Dry drunk

The typhoon broke this tree, but plants are relentless, and it'll come back even stronger.

At the end of the fourth day with no running water in town, and patience is starting to run out.

We collect rain water and use it sparingly.

This is how some people live all the time, and it can be done, if you lower your standards and drink more beer than water.

Cultural differences in the fundamental attribution error

Osaka cab view

In Himeji, on total down time, riding a simple bicycle and doing nothing. I think I may've outgrown the idea that a vacation should be judged by how many intoxicants are consumed and how much sex is had. All of this just ahead of my [next] mid-life crisis, which should see a tremendous regression on all fronts.

The contrast with last summer could hardly be greater, when I was working all the time and feeling wasted. I have work with me here, but it's an hour or so in the morning, an hour or so at night.

Previous research has shown that cultural differences exist in the susceptibility of making fundamental attribution error: people from individualistic cultures are prone to the error while people from collectivistic cultures commit less of it. ...

These discrepancies in the salience of different factors to people from different cultures suggest that Asians tend to attribute behavior to situation while Westerners attribute the same behavior to the actor. ... One explanation for this difference in attribution lies in the way people of different cultural orientation perceive themselves in the environment. Particularly, Markus and Kitayama (1991) mentioned how (individualistic) Westerners tend to see themselves as independent agents and therefore prone themselves to individual objects rather than contextual details.

Excerpted, cut and pasted from Wikipedia

Related posts:
Impelled by convention

To hell with authenticity

The creature that wins against its environment

Walking my legs to stumps in Kyoto and Osaka. The picture is of the woodwork in part of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which I'll write up later.

I've had the quote below in my notebook and ready to post for some time, and at first I thought it was unrelated to the temple, but going over it there's a connection with some of the ideas that play out again and again in Mishima, with the hero finding victory in self-destruction.

....the ideas which dominate our civilization at the
present time date in their most virulent form from the
Industrial Revolution. They may be summarized as:

(a) It's us against the environment.

(b) It's us against other men.

(c) It's the 'individual' (or the individual company, or
the individual nation) that matters.

(d) We can have unilateral control over the environment and must strive for that control.

(e) We live within an infinitely expanding "frontier."

(f) Economic determinism is common sense.

(g) Technology will do it for us.

We submit that these ideas are simply proved false by the great but ultimately destructive achievements of our technology in the last 150 years. Likewise they appear to be false under modern ecological theory. The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.

Gregory Bateson, cut/pasted from here, and also in Steps to an Ecology of Mind [my bold].

Complex systems and intuition vs rationality

almost taiwan

...destruction of the invading disease organisms; chronic infection; destruction of the host; or symbiosis...

James Lovelock's four possible outcomes for humans vs Gaia, quoted in Straw Dogs, p8

Recent interview and Q&A [mp3] with James Lovelock, who has good stories and is cheerily gloomy about the outlook for humanity. He's 90 this year, but sounds decades younger.

Many good things to take away, but one I noted down at the time: There's no use being rational about complex systems, as all models that we'd rationally produce are gross simplifications that make us over-confident in their simplified [i.e. wrong] predictions [cf. recently discredited financial models]. In such cases Lovelock says it's best to observe a lot and then be intuitive.

Related post:

The planet will save itself

People are a part of nature

Kurosawa's Dreams - Village of the Water Mills, Part 1

Drunk early in a BBQ restaurant, and the old realization that even if anything isn't possible, at least any feeling and thought is, which is good enough. Plus, the key to drinking early - and at any time - is to know when to stop, and for me that's always when I start to think that maybe it might be a good idea, perhaps, to put my hand up the skirt or down the top of a stranger. Once that thought is entertained, I always move on to water.

Part 2

Consumption / production

Gerhard Richter - Niagra Falls

An interesting talk by Richard Lewontin entitled The Coevolution of Animals And Their Environment, which is about the micro-environments that each organism, at both the individual and species levels, creates around itself.

In the talk he uses a quote, which I think may come from Marx, but my search only came up with the following reference:

...in every act of consumption there is production, as in every act of production there is consumption.

Consuming People: From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption

By A. Fuat Firat, Nikhilesh Dholakia p77

Which made me think of all the microbes feasting on discarded food and just getting on with things, thriving in whatever we do.

Related posts:
Human Evolution and the Environment
The planet will save itself
Misdirected anger

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

Misdirected anger

There's man I sometimes meet who's always angry. He's a not a young man, but about my age, and so the anger always seems misplaced. I think he should be angry at himself more and at the world less. To expect things to be different at age 40 seems naive, and it strikes me that his anger comes from either disappointment or hope, neither of which seem entirely appropriate. We're primates, playing primate games. As such it's essential that low status members of the group that screwed over while high status ones get the honey.

Nothing is wasted - ants consume a dead gecko

Look at this another way. Someone talked the other day and said it was terrible that fishermen caught sharks, cut off the fins, and dumped the bodies back in the sea, all to satisfy the Chinese craving for shark fin soup. Two points, the glib one first. First, they're killing sharks, which I imagine is a great relief to every other species in the vicinity. Second, a dead shark falls to the bottom of the ocean and is wasted to humans, but not to other life. Nothing is wasted. Other animals nibble at the corpse, and it rots, which is all good. Like people who frame environmental questions in any way other than trying to save humans, I think to worry about the 'waste' of dead, but not endangered, animals is misguided. Other things will always eat them.

Related post: The planet will save itself

The planet will save itself

The planet will save itself. This is the underlying message of Lovelock's Gaia, that the biosphere itself will force us to adapt or die, but that it's under no great threat, no greater than any it's faced in the past. The rallying cry of environmentalism is something along the lines of 'humans vs nature', but that miscasts the thing. Humans can never win against nature. We're part of it, and can only adapt to its changing terms.

Listening to Craig Venter from my last post, and it's clear that the bulk of the genetic diversity on the planet- and I guess the bulk of living material - is invisible to the naked eye. The plants and the animals are nice, but they're not the thing itself. No matter what we do or don't, life will continue to thrive. So the notion of us protecting the planet is rather misguided, as it's going to do just fine, with or without us, the whales, the spotted owl, whatever. DNA is tough, it's one instinct is to thrive.

Our concern is a little like an ant colony worrying it's going to kill the householders it's stealing from. The colony will get rooted out way before it goes that far.

When it comes to protecting the environment, the species it matters most to is us.

Venter at the Long Now

It's almost redundant to express amazement at another talk from the Long Now Foundation. Hardly any of them, amassing here, are duds.

This is the first time I've heard Craig Venter speak, and he's great, perhaps the best talk I've heard since...well, probably only since Vernor Vinge, but then he set a high standard. Venter will make your head glow, there's so much cool stuff. Listened to it while cycling out to the country, with the picture of the fractal / broken wall, above, and the network of roots, below, two of the sights, but some notes on the talk from a 7/11 stop:

- Using genes as software for cell's hardware - software that can produce its own hardware.
- The huge variety of undiscovered (microscopic) lifeforms in the oceans and deep (1km +) underground.
- Life in the Sargasso Sea feeding on sunlight, but not by photosynthesis.
- Lifeforms that can be dried out, cut up, hit with high radiation for tens of thousands / millions of years and then recombine and live again when put in water - your basic panspermia seed.

Smog and rust

Check out the smog from China / Taiwan in this NASA image. Tainan is just by the big dirty cloud 3/4 the way down the west coast. This picture makes me want to move to the east.

Had a long bike ride from Tainan city to Salt Mountain in Chigu, which is really just a heap of salt by a salt processing plant that's been turned into a very minor tourist attraction, complete with salty tea, salty coffee and salty popsicles. It's a nice ride to get there but it's not worth visiting.

Came back via Tainan Science Park, which was deserted, with long straight roads past anonymous block buildings in which the future is being dreamed up. The ride was done with a good talk and Q&A by Vernor Vinge on my MP3 player. It's called "What if the Singularity does not happen?", and the text notes can be found here at Vernor's page, while the audio - which is a lot better than the notes - is here. He's a good speaker, perhaps because he's an entertaining sci-fi author aside from being a math professor, although the same is true of Rudy Rucker, and he always sounds slightly dazed, losing his line of thought very easily.

In the Q&A Vinge says that he doesn't really think about the environment, as he thinks there are a) no clear courses of action, and b) the Singularity - which he still thinks is the most likely near future - will be able to address such problems in its own time.

It's interesting that two large groups of smart people have such totally opposing views of the future - environmental breakdown and technological rapture. I enjoy flipping between both positions. I'm getting more and more promiscuous in my thinking, and I think it's a tendency I should encourage.


Having said that, what's the downside of saving energy and keeping things clean?