More than impulse and caprice

Burst 1.0

We think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. In his lecture Dr Gigerenzer argues that intuition is more than impulse and caprice; it has its own rationale. This can be described by fast and frugal heuristics, which exploit evolved abilities in our brain. Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. He shows that biased minds that intuitively rely of heuristics can make better inferences about the world than information-greedy statistical algorithms. More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more.

Full talk by Dr Gigerenzer at the London School of Economics here.

A good talk, if only [but not only] for explaining how outfielders run and catch the ball.

Shulgins / Horizons

A Boston-area housewife considers a Buddha statue in 1963 after taking LSD. NY Times

Another good talk from Ann and Sasha Shulgin, this time at the recent [Sept. 2008] Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics set of talks. Subjects covered include: Bohemian Grove [Sasha's been a member for 50 yrs], the rapid spread of new substances, a definition of true hallucinations and how to stay healthy in such a life, but as ever with the Shulgins the take away is what a good relationship they have with each other, their selves, and the wider community.

Related sites: Horizons and all the talks from the event, and The Psychedelic Salon has a large and growing archive [158 shows to date] of MP3 discussions and talks with all the usual suspects.

Human Evolution and the Environment

An interesting talk by Paul Ehrlich at the Long Now Foundation called The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.

The first four steps on our path to dominance:
1) Living up in the trees [binocular vision, judging distance, grasping hands]
2) Down from the trees
3) Up on two legs
4) Language with syntax

A considerable gap, then the next four, which are rather obvious, but added for completeness:
5) Agriculture
6) Writing
7) Printing
8) The Industrial Revolution


Related. An overview of Merlin W. Donald's theory of How our mind, brain and culture evolved. Many of the actual papers, which I've yet to dig through, in pdf form here.

"The story you tell yourself is largely the story you're living"

Terence Mckenna in his farewell speech to the community, Posthumous Glory, via Lorenzo

Trivial, unconscious

The cafe scene from If... [some nudity]

...evolution consists of an infinitude of trivial, unconscious events...

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p xv

A box from Amazon the other day to ease the apprehension about the next eight weeks full of classes and proofreading ahead of my 'last day', August 8th. Among the things inside were the Criterion disks for If... and The Botany of Desire, subtitled a plant's eye view of the world. The line above jumped out at the start. Pollan's writing about his attraction to one kind of potato, and making the link to bees and flowers, but I thought straight away about the trivial, unconscious reasons to be attracted to someone, and about the trivial ways of getting pregnant and entering the future flow of evolution. One (un)lucky orgasm and that's a whole new roll of the genetic die cast.

I think I'm lucky that I've never become a father, and that Yuki also doesn't want kids. I think I'd be a terrible father, and I'd resent the time and energy a child would take from me. My students disagree, adding that a mixed-race baby would be very cute, but I don't want to take the risk of my deepest feelings on the topic being proved right.

I think everything I do is built on trivial, unconscious foundations, rationalized after the event with the aid of confirmation bias. At the same time I fall for the idea that nothing else could ever have happened, that....well, from Burnt Norton, Eliot's recording of which [here] has been sitting on my MP3 player and getting a regular work out:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

Which for me means there were never any choices, because only one path was taken, and the future is already written. Why not? I don't know what happens next, nothing actually changes.

Related: All posts labeled 'plants'

Things to listen to when doing other things

WGBH Forum Network: Live and Archived Webcasts of Free Public Lectures.

Shopping with your genitals

William Steig

About half way through a talk called Totalitarian Consumerism and the Death of Citizenship by Benjamin Barber [details and MP3 - look for the little speaker icon - at the link], and I'm sure it will develop better, but it starts from the well-worn premise that, in developed countries, all our needs are met and now the market has to construct essentially superfluous wants to keep things going, with Barber giving the example of the iPhone. This is an argument that only an intellectual could make, one who doesn't think, or doesn't want to give the impression of thinking, with their genitals.

We're primates, and our main want, after food and shelter, is for some good place in the hierarchy, leading to status / friendship / sex. That kind of thing. A flashy phone, the right pants, a new car - these things are cool, in certain circles, and lead to status / friendship / sex. It's true that the markers themselves are fairly arbitrary - this brand or that - but the underlying values that they represent, obtaining an object of scarcity, rationed either by an underground coolness quotient or the financial barriers to ownership, are genuine markers of social / sexual desirability. Rich guys and cool guys get to f*** more women and hotter women, if they want to, than the poor and uncool. Status counts, and even if you don't fall for the rules of this group [LV, Ferrari, etc], you'll fall for another [insert subculture fetish here], or another [ditto]. Such needs are not really manufactured, but are clamored for.

Obvious question: that accounts for men buying supposedly useless crap, but what about women? I'll be honest and not claim any detailed understanding of their status games, but have no doubt these are operating in some way, as they must do in all healthy folk of both sexes up to, say, 40 or so, the original life expectancy of the species, the age to have raised your own kids beyond sexual maturity.

But I'll finished the talk tomorrow, while washing up, and will no doubt recant all of the above.

The Book of Disquiet, text 54

Tokyo Undressed

The most contemptible thing about dreams is that everyone has them. In the dark, the errand boy dozes away the day as he leans against the lamp post in the intervals between chores, immersed in thoughts about something or other. I know what he's daydreaming about: the same dreams I plunge into between entries in the summer tedium of the utterly still, silent office.

Text 54

I don't see anything contemptible in the shared quality of dreams. We're all rulers of our heads, at least in theory, and there's reason to feel that someone else's sovereignty in any way detracts from your own.

Had a student come to class today with a low cut top, a push-up bra and plenty to put inside. It was distracting, so I kept trying to avoid her side of the room, but it was like a loose tooth that will nag until you poke it.

Tom Waits says you're innocent when you dream, but I don't know if that holds for daydreams.

I'm innocent until then.

Buy Frank's Wild Years by Tom Waits.
Buy The Book of Disquiet.

Historian vs Futurist

"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future"

Attributed to Yogi Berra, Samuel Goldwyn and Neils Bohr

The past is all we can talk about - predictions are just extrapolations, but it's the future we'll all be living in.

Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz, a futurist, had a debate the other week at the Long Now Foundation. MP3 here. Schwartz came off the worse, if only because it's so much easier for a futurist to get it wrong (it's almost guaranteed) than for a historian. There's one past, but many futures.

The one line summary is that Ferguson is a pessimist and Schwartz an optimist. I veer between the two, happy today but aware that it could all go very wrong, very soon. Consequently I see myself as a good boy scout, although in practice I tend to be ill-prepared.

Without pessimism there's less incentive to work for a decent future. All the optimists I know - something will turn up - are getting picked off by reality, one by one. Meanwhile, the pessimists are grinding themselves down...

Consider climate change - is the good work being done by those who think it’s not a problem or by those who think it is? Or is no good work being done? Be pessimistic about the future but work towards a better one, which also seems to be behind Ferguson’s liberalism [or conservatism, for American readers].

More Niall Ferguson on MP3

The secret of happiness is this...

Souls of Mischief - 93 Till Infinity

Something like a mission statement from Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness. [Also available for free on this Japanese site with a number of strange images and gifs.]

The world is vast and our own powers are limited. If all our happiness is bound up entirely with our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. [...] The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

p123

Which is all well and good - drinking beer with a stack of books on the balcony, until I was driven to retreat by a couple of mosquitoes I was too lazy / slow / compassionate to kill - but the flaw in the above is the injunction to 'not demand of life more than it has to give'. How to test the limits of this and be confident one isn't holding back not out of timidity, but wisdom?

Another book in the stack is Disputers of the Tao, by A.C. Graham, which I picked up in Shanghai 11 years ago and read, made notes in. Am curious what my old self felt important. Chuang-Tzu [aka Zhuang-Zi] has the idea of 'the untroubled idler', 'interested only in doing nothing', and it's one that's always appealed to me. This is the tension / dilemma - do nothing or work furiously? I did very little for years, but now I lack the balls to be a true idler, or maybe just the resources.

Which brings me to the third leg of this post, something else I read today, entry 38 in Nassim Taleb's online notebook [scroll down].

I am involved in an activity called “glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. [...]Glander is how I write my books, how I brew ideas. Remarkably it best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity. Newton was my kind of a “glandeur”; In [Dijksterhuis 2004]:

George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”

My doing nothing is dangerously close to doing nothing. Everyone knows someone who wanted to be an artist of some kind, who was dedicated to their craft and knew they were going to succeed, because perseverance and talent were the keys to success, and they had both. At the very least, they had the former, and success, as Woody Allen promised, is mostly turning up. Everyone knows someone like that. Many people, [most?], have been or remain someone like that. But not many people pay the rent as artists, there's plenty of losers hidden behind each winner. Likewise, my doing nothing is no doubt doing it's part in the complex math of reality to support someone who'll bring something useful back from their lounging.

But that's looking at things only from the standpoint of $ and acclaim. The idea is to live a somewhat stoic life, immune from the highs and lows of fortune. The work of real value is internal, which is in any case where all happiness comes from.

Related post: The myth of 1,000 true fans

Awareness of ignorance

A series of three lectures from David Gross called "The Search for a Fundamental Theory of Reality" [scroll down, April 2006], each about 1hr 40min. There's no math, the guy speaks well, and he won a Nobel prize in physics - three things that rarely come together on the topic.

In the third lecture [1hr 15min in], Gross dismisses the idea of progress in science being like peeling an onion, getting closer and closer to the truth. Instead he sees knowledge as expanding outward, like a growing sphere.

Since ignorance exists at the boundary of knowledge, more knowledge = greater awareness of ignorance. But, thinking in terms of the sphere, we can see that the volume is knowledge and the surface is ignorance, which means there is a net gain, even as ignorance increases. He ends the idea with this formula:

wisdom = knowledge / ignorance.

Now, I have no idea what Gross means by wisdom, but I like that image of learning. It reminds me of Nassim Taleb's point about Umberto Eco's library, which runs like this [lifted from a pdf accompanying a Taleb talk]:

..the interesting thing about Umberto Eco is that he has a library, and he has two kind of visitors. His library has 30,000 books, so two kinds of people come to pay homage to Professor Eco. The first category is people who tell him, "Oh wow, how many of these beautiful books have you read"? And you have a second category of people who realize that the value of a library does not lie in the books you've read, but in the books that you haven't read.

So really there's some people who use a library as a tool for self promotion or to convince themselves that they're very smart and look how much I've read. Basically people focus on what they know. Or, you can use it to humble yourself. Every morning you wake up you go down to your library, you have your cup of coffee and look at it and it reminds you how ignorant you are. So this is the idea of a library.

Intractability vs Evolution

On the train to Taipei listened to an interesting talk about algorithms in nature from Princetown's lunch'n'learn series, which tied up various things that have been floating through my head. In brief, there are certain problems, such as folding proteins, that for humans [and their computers] seem to be intractable, but for nature are easy, instantly done.

Rudy Rucker maintains that everything is computation, that when the wind hits trees reality is the result of calculations that takes place.

Craig Venter is not trying to make something entirely new, but rather to find / decode what nature has produced and then to put the parts together in a different way.


The world has been evolving for a long time, and nature is really, really smart. It knows what works, it gets things done.

When hurting someone is OK

Interesting Carnegie Foundation talk / Q&A with Darius Rejali on the history of torture in democracies. He has a pleasant voice, and uses no graphic language. At the end someone, thinking they're being very smart, brings up the ticking time bomb scenario, and Rejali makes a calm and clear reply: we have jury nullification, and courts would always consider mitigating circumstances, so legalizing and regulating torture is not only unnecessary, but would also have unfortunate consequences (the elaboration of which was the bulk of his talk).

If your life is in danger you're allowed to act in self defense, and we don't need to legislate all the permutations of how that might happen. In open democracies the legal system can / should be trusted to understand when hurting someone is OK.

The Roman Empire at Berkeley

How I ever did the housework without an MP3 player is beyond me. Isabelle Pafford, who I know nothing about, is giving a great series of lectures on the Roman Empire from Augustus to Constantine at UC Berkeley, and they're all being put online. A clear, fluent and entertaining speaker with well organized material - highly recommended. She references Seutonius a lot, and if you've never read him you're in for a wild ride and treat, available for free here.

Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge

Another great talk here from the Long Now Foundation. This one is from Juan Enriquez, and he starts out bringing the audience up to speed on developments in the life sciences - mapping the genome, cracking the code and then using it as software for the cells' hardware. Cool stuff all in the first 30 minutes. It'll make your head wobble. Then he moves on to more on the rise of Asia and the decline of the West, the evolution of religions, our place in the universe [slight], why pharmaceutical companies are too conservative, and hacking life forms. Your kids will breed spam made flesh.

“All life is imperfectly transmitted code,” Enriquez begins, “and it is promiscuous.”

06, 07 Niall Ferguson on MP3

Nassim Taleb says that Niall Ferguson is 'a good lunch', which I take to mean they get piss drunk and talk shit, but I'm probably wrong. What I do know is that he talks well, and is worth listening to.

Side note. I don't have much tolerance for listening to or reading things that I agree with. It's nice to be stroked, but it gets boring fast. I don't need someone else to go on at length about my ideas or confirm my prejudices - I do a good enough job of that myself. So take this endorsement of Ferguson as something that I'm not entirely comfortable with, and hence all the more delighted with. I first heard about him when he came out as pro-British Empire and knee-jerk ignored him, being a good Chomskyite and all. So, yes, he's broadly in favor of 'liberal empires' and tends to ignore the wishes of the colonized, but he has lots of challenging ideas, and challenges are good. Plenty of contra-Ferguson articles are available at Wikipedia. So, here are four recent [2006-07] MP3s that all deal with the lessons of the past for the future we are facing.

Interview on NPR about The War of the World, or why the 20th century was so bloody. The same topic in a good talk and Q&A at Vanderbilt University.

Trialogue on reassessing neoconservatism, with Francis Fukuyama, who goes by the name of Frank here.

Another interview about America and empire.

Similar topic, After Hyperpower - The United States and the Next War of the World, November 28, 2007

MP3 autodidact

Took this photo the other day. It was a torn and faded notice stuck to the side of an old house. The character on the left means 'open' and the one on the right means 'whole' or 'complete'.


When I'm doing housework, grocery shopping or riding my bike I hate being left alone with my thoughts. No doubt I ought to cultivate the Zen of such actions - an empty-headed, ego-less perfection - but I still prefer to listen to things.

The DIY Scholar is a good site that rounds up the 'best' free classes and courses available online [the 'best of page' is actually here], with lots of click explore and download. On a related note, links to some Niall Ferguson talks with a great picture that's mostly bright yellow will be posted tomorrow. Things to look forward to.