of religion could accept his reading of scripture. His reading of the Bible was not to be proved by the bare text; it was rather to be validated by the experience of the 'true Christians' whom he addressed, an experience very much like his. Soon enough Luther was to discover that to his chagrin and alarm that 'true Christians' were not as numerous as he supposed and that, as Catholic writers such as Thomas More had scornfully predicted, agreement on the meaning of scripture was impossible, even among the devout. He argued eloquently that true religion could not be imposed by force. In the end force ruled after all. His tragedy was that the intensity of his own experience and his demand for certainty blinded him almost completely to the experience of others.

I think Marius would say that Luther was more of a tragic figure than a pathetic one. Like all tragic heroes he had an appreciation of evil, inescapable guilt at his own inability to avoid wrongdoing, a strong sense of fate, and at the same time an unwillingness to stand by and allow events to proceed in a direction that he thought was wrong. But tragic heroes are tragic because it is their own actions, in seeking what to them seems good, that inevitably also have evil consequences. Luther did not see himself as tragic because he felt he was led by God, and God works all things together for good. Ultimately there can be no tragedy with God, at least for the elect. But there were many negative consequences, especially for Christianity, and from a secular perspective many centuries after his death, Luther's story does indeed seem tragic.

With that in mind, I have a lot of sympathy for Von der Ecken's response to Luther's "Here I stand" statement at the Diet of Worms:

Do not deceive yourself Martin. You are not the only one who knows the scripture, not the only one who has struggled to convey the true meaning of holy scripture—not after so many holy doctors have worked day and night to explain holy writ! Do not set your judgment over that of so many famous men. Do not imagine you know more than all of them. Do not throw the most sacred orthodox faith into doubt, the faith that Christ the most perfect lawgiver ordained, the faith that the apostles spread over the world, the faith confirmed by miracles, the faith that martyrs strengthened with their red blood...

And yet, it is hard to imagine that the church could have remained unified even without a Luther. The internal contradictions were not imaginary. Even if one granted that the Catholic Church had sole authority in interpreting scripture, who held that authority within the Church? Was it the pope, or was it the councils that convened from time to time, sometimes overruling or overthrowing popes? There was too much questionable tradition for the idea that it was all infallible to last forever. The question of where ultimate authority rested sat at the heart of Christianity like an overstressed pillar. It seems to me that, as in any good tragedy, its eventual collapse was inevitable.

But it is possible to imagine that it could have happened differently, perhaps more gradually. Erasmus mocked the superstitions of the Catholic common man and wrote against the corruption in the Church, and he was not alone. He had many things in common with Luther and did not want to confront him, although he disagreed with his rhetoric and the extent to which he wanted to break from Catholicism. If things had been different, Erasmus's brand of slow reformation might have triumphed; who can say. But the two men had fundamentally different personalities. Erasmus, says Marius, ultimately judged scripture by the morality it produced. His Jesus was primarily the moral teacher of the synoptic gospels. Luther judged scripture by whether it affirmed the resurrection of the dead. He favored the gospel of John, interpreted Jesus through Paul, and held Romans to be the most important book in the New Testament.

It appears that both men worked backward from their deepest concerns about life and faith to declare that they had been led by God's spirit to a result that in fact was dictated to each by experience.

Erasmus was at heart a humanist, steeped in literature and deeply knowledgeable of Greek and Hebrew. He published the first Greek New Testament with a Latin translation and extensive annotation, which Luther would later use as the source for his German translation. He flatly rejected the idea that every word was inspired, while maintaining that the authors were. He did not refrain from pointing out the contradictions of the human-like God of the Old Testament in his annotations. He believed that allegory was vital for understanding much of the bible. Luther was not a fan.

Erasmus says "So thinks Ambrose. So reads Augustine." Why? To disturb the reader and make him think that this doctrine is absolutely uncertain.

But Luther was not so different. He took the bible much less literally than later Protestants would, and, like Erasmus, he did not hold all books in the biblical canon to be equally inspired. Nor, in the end, could he allow the readers of his German bible to read it without guidance.

Like Erasmus, Luther found himself making a revolutionary shift in his evaluation of scripture. The books of the Bible were not all of the same worth. The divine was not found equally in all its parts. Therefore a translation could not be a mere release of the bare text upon the world. Luther's translation came with many helps to ensure that readers understood it as he did.

Marius goes further:

Still, his selective principles of interpretation became the avenue that would in time lead to the 'higher criticism' of the Bible that in the nineteenth century would become supreme in Germany and virtually demolish among the educated the notion that such inspiration as the Bible possesses enjoys a magical, supernatural quality. The fundamentalist movement that arose in reaction to higher criticism and other modern currents of thought, including Darwinism, was a renunciation of a selective evaluation of the Bible that Luther himself advocated.

In his efforts to bring down the authority of tradition, Luther helped to create the very cracks that would ultimately bring down the authority of the scriptures that he had used to replace tradition. It was certainly not his intent to do so, but the tragedy of human decisions is that they always have unintended consequences, and that often the unintended consequences come to dominate the intended ones.

When Erasmus was finally forced to confront Luther, he chose to do so over the question of free will. He himself had attacked some of the more corrupt Church traditions, and if he addressed the issue of authority he ran the risk of Luther pointing out that his professed belief in the authority of the Church was dangerously inconsistent.

Free will was vital to Erasmus's belief that Christianity should move people to behave morally. But predestination was just as central to Luther, and he maintained that human beings utterly lacked the capacity for good in themselves. Erasmus confronted Luther, as his fellow Catholics asked. Luther responded with a forceful presentation of the scriptural backing for his position and the kinds of harsh attacks that he seemed unable to hold back. No one's mind was changed.

The legacy of all of this is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, Catholicism was pushed into reforms it had been slow to address, and many people who had a vision of Christ that was similar to Luther's now had the beginnings of a tradition that offered a better fit. On the other hand, Christian unity in Europe had been shattered, probably for good. Both Catholic and Protestant Christianity lost much of their authority, and seeds were planted that would undermine it further: Protestantism itself continued to produce numerous variants that would schism and split and schism again. (Although all are different, many hold very literal views of the bible, emphasize the importance of salvation and the spiritual life over the corruption of the physical world, and remain deeply suspicious of reason. All these things can be traced back to Luther, the writers, like Augustine, who influenced him, and the practices of other Protestant groups that sprang up around the same time and drew partial inspiration from Luther.) Years of bloody and unsuccessful attempts to reunify Christendom would lead many to look to reason as a unifier that could do what Christianity on its own could no longer do. Others would grow tired of energetic religion all together.

Whether some or all of these things were good or bad depends on your point of view. Marius again:

Religious toleration in the West developed along with uncertainty about ultimate things. Luther was responsible for much of that uncertainty. Confounded by competing absolutist claims in matters of faith, rulers and people alike eventually decided to live and let live in the interest of public order and tranquility.

Only professional theologians think much of dogma these days, and the most popular of these make doctrines symbolic rather than literal, inclusive rather than prohibitive.

He reiterates Luther's unwitting contribution to the undermining of the authority of scripture:

A further irony is that Luther's preoccupation with scripture led to intense study of the sacred text, and under the study something of its sacredness dissolved. Under the higher criticism of scripture, developed largely by German Lutherans in the nineteenth century, Luther's own critical attitude towards some books of the Bible was expanded. Under the probing intellects of scholars such as Julius Wellhausen, any notion that scripture could be an infallible historical record fell to pieces except among those ignorant of this stream of thought or among those whose minds were shut to it or among those fundamentalists who can hold their own faith only within the carefully restricted boundaries of their own kind. This decay of biblical authority among the educated is one of Luther's legacies—shared with Erasmus.

What stands out to me in Luther's story is what stands out to me everywhere: The struggle to find a reliable source of truth, and to live in a world where doing so seems to be impossible, whether we recognize it or not. (Like Luther and like everyone else, I filter everything through a few ideas that my personality has seized upon as being of primary importance.) It is a very old, very human story.

Marius at one points quotes Richard B. Sewall's The Vision of Tragedy:

[Tragedy] sees man as questioner, naked, unaccommodated, alone, facing mysterious demonic forces in his own nature and outside, and the irreducible facts of suffering and death. Thus it is not for those who cannot live with unsolved questions or unresolved doubts, whose bent of mind would reduce the fact of evil into something else or resolve it into some larger whole. Though no one is exempt from moments of tragic doubt or insight, the vision of life peculiar to the mystic, the pious, the propagandist, the confirmed optimist or pessimist—or the confirmed anything—is not tragic.

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found.
Miguel de Unamuno

"And if it is nothingness that awaits us, let us so act that it shall be an unjust fate" ...the firmest basis of action for the man who cannot or will not be a dogmatist.
Miguel de Unamuno

Sounds right up my alley. Tragedy is another subject that I've come in contact with from time to time that sounded intriguing, but never quite like this. The library had the book, and now I have a new one to read over meals (it takes me over forty-five minutes to eat now). My mini "analysis" of Luther as a tragic figure a few paragraphs previously is straight out of the first couple chapters.

Sewall mentions Miguel de Unamuno's book Tragic Sense of Life. Unamuno, sounds familiar. Ah yes, in the quote file. A Wikipedia inspired search turns up another quote, this time Unamuno quoting Sénancour: a new name this time. I have thought the exact same thing many times since coming to terms with my apostasy, although I'm not sure I've ever written it down. More evidence for my conviction that few if any ideas are original, especially good ones, and I'm sure this one originated well before Sénancour. Looks like I've got another book to read after this one.

None of this has anything to do with math. What am I doing? Oh, right, procrastinating. The other quintessentially human story.

feynman sightings

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 02:11:57 GMT

Two of them, to be precise.

David Sirlin ~~wrote a~~ has written two pieces in a series on how to write clearly and without the lazy pretentiousness of the writer who doesn't really know what he or she is talking about. By the way, I never do this. (The meaning of the previous sentence is very clear, but it is also defensively sarcastic and a complete lie.) The second article contains this nice anecdote:

Feynman sat in on a philosophy seminar where the graduate students were discussing a book called Process and Reality by Whitehead. They talked a great deal about the term "essential object" and Feynman took it as a technical term he didn’t know the definition of. Then the professor leading the seminar asked Feynman if he thought an electron is an essential object. Feynman admitted that he didn't even read the book (he was just sitting in on this one seminar) but said he'd try to answer anyway if someone could answer for him whether a brick is an essential object.

Feynman's plan was to then bring up the question of whether the inside of a brick is an essential object. We can't actually see the inside of a brick; when we break a brick open we create new surfaces, but we believe the inside of the brick is still underneath those surfaces. His point was that an electron isn't so much a concrete thing like a brick, but more of a concept like the "inside of a brick" that helps us understand the world.

Feynman didn't get to make his point. One student said, "A brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead meant by an essential object." Another man said, "No, it isn't the individual brick that is an essential object; it's the general character that all bricks have in common—their 'brickness'—that is the essential object." Yet another man said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves. 'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you think of bricks."

Feynman couldn't believe that these philosophers had spent so much time talking about this subject without asking whether something as simple as a brick is an essential object, much less an electron. It's a safe guess that any papers they would have written about this subject would turn out bloated, fluffy, and vague. You can only write vigorously and concisely if you know exactly what you're talking about.

After the philosophy incident, Feynman took a biology class for the hell of it, promising he would do all the assignments like any other student, even though he was already a renowned professor of physics. The students laughed hysterically at one of his biology presentations when he talked about "blastospheres" instead of "blastomeres" or some other such thing.

His next presentation was about the nerve impulses in cats. The research paper he was reading often mentioned specific muscles and nerves in the cat, but Feynman had no idea where any of these things were located relative to each other. He then went to the biology library and asked for a map of the cat. "A map of the cat, sir?" the librarian asked, horrified. "You mean a zoological chart!"

Feynman started his presentation to the graduate biology students by drawing an outline of the cat on the board and labeling various muscles. The students interrupted him saying, "We know all that!" Feynman replied, "Oh you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology." He said they wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.

While the philosophy students hadn't defined their language well enough to have clear ideas, the biology students were so caught up in language and jargon that they had not spent enough time going beneath the surface. Language is a tool, but it is also a barrier between people and ideas. Using vague language is like trying to see those ideas through a dirty lens. But spending all your time polishing the lens (quibbling over jargon rather than the underlying concepts) is no good either. You have to actually look through the lens of language at the ideas underneath.

I would note here that a lot of the history of science (which includes mathematics) can be seen as a series of more or less vague ideas that were either made more precise or eventually abandoned.

The other Feynman sighting (actually more of a hearing) was on the Diane Rehm Show last week, when Diane interviewed Alan Alda. Alda spent a lot of time talking about his views on the meaning of life, especially after an experience where he almost died:

Diane: When you say you were more interested in people [after nearly dying], is that because perhaps you were listening more carefully?

Alda: Yes, I think so, I think so. You know what I've come to think, and this is a round about way of responding to this, but, the background of it is that I have been lucky enough to live through many of the ways, most of the ways, that we all think you get meaning from, the ways that meaning comes to you in your life. Through, art, through family, through love, doing good for other people, fame, money, all of these things; I've touched all of these things in my life. And yet, none of them does it for me alone. And doing too much of one takes away from the others. And it gets to be a complicated formula, with x's and y's things like that, and it's hard to break down, it's hard to solve. And yet what I find lately, and this gets back to what you were saying about listening, I find that paying attention to what's happening to me right now...

Diane: In the moment.

Alda: In the moment, that seems to give me meaning more than anything. And if it doesn't give meaning, at least it obliterates the need for meaning [laughing], you know, I don't worry about it so much, because I'm full of life when that happens. It reminds me of the guy I played on Broadway, the great physicist Richard Feynman; a curious man, completely invested in trying to understand nature and understand his own brain, understand everything around him. And he said to his doctor, when he was dying of cancer, 'at the very end I don't want you to give me an anesthetic, because if I'm going to die, I want to be there when I do.' He wanted to know what that experience was like. I mean, he's my hero for that statement alone.

Science is not, strictly speaking, a worldview, but for some, myself included, its high regard for curiosity, inquiry, and the never ending pursuit of better understanding suggests a way of living that is centered on areté and a full and joyful engagement with the world. I don't know anyone who lived this out better than Richard Feynman, and for that he is a hero to me and, obviously, to many others as well.

that old time religion

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 06:23:20 GMT

It is the middle of the week. There are no preachers spreading culture in the Brickyard, but God's people are not resting on their laurels. Gideons prowl the walkways in pairs, like old white haired lions, seeking whom they may devour.

The main part of campus is split in two by an east-west railroad track, lined to the north and south by fencing and a thick line of trees. Most dormitories, dining halls, and parking decks are south of this line, and all academic buildings on the main campus are north of it. The two halves are connected by two bridges and three tunnels. Every student must traverse one of these bridges or tunnels several times a day. The strategic nature of these choke points is not lost on the Gideons.

Despite working for the state editor of the North Carolina Gideons and helping to print and mail their official newsletter for several years, I never really understood the need to "place," as the Gideons say, so many Bibles, especially in the United States. It's not completely daft I suppose; they do try to give their testimony too, and lay out the gospel for you and lead you in the sinner's prayer if you feel the tug (or maybe even if you're just not sure), and they also distribute Bibles overseas in poor countries where you would expect that fewer people would have them. But I used to read their newsletters as they went by in the folding machine, and they place a lot of Bibles in the United States. Can there be that many people left who do not have easy access to a Bible, if not multiple Bibles? Any self-respecting educated person has to have a copy of the most influential book in Western (if not world) history in their library. (Or at least that was the case until recently. For infrequent use these days I think it's more convenient to go to one of several websites that provide the full searchable text in many different English and non-English translations.) Something like 90% of Americans are at least minimal Christians. Does that mean they actually read their Bibles? No, but is handing them another one going to change that? There are stories of people who read the Gideon Bible in their hotel room and experience spiritual reawakening, but I can't imagine that it happens on a regular basis. I think the appeal of distributing Bibles is based on the concrete and quantifiable nature of the enterprise. All Gideons are businessmen, and x number of dollars raised, y Bibles purchased, z Bibles placed makes for the kind of straightforward productivity metrics that can give such a man the confidence that he's accomplishing something. It's a lot harder to measure the quality of lasting change in people's lives. The other factor is, I think, a simple (and probably uniquely Protestant) belief in the self-evident power of the raw Word of God to change lives.

I remember when that view of the Bible sounded plausible, but as time goes on it just seems more and more naive; the product of a culture so steeped in its own beliefs about the Bible that it no longer has the ability to see it from the perspective of an outsider.

I run the gauntlet and head down into the graffiti covered free expression tunnel, avoiding eye contact. Did one of them say something to me as I passed? Class starts in ten minutes man, I don't have time to stop even if I wanted to, and I don't. I know exactly what's for sale, and I'm not buying. The guys who sit in front of me in calculus are always there before I am, and a few of them have taken the time to acquire a little green Bible; one guy managed to get two. That's one less student that will need to stop in order for the Gideons to make quota for the day. They joke about it for a bit before going back to talking about things that actually matter to them; they have no more intention of buying the product than I do.

The topic in history class is the Protestant Reformation. On Monday the professor read us a bunch of really bad pickup lines to lighten the mood before talking about what he said would be a terrible and depressing period of history. A few years ago the statement would have surprised me because I had always heard the Reformation described as a good thing; the democratization of religion, translation of the Bible into the common language, and movement away from empty rituals and corrupt central authority towards an emphasis on the individual's direct relationship with God. In religious terms it was the rebirth of something much closer to the true faith of the early church, and in secular terms it was part and parcel of the Renaissance movement towards greater individual freedom. And we all know that freedom is good and kings and popes are bad, right? I mean, I always knew in the back of my mind that I was steeped in the Protestant perspective, but I am still in the process of discovering just how much that perspective has colored the way I view a wide variety of things.

Maybe that's why my intellectual curiosity about Christianity continues to churn along at a slow but steady pace, sometimes in the background, sometimes jostling for attention. I thought it might simply be the fact that I tend to be curious about quite a lot of things (a trait that I'm convinced is a central intellectual virtue; if it was the only one I'd be in pretty good shape), but it was too persistent to be just that. I though it might reflect an interest in religion in general, but I haven't developed any lasting interest in any other religion even after taking a survey of world religions class. Then I thought it might be because my family and most people I knew were Christians, and I wanted to understand them better, but, although that may be part of it, I don't think it's the whole picture. Now I think it's because I unconsciously understood that learning more about Christianity was still one of the best ways to yield some of the easiest and largest paradigm shifts still available to my current worldview.

I still crave those great big intellectual surprises. I don't think anything will ever top the world-inverting double whammy of realizing that all knowledge is uncertain and that God may not actually exist (the discovery of solid evidence that we actually do live in a computer simulation is the only thing I can think of that might come close), and that first realization causes a person to hold onto their other ideas more loosely, and the result is that the head-spinning impact of all future paradigm shifts tends to be somewhat less intense than it would be otherwise. Now the reduction of surprise is pretty much the definition of intellectual progress, so that's a good thing, don't get me wrong, but I was beginning to think that there might not be any more really big surprises, that all future paradigm shifts would come in small, hard earned increments, the way all new paradigms about the world have to be mined for and refined and forged into something comprehensible and useful. But I really needn't have worried. There are still so many things that I take for granted, beliefs that I have never closely examined, that are so deeply rooted that I don't even know that I have them. Many are probably things that everyone, or almost everyone believes for reasonably good reasons, but some of them are surely things that others have excellent reasons for believing are wrong. It's not necessarily so much about finding new truths, which may or may not even be possible, as it is discovering that other people believe very different things for reasons that, on reflection, are just as good or even better than the reasons for why you believe what you believe. This isn't the discovery of truth, this is suspension of judgment brought about by balancing opposing arguments: good old fashioned Pyrrhonian skepticism. The goal is to open the mind to new ideas so that, if necessary, decisions can be made by a more rational weighing of all that is known, as opposed to taking dogmatic stands based on ignorance and misguided presumptions of correctness. Anyway, discovering preexisting ideas that are very different from your own is one relatively easy and potentially profitable way to dig for new paradigm shifts. One way to do that is to read the books that are assigned to you in school. You're bound to find a lot of good and relatively well tested ideas this way (the humanities cover most of the bases here), and many of them are sure to be more or less new to you, but most of them will probably be fairly boring outside of a larger context that would make them more directly interesting or meaningful to you. (If that greater context is just your entire worldview, you probably won't learn much.) Another way is to probe the family tree of the ideas you grew up with. If you can trace your way back to a fork, you have a good candidate for an opposing viewpoint that may be worth investigating. If you can find the fork where one of the foundational ideas your grew up believing without question was born... well, you have a candidate for a decently sized paradigm shift.

"Ehh, too much work" you say, and that's what I thought too. "I've got more immediate things I'm supposed to be thinking about. I'm trying to learn math here, you know. And at some point I'm going to have to start digging into computer science too, if I ever want to actually get where I'm planning on going." Well, my brain obviously disagreed, because it was doing the work in background all along anyway. Which brings us back to the Reformation.

As I mentioned, it did not come as a complete surprise to learn that a professor at a university thought the Reformation was a disaster. I'd read some claims to the effect that, contrary to what some Christian scholars claim, the advent of Protestantism did not in fact clear the ground for the Enlightenment or the blooming of science by promoting an era of tolerance that allowed for many new and revolutionary ideas, because Protestants were every bit as dogmatic and ruthless towards dissenters in their own fiefdoms as Mother Church had been. Plus, I did have a dim awareness of my purely Protestant perspective. We are still in the middle of discussing it (by which of course I mean "listening to lectures and maybe reading the relevant textbook sections about it"), but my professor describes a religious movement based on Augustinian ideas about original sin, the depravity of man, and the predestination of most people to hell. Protestants holding the material world in contempt, denying much of the usefulness, or even the possibility of true good works, and seeking a pure and static faith. The church, for all its corruption and abuse of indulgences, at least believing in free will and in its ability to help people do good. Martin Luther as a a pathetic figure, full of angst and terrible self-imposed guilt about his sinfulness. His revelation of salvation by faith alone appealed to a certain segment of people who sought the assurance of eternal life in a purer and more certain faith amidst a changing and chaotic world where the church was losing its power, secular rulers were jockeying for it, and a healthy person could die at any time from the black death. Meanwhile, the elite were happy to encourage anything that weakened the church's power and hold over its land and wealth. And for the first time, I saw a connection between the concern for the poor in Catholicism and the tradition of socialism and safety nets in many majority Catholic countries. In fact, I have a lot of sympathy for centralized, authoritarian, corrupt Catholicism compared to this reactionary, puritanical, world loathing, grasp for certainty that would tear Europe apart for centuries and act as the clear predecessor of many of the most unpleasant (and, dare I say it, immoral) aspects of modern Protestant Christianity.

Of course this class covers history from 1400 to the present, so we have to cover the entire time period of the Reformation in two or three hours. Fitting history into grand unifying arcs like this is always problematic, but it's inevitable in a class setting and even more so in a class that has to cover such a large chunk of space and time. It almost doesn't matter; my previous understanding of Protestantism was just as shallow, so a single professor's say so is enough to convince me that the glowing picture of the Reformation is not the only widely accepted one. But my curiosity will not let go, and so when the prof mentions a biography of Luther by a former prof of his, I head straight to the library after class, look him up on the internet, and check out the book: Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death, by Richard Marius. From the preface:

For centuries devout scholars, evangelical and Catholic, studied Luther to extol or condemn him. Evangelicals made him a colossus and a hero who cleansed the gospel and gave light and freedom to the soul. Catholics portrayed him as demon-possessed, a sex-crazed monk of furious temper, a liar and a fraud willing to tumble down the great and beautiful edifice of Catholic Christianity for no better motives than lust and pride.

My estimation of Luther's Reformation is much akin to Simon Schama's of the French Revolution or Richard Pipes's of the Bolshevik Revolution. They believe that these great upheavals were disasters for the peoples involved, and I believe that Luther represents a catastrophe in the history of Western civilization. This is not to say that the catastrophe was all his fault.

Everyone who knows anything about Luther knows that he had doubts all his life. The traditional understanding is that he doubted that God could save a sinner such as himself. This reading long ago appeared simplistic to me, even when I found it eloquently stated in Roland H. Bainton's seminars at Yale and in his great biography, Here I Stand, the most popular book about Luther in the English speaking world.

My own view is that Luther's doubts were far deeper, swept along by one of the great recurring waves of skepticism in human history, doubts that God exists at all and that he can or will raise the dead. Luther was situated in the Renaissance, where chaos and order, justice and injustice, appearance and reality, darkness and light contended with each other to an uncertain end. For him faith and the most radical kind of doubt dwelt entwined together until the end of his days. His tragic meaning for Western civilization is that to him radical doubt was akin to blasphemy, a sin to be purged from the human heart by vehement assertion and hateful insult.

He grounded his claims to certainty on scripture, and even in his own time scripture proved to be a frail reed. Many of the problems illuminated by later biblical scholarship were known in outline in Luther's time, and his skinned his knees on lots of them. He extracted dogmas from the Bible according to profound needs in his own psyche. He raged against those who disagreed with him, although such disagreements were inevitable. How he read the Bible is an essential part of his biography, and we cannot talk about his doctrines and his furious defense of them unless we can see, by examining the Bible, how tenuous these dogmas were on all sides.

Why did he not face the difficulties of scripture squarely and arrive at the irenic balance between faith and skepticism that characterized Erasmus? The ultimate answer, of course, is temperament, the mysterious and perplexing force that makes all of us unique and gives us our own niche in history. As Luther confessed time and again, his was a temperament driven by fear and by the need to conquer it so he could live day by day. His greatest terror, one that came on him periodically as a horror of darkness, was the fear of death—death in itself, not the terror of burning and eternal hell awaiting the sinner in an afterlife. It is startling to see how seldom he speaks of hell as a place of eternal torment, and indeed he finally rejected the notion of hell as any sort of place. When he spoke of inferno in Latin or Hölle in German, he usually meant the Hebrew sheol, which he correctly said meant simply the grave. When locked in combat with an especially galling foe, Luther could consign such a person to everlasting flames, but the more reflective Luther scarcely mentions hell. His ultimate question was this: Can I believe that God has the power to raise us from the dead? The corollary to the unanswerable, existential puzzle is another question: How does the Christian deal with the terror that death evokes while reaching for a faith that the triumph over death is possible? It seems to me that Luther's theology arose from these two elemental queries. He would shake the world to its foundations so he could believe in the resurrection of the dead.

Luther, who hated skepticism, was a skeptic in spite of himself, and his titanic wrestling with the dilemma of the desire for faith and the omnipresence of doubt and fear became an augury for the development of the religious consciousness of the West in modern times. Although few scholars seem to have contemplated the idea or studied Luther's works with that possibility in mind, this thesis, I believe, brings Luther closer to us, makes him more human, and explains if it does not excuse some of the more terrible words and deeds of his career.

As you can see, not only am I getting a quality new perspective on the founder of the religious heritage that I grew up with, I've also learned two new words. I'm on the third chapter.

I also found an interview with Marius in Southern Quarterly. Below is a section in a similar vein:

RM: I cut a line out of the novel I'm working on that I believe to be true, that nowadays people lose faith much more readily than they lose their virginity. And it doesn't take much to lose their virginity in this society, you know. But the fact is, we live in a world where most people don't think much about that. I'm convinced that fundamentalists are the biggest atheists on the face of the earth. Fundamentalists are just terrified that any contact with people like me is going to bring them down in destruction.

[interviewer]: They're in denial.

RM: Yes, that's right. I read a thing the other day, a book by Stephen Bates about a case that took place in Hawkins County. A woman decided that secular humanism had arrived in some textbooks in Hawkins County. She was going to fight it and get permission from the fundamentalists to use their own textbooks in school, have special classes for them. Anyway, it went to court and was a terrific sort of case, but it was obvious she was terrified every moment of losing her faith. She objected to the version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" that was in the reader that children were seeing in the Hawkins County schools because in that version Goldilocks apologizes and the three bears let her go. The woman said that if Goldilocks is not punished for her sin, this is secular humanism. Now that's the madness of literalism.

I got up late and didn't have time to eat before class, so after picking up the book I head for the southern half of the campus walking fast as I always do. Zounds! There must be more Gideons here than are necessary to work the bridges and tunnels, because two of them are stationed at one of the Brickyard exits, right up ahead. Too late to take another route now. A big grin spreads across my face, and I'm not even sure why. It just happens sometimes; I would make a terrible poker player. "Good morning!" says the one closest to me, making eye contact. He smiles. "Good morning!" I reply, the grin still firmly affixed. "Doing well?" he continues. "Yep!" I say, and then I'm past and looking ahead again, still grinning. Much to my relief, any feeling of obligation to stop after the exchange of pleasantries has completely failed to register on my Yankee, atheist, introvert, social obligation-o-meter. As I walk away, I hear them chucking to each other, no doubt in a polite sort of mild amazement over my failure to observe expected social norms.

As I head for the central tunnel, I think about the fact that this is the south, and most students here are probably Christians, whatever that means to them, in more or less the same amounts as the surrounding area. The loss of faith during college is much over hyped, and modern college students are as religious as ever, despite the railings of the Brickyard practitioners of assault Christianity. I am actually a minority here, as are the kids who sit in front of me in calculus (although probably to a lesser extent, since I doubt that they are all atheists). It doesn't bother me. I'm used to it. I certainly don't feel persecuted, even with Gideons hovering around, no doubt happy to tell me, politely but sincerely, that I'm going to burn unless I believe what they believe. It's great to live in a country that upholds freedom of conscience, Gideons and all. As I exit the tunnel I spot two of them stationed at the mouth, one on each side. The one on the right is occupied with something at the moment, and the one on the left is talking to a young man who holds a little green Bible and seems to be listening carefully to the plan of salvation. As I walk past, I wonder what he's thinking. Has he heard it all before and is just being polite? His expression said otherwise, but faces can be hard to read, and I am no virtuoso. Maybe he feels the fear that Luther felt. Who can say. All I know is that if I did at one time, I don't any more. It's a temperament thing, I guess. The little life I get is lived in this world; I just hope that I can do a little bit of good before I dissipate back into the flow of particles from whence I came.

a day in the life

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 03:34:50 GMT

While I wait for better ideas....

0645:	Get out of bed, finally. My goal is 0600, but I'm not quite there yet. Shower.
0710:	Get online, take care of banking stuff. I am finally able to initiate a transfer that will set my old account up for easy closing, hopefully that will complete by tomorrow. Cross fingers.
0730:	I'm out the door. It's too late to eat; I head straight for class.
0750:	I arrive at Harrelson 201. I am reminded of the fact that the six kids who sit in front of me are in high school. I manage to feel slightly less depressed about that than I did yesterday.
0805:	Class begins. I alternate between paying attention to what the instructor is talking about (one of: a concept that is probably easier for me to learn from the book, an example problem, or a tangent that's got nothing to do with calculus and is almost never interesting) and browsing the sections in the book near the ones we're covering. I reflect on the fact that my ability to solve these problems has everything to do with how many practice ones I do and nothing to do with what I do in class, or whether I even come. I wish they didn't take attendance. I write nothing down.
0855:	Class finishes. It's Thursday, so I don't have another one until 1500. I head for the dining hall, grabbing a copy of the student run newspaper on the way.
0910:	The dining hall is just as empty now as it always is at 0715. Breakfast is fruit (most "fresh," some canned) and granola. The granola has raisins... and sugar. All the cereals have significant amounts of sugar, except for the Cheerios. I really don't want to eat Cheerios. I read the newspaper; it's pretty boring, as usual. Apparently the gender gap continues to narrow here. (There are many more females than males graduating from college in the U.S., but NC State is still 55.9% male, in part because it did not have a real liberal arts program until the '60s. The engineering school is still 84% male, which is pretty typical. Why it is typical is a hotly debated topic that I will avoid speculating about.)
0945:	Head back to the dorm.
1000:	Check the bank; no transaction, of course. Check email. Read RSS feeds, follow links, do searches on related topics....
1200:	A knock on the door: do I want to go to lunch with the rest of my suite? The dining hall will be full, but I'm getting nothing done and I'm enough of a recluse already. I stick my linear algebra book in my backpack and head out.
1220:	We arrive at the dining hall; it is indeed almost full. I learn some things about a few of the guys in my suite and they learn some things about me. The food is unmemorable. Once again I am glad the salad bar is decent.
1305:	Time to head for the library and get some studying in.
1320:	I arrive at the library, head up the stairs, and find a desk in a quiet corner of the eighth floor. Studying happens.
1445:	Time for class. Down the stairs I go.
1450:	I arrive. The library is right next to the math building; very convenient.
1500:	Class starts. We step through the construction of the inverse of a matrix, with proofs. I write some things down, but stop when I realize that merely copying down theorems and proofs that are in the book is not very helpful, especially if I don't fully understand them yet. There is no quiz, but I learn that the test is a week from today. I'd better make sure I'm fully up to speed by then. Before then.
1616:	Class ends; we used the entire class period, no surprise. I quickly head for the nearest exit.
1625:	I arrive in the building where my Philosophy of Science classes are held. Jesse Prinz has come from Chapel Hill to give a talk on the neural basis of consciousness which is supposed to have started at 1600. I discover that the talk has been moved to a larger room.
1630:	I arrive at the proper room in mid-talk. Too bad; (too bad that I'm not on the ball enough to get away with skipping linear algebra class) it's a pretty good one. Prinz lays out his AIR concept of consciousness as Attention paid to Representations in the brain: we are conscious of what we are aware of, which is a selection of sensory input (at an Intermediate level of processing, or abstraction) that is committed to memory. This covers all senses, including our sense of our body, but seems most evident in vision (which is also the most studied and best understood sense). He spent some time talking about how tests of attention, as well as brain damage studies of visual neglect, support the idea that we may have some kind of high level reaction to a visible object without being consciously aware of it at all (think subliminal messages). Some familiar territory for those who have read popularizations like Phantoms in the Brain. He thinks attention is definitely necessary for consciousness but not really sufficient, although as far as I could tell the AIR model implies that the two are mostly one and the same thing, modulus some memory work. But then, I did miss half the talk.
1705:	The Q&A session begins. Some professors ask about how the AIR concept fits with certain cases in the literature. A few people ask more basic questions, like how all this fits with free will. I can't stop myself from asking what may or may not have been a slightly better question about whether Prinz thinks consciousness will continue to be a useful concept in cognitive science. He says it's too early to say; perhaps unsurprisingly, he thinks it will continue to be useful if the AIR model turns out to be a common pattern across other senses, although he is in favor of dropping it if it doesn't seem to be productive. It sounds obvious in retrospect. Generally a sign of a good answer. I come away impressed with Prinz's ability to give thoughtful answers to good questions and equally thoughtful answers to maybe not so good questions that really weren't very related to the talk, and also energized and motivated by the palpable expertise and intellectual atmosphere in the room. Ahh, that's more like it. Good stuff. Breath it in.
1750:	Time for supper. I head for the dining hall.
1805:	The dining hall is a jungle. I share a table with random strangers for the first time, out of necessity. The food is unmemorable, again. I have another salad.
1850:	Exit dining hall.
1905:	Back in my dorm. Check the bank, no transfer. Screw around on the internet. Estimate the time spent walking during the day. Estimated distance: about three miles, but the error for that estimate is probably about ±0.5 miles. Think about getting a pedometer. Resolve to waste less time tomorrow (again). Start to write a blog. It takes much longer than it should, as usual.
2300:	Climb in bed, an hour later than usual. Fortunately, I don't have an 0800 class on Fridays.

cinema

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:54:46 GMT

A few movie reviews.

The Weather Underground | (4/5)
This movie interviews some of the former members of the titular organization, laying out the story of how these leftist, mostly affluent, white college students decided that a people's revolution in the United States was a real possibility, how they wanted to be at the forefront of it, and what they did to try to make it happen. Of course these days one just thinks "...revolution? What were these people smoking?" especially if one is, like me, too young to remember what things were like in the '60s and '70s. It turns out that they were pretty much delusional about the prospects of real revolution in the U.S., but it was a time when civil rights was a big issue and groups like the Black Panthers were threatening to make it a violent one, real leftist revolutions had happened in the recent past in places like Russia, China, and Cuba, and of course there was the whole hippie thing. The Weather Underground and similar groups were horrified by the Vietnam war, upset by the treatment of black people, and felt that little or nothing was more important than overthrowing the entire system and replacing it with something more just and equitable.

It's fascinating how their goals, many of which I and many others today could get behind, contrasted with their methods, which were almost certainly counterproductive and most certainly almost entirely ineffective. Essentially all they did was destroy some property, kill a few people by accident (which dissuaded them from killing anyone on purpose), and convince almost no one. Black people were eventually granted their full civil rights and the U.S. eventually got out of Vietnam, but as far as I can tell these things were not expedited in the least by the actions of the Weather Underground. It seems like a case of the utter failure of extreme idealism.

The Vietnam war seems to have been the decisive factor for a lot of them. In their eyes, all American citizens were equally responsible for allowing the government to continue to prosecute an unjust war that was killing thousands of innocent people. That was the reasoning that allowed them to seriously contemplate killing U.S. civilians. At this point I think their only mistake was to believe that violence was a useful or morally acceptable response to violence; in the case of Vietnam I don't think it was either useful or morally justified. I don't think they were wrong to hold all Americans responsible, and I do think they had some right to be angry at Americans for allowing the cruelty of an unnecessary war, given all the My Lai type events and massive civilian deaths that always accompany the red horse. But they were convinced that they had an unimpeachably superior moral position. It is that kind of certainty, as at least some of them now realize and mention more than once in the film, that enables a person, or a group, to commit terrible acts of violence and cruelty.

But I think it would be a mistake to say that the Weather Underground was the only group that made unconscionable decisions based on a feeling of moral superiority. The government broke many laws as they monitored these kinds of groups, but I guess they were just protecting innocent people against violent terrorists, right? The American people allowed Vietnam to go on for a long time, but a little war is OK; we're the U.S.; we're fighting communism. Our cause is just. God is on our side. It's necessary, and besides, it's up to the people in Washington. It's not our responsibility. Right?

Well, like it or not, it is our responsibility. The interests of politicians in Washington are not always the interests of the American people, nor are they always especially wise or moral. That's why the U.S. is a republic and not a monarchy. It's not just so Americans can elect their king every four years, although too many people seem to think it is.

Obviously there are parallels to today. Osama bin Laden kills civilians in democratic countries using the same justifications, with the same flaws, as those used by the Weather Underground. The U.S. is once again in a war of choice against a much poorer and weaker nation that was never a threat to it, an irregular war that drags on and on despite overwhelming U.S. military superiority, that generates atrocities committed by all sides, hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, millions of refugees, and that grows steadily more unpopular at home. The government stretches and breaks laws to monitor and and lock up U.S. citizens without warrants or charges. Nothing new under the sun and all that.

Despite my sympathy with the Weather Underground's position on the war and civil rights, I consider myself more of a pragmatist than a leftist. Pragmatism as a political philosophy certainly has its share of moral swamps and inviting shortcuts to evil, but so do all philosophies; pragmatism is my nature and I won't deny it. With that in mind, one of the things that really stood out to me about the Weather Underground was their utter ineffectiveness. They did not think through the details of what should replace the "system," or how it would be administered, or even how they would overthrow the current system. They had no clue how difficult such a thing would be because they had no real clue what would be required. It took them a long time to realize that they would need far more support than they were ever likely to get. They believed in violence, but they were more or less privileged white young people who had no temperament for it and no idea about how to go about it. In short, they didn't know what they were doing. From the film:

David Gilbert: To me, there was an aspect of what we did that was psyching ourselves up to make the jump over this hurdle from sort of a more comfortable middle class life.

Mark Rudd: We developed all kinds of our own repertoire of psychological tricks, like something called the gut check where we'd challenge each other to be more violent and to be therefore more revolutionary, or to be more disciplined, to give up our bourgeois luxuries.

I have to say, the first thing I thought of when watching this bit was the last church I attended (last, as in before I quit going to church altogether). Not the psyching each other up to be more violent obviously, but psyching each other up to take God seriously. The undertones were exactly the same: a group trying to get itself to believe in something that it did not really understand. One can have an abstract belief in things one does not understand, but actually acting on those beliefs is much harder. Actually getting things done is the acid test; it requires understanding the real world. The Weather Underground eventually figured out how to be pretty good at building and planting bombs, and even busted a few people out of prison, but as far as I can tell the church doesn't have a clue about God. Whether that's because it needs some new insight, or more faith, or because it is fundamentally mistaken about the likely nature of reality is left as an exercise for the reader.

Duel | (4/5)
Found on MetaFilter; you can see this on Google video, at least for the moment. Made in 1971, this was apparently Steven Spielberg's first film. At Steven Den Beste says in the MeFi comments: "After watching it, it's easy to see why Spielberg was given bigger and better opportunities." It does a bang-up job of building and maintaining suspense with zero blood and gore, in part by never really showing the antagonist. Far better than almost all modern horror thrillers that utterly fail to appreciate the fear and suspense that can be milked from the simplest of setups if one only remembers that nothing is more scary than the unknown.

Observation of the day: Bolting your bike to a bike rack will not prevent the seat from being stolen. Nor will it prevent the wheels, the chain, the handlebars, and pretty much everything except the frame and the bolt from being stolen.

Amusing technology related item of the day: My final transcript is now in the NC State computer system, giving me sixty-six credit hours in total. I am now considered a freshman (with the incomplete transcript I was a sophomore). [UPDATE 8/24: I am now a junior, which should be correct.]

Next up: more studying, less blogging.

thoughts on the first day of classes

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:12:20 GMT

My sleeping mechanism has not yet fully adjusted to the change in environment even when the noise level is low. I'm not one of those people who seem to be able to function almost normally with little sleep - in particular, my ability to reason about novel situations falls off dramatically with only a few hours accumulated sleep debt (anything under eight hours per twenty-four for me) - so hopefully this will work itself out over the next few days. If a few entries before or after this one seem unusually incoherent, that's why.

I think the earliest classes start at 0700 (my first class is at 0800). The main dining halls open at 0700. There are a fair amount of students walking around around at 0730 but very few in the dining hall (at least the one I go to).

Informal observation made while waiting for math class: over 90% of females wearing some form of open toed footwear have painted toenails or porn star style fake ones. Still waiting to see a guy with painted toenails.

The Calculus III instructor knows what he doesn't know about what students can do with calculators. He related a story of a professor who tried to prevent students from using custom programs or stored formulas etc. by hard-resetting calculators (the "sticking a pointy object in the tiny hole" type of reset) at the door, unannounced, at the beginning of class on a test day. Scores were down for that test, but rebounded on subsequent ones even though he continued to reset calculators. Of course, students had programmed and/or modified the hardware on their calculators to give the reset message without actually resetting when the procedure was performed. Moral: it's a computer in the hands of the enemy, you can't hope to control it. He even allows TI-89s, which will do almost everything, for tests. My opinion is that, like it or not, this is the future. Education is going to change a lot with the advent of the wearable/internal computer, when most (naked) persons will have access to a powerful general purpose computer, and probably the entire global network, using very little (and eventually no) equipment external to the body. As computing and communication technology get better and better it gets easier and easier for a few people who really know what they are doing to do more and more work for others who are less able. It can be done in real time (e.g., calling an expert on the phone and asking them to solve your exam problem for you during the exam; I think it will be possible to do this, undetectably for all practical purposes, within twenty years or so, possibly much earlier), but even without net access more and more problems will be solvable offline using specialty software. It's not just in education of course; much of the computer industry seems to be structured around a relatively small number of experts designing software that makes programming (and hardware design, and many other things outside of the computer industry) easy enough for non-experts. Homo sapiens is remaking itself into Homo techno. The dividing line between an individual's knowledge and ability and the knowledge and ability of their society (or even humanity) as a whole is blurring. It'll be interesting to see how educational institutions adjust.

According to the school newspaper, Da Chen had nothing interesting to say at the convocation. Also, NC State athletics sucks, with many NC State teams predicted to finish last or second to last in their conferences (or whatever they call them in college sports). The newspaper's insightful analysis of the baseball team was something along the lines of how they will continue to do poorly if they have to keep playing while behind like they did every game last season. For some reason the pathetic showing of these teams actually bothered me for a second. Then I remembered I didn't care.

As always, it is interesting to see how different professors have different styles. Most professors prefer email for non face to face interactions, but my history professor prefers the phone; he claims he's too poor to afford the internet at home (and apparently doesn't check it very often in the office). He uses an old fashioned slide projector in lieu of digital photography or projection. He showed us some slides of a trip he took to Europe, and then some Dennis the Menace and Calvin and Hobbes cartoons to drive home the fact that history is written by the winners, or "the establishment." He mentioned something about a university requirement that he drop people who did not attend the first two classes, something I've not heard mentioned anywhere else. He went around to each person and had us write our initials by our names on the roll (he could have just passed the sheets around, but I think he wanted to make sure we put our initials in the right place) and made up a seating chart so we could complain to him if someone took our seat, something else I've never seen done before. You might think he would be older, but he actually might have been the youngest professor in any of my classes. Definitely wins the award for quirkiest professor to date, although he seems nice enough.

I know some of you think it is improper to speak badly of the dead. Well, you're wrong.
David Austin (paraphrased)

My only large lecture hall class (Philosophy of Science, 250 students) is also the only class where attendance is not required. The professor was very organized. All relevant course materials are online, including the comprehensive syllabus and the book that came of his lecture notes after teaching the class for decades. All that distilled material online is what allows the class period to be mostly questions and answers and optional for people who don't need help or don't feel like starting an in depth discussion about some point or other. Seems like a great method to me. He covered accessing the materials and the high points of the syllabus in about twenty five minutes, said bad things about his deceased mother-in-law for about five minutes, and wrapped up in half the time the other classes did. "I love this guy" was the comment of the guy sitting next to me. Seems about right.

There are no papers in any of my classes. There used to be a required paper (on dualism) in the Philosophy of Science class, but it was dropped after something like two-thirds of the submissions were graded 'F' year after year. The (detailed) directions and requirements for the paper are still posted for posterity. It looks a little more challenging than anything I wrote at Gaston, mostly because of the careful reasoning required (it's a 300 level philosophy class after all, one should expect to have to reason carefully, right?), but nothing too bad.

We actually got to do a (very) little bit of work in Into to Advanced Math. My group of three (there are about twenty-five students in the class, my smallest so far) was the only one to correctly identify the barber paradox as neither true nor false and so not a proposition in the mathematical sense of a statement that is either true or false. I had seen the paradox before, but I confused my poor sleep deprived brain when I attempted to make sure it was actually the barber paradox and not just a similar statement that seemed equivalent from a quick reading. Fortunately the other guy had his head screwed on straight and remained confident until I got it right.

The calculus professor put up a fairly long math problem (using only addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and parenthesis) and solicited answers from the class (no calculators). "No wrong answers" he said, so he got about 8-10 different ones. Most people got it right, but I'm still not sure what was up with that. I think his point was about order of operations. It's the kind of problem anyone ought to be able to do in their head. If you're sleep deprived you'll have to write down one or two intermediate results.

None of this stuff looks to be that hard, which is what I was expecting and why I went ahead and registered for a fifth class.

So far the experience has been pretty much exactly what I would expect from a generic State U.

For some context, let's remember how low the general public sets the bar, even in Europe (via):

more unoriginal observations about university life

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:14:53 GMT

Given that sleeping really can't be done outside the dorms, using one's room (and the hallway) for loud drinking games with one's suite mates and not wrapping up until 0230 is extremely obnoxious. Welcome to dorm life, me; pass the earplugs. That is all.

After finding another good book online (via) and looking around at all the ones I already have sitting here in my dorm, I'm reevaluating how much time I'll be spending in the library. They don't have this book. I can access all the journal articles I want from any computer, anywhere. I guess it'll depend on how quickly I work through the books I have, how loud the dorm gets during non-sleeping hours, and whether or not I feel like lugging my laptop (and potentially multiple extra books) around.

Classes start tomorrow.

university: day 3

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 03:41:38 GMT

What is it like to be at a real university? So far, a lot of walking and pushing furniture around in tiny dorm rooms. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. The beds are loftable, and there's plenty of room for my purposes once everything's set up; it's just that setting up is like a sliding puzzle with you as one of the pieces. The payoff is you get a room to yourself that's more than half the size of a room for two. So very worth it, especially for people who value their privacy. People like me.

Yes, being thrust into close proximity with a lot of other people has only enflamed my solitudinous tendencies. By now I think it's safe to say that this is a real personality trait and not something I'm likely to outgrow. We'll see what happens in a few days when classes start and I start looking around for clubs and organizations that fit my interests.

Some random observations:

The weather has been hot but bearable for the fifteen minutes it takes me to get from point to point.

The air conditioning in the dorms is not central. The unit in my room doesn't seem to to dehumidify very well. Maybe it's subjective (I'm used to fans and not sweating so much), but if my books start to warp in a month or two I'm going to be mad.

Nearly every male student is wearing cargo shorts (of course). I refuse to follow suit (of course).

There are apparently no water fountains in the entire building. If this is a scheme to sell bottled water, it works. I see people carrying cases of water back to their rooms. Since I am (selectively) cheap and a reflexive nonconformist, my plan is to buy a couple bottles and refill them at fountains when no one is looking. We'll see how that goes.

A microfridge is not a small refrigerator. It is a small refrigerator with a small microwave bolted to the top. Nice for keeping water cool I guess.

A slot opened up for me to get a history class I wanted. Amusingly, the single review of the textbook on amazon.com is one star out of five, and the reviewer claims he transfered out of his college just to avoid buying it. I bought it. I've only given it a cursory look, but it seems to be pretty much like any other 100-200 level history textbook.

It behooves one to attend some campus events so as to not be a complete shut in, but frankly most of them are probably going to be skippable. A free ice cream sandwich to go with a free movie does not make Blades of Glory into anything more than what it is: a stupid, lowest common denominator, Will Ferrell American comedy. (John Heder notwithstanding, I certainly wasn't expecting Napolean Dynamite II, and I certainly didn't get it.) I knew what I was getting into (well, I was hoping for real ice cream) and got what I was looking for: proof that just because cheery student organizers want you to go to everything doesn't mean you should go to everything, or even most things.

I realize that this is probably not an especially clever or original insight.

Also skippable: a convocation speaker who may or may not value self promotion over accuracy in his writing. OK, so I was looking for excuses not to go, but I really do dislike the practice of becoming a "professional" public speaker based on something the speaker did in their past. Especially when a lot of other people did the same thing. Why are we hearing from this or that particular guy or gal and not one of those people? It's a good bet it's because the speaker has done a lot of publicity work, advertised the fact that they do public speaking, etc. It's got precious little to do with whether or not they have a message that's actually helpful or original.

Tomorrow: library day.