Mind Without Borders

Force Is More Than Violence

2011-03-01T01:09:00.000-08:00

Inspired by discussions with Victor Ganata and others on FriendFeed here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, I decided to post this bit I had written in a private mailing list a year and a half ago.

A lot of argument arises because of confusing voluntariness with actual freedom. This subtle distinction was very cogently elucidated by Serena Olsaretti in the argument summarized here. I learned of this argument from David Singh Grewal's Network Power (that's an affiliate link).

Libertarians object to the majority having power over the minority. Well, a majority already has power over a minority, by virtue of its numbers, completely regardless of the form of government or lack thereof. What is the libertarian solution to lynch mobs? In every country where the government has failed, warlords have arisen, through their own physical and mental strength and usually aided by being a member of the ethnic majority in that locale.

Power exists whether it is wielded by a government, a corporation, a group or an individual. Whoever has power over me restricts my freedom, i.e., my available set of choices about how to live my life. It is simply impossible to eliminate inequalities of power. They can only be managed dynamically through a system of checks and balances—which is what our system of government is meant to do.

Libertarians make much of the government monopoly on violence. But violence is not the only form of coercion. Imagine a spaceship where I live with Jack and Jim. Jack is physically stronger than me and willing to kill me if I don't do what he wants. Jim completely controls access to the ship's food supply and is willing to withhold it if I don't do what he wants. As far as I'm concerned, Jack and Jim each have power over me and can each coerce me. The fact that Jack may kill me quickly and Jim may kill me slowly doesn't change the fact that in the presence of either of them, I am not totally free. Perhaps Jack is also stronger than Jim, so Jack is the "government" of this little system. For me it doesn't make any difference: labeling one particular entity as the "government" doesn't entail anything special about the power wielded by that entity over me.

As a more down-to-earth and salient example, I may not be able to leave a job because it is my sole source of health insurance. Jobs that pay by time periods essentially restrict the employee's freedom: they require a certain level of obedience to the supervisor within working hours. There are many people stuck in jobs they hate specifically because of health insurance.

The choice to undergo bodily harm due to lack of medical care is not any more acceptable than the choice to undergo bodily harm while being arrested or imprisoned. Each can be seen as a voluntary choice, but the person who has only such unacceptable choices available is not free. This is the distinction between voluntarism and actual freedom to which I alluded at the start. As a liberal, I strive to maximize people's actual freedom--a constrained maximization problem, given the existence of other people. To me this is much more important than maximizing their freedom from government.

Perseverance and Zoomability

2010-02-09T18:18:00.000-08:00

Ben Tilly's blogpost last week on What is intelligence? got me thinking about two other personal traits that impact the course of one's life. One is perseverance and the other doesn't have a name that I know of, so I'll make one up: zoomability.

Perseverance

The word “perseverance” has a positive connotation, whereas the word “inertia” has a negative connotation. But in reality, it may not always be clear how to distinguish the two. The advantages of perseverance are readily apparent: the path to any substantial accomplishment is rarely easy and usually strewn with obstacles, which it will take perseverance to surmount. Correspondingly, a person who tends not to persevere may have little to show for their time.

Yet any virtue can become a vice, when taken to an extreme. In particular, perseverance is a prerequisite for perfectionism, and a perfectionist may “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” Doing “just enough” is desirable in many areas of life besides working for a startup.

Furthermore, the person who tends to persevere may be slow to recognize when it's time to backtrack and take a different path. It's worth referring again to Robert Pirsig's train metaphor. Perseverance will keep the train going as long as there is a track ahead, regardless of whether it leads to the optimal destination. The person who tends not to persevere is more likely to be the first to spot the next new thing, the one that changes everything. Furthermore, this person will accumulate a wide range of skills and experiences, the combination of which may later turn out to be uniquely useful.

In machine learning, there's a classic tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. An agent who's always exploring for new solutions may never get a chance to derive the benefit from any of them, whereas an agent who milks a single solution for all it's worth may miss out on a better one. One approach to handling this tradeoff is simulated annealing: spend a lot of time exploring in the early stages, and try to settle down and persevere in one course during the later stages. Indeed, simulated annealing has even been recommended as A Mathematically Proven Way To Achieve Happiness. So it may be fortunate that the ability to persevere tends to increase during the life of an individual, or perhaps even an organization. But even once you're in the later “exploitation” stage, the landscape, your local circumstances, or even you yourself may change—perhaps without your even noticing it. So it's worthwhile every now and then to enter a playful, exploratory mode for a while before going back into a tenacious working mode.

Speaking of organizations, it might seem that the tradeoff could be solved by a division of labor: have one group of people persevering in getting things done, and another group of people on the lookout for the next new thing. But when the time comes to decide the future course, these two groups will always be in tension. So in order to move forward, flexibility in one's degree of perseverance will still always be necessary at the individual level as well.

Zoomability

To define zoomability, first I need to define the more basic concept of zoom. Some people are very meticulous and detail-oriented—they dot every i and cross every t. Others are very imaginative and like to look at the big picture—they are the dreamers of dreams. Think of the lens of your camera. Some people like to keep their lens zoomed in, and others like to keep their lens zoomed out. Each of them has a preferred level of zoom that they're most comfortable with. Think about your acquaintances: chances are you'll be able to categorize many of them as one or the other.

Both are needed, but people at one end of the spectrum may tend to distrust or dismiss those at the other. The detail-oriented people may think of the big-picture people as unmoored from reality; they may think that when the rubber hits the road, they're the ones who do the real work. On the other hand, the big-picture people may think of the detail-oriented people as plodders preoccupied with the trivial and mundane; they may pride themselves on experiencing life at a higher level.

Of course, the ideal position is “to have one's head in the clouds and one's feet on the ground.” In order to achieve this, a person needs zoomability: the ability to zoom in and out, from focusing on the details to surveying the big picture. Many people seem to go through life with their zoom lens stuck in one position, but it seems that zoomability would be strictly more desirable.

But is it? Suppose you're Michelangelo and you're hiring assistants to help you paint the Sistine Chapel. (What I'm about to say isn't meant to be historically accurate, it's just an illustration.) You want every part of it to be perfect, so you want all of your assistants to be very detail-oriented. You hire a small army of skilled and meticulous painters to fill in your cartoons. But suppose one of them has high zoomability. He realizes that relatively few people will ever see this tiny patch of sky along the underside of a small arch that he's filling in. He'd much rather fill in the folds of God's robe—countless people over the course of centuries will look at that! That would be much more satisfying. Well, you could accomodate this one person by switching him to working on God's robe. But what if all of your assistants were like that? Someone has to paint the undersides of the arches!

You might think that we don't need individuals within an organization to be zoomable, as long as we have a proper division of labor. Choose detail-oriented people as the rank-and-file workers and put the big-picture thinkers in management positions. The engineers and the architects can work in tandem.

But this poses two problems. To completely specify every detail of a task may take nearly as long as to do the task itself. The rank-and-file workers may need some discretion to judge what the details should be, and for that they need to be able to see the big picture. Conversely, it may be that not all the details matter when painting the big picture. But there may be a critical few which change the nature and perhaps even the feasibility of the whole project. A manager without a firm grasp of the details may lead a whole team astray. So every individual needs at least some degree of zoomability.

So just as we concluded that it's worthwhile to spend some of our time in a playful, exploratory mode and some of it in a tenacious, working mode, it's also worthwhile to switch from our preferred level of zoom—to zoom out and zoom in from time to time.

Comment on FriendFeed:

Memorial Service for Eric Tiedemann

2008-06-03T11:12:00.000-07:00

Eric's memorial service will be held on Sunday, June 15th, at Cellspace in San Francisco, from 7 to 11 pm. There will be chill space to talk and reflect, as well as space for dancing, for those who are so moved. Please RSVP by emailing me so that we can get an idea of how many people are coming.

Sunday, June 15th
7-11pm
Cellspace
2050 Bryant St.
San Francisco, CA 94110
Cellspace phone number: 415 648-7562

Update: Please bring your children if you wish.

My Thought For Today

2007-07-15T21:20:00.000-07:00

Regarding the disruption of Hindu priest Mr. Rajan Zed's prayer opening the Senate's July 12th session: I am a practicing Hindu and at first I felt that this disruption was deeply disturbing. But I have gone through a process which was deeply personal and deeply religious.

To those who were protesting I say this:

I forgive you.

To those who were hurt by the protest I say this:

Let us not let the actions of a few keep us from marking this historic moment. Let us celebrate our great nation:

E pluribus unum.

John Edwards Tells Us: Your Country Needs You

2007-06-02T14:57:00.001-07:00

When Saheli told me our little brother Ben Brandzel had chosen to work for John Edwards's campaign, I knew I wanted to learn more about Edwards. I was impressed by reading and viewing his speeches, and by his efforts to urge Congress to stand firm in ending the war on Iraq. On Thursday I attended Edwards's Small Change For Big Change event at San José State University.

We generally expect politicians to tell us what they will do for us. What moved me most was not what John Edwards promised us, but what he asked of us. John F. Kennedy famously said: "Ask not what your country can do for you---ask what you can do for your country." It's been a long time since I've heard a public call to sacrifice, yet this is precisely what constitutes leadership. John Edwards OneCorps is not just a campaign organization, but also puts these ideals into action: "John Edwards One Corps members aren't waiting until the election to help build the one America we all believe in - we also engage in local service projects and issue advocacy to start transforming America today." For instance, the Orlando One Corps is holding a Canned Food Drive today.

When Edwards called us to action against poverty and disease, in America and around the world, he said we could not just stand by: "We're better than this." The beauty of this statement is that if, looking through the jaundiced eyes of cynicism, we evaluate it as a vote-getting strategy, we can only conclude that he wouldn't think it is a vote-getting strategy unless he actually believed that we are better, or aspire to be.

I was particularly heartened when Edwards said, "Instead of spending 500 billion dollars in Iraq, ...suppose America led an international effort to make sanitation and clean drinking water available in the Third World." This is a cause that is dear to my heart, as Saheli noted when she mentioned my frequent touting of WaterPartners International. Improving sanitation and access to clean drinking water has enormous leverage in the effort to eradicate global poverty and disease. It doesn't require new ideas or technology, simply our will to make it happen. As Peter Singer wrote in the New York Times Magazine last December, we can achieve not only this but all the Millennium Development Goals, with little hardship to any of us. I hope that Edwards's vision will catalyze this movement.

Afterward I met Edwards briefly and asked him about maintaining America's scientific and technical leadership, specifically through the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He said that funding for these agencies should be "significantly enhanced", and apologized that he wasn't able to give me more specifics right at that moment. I look forward to learning more about what he proposes from his campaign.

ToastyKen saw Edwards speak on Wednesday, and blogged about it.

Crossposted from More Fantasticness.

Garish vs. Vibrant: Socioeconomic and Cultural Factors?

2007-02-05T16:43:00.000-08:00

I noticed the following notion rattling around in my head: Emotional intensity is considered socially acceptable only up to a certain threshold level. To go beyond that is considered vulgar or ostentatious. This translates into specific sensory modalities. In particular, describing color in terms of hue, saturation, and brightness, only colors up to a certain maximum saturation are considered to be in good taste in interior decoration or fashion design. This maximum level of saturation may be somewhat higher for lower brightness levels (i.e., for darker colors). Colors beyond the maximum level, especially in schemes involving two or more such colors, are considered garish. This same aesthetic threshold may also apply to written style: the hyperbole of "purple" prose versus the understatement of mainstream literary fiction, which is more like a pale watercolor wash. But what appears garish to one person may appear rich and vibrant to another. In particular, my impression is that the "old money" upper classes in the United States would tend to have a lower threshold of tolerance for saturation or emotional intensity.

I can think of a number of reasons why this might be so. People with "old money" may be more likely to be descended from puritanical religious traditions which frown on emotional show. Or, they may be more likely to come from more northerly latitudes (e.g., northern Europe vs. the Mediterranean), where the colors of nature are less vibrant for most of the year, and thus their vision may be adapted to a lower intensity level. Or, they may associate good taste with the Old Masters, whom they have seen only in their faded contemporary versions. (The restoration of the Sistine Chapel demonstrates that the original pigments used by Renaissance artists were much more vibrant than what we see today.) Or, with ample leisure in their upbringing, their visual system may have become more attuned to fine discrimination of subtle differences in colors, and such a sensitive system may find fully saturated colors overstimulating. Or, they may be more guarded in their emotional dealings because expression of emotion can lead to vulnerability, and those with more power have more to lose.

The funny thing is, I don't know how this notion entered my head in the first place, or whether it is widely shared. Considering its economic importance for advertising/marketing, I would think it should be easy to find research on this subject. Experiments could display swatches of various colors and measure neural or physical correlates of valence and arousal; my hypothesis is that the valence would switch from positive to negative for very saturated, bright colors, and the threshold level would be correlated with socioeconomic and cultural background. In "Why We Think Blue Is Calming: Color-Mood Associations As Learned or Innate", Diana Vining of the University of Pennsylvania surveys the literature. From this paper it seems that not enough evidence exists as yet to support or refute my hypothesis.

(Crossposted from More Fantasticness.)

Architecture for Humanity

2006-08-27T22:33:00.000-07:00

Every year the TED conference brings together thought leaders in Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and honors at most three of them with the TED prize, granting each of them a wish.

Nearly a year ago, I pondered the long-term housing needs of Katrina's survivors and wondered whether they could be provided with housing kits they could easily build themselves. When I recently viewed the 2006 TED Prize Webcast with a group of friends, I was greatly heartened to learn of TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair's Architecture for Humanity. These architects are working to help Katrina's survivors as well as other needy people around the world.

Jehane Noujaim, director of Control Room, who also won the TED prize, spoke passionately about the power of film to bring people together. Dr. Larry Brilliant, leader of the successful effort to eradicate smallpox, co-founder of pioneering online community the WELL, founder of the Seva Foundation to combat blindness and executive director of Google.org, was the final winner of the TED prize. He spoke about the importance of early detection and early response in combating disease.

Who Killed The Electric Car?

2006-07-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

I just attended a preview screening of Who Killed The Electric Car? The film was remarkably well-paced, strong in several aspects of the filmmaker's art that one doesn't always expect from a documentary: suspense and dramatic tension, colorful characters, and understated irony. All in 91 minutes. I really enjoyed this film. Go see it!

Update on Katrina Housing

2005-10-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

My post a month ago on the long-term needs of Katrina survivors took up the question of affordable housing. Today Salon has an article on affordable housing, especially for Katrina survivors, as part of its second annual Big Idea series.

Towards A More Realistic Science of Economics

2005-09-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

I recently got Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution by Samuel Bowles, and yesterday I read the Prologue. I was gratified to read Bowles's bold and cogent expression of many of the limitations of the neoclassical model that have concerned me for some time: Making little reference to the specifics of time, or place, or indeed any empirical facts, the Walrasian paradigm deduced a few rather strong predictions concerning the outcomes likely to be observed in the economy. In Section V, “The Walrasian Detour”, of their 2000 paper Walrasian Economics in Retrospect, Bowles and Herbert Gintis state:

In retrospect, the Walrasian model, with its canonical assumptions—complete contracting and the conventional preferences of Homo economicus—was an intellectually exciting detour whose glamour hid the fact that it cast little light on the time-honored questions of economic institutions, policy, and the wealth of nations. Many economists believe that the canonical Walrasian assumptions are the unavoidable price to be paid for clarity and rigor in more abstract reasoning, while accepting that more empirically grounded assumptions should inform practical investigations in particular applied topics. Others recognize that the time may have come to reconsider the Walrasian approach and its assumptions, but regard it not as a detour but as having provided essential foundations for our current knowledge. We disagree with both views. We need different (but not necessarily fewer) abstractions, and we need not have taken the circuitous Walrasian route to the present....Most neoclassical economists in the postwar period were actively hostile to broader models of human behavior and to introducing strategic interaction into economic theory....After decades of Walrasian respite, complex institutions and multifaceted people again intrude on our thinking, forcing a retreat from the elegant but misleading abstractions that once monopolized economic theory.

I have long thought that an essential element of economists' eagerness to embrace the Walrasian paradigm was their desire that their discipline be seen as a science. Assuming strong axioms allowed them to use powerful mathematical tools to build up a grand edifice of theory. Extensive use of mathematics made economics superficially similar to physics, whose status as science no one could call into question. But science is defined by the use of the scientific method, not by the absence or presence of mathematics. How much weight we can place on axioms, and the conclusions drawn from them, rightfully depends on the degree to which they accord with experience, not the degree to which they allow abstract analysis. Furthermore, the needs of physics fructified in the growth of various branches of mathematics, and there is no reason why the needs of economics should not do the same, if economists replace their unhealthy veneration of mathematics with the respectful demands a craftsman makes of his tools. As Bowles continues in the Prologue: It would be salutary for economists to focus more on answering [empirical] questions and less on demonstrating the use of our increasingly sophisticated tools. But it seems that a more problem-driven and less tool-driven approach will require yet more sophisticated tools. The mathematical demands of the theoretical framework I am proposing will be greater, not less, than [those] of the Walrasian paradigm.

A Whole New Way To Update Your Anti-virus Software

2005-09-22T18:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I heard Ray Kurzweil speak and got a signed copy of his new book, The Singularity Is Near. From his talk I learned of an intriguing development: microbivores, artificial white blood cells. These could download software to respond to various pathogens. Kurzweil pointed out that the Activa deep-brain implant for controlling Parkinson's tremors can already be reprogrammed from outside the body.

What Next For Katrina's Victims?

2005-09-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

I've had some thoughts on how best to help the survivors of Hurricane Katrina in the longer term. I'm aware that this is still a crisis situation and many of them are desperate for basic needs. The human tendency is to give generously in a crisis, but to become fatigued once crisis mode has passed. These people will need help recovering for months to come. Furthermore, it will take time to come up with and implement these longer-term solutions. John F. Kennedy told the following story:

"...we must think and act not only for the moment but for our time. I am reminded of the story of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon.'"

So, what are some of the longer-term needs of Katrina's survivors? It's clear that they've gone through a very traumatic experience, so perhaps they could benefit from some psychological counseling. What may not spring to mind so quickly is that they might benefit from various types of economic counseling, specifically career and credit counseling.

People generally think about what they should do with their lives at specific turning points, e.g., on reaching adulthood or retirement age. At other times the thought of uprooting themselves and possibly their families exerts a strong pull towards staying on their current path. Now that all of these people have been uprooted willy nilly, it may be the right opportunity for them to think about how best to rebuild their lives. To make their new life as much as possible like their old life may not always be the best choice, although it may be the natural first instinct. If they are to start fresh, either because they decide to or because they're forced to, they could benefit from some of the resources which usually are reserved for college career counseling centers.

I don't know much about how credit works for disaster survivors. As noted on Slate, people may owe mortgages on houses that no longer exist, but FEMA aid can help alleviate this problem. However, Americans in general are also saddled with large amounts of consumer debt. What happens to their credit card loans in the event of a disaster? If people are forced into bankruptcy, what are the implications of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005? Will it make a difference whether the survivors go into bankruptcy before or after this law takes effect on October 17th? Whatever the answers may be, it seems clear the survivors could use help with understanding and dealing with them.

The most glaring large-scale need is for housing, but it's not at all clear what to do about it. Homeless shelters constitute the conventional stopgap, but the existing shelters in the area almost certainly don't have the capacity to accomodate so many people. A discussion with Saheli prompted me to think about one of the systemic defects in how we treat homeless people in general: Because many of the homeless have problems with mental illness and drugs, the shelters often assume the worst about all of them. In particular, they separate men from women and children. But breaking up families will often make a bad situation worse, especially at times like these when those families have just been through a disaster. This got me to thinking about whether there's some way these people could at least have some sort of "home base" where they can stay privately with their families and think peacefully about how to rebuild, rather than being trapped with a bunch of stressed-out strangers.

I think it's also important that the survivors regain as much control as possible over their situations, as soon as possible. For this reason I think it would be good if they could have the option of temporary cooperative housing. In this model, often used in college communities, residents use their labor in maintaining the household to make up part or all of their rent. But unfortunately this obviously requires large residential structures, which aren't going to spring up from nowhere.

Habitat for Humanity does great work building affordable housing, but because their model requires human as well as financial capital, it would be hard to scale to fit this situation. It's more geared toward the chronic problems of the working poor. A few months ago Saheli blogged about Tumbleweed Tiny Houses. They're tiny by normal American standards, but may provide more living space than the survivors' current shelters, and have the benefit of looking very home-like and comforting. Alternatively, given access to pre-fabricated housing kits, the survivors might be able to build such shelters themselves. This would have the added benefit of being a positive, cooperative endeavor they could take part in together, giving them a sense of control in the process and accomplishment at the end.

Unfortunately the big problem with all these ideas is land. Where would these structures be built? How long would they stay there? What would happen to them once people pick up the pieces of their lives and move elsewhere? These are very tough questions and I don't know the answers to them, but I hope I've given people something to think about.

Mind Hacks Here

2004-12-13T20:49:00.000-08:00

My copy of Mind Hacks (weblog) arrived today. It highlights discoveries in cognitive neuroscience with tricks you can do to see how your own brain works. So far I've learned about OpenEEG: EEG for the rest of us, a project to make plans and software for do-it-yourself EEG devices freely available.

No Monopoly On Morality

2004-11-03T18:54:00.000-08:00

On June 8th, I heard George Lakoff, UC Berkeley linguistics professor and a founder of the Rockridge Institute, speak on the use of language in politics. His views seem particularly apropos today, so I'll summarize them briefly.

Conservatives spend billions of dollars a year funding a network of 43 think tanks that has been growing since 1970. They've used these insitutions to build up a formidable language apparatus: 80% of TV talking heads spring from these institutions, and Frank Luntz puts out a 600-page training manual yearly. They systematically frame the discourse in ways that favor their viewpoints. Lakoff called on progressives to begin reframing the issues.

To explain framing, Lakoff told us, "Don't think of an elephant." (This is the title of his new book which has appeared since then.) But we had to think of an elephant to process this command. Thus, negating the frame still invokes it. Similarly, Bush frames his tax cuts as "tax relief". The word "relief" implies that taxes are an affliction, the one who relieves you of them is a hero, and the opponent is a bad guy. Frames trump facts. For example, the Bush administration successfully put Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida in the same frame.

Furthermore, progressives tend to campaign on specific issues and programs. Conservatives, on the other hand, campaign on values. Progressives have failed to understand that people vote their values, not rational self-interest. By not talking about values, they have allowed the notion to arise that only conservatives have them, whereas in fact progressives simply have a different value system.

Both conservatives and progressives see the family as a metaphor for the nation, but they perceive the family very differently. For conservatives, the family is rooted in strict discipline. For progressives, on the other hand, the family is rooted in nurturing, empathy, and responsibility, first for oneself and then to others. Lakoff's explanation of the political entailments of these two viewpoints was very interesting, but would take too long to summarize here. The Rockridge Institute was founded to understand the conceptual system of conservatives and liberals, fill in the conceptual gaps, and create language to combat the Orwellian language of the conservatives.

Lakoff now seems particularly prescient. But progressives can take heart in Barack Obama's convention speech, which returned to the language of values, as a rallying point for the hard work that now, more than ever, must continue.

US Presidential Election Poll Calculator

2004-09-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

This poll aggregator does a good job of processing polling data into various scenarios and presenting outcomes.

Gosper and Elkies

2004-07-16T17:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I had the privilege of meeting Bill Gosper and watching him demonstrate various fascinating configurations of John Conway's Game of Life. I first came across Gosper's name in Steven Levy's Hackers, and later in my computer algebra course, where we learned about his work on continued fractions.

As I was leaving he mentioned musical mathematician Noam Elkies. Dave Rusin maintains a site on Mathematics and Music. Gosper, on the other hand, is known for his "visual hacks"---mathematics and art, more or less.

WordSpy: Affective Computing

2004-07-09T13:52:00.000-07:00

Eric Tiedemann sent me to WordSpy, the "website devoted to lexpionage". The term affective computing reminds me of the book of that title I read a few years ago, by Rosalind Picard. The basic theme of the book is artificial emotional intelligence. My thinking is that emotional intelligence, as a component of artificial intelligence, is a worthy and attainable goal. I see this as a branch of natural language understanding and synthesis; the language of emotion communicates very compactly about things that are very important.

I don't think that artificial emotion is either possible or desirable. One can endow artificial agents with a utility function, and from that utility function they may derive further goals and preferences; but the overall mission will ultimately be externally directed. From Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, here's a quote on Quality:

In my mind now is an image of a huge, long railroad train, one of those 120-boxcar jobs that cross the prairies all the time with lumber and vegetables going east and with automobiles and other manufactured goods going west. I want to call this railroad train "knowledge" and subdivide in into two parts: Classic Knowledge and Romantic Knowledge.

In terms of the analogy, Classic Knowledge, the knowledge taught by the Church of Reason, is the engine and all the boxcars. All of them and everything that's in them. If you subdivide the train into parts you will find no Romantic Knowledge anywhere. And unless you're careful it's easy to make the presumption that's all the train there is. This isn't because Romantic Knowledge is nonexistent or even unimportant. It's just that so far the definition of the train is static and purposeless. This was what I was trying to get at back in South Dakota when I talked about two whole dimensions of existence. It's two whole ways of looking at the train.

Romantic Quality, in terms of this analogy, isn't any "part" of the train. It's the leading edge of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance unless you understand that the train isn't a static entity at all. A train really isn't a train if it can't go anywhere. In the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts we've inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn't a train we are examining. That's why we get stuck.

The real train of knowledge isn't a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It's always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. And that engine and all those 120 boxcars are never going anywhere except where the track of Quality takes them; and romantic Quality, the leading edge of the engine, takes them along that track.

Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been. At the leading edge there are no subjects, no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train has no way of knowing where to go. You don't have pure reason...you have pure confusion. The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?

The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.

Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it's derived.

One's rational understanding of a motorcycle is therefore modified from minute to minute as one works on it and sees that a new and different rational understanding has more Quality. One doesn't cling to old sticky ideas because one has an immediate rational basis for rejecting them. Reality isn't static anymore. It's not a set of ideas you have to either fight or resign yourself to. It's made up, in part, of ideas that are expected to grow as you grow, and as we all grow, century after century. With Quality as a central undefined term, reality is, in its essential nature, not static but dynamic. And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of change.

To put it in more concrete terms: If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn't just something you're born with, although you are born with it. It's also something you can develop. It's not just "intuition," not just unexplainable "skill" or "talent." It's the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.

Now to put it briefly, artificial agents cannot directly perceive Romantic Quality. But if they understand the language of emotion, they will have a hotline to Quality through the people around them, and thus they can better serve.

Rosalind Picard directs Affective Computing at the MIT Media Lab. Their many very interesting projects include efforts to synthesize emotions. My sense is that they are using emotion as a shorthand computational heuristic, which I think is legitimate and likely to be very useful. But as I've made clear above, I think there's much more to it than that.

Portola Park Pics

2004-07-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

In my smugmug gallery. Here's a puzzling poster from Pescadero.

Thomas Friedman: Entire

2004-06-28T17:40:00.000-07:00

I heard Thomas Friedman speak the other day, on his views on the war in Iraq, the war on terror, and globalization; and on his upcoming book project. A fascinating worldview. Something that comes across really well in person is the warmth of the man. I lost track of how many times he said "I got so mad! I wrote a column...." It was really quite endearing. Here was an intellectual who wasn't afraid to admit that he cares intensely about things. The balance of passion with clear and articulate thinking isn't that easy to find, and is quite appealing.

Public Campaigns on the Public Airwaves

2004-05-25T16:04:00.000-07:00

I just ran across the Our Democracy Our Airwaves Campaign website. The bulk of the enormous and ever-growing amount of money needed to run a successful election campaign in this country (the U.S.) is devoted to television commercials. But the TV spectrum belongs to the public and is licensed to broadcasters by the FCC. Why not make it a condition of the license that they must provide designated amounts of free airtime to candidates for public office? This wouldn't solve everything, but at least in the short term it would reduce the amounts of money needed for political campaigns by orders of magnitude. That would go a long way toward levelling the playing field and bring us much closer to democratic ideals.

Despite their negative image, I think there are many politicians who don't enjoy having to spend so much time fundraising and would rather have more time for public service; more significantly, I think there are many corporations who would rather not have to spend so much money on campaign contributions and would rather spend it on better serving their customers. There's only one player that benefits from the situation as it stands: the broadcast media. See the Columbia Journalism Review article Media Money for a review of how lobbying by media corporations and their trade associations quashed this reform, which Bill Clinton had proposed in 1998.

But even if we take cynicism to the extreme, media money should not have been able to quash this reform. It's not plausible that the media has more money than all the other corporate interests put together. If those other corporate interests spent their money lobbying for this reform, then even in the most cynical view, it would have gone through. This would reduce their costs for all their future political lobbying by large factors, which would be an enormous net gain for them. If we also assume as above that politicians would rather decrease the size of campaign budgets (an assumption requiring a bit less cynicism), then the other corporate interests would not even have to match the media lobby in order to carry through the reform.

So why then did this happen? I can think of a few reasons:

No individual politician wants to be the one to offend the media lobby.

Incumbents fear that this would significantly erode their advantage.

Neither the corporate interests nor the politicians are used to thinking at this strategic level. They may be very adept at the game of campaign contributions, but the considerations above require thinking about the meta-game: the possibility of changing the rules of the game. They're too caught up in the game as it's played now. Thus the corporate interests and the politicians perceive this as a media issue and not as an issue affecting each of them.

Regarding the first point, if we look at what actually happened, term-limited Bill Clinton had already stepped forward as the one to take this risk. Legislators then actively stepped forward to quash the FCC. If they had just passively let it go through, none of them could have been singled out for blame. So this alone is insufficient to explain it. Regarding the second point, incumbents had an advantage even before the advent of radio and TV. They know the corporate lobbyists personally, and the corporate interests see them as known quantities with predictable behavior. So this would also be insufficient to stop the reform, if the weight of all the other corporate interests were behind it.

That leaves the third point. Thus, out of this exercise in extreme cynicism comes a ray of hope for our republic: if the parties concerned can simply be brought to see what's in their own self-interest, we can bring about this change, and begin a return to the democratic ideal of candidates competing freely in the marketplace of ideas to represent the voters' viewpoints.

the world's writing systems

2004-05-14T17:59:00.000-07:00

I got The World's Writing Systems yesterday, and it's endlessly fascinating. I wish I could just curl up in a chair and pore over this book exploring the different scripts, from the curving contours of Oriya to the yet undeciphered Rongorongo.

Small Beginnings, Greater Ends

2004-05-12T21:16:00.000-07:00

So said St. Francis of Assissi. I first heard these words in the song "If You Want Your Dream To Be", by Donovan, from Franco Zeffirelli's 1973 film "Brother Sun, Sister Moon".

For my first post, I ponder: what was the first blog? The question of "firsts" is always interesting. For example, what was the first English novel? Some say Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and others, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, but neither of these seem particularly novel-like to me---not enough interactions among characters, which I'd say would be the defining trait. I would vote for Richardson's Pamela.

Back to blogs. I propose that the first was John Baez's This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, which he began on January 19, 1993. True, blogs are supposed to update more often than weekly; and This Week's Finds started out on a Usenet newsgroup, not the web. But blogs often don't update even as much as weekly, and I'd say no other blogger has the track record of John Baez. Moreover, newsgroups are all on the web now anyway. Speaking of which, the Google Groups 2 beta launched today!

Back to Baez. He seems to me to capture the spirit of a blog in a couple of ways. He puts together a bunch of things he's just learned and gotten excited about that week, even if they don't necessarily have to do with each other. And he always links in lots of references to other people and their work---in fact this is more or less the main point of his column. At first the references were just citations, but for quite a while now they've usually been hyperlinks to preprints, usually on the arXiv.org e-Print archive.

Those more interested in the history of electronic media than in mathematical physics can check out Week 32, where he discovers the World Wide Web, and Week 84, where he discovers the search engine (namely AltaVista), among many other interesting things.