Odd Todd Not Bad

Odd Todd's a web-based animated cartoon I just came across. Seems decently funny, based on the toon I had a look at.

Blaming Being Illogical's Not Always Sensible

"You're being illogical"
"Your argument is illogical"
"My argument is completely logical"

Logic, or a lack thereof, seems to the standard mark of evidence held up for or against an argument. So, it supposedly goes: an argument is invalidated by being illogical, validated by being logical. If someone is drawing an invalid conclusion or presenting an invalid argument, it's because there is a fault in their logic. This explanation, I want to argue, doesn't always make sense.

Logic can certainly take the blame in some situations. For example, a person may take p to be true and ultimately know that if p is true then q must also be true, but still deny that q is true. Or they may beg the question, by assuming the conclusion they're trying to justify. But frequently, mistakes can't be blamed on logic.

Perceptual problems and inaccurate knowledge can be at fault. I won't talk much about the former here, but will note that Edward de Bono has (see his book "I am Right, You are Wrong"). Logical rules such as "if x then y" (e.g. "if the afternoon sky is red then the weather will be fine in the next day") represent knowledge about the world. They say that the world is such that a red sky in the afternoon is an indicator that the weather will be fine the next day. "if x then y" is an encoding of knowledge.

Flawless logic can lead to mistakes, if the knowledge encoded by statements such as "if x then y" is inaccurate. While it may seem obvious that flawed knowledge can lead to mistaken conclusions, this reason seems frequently overlooked. Someone may be accused of overlooking a simple fact, but in cases where there's a more subtle problem with their knowledge of how the world works and is, their mistake is far more likely to be attributed to being illogical.

This actually takes us back to the issue of perception. I'm sure we've all experienced situations where a conclusion seems obvious to us, but not matter many times we enumerate the facts and outline the chain of reasoning, the other person just don't gettit. The conclusion that's usually drawn is that the person is "illogical", as if there's some problem with their logic.

Illogical they may be, but more frequently, I think, they just have different knowledge of the world. The other person's logic may be impeccable, but they may have quite different knowledge -- quite a different view of the way it is and works -- giving them no reason to accept your conclusions and leading them to different ones. They're perceiving the situation differently. Thus, effectively criticising their view would require criticism of their underlying beliefs (knowledge) about the world.

It would be useful to investigate the frequency of the various causes of mistakes in reasoning. The conclusion that I've drawn from my experience is that perceptual and knowledge problems are far more common than logical problems, but this is something for systematic investigation to determine (it may have already done so!).

What I can say is that when we see that statements like "if x then y" are primarily encodings of knowledge, it's easier for us to see that any long chain or reasoning is primarily composed of knowledge, and thus that if we're looking for the causes behind mistaken conclusions, knowledge should be a big potential candidate.

An Origami-folding Robot

A PhD student has developed for their thesis the first robot capable of folding origami (EurekaAlert).

As the article points out, Origami folding is deceptively simple and requires quite complex movements, particularly to deal with the supple flexibility of paper. Origami folding requires the simultaneous coordination of multiple sets of motion. As the student's supervisor says "Origami defies description by our current mathematical tools".

I think this work highlights the current state of the art in robotics and how far we've got left to go, and it suggests that if we if we can tackle some of these more fuild types of movements, a lot of intresting capabilities will be opened up to us.

The Copenhagen Interpretation and The Theory of Evolution

The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics [1] makes more sense to me than the Copenhagen interpretation. The latter seems a too ad-hoc -- why should reality give the notions of 'measurement' and 'observer' such fundemantal status? I can't say I know that much about quantum physics, but then -- and assuming my understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation is accurate -- my criticism is not based on the details of the physics.

A stronger way of framing my objection occurred to me recently (and I've been wondering what, if anything, has been written about it). This is the view that the Copenhagen interpretation goes against the theory of evolution. Surprising as it may seem, the theory of evolution should have the higher priority, for it is more fundamental. It would be easy to misinterpret my statement that the theory of evolution is more fundamental as saying it's more fundametal than quantum mechanics. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, I think it should be considered more fundamental than any type of interpretation of quantum mechanics, which themselves are not reliant on the details of quantum mechanics (or at least the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't seem to be).

I'm not here to argue the validity of the theory of evolution nor of its universality, as plenty of people have done a good job of that, notably Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett; I'm going to take it here as a given. From an evolutionary viewpoint, our universe started out with no real organisation, just "random interactions", and through evolutionary forces working over the progression of time the organisation we see in the world today has been constructed. This means that concepts such as observers, measurements and consciouness once did not exist, and have come into existance through the piecemeal construction of evolutionary forces.

From this point of view, the Copenhagen interpretation seems too arbirary. The Copenhagen interpretation makes it seem that the workings of nature presuppose the existance entities that did not appear on the scene until things were well underway. Now, I know this doesn't say demonstrate that the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong, but I do think it highlights something people don't think about when considering how we might interpret quantum mechanics, and I do think it makes the Copenhagen interpretation seem a lot more arbitrary.

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[1] interestingly, Hugh Everett, the developer of the Many-Worlds interpretation, was the father of Mark Oliver Everett, "E", from the band the Eels.

More Than Words for Snow (4): Ridiculing Them With Their Own Argument

In my last post on this topic -- of how language can shape thought -- I promised a follow-up, but this isn't it! I have been working, here and there, on that followup, but it's taking longer than I had thought, and it's not done yet. (The first two posts on this topic can be found here and here).

This post centers around a simple example. Imagine that person A has presented the following argument to an audience:

If a person's argument has property Q, then it is an invalid argument, and as such, is worthless.

Person B raises an issue with this, and after explaining it, sums up by saying "If something's has Q then it's worthless".

We can look at the two statements in logical terms. A's comment is "If has Q, then invalid argument, then worthless". B's comment is "If has Q, then worthless". The content of B's statement can be derived by A using standard logical operations. In logic, if we have a statement saying "X then Y then Z" implies that "X then Y". Thus, B's comment says nothing that A's didn't. B's comment seems such an obvious consequence of A's that it seems a little pointless for them to have even said it.

But B knew what they were doing. In fact, Person B had a distaste for A's idea, and was using their comment to hold up A's argument as being silly. I'll explain why in a moment, because before I can do so I need to divulge something I've been holding back about A's argument. A's argument is such that the connection between the premise "If something has property Q" and the conclusion "is invalid argument" is not intuitively obvious.

An intuitively obvious connection won't require any explanation. If I say that "If you leave your door unlocked at night, then there is a greater chance your house will be robbed" the connection between the premise and the conclusion is intuitively obvious. But if I say that "eating certain high-fat foods can help you lose weight", hardly intuivtively obvious, you'll be wanting some explanation to show how that could be, otherwise, it's likely to sound a bit ridiculous.

The logical structure and truth of a statement is unaffected by the obviousness of the connection between the elements of that statement. That B's comment is a derivable consequence of A's is no way effected by the not-at-all intuitively obvious connection in the first step of A's argument.

I'm almost ready to put it all together now. I can now return to the statements made by A and B, and present them again in light of what we now know. In A's talk, they spent a fair bit of time explaining why that not-at-all intuitively obvious connection between "If something has property Q" and the conclusion "is invalid argument". Some people may have been convinced, but others not. After explaining why this they are thus invalid arguments, A went about explaining if something's an invalid argument then it's worthless.

Having heard A's reasons, an audience member was in a position to understand why "If has property Q" then "is invalid argument" (whether they bought this argument is another matter), and they were also in a position to see why "If is an invalid argument" then "is worthless". Thus, as a consequence of this, there were in a position to see the argument as a whole, and that "If has property Q" then "worthless" (which happened also to be what B said).

We can now see why B's statement was meant to ridicule A's argument by making it look silly. If A had just said "If has property B then it's an invalid argument" without explaining why, it would've sounded ridiculous. B's is making A's argument sound even worse, by making it look like A's simply stating "If some has property B, then it's worthless". B's statement left out all the supporting argument, and just presented to statement to the light of intuition. To intuition, the conclusion that "is an invalid argument" sounded ridiculous, but the conclusion "is worthless", which is a much stronger conclusion, consequently sounds even more ridiculous.

...and I'd spend some more time working on this post, to try and make the point clearer and to flesh out some conclusions, but it's getting quite late (it took me about an hour to write the post you see here, so it's now ten to one in the morning). I'll leave you with a point I hope to flesh out more in the future: the content of a statement matters, but so does the form in which it's presented.... that latter may not matter when it comes to content, but it does when it comes to interpretation... interpretation can make a big difference... interpretation matters.

An Alternative to Footnotes I Haven't Seen

To footnote or not to footnote? That's a question commonly faced by non-fiction writers. There's a number of answers to this, all of which address the issue of how to deal with information that's of relevance but which clashes with the main flow of the text. I want to describe an approach I haven't seen before (which may or may not already exist), but first I'll recap the approaches I'm aware of.

I can think of five different approaches, most of which are variations of a few basic themes. If footnotes at the bottom of the page are not included, a reference may still be included in the text, but the note itself may be relegated to the end of the chapter or the end of the book. Alternatively, such notes are left out altogether, and yet another solution is for notes to be included at the end of the chapter/book but not being referenced in the main text. In this case, the text the note applies to is identified by a page number and sometimes a short quote to identify what the note applies to.

Now for the approach I haven't seen before. It follows the same line as the "no references in text, but the notes are included at the end of the book" approach. With that approach, the quote of text included with the note can help you to know what the note applies to, but it usually doesn't include enough information for you to appreciate the note in full, so you have to skip back to the relevant page then go back and read the note. The approach I'm suggesting ought to avoid the need for this skipping back and forth.

The idea is to make the notes section self-contained. The entry for each note would, as a lead in to that note, recap on all the relevant ideas from the book. This way we still avoid breaking the flow of the main text, but in addition we also avoid breaking the flow when reading a note. I'd also suggest this notes section be placed at the end of each chapter, so its there for you to read immediately after reading the chapter. Done this way, the notes section would have a narrative feel, like the author was recaping on what they'd been talking about in the main text and pointing out where what they said there needs qualification, references to further information, and so on.

So I guess the question is: is this approached used anywhere, or has it been tried but found lacking in some way, or is it still waiting to be tried out?

Breakthrough in Growing New Teeth From Stem Cells

Scientists at Kings College in London have been able to, in mice, "coax stem cells to grow into teeth within only a few weeks" (ChannelNewsAisa).

The article says that "[t]he procedure entails taking stem cells from a living being, nurturing them in a laboratory until they form a ball of new cells known as a bud, and inserting the bud into the gum where the new tooth is needed". The scientists who developed the technique hope to "make the technology available to the general public within five years".

Eugene Eric Kim's Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

Eugene Eric Kim has written A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools, in which he argues that there is a pressing need to improve our collaborative tools, and this need boils down to being "people-centric when designing and building applications, and [working] with other developers to make our tools more interoperable." The article elaborates on these themes and points to some directions for addressing the issues. He ends with a handy list of references to related work. I agree that it's an important issue, and I think he has some worthwhile things to say. Some of my comments on it follow.

Regarding interoperability, this is how we should be trying to make tools work: "[y]our PIM application may already allow you to link a person's name in your calendar to that person's contact information within the same application. However, it should also allow you to link to that person's contact information in another application, to the email with directions to the meeting place, to the document containing the agenda, to the instant messenging transcript where you arranged the meeting, and so forth, all independent of the tools or file formats being used."

I think his notion of a shared conceptual framework, as a solution for the interoperability issue, is an important one. To illustrate this notion, while there a numerous relational database systems, they all have at their core the relational model, and can all speak SQL. Kim suggests that a shared conceptual framework for collaborative software "would provide a common vocabulary for thinking about and discussing these tools, and would also reveal opportunities for standardization". He goes on to provide some good examples of the elements that could go into such a framework, including backlinks ("links from other documents pointing to the document in question"), fine-grained linking, and a standard document model ("do for documents what relational algebra and SQL did for databases").

Kim suggests that XML, in itself, is not the best way to provide the kind of features he talks about. His criticism of XML is of it being a syntax for representing information: "[t]he syntax used to express a document is ultimately irrelevant. What's needed is a standard way to express and manipulate the fundamental constructs of a document, regardless of the syntax". He then explains why a better solution would involve "a standard language for expressing graph-like data models (such as RDF) and standard APIs for manipulating these data models". In such a solution "the actual syntax of the data would be rendered mostly irrelevant". What it would enable us to do is "things such as [creating] a link from a word processing document to a function in source code without having to translate either document into some intermediate format."

Kim notes a useful bit of practical advice in relation to user interfaces. As Kim points out, the user-interface is one obvious way to make software more people-centric. When considering why the software user-interfaces are not better, he claims that "[t]he problem with usability is not a lack of good ideas; it's that most of these ideas never make it into real applications" and suggest one solution would be for [r]esearchers [to write] plugins for widely-used open source applications, such as the Mozilla Web browser, instead of developing prototypes from scratch", also suggesting that "[o]pen source developers should be scouring academic publications for ideas, rather than simply duplicating the user interfaces in commercial products."

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A minor niggle, but I was a bit surprised to see him make a rather unfair claim against the semantic web idea "[w]hile the futuristic applications promised by the Semantic Web have failed to crop up, some of the resulting work is quietly making an impact in different ways" - unfair, because if we're talking about its practical impact its clearly still rather early days!

Quote on Preserving First Impressions

(Added, 23.5.04: Paying attention to initial impressions of phenomena helps preserve an accurate account of them. Without such recording, our later recollection is typically a gross simplification yet we rarely realise that they are. Thus preservation is important if we are attempting to explain the phenomena, for we want a detailed and accurate account of what we are to explain, or similarly if we in some way need to reason about the phenomena. Too often people will look back at their recollection of a phenomena, thinking it is accurate and sufficiently detailed, while it is not, and end up developing an explanation that only covers toy situations and is useless -- often even as a starting point -- for explaining the real things in the world).

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Lafcadio Hearn, quoting Basil Hall Chamberlain, in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan

Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible, they are evanescent, you know; they will never come to you again...

I didn't actually come across this quote through that book (which I haven't read), but through its mention in Peter Carey's "My Life as a Fake". I think its point is of importance in trying construct a coherent picture of anything, particularly your own thoughts. I'm not sure yet how to make my point, and my main purpose in jotting down this quote is so as to not forget it.

Article: Bush's Quiet Multilateralism

A pretty reasonable sounding colmn over at Newsweek:

Bush's Quiet Multilateralism
The administration loves global cooperation when it comes to trade. So why can't we try it when lives, and not just lucre, are on the line?

Simple and Effective Lecture-theatre Interaction

PAUL CARON, a law professor at the University of Cincinnati, uses them to break through what he calls the "cone of silence" in his classroom. For Wendy Tietz, who teaches accounting at Kent State, they are a way to encourage teamwork and give credit for class participation. Melissa Wilde, a sociology professor at Indiana University, says they help her students feel a connection to the subject.

For these and other professors across the nation, the newest aid in the classroom is a small wireless keypad, linked to a computer. Students answer questions not by raising their hands but by punching buttons, with the results appearing on a screen in the front of the room... [read the rest at New York Times ...there's some intesting consequenes of using the technology.]

Richard Dawkins on Science Writing: Next Step, A Nobel Prize for Literature?

Novelists may win the plaudits, but they don't have all the good stories...
Richard Dawkins gives advice to entrants to a competition for young science writers.

...Choose science, and you have something important to write about....Not just important but fascinating. Not just fascinating but open-ended: you'll never run out of subjects, where the effort of simplification repays the writer as richly as the reader. Einstein said: "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." Any fool can oversimplify. Far from talking down, flatter your reader. Don't apologise for elitism, encourage your reader to join the elite. Don't shrink from choosing the exact word that says it best, even if it drives your reader to the dictionary. A dictionary never harmed anyone, and a word can excite by its very unfamiliarity... [read the full article on Edge]

Thoughts in Few Words (5)

Before I can begin I must clarify my thinking.

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(Previous thoughts: 1, 2, 3, 4)

Thoughts on Our Thinking Tendencies, Redux [-]

A few days ago, I talked about how it seems we have a tendency to see situations in terms of certain types of things ("subjects", such as the game of football) rather than in a "contextualised fashion" (such as the importance put on the game of football, rather than the game of football itself). Writing that has helped me clarify my thoughts, and here I present my current views.

I would describe those ideas in terms of the following. There is in inherent degree of difficulty associated with perceiving a particular type of thing (a physical object, relationship between things, etc etc). The degree of difficulty of perceiving a type of thing can stop us from doing so. We seem to have an inherent capability for perceiving particular types of things (physical objects are of course one example), and I believe we have to learn (though it may not be though explicit learning, perhaps just experience) how to explicitly perceive the more difficult types of things.

What we explicitly perceive in a given situation is, in addition to what we can explicitly perceive 'innately', those types of things we have 'learned' to see, modulo what we can't see because of our present cognitive load - after all, we only have so much mental capacity (I'll have to try coming back to this issue in the future and be more precise).

There are some questions that need to be answered about this. What governs the degree of difficulty? I'm not sure, but I would think the two major factors would be: temporal resources required for the processing required to perceive that type of thing, and secondly, our evolutionary history (where the temporal factors are really a subset of the evolutionary factors). I give that as a second factor because of the role evolution played in shaping our mental capabilities. Also, what are the different types of things that are there to be perceived? Both these things also deserve a fuller treatment in the future.

These difficulties in perceiving certain types of things can be seen as 'constraints on perfection', to use Richard Dawkin's term (or at least seems to be his). That term is the title of a chapter in his book "The Extended Phenotype" in which he gives the various reasons why an evolutionary adaptation may not be able to come up with an ideal 'solution'. An example of such a constraint is the need for the adaption to modify the current design of the organism rather than being able to go 'back to the drawing board'. In this context, a 'constraint on perfection' is a constraint on thinking that draws it away from the ideal.

The Illusion of Unlimited Free-Will

I'm not really going to talk about the issue of free-will here. I'm going to talk about the conception of unlimited free-will. The difference between the two is that, with free-will -- at least in terms of common conceptions of it -- you are free to make your own decisions, whereas with unlimited free-will you can always have 100% full control. In unlimited free-will, your all-powerful will is a resource you have at your disposal, and you just need to show enough determination or resolve to apply it. And should you not be able to muster this determination this is a because of some weakness, some lack of resolve, on your behalf. With the distinction between the conceptions of free-will made hopefully made clear, the rest of this post will be concentrating on the notion of unlimited free-will.

I'm not sure how many people explicitly subscribe to the view of unlmited free-will, but I do have the impression that most people tend to implicitly belive it. I suppose I won't need to say my view of unlimited free-will, becuase I've given the game away with the title given to this post -- I think it's an illusion.

It certainly feels like unlimited free-will exists. You're trying to cut down on fatty foods, but, damn it, those chips as tasty little buggers. You know if you'd just had just exercised a bit more willpower you could have held back. You know you're definitely capable of exercising that level of will -- in fact, you've done so plenty of times in the past. Sometimes you've exercised an enourmous level of will power. There was that time that you could have easily gotten away with a tidy sum of money that you almost certainly would have gotten away with -- it was so tempting, but you knew you had to hold back because it was the right thing to do. So if you can hold back then, you could hold back when it comes to some measly chips!

If you have the capability to exercise an enourmous amount of free will, an amount of free-will that is potentially large enough to overcome any desire, then it would seem you do have some sort of unlimited free-will. I'm going to argue that this is in fact wrong. It is an illusion. My argument is basically this. Your mind is a battleground between a number of drives and desires. They are not necessarily all against each other, but at least certain gruops will be in conflict with each other. You have your inbuilt, instinctive desires, to do with food, mating, and so on. And you have your concious desires (to be pedantic, I think 'desires deriving from experience' might be more accurate, for they don't necesarily have to have been conciously chosen or conciously accessible, but I think that's besides the point). The role these opposing forces -- with instinctual and concious desires on both sides -- play in decisions you make is the key to my argument.

In my view, will does not spring from some source of your "resolve", as if this resolve was something you just had. We should pause for a moment to consider this "resolve" (or whatever you want to call that ability you have to apply your will), because the notion that will comes from your resolve is very circular, and this should give us reason to be suspect of it. Saying that you've got something like resolve from which your will power springs is really saying you've got the will to apply your will. Where does this original will come from? Where do you get the will to apply it? And so on, and so on... I suspect the only way you'd be able to resolve this regress would be to resort to some sort of mystical explanation.

Rather, in my view, your will arises from the battle between conflicting desires. The temptation to steal some money is pushing you in one direction, but pushing back against it in the other direction is the your desire to "do what's right" and the concern you might get caught. You don' t have some well-sprint of resolve to apply your will to overcoming this temptation, you simply have a stronger desire to do the right thing and to avoid being caught. That is, I'm saying what we call resolve comes from the strength of the forces opposing the desire or temptation. There is no pure source of this resolve -- it is simply whatever oppposing forces populate your mind. There is no single source of this resolve either -- your resolve against any particular temptation will simply be whatever forces opposing that particular temptation there are in your mind.

Even supposing my argument might be correct, what good does it do to claim unlimited free-will is an illusion? Wouldn't that just diminish our feeling that we are in control, and if so, what good could that do? If you're thinking that pushing this view is not a good idea, I can tell you that I'm afraid I think exactly the opposite! I think that the notion of unlimited free-will has been extremely destructive and counterproductive, strange as that may sound. In short -- becuase I don't have time to try and explain myself fully at the moment -- I think it provides a great excuse for all kinds of things (because you can just blame people for not exercising their will, which they could if they really wanted to), and it's a major barrier to actually doing something to build up your will-power (rather than doing something that could diminish the forces on the side of temptation and to strengthen the forces on the opposing side, you're just meant to "try harder", whatever that's meant to mean).

Integrated Language Tools

When I was growing up, I hardly ever looked in a dictionary. It didn't seem worth the effort, having to walk out to the living room to get it, spending the time to find the entry and then having put it back again. Nowadays, having a permenant Internet connection, if there's a word I don't know, I'll immediatelly look it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The point is, convenience can make a big difference.

Despite the utility of on-line dictonaries and thesauri, I think there's a lot further we can go. We could provide integrated access to all the various types of language tools out there - domain-specific dictionaries, idiom dictionaries, slang dictionaries, cliche dictionaries, translation tools, etc [*]. Ideally, we could simply select a particular word, phrase or body of text and immediately access any of this language-related information. No doubt such integration will come.

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* In addition to all of the language tools I'm aware of, I think it would be very useful to be able to access more specific information on the relationships between synonyms. For example, if synonyms could be ranked in terms of how general or specific the concepts they describe are relative to the current term.

Having 17cm Scissors Left in You After an Opeartion

Last night on tv I saw a shocking report about a woman, Pat Skinner, who had 17cm surgical scissors left inside her after colon surgery, and had to put up with it for 18 months until the problem was diagnosed. She's now trying to take legal action, and is -- surprisingly, you'd think -- having troubles doing so. The story has been covered by various news sources, including TheAustralian, Canada.com and TheTimesOfIndia.
The transcript of the show I watched is available at the 7:30 Report Website.

The thing that really struck a nerve with me was how much trouble she had getting people to belive she was in real pain and that there was something wrong. But it's not just her - so many people over the years have had real, serious problems, and yet people thought they were just making it up. Worse than just having to put up with the problem, they were treated like fools for having it. Fibromyalgia is one example
(unfortunately, I couldn't find the excellent site on it I'd read a few years ago).

Here's an except from the report I saw on tv:

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Pat Skinner complained to her specialist and her GP.

She couldn't stand, sit or lie down without being in extreme pain.

PAT SKINNER: I did complain and I was told, you know, it takes time.

This was the thing I kept hearing.

It takes time to recover.

I think they thought that maybe I was making a fuss.

I think, yeah.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: You felt guilty about that?

PAT SKINNER: Yeah, I think they felt, well, you know, you're going through depression.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Pat Skinner was put on anti-depressants and given counselling which was particularly galling given that she had worked as a professional grief counsellor herself.

...

DON SKINNER: My wife instigated the X-ray.

That's the amazing thing that in all this time, not one person would suggest the fundamental thing like an X-ray.

As you can see, this sort of thing really gets to me! I strikes a particularly strong personal nerve because I've had really chronic health problems (related to my jaw alignment) that went undiagnosed for many years, and the problems that have come from it -- the extent of which no one really belives. In my view, most people try to pigeonhole you into whatever categories they're used to seeing, and if they can't, then either you're making it up or its your fault. People have a really strong tendancy to blame things on your personality, rather than even accept that it could be something you don't have any control over.

Thoughts on Our Thinking Tendencies [-]

A quick write-up of some thoughts on some tendencies we seem to follow in our thinking. Nothing rigorous.

Two people are in conversation. Person A makes a comment to Person B about their country's favourite sport. Person A says that people in the country are way to devoted to the sport, and place way to much importance on it. Person B responds claiming that just because Person A doesn't like the sport, they can't say that it's right or wrong.

While Person B's response may be right in its own way, it is flawed as a response to Person A's point. Person B's response is framing the issue as an aesthetic one, and implying that Person A was saying it was wrong to like or play the sport. What Person A was saying was not so much about the sport, however, but about the level or importance or devotion accorded to it (e.g. because the level of devotion given to it draws resources away from more important issues).

I think Person B's mistake is quite a common one: I think we have a stronger tendency to perceive issues in terms of the subjects involved -- the sport itself -- than to see it in a "contextualised" fashion -- the importance accorded to that sport by the society. In the case of Person A's statement, they're talking about a property of the relationship between the sport and the society.

I'm not sure yet exactly how I'd define "contextualised", but by it I mean things like: seeing things as a system, and seeing the properties of the system, seeing the processes going on, seeing the relationships between the elements of that system, and seeing the nature of our own perception of the system.

Things and Talking About Them

Jon Udell writes, on songs, movies and other things: "We crave access not only to intellectual products, but also to other people's experience and understanding of those products." Absolutely! And moreso, in my case.

I think I enjoy movie reviews (Filthy Critic, The Movie Show) more than the movies themselves. I've spent so much time on sites like Amazon.com reading book reviews, and I used to spend a lot of time in newsagents reading music and computer game magazines.

I think I like the discussion about things so much, partially because its like a form of gossip, and partially because it builds up a sense of anticipation about things, which is much easier to do than its fulfillment.

The Google Operating System

Kottke, quoting Rich Skrenta:

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?.