dots in the shark

Parallel dimensions

2010-08-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

The term "parallel dimension" makes no sense. A dimension, if parallel to any other dimension, is equal to that other dimension. The dimension would have to be parallel to no preexisting dimensions in order to qualify as a new one. What most users of the term "parallel dimension" probably mean is "parallel cross-section of a higher-dimensional embedding space". I hope this linguistic abomination, now too widespread to correct, does not cause too great a delay in our achievement of faster-than-light travel.

Neurological imaging

2010-08-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

I wonder how many of the neurologists trying to identify what the brain is doing with blood-flow images have tried to write a complex piece of software. The job seems categorically impossible to me -- like deducing the rules of a card game solely from the number of cards in each player's hands.

Patter and Buddhism

2008-11-02T21:04:00.000-08:00

(Yes, it's been two years since my last post. I just had another idea.)

Magicians talk while they perform. It's almost entirely used as a distraction, and yet it's such an important part of being a magician that they've designated a word for it: "patter". They even write the stuff in advance (although one has to imagine it's not entirely predetermined).

Society calls for patter too. Conversation may be edifying or not, but even when it is, the majority of it is not primarily aimed at the exchange of information, but rather for bonding. A steady stream of talk is useful in its own right, even if the particular information transmitted turns out to be of no independent value. First dates, for instance. Or job interviews. (Economists may note the parallels.)

When I was trying to study Buddhism, in high school, I came across a number of ideas (they all seemed to fall under the general umbrella of "expanded awareness") which, although they seemed meaningful and important on paper, I could not operationalize.

I think the idea of patter may offer a bit of practical insight. It's easy to get caught up in the high-frequency stream of ideas that patter contains, and thereby lose sight of the underlying reality, which is a very slow-moving process of people orbiting each other. Sometimes they get closer, sometimes farther away -- but underneath all the overlay of activity and talk, what's going on is fairly simple, and it's good to be aware of that foundation.

Electric Battery idea

2006-12-26T19:52:00.000-08:00

Someone should make a thing that looks like a battery, except it's got a cable coming out of it that you can plug into the wall. It would be more environmentally friendly than using disposables, and more energy efficient than charging a rechargeable battery.

A Bush speech that I buy.

2006-08-31T22:55:00.000-07:00

His goals and threat assessment are both good.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/washington/31text-bush.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

His methods are wrong. But still, I'm amazed to find myself in such agreement.

Dubious hope

2006-08-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

From the Financial Times, in a piece about the pending California greenhouse gas emission bill:

The United States is the world’s largest producer of the heat-trapping gases that many scientists link to extreme weather like violent hurricanes and rising sea levels.

But Bush pulled the United States out of the 160-nation Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions in 2001, arguing that it would hurt the economy and unfairly excluded developing nations like China.

I, like the author, think global warming sucks. But from the facts he presents in the article, it’s not clear that American emissions caps would have much impact on the phenomenon. Suppose that each year, every country in the world was producing one unit of pollution, except that the US was producing two. The US would then be the world’s largest producer of pollution. But reducing our emissions by 25% (which is what Gov. Schwarzenegger hopes to achieve by 2020) would have no effect.

Most of life is an exercise in prioritization

2006-08-21T17:46:00.000-07:00

(At various scales, that is.)

I’ve thought that since I was ankle-deep in economics, but I only just verbalized it. It feels deep, so I wrote it down.

What scares Greg Mankiw

2006-08-19T06:41:00.000-07:00

"So Lamont seems to think the U.S. economy is suffering and the primary reason is competition from poor workers in China.

This rhetoric scares me. Wages, benefits, and labor and environmental standards are primarily a function of the level of economic development. Complaining about poor countries' low wages and benefits is essentially blaming the poor for being poor."

Here’s his original post.

Male / Female Ratios: Where to hang out at school

2006-08-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

I like meeting people at colloquia. They’re smart, they care about something, and the food for conversation is already on the table. So far I’ve only met men. I think that’s because they’re generally the only people at the conferences I’ve been attending (physics, math, economics, computer science …)

A professor of mine at CSU Northridge said that when he went to Penn he learned to hang out at the history department, where the female/male ratio was more favorable. I’ve been contemplating trying that out, but the onus of experimenting in person with different departments on campus looked intolerable. Instead I visited the National Center for Education Statistics, which has already done all that work, far better than I could have.

I’m sure a few of my imaginary readers are thinking, “How crass. This guy’s brains are all under his belt.” If that were the case I would not publicize my (two hours of) research. I think the world would be a happier place if more women knew where to find me(n) and vice versa. Disequilibrium confers an advantage on those privileged with information; I’m acting against my own interest, for the greater good.

Some of what I learned follows quite accurately those stereotypes I never took seriously enough. For instance:

High female/male ratios in
· International studies
· Biomedical stuff
· Ethnic studies
· English lit
· Most languages
· Education
· Communications
· Psychology
· Everything to do with animals

Low female/male ratios in
· Engineering
· Computer science
· Most mathematics
· Military science (sic.)
· Other stuff that I’ve forgotten (do you keep track of the places you failed to find something?)

There were also a number of surprises. For instance, despite my mentor’s advice, history is not a high-female discipline (although it’s better than economics). Neither is religion. Probability / statistics majors are 2 to 1 female, though the rest of math skews strongly the other way. The arts skew female, but not as much as I thought. A number of sciences have more women than men: planetary science, astronomy, analytical chemistry, geochemistry, neuroscience.

[The trends I found hold precisely at the undergraduate level, and vaguely beyond that. For high-female disciplines, many of the ratios stay very similar at the master’s level, and most seem to drop, though not necessarily below unity, at the PhD level. To illustrate, in “American/United States studies/civilization” the female/male ratio is 1.9 at the bachelor’s level, 1.8 at the master’s level, and 1.12 at the Ph.D.

My data came exclusively from Table 252: “Bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by sex of student and field of study.” I have not done my homework – I assume they surveyed the whole country, but for all I know Kentucky could be the only state represented. If I had found a table that takes into account regional differences, future life circumstances, family medical history, etc. I would have jumped at it, but I think this is as good as I’m going to find.]

Score one for Microsoft

2006-08-06T18:54:00.000-07:00

There’s a little paperclip-with-eyebrows that tries to help you out in MS Word (and Excel, and Outlook …) that I find really annoying. It makes a bunch of noise and distracts me, and I never use it. I didn’t know what to call it, so from the Word help menu I typed “Shut up.” One of the suggestions it came back with was “turn off the Office Assistant.” I pursued that option and it worked.

Free books!

2006-08-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

At lunch the other day I was talking to someone about my experience at the MSU library. I hadn’t found a book, and tried to tell the front desk it might be missing. They dismissed my suggestion, saying “It’s probably in the library, just not on the shelf where it’s supposed to be.” My lunchmate said, “Doesn’t that mean the book is lost?”

If the book were on a different shelf (as opposed to on a desk or something) he would be right. Of course, libraries probably go through all the shelves every now and then, checking to make sure everything’s in order. But what a pain! That must take forever, so they can’t possibly do it very often.

It’s work better suited to a machine. So here’s my suggestion: Put a UPC sticker on the spine of every book, and then occasionally send grunts around with UPC guns to read the spines of all the shelved books. Dump that data into a computer, and tell it to look for any out-of-order entries.

At any place where misplaced books are a significant problem, this measure would effectively increase the library’s stock of books.

Wannabe string theory

2006-08-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

I read in Gerard Hooft’s book “In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks that string theory may end up involving knot theory. If so, there would be beads on the knots.

It tickles me to compare that to music theory. Harmony takes place on a necklace with twelve spots for beads, and you can only load a few beads (seven or so) onto it at a time. Then you color them “on” and “off”, and shift them around …

I don’t know why this comparison fascinates me so much, but it does. It’s manifestly useless. String theory isn’t even about strings, but rather high-dimensional analogues to them. I don’t think (nuclear) physics has anything to gain from music, or vice versa. Still, I’m really happy that human art and the laws of physics could be taking place on similar playing fields.

Full-contact reading

2006-07-24T20:32:00.000-07:00

When I read I lean on the desk. I’ve tried other arrangements but none work as well. However, the desk is hard, and I put a lot of weight on my elbows; this has always presented a problem for me. Today I bought elbow pads from Dick’s Sports. (Yes, Dick’s Sports.) I came home and read with them, and the experiment so far looks very successful. In fact, now that I have them, I’m discovering other situations where they might be useful, such as when I type. Maybe I’ll just never take them off.

Then again, my cousin did that with sports-goggle glasses, and looked so geeky that even I was uncomfortable.

Jazz is like paint-by-numbers

2006-07-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

I just realized this. I feel deflated.

Of course, the degrees of freedom left to the artist by a paint-by-numbers product are not insignificant. You’re free to fill in the provided structure however you’d like, even including disregarding the suggested colors and boundaries. And in a sense any art form is paint-by-number to some extent: always, some parameters (e.g. “people will use tools to make noise,” or “there will be actors on a stage talking to each other”) are not consciously decided by the author, but instead simply assumed.

Still, I feel deflated.

A hack for someone to write

2006-07-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

In the old Nintendo game called Contra, one could punch in a certain secret code (up up down down left right left right select start) to get secret powers, like invincibility. Someone should put that feature into Yahoo! Mail, so that nothing you sent could ruin your reputation.

(No, I don’t have any sudden reason to want that. I just think it would be cool.)

Don’t give them hands

2006-07-07T15:33:00.000-07:00

There are two fears that arise commonly in discussions of artificial intelligence: that the AI could put us all out of work, and that it could turn against us. We could avoid both possibilities if we scrupulously restricted the output devices of AIs to include only printers, computer monitors, and stuff like that. Then the artificially intelligent could only put us out of jobs that require thought, and they could only take over mankind if they convinced humans to help them do it.

Of course, it might not be possible for intelligence to arise without constant feedback from a manipulable world. If not, we would have to create the AIs in a virtual physical reality (where they could have all the hands they wanted), and only later introduce them to the real world.

Deciding which output devices should be considered safe might be tricky. For instance, if it were possible through the proper combination of radio signals to, say, take control of an airplane, then radio transmission would not qualify as a “safe” form of output. Ditto the internet.

(Isaac Asimov proposed a different leash: Simply program the machines to work in the best interests of humankind. I think that would be great, if only it were possible.)

Did I just sell my mom's car to the Mob?

2006-07-01T19:04:00.000-07:00

The car has been advertised on craigslist for $700. A Maurice calls today, declares that he just got to LA from New York and needs a car fast, but he can't do $700. Offers 5; I say no. Offers 6 in cash tonight; I say yes.

I scramble around for a couple hours figuring out what paperwork I'm obligated to subject him and myself to, and realize I can't sell my mom's car without having her signature on the papers. She's not around. When the buyer calls back (private number) I explain to him that we can proceed with the transaction tonight, but if so he'll have to wait for the papers in the mail. He sounds uncomfortable, and says "Truthfully, I'm buying it for a friend of mine. I'll have to call you back about that."

Three minutes later he calls back. "The guy I'm buying it for is my brother-in-law; he's in the car with me. [Did I ASK for an explanation?] He seems to be willing to go ahead with whatever's needed to make the deal go through."

They should be pulling up any minute. Earlier I was worrying about getting counterfeited. Now I'm thinking that not getting whacked would be par for the course, so I will not insist on driving somewhere to get a money order.

Besides, if it's counterfeit I'll get to rat them out to the Secret Service.

Wait. They know where my mom lives. I guess I can't talk.

[Later]

When they show up they're four guys (I was expecting two) in their late twenties, all Italian. They claim to be "theater hands", but they're not fairy goofballs like the theater hands I've known. They tend to punch one another as they talk. I'm paid in old, wrinkled hundred dollar bills.

[The next day]

The bills were real!

Y, that’s brilliant!

2006-06-14T13:03:00.000-07:00

Ten years ago, my dream guitar had strings that weren’t parallel.

Today, it has strings that aren’t straight.

Problem-solving through denial

2006-06-12T21:51:00.000-07:00

I went to a club. It was outdoors so that smoking would be legal, but narrow and walled on three sides so that it would be warm. My pants smelled strongly of smoke this morning. I wore them anyway, and now they smell okay.

There should be more problems like that. Or rather, there should be fewer that aren't.

Weak Sheets: Copyleft

2006-06-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

I will never invest in this idea myself, and I would like to see it happen, so I am offering it to any entrepreneur that might be scavenging the blogosphere. Prisons and asylums should use linens and clothing made of some material too flimsy to be turned into a noose. Preferably one that’s still warm and comfortable.

Techno hybrids

2006-05-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

Five albums, each the bomb:

Techno Hip-hop: Prefuse 73’s Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives
Techno Country: Stop the Panic, by Luke Vibert and B.J. Cole
Techno Soul: Jamie Lidell’s Multiply
Techno Jazz: Squarepusher’s Music is Rotted One Note
Techno Metal: King Crimson’s The Power to Believe

As if that’s not cool enough, the last two albums on that list are performed live! (Okay, Squarepusher’s only one guy, so he had to multitrack -- but each of those tracks was live.)

This ought to be a smackdown

2006-05-21T16:00:00.000-07:00

It won't, but it ought to be.

In an open letter to the President and Congress, Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, describes the “consensus opinion of economists” regarding the question of immigration's effect on the US economy.

The entire contingent of economists at GMU are usually labeled conservative, but this letter comes out strongly opposed to the current rash of Republican xenophobic bill-passing. The apparent mismatch arises because Republicans are pandering to workers who mistakenly believe that their jobs are being stolen.

I believe that hardly anybody will listen to Dr. Tabarrok, because, as with so much of politics, the immigration debate is not a rational debate.

Innumeracy and self-deception

2006-05-18T20:45:00.000-07:00

I have had the privilege of tutoring a number of people over the last year who claim to understand the concepts of their economics classes, but not the math. I can sometimes, with difficulty, formulate such a distinction to myself, so I do not reject the claim on its face. But so far, everyone to make it has been wrong – they’ve turned out not to understand the underlying concepts.

Their lies generate my income, and do not bother me. I’m just writing to marvel at the human capacity to deceive itself, which so regularly boggles me.

Three brief things

2006-05-18T20:38:00.000-07:00

My mother writes: “Just heard on the news that the Catholic Church is objecting to The Da Vinci Code because it ‘mixes fact with fiction.’ Like the Bible doesn't!”

Opening a CD. There are typically two membranes of disposable plastic separating the purchaser from his music. One is a wrap of cellophane. The other is a slender sticker wrapped along the top of the case. I just found the quick way to remove the second obstacle (peeling which can take quite a long time otherwise). Open the case before it’s off! It rips right in the middle, and then peels easily. (You have to brace the hard plastic parts in such a way that they don’t fracture, but it’s not hard.)

“Voter cynicism.” This is an abuse of language. It foists the opinion (manifestly common among reporters) that voting is somehow worth most people’s time. The foist is probably unintentional, but a foist nonetheless.

Artists apologizing

2006-05-18T20:37:00.000-07:00

The first “group” (one dude) I saw at the Knitting Factory this Sunday had a habit of making statements to the crowd such as, “There’s more … sorry.” He wasn’t very good, so it’s hard for me to separate causes, but I feel like some of our unenthusiasm resulted from those apologies.

Audiences give explicit respect to artists, by allowing them to dominate our attention for a while. We do it because apparently we’ve got nothing better to do, but that doesn’t mean we don’t value our time. When an artist apologizes, he implies that he doesn’t feel like whatever he’s doing is valid. The artist knows the art far better than any of us; if he feels that way, who are we to disagree?

Audiences are suggestible. We don’t really know what we want, and we hope to be shown things that we didn’t realize we would enjoy. Musicians who don’t recognize and exploit that feature basically suck.

Finding meaning in the public sphere, despite one’s intuition

2006-05-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

I’m a fourth of the way through Madness and Modernism, by Louis Sass. Sass’s thesis is that schizophrenia can be seen as a somewhat logical extension of 20^th century social and artistic trends.

On p. 100, he quotes French philosopher Nathalie Sarraute (1900-1999), who I had never heard of, in the following: “Sarraute … is a harsh critic of conformity to the ‘impurities’ of social convention and tradition. She associates such conformism with a focus, in novel writing, on ‘literary types’ and on ‘tiresome descriptions’ of public events, which she dismisses as ‘but large empty carcasses’ when set beside the ‘wealth and complexity’ of the inner life.”

This attitude strikes me as intuitively appealing and highly undesirable. Value is among the trickiest of mental phenomena. A few of our values (e.g. food, company) are inborn, but most of them have to be learned, if not deduced. Having evolved in tribal situations, our brains are in particular unlikely to correctly valuate, based only on immediate stimuli and impressions, events from the unbelieveably huge “public sphere” of modern Earth. (I mean, when you were a kid, did you enjoy watching the evening news?)

I agree that public events can fell pretty lame. And sure, some of the blame can usually be placed on an event’s planners. But just as much responsibility lies with the audience. We can’t rely on any neurologically pre-coded value to fire in the course of such events. The challenge we face is to actively find and experience meaning in the public sphere, however unnatural it may be.

Inverting division

2006-05-03T18:27:00.000-07:00

Recently I was listening to someone talk about “divisive factors”– race, class, religion, that sort of thing – and the contrarian in me wondered if “divisive” might be a mischaracterization. The question of whether diversity helps or hurts a nation’s political environment is an empirical one, and I can think of examples that point in either direction.

Perhaps people will find things to hate each other about no matter how similar they are. Perhaps broad categories like race or religion actually serve to organize and mollify what would otherwise be a more chaotic and frightening melee.

Just a thought.

Cyberdrugs

2006-04-30T01:17:00.000-07:00

What if you could grant somebody control over your sensory organs – for instance, letting them change the amount of time it takes for visual stimuli to reach the optical cortex, or distort your kinesthetic sense for the dimensions and configuration of your body, or rout individual auditory signals through chains of sound effects (pitch-shift, echo, granulation) before you hear them?

If that turned out to be merely disorienting and not intrinsically fun, would you be inclined to further grant them control over your endorphins and opioids?

What if you could grant even more than that, such as, through virtual reality, control over the physical contents of the room you believe you’re in? That is, what if your “trip operator” could cause not only sensory distortions, but full 3-dimensional hallucinations? (“Virtual drugs” might be a better term for such experiences than “cyberdrugs” – “cyber” denotes mechanical modifications of one’s body, while “virtual” denotes an environment that has no existence beyond some computer interface.)

Granted such privileges, some operators would try to induce more elaborate hallucinations (e.g. a Roman army) than they could describe in any sort of programming language in real-time. That limitation could be circumvented, though, if we could alter the speed at which one or both parties’ brains operated.

Such activities would not be for everyone, and a lousy operator could make even the most enthusiastic tripper miserable. But it seems to this speculator that a gentle, well-meaning and skilled operator (perhaps they would need a good sense for cinematography) could create some killer experiences.

We already have the sort of technology that would allow a (suitably determined) person to hand over some rudimentary control of their audiovisual stimuli. I don’t know if the sort of apparatus currently feasible would be any fun, but if progress in understanding the mechanisms of the brain is inexorable, then perhaps cyber-drugs of the sort described above can’t be avoided.

Would they be outlawed? The question of cyberdrugs’ legality would be all tangled up with the question of their medical effects. I have no idea. It’s conceivable that direct neural interfaces would pose a threat of addiction beyond anything yet known. It’s also conceivable, though, that once we know what we’re doing to the brain, the risks currently associated with drug-use will go the way of Kuru (an extinct disease linked to cannibalism). Time and science will tell, if we let them.

Beyond their medical effects, there exists a question of their economic impact. A cyber-drug might leave someone perfectly rational and capable while providing an activity so enjoyable that they choose to pursue it to their economic detriment. If that outcome were prevalent enough, there would be an economic incentive for individual nations to ban the drug, thereby becoming more competitive with their neighbors. I believe this argument has been made against chemical drugs that exist today.

Would a ban be enforceable? I can kind of see how a government might put a blanket ban on any cybernetic enhancements (though they would likely leave exceptions for military and law enforcement). It would be hard, though, to impose a ban virtual reality, because we already have it. Improvements in VR technology are small and cumulative; we won’t be playing Pong one day and have a neural implant that totally supplants awareness of the original (real) world the next day. The line between drug-like VR and video games will be hard to draw, because no obvious single feature distinguishes one from the other. In fact many argue that we have drug-like VR today, with millions of teenage boys addicted already.

As a youth searching for mystical secrets (a pursuit I eventually decided is as productive as polishing horseshit) I was frequently attracted to the notion that each person in society is somehow simultaneously the creator of everyone else. Alas, I had to give up on that idea because no set of mutual co-creators would deliberately make each other so miserable. (Although perhaps Arrow’s paradox lends credence to that vision.) For reasons I’ll skip, I no longer look for God beyond this world.

But if neuroscience, neural interface technology, and virtual reality engines become good enough, we’ll be able to grant to others powers nearly equal to those a god would have. Moreover, the gods that we become for each other could be bound by contract!

I don’t think I’m being unrealistic. Cyberdrugs as sketched above might never happen for political reasons, but so far there’s no scientific law I know of that bars their possibility.

Court upholds kid’s right to declare “Bong Hits 4 Jesus”

2006-04-25T20:32:00.000-07:00

The task of balancing society’s myriad rights and interests is usually subtle and messy. Cases like this one, in which it’s obvious that the justice system has its priorities straight, make me very happy.

Hat tip to Gojomo.

Israeli mother hosts marriage debate

2006-04-25T09:34:00.000-07:00

I found a good discussion from 2005 regarding a study that finds more intelligent men more likely to marry and more intelligent women less likely to marry. It also provided my introduction to the English blogs of parents in the Middle East – a fascinating world that I never would have checked out on purpose.

I can’t know whether to be happy about the study. If the low marriage rate among highly intelligent women is due primarily to their own preferences, then that sucks. But if instead it’s due primarily to the choice behavior of males, then that makes me very happy indeed.

Money quote: "... with the advent of birth control, smart people are unfit for survival."

“You think immigrants are a problem?”

2006-04-22T21:18:00.000-07:00

… “Then you must hate all these pregnant Americans!”

Sometimes the truth is better than any joke. This is the sort of argument that drew me to economics.

Nearly effortless posture correction

2006-04-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

I just discovered that the secret to keeping one’s back straight is not in the back, but the hips! Try this for yourself: roll the bottom of your hips backward and the top of your hips forward, and see what your back does.

I’m absolutely amazed. This requires almost no strength and feels much better than the posture I’ve always kept. I have tried to “straighten up” before, by sending different commands to my back (rather than my hips), but it never worked – I always got tired and stopped in a few minutes.

Absolutely amazed.

I found this out from Art deVany’s blog. He’s a retired biologist, and uses the term “lordosis” for the hip configuration I’ve described. (I found that amusing, because I had thought lordosis referred to the posture of sexual receptivity adopted by female rats – and I was right.)

Semi-control

2006-04-18T23:07:00.000-07:00

“Chaos theory” is a lousy name, because “chaos” is supposed to mean the opposite of order. Chaos theory isn’t about randomness, but rather about a weird place between randomness and order. That dichotomy is central to organic life – too much randomness (e.g., a temperature too high) and we die; too much order (e.g., a planet smothered in quartz crystals) and we never could have evolved in the first place. A bunch of really smart people have written a bunch about chaos; I’ve forgotten most of the books I liked, but I can at least recommend Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science.

Chaos is part of the way our minds work. We seek out order and novelty in the world simultaneously. We want things to make sense, but we don’t want to be bored. These are useful qualities for biological organisms: a grasp of order allows one to accomplish more stuff, while a handle on novelty allows one to compete with other organisms. The act of living is fundamentally chaotic (in the mathematical sense, not the original one), and our minds are “designed” to help us live, so it seems reasonable that chaos would be a major property of our minds. (Perhaps in support of that idea, it turns out that individual neurons compete for survival and real estate.)

What’s weird about being a human is that after millions of years of neurological evolution, we’re left with all these bizarre side-effects like aesthetics, or art, or humor. We like to look at flames. Why? I suspect it’s that the patterns that flames and other chaotic systems (inc. various screensavers) send to our brains, unpredictable yet ordered and coherent, ape in a simple way the complex patterns we confront in our attempt to stay alive and produce viable offspring.

One could argue that the human activity where the randomness/order dichotomy is most evident is jazz. Good jazz musicians cultivate a sense of kind-of-in-control, until they can invoke it at will. I can’t evoke it at will, but I often stumble into it, and it’s the most enjoyable thing I know about.

There should be a headphones section of the library!

2006-04-18T22:11:00.000-07:00

Right?

Flake awareness

2006-04-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

I have generally operated according to the following principle: presume every individual to be a good person until finding evidence to the contrary. I realized yesterday that the principle requires a little bit of modification. From now on, I will assume that every person is (1) a good person, except (2) that they are a flake, until I have evidence to the contrary.

In particular, this means calling up every client who has scheduled an appointment with me before I show up at their house with nobody there. If I show up while the house is empty except for their teenage daughter who is pulling out of the driveway and telling me that her mom is coming in ten minutes, I will call her mom to make sure. Etx.

Thanks God for NPR.

Signs on the road to techno-heaven

2006-04-03T23:41:00.000-07:00

For those of us awaiting the arrival of controlled macroeconomic experiments facilitated by MMORGPs (massive multiplayer online role-playing game), this might not exactly qualify as a milestone, but it’s weird enough to be of interest. It’s about a live talk show running inside a video game.

Music theory has hurt us

2006-04-03T00:52:00.000-07:00

In my last post, I said that my teachers couldn’t explain music theory any better than a book. I didn’t mean to imply it came easily that way. While the books could be good, there’s only so much any medium can do to make music theory understandable. It is an arbitrary, needlessly complex system. It could be easier, and if it were, we might have a lot more beautiful music. My blood boils at the thought. Music theory is kind of like counting in French or Hindi, only far more crippling to aspiring musicians than those languages seems to be to mathematicians. (In fact, disproportionately many important mathematicians are French or Indian. Um, let’s ignore that.)

It would take a book for me to fully describe what we should use instead of the Western 12-tones-in-seven-tones system, but in a nutshell, the seven tone system (“minor second” = 1 half step, “major second” = 2 half steps, “perfect fifth”=seven half steps, etc.) is garbage. We should instead lay out everything in 12-tone. Seven-tone scales fit perfectly well in a 12-tone system. The colossal avoidable headache of music students is that the reverse is not true: 12 tones do NOT fit uniformly in a seven-tone system.

A good notation should get out of the way quickly. This is why languages with alphabets dominated pictorial ones, and why Arabic numerals dominated Roman ones. Western staff notation is terrible for information theoretic reasons.

One objection is that, given any melody and any tonic center, we would like the relation between any two tones to be immediately apparent. In 12-tone numerical notation, it would be. With the current system, it takes a bunch of mental arithmetic – more than most musicians are willing to do for most of the combinations on the page. This opacity makes it harder than necessary to compose or improvise, which impoverishes the listening public.

Often, band leaders are forced to teach theory to their incoming members. They recognize the failings of music theory, and so they replace it with their own curriculum. This duplication of effort drains productive time from the lives of some of our most creative people. Musicians should be outraged, and move swiftly to replace the system. I guess they’re too busy starving or something.

(Incidentally, the best (traditional) music theory book I know of is the companion booklet to the program Practica Musica. It is a concise and useful exposition (of a needlessly complex system).)

The value of teachers

2006-04-03T00:51:00.000-07:00

Though each was brief, I've had a number of music teachers. They always talked, and what they said was generally useless or already familiar, having been laid out more thoroughly in some book. However, my teachers did convey a certain type of valuable information that can't be written down at all well: namely, they showed me what is possible and what not to bother trying.

Certainly, I watched them play, but that sort of learning is already available for less money in live performance settings. What's unique about teaching situations is that the student can see how the teacher talks about music, which terms roll off the tongue and which require a bit of thought to recall, how long it takes them to recognize an interval or transpose a chord they're reading, what they consider difficult, how many notes they can improvise at once, how well they can execute an idea that occurs to them, which errors in the student’s playing they can hear and which they can't … Such facts contribute to a sense of what the brain and body are capable of, and that sense allows one to use one’s time well.

Music students treat teachers as yogis – these weird, other-worldly creatures who knowingly bestow well-delineated gifts which, given enough ponderment, can come to be understood. That's dumb. We should look at our teachers the way stock brokers look at each other's activities: jealously, intending to extract maximum information from an agent who doesn't necessarily recognize, let alone vocalize, all relevant data.

Ban scholarships!

2006-03-31T01:18:00.000-08:00

I've had much more experience in the last year with scholarships than anyone could want, and I've had a lot of time to ponder the question of who is wasting whose time in the process of scholarship-application. I've come to the conclusion that the people who offer scholarships may be doing society a disservice.

The vast majority of applicants to any given scholarship are losers. For them, the application process is a total waste of time. Moreover, even the winners produce nothing of lasting value; the time they spend on applications effects only a transfer of wealth, not the creation of wealth. So the "benefactor" causes a few people to have an easier time of going to school, but causes a bunch of people to waste significant time pushing paper. Depending on the relative number of winners and losers, the size of the transfer, and the opportunity cost (e.g. foregone wages) of the applicants, it could easily be that society would be better off without any scholarships.

Obviously, a scholarship process that took zero time would produce net benefits. Such a process is hard for me to imagine. But it might be better for everyone if benefactors were less discriminating.

Those quirky pirates

2006-03-23T16:45:00.000-08:00

The thieves responsible for this DVD slapped an English review on the cover which neither they nor, apparently, their consumers could read. (The comments are helpful.)

Hat tip to That’s News to Me, February 27.

The Road to Pretentiousness

2006-03-22T23:23:00.000-08:00

I just bought a couple piano concertos by Lowell Liebermann. I heard the disc before and decided it was fantastic without recognizing that the music is atonal. Now I’m faced with a curious phenomenon: If I pay rapt attention to the music, it’s beautiful, but if I try to multitask (say, blogging as it plays in the background) it becomes unpleasant – disconcerting and tiresome.

Worse, now that recognize that phenomenon, I think it applies to most of the (largely complicated and unpredictable) music I love: none of it seems to do any good in the background. (Fortunately, there exist exceptions to this trend, such as classical music like Bach’s, and jazz like Pat Martino’s. Their music is still complicated and still beautiful, but it’s also in uniform and constrained enough to work well in the background.)

Often, when someone reacts with displeasure to music I worship (e.g. Stravinsky, Cecil Taylor, Yes, Aphex Twin, Meshuggah) I am tempted to retort, “You’re not even trying! Give it a chance! You can’t expect the recording to do all the work for you!” So far I’ve managed to stifle it.

I’m sure there are other fun parts of the human experience that I’m missing out on because their value is similarly obscure. I don’t know whether to care.

Important thing happening

2006-03-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

"In Arabic, 'Internet' Means 'Freedom'"

http://reason.com/rauch/030606.shtml

Paternalism: Weakening our minds?

2006-02-28T10:29:00.000-08:00

There are proponents now of a wide array of paternalistic government programs – forced saving plans, restrictions on products and activities that can hurt the consumer, etc. It’s hard for me to entertain the notion that what a well-informed person chooses to do is not in that person’s interest: If you choose to skydive, even if I would not, it must be that you prefer the life in which you do it to the one in which you don’t. Right?

But let’s try supposing that paternalistic programs work: that is, that the people they coerce are made happier. If so, it is because those coerced would, if left alone, make the wrong decision. Paternalistic policies keep a tendency to make bad decisions from hurting the decision-maker.

Does that, to some extent, undermine the mechanism that motivates people to manage their impulses well? Could it lead to weaker-willed people, unable to make good decisions on their own?

Opinions to stifle if you want to be on the Supreme Court

2006-02-11T20:52:00.000-08:00

Judge Richard Posner, currently on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals (I think), co-wrote a paper in 1978 that argued for a freer market in adoptable children. The basic idea is that some women have a comparative advantage in childbearing. Healthier children and wealthier families would result from a market in which childbearing specialists could trade with others less suited to the task.

As a result, he will never be nominated to the Supreme Court.
[My source: James Reese, a professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate, produces Radio Economics, a podcast that consists entirely of interviews. In the show (available here) dated Sunday, July 24, 2005, John Palmer said so. Palmer writes the Eclectic Econoclast.]

Why do dogs bark more than once?

2006-02-11T17:17:00.000-08:00

A single bark ought to suffice -- it would alert other dogs, or remind a small creature to be afraid of the dog. Successive barks expend calories needlessly, and distract the dog from other productive activities. I see cost with no benefit.

The only potential benefit I can imagine is sexual advertisement. Advertisement is from a public finance perspective inefficient, but from an individual actor's perspective it is necessary, and that's the level of decision-making relevant to nature. Hence peacock's tails, headbutting and other ostensible design flaws.

Extremes of cultural sensitivity

2006-02-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

Mark Stein writes in the Chicago Sun-Times (online for free):

“One day the British foreign secretary will wake up and discover that, in practice, there's very little difference between living under Exquisitely Refined Multicultural Sensitivity and Sharia.”

Digestion and cognitive dissonance

2006-02-05T20:07:00.000-08:00

Culture has a lot to do with what foods you’ll accept, but other standards are universal. Consider tuna and ice cream, or chicken soup with a broth of banana weight-gain smoothie. Could some culture have arisen that would enjoy these mixtures, or are they objectively bad?

The sense of taste serves a purpose: it guided our nutritional decisions before we were conscious, and to some extent it continues to guide us. I weight train, and it demands a certain experimental attitude regarding nutrition. I mix a lot of things that other people wouldn’t dream of. Usually it’s okay, but I have hit upon a few totally abhorrent combinations. All of them involve mixing some high-protein food source with something very different, such as the aforementioned weight gain smoothie with chicken soup.

Gustatory (taste) sensations are partly responsible for the cocktail of digestive enzymes that ends up in the stomach. I suspect that the abhorrent combinations I’ve hit on are so gross because they are indigestible – no appropriate chemical cocktail can be devised to handle them.

Is pity good?

2006-02-05T19:36:00.000-08:00

Merriam Webster online defines pity as “sympathetic sorrow for one suffering, distressed, or unhappy”. It’s more than recognizing a sad state of affairs; it involves feeling unahppiness oneself as a result of seeing it in another.

Is pity, particularly pity that’s unexpressed, good for anything? Is it useless suffering, or does it enrich one’s life?

I heard some playwright on NPR declare that a good artist must understand that humanity is “ultimately tragic.” I think it’s strange to think of humanity as ultimately anything in particular. However, I can imagine that the ability to feel tragedy (as opposed to merely recognizing it) could improve one’s experience of life.

I’m interested because the sensation of pity is to a large extent within my conscious control.

Jocks vs. Brains

2006-01-23T18:04:00.000-08:00

When I was growing up, many around me endorsed the jock / brain dichotomy: one could excel either physically or mentally, and make up for deficiencies in one area by doing well in the other.

To a certain extent, that’s true: people specialize, and we’re all better off because of it. But it’s becoming obvious to me, as I begin to wade into neurobiology, that the idea of brain “strength” and physical health as distinct options is inaccurate. A well-functioning brain requires a fantastic physical coordination of organs (including but not limited to one’s digestive and cardiovascular systems) and a delicate, finely tuned chemical bath. Whenever a stereotypically scrawny, uncoordinated genius thinks of himself as having a lousy body, he is defining “body” rather narrowly.

Anecdotes of geeks with hayfever and other allergies abound. I wonder if there really is a statistical correlation there; if so, one might hypothesize that their brains have evolved ways of accomplishing difficult feats that require special, idiosyncratic chemical conditions.

Also contrary to popular western stereotype, the brain depends for its healthy development on a vital engagement with the world, rather than prolonged studious isolation. I like that; it fits better with my intuition, and its behavioral implications are more fun.

Internet advertising is whack

2006-01-16T02:09:00.000-08:00

I used to be able to completely tune out the Yahoo ads. Weird letters flying around, percent signs dancing in front of a house in silhouette, all of it – I didn’t even have to try to ignore them, because they never registered in the first place.

Now the ads on my Yahoo account are dedicated in full to female models. I still don’t know what they’re advertising, because reading and storing in memory the advertiser’s logo would take conscious effort. Their advertisers gain no sales from me, and I gain no useful information from them. But they have finally succeeded in distracting me, sometimes severely. Yesterday I surfed a lingerie catalog that they brought to my attention. I still don’t know whose it was.

Here’s another bizarre business arrangement: some British kid’s idea for putting himself through college. He auctioned off the individual pixels of a webpage for a dollar apiece on EBay. He called it the Million Dollar Homepage, and advertisers on it have in fact made him a millionaire.

I am dying to know what sort of media formats we will “end up with” in the next century. Will advertisers yearn for the days of a more captive audience? Will we the hyper-free audience yearn for the days of free stuff, paid for by advertisers too stupid to realize they weren’t reaching us? As consumers’ gain the capacity to navigate the set of commercial goods and services faster, more accurately and more thoroughly, will advertising become less relevant, because we already know exactly where to get what we want? Will advertisers react by targeting younger, less search-savvy and more easily suggestible audiences? Can they do that any more than they already do?

[Hat tip to The Agitator re. the Million Dollar Homepage.]

Accounting for mathematicians

2006-01-13T22:14:00.000-08:00

For the “things I wish someone showed me in high school” department:

I just found out how to do long math problems without getting lost! I’m elated. This discovery hasn’t just made things easier; it has made possible things that I was previously incapable of.

It’s just an accounting system. First, label every initial proposition with a number, in order:

X > 3 __________________ (1)
Y > 3 X ________________ (2)
Z > 3 Y ________________ (3)
etc.

Then start deducing stuff, labeling each new deduction and indicating how you got there:

Y > 9 by (1) and (2) ___________ (4)
Z > 27 by (3) and (4) __________ (5)
etc.

That’s right, my discovery is: write stuff out just like it would be in a math book. I knew that such a format was a good way to present an answer, but I didn’t realize it's useful before the answer's in hand.

To make it obvious what I’m talking about, I’ve had to choose an example that’s easier than the sort of problem for which you would actually need to do any accounting. But for complicated problems, the difference that a labeling system makes is just ungodly huge. For one thing, when something goes wrong, it’s much easier to find out where the error lies. For another thing, you can see what you’ve already tried, without which benefit I and billions (just a rough guess) of others can be prone to going in circles.

I feel like I’ve thought I was blind for years, and I just discovered that I’d been trying to see with the lights off. My inability to do long math problems has shaped to a large extent the areas of math I’ve explored – I took on topology, abstract algebra, combinatorics, etc., and stayed away from differential geometry, optimization and whatnot, because the proofs in the first set of things I listed were short, and the proofs in the second set were long. Whole new career options may have opened up for me today.

The unsettling fallibility of brains

2006-01-11T03:43:00.000-08:00

This year I began my exploration of neurophysiology. It is becoming apparent to me that the mind, a thing I used to think of as pretty solid, is quite ridiculous. I’ll describe two aspects that particularly stun me:

(1) Consensus among neurophysiologists seems to hold that the mind is a patchwork of semi-autonomous programs with limited access to one another’s calculations. The imperfect wiring between them leads parts of the brain to learn to “communicate” in ingenious and bizarre ways. Inter-brain communication is easiest to see in split-brain patients; however, it happens in ordinary people too.

To me the most astounding split-brain experiment is this one: Ask someone to feel around in a bag with their left hand, then tell you what’s in there. The right hemisphere gets the sensory stimuli from the left hand, but the left hemisphere controls language, and because the corpus callosum has been split, the left doesn’t know what signals have arrived at the right. Pain signals, however, are sent to both hemispheres. Apparently the right one is able to figure this out, because many patients eventually hit upon this strategy: Drive the pencil-point into the hand. The left hemisphere realizes it’s something sharp, and begins to guess, out loud. The right reacts to those guesses with facial ticks, smiling when the answers are close, until the word “Pencil” emerges.

I realize that pointing to the fracturedness of the personalities of people who have had their brains severed is not per se evidence that the rest of us suffer inter-brain schisms. Demonstrating the second proposition is harder and not as exciting, but neuroscience has embraced it.

In The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity, Daniel Dennett explains how the concept of “self” imposes a veneer of coherence over our neural sub-systems even though experiments can demonstrate that they routinely conflict with each other. The self is a useful concept, but one with properties we’re not very good at thinking about. For instance, some questions regarding the self literally have no answer – such as the question, “What do you really want?”

We can provide an answer, and once we do we tend to defend it. That defense may be disadvantageous from an individual’s standpoint, but from a group standpoint it’s good: If we can depend on the expressed psychological states of others to remain somewhat constant, we can base plans on them. Thus the unity that the notion of self imposes on our patchwork behavior has evolutionary value. In nature, the self needn’t live up to any higher standard. However, under scientific scrutiny, it’s an embarrassingly ugly hack.

(2) The gambler’s fallacy. We see patterns where there are none. This trait served us well in the wild, because most of the stuff that mattered to us exhibited useful patterns. However, our cultural development has outstripped our cognitive development, and we are left believing in phenomena such as lucky numbers and astrology.

We so depend on pattern-recognition to track our gains and losses that we do a lot of it subconsciously and automatically. When experimental subjects are given a gambling game to play and are explicitly told it is random, with no patterns, their brains still predict future winnings based on past ones (Gehring and Willoughby, “The Medial Frontal Cortex and the Rapid Processing of Gains and Losses”, Science 2002 – as paraphrased byAdam Gifford in his working paper, “The Role of Culture and Meaning in Rational Choice”).

Adam Gifford hypothesizes that evolution favored those who perceive cause where there is none to those who failed to perceive legitimate cause. I like that explanation because it exists. (Can you think of any others?)

Not only do we attribute pattern to random sequences, we attribute agency where it doesn’t belong. Paul Bloom’s “Is God an Accident?” (The Atlantic, Dec 2005):

Stewart Guthrie, an anthropologist at Fordham University, was the first modern scholar to notice the importance of this tendency as an explanation for religious thought. In his book Faces in the Clouds, Guthrie presents anecdotes and experiments showing that people attribute human characteristics to a striking range of real-world entities, including bicycles, bottles, clouds, fire, leaves, rain, volcanoes, and wind. We are hypersensitive to signs of agency — so much so that we see intention where only artifice or accident exists. As Guthrie puts it, the clothes have no emperor.

Bloom’s hypothesis is that the (scientifically consensual) schism between brain subsystems for predicting the behavior of physical objects and brain subsystems for predicting others’ psychology makes us biologically predisposed to believe in the supernatural.

In a significant study the psychologists Jesse Bering, of the University of Arkansas, and David Bjorklund, of Florida Atlantic University, told young children a story about an alligator and a mouse, complete with a series of pictures, that ended in tragedy: "Uh oh! Mr. Alligator sees Brown Mouse and is coming to get him!" [The children were shown a picture of the alligator eating the mouse.] "Well, it looks like Brown Mouse got eaten by Mr. Alligator. Brown Mouse is not alive anymore."

The experimenters asked the children a set of questions about the mouse's biological functioning — such as "Now that the mouse is no longer alive, will he ever need to go to the bathroom? Do his ears still work? Does his brain still work?" — and about the mouse's mental functioning, such as "Now that the mouse is no longer alive, is he still hungry? Is he thinking about the alligator? Does he still want to go home?"

As predicted, when asked about biological properties, the children appreciated the effects of death: no need for bathroom breaks; the ears don't work, and neither does the brain. The mouse's body is gone. But when asked about the psychological properties, more than half the children said that these would continue: the dead mouse can feel hunger, think thoughts, and have desires. The soul survives. And children believe this more than adults do, suggesting that although we have to learn which specific afterlife people in our culture believe in (heaven, reincarnation, a spirit world, and so on), the notion that life after death is possible is not learned at all. It is a by-product of how we naturally think about the world.

I guess I can’t make their points as well as the authors I have mentioned; perhaps I should just wave my arm at their work.

Part of the reason these ideas are so unsettling to me is that they are subtle. I would have thought that a society full of patchwork selves would exhibit more inconsistent behaviors, and more problems due to them. I also would have thought that a hyper-proclivity to see pattern and agency where there is none would show up as a higher incidence of delusion, and more problems due to that.

I suppose, depending on your political allegiance, you might think that the mechanisms behind religion and behind conspiracy theory worldviews are pretty harmful. But even if you think so, as far as worlds full of delusional schizophrenics goes, ours seems pretty mild.

Dangerous ideas

2006-01-06T02:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/01/the_end_of_insi.html

I can't believe I have the pleasure of reading stuff like this.

The link I’ve provided gets you to Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, who provides a nice introduction. From there you can link to the whole big list. (Just in case his page goes offline, though, I’ll also stick a direct link to the list of dangerous ideas here.)

Mixing video games and politics

2006-01-03T00:56:00.000-08:00

When I was a dumb kid, I played a lot of video games, in which bizarre cartoon-like creatures conspired and fought.

I think they did me some good. Children play stuff because it’s fun, and our perception of fun is, in a Darwinian sense, “meant” to induce the developing brain to seek activities that improve the brain, thereby improving the chances that the brain’s owner will reproduce. Video games are complicated, and fast, and the good ones require one to anticipate the behavior of other humans. I believe those qualities are good for you. It’s a testament to the strength of biological imperatives that when parents don’t want their kids playing those games, but the kids do, the kids usually win.

While the aspects I have described seem to me bound to have positive effects, I have not addressed the question of how video games affect a player’s attitude toward violence. I don’t know. This guy and these guys sure think they’re harmful – in fact, so it seems does every study that Google returns. It may be that Google returns the most popular things first, and for any topic X the position that X is bad is more popular than the position that X is good,– but I tried including phrases like “no effect” and “harmless”, and still got none of the other side of the argument, if it exists.

What I can say, though, is that video games have meaning now that they did not when I played them. I left right around the time that games started to be able to portray bleeding three-dimensional humanoids. Perhaps that novelty was enough to allow the storylines to be stupid, because they were: “creatures from hell invade Earth”, or “men fight creatures from hell on a moon base”. Even if they were to affect my attitudes toward violence, they could not have affected my politics.

Today, most of the storylines go like this: “There’s a terrorist threat [over there]. You must neutralize it.” The player is not given the opportunity to deliberate the morality of this imperative. He obeys it. He has fun doing so. His simulated fellow citizens treat him like a hero when he succeeds. (Here’s one description of what video games are like now.)

I would whine at this point that video games ought to be apolitical, to keep impressionable youth from forming baseless opinions about who’s right and about what sort of war actions are legitimate. But I don’t see any way around it – the realistic games sell the best, and the one-sided, “you’re a hero” games sell the best. Telling firms not to make those games seems like a violation of the First Amendment.

It’s all ugly and complicated.

Fake is better

2005-12-28T00:56:00.000-08:00

Imagine somebody were to argue that Kool-Aid’s convenience outweighs the superior taste of real grape juice, and convinced society to switch en-masse to Kool-Aid. Imagine further that we grew so accustomed to Kool-Aid that grape juice began to taste somehow wrong, and we now preferred the taste of Kool-Aid. Sick, no? It happened, in music:

The twelve-tone equal-temperament (12-TET) system that we use today developed as an approximation to the first few elements of the harmonic series. The ratio of any two distinct tones in 12-TET is an irrational number, some power of the twelfth root of two (the half-step), and that irrationality creates dissonance. By contrast, scales whose frequencies are related by small whole-number fractions are minimally dissonant, because they synchronize – but we wouldn’t know, because we never hear such scales.

Fortunately, there now exists computer software that allows one to play in harmonically perfect scales from the computer keyboard. (“Harmonically perfect scales” = “just intonation” = “rational temperament” and other combinations thereof.)

I did a little experiment over Christmas, subjecting a few family members to blind taste tests of the two scales. I would play a major seventh chord (e.g. C, E, G, B) first in 12-TET, then in a scale for which the tones were perfect consonances (1, 5/4, 3/2, 15/8). Very consistently, everybody preferred the approximation to the real thing!

12-TET is a recent phenomenon, dating to around Bach, whose series of compositions, The Well-Tempered Clavier, was intended to showcase 12-TET’s capacity for modulation to any of twelve identical keys – all of them slightly wrong. Bach and others eventually convinced Europe and most of the world that the novel ability to modulate “freely” was worth the sacrifice of perfect harmonic intervals.

But that is not what my family preferred about 12-TET, because I never changed key. They thought a single, static chord sounded better in 12-TET than with just intonation. Moreover, that reaction is typical of people who have just been exposed to harmonically perfect scales (according to I don’t remember who; sorry).

My uncle Steve, an occasionally-professional musician, said the 12-TET chord had more “soul”, while the other was “too consonant”. Too consonant to sound good. His comment, while provocative, is not a good defense of 12-TET: dissonance should be intentional, not ubiquitous.

Before 12-TET, composers had to be conscious of the frequency relationships between tones. Now they don’t – almost all of them identify the pitch spectrum with the piano keyboard, as if the latter begets the former. Composers have largely lost sight of the mathematical origins of the pitches they work with.

I think we have screwed ourselves out of a lot of good music. Can you imagine restricting dance to a lattice – and not just some abstruse branch of dance, but almost all the dance in the world? Or can you imagine visual art limited to 16 colors – and no longer because it is convenient, but because we have come to perceive colors from outside the grid as wrong? Can you imagine math restricted to some excruciatingly small subset of the real line? That last example actually happened, although we eventually saw our way past it. It is hard to imagine how we could see our way past 12-TET.

I realize I am being quixotic, but I really think this is sad.

Ways I might change my tune

I have so far complained about the near-total domination of 12-TET over more conscious tuning systems. Might there be a few silver linings?

(1) A few years back, I bought some music in just intonation, from the Just Intonation Network. It is indeed sublime. Perhaps exposure to such artistic heights, and frustration with my own instrumental resources, will conspire to drive me away from what has been a blood-sucking hobby.

But really, I’m not going to stop playing music, so that’s dumb.

(2) Maybe the 12-TET system prevents musicians from wasting time. There are, after all, a lot of other parameters musicians can work with – the words, the instrumentation, the cultural context – and the Pandora’s Box of true freedom might lead one to spend so much time on harmonic questions that the music is left too poor in orchestration, lyrical content, or social midwifery to accomplish anything. Indeed, much of the music I got from the Just Intonation Network could be accused of such faults.

Alas, argument (2) is also lame, because although it’s true that some people would be wasting there time working with just intonation (e.g. Bob Dylan), there will exist others whose time would be best spent there, given appropriate accomodations. Comparative advantages differ. I would like a world in which someone whose comparative advantage might lie in the exploration of rational scales would have access to keyboards made for its exploration. Presently, such people have to learn how to program, or else how to build instruments. That difficulty drives most of them to other pursuits.

Which sucks.

Are marriage norms efficient?

2005-12-23T02:41:00.000-08:00

Judge Richard Posner has hypothesized that the common law is economically efficient. He seems to be right that our intuitive notion of justice often aligns itself spookily well with the efficient rule that pops out of a cost / benefit analysis. On the other hand, there are many shocking examples (e.g. regulating the production of flu vaccines so tightly that the number of firms producing them drops from 30 to 3) of inefficiency in the common law.

I wonder whether cultural norms are similarly efficient. In this blurb I will consider two particular norms, regarding marriage: the expectation of an arranged marriage, and the taboo against divorce.

The qualities by which we would label a norm “good” or “bad” are the same ones by which we would judge a law: Law X is better than law Y if, on net, the total societal happiness under law X is greater than that under law Y. A norm against divorce, then, would seem to indicate that our society “believes” it will be happier if there are fewer divorces. (Whole societies don’t hold beliefs, but it can be useful to think of them that way.) This does not necessarily mean that society believes individual couples will be happier if they stay together (although that might be so); the existence of a norm against divorce suggests merely society’s belief that the couple, their children, their relatives, and everyone else dealing with the couple will on net be better off if there is no divorce.

I suspect the norm against divorce was efficient. It is weakening, and I think that is efficient, too. That is, I think it is more likely for the gains from a divorce to outweigh the losses today than it was a few centuries ago. Similarly, the expectation of an arranged marriage is less prevalent today than it was in the past, and I believe that is efficient as well – arranged marriages are less likely to work today than they were once.

The mass social phenomenon of falling in love is recent; one can watch it happening from the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote from 18^th-century France. Not much before that, European marriages were arranged; in many parts of the world they continue to be. One might look for philosophical differences between arranged marriage and “marriage for love”, but I think they vanish if we define “love” the right way, which I hypothesize is this: “love” is what one feels consciously when one’s body decides subconsciously that a mate is optimal, i.e. that a better yet still feasible mate will not be found. There is no philosophical difference, just a pragmatic one of who’s choosing the match.

The question naturally arises whether an individual’s parents might be better suited to choosing that individual’s spouse.

For most of humanity’s history, people did not change social surroundings much. One generally inhabited either a town or a traveling tribe; either way, the social environment was stable. In such situations a family could gather all necessary information on a child’s marriageable peers. If so, and given that one’s ability to weigh future payoffs only fully develops in one’s mid to late twenties, a family might indeed be expected to consistently choose a better mate than the child him- or herself. Furthermore, in a town or tribe with little change in population over that child’s lifespan, the well-chosen mate selected by the parents early on is likely to continue to be the most appropriate mate years later. In these circumstances, a taboo against divorce would be helpful to the community.

Modern society is bigger, more complex, and subject to heavy traffic. Parents would have a difficult time surveying every candidate, because there are more qualities to consider (a point I will leave for a future post), more candidates, and more change in the pool of candidates. Further, certain kinds of information which are difficult for parents to judge have become more relevant.

For instance, one who expects to move a lot (what’s that statistic – the average American now changes jobs six times before retirement?) will care more about a spouse’s conversational potential than someone who can expect his buddies to live next door forever. For conversational potential to be high, mates’ interests must overlap. The range of potential interests today is wider than at any point in the history of our species, and the chance of overlap accordingly smaller. The search for a mate in a compatible social situation may be feasibly undertaken by one’s parents, but the search for a mate with compatible interests is difficult to proxy.

An individual’s mate may be optimal at one time, and become sub-optimal as other candidates are discovered. This can only happen in a society with significant human traffic, so it was less of a problem in pre-industrial societies.

Someone, for instance the Pope, who is categorically against divorce must argue that once one has committed to marriage, there can be no better use of resources than maintenance of the marriage. That is, the costs of divorce always outweigh any possible benefits. Aside from divine inspiration, what might lead someone to say that? Let’s consider the costs of divorce:

To divorce is to sacrifice a frighteningly large investment. Ceteris paribus, a nation full of investment-sacrificers will do worse than it would otherwise. Among those investments are some obvious ones (e.g. financial) and some less obvious ones (e.g. “firm-specific investments,” “on-the-job training” – the time spent learning how to make marriage with a particular individual go smoothly). Of course, the ceteris paribus condition does not hold; a nation that outlaws divorce creates a stronger incentive for people to choose mates that will last, and (arguing the other way) a nation full of divorcers may move from less efficient to more efficient uses of resources. (Imagine how efficient our labor force would be if employers were not allowed to fire and employees not allowed to quit.)

Another cost of divorce which former Popes might have had in mind when arguing that divorce is never worth it: Marriage was once largely a business decision. The families of spouses can expect to transact with each other regularly (not necessarily monetarily); they therefore have a strong incentive to pair offspring with other families that offer attractive transaction opportunities, and they usually succeeded. Thus, dissolution of a long-standing marriage could be highly disruptive to many people who were not direct parties to the marriage contract. Of course, this disruption-of-family-ties argument is weak today, because we are less reliant on family and more reliant on other institutions, such as the school, the workplace, the sports league, the interest group, etc – which seems to support the hypothesis that the weakening of the taboo against divorce is efficient.

The sacrifice of investments and the disruption of family ties are positive costs of divorce, but they are finite, and so (Papal admonitions notwithstanding) they could be outweighed by the potential gain from divorce.

The benefits of divorce are precisely the opportunity costs of marriage: the ability to do anything that marriage precludes, such as a different marriage, or life as an artist. When the life expectancy was 30, having children was something like one’s first and last accomplishment. Now, one may have time to do something else afterward, so it may be efficient to terminate the marriage contract once the project for which it existed is complete.

Gifts: good or bad?

2005-12-19T11:49:00.000-08:00

Economists always knock the idea of giving gifts. The argument goes like this: If I give you a $20 pair of socks, they may be nice socks, and you may be happy to have them, but you’re not as happy to have them as you would have been to have $20, which you would have spent in some other way. Thus, purchasing a gift destroys wealth – at least if the gift is a nice pair of socks.

However, the same language and logic can provide an argument in favor of gift-giving, in certain circumstances. If I could find an object G such that the utility I predict you will receive from G is greater than the utility of anything you would have spent the money on yourself, then my giving G to you for the holidays is in fact efficient.

How often do circumstances favorable to gift-giving come about?

(If I’m right that you’ll like G more than anything else, then it would be equally efficient for me to simply convince you of that fact, leading you to spend your own money on G. I would have performed a valuable service, by delivering information that permits you to attain greater utility.)

Rebutting Searle's Chinese Box argument

2005-12-06T23:04:00.000-08:00

(I've taken this post down because many others have already said what I think, long ago and in more detail than I.)

Dying to talk to someone

2005-11-30T22:14:00.000-08:00

I was imagining having an Uncle Joe across the galaxy: being able to talk to him over the radio, but unable ever to see him. Then I realized that scenario does not make sense. The incongruity between my intuition and my understanding of physics was delightful.

Radio waves are light, and hence subject to the speed of light, so a single conversation at interstellar ranges could take lifetimes. Moreover, since visible light and infrared light are both light, my inability to see Uncle Joe is practically identical to my inability to exchange radio messages with him.

One difference is that radio signals are serial, whereas visual signals are series-parallel. If we needed to transmit radio messages in parallel, though, we could do it by using more than one frequency (“channel”).

A stranger difference between radio and visual is the potential for broadcasting at different volumes. To broadcast a visual image of Joe more “loudly”, Joe’s engineers would have to shine more light on him, and to distinguish him from background radiation I would require more light than his body could reflect without combusting. Still, intergalactic radio and intergalactic semaphore are essentially the same process.

My Earth-formed concept of distance does not predict well what happens at interstellar ranges. That tickles me. The Earth-formed concepts of number, or Euclidean geometry, those seem to hold at any range in the universe. (Non-Euclidean geometries have been sought by astronomers, but none found.) However, other intuitions just don’t scale.

Calculatedly subconscious generosity

2005-11-30T00:04:00.000-08:00

Part I: Conditions under which altruism is inevitable

A rationally self-interested person will, if he understands enough psychology and has enough stuff (and satisfies some plausible assumptions) choose to be altruistic. Check it:

Consider a hypothetical person, Dude With Stuff. Dude will give away some of his stuff, or some of his time (not that there’s much difference), because he’ll recognize that it is optimal for his own happiness. Dude recognizes the positive but diminishing marginal returns to “consumption” (which I’ll define here as enjoyment on his own of his stuff), just as Dude recognizes the positive but diminishing returns to altruism. Some of the return to altruism comes in the form of reciprocation – friendship, political back-scratching, etc. Some comes in the form of recognition by third parties. Hopefully, some of the return to altruism is the selfless joy of giving, without thought of future material gain.

A rational Dude will engage in altruism whenever the value of an additional unit of altruism is above that of an additional unit of consumption. Dude can only continue to be totally selfish for as long as the value of additional consumption is above the value of the first unit of altruism. If consumption gets arbitrarily small (which is conceivable although not unavoidable) and if altruism is everywhere positive (which seems likely for the average person but is again not unavoidable), then there exists a threshold of wealth beyond which altruism is better for Dude than additional consumption.

Part II: Maximizing the psychological effectiveness of altruism

So far I have left out something which for many people may to be a big factor in altruistic behavior: they dislike the calculation. Therefore, one might rationally decide to foster some subconscious behavior pattern in oneself such that the likelihood of choosing high-yield benefiters to one’s altruism is high, and the cost of consciously making that calculation is small. Even if the subconscious algorithm were subject to error, that error might be more than compensated for by the benefit to one’s sense of well-being by not having to witness one’s own pecuniary scheming.

I believe this sublimation occurs in everyone, to some degree. Sure, gift-giving is often consciously rational, but a lot of it is unconsciously rational.

Consider an example: When someone on the street stops you to ask the time, you might think to yourself, “What costs and benefits do I incur from revealing the information this person has asked? I am slowed; that’s a cost. Maybe I feel like a better person if I answer truthfully than if I ignore; that’s a benefit. And there’s a chance word could get around that I’m a jerk; avoiding that is a benefit. On net, I guess the slowing down is outweighed by those two benefits, so I’ll respond.”

But you don’t do that, right? You probably don’t even make a conscious decision to answer – you just do it. Somehow, the cost-benefit analysis you’ve avoided has been sublimated.

That may seem like a trivial example, but more “substantial” decisions operate in the same way: A mother deciding whether to feed her son’s friend; a drug user deciding whether to share with his neighbor; a woman deciding whether to give her boyfriend a ride to work; etc. Sometimes altruistic decisions are conscious, but many, perhaps most of them, are not ... and maybe that's optimal. We make faster decisions, the decisions are on net pretty good, and we feel better about ourselves in making them.

We really ought to have three ears.

2005-11-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

The brain calculates the origin of a sound in part by measuring the time elapsed between the sound’s arrival at one ear and its arrival at the other. Other procedures accompany that one, such as spectral analysis. (For instance, your brain knows that distant sounds lose treble, even if you don’t.) However, the elapsed-time calculation is a fundamental one.

The brain’s calculations of the origins of sound work astonishingly well; however, they IS prone to error. For instance, a sound reaching your skull from directly behind you can sometimes sound as if it comes from somewhere else. It’s an unsettling illusion, because it persists even after you’ve recognized it, as long as you don’t move your head.

If we had three noncollinear ears, we could triangulate, and such ambiguities would vanish.

(Sticklers for the geometric truth might gripe that, were the elapsed-time calculation the brain’s only method for determining the origin of a sound, then every sound not originating from the plane spanned by the three ears could be interpreted as having one of two distinct origins. We would need four ears in general position to truly make no mistakes. However, choosing from among two choices is so much easier than choosing from a continuous circular array that I think our brains could adequately handle the task using spectral analysis or other tricks. That is, I don't think a fourth ear would be worth the trouble.)

The argument that we need more than two receivers to adequately determine the spatial origin of signals applies only to ears, not eyes. If we were content with knowing the direction of a signal, then a single eye would be enough; we use two of them so that we can determine how far something is from the receiver. (Astonishingly, we manage the same task with our ears. I don't think an extra ear would help with the distance calculation at all.)

Is spirituality a good thing?

2005-10-29T00:56:00.000-07:00

(See the end for a brief definition, if you want.)

Consider the belief that there is no world beyond the physical world. At the moment I’m interested in examining not potential arguments for that belief, but rather the implications of it.

If there’s no world beyond the physical one, the institution of religion could still be useful. It makes some people happy, it keeps kids off drugs, whatever. Religion does some good stuff. On the other hand, religion does some terrible stuff, too, like found America. (Just kidding. I love America.) Whether the good that religious institutions do outweighs the bad is an empirical question I wouldn’t know how to address.

But if there is no world beyond the world, then whether or not religion as an institution is a good thing, the false spiritual beliefs that those religions prescribe must be doing net harm, right? To my chagrin, I can’t say so for certain, because there exist arguments in favor of entertaining spiritual beliefs even if they’re false. I can think of a couple: (1) They might compel believers to behave better than they would have otherwise, and (2) they might provide comfort – that is, the beliefs might be goods in their own right. (1) I’m skeptical of, but (2) could be compelling. Both are, again, empirical questions I’m unable to answer.

Of course, it’s easy to think of ways that false spiritual beliefs would be harmful. If you think you will survive death, then you are likely to make poor intertemporal consumption decisions. If you think scriptures are a shortcut to the truth, you are likely to abnegate a lot of valuable philosophical debate. If you think you and your affiliates are the only people who will be admitted to Heaven, you are likely to put yourself through a lot of unnecessary pity. More generally, if the world is one way and you believe it’s another, then on net your error is far more likely to result in harm than benefit.

However, judging from the overwhelming number of religious people, it might be that the psychological benefits of believing in a spirit world outweigh the various harms resulting from misperceiving the real one.

I would not expect anybody, however religious, to argue with the above potential negative effects of false spirituality. Religious people (like all people) assume their beliefs are correct; it would be strange for them to defend the utility of their beliefs under the assumption that those beliefs are wrong.

Yet the question concerns me, because I think spirit, God, etc. is wishful thinking. I want to know whether I should desire that they all stop believing nonsense, or whether I should instead be thankful for it.

The aforepromised definition: Let’s define spirituality as “A belief in and preoccupation with a world beyond the physical world.” Include notions of thought, mind, ethics, and other computational-cognitive phenomena in the physical world, but banish notions of soul, God, and other non-falsifiable phenomena to the spirit world.

Could sleep benefit a robot?

2005-10-27T20:05:00.000-07:00

We will die. We don't know what it'll be like. But we know what sleep is like, and we compare death to it all the time. The ability to fall back on that metaphor helps us somewhat to deal with the emotional disturbance arising from our expectation of death.

Those are facts. Here’s a conjecture: Maybe the need for sleep comes in part from the need to reassure oneself that such experiences aren’t so bad? That is, maybe we’re assuaging our fear of death when we sleep? It sure would be nice, because it would suggest that by becoming less afraid of death, I could reduce my sleep requirement!

More generally, I wonder whether sleep serves a purpose psychologically, beyond what it accomplishes biologically. We know that animals need sleep, even animals like fish that eschew heavy introspection. That’s because sleep serves real, biological, physically concrete needs, such as letting us knit brain cells together in ways that we can’t do when they are in use. But I wonder whether there exist other benefits of sleep that are specific to the software of creatures with a notion of self, benefits having nothing to do with biology?

Assuaging one’s fear of death would be an example of a non-biological psychological benefit – e.g., a benefit that even intelligent machines could garner from sleep. Another such benefit might be that sleep forces one to step back from one’s involvement in the world. It could be perceived (erroneously, but perceived nonetheless) as the world’s way of saying, “You’ve got to chill out,” and because it’s “said” in such a peremptory manner, the “advice” is heeded, and the “advice” turns out to be healthy.

I’m stretching to look for reasons that sleep might be good for the mind even independently of the body, because sleep feels that way to me: the comfort that sleep provides seems partly philosophical, rather than purely biological. Sleep is a necessary part of the day, the way sex or gunfights are necessary parts of certain kinds of movies. Whether or not they have to happen as a matter of mechanism, they have to happen in order for the experience to feel complete and satisfying.

Alas, I’m probably confusing cause and effect. Sleep probably feels philosophically satisfying precisely because the human genome discovered that such feelings make us most likely to get enough sleep.

Firms aren’t parents, but money is life

2005-10-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

Adam Gifford, a professor of mine, basically made the latter statement today. It was an epiphany to me.

He was going off on how our tort system doesn’t make sense. While there are multiple ways it’s unreasonable, the focus today was on the tendency juries have to punish the act of equating money with life.

Let me use an example: An auto manufacturer has to decide which safety devices to include in a car. They do that by figuring out which feature set will elicit the highest profit. If a feature helps sales, it’s because people want it, and so it should be included. If it hurts, it is not something people want, and it should be left out.

One could argue, “But that’s not fair! The consumer is uninformed about all the stuff that goes into an automobile, or any complicated machine. Producers therefore have a responsibility to make safe products, whether or not the consumer knows about it.” Well, in fact firms already do include safety features that most consumers don’t know or care about. That’s not weird: they have good market-based reasons to do it.

The question is not whether to include little-known safety features, but at what point to stop – and this is where juries get it wrong. There exist mechanisms that communicate to firms what is worth including and what is not. If you don’t trust the preferences revealed by most consumers’ purchases, there are those consumers who pay attention and make noise. Firms have reputations to protect. There exist consumer advocacy groups, watchdogs, and ratings services. Praise from them translates into profits; blacklisting translates into pain. And of course there’s government, which tells firms what they have to do.

Firms have to pay attention to that stuff. If they don’t, they go out of business. The question that I claim juries answer poorly is, supposing a firm adheres to all the guidelines laid out by the various groups keeping tabs on its products, does that firm have a duty to put even more safety into their stuff? If they want to, they certainly can … but I don’t think it’s a duty. It is the purpose of firms to provide people with what they want, not to tell them what they’re allowed to have.

We should not want it to be the duty of firms to invent safety standard. It would create a conflict of interest. If we want safety standards to be good, they should come from outside of the firm; the firm should be in the simple business of meeting those standards at low cost, thereby allowing consumers to enjoy those standards.

Not every safety feature is desirable – otherwise, everyone who could afford one would drive a $300,000 armored personnel vehicle. A producer by definition has to decide what’s worth producing, and if the benefit of a thing is less than its cost, that thing should not be produced. In following that principle, car manufacturers and other producers are basing life-or-death decisions on money.

Juries don’t like that. When they hear about a company that did not include some feature to make cars a little less dangerous, and there’s a chance that the left-out feature would have saved a plaintiff from injury, a jury finding in the plaintiff’s favor seems to routinely include a premium intended to punish the cavalier equation of life with dollars and cents.

But – and here’s the second point of this post – dollars and cents are life. You can turn your life (time) into money, and you can turn your money into life (time). The conversion isn’t perfect; every time it is made, something is lost. You’ll never be able to buy exactly the time that you spent earning money this year. But the conversion is real, and important, and it goes both ways. Every time you pay someone to do something that you could do if you spent enough time at it – sew your clothes, hook up your internet, cook your exotic lunch, raise your children – you are buying time. In that sense, we have more time now than ever before in history.

If we needed something to measure life in terms of, money would seem to be the only candidate. Is the measurement imperfect? Sure. But is it unreasonable? No.

In particular, juries don’t like to see life-or-death decisions based on money. But in many cases, that’s the only thing one could base them on.

Oh, I’m bored. Goodnight.

Math trauma: Suppressing logic rather than data

2005-10-15T22:57:00.000-07:00

Some psychologists believe people suppress data they find too upsetting to retain. What if some brain somewhere categorized the entire logical process that way, and suppressed it, rendering the brain’s owner bad at things like math?

I’m not saying I know anyone I think this happened to. It’s just a hypothetical.

Could such suppression of logic happen? It seems like it might work, from an upset brain’s point of view. Upsetting data is only upsetting to the extent that it can be processed. Suppressing the logic that enables one to become upset at a memory would be as effective as suppressing the memory itself.

It would be more costly, so it seems unlikely that a brain would “choose” logic suppression over data suppression without a reason. However, there might be something preventing the brain from suppressing the offending data itself. For instance, the data might be that someone is going to try to kill you.

I concede that a brain probably could not disable “the entire logical process” without basically disabling itself. But maybe it would be possible for that brain to merely introduce a high level of error into its logical processes, rather than disabling them entirely, so that the simple operations that might bear on one’s chances of survival would not be too greatly impacted, but the complicated ruminations that might lead one to become upset would be no longer possible.

This took me an hour to write. I’m unimpressed.

Schools should teach values

2005-10-15T01:40:00.000-07:00

There are two kinds of bad decisions: those due to incompetence and those due to lousy values. Earth has got plenty of both, but I think the second kind is much worse, and it’s inadequately addressed.

I’ll use “values” in the most neutral sense, to mean “a preferential ranking of states of the world.” I have to provide a definition because “values” is a much-abused term. It’s common to think one’s own values are “the right” ones, an attitude that can lead to such ridiculous terms as “family values”. We’re largely unaware of how values form, and we often feel hostile or at least superior to people whose values are different from ours.

Perhaps due to the volatility of sentiment regarding “values issues”, schools are irresponsibly silent about the formation of values in students. Presently, our schools aim to impart competence – which of course is good. However, competence alone is no guarantee of worthwhile results. Adolf Hitler was competent. To generate good things, competence must be well-directed. That is, it needs a legitimate, credible system of values. Our schools impart huge quantities of knowledge, but they don’t help students decide how to use it. They should.

Note that I wrote “help students decide how to use it,” rather than “advise students on how to use it.” It would be monstrous, as well as impossible, for schools to implant their own preferences in students. However, to familiarize students with the logic of preferences and value judgments could only be beneficial.

The numerically-oriented may be thinking, “How beneficial? More so than the courses they already get?” I think so, and here’s why: Kids fresh out of school are prone to spectacular screwups – picking the wrong mate, the wrong job, the wrong habits, the wrong dreams, you name it. Such bad choices are for the most part, I think, the result of poorly-thought-out values, and they don’t have to happen so much.

One could argue that plain "life experience" inevitably leads one to define and rank one's values. I would agree. However, the traditional trial -by-fire ranking process is unnecessarily costly. When one is making real, important decisions for the first time, it’s true that mistakes are inevitable. And because of the high stakes, it’s reasonable for society to postpone those decisions (e.g. whether to drink, work, marry) to a certain age. However, if we want kids to make good decisions when their time comes, we ought to at least familiarize them with the ideas they’ll be facing. It’s one thing never to have faced a certain vital decision before, and quite another never to have developed the sort of thinking that the decision will require.

For most people I think the development of a value system is slow, at best semi-conscious, and often self-contradicting. (Some economists have shown that lots of people exhibit irrational preferences – e.g. behaving as if A is better than B is better than C is better than A.) It is my (culturally imperial?) belief that the intrepid few who create their value system entirely consciously are unlikely to do a thorough job of it without standing on the shoulders of past great thinkers.

I know the curriculum is already stuffed. But a course in values would be more than an addition to the curriculum; it would enhance the effectiveness of everything being taught already. It would lead to better use of the knowledge absorbed elsewhere. And hopefully, by transmitting the logic necessary to develop a sound set of preferences, it would also increase the likelihood that students would take the time to absorb what they’re taught. A values course might even create room in the curriculum for itself, by making students more efficient. I’m not saying it would, and if it didn’t, the course would still be worthwhile. If a child had to choose one course, one year, that he thought was least useful to him, and replace it with a values course, the loss to society would be close to nil, and I’m arguing that the benefits would be huge.

Alright, that’s my argument.

The course should hold whatever it would take to allow students to make their own value judgments in a way that maximizes happiness – in particular, rationally and consistently. I would like the course to include bits of logic, economics, ethics, and psychology. I can list a few specific topics I think would be good:

Students should become familiar with the algebra of how one’s own preferences change over time – e.g. how ex-post I might wish I had not wanted to drink the night before. They should learn what is known about how preferences are developed, including the extent to which it is possible to choose and steer oneself toward a “desirable” set of preferences.

They should be made familiar with how an individual’s preferences can conflict internally as well as with those of others. To operate well in society, one has to understand that conflict between individuals can be subtle. Examples: the conflict of advertisers trying to convince you to want something you don’t know much about; the conflict between a mechanic and a customer who doesn’t know how much he can trust the guy; or the conflict between colluding exporters of oil.

Students should get the opportunity to try to justify (or debunk, I suppose) the notions of human rights and societal utility, upon which (most of? all of?) our behavior ought to be based.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Implications of mood echo

2005-10-14T12:02:00.000-07:00

Clap your hands on one side of a canyon, and the air in the canyon does something weird: It will report what your hands are doing now (you hear the clap instantly), and also, more quietly, what they did a little while ago. If you clap loud enough you’ll hear several echoes of your clap; that is, the delay effect recurses.

Many musicians, particularly guitarists, like to reproduce this effect with a gadget called a “delay box”. With a delay box between the guitar and the amplifier, the amplifier reproduces not only what the guitar is currently producing, but also, at a (usually) lesser volume, what it was producing a few moments ago.

Sending music through a delay requires some mental acrobatics, because each note turns into an investment over time. The guitarist’s choice of what to play becomes constrained, because he has to coordinate with what he was playing a little while ago, and because he’ll have to be able to play along with it in a little while.

I think there’s a similar signal delay in the human sensation of happiness. When I experience something that feels good, there is an immediate joy, and there is also a long-term contribution to my overall sense of well-being that does not take effect immediately. In fact, for some acts (such as altruistic ones) the first component may be totally absent.

Disregarding the happiness-signal-delay effect can lead to burnout. For instance, I have seen students choose to study when they really shouldn’t, because they think they can stand it. In the short term they’re right – the choice of studying now or not studying now does not seem to change the probability of burning out now. But beyond some point, it becomes too much – and at that point burnout is assured, regardless of what they decide to do now. The accumulation of past effects is real and binding, so disregarding it is dangerous.

On the positive side, in music there exist patterns that are easy to play, which when sent through a delay effect sound not just complicated, but really good. The same is true of happiness: simple activities, regularly compounded, can generate a rich, complex, and unexpectedly enjoyable result.

More generally, keeping in mind that changes in one’s sense of well-being are integrations (in the calculus sense) over one’s history can probably facilitate more effective use (in the utilitarian sense) of one’s time.

Art as complex science

2005-10-13T00:19:00.000-07:00

As a youngster, television gave me the idea that scientists look down on artists. I have seen little real evidence for that stereotype. But for the sake of an essay, let’s suppose that attitude existed. It would have to come from a misunderstanding of what art is. (Yes, this means I think my own definition of art is correct. I’m sure there are people who would disagree with me strongly. I wish they were reading this.)

Art is: the science of manipulating an audience’s thoughts and feelings. That makes art the most complex science – one so complex, we have trouble communicating what it does. Most of the other differences come from this one.

Scientists are humble about what they’re trying to accomplish. A scientist picks a question so specific that if he finds an answer, he’ll be able to verbalize it. By contrast, the scope of art can be as wide as all human experience. Any attempt to communicate artistic discoveries in non-art form is painfully incomplete.

Does the artist’s message get communicated perfectly in the art itself? Uh, no. Artistic communication is bizarre, because it’s stochastic. Whereas scientific ideas can be communicated in a lossless fashion (right?), artistic ones can’t be. Artists do have heuristics for guessing what sorts of stimuli will elicit what sorts of responses, and better artists have better heuristics. But they recognize an element of randomness in the audience’s interpretation process, and (perhaps because they have no choice) artists embrace that randomness. Each interpretation is different, and that’s supposed to be a good thing. (I’m a believer – I think it’s a good thing.)

An artist’s goals are as audience-dependent and hard to describe as art’s results. That doesn’t make the artist’s goals any less real or definite than a scientist’s. However, it does mean that the goals never make it very far into words, or perhaps even into the artist’s conscious mind.

Is that bad? Should artists be more conscious of what they’re doing? I say no.

One wacky aspect of the brain is that the majority of its calculations are subconscious. Being a human is just too complex to keep all operations conscious; we perform better by automating most of the performance. And automation is a useful way to think of emotion, intuition, and the other subconscious phenomena that artists rely on.

If art is as complex as living, one could hypothesize that art can be done better by leaving much of it subconscious. History confirms that hypothesis. If there were a better way to do art, it would be happening. Despite hundreds or maybe thousands of years of taunting for flakiness, and despite strong market pressure to generate an artistic product efficiently and dependably, artists continue to be fickle, strange, and “unmethodical”. I think that’s not a failure, but rather an empirical demonstration that the best way to make art is by relying heavily on the mind’s less-conscious parts. Madness, history tells us, is the best method.

I’ve been harping about the vagueness and the randomness of artistic communication. Works of art contribute to a body of knowledge, but again, stochastically. A scientific record will be understood to mean the same thing by multiple parties. Artistic ones won’t be. A piece of art is some sort of statement, but the statement that it is depends on who’s using the information.

Professionals from both areas will, if they’re good, spend a lot of time keeping track of the state of their art, and building on what has come before. Scientific literature is in one sense more efficient, because one can tell from a good article title what one will get from the article. But the body of art has an efficiency that scientific lit. lacks: Artists don’t have to read in their specialty, or even in their profession – e.g. musicians often build on ideas from filmmakers. This effect comes from the breadth of scope that so much art exhibits – pieces of art, by addressing many issues at once, can overlap each other more easily than scientific works can.

I’ve talked about how art is science. Others have probably said that, but I missed it. I can say for certainty that others have talked about how science is art, and I don’t have anything to add to that. So I’ll go to bed.

How music is like childhood

2005-10-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

You sense these patterns.
You can't describe most of them.
You think someone can.

(Haiku.)

If you walked on all fours ...

2005-10-06T22:54:00.000-07:00

... then wouldn't the floor be upright? And rotating?

(You may be responding, "Uh, no. Think of a cat -- its head and neck are built such that it, like a human, is generally looking forward." Of course you're right; but there exist creatures, four-legged and otherwise, designed to walk around staring straight down all day. That must be weird!)

Resenting leadership

2005-10-06T22:31:00.000-07:00

Apes live in a hierarchy based on strength and recklessness. That is, the strong ones who are also daring enough to force others to recognize their strength are the ones that get to do more of what they want. Apparently it's very complicated -- and useful. For the most part everyone in the group accepts it.

I don't know if apes low on the totem pole are capable of harboring resentment, or of sublimating it. Humans can do that, though, and I think lots of us do.

We have a status quo in which one cannot easily change one's wealth, or whether one has the right to arrest another, or ... lots of stuff. Fortunately, it's possible to justify large portions of even a terrible status quo to oneself. But the justification is real work, and without a guarantee of the intended outcome -- peace of mind -- in advance, it might not look like work worth doing.

Most of us are low on the totem pole. Society gives strong incentives for someone down here who has not justified the status quo to themselves to accept it anyway, and try to succeed in it. Out of all the people who have done that, how many harbor unconscious resentment towards the human pyramid that they've become a part of? And how does it affect their behavior?

If monkeys in fact do harbor resentment toward their higher-ups, one might conjecture that it plays a useful role. Perhaps a leader who has to spar with competitors will be more attentive to the group. Maybe he will be more trusted if he has to demonstrate superiority sometimes. I don't know.

But evolution lacks foresight, and it might be that a mindset which works okay in monkey-space is much less suited to human-space.

Leading by denial

2005-10-06T21:57:00.000-07:00

Some people are able to lead effectively by denying that they are leading. When others have no reason to take you seriously, such a method would seem to make sense: humility is more likely to result in cooperation. But I think I have seen people with legitimate claims to authority who chose nonetheless to do what I'm describing. And I think it worked.

Test

2005-10-05T14:54:00.000-07:00

this is my first post