People were scattered around the beach, laughing, drinking, warming themselves with daytime fires as he walked along the shore and into the rocks, around a bend, and then out of sight. The sun was beginning to set out across the expanse of the Pacific; the orange horizon bent with the curve of the Earth. It is beautiful, he thought.
The sea surged over partially submersed crags, charging forward quickly toward him, swirling with turbulence and a power that crashed onto the shoreline boulders he walked among, only to retreat again in swirls and froth into the depths. It is not safe, he thought. It is beautiful.
It washed up over his feet, barely, and he stood and breathed deeply. But the rocks, now slippery, failed him, and he slipped. He hadn't considered this; his only precaution was not to get too close, to avoid getting knocked down by the surging sea. But he just slipped. And into this monster of sea he went.
When the currents pulled him out, like flotsam, his chest heaved as he flung himself back toward shore. He thought to cry out but decided instead to swim. Swim. It was just panic. It was just panic. The shadows on the shore had grown larger and the thought of struggling in this immense leviathan of blackness approaching from above and below was too much. It was just panic.
When he reached one of the boulders, partially submerged, he felt lucky that it protruded for him momentarily above the surging water. He climbed onto it, heart pounding, gasping. Out of the sea he grew calmer, and then he almost laughed, realizing that he'd not (until that moment) thought of the horrific maw of large sharks coming up to him from beneath. He had been consumed with not drowning. A triumph of sorts. Moments later the sea came again, and his white bloodless hands slipped off of the surface as he was pulled again into its awesome power. It drove him violently forward toward the boulders, and helplessly he was flung onto the jagged rocks. But this did it. In this moment he grasped a protruding crag and clung fast as the sea turned back again in its endless cycle. He was alive.
His boots were gone. He walked, wet, shaken, barefoot, back to the beach. A large camp had stoked to life a bonfire, and grinning faces circled it, laughing, talking. He walked up, and smiled, and said hardly a word all that good, long night. It was beautiful.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Mr. Magoo
If it turned out that the entire edifice of human thought and indeed the fate of the free world depended on a guy named Mr. Magoo, would we still listen to him? I would. But it would bug me.
Generalizations
A little theory. About generalizations. On Monday.
Think of a "generalization" as a rule or conditional of the form "If X then Y", where X and Y can stand for everyday things like "If you need eggs then go to the store" or for scientific things like "If a fixed amount of gas is kept at a fixed temperature, then pressure and volume are inversely proportional". In the latter case we might also use the word "law", as in scientific laws.
A whole lot more can be said about generalizations, laws, and the like, but this admittedly cursory intro will do for present purposes.
Now, something we've discovered in the history of science is that the power of generalizations reduces drastically when applied to complex systems. In contrast, generalizations--say, the inverse square law in physics--have enormous predictive power when applied to very large systems where details can be ignored (to "the very large" as Hawking puts it). It's interesting that generalizations work wonderfully also for the really small; say, with quantum mechanical explanations of subatomic phenomena (where the generalizations are statistical in nature, but still general, powerful, and well-defined). But what's common to successful generalizations in either case is the lack of complexity in the systems in which they apply. Celestial mechanics ignores quite a lot. We want to know how long it will take for one body to orbit another, but we don't inject millions of other possible interactions (say, possible meteorites) to perform the calculations. Likewise, we isolate photons or other quantum phenomena in order to use quantum mechanics to predict outcomes.
Sure, classical mechanics -- Newtonian, and we can include Einstein's theories of relativity for these purposes-- are composed of really beautiful, powerful generalizations. So strange, then, that they are so irrelevant to prediction in everyday experience. The location at some time t + n given the location at time t of an entire planet is knowable given our classic theory. But something seemingly simple--the movements of a particular cubic inch of water in a mountain stream--is not. Why is the world like this?
We use other generalizations for predicting outcomes in complex systems. Mostly, however, we don't use laws but past experience. This is true of course with people (we rely on our knowledge of past events to make plausible inferences about future ones), and with computers, where models of complex systems invoke observed prior cases and relevant features (where "relevance" is added by the human) to generalize to likely future outcomes given unseen data. Laws don't do the predictive work in messy systems (we may assume, of course, that laws governing the relation between pressure, temperature, and so on all continue to apply in such systems nonetheless).
Humans, of course, make use of generalizations in everyday experience. They constitute "heuristics" or "rules of thumb". These are generalizations that no one expects will always apply. We know they admit of exceptions, but still they capture correlations between events of certain types that make them useful. Don't get into a car with a stranger, I tell my children, knowing full-well that there are scenarios where that is exactly what they should do (say, to save them from a maniac on the street).
But now things start to get messy. In everday experience, humans are what I call tightly coupled to changing circumstances--to facts--in a way that classical generalizations are expressely designed to avoid. We don't care about details of the celestial bodies when computing their trajectory through space. We care about some fixable features (their mass and velocity, mostly). We do care about these details when navigating through life. A person is a large object, and the slight raising of an eyebrow is a relatively small change in this object. But it might matter to someone (matter a lot), depending on some or other context.
So, this connection we have to changing circumstances implies that our cognitive or inferential abilities must be constantly, highly sensitive to details. This is, of course, exactly how it is with us. And an interesting consequence of this feature of everyday thinking is that our use of generalizations is circumscribed; they're not doing the inferential "heavy lifting" (what is?). Indeed, our stock of generalizations about the everyday world constantly become relevant, then irrelevant, and relevant again depending on context. (Some, like our belief that we won't float away into space, remain robust, though equally useless.) It's interesting that the world is like this. I think a whole lot follows from it, and I'll try to find some time to spell this out more later.
Think of a "generalization" as a rule or conditional of the form "If X then Y", where X and Y can stand for everyday things like "If you need eggs then go to the store" or for scientific things like "If a fixed amount of gas is kept at a fixed temperature, then pressure and volume are inversely proportional". In the latter case we might also use the word "law", as in scientific laws.
A whole lot more can be said about generalizations, laws, and the like, but this admittedly cursory intro will do for present purposes.
Now, something we've discovered in the history of science is that the power of generalizations reduces drastically when applied to complex systems. In contrast, generalizations--say, the inverse square law in physics--have enormous predictive power when applied to very large systems where details can be ignored (to "the very large" as Hawking puts it). It's interesting that generalizations work wonderfully also for the really small; say, with quantum mechanical explanations of subatomic phenomena (where the generalizations are statistical in nature, but still general, powerful, and well-defined). But what's common to successful generalizations in either case is the lack of complexity in the systems in which they apply. Celestial mechanics ignores quite a lot. We want to know how long it will take for one body to orbit another, but we don't inject millions of other possible interactions (say, possible meteorites) to perform the calculations. Likewise, we isolate photons or other quantum phenomena in order to use quantum mechanics to predict outcomes.
Sure, classical mechanics -- Newtonian, and we can include Einstein's theories of relativity for these purposes-- are composed of really beautiful, powerful generalizations. So strange, then, that they are so irrelevant to prediction in everyday experience. The location at some time t + n given the location at time t of an entire planet is knowable given our classic theory. But something seemingly simple--the movements of a particular cubic inch of water in a mountain stream--is not. Why is the world like this?
We use other generalizations for predicting outcomes in complex systems. Mostly, however, we don't use laws but past experience. This is true of course with people (we rely on our knowledge of past events to make plausible inferences about future ones), and with computers, where models of complex systems invoke observed prior cases and relevant features (where "relevance" is added by the human) to generalize to likely future outcomes given unseen data. Laws don't do the predictive work in messy systems (we may assume, of course, that laws governing the relation between pressure, temperature, and so on all continue to apply in such systems nonetheless).
Humans, of course, make use of generalizations in everyday experience. They constitute "heuristics" or "rules of thumb". These are generalizations that no one expects will always apply. We know they admit of exceptions, but still they capture correlations between events of certain types that make them useful. Don't get into a car with a stranger, I tell my children, knowing full-well that there are scenarios where that is exactly what they should do (say, to save them from a maniac on the street).
But now things start to get messy. In everday experience, humans are what I call tightly coupled to changing circumstances--to facts--in a way that classical generalizations are expressely designed to avoid. We don't care about details of the celestial bodies when computing their trajectory through space. We care about some fixable features (their mass and velocity, mostly). We do care about these details when navigating through life. A person is a large object, and the slight raising of an eyebrow is a relatively small change in this object. But it might matter to someone (matter a lot), depending on some or other context.
So, this connection we have to changing circumstances implies that our cognitive or inferential abilities must be constantly, highly sensitive to details. This is, of course, exactly how it is with us. And an interesting consequence of this feature of everyday thinking is that our use of generalizations is circumscribed; they're not doing the inferential "heavy lifting" (what is?). Indeed, our stock of generalizations about the everyday world constantly become relevant, then irrelevant, and relevant again depending on context. (Some, like our belief that we won't float away into space, remain robust, though equally useless.) It's interesting that the world is like this. I think a whole lot follows from it, and I'll try to find some time to spell this out more later.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
The Happy Gadget
Years ago, scientists from several countries collaborated on a well-funded effort to engineer an "experience machine" (it later came to be known as the "Happy Gadget"). Ethicists around the world squawked, initially, in protest, then were silenced when public support grew, and politicians around the world endorsed what became known as "The Happy Revolution", or just "The Happy".
The Happy Gadget gave wings to generations of parents who wanted only to see their children be happy. In times past, the failure of offspring to make of their lives a success (to become "healthy, wealthy, and wise", as pre-Happys once remarked, steeped as they were in ignorance) was bemoaned by all. It caused great consternation, and by degrees, greased the axles for a new social theory and shortly thereafter the political will to usher in The Happy.
In 2015 the Happy Gadget was tested on a small group of children. Measurements of happiness were, in the words of one examiner, "through the roof". In a press statement released by Happy Industries shortly after the test, results read as follows: "...subjects experienced consistent, non-degrading feelings of happiness while connected to Happy [that is, Happy 0232i, the first Happy Gadget]. 90% reported wishing to stay connected to Happy indefinitely." [One outlier reported feelings of guilt, and later anxiety, at not having "done anything", in his words. He was released from further experimentation; his whereabouts now are not known.]
By 2025, Happy was the rage. Parents who, before, had "just wanted their kids to be happy", would report that levels of happiness were markedly increased; children, hooked to the Happy Gadget, self-reported happiness levels never seen before. By 2027, according to official reports at the time, 93% of all children under 16 were Happy. The project was vindicated, and proclaimed a success. It seemed a new era was at hand.
And then it happened. In the summer of 2029, they came to our Eastern shores, and by the winter of that same year the Great War was upon us. Soon after the standing government closed the Happy experiment. Parents, alas, had realized their professed dream of "just seeing their children be happy", only to see it come to naught. By the following summer, their society was in ruins. Wailing into the night sky, parents were captured on film repeating, endlessly, the Gadgets mantra that their children were finally happy. And later, even their clarion voices would be silenced. The Happy children were made to work, and were enslaved, and of the few documents published during this dark time, it was recorded that happiness fell to levels not ever seen before. It fell, in one definitive account, even below the pre-Happy levels.
It is today of pressing historical and scientific interest how the greatest project in the history of mankind, with the greatest, surely most noble goal--to make our kids happy--ended ignominously, and with decades of subjugation and war. No definitive theories are forthcoming; some small minority have questioned the Happy Gadget project itself, but no doubt with strong opposition, and a questionable command of the facts. These views, such as they are, are still voiced, though mostly dismissed. There is now no clear path ahead.
The Happy Gadget gave wings to generations of parents who wanted only to see their children be happy. In times past, the failure of offspring to make of their lives a success (to become "healthy, wealthy, and wise", as pre-Happys once remarked, steeped as they were in ignorance) was bemoaned by all. It caused great consternation, and by degrees, greased the axles for a new social theory and shortly thereafter the political will to usher in The Happy.
In 2015 the Happy Gadget was tested on a small group of children. Measurements of happiness were, in the words of one examiner, "through the roof". In a press statement released by Happy Industries shortly after the test, results read as follows: "...subjects experienced consistent, non-degrading feelings of happiness while connected to Happy [that is, Happy 0232i, the first Happy Gadget]. 90% reported wishing to stay connected to Happy indefinitely." [One outlier reported feelings of guilt, and later anxiety, at not having "done anything", in his words. He was released from further experimentation; his whereabouts now are not known.]
By 2025, Happy was the rage. Parents who, before, had "just wanted their kids to be happy", would report that levels of happiness were markedly increased; children, hooked to the Happy Gadget, self-reported happiness levels never seen before. By 2027, according to official reports at the time, 93% of all children under 16 were Happy. The project was vindicated, and proclaimed a success. It seemed a new era was at hand.
And then it happened. In the summer of 2029, they came to our Eastern shores, and by the winter of that same year the Great War was upon us. Soon after the standing government closed the Happy experiment. Parents, alas, had realized their professed dream of "just seeing their children be happy", only to see it come to naught. By the following summer, their society was in ruins. Wailing into the night sky, parents were captured on film repeating, endlessly, the Gadgets mantra that their children were finally happy. And later, even their clarion voices would be silenced. The Happy children were made to work, and were enslaved, and of the few documents published during this dark time, it was recorded that happiness fell to levels not ever seen before. It fell, in one definitive account, even below the pre-Happy levels.
It is today of pressing historical and scientific interest how the greatest project in the history of mankind, with the greatest, surely most noble goal--to make our kids happy--ended ignominously, and with decades of subjugation and war. No definitive theories are forthcoming; some small minority have questioned the Happy Gadget project itself, but no doubt with strong opposition, and a questionable command of the facts. These views, such as they are, are still voiced, though mostly dismissed. There is now no clear path ahead.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
The Warming Planet
The Northeastern United States is currently gripped with unseasonably cold weather. I'm sure the Global Warming converts will have their circumlocutions ready. It's complicated. But we're still dead right. Sure.
Not Clinging to Religion
I've always had a hard time with a literal intepretation of the many claims of the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament is fraught with such difficulties that I'll set it aside for now. But believing the claims made in the Gospels is hardly an epistemic picnic either. "Jesus is God", that central tenet of Christianity, is just hard for me to believe. I'm no skeptic of the historical Jesus, but God? Really? And then there are the miracles (not just really rare events, but supernatural interventions in the physical world). The list goes on.
In addition to the basic problem of accepting these fantastical claims made in religious texts dating back thousands of years, there's a kind of convoluted quality to attempts by the early Church to makes sense of it all (and yet, it's now accepted doctrine, not amenable any more to re-interpretation). For instance, the Trinity. Do we really take seriously the three-in-one divinity idea? It just all seems so fishy.
For an insightful critique of organized religion try Sam Harris' The End of Faith. Even if you disagree, it's a fresh angle on the place of ancient religion in modern society, and it avoids the acerbic condescension of nit-wits like Bill Maher.
Finally, so I'm not misunderstood, and contra Harris, I'm not an atheist. Also, I'm not against the Church, whatever that would mean. I'd be horrified if religious faith ever "ended" in Harris' sense. I like the insights in his critique, but just not his conclusion. For one, organized religion provides much non-government public benefit; it's a strong "mediating institution" that stands between the State and individuals. Two, it's community-based, in the "Bowling Alone" sense that it discourages the slide toward selfish individualism. It brings people together. Three, the concept of the Divine, whatever the doctrinal details, is I think right-headed and, for lack of a better word, inspirational. I've never understood how Carl Sagan types find such beauty and purpose in matter and energy. I'm no materialist.
Okay, I think that's enough for now. I'll leave things with a few anecdotes from our political past. One, our own Benjamin Franklin, who was a lifelong supporter of church, was friendly to and friends with clergy and all things ecclesiastical, but nonetheless would spend Sunday "catching up on work" rather than in the pew. Two, the great Winston Churchill, who helped save the free world from the tyranny of fascism, once famously remarked that he was not so much a pillar of the church but a buttress, supporting it from the outside. Now that makes good sense to me.
In addition to the basic problem of accepting these fantastical claims made in religious texts dating back thousands of years, there's a kind of convoluted quality to attempts by the early Church to makes sense of it all (and yet, it's now accepted doctrine, not amenable any more to re-interpretation). For instance, the Trinity. Do we really take seriously the three-in-one divinity idea? It just all seems so fishy.
For an insightful critique of organized religion try Sam Harris' The End of Faith. Even if you disagree, it's a fresh angle on the place of ancient religion in modern society, and it avoids the acerbic condescension of nit-wits like Bill Maher.
Finally, so I'm not misunderstood, and contra Harris, I'm not an atheist. Also, I'm not against the Church, whatever that would mean. I'd be horrified if religious faith ever "ended" in Harris' sense. I like the insights in his critique, but just not his conclusion. For one, organized religion provides much non-government public benefit; it's a strong "mediating institution" that stands between the State and individuals. Two, it's community-based, in the "Bowling Alone" sense that it discourages the slide toward selfish individualism. It brings people together. Three, the concept of the Divine, whatever the doctrinal details, is I think right-headed and, for lack of a better word, inspirational. I've never understood how Carl Sagan types find such beauty and purpose in matter and energy. I'm no materialist.
Okay, I think that's enough for now. I'll leave things with a few anecdotes from our political past. One, our own Benjamin Franklin, who was a lifelong supporter of church, was friendly to and friends with clergy and all things ecclesiastical, but nonetheless would spend Sunday "catching up on work" rather than in the pew. Two, the great Winston Churchill, who helped save the free world from the tyranny of fascism, once famously remarked that he was not so much a pillar of the church but a buttress, supporting it from the outside. Now that makes good sense to me.
OU Tech game
OU's O Line steps up, Bradford shows that he's still in the Heisman hunt, and the defense finds an answer to Crabtree. OU by 10.
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