Entries in Life

I love to read, and I love to read books that make learning fun; The Information is one of those books.

I’ve been enjoying the trip the book provides. It talks about the some of the oldest written language we have and quotes Plato sounding like a teacher complaining about the invention of the pocket calculator:

For this invention [writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it. … You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

Imagine if Plato saw how many of us use more modern technology — an always-available Internet search engine, for example — so that we don’t even have to think twice about getting access to entire libraries of “the appearance of wisdom”.

It goes on from there to explain how people in Africa developed long-distance communication with their “talking drums” long before Europeans had strung up the first telegraph. He uses the telegraph to lead into a discussion of cryptography, information theory, and data compression.

Over and over, he returns to this idea of how we communicate and collect and understand our knowledge. In the process he introduces people like Gödel and his incompleteness theorem or lesser known people like his student, Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician who so fascinated me that I went looking for the source of a quote and discovered his “Paradoxes of Randomness, a piece of which I’ve managed to quote in my email signature:

Sometimes mathematical truth is completely random and has no structure or pattern that we will ever be able to understand. It is not the case that simple clear questions have simple clear answers, not even in the world of pure ideas, and much less so in the messy real world of everyday life.

Of course, any recent book about how we think about what we know and how we collect and classify what we know wouldn’t be complete without some discussion of Wikipedia. And, here, there was a hidden gem for me. I discovered that I know one of the characters in a story he tells about the growth of an article about a butcher shop in South Africa. Jimbo Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, created a stub article about a butcher shop he visited and a few hours later, ^demon, a developer I’ve worked with at Wikimedia and grown to respect for his keen eye for detail proposes deletion.

I fairly squealed when I saw ^demon’s handle in the book.

But even if you don’t know ^demon or appreciate the finer details of information theory, you’ll likely enjoy the book. I asked my 14 year old son to read a bit and he quickly tore through the first few chapters before agreeing that it was well-written, fairly entertaining, and accessible.

I just finished reading 1491 by Charles C. Mann, and I have to say, everyone should read this.

Columbus discovery of the Americas changed the world, but until reading this book, I didn’t have any clue of the degree to which the world changed. Before reading it, the idea I had of the Americas that Europeans discovered was closer to that of the noble savage than anything else. In my old, incorrect, paradigm, the indigenous population was destroyed by the genocide of greedy conquistadors and similar violence.

Instead, anthropologists now think that that the population of the New World rivaled that of the Old, but the people there lacked genetic diversity. An example of this would be the distribution of blood types. The A and B blood alleles were almost completely absent in Central and South America, so that the entire population had Type O blood.

As a result of this homogeneity, the lack of exposure to contagious diseases like smallpox and the plague, and the resulting ignorance of how to use quarantine meant that disease decimated 90% of the indigenous population before they even saw an explorer.

That information alone cast the native population in a new light. But this also means that the populations of the various fauna found in the Americas was much smaller than later observed. For example, the natives kept large animals like the bison a days journey from any village and kept their population under control.

Another story of the fauna of North America is the passenger pigeon. It is now extinct, but John James Audubon recorded watching what must have been billions of pigeons passing overhead for three days straight. The bird was not seen in this magnitude because the indigenous people kept them in check.

Finally, 1491 showed me that the foods from the Americas have become the staples of the world. Three of the top five staple foods that the world consumes — maize (corn), potatoes, and cassava — have their origins in the Americas. Mann asserts that the introduction of cassava into Africa made the later slave trade possible since it became the staple of choice in much of Africa.

I haven’t even talked about how great the civilizations in America were — empires rivaling those of ancient Rome grew and thrived and then died out centuries before the first explorer showed up. In the past, some people have floated theories of ancient European colonizers to explain the unexpected sophistication that we found among the “noble savages”.

So go get a copy of 1491. You won’t regret it.

One thing to take away from the book “You are not so smart” (besides the fact that we humans are very good at fooling ourselves) is inspiration. For any unpublished writer, David McRaney’s story is inspirational. As he relates in the acknowledgments, he and his wife moved from Mississippi to Europe (seemingly on a whim) without a college education. By the time they returned to the States, they both realized how much they lacked in education and, six years after high school, when some in their cohort would be getting a graduate degree, they started college as freshmen.

The introduction to psychology professor was so compelling that he started his weblog and, from that, eventually the book was born.

Like many other books-from-blogs, this book is a series of essays. It differs from them in that it includes an extensive form of hyperlinks, in the more traditional form of a references for each chapter.

For instance, in the chapter on self-handicapping — creating situations for your own failure so that you can blame something else if you don’t succeed, or feel extra good about surmounting the odds if you succeed — David says that studies show men are more likely to self handicap than women, which made me wonder if this was different for different cultures, or if part of this was gender inequality at play: that the obstacles women face made it unnecessary for them to create artificial handicaps. Now I get to read the relevant studies and find out more information.

Overall though, my takeaway from this book was just to reinforce my prejudice against those people who are confident that their intelligence is a guard against stupidity. As he shows through study after study, no matter how much of a rational an actor we think we are, the situations we find ourselves in and the choices we make tend not to be well thought out, let alone rational.

Thank goodness economics is moving beyond this tautology.

Adherents of the modern cult of reason see facts as much more valuable and useful than stories. “We are influenced only by reality, by the facts.” This tends to be the way they separate themselves in their narrative from those they refer to as “religionists”.

But this ignores what modern psychology has discovered and what ancient religions have capitalized on: No matter how rational we think we are, no matter how well thought out and considered we try to ensure our decisions are, we use emotion as the basis for most of our decisions. And emotional decisions are based on the story that plays out in our mind every day.

The book You Are Not So Smart ends its chapter about the Affect Heuristic, with the story of Elliot, a successful businessman who, as the result of the removal of a brain tumor, lost any ability to make decisions influenced by emotion.

He appeared normal and continued to score well on IQ tests, but after the surgery, his life fell apart. His wife left him and he lost his job. He went to live with his parents who were evidently the only people who could tolerate him.

We are often told not to make decisions based only on emotion — to be rational. But Elliot’s case shows us what would happen if we made decisions based only on facts: we would fall apart.

Our emotional self responds better to stories. For the past few hundred years, we’ve had tremendous success as a society building on the advances we’ve gained through science and a more rational approach to life. This has led some of us to think that stories aren’t useful for anything more than entertainment — certainly we shouldn’t let them guide our decision-making!

But in jettisoning religions and the stories that come with them, we’ll just end up creating new stories. The stories will be less mature, less developed, less well thought out and we’ll all suffer as a result.

I’ve been slowly coming to the conclusion that the stories that religions offer us are a deeper and more valuable form of truth. The affect heuristic and Elliot show us that the influence stories have on our decision making is far more important to us than any collection of mere facts.

The Introspection chapter of You are Not so Smart tells of a study where researchers asked people to rate five types of jam. They five jams the picked had already been rated by Consumer Reports as the 1st, 11th, 24th, 32nd, and 44th in terms of quality.

The asked the first group to provide a list of their preferences by rank without explaining why they ranked each one where they ranked them.

They requested an explanation for the rankings from the second group.

The group just gave a gut reaction came close to matching the rankings given by Consumer Reports. The group that was asked to rationalize their choice ended up being all over the map without any correlation to the ranking from Consumer Reports.

The appropriately-named study (“Thinking too much”) shows why it is dangerous to put too much trust in the power of reason to help us make decisions.

The very act of explaining why we make a choice will cause our decisions to degrade in quality.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that having a reason for our choices is a bad thing. People in the study were measured against those with experience in judging food quality, after all, so it is possible to be rationale about our decisions and still make good ones.

And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t trust the ability of untrained professionals. The people in the first group came to the same conclusion as the professional food testers.

Instead, I would suggest that this study tells us that the act of making rational, well-reasoned decisions is harder than we think.

Just because someone is able to explain their reasoning for their decision doesn’t mean that decision is any better than someone who is just going with their gut.

(Of course, the chapter just before the one on introspection was about normalcy bias and how it causes many people to not to act to save their own lives in emergency situations, so this shows us that just going with your gut doesn’t always work, either.)

Derren Brown has produced a number of British TV Shows about priming that are really fascinating to watch. Even though he is a public figure, he is able to use priming to get people to do things they wouldn’t normally do, including, in one show, robbing an armed car.

I just started reading You are Not so Smart, and the first chapter was on priming, appropriately enough.

Priming is all about the subconscious — the extra-rational — something that, over the millennial, religions have adapted to. In the West, though, we don’t really seem to value things we can’t reason our way towards. You can see this in Christianity before the Enlightenment and even before the Protestant Reformation — even before the advent of Thomism — in the Roman Catholic dogma of transubstantiation.

The Church saw “This is my body” and dogmatized the premise that made that statement literally true. Eastern Christians, who have been more comfortable with a mystical understanding of truth, simply accepted the statement as true without the need for philosophical and dogmatic exercises.

Over time, I’ve come to the opinion that the different directions the Eastern and Western churches took on the idea of what has come to be known as the “real presence” are reflected in a lot of other areas — including what I have been calling the modern Cult of Reason.

So, what does all this have to do with psychological priming?

Priming is what happens when you act in a way that is largely influenced by your extra-rational mind. Priming is dependent upon cues that come from your environment. Derren Brown is adept at creating these sorts of cues for people, but you can also see these cues in the Liturgy of any Eastern Church. The smells, sights and sounds (which have all been developed over the centuries) all prime the person and provoke an extra-rational response.

In the West, many protestant denominations explicitly shy away from creating this sort of “heavenly” environment. Many Mennonite churches, for example, explicitly shy away from any environmental cues. While they certainly are not as explicit in their rationalism as others – Presbyterians, for example — they’re like so many in the West who don’t seem to see any use in anything that cannot be rationally explained.

But, as You are Not so Smart makes clear, even in the first chapter on Priming, we are not the rational, thoughtful creatures we imagine ourselves to be.

I’ve been reading a book The Fat Years, a book by a Chinese author that seems to posit a transition from Orwellian control to Huxlean control.

I just finished reading the following bit and had to share:

Lao Chen then considered a new concept: “90 percent freedom.” We are already very free now: 90 percent, or even more, of subjects can be freely discussed, and 90 percent, or even more, of all activities are no longer subject to government control. Isn’t that enough? The vast majority of the population cannot even handle 90 percent freedom, they think it’s too much. Aren’t they complaining about information overload and being entertained too much?
…
And furthermore, when the national situation permits, the state can always relax its restrictions and permit up to 95 percent freedom. Maybe we already have 95 percent? This would be very little less than in the West. Western nations also have some restrictions on freedom of speech and action. The German government restricts neo-Nazi organisations, and many states in the United States deny homosexuals the freedom to marry. The only disparity is that, theoretically, the power of Western governments is given to them by the people, while in China the people’s freedom is given to them by the government. Is this distinction really that important?

The more time goes by, the closer China and the U.S. become. China is on track to pass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy in 2020. When that time comes, what is the real difference between our democratic free market capitalism and their state-controlled economy? I’m hopeful that we can still claim “rule of law” as a distinctive feature, but even that is disappearing. We can still watch the trial of Bo Xilai’s wife smugly, but how long will our smugness last?

I recently read When Atheism Becomes Religion under its more provocative original title: I Don’t Believe in Atheists.

The author, Chris Hedges is becoming one of my favorite authors. The first book that I read of his, The Death of the Liberal Class was a great history of classical liberalism — something that all political ideologies today could learn from.

Chris Hedges is a fascinating writer and the perfect author for a book that offers a critique of the modern Cult of Reason. (It is important to note that the use of the word “cult” here reflects the thinking in this footnote of that article: The word “cult” in French means “a form of worship”, without any of its negative or exclusivist implications in English; its proponents intended it to be a universal congregation.)

In fact, although I had this blog post in mind, it wasn’t till I started looking for a picture to accompany it (the Alter of Reason was perfect) that I learned about the Cult of Reason from the time of the French revolution.

That period of time is a great precedent for what happened since September 11, 2001 in the New Atheist movement.

Some people saw religion itself as the cause for the violence inherent in the terrorist attacks. If religion didn’t exist, the movement seems to say, no one would have an excuse to slaughter any group of people.

Chris Hedges’ book is a powerful antidote to this fantasy. Not only does he remind us that the greatest genocides of the 20th century were secular in nature, but he also asks us to consider human limitations in any solutions we propose: No ethical stance, no matter how pure it appears, is moral if it is not based on the reality of human limitations.

Humans — whether created by God 6000 years ago, or just some random chance of the universe — have some very stark limitations. Making religion a demon while deifying reason will not solve anything.

I came across another book today while browsing the bookstore, You Are Not So Smart, that really began to drive home the point of our limitations. As the book points out, Even when we think we’re being rational and thinking things through carefully, our emotional brain, our subconscious, is the one really running the show. (I’ve requested a copy of the book from my local library, so I’ll post more about it after I’ve read more.)

Amusingly, Penn Jillette’s God, No! was nearby and I had time to read the introduction where he talks about the humility of Atheism. He’s right: we should all be able to say “I don’t know”.

But he says that saying “I don’t know” makes you an atheist and here I disagree. I know we haven’t done a great job of celebrating doubt, but even as great a Christian as Mother Teresa had doubts. That didn’t make her less of a Christian — it was simply part of her humanity. You have the chance to say — like Christopher Hitchen’s did — that this makes her a fraud, but I prefer the title “human.” Not knowing, doubting is a fully human thing to do.

It is fine to celebrate everything that reason gives us — and we’ve been able to accomplish a lot through the use of the rational mind — but, as Hedges rightly points out in When Atheism Becomes Religion, as much as reason has helped us reach new heights, it has empowered evil to new depravity.

There is no scientific utopia and efforts to create one only end in destruction. Achieving Utopia must mean destroying everyone that you can’t convince to join you. St Isaac the Syrian put it this way: “If zeal [using passion to convince others of the truth] had been appropriate for putting humanity right, why did Jesus use gentleness and humility?”

Today I got my copy of “Fr Alexander Men; Martyr of Atheism”.

Since I like to read this sort of book with my kids, I sat down with them and we read the first chapter.

The book starts out with a broad overview of the history of the Church in Russia to provide a context for Fr Men’s birth and life. This is good for those, like me, who are mostly ignorant of history. As I’m sure many of you know, the Church in Russia did not have an easy time.

As is clear from the first chapter, the Church became dependent upon the State and then had to cope when the States protection disappeared.

My curiosity was piqued, though, by mention of the aborted Council of Moscow in 1918. The author says it had potential to be Russia’s Vatican II but, instead, became a dead letter. Research is needed!

For the first time ever, I replaced a citation needed template in Wikipedia with an actual citation. And, even better, I am pretty sure it is gonna stick.

The fact template was on the Absolute hot article which I came across after while reading The Hour of Our Delight.

This book as turned into a very readable introduction to particle physics for me. In fact, I was reading some parts of it to my son and he asked me some questions (of course) that I couldn’t really answer. “To Wikipedia!” was the natural solution. And I saw that a citation was needed for something I had just read.

Even better, I learned that there is a direct link between Quantum gravity (which was in the book’s quote) and the theory of everything.

So, yeah, I’m recommending The Hour of Our Delight (or in the original French as L’heure de s’enivrer). You should find it and read it if you have any interest in this sort of thing. I’ll probably write a post later about the chapter titled “An Anthropic Principle”.