Mentalese bound (Not every flowering dream should bloom)

Viewing this gem from the “thinking allowed” archives; found it amusing how Herr Mishlove’s peculiar smile and enquiring expression invited the then young professor Pinker to engage in max lucidity. The argument chains appeared to be so clear that I fancied an impromptu objection. At some point (@ 19:07) they came to discuss, if “cadence” may affect the environment in which we think. Pinker mentioned lines from Woody Allen adding that “there is something about the rhythm and the cadence of Spanish that puts us in the mood, perhaps, of more romantic thoughts. But I think that's probably the extent of it…” 

If as Pinker states,“The sounds of the language might make (it) more appropriate to express (it) in kinds of emotion that might resonate more with certain kinds of experience” then should not a ranking be possible? One that would rank each such assemblage of sounds (Cadences of a language) according to how well they lend themselves to expressing “kinds of emotion”. Where the ease with which say the prosody of a Bengali dialect may put us in a melancholic mood would out compete that of Icelandic.

There's the rub I guess for if we assume a correlation between emotions and moods with such sounds, pitches or timbres; it would by definition be a subjective resonance not available to investigation. The cadence of Finnish appears not to lend itself to “my softer thoughts”. But since their respective qualia cannot be analyzed, their “lack of resonance” with vowel harmonies of that language as perceived by me is not measurable. The data for our ranking would be no more than reports by subjects about the resonance between two sets of qualia. There is no reason to believe that the subjective experience of a set of sounds are the same for different people, nor that of what they may label melancholia.

Had it been possible then languages could be assessed as regimes of repression. With let’s say Bengali allowing for easier expressions of certain "thoughts and their accompanying emotions" whilst those same would find far fewer available propositions with appropriate sound and timber in Icelandic. Such comparative assessments can be done by a single person with results that may serve to amuse at least him or her. Each language on the other hand will, during this subject’s lifespan, adopt or invent thousands of new terms or phrases with varied intonations. Possible witty anecdotes on the deficiency or superiority of Bengali over Icelandic for "creamy hatred which I would like to spread on my enemies as when I imagine them to be air bound intrusions" then, will never stand to be true even for a single subject. Unless each such assemblage of sounds (languages) in its capacity for borrowing or adopting new sounds (not words or terms) were more conservative. Take the mandatory vowels at the end of Poliisi and Posti in Finnish. Do these suggest that the mood or character that inhabits a language in an era; which cannot be objectively analysed has a self-preserving character? Such an aspect should limit the mutation of Finnish intonation into  hip-hop prosody or Caribbean drawl within a few decades. 

At an earlier section (@3:52) of this interview were cadence is discussed, Pinker talks of translations. Since translations are possible at all he explains “There has got to be something, I think, underneath it, something like a set of propositions that don't really have sounds, that don't have any left-to-right linear order the way language does, but that has a web of connections between concepts, and that are also connected with other aspects of experience -- with visual images, with body sensations.” But why not sounds? If this set of propositions (mentalese) is a web of connections between concepts and aspects of experience, then why does he limit these and not couple them with sounds too. The sonic aspects of these mental propositions can hypothetically be in disharmony with a staccato set of sounds of that proposition in say Dutch.

It seems then to some tiny extent as Lacan would put it “signifier’s displacement” does determine the “subjects’ acts, destiny, refusals, blindnesses, success, and fate, regardless of their innate gifts and instruction, and irregardless of their character or sex;”. Tiny since that juicy quote knows no limit; as success, fate and destiny and many more notions are at risk. The disharmony I imagined under each such regime of repression or displacement was far less and if anything not noticeable by less expressive subjects. But if it can add up to create a more acute sense of entrapment, it would be intriguing.

Curbstones

How is an act (A) where a person is beaten to death different from (B) where that same person is raped and beaten to death? In what way can the aggression of perpetrators be distinguished in a non-symbolic way? What makes an injury inflicted on the neck, ears or knees more grave than one on genitalia? What role do cultures play in distinguishing the above, to the extent that they may be blamed or lauded for the efficiency with which they prevent either?

There are arguments among some homo sapiens for extending protection to chimps, bonobos and other great apes since studies have shown them to have a sense of self and capacity to exercise empathy; demanding consideration of them as persons. Leaving aside the fact that genocides are carried on currently by the concerned sapiens on their own kind, how much sense would the question on the distinction between acts A and B have when they occur among other Homininae? Who is the Asaram Bapu of bonobos or hojatoleslam Kazem Seddiqi of chimps whose attitude, comments and shrieks may produce a favorable climate or legitimize violence amongst those species? And if they have no need for such varieties of pant-hoots, in what way are such vocalizations crucial for the sum total of violence possible amongst sapiens? If one were to install loudspeakers on tree tops all over Gombe Stream national park and play Moody blues instead of Lata Mangeshkar can we hope to see a decline in incidents of “overpowering”? If so how much of the trend can be attributed to the lyrics?

Power is a dirty word; but once present in physical or cognitive form in a member of a species it takes a variety of mechanisms to prevent that agent from practicing it. Let us allow cultural codes to be amongst such; containing mechanisms of moderation. Does not the moderation of existing powers then always come at a cost? And are they not like all mechanisms of control subject to laws of nature which impose limits on the efficiency of such systems? In the light or shadow of such formulations, mechanisms such as segregation of sexes in public places, as reactionary as they sound acquire sense as attempts to optimize a system’s objective; given the available funds or resources. In response one may already hear cries that exercise of “humanity” needs no funds or resources; with nonviolence and restraint seen as cost free aspects of a “human” essence, the evidence for which need not be produced. Yet co-founders Sonya Barnett and Heather Jarvis are not likely to stage one in The Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Freedoms and rights and practice of “humanity” are a function of what is possible within a system of moderation which apart from resources, requires the consent of the powers that run the system. This consent, which, in a modern democratic society is labeled consensus; while impacted may not necessarily be reflective of the resources of that societal system. Where by resources it’s meant the sum total of material and intellectual funds and the institutions for channeling them.

To digress Let's take some choice quotes from the feminist canon:

"Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies." -- Andrea Dworkin

-Contempt is seen as inherent in an encoded behavior, needless to say that feelings of contempt require ideas of status, hierarchy, which are less immediately primordial compared to an urge to penetrate. Nonetheless the specie has to resign as it has come to be, before it becomes worthy or free from blame. Not too uncommon a take, considering millennia of religious traditions east and west which have variously asserted a fall from a state of "heavenly no intercourse". The sentence also provides an endless potential for contemplating just how much contempt I have for oranges when I drink my juice straight from the pack rather than pouring it into a cup. So to the following from Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M manifesto:

 “To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples………………He (the male) is trapped in a twilight zone halfway between humans and apes, and is far worse off than the apes because, unlike the apes, he is capable of a large array of negative feelings -- hate, jealousy, contempt, disgust, guilt, shame, doubt -- and moreover, he is aware of what he is and what he isn't…the male is, nonetheless, obsessed with screwing; he'll swim through a river of snot, wade nostril-deep through a mile of vomit, if he thinks there'll be a friendly pussy awaiting him. He'll screw a woman he despises, any snaggle-toothed hag, and furthermore, pay for the opportunity. Why? Relieving physical tension isn't the answer, as masturbation suffices for that. It's not ego satisfaction; that doesn't explain screwing corpses and babies.

Completely egocentric, unable to relate, empathize or identify, and filled with a vast, pervasive, diffuse sexuality, the male is psychically passive. He hates his passivity, so he projects it onto women, defines the make as active, then sets out to prove that he is (`prove that he is a Man').

His main means of attempting to prove it is screwing (Big Man with a Big Dick tearing off a Big Piece). Since he's attempting to prove an error, he must `prove' it again and again. Screwing, then, is a desperate compulsive, attempt to prove he's not passive, not a woman; but he is passive and does want to be a woman...”

I don’t know if these passages answer the initial question about the difference between act A and act B, but in a perverse way they seem to come close by allowing nature and violence endless echoes. They share in their urgency, truths which only reactionary and fundamentalist forces utter mindlessly. But whilst failing to locate these same set of psychic complexes in the “second sex” they also omit that; irrespective of the stance (passive or active) in the absence of power, in the absence of brute physical force, it fails to be an issue. Desperate compulsive Dodos (yes Raphus cucullatus not the band) are not likely to rape and torture me or my family.

As incorrect as it may seem, I want to share what I believe is another instance of this misapprehension of costs. A deluded Izetbegović who seems to have as much grasp of power dynamics as a slutwalk organizer or participant is presented with an inconvenient truth (@2:12)

In retrospect he says that he expected war but not genocide. It serves; I think to never, not expect it, and to go further there is something criminal in this lack of grasp. Recognition is not an endorsement. But to set aside the power equation and the fact of limited resources for enforcement; is to forget, that the same impulse which enabled the recent Delhi gang rape also powered the protests. And contrary to this slate article it really needs little encouragement from a sexist culture.

Ten percent is not...

I learned about the statistician David Salsburg when Mainak sent me a copy of The Lady Tasting Tea, a popular science book about the history of 20th century statistics. Imagine my pleasure when I stumbled upon this excellent collection of amusing errors in data analysis, narrated by Salsburg.

It includes eclectic examples of faked data, such as the sizes of families from the Book of Ezra in the Bible, and trivial causes for observed anomalies such as the case of the eldery-white-male-in-foreign-sports-car phenomenon. Enjoy!

On the natural history of destruction and biased biases (Over-deliberate marriage of Sebald and Kahneman)

In a series of lectures given in Zurich, on the subject of how or why German literature did not deal adequately with the topic of allied bombings of cities; W.G. Sebald while pointing out the strategic irrationality of these bombings inserted few lines on the extent to which they were inevitable. A strategy targeting mainly civilian populations was opted for by Churchill, despite some opposition and lack of prerequisites in 1941. Moreover it was sustained instead of selective attacks on targets such as factories making ball-bearings, oil and fuel installations, railway junctions and the main transport arteries which would soon have, in the words of Albert Speer paralyzed the entire system of production. By spring of 1944 Sebald states, the critics had pointed out that the morale of the population was unbroken while industrial production was “impaired only marginally”.

Why then this strategy? The determinism one can trace in Sebald’s account has two phases. It is presented as the irreversible momentum of production, for a strategy preferred to alternatives. Phase one being the choice (decision-making bias) and phase two, the impossibility of a revision (cumulative causation in a system).

In reference to the historian A.J.P Taylor, Sebald gives a picture of the latter phase as:

“…an enterprise of the material and organizational dimensions of the bombing offensive, which …swallowed one third of the entire British production for war material, had such a momentum of its own that short-term corrections in course and restrictions were more or less ruled out, especially when, after three years of intensive expansion of factories and production plants, that enterprise had reached the peak of its development. Once the material was manufactured, simply letting the aircraft and their valuable freight stand idle on the airfields of eastern England ran counter to any healthy economic instinct”

Yet, Sir Arthur Harris commander-in-chief of Bomber Command was not sacked despite his “inflexible support” for a strategy that was not working. A peculiar hold on Churchill is mentioned and the following as to why his position was unassailable.

“His plan for successive devastating strikes, which he followed uncompromisingly to the end, was overwhelmingly simple in its logic, and by comparison any real strategic alternatives such as disabling the fuel supply were bound to look like mere diversionary tactics the war in the air was pure and undisguised.”

Here Daniel Kahneman’s work on biases in situations of conflict while not a study of crude options (with a simple logic) versus more decisive complicated strategies, seems to provide indirect support for the tone of inevitability in Sebald’s account. The following talk given in the Center for Study of Rationality titled “"Biased Biases: Do Cognitive Biases Give an Advantage to Hawks over Doves” lists predictable errors that favor one category of competing counsel over another. That is, if such a division of alternatives into two broad categories were possible. Outside the scope of situations tested and detailed by Kahneman his use of labels such as “hawks” and “doves” broadens the signification. Hence abuse of the sort indulged in this piece.

The alternatives documented by Sebald may then be considered as instances of these categories, in relative terms not as types but as degrees. One of which can be labeled more hawkish as it was “in perfect sympathy with the innermost principle of every war, which is to aim for as wholesale an annihilation of the enemy with his dwellings, his history, and his natural environment as can be possibly achieved”

Kahneman’s conclusion is not that hawkish advisors are necessarily wrong only that they are likely to be more persuasive than they deserve to be. Adding to biases the accumulated potential of all the capital, labor and intelligence which will then go into a certain plan, it becomes easy to agree with Alexander Kluge’s idea which Sebald quotes:

“…systematic destruction arising from the development of the means and modes of industrial production hardly seems to justify the principal of hope”.

In the lectures an interview is referred to with; Brigadier Fredrick L. Anderson of U.S. Eight Army Air Force, where he is asked the question “weather hoisting a white flag made from six sheets on the tower of St. Martin’s in good time might have prevented the bombing of the city”. In response “he points out that the bombs they had brought were, after all, “expensive items”. “in practice they couldn’t have been dropped over mountains or open country after so much labor had gone into making them at home”

The psychological determinism which may affect the choice of tactics at an earlier stage in the conflict is then overtaken by the techno-economic determinism of the war industry. The biases in turn at later stages can affect the interpretation of the outcome. The tendency therefore is not to consider revisions in tactics and onwards.

When a system’s mechanism is remotely dialectical it’s difficult to resist the temptation not to import more obfuscation. Thankfully Sebald does the kind job of telling us that Alexander Kluge captioned a photograph of a ruined city in one of his works with the following quotation from Marx.

“We see how the history of industry and the objective existence of industry have become the open book of human consciousness, human psychology perceived in sensory terms …”

This all is too easy and deliberate, decision making histories can never be reduced to an account of competing alternatives. But bias plus the momentum of production leave little elbow room to suggest "a natural history of destruction" which is really the summary of technical, organizational and political prerequisites for its unfolding.

On local enhancement and its cost

In crystallization, assembly of initially unordered molecules is paid for by a transfer of thermal energy from the crystalline phase to the solution. To demonstrate a similar compliance with the 2^nd law of thermodynamics in the reproduction of highly ordered structures an experiment closely comparable to crystallization for living organisms can be considered.

Jacques Monod, 1970, Chance and Necessity:

“We take a milliliter of water having in it a few milligrams of simple sugar, such as glucose, as well as some mineral salts containing the essential elements that enter into the chemical constituents of living organisms (nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc.). In this medium we grow a bacterium, for example Escherichia coli (length, 2 microns; weigh approximately 5×10^-13 grams) inside thirty six hours the solution will contain several billion bacteria. We shall find about 40 per cent of the sugar has been converted into cellular constituents, while the remainder has been oxidized into carbon dioxide and water. By carrying out the entire experiment in calorimeter, one can draw up the thermodynamic balance sheet for the operation and determine that, as in the case of crystallization, the entropy of the system as a whole (bacteria plus medium) has increased a little more than the minimum prescribed by the 2^nd law. Thus while the extremely complex system represented by the bacterial cell has not only been conserved but has multiplied several billion times, the thermodynamic debt corresponding to the operation has been duly settled.”

Monod meditates further on this phenomenon in the following lines:

“Nonetheless, something unfailingly upsets our physical intuition…Why? Because we see clearly that this process is bent or oriented in one exclusive direction: the multiplication of cells. These to be sure do not violate the laws of thermodynamics, quite the contrary.  They not only obey them; they utilize them as a good engineer would, with maximum efficiency to carry out the project and bring about the “dream” (as Francois Jacob has put it) of every cell: to become two cells”

Now, recovering from that metaphor (i.e. the dream) one is left with two thoughts. The first has to do with, the cost of order or the transfer of thermal energy to the periphery. The other a bit less sound has to do with the possibilities of a transplant; as any analogy may be described as one.

Let us take a short story "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" by Will Self which I haven’t read but whose plot is relevant to the operation (transplant). A theory is put forward in the story that there is "only a fixed proportion of sanity to go round in any given society" so it follows; if you cure an asylum full of schizophrenics in Turku, a group of perfectly sane people will go crazy in Saarbrucken. Not quite the 2^nd law as the system does not evolve towards a degradation of order, the sanity remains constant.  

However it leads one to think of the cost of sanity/intelligence, and its relative growth in terms similar to any system of invariant replication and its energy demands. Can such metaphors be applied to information processing or the memeosphere? If codification and copying of knowledge comes at a cost is there a loss in the sum total of codified exchange and apprehension? If so where do we draw the boundaries? Which apprehending systems should we consider?

Reduction in biodiversity is also coupled by an increase in the scale and power of computing or sensory systems produced by mankind that are to measure, record, analyse, warn etc. These do not yet have the apprehending power or complexity of many life forms in tracing phenomenon and reacting. So the question is how much loss has accompanied this local increase in apprehending power or sanity in some components of the biosphere. 

To further define sanity as any processing power for a purpose, I am tempted to use Gregory Bateson's definition of “information” as “a difference which makes a difference”. With a slight difference between the first difference and the second, the first implying any pattern in the universe which can be discerned or sensed the second being the significance as in “what difference does it make to …my life, survival or whatever aims a component of a system can have”.

Here it becomes a bit more tricky, as the metaphors start to distract the “…dream of every cell to become two cells” is no more conscious or deliberate than say the dream of the water pouring down a waterfall or that of a river reaching the sea. So the differences that make a difference to cellular multiplication are not objectively different than the differences in topography which create a waterfall, or are they? How much more does it matter to a cell to multiply, than it does to water under the influence of gravity to fall off some edge? This makes the earlier definition of sanity or apprehending power as the processing of a difference that makes a difference less natural or purposeful even at higher levels. I have a feeling that this line of thought can only conclude in a variety of reverse panpsychism, which will invalidate the attempted transplant. 

Super Macro

This blog post is probably a query..

My tasks on the computer very often involve repetitions of commands. Even though the same commands (steps) reveal new information everyday.

Example 1.

Internet -

1. check 2 different mailboxes 
2. two different news sites and 
3. three blogs depending on the RSS feeds I have received

Can this happen automatically- at one mouse click?

Example 2.

Non-internet based job -

1. Start a custom designed commercial tool to do certain tasks
2. This job requires repeating the same steps to get different simulation results obviously with small variations in input data.
3. Then I copy and paste various texts from the tool to an excel sheet.
4. And do further simple math in excel. 
5. Finally, results are plot

How about a super macro creating software which records the steps across different tools on the computer and creates an executable script based on this recording. 

Enhanced feature - to add variables to this script so it may in the end have the capacity to produce an analysis.

Super Macro - to make for/ if-else loops within macros.

It would be brilliant to see an easy GUI based software that does this. With increasing computation capacity would'nt this be handy for the less code-able.

Transhumanism

Living Science Fiction.

Transhumanism is a movement or the philosophy that we can and should develop to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socialy using rational methods.

A TED talk by a transhumanist about some elements of transhumanism.
Transhumanism is a philosophy that humanity can, and should, strive to higher levels, both physically, mentally and socially. It encourages research into such areas as life extension, cryonics, nanotechnology, physical and mental enhancements, uploading human consciousness into computers and megascale engineering.

Also see - Transhuman resources by Anders Sandberg.

Google Publishes an online guide book

Google has just published an ebook to help people get started with the web -

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/

Bloom Box

One of the most heavily funded projects in the Silicon Valley inspite of the recession- the bloom box clean energy solution is now already installed in Google and e-bay campuses. It is the size of a cardboard box and supplies 1KW of SILENT power.

Comprising layers of ceramics and nanocomposites(magic sauce). Dr. Sridhar was a member of faculty here at University of Arizona, Tucson.

further

Lovely typos

Better cowhouse

The temperature of a cowhouse is unnecessarily high for the cows. One cow sweats approx. one bucket a day, so there is much energy going to waist.

--from a random find

The pen is mightier than the sword, but not the superhero

A true tale from Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)

Kennedy Stetson, son of the famous Stetson hat company founder, saw a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen tie the family's black maid Flo to a tree and gang rape her for talking back to a white trolley driver who had short-changed her.

Historian Wyn Craig Wade would later write, in his book about the KKK called The Fiery Cross, that Kennedy was "the single most important factor in preventing a post-war revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the north."

Kennedy's plan was simple: he would join the Klan and bring it down from the inside. Within just a few weeks of membership, Kennedy had compiled all the secret passwords, secret language (I'm looking for Mr. Ayak (translation: are you a klansmen?)), and had figured out its corporate structure with proof that the KKK was a slick profit-making, very political organization.

With information comes power, and Kennedy began wielding it. He passed Klan information to the Assistant Attorney General of Georgia, a known anti-clan buster. He presented to the Governor of Georgia the evidence on which the Klan's corporate charter--registering the KKK as a non-profit, non-political organization--was revokable.

The only thing was, it didn't work.

Like a creeping weed that infests the garden by an intricate root system from the bottom up, the KKK was deeply entrenched in the business, politics and law enforcement of the day. It seemed hopeless.

Until Superman literally came to the rescue. In an a-ha moment worthy of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Stetson Kennedy wrote to the producers of The Adventures of Superman, a radio show broadcast at dinnertime to millions across the nation. Turns out that the show's producers were looking for new villains, having exhausted Hitler, Mussolini, and the like. Kennedy gladly handed over all the secret information he had gathered and the producers wrote four week's worth of programming.

Almost instantly, Klan members started seeing their kids making a mockery of the KKK's most intimate rituals and code words. Towels and pillowcases tied around their heads, running around looking for Mr. Ayak and shouting chants...

In short, Klansmen were humiliated.

Membership applications plummeted and the Klan was never the same again.

It's a good thing that the KKK never had any kryptonite.

Chemical fingers

Can machine learning be enhanced by tactile experience, as in human learning? Well, why not put these chemical fingers on your robot and give it a learning task!

New Sensor Feels Fine

By Adrian Cho
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 June 2006

Even our super-sensitive fingertips would be hard-pressed to top this: A high-tech touch sensor can feel out the likeness of Abraham Lincoln on a penny. Rivaling the human fingertip's sensitivity to texture, the new sensor could give robots a finer sense of the objects they manipulate and help surgeons feel as well as see their way around the insides of the body.

Engineers can give robots eyes and ears by equipping them with video cameras and microphones. But enduing robots with a sense of touch is far more difficult. Simple sensors can tell a machine whether it is in contact with something, but detectors that also sense texture tend either to be too complicated and delicate for commercial use or lack the spatial resolution needed to detect details dozens of micrometers across. Now, chemical engineers Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi Saraf of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, have developed a relatively simple and sturdy sensor that can sense texture about as well as a human fingertip can.

The device is a film roughly 100 nanometers thick. Within it lie alternating layers of nanoparticles of gold and cadmium sulfide separated by films of polymer. The electrically charged gold nanoparticles repel each other, and because they don't touch, no current can flow along the film. However, if a voltage is applied from one side of the film to the other, electrons can pass from one layer of gold to the next by burrowing through the cadmium sulfide nanoparticles in between. When this happens, the cadmium sulfide nanoparticles emit light. The amount of current flowing and light produced increases dramatically as the various layers are squeezed together. Thus, when something textured presses into it, the electrified film will shine brightest where the object's bumps and bulges push in the farthest, creating a pattern of light that can be imaged with a digital camera.

Maheshwari and Saraf used the film to feel a penny and were able to resolve the tiny lettering on the coin. The detector can measure features as small as 40 micrometers cross and 5 micrometers tall--about as well as the human fingertip.

"There's something novel, something really good about this," says Richard Crowder, an electrical engineer at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. "You put a film on your robotic finger, and you've got your signal." The challenge, he adds, is incorporating a camera into the fingertip. But Saraf says it should be possible to detect the current flowing through the film directly, obviating the camera.

Page design to direct the reader's eye

Visualization is a common theme in Novelvig. Here is a short but clear guidline for page design by Christine Sevilla.

Effective page design maps a viewer's route through information. When designing information, your objective is to lead the viewer's eye directly to your message. Readers of English read from left to right and from the top of the page to the bottom. (The typical page-scanning pattern actually follows a Z). This habit of left-to-right eye movement dominates most design decisions in the West and is the basis for most conventional graphic design of print publications.

Minipreneurship

Worth thinking about!

http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/internet-marketing/3871396-1.html

MINIPRENEURS': a vast army of consumers turning entrepreneurs; including small and micro businesses, freelancers, side-businesses, weekend entrepreneurs, web-driven entrepreneurs, part-timers, free agents, cottage businesses, seniorpreneurs, co-creators, mompreneurs, pro-ams, solopreneurs, eBay traders, advertising-sponsored bloggers and so on.

Take the end user with a grain of salt

"If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

-Henry Ford

The Honda story

This is an anecdote about Honda passed on by one of the professors of my innovation class. I haven't independently verified its accuracy (ELFS), but here it is anyway.

The story goes that Honda was studying how to penetrate the American car market. They sent over some analysts to probe the situation and do some market research. They failed. They could find no way to interest Americans in Honda cars. They gave up. Just before they were scheduled to leave, one of these analysts goes shopping on his little Honda motorbike, and a randomly-encountered random stranger saw this bike and exclaimed surprise and admiration for this novel piece of small-bike engineering. No one had seen anything quite like it.

The analyst was hit with an idea. Perhaps the way in to America was not through cars, which had been the plan, but through little motorcycles.

And the rest is automotive history.

Ben Franklin in Stockholm

The reciprocity norm, tit for tat, the golden rule, the many names of the basic decency in us. At the same time a bayesian-evolutionary cooperative Nash equilibrium to which we have successfully converged.

The rule of reciprocation gives us a strong gut feeling that good deeds ought to be returned, which results in community cohesion and competitive advantage for a group, a society and a whole species. Those who only take and never give are usually hated, punished and ostracized (unless they manage to go unobserved).

Just as our preference for sweet-tasting food (ripe fruits) has been hijacked by the chocolate industry, our reciprocation sense is ruthlessly exploited by marketers, salespeople and master negotiators. When we taste a food sample from the supermarket, we feel obliged to buy something, or at least to listen carefully to the sales pitch. When we get a candy with the receipt, we feel obliged to buy more next time, even if we know it is a cheap trick. When we are flattered, we are more likely to give favors even though we claim to be rational and just. To avoid being seen (or seeing oneself) as ingrate or as a moocher, we overcompensate and engage in disproportionate reciprocation to the great satisfaction of waiters and cab drivers.

People are nice: researchers sent out "Merry Christmas" postcards to random strangers, and got enthusiastic replies from a significant portion of them. Many of the recipients added them to their list of friends to send postcards to on all occasions (this was before people got used to spam).

Nothing revolutionary so far, just Marketing and Psychology 101. The surprise lies in a more subtle and somewhat contradictory phenomenon, the Ben Franklin effect.

An acute observer, Benjamin Franklin noticed that political opponents became more sympathetic and easier to persuade if at some point he asked them a small favor, such as to borrow a book from them. They were both flattered and comforted by the fact that Ben Franklin owed them a book/favor.

Distilled in B.F.'s own words:

He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

The psychological explanation is that people engage in post hoc rationalizing: "Why did I do a favor to this person ?" "It must be because I like him so much."

The effect readily explains a large number of social phenomena and has been tried experimentally: participants in an experiment were given cash reward. After the experiment the professor asked some participants (randomly selected) to give back the reward (on some made up grounds). Most of them complied. In a later study, those who were asked to give the money back were found to have a much better opinion of the professor than those who were not asked such favor.

At an extreme, this might explain the Stockholm-syndrome as well (where captives become sympathetic to their captors).

If one can prepare to defend against an exploit of the reciprocation norm, by simply not asking or accepting favors, the Ben Franklin effect is devastating: you ask me a small favor in order to ask a greater one later and I will gladly comply. You abuse me, and I'll love you even more. A tragic corollary of this effect is that in war we end up hating our victims. The more innocent they are, the more negative our feelings become.

But how can both effects work at the same time, how can they be reconciled when there is seemingly a contradiction ? Are there some cases in which one is stronger than the other ?
Does it depend on whether the favor is asked for or not, or on some other variable ? Are there personality types more vulnerable to one or the other ? How to prepare against being tricked by car-salesmen who use one of these effects ? Where is a resident psychologist when we need one ?

Science and fundraising

A candid piece in PLoS Biology about grantsmanship and its ills, the stifling of creativity due to insecurity and poor criteria for evaluating proposals etc.

Borges the post-modern

Revisiting Borges (previous visit), a hilarious short story is Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote (link to Engl. translation).

It is the fictitious inventory and literary criticism of the lifework of a certain symbolist poet, Pierre Menard. The author has left behind many works, for example:

e) A technical article on the possibility of improving the game of chess, eliminating one of the rook’s pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, discusses and finally rejects this innovation.

However, most notable is his "Don Quixote" which is (spoiler alert) a word-by-word recreation of Cervantes' original.

So the critique goes:

In spite of these three obstacles, Menard’s fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes’. The latter, in a clumsy fashion, opposes to the fictions of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country; Menard selects as his “reality” the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. What a series of espagnolades that selection would have suggested to Maurice Barrès or Dr. Rodríguez Larreta! Menard eludes them with complete naturalness. In his work there are no gypsy flourishes or conquistadors or mystics or Philip the Seconds or autos da fé. He neglects or eliminates local color. This disdain points to a new conception of the historical novel. This disdain condemns Salammbô, with no possibility of appeal.

just to build up for the main pun:

It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.”

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the “lay genius” Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

“. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor.”

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases—exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor —are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Menard—quite foreign, after all—suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his time.

With this 1939 piece, says the anonymous expert from wikipedia:

Borges anticipates the post-modern theory that gives centrality to reader response [citation needed].

Taxonomy of technical results

ok, ok, I'm back ...

here's a proposed taxonomy of technical results / scientific papers:

a technical result is a(n)
elegant/ugly
solution/non-solution to a(n)
difficult/easy
problem/non-problem.

We all hope (imagine?) to be producing elegant solutions to difficult problems, when more often we create ugly non-solutions to easy non-problems.

Is there any part of the science landscape not fitting onto this chart ?