Chairman, I Have the Dance Floor!

There are sometimes news stories that just seem so... right for the world. So perfectly suited to our times; so demonstrative of the way the world is.I just ran across one of those stories and thought I'd quickly share it.

So over a thousand people have been slaughtered in the past month in the world's newest country, South Sudan. It is a terrible tragedy- with no real institutions running yet and an inexperienced government busy fighting against aggression from Sudan to the north and rebels within, the people of this nation are once again caught in a conflict that proves how fragile our existence is in this world. Amid the chaos, those seeking peace have called for a cease fire and time to work out a fragile truce between the government and rebels. To do this, they took their talks to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa so they could rationally debate the issues in a calm, neutral setting.

So far, the story is a perfect demonstration of the instability of the fast changing world we live in and how those who want to make the world a better place must put forth heroic efforts to do so.

But the story is also a bit of a downer. Where's the fun?

Here's the fun.

So the delegates get to Addis Ababa ready to talk but Ethiopia has some trouble finding a suitable venue for these men. So where do these august gentlemen trying to stop their country from tearing themselves apart find themselves?

In a nightclub. That's still open.

If you look in the picture, you can see the DJ in the back with cords coming down from his equipment. Delegates complained of the "poor lighting" and "excessive noise." Have you ever tried having a real conversation in a nightclub? It's damn near impossible. Now try having a conversation upon which the lives of thousands hangs on. Imagine General Robert E. Lee surrendering to General Grant and trying to work out the details of the post-war world and Grant shouting, "I'm sorry- WHAT? I can't- did you say you want the sexy back? I'm sorry, that's a DEAL BREAKER. WAR ON."

But luckily the delegates didn't have to put up with this for long because the leaders of a nation at war got booted out of their room. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to town and obviously his trip was more important than stopping a civil war, so the South Sudanese leaders got put in the basement of the building. So now the peace talks have gone from a nightclub to a basement.

Peace is hard in this chaotic world. Sometimes to build a nation, you've just got to break it down. You need to compromise- they need to raise the roof on what they can do and you need to drop the base. It won't always be calm- sometimes people will be raving. You just need to stick with it- grind away at the problem. Hopefully the talks will hit the right chords and one day, they will get their country out of its funk.

Quantum Suicide

This isn't a cognitive tool or about the internet, but I said in my first post that I'd write about things that interest me, and I ever since I heard about this thought experiment I've been fascinated with quantum physics. Proposed by MIT Professor Max Tegmark in 1997, it starts out simply: you're in a bar and Walter White comes up to you holding a gun.

Ok, so I've updated the set up a bit. What can I say? I'm working my way through Breaking Bad on Netflix.

He comes up to you and offers you a deal: he has a new type of gun called a quantum revolver. He says that, in a new take on Russian Roulette, he wants you to point the gun at your head and pull the trigger. If you live, he'll give you a thousand dollars. If you die... well, you're dead so it doesn't matter what he does. Maybe he'll put you in a tub with acid. *Spoilers.* Of course, being the feared Heisenberg and carrying a special quantum revolver, there is a catch. The trigger mechanism is rigged to a nano-camera that can observe quantum particles called quarks. If, at the moment you pull the trigger, the quark is spinning clockwise, the gun won't go off. If the quark is spinning counter-clockwise, it will. What do you do?

There's a METHod to his madness.

There is an actual answer to this- you take the deal. And when you've pulled the trigger, you take the deal again. And again. And again. You keep on going and make yourself filthy rich (never mind that the money is coming from drug deals. Way to support addiction).

Unfortunately, it also means you'll be committing suicide each time you do it. Kind of win-some-lose-some thing.

So what am I talking about? In quantum physics, a particle exists in multiple states at the same time. The quark in the gun is going both clockwise and counter-clockwise at the same time. We know this from experiments which give that result, but we've never been able to actually observe this. This is because, according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (get it now?!), you can never know the state of a particle because as soon as you observe it, the quantum state of it collapses and changes the way it behaves. Before you look at it, the particle exists in multiple states. As soon as it is observed, the state becomes one way or the other. And this isn't just a pot-head thing- this is the way the world actually is. Schrodinger's Cat is both dead and alive in the unobserved box at the same time (unless you don't feed it ever in which case it'll just be two different kinds of dead).

Back to the guy with a gun in a bar.

You pull the trigger. To you, you will never have to worry about being killed. That's because at the moment you pull the trigger, according to the Many-World's Theory of quantum physics (which I have doubts about but it is entirely possible and even necessary according to String Theory), the universe will split. In one, the quark will spin counter-clockwise and you'll die, in the other, the quark will collapse as spinning clockwise and you'll live.

The beauty of the theory is that you will only ever experience the world in which you live. That's because if you pull the trigger and the gun goes off, that's it, you're dead. You don't sense anything else. The version of you in the universe where the gun doesn't go off will continue on though and will remember every time you pulled the trigger and the gun didn't go off. For that version of you, you'll go on living completely oblivious to the other universes and you'll be $1000 richer.

That's why I found this thought experiment so fascinating. It's because one version of you will ALWAYS win and never have to worry about the infinite number of other you's that die. And at the end of the day, does  the fact that you're dead in another universe really matter? You will never be able to go to that universe anyway- you can take the money and go on your merry way. Just don't blow it all on meth.

Cognitive Tools: Triumph of the Will

One of my favorite psychological experiments was conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960's. What he did was to take a bunch of pre-school kids and put them in a room. He put a cookie on a table in front of them and told them that he had to step out of the room for a few minutes and that the kids had a choice: they could eat the cookie now, or, if they didn't eat the cookie and waited until he got back, they could have two cookies. The vast majority of kids said they'd wait.

Very poor self control. 

Something interesting happened. As time went on, most kids said, "screw it, Imma eat that cookie" (though not in so many well-articulated words). A small number held out however. When Mischel years later checked in on the the kids in the experiment, it turned out that the ability to wait; to delay the gratification of the one cookie now for the two cookies later was the single biggest factor in determining later life success. This single factor was more predictive of higher test scores and performance success than socio-economic status or genetics or any other one thing- being able to wait for a cookie could make you rich.

Now this experiment is a favorite for a couple reasons. First and most important is that this justifies my "Lucky Charms" theory that it is scientifically better to eat all the cereal parts first and then have a few glorious spoonfuls of marshmallow at the end than to it is to eat it all together as the makers intended. Secondly, the experiment means that self-discipline, a skill that can be practiced and internalized, can actually make you perform better as a person. In other words, how you are now doesn't have to be who you are forever- you can be better.

The question is how is this done and, once again, we can turn to Mischel. Mischel noticed something about the kids who could hold out for the second cookie. When they were waiting, those kids didn't just sit there looking at the cookie- they intentionally diverted their attention to other things. Some kids sang "Sesame Street" songs, some repeatedly tied their shoes, some pretended to take naps- they chose to forget about the cookie right in front of them. Those who could willfully choose to occupy their mind with thoughts other than of cookies were able to get the result they wanted.

Author of "How We Decide" Jonah Lehrer describes this as the strategic allocation of attention and is a technique anyone could use. If you are trying to diet, you're naturally going to think about how hungry you are and how you'd really like a pizza instead of a salad. If you can focus your attention on something else- say the football game on TV- you'll be less inclined to think about your cravings and you'll have an easier time sticking with your diet. It also applies to sitting in a lecture. If you consciously focus your attention and chose to not go on facebook where you'll have the temptation to be distracted, focusing on the lecture itself will be much easier. Of course, this is all much easier said than done. That is where newer research comes in.

In 2007, Mathew Galliot and Roy Baumeister discovered that a single act of will power causes depletion of glucose and that, as more acts requiring will power are performed, glucose levels decrease and those acts become harder for the individual. In other words, no one has infinite will power and can always be disciplined all the time. Instead, we have a limited source of will power that decreases over time and needs to be recharged.

This is important for a number of reasons. The first is that you can forgive yourself for not being the super productive person you imagine yourself being because will power relies on chemical processes that aren't infinite. It also means that you can consciously improve will power through two means. The first is to continually "exercise" you will power. Glucose production and depletion is a product of natural processes that can be strengthened or weakened over time. If you never force yourself to do things, it is, purely on a chemical level, harder for you to force yourself to do things when you really need to. If you force yourself to do things all the time, your body will become better at glucose production and use and forcing yourself to do things will become easier over time. Another way to effect this is through conscious habit building. When you perform the same actions routinely, those actions require less will power over time as they become habit. This frees up that energy that would be used for doing those things for other, more important tasks. For example, if it is hard to brush your teeth and floss twice a day, start by forcing yourself to do it when you aren't in a particularly stressful time in your life. Over time, this will become a habit and you'll be able to do it without a second thought. Once stress comes around (during finals time for example), you'll be able to keep up the behavior and still be able to have energy for focusing on your studies. This has the added benefit of exercising your self-control in an easy situation so you'll be stronger for when you really need it.

So, the TL;DR version: willpower is a muscle like anything else. The more you exercise it, the easier it will be to use and the more you can use it to strategically allocate your attention, the more cookies you'll get.

Cognitive Tools: The Nominal Fallacy

I'm not a Taoist. I find a lot of its ideas interesting and I love to read the Tao Te Ching and reflect on what it says, but at heart I am too much a scientist. The second line of the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching says, "The name that can be named is not the eternal name" and a central tennet of Taoism is that giving a name to anything divides it from the united totality of the universe. The most famous Taoist symbol- that of Yin and Yang is a representation of the futility of dividing and defining things.

Yet labels have been a cornerstone of science since Aristotle and it are an immensely powerful tool when trying to understand the world. For example, the 2004 Nobel Price in physics winner Frank Wilczek wrote that, "When Murray Gell-Mann invented 'quarks,' he was giving a name to a paradoxical pattern of facts. Once that pattern was recognized, physicists faced the challenge of refining it into something mathematically precise and consistent, but identifying the problem was the crucial step toward solving it!" In other words, once we can give a name to an identifiable thing (or pattern), that allows us to analyze it and begin to understand it even when we lack complete information.

Not only that, but labels are a useful heuristic for understanding the world. We have to categorize things in order to get through our lives. For example, when you are at a new restaurant and see that they have steak tartare, there is no reason to assume that restaurant's dish is going to be a disgusting pile of meat that will get you sick. But, because you one time got terrible food poisoning from steak tartare, you put it in the "dangerous pile of disgust" category and order something else. You lack complete information regarding the safety and taste of the dish at this restaurant, but because it shares many characteristics with something you know you don't like, it fits the category and you can save yourself hours locked in a bathroom.

There is a problem with this thinking however. 

Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia Stuart Firestein calls it the "nominal fallacy;" the error of believing that the label carries explanatory information. The example he uses is "instinct." We ascribe a number of supposedly innate behaviors to instinct that are attributable to genetics and natal conditioning. When describing the way a chicken pecks the ground for example, we say that the behavior is instinctual and the chicken simply does it because it is part of its hardwired instincts to do so. The problem with this is that this label is a sufficient explanation for most people when, really, we had no clue about why chickens pecked the ground the way we do. In the 1920's, Chinese researcher Zing-Yang Kuo decided to go beyond the instinct explanation and actually discovered that chickens peck the ground the way they do because while they are in the egg, their necks are bent over and when their heart starts to beat, their head moves in precisely the same manner as they peck the ground. The chicken's movement isn't an innate instinct at all- it is a learned, pre-natal behavior. 

This example demonstrates the key problem of the nominal fallacy. Because we had a label that explained that behavior, people were content to use the word "instinct" as an explanation when really that didn't explain anything at all. Science and common discourse are full of other examples. "Gravity" quickly comes to mind- gravity describes how all matter in the universe is mutually attracted to everything else but the truth is that we have no idea how gravity works, if it is an independent phenomenon, or if instead it is the product of several separate processes. 

The problem is not specific to science either. Consider human behavior. When someone is an asshole to us, we say it is because they're an asshole. The label explains the behavior. The problem is that anyone who has seen a made-for-TV movie knows that people are never assholes just because they're assholes. The "bully" at school often has an abusive home life. The "idiot" may have a learning disability or simply not excel at analyzing poetry but may be brilliant at working with their hands. 

The problem becomes a more serious one when it gets thrown into politics. "Democrat" and "Republican" become shorthand for a whole host of views that almost no individual has in their entirety. Solutions for poverty get explained away as the poor being poor because they're the kind of people who are poor- lazy people who would rather spend their welfare checks on a new iPhone rather than getting a better job rather than being the product of a whole host of factors both in and outside their control. Crime gets explained the same way- criminals are just vile people who chose to sin rather than be upright, righteous citizens rather than being put into hard situations with little social support or practical, legitimate means of getting out of their situations.

Now this isn't to say that labels aren't useful analytic tools. The problem is that too often labels are inappropriately used as explanations for phenomena when the true causes or mechanisms are unknown. As Firestein wrote, "The power of language to direct thought should never be taken lightly, and the dangers of the name game deserve our respect."

You and Your Friends Versus Me and the Revolution

The Revolution is Coming. With Pancakes.

So, for my first real blog post, I wanted to lay out one theory of mine that I've been thinking of for a while. It isn't particularly controversial or insightful, but I think the conclusion is under appreciated: we live in one of the greatest periods of transition the world has ever known and the world is going to get messy by the time Aubrey de Grey's beard turns 100 (the benefit of having my own blog is that I can make obscure references with links so people can understand my jokes!). This might take a while, so I'll break it up into various posts. Also, excuse this first post- I know it is going to be very general but before I get technical you need to see where I'm coming from.

So. One of the most forceful drivers of human and societal progress is communication technology. While there is considerable controversy on this point with regard to whales and primates, so far as we know, language is unique to humanity. Language enables us to convey information to others, enabling its rapid acquisition and use among a broader range of people. The more information is spread, the more its validity can be tested, refined, and built upon. The more information is built up, the more it can be used for the advancement of whichever group has it. This goes all the way back to the earliest time of our species and why we established dominance in Eastern Africa: human children were able to draw on the knowledge of their parents and tribe, thus avoiding having to discover everything for oneself. There's no need to reinvent the wheel every generation if someone can just tell you how to make it. Language, the most basic form of communication also allowed advanced coordination among members, allowing tiny humans to hunt and kill giant mammoths or deadly saber-tooth tigers. Once we had language, we had a huge advantage over species that did not.

Writing was the next big advance in communication technology. Writing started from ancient Mesopotamians trying to facilitate trade and taxation. It turns out that scratching a symbol on clay to represent something in the world is a lot easier than having to carry around all your grain or animals to keep track of them all. With this came advanced coordination and information transmission because you didn't actually need the speaker to be right next to you in order to benefit from the information they were trying to convey. Carl Sagan described just how awesome this was:

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.” - Carl Sagan

Hammurabi's Code was Great. His chair looked uncomfortable. 

Now along with writing came the first civilizations. Hammurabi's Code is the first example we have of a society deciding they're going to live by more-or-less stable rules that everyone can point to. This stability enabled even more coordination in the form of trade and the benefits of specialization that come with increased trade (Plato pointed this out way before Adam Smith ever did) which in turn freed up resources for military and the first empire building.

At this point, history speeds up. Humanity existed as hunter-gatherer tribes for hundreds of thousands of years without much advancement because you were limited to what knowledge you could get from your tribe. Hammurabi's code is dated to a mere 4000-ish years ago. Once you have increased communication spread, you can go much faster.

You could write entire books on this subject, so I'll speed things up by going briefly how communication technology (tied with ability to project power) built some of the more major empires. Keep in mind this is all ridiculously simplistic, but it helps understand where things are going. So after the ancient empires, the next empire-model is the Roman one. Rome was unique for both its extent and duration. A part of why it was able to get so big for so long is because they were able to move troops, goods, and information faster than anyone else. Why? After the Punic Wars they dominated the Mediterranean allowing their ships to reach any part of their empire pretty quickly and they built an extensive road network to get troops and messengers anywhere faster than their enemies could. After the Romans came the dark ages where communication became restricted and trade destabilized, with only monasteries acting as repositories of human knowledge. The first massive empire after Rome was really the Mongols. How did they do it? They were a society of horsemen who could move and strike faster than just about any army until mechanization. Once they took over, their harsh punishments for crime enabled safe passage, making the Silk Road safe to travel on from end to end for the first time. (I highly recommend "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford for insight into this. Keep in mind, this is a pretty revisionist history- for those interested in a more balanced depiction of the Mongols, listen to Dan Carlin's excellent podcasts on the subject). The largest empire ever- the British empire- was able to exist because they controlled the oceans and could send their fleets anywhere in the world faster than anyone else.

Now, empires were built because of power projection which used the same avenues as information transmission; messengers carrying orders also carried treatises on philosophy and math. But what really destabilized the world was the mass expansion of information that came with the printing press. Again, whole books have been written on the subject so I can't do it justice here. But think of this... the printing press comes out and suddenly people are no longer reliant on the clergy to get their spiritual direction. This leads to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation along with their war cry of "Sola Scriptura!" This broke the power of the gate keepers of information and lead to a general decrease in the power of authority. Time and time again, the more people had information and could utilize it, the less power elites in society had over others. Once you can intelligently question those in power, that power is broken (just read the writings of the man with the sweetest hair in history: Frederick Douglass). This premise is built into the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution- free speech and a free press enables an informed citizenry which can produce better results in terms of leaders and policy preferences.

The Hair With the Stare.

So, where am I going with this? The internet and why the old world and way of doing things is over. In the next couple posts I'll get more in to that, but I also want to analyze this theory through the lens of mathematical information theory and application to crowds which will be a post unto itself. I also plan on going over modern tools of data analysis and communication technologies that can change the world and I want to connect this to developments in evolutionary programming. And this is all only with this one general subject and doesn't touch any other subjects I want to get to... I have a lot of writing to do.

The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning...

Hello theoretical reader! I've decided to start a blog!

Writing is an excellent mental exercise that forces one to clarify thought into a form understandable to others. I often write short stories and then delete them or I think of various theories about the way the world operates and never try to put them on paper and flesh them out. This blog will serve as a repository for both of those, for things I find interesting, and for anything else I want to put up. It doesn't particularly have any one theme and I'll write about whatever I'm interested in at the moment be it politics, the law, physics, math, biology, fiction, or anything else. So let's get to it!