Cartesian and Radial Metaphors for Thinking About Change

Clay Shirky identifies (or did, a few weeks back) two prototypical ways people think about technological change, which he metaphorically associates with cartesian and radial coordinate systems. (though he's talking about technological change, it seems applicable to any type of change)

Radial people assume that any technological change starts from where we are now — reality is at the center of the map, and every possible change is viewed as a vector, a change from reality with both a direction and a distance. Radial people want to know, of any change, how big a change is it from current practice, in what direction, and at what cost.

Cartesian people assume that any technological change lands you somewhere — reality is just one point of many on the map, and is not especially privileged over other states you could be in. Cartesian people want to know, for any change, where you end up, and what the characteristics of the new landscape are. They are less interested in the cost of getting there.

(as one of the comments to the article points out, this is focusing on the journey vs focusing on the destination, which is perhaps a better way of putting it, but anwyay...)
I think it's a useful identification/distinction. I think, though, that what Clay presents as the Cartesian viewpoint is really more a "naive" Cartesian viewpoint, attributing to it naive views that are not inherent to it.

I also think he makes the folk psychology mistake of considering attributes and dispositions to have "complete coverage" and always apply to every facet of the person's perception and thinking -- where we say, for example, that some person is a good person, or a bad person, or a mischevious person, or a radial person, or a cartesian person, as if they had this essence of badness or whatever.

But this radial/cartesian thing can apply to different facets of someone's thinking. For example, it is better, I think, to consider possibilities, in a cartesian fashion, and then once you have figured out what is possible, to think consider how we can get there in a radial way. It is possible for a single person to be able to apply both forms of thinking about a situation.

I also disagree with the concluding remarks

There’s no answer to any of this — as Grandma used to say, "Both your maps are nice."

which sound like relativism to me. That sort of conclusion comes, I think, from thinking of the radial/cartisian as things in themselves, as is done when thinking about them in "complete coverage" terms, and thus concluding that "they both have their good and bad points, and thus one isn't superior to the other". But when we consider how good something is or isn't we always have to ask *for what?*. The mistake that relativist thinkers make is failing to do this, and thinking that things have some single property -- some "absolute" property -- of good/bad, useful/not useful or whatever. When we consider "for what" we can usually say something more decisive. (I know this is a very brief presentation of this argument, and probably not convincing to you, and I wish I had more time now to try and elaborate on it).

Slashdot Article Summaries?

[Update: this post has been superseded by Collaborative 'summary of useful points' for Reddit/Hacker News kinds of posts]

The comments following the articles on Slashdot often contain some gems of additional information -- hidden under tonnes of junk. It'd be useful if people would wade through the junk and find the useful stuff so you didn't have to.

There is, of course, nothing stopping people now from adding comments to the discussion that contain this 'best of' information, but I think the way things are set up at the moment is not as conducive as it could be to doing so. Perhaps the simplest way of doing it would be to have separate types of comments for these 'best of' type summaries, simply so you could jump straight to them.

Creating these summaries would be a bit of work, so there is an incentive issue here. Slashdot employees would have a pay incentive. But I think you'd also want to slashdot readers doing it, and for them the notoriety incentive could work -- by gaining a reputation for creating good summaries. It's fairly obvious there's a parallel here with blogging.

Metaphors We Learn Languages By?

If the argument in Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By is correct -- and it seems to me that their basic thesis, that the substance of language and thought is metaphorical in nature, has plenty of evidence and is hard to deny -- then could this knowledge be usefully applied to language learning, if it is not already?

If a large part of learning a language involves learning the metaphors used to express various concepts, then perhaps it would be profitable to more explicitly focus on teaching these metaphors. This is particularly because, as Lakoff and Johnson show, many metaphors are used and related in a systematic and comprehensible way. Understanding these details could be useful in making the language learning less rote and more grounded in understanding, which helps in reataining and applying knowledge.

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Paul Graham gives advice, for graduating high-school students, but applicable to anyone who wants to make something of their life. Not the usual "follow your dreams" stuff, but on the mark, I think.

Jon Udell's Google Maps Screencast

Jon Udell provides a five-minute screencast tour of his home town, using Google Maps. A week or two old now, but cool as a demonstration of both the screencast medium and Google Maps.

Struck me as a nice line: "When the adults say follow your dreams, they mean only the ones that fall within a narrow band of acceptable behavior and historical results".. though I thought the movie review it's from was a bit mixed.

False Neutrals

In one of his blog posts, Clay Shirky writes:

We need a word for the class of comparisons that assumes that the status quo is cost-free, so that all new work, when it can be shown to have disadvantages to the status quo, is also assumed to be inferior to the status quo.

Hear hear! In my opinion that is a very common mistake. I use a term for such things, and here's a very quick, sketchy description:

I believe this is actually the conjunction of two mistakes. The first is the mistake is the assumption that if you can demonstrate that something has positive aspects then it is good, and similarly that if you can demonstrate that something has negative aspects then it is bad. (The reality is that you have to consider the combination of the positive and negative aspects, and compare them to those of the other options, and to see which aspects are important for what is being considered. You also need to not assume, when considernig a particular option that isn't the way things are now, that if was realised the world will be the same as is now, because otherwise you are unfairly biasing the evaluation against them... but I'm getting away from my point here).

The other mistake -- which is the thing Shirky is primarily talking about in that quote -- is to assume that one of the options is fine as it is, such that you don't evaluate it, only the others. I call these options false neutrals. I've got a feeling that this doesn't just apply to the status quo, though off the top of my head I can't think of any examples.

(BTW, that post of Shirky's is quite good, and I think it's a good example of how people tend to think of things in pretty much only in terms of their ostensible purpose and how they aren't very good at realising, or factoring in, 'economic' sorts of considerations).

Loud Sound, Bright Flash

Each night, some time after I've switched off the light (I'd say about 20 minutes after, but I'm not sure if it's always the same amount of time) and gone to bed there's this 'bang' sound that comes from the light fitting above my bed. I think the noise is caused by part of the fitting cooling down and at one point suddenly deforming. By the design of it, the light bulb actually touches part of the fitting, and consequently the fitting seems to get very hot.

Now what's strange about it all is that if I'm lying in bed when it happens, I see a flash of light. I'm pretty sure, however, that there isn't really any flash of light, and it's just a construct of my brain. There's been times when I've had my eyes open when the sound happened, and there was no flash, and there's something abou the flash that I see that makes me think it's a mental construct -- it kinda feels like what I'm seeing is "deeper" in the perceptual system than something that comes from the eyes, though I don't really know how to explain this. I'm not sure if I always see the flash, and I don't recall having this visual effect accompianing in sounds in other situations.

It's strange, but for a while I never thought about it being strange that I was seeing this flash of light. I'm wondering: how common/uncommon is this? I would not be surprised if it was quite common. I'm also wondering if this could be some sort of synthestisia effect, or whether it is it something else? If you're wondering, I don't think I have anything else that could be interpreted as synthestisia (and if you think it would be obvious whether you do or don't, it's not necessarily so -- my dad has been aware of synthestisia for a while, but it wasn't until he listened to some of the descriptions of it in a radio program he was listening to that he realised that he seem to have a mild form of synthestisia involving numbers -- it's apparently not all just perceiving things in terms of different types of perceptual sensations).

Cringely: How to Build a Global Internet Tsunami Warning System in a Month

Robert X. Cringely argues that governments are not the right people to build tsunami warning systems: too slow, too expensive -- and that it can be done, and quicker and cheaper, on a more grassroots level.

The Onion: Nigeria Chosen To Host 2008 Genocides

The Onion reports:

ABUJA, NIGERIA—At a celebratory press conference Monday, President Olusegun Obasanjo announced that Nigeria's troubled but oil-rich city of Warri has been chosen to host the 2008 Genocides.

Grief as Precautionary Tale?

I don't know whether anyone has brought this up before, but since I haven't come across it, I thought I might as well jot it down here...

People have often wondered about the biological function of the kind of deep, lasting grief that accompanies events such as the loss of a child. Why is it so debilitating, and why can it be so debilitating for such a long period of time? Wouldn't it make more biological sense to let the person get on with their life and the business of propagating their genes?

In Stephen Pinker's book How the Mind Works (which would more accurately, but with less impact be called, "An Overview of What We Currently Know About How the Mind Works") he notes that such grief seems to act as a kind of deterrent - basically, knowing how awful it feels acts as a major deterrant to any behavior that might lead to those kinds of circumstances arising.

It occurred to me that perhaps the deterrance is not just for you -- but for those around you, and that this factor could help explain why it is so highly debilitating (if in fact this actually requires any separate explanation). Not only do you experience how awful it is, but others can also see how awful an effect it can have on you. And since in the times when evolution was at work we lived mostly in tribal groups with large numbers of relatives, Kin selection would explain how this kind of grief could evolve to serve "both" these purposes.

Perhaps just the right impact on the grief is where it has a large precautionary effect on the other kin members at the expense of really debilitating the grieving person? (i.e. this is the level of grief that results in greatest chance of those genes propagating, because the least number of people carrying the gene make the mistake that led to the grief).

How Explicit Does a Representation Have to Be?

Some people (and I don't think they're the only ones) talk about representations as if something was only a representation if it was in some fairly explicit form that can be read by some process which then interprets its meaning.

For example, consider the rules of grammar that our brains respect (to a certain degree) in the production of speech. Under this view of representation, there are two options for how these rules exist in our brains: either these rules are represented in the brain, or they are in some sense built-in to the brain without being represented. In the latter case the system in some sense knows the rules, but it doesn't explicitly represent them -- the brain just works in a way that respects the rules, just as a calculator doesn't explicitly represent the rules of arithmetic, but just operates in a way that respects them.

This distinction between things that are represented and things that are 'built-in' sounds fine on the surface, but I'm suspicious of there being a real distinction there. Certainly the distinction makes intuitive sense. It's easy to imagine an explicit representation there that is to be read off and used. And its also easy to imagine the other case, of a system with no representation, that just works in a way that respects the rules. However, the thing is that a representation is represented by some encoding scheme. You can represent something an unlimited number of different ways (of course, different ways will have different properites, such as how long it takes to read the representation, how much space it takes up, etc etc) and in each and every case what is important is that you have the right means of interpreting the representation.

And amongst this unlimited variety there are encoding schemes that more explicitly represent the thing and those that do so less explicitly. So my question is, is there just a spectrum here, from very implicit representations right up to very explicit reprsentations? And is it possible to to make any hard divisions of this spectrum? I strongly suspect that it is not possible to make any hard divisions or distinctions.

In the case where the brain simply respects the grammar rules but does not explicitly represent them would still be a case of the brain representing those rules, but just implicitly. Taking another tact on this, I don't see how the brain can "know" the rules yet not in any sense have a representation of them. With the right means of interpretation we can still 'read' the implicit representation (not that we, as people trying to understand how the brain works, necessarily have the means to determine this means of interpretation). In other words, some aspect of the system's organisation implicitly encodes the rules, and the way that that organisation interacts with and influences the behaviour of the rest of the system consitutes the interpretation of those rules.

It may seem a bit of a stretch to call such implicit cases 'representation'. But if what I'm suggesting is correct, then there's no hard distinction between "explicit representation" and "implicit representation", and thus the common meaning of representation is making a hard distinction that doesn't exist. Thus, if we are looking for technical accuracy (and of course we are often not) then we either have to modify the common meaning of the word or find another term that can have a more accurate meaning.

The Roachinator and Lycra-Clad Chickens

This is just fantastic. An article in the Australian reports into cutting edge scientific research in robotics (link via The Thin Line).

"The robot, InsBot, developed by researchers in France, Belgium and Switzerland, is capable of infiltrating a group of cockroaches, influencing them and altering their behaviour."

"The third stage, undertaken by the French Centre for Scientific Research in Brittany, was to isolate the molecules that give cockroaches their smell -- to create a cockroach perfume".

I think this is going to be big. I can just imagine it: Roach, by Calvin Klein

"InsBot, which is green, the size of a matchbox and equipped with lasers and a light sensor, was developed by Switzerland's Federal Polytechnic School in Lausanne."

From the description it's obviously some sort of cyber commando roach with shoulder mounted laser deaaath raaaays.

"Other applications are also envisaged for the computer programs developed under the Leurre project. Guy Theraulaz, CRCA director of research, said it may be possible to build chicken-like robots that will be used to stimulate poultry."

That sounds a little raunchy. I don't know if I'd want to eat that at KFC. Wait a minute -- I see, my dirty mind was getting away from me a bit there -- it's some sort of robot that reads shakespeare to the chickens.

"A lot of chickens don't move at all and die as a result. They need to be encouraged to run around. Robots could do that," he said.

Oh, I see. It's good to see the poultry industry making efforts to increase efficiency by utilising modern technology with their robo-chicken exercise instructors. "C'mon girls, lets move those bodies, kick those legs! We want to be 97% fat free. Yeah. Now some star jumps!".

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(While it might sound like I'm being sarcstic about this technology, I actually think it's very interesting and has a lot of promise. It's just, some of those lines in that article...).

Why Computer Games Give us a Way of Looking at the Problem of Qualia

Qualia is the mystery of mysteries. If the world really is just processes involving aggretations of atoms, then what kind of thing is that sensation that is the taste of an orange, what kind of thing is the visual image we see when we look around?

There's lot of other things we don't understand, but with other problems we usually have some idea of what an answer might look like. But with qualia we literally have no idea.

It seems impossible that it could be the product, like everything else, of processes involving atoms. It must be some special sort of entity, we think. And there may be literally no way for us to understand it, or if there is, we may not be smart enough to gain that understanding.

For an abrupt change of context, there's a tribes person living in an untouched, remote area. They have never seen or heard of modern technology, and they are given a gameboy. They see the little person on the screen, they see them moving about an environment, and they see how they can control this person's actions. It must be some sort of magic.

They know of nothing that is even remotely like this gameboy, and they have absolutely no idea how any such thing is possible. They have no idea of how they could even begin to understand it. But we know it can be understood, we know there's no magic.

Could qualia be to us like the gameboy is to the tribesperson?

Thinking Outside of the Ought

Yeah, Paul Graham gets it. He doesn't restrict his thinking to the space of what things ought to be about -- he actually thinks about what's going on. Why does a particular candidate win an election? The political attitudes of the populus, the things that influence these attitudes, etc, of course. Well, at least that's what you'd expect it's about, that's what it ought to be about, but wrong tree argues Graham. The answer he suggests is very simple and easy to see if your view isn't blinkered.

Sure, people understand it's important (read the article to see what I'm referring to), but I think it's clear they don't appreciate just how important it is, how important it is relative to other issues -- after all look at some of the candidates the parties have chosen, as Graham points out, or the apparent lack of real effort to address charisma issues.

And let's put this into the right perspective: the US, the most powerful country in the world, lots at stake in presidential elections, huge resources put into the opposing sides. And: a simple notion that easy to see if you're view isn't blinkered, massively overlooked by all these people over many decades who've had huge stakes in these elections. Election results in the most powerful country in the world could've been different -- that's the size of those blinkers.

Dawkin's Review of Intellectual Impostures

Richard Dawkin's 1998 review of Sokal and Bricmont's Intellectual Impostures. Pretty good stuff - and interesting for his insights, not just what he says about the book. Right now I'm too lazy to try and describe what the book is about, but here's the first paragraph of the review:

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.

Goddamn it irks me when people try to be critical or insuling of something and dress it up in humour on the pretense that they "don't really mean it"; where they want to mean it but be able to claim that they don't mean it. Of course, you can say something and and only half-heartedly mean it, and you can say something purely for the joke -- I'm only talking about the situation where someone is doing it because they want it both ways. Good, now that I've got that off my chest, I return you to your normally scheduled programming... :-)

The Nature of Language and Thought in an Argument Against Reductionism

More rough notes.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts: if you lay two planks of wood on top of each other, and they can hold more weight than the combination of what they could individually hold. Together you get more than you had separately, therefore reductionism is wrong.

That argument is flawed, because it is confusing petty reductionism for reductionism. Are any laws of physics violated by the result of putting two planks of wood together? Obviously not. The result of putting the two planks of wood together is fully explainable at a lower-level of the laws of physics.

While that might be the reason why the argument is flawed, I don't think it'll always convince people. We arrive at conclusions through chains of reasoning, and even if our conclusion is shown to be wrong, if we still think our chain of reasoning is valid there's a good chance we'll still think the conclusion is right, too. I think there is one such chain of reasoning for this matter, and that this flawed reasoning comes about because of the nature of language and thought. I'll talk about it now.

It really can seem that we have something here that is 'greater than the sum of the parts' because we have something, the 'strength' of the pieces of wood, that is some amount when the pieces are wood are separate, and yet is more than twice this amount when they are combined. Doesn't it seem that we have in fact gained something here which wasn't there before?

The problem is that in thinking this we are reifying the 'strength'. But wait a moment, doesn't reifying mean "to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing", and isn't the strength of the planks a real thing? It is a real thing, but we must be careful with what we mean by 'real'.

The strength is real, but it is not a substance, such that we have created some new amount of this substance when we put the planks together. Strength is a real property, but it is not a "thing" in itself, and you might describe it as being both "real" and "abstract". It is the product of a number of factors, such as the type of material, the structural arrangement of the item, etc. Quantity of the property (strength) is not simply a function of the quantity of the things making it up.

So what exactly is causing the problem here? Seeing 'strength' as a "real" thing, and thus that we have more of a "real" thing when the planks are combined, and thus that reductionism is violated. The root problem here is in considering that "real" can only mean a real "thing".

The "strength" of something is simply a consequence of the brute physical details of that thing -- there is no thing that is "strength" over and above those details. Those details have real consequences - such as how much weight it can carry before it breaks, but to say there is some actual extra thing called 'strength' responsible for those properties is a mistake. It is confusing a label in our heads for a thing in reality -- whereas that thing in our heads is really a description of reality.

Clarifying Reductionism

More rough notes, written more for my benefit, as an aid to organising my thinking, than as a geninue attempt to convince anyone of anything. It's all for me me me -- it's not for you *.

As Richard Dawkins has noted, reductionism is uncool. Even the name has a negative tinge: it's reducing things to something less than the original.

It is one of those concepts that everyone thinks they understand, because it seems so simple and self-evident: reducing things to their parts. Except, this self-evident view is wrong.

It's describing what Stephen Weinberg has called petty reductionism. Reductionism proper, what Weinberg has called, grand reductionism (he has borrowed both 'petty' and 'grand' from the language of criminal law) is the view that reality is the result of fundamental, universal laws, and that all the systems and apparent 'layers' that we see are simply the results of the operations of these laws.

The following is a short list of the reasons, it seems, people make flawed arguments against reductionism:

• equating reductionism with -- the obviously wrong -- petty reductionsim
  • this is why people think that "emergence" and the "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" stuff shows reductionism is wrong. Note that unless you think that these things violate the laws of physics, then you don't think these things violate reductionism proper.
• equating reductionism with a methodology of trying to understand something by understanding its parts, and then using a failure in achieving this as evidence that reductionism (that is, 'grand reductionism') is false. Daniel Dennett has used the term "Greedy Reductionism" for when people use a reductionist methodology and paint an oversimplified picture of a phenomena.
• assuming that reductionism must mean reducing to some specific thing, and that if you can't reduce it to that, this shows that reductionism is wrong. There is, for example, a very prevalent belief that if reductionism were true then this would mean that human behaviour would simply be reducable to DNA.
• assuming that the explanation of a phenomena must have the same properties as the phenomena itself. that is, life must be living because it has some life force. or that water molecules must have 'wetness'. this makes it hard to see how something could have an explanation on a lower-level because this invariably seems to involve things that don't have these properties.
• similar line, thinking that because something seems very complex, that it couldn't possibly have a reductionistic explanation because you can't see how that'd be possible. Why should people expect that they could forsee one?

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[*] which I came across via Scott McCloud (to find the specific spot on this page, search within the page for "Penny Arcade")

Film Version of Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love"

I just discovered there's a soon-to-be-released film version of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love, one of my favourite books. I hope they do a good job...