Ming the Mechanic

Laws of social networks

Sun, 6 Jul 2008 23:20:20 GMT

There are a few "laws" that typically are brought up when one discusses networks, particularly online social networks. They show a progression of different kinds of networks. They're not rules and they're not natural laws, but they're an abstraction of observations smart people have made about different types of networks.

First there's Sarnoff's Law. David Sarnoff was a big name in radio broadcasting. Around 1930 he formulated a law that said, essentially:

The value of a network is proportional to the number of members

He was talking about a broadcast network. Meaning a one-way emission of some program to a number of listeners or viewers. Sure, twice as many listeners is twice as good, if we're thinking about influence, advertising dollars, etc.

Then we move on to a different kind of network where each node potentially might talk with any other node. Here is Metcalfe's Law:

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system

Here were talking about a telecom network. Think about a phone network. Anybody with a phone can call anybody else with a phone. So, the number of possible connections is much higher. It is the square of the number of nodes. Robert Metcalfe who formulated this law around 1970 was the inventor of the ethernet protocol for computer networks, and this applies to networks between computer users as well as it applies to telephones.

But we can do better than that. Computer users can not just make calls or send e-mails. With proper software like forums and social networking sites, they can also get together and form groups. The number of theoretically possible groups is much higher than the number of connections between individuals. So, here comes Reed's Law:

The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

This was formulated in 1999 by David Reed. This obviously applies to the Internet.

So, we went from a potential value proportional to number of members in a broadcast network, to the square of the number of members in a telecom type network, to roughly 2 to the n'th power, in a group-forming network, where n is the number of members.

This is all rather abstract and theoretical. We're only talking about potential maximum value, a potential which will never be met. In a phone network, most of the nodes wouldn't have the slightest interest in calling up the majority of the rest of the nodes. And on the Internet, most people would never want to participate in anything remotely like the number of groups that could be formed, as they wouldn't possibly have time, and their number of interests has not grown exponentially.

I'd rather go in a somewhat different direction and formulate a law that both is more correct and just as useless.

The value of a network is proportional to its complexity

See, the real value doesn't really depend very directly on the number of nodes. Sure, the Internet is potentially more valuable if we add a lot of people to it, but in reality only if there's a meaningful way for you to have a direct or indirect relationship to them, or to draw value from what they're doing. But it is not the number that does it, it is the type of web that is woven.

I'm talking about complexity in the sense of systemic properties where the parts somehow are inter-related in a way where the sum becomes more than just the total of the parts.

Those types of networks above are special cases of this. A broadcast network is very simple and doesn't have much complexity. However, the real value of such a network doesn't really depend on just the number of viewers, as it depends on who they are and what the network is broadcasting. One network might easily be more valuable than another with the same number of members.

The value of a telecom network isn't really n squared. It depends on which relationships people have outside the network. The more complex the relationships, and the more complex relationships the network facilitates, the more valuable it is.

Everybody on the net aren't going to form groups with everybody else, so, again, the real value depends on the complexity of the relationships that it is meaningful to maintain. Something might increase it, but it isn't the number of members itself that is going to increase it.

It is an easy claim to make, that the value of a network is proportional to its complexity, because complexity is badly defined and there's no way of measuring it. That doesn't make it less true.

What increases the value is increased complexity in the sense that more intricate webs are woven in a way that is useful.

Think about a brain. Neurons are connected with other neurons in a very complex way that creates a system ready to respond in useful ways to a great number of different situations. It isn't the number of neurons that's key, but the multitude of ways they're become connected, based on a multitude of learning experiences. Signals propagate and ripple across the network, useful responses emerge, and the system keeps learning and evolving.

It isn't very valuable or useful to connect random people with other random people in random constellations. What is useful is that relationships form, based on shared interests or experiences, and that one is able to indirectly draw on the connections and knowledge of other people, through several steps.

If you're in a social network, you've somehow become connected with people that you have something in common with. You've also connected yourself with resources that are useful to you, which have been created by people you probably don't know. These people and those resources are again connected with networks of people that again are connected with other people and other resources. If there's something you want to do, or something you want to know, there's an intricate web of connectedness available to you. Maybe what you're looking for isn't available from what you're directly connected to, but it might materialize from what you indirectly are connected to. You're connected with a complex network and exactly what is available is in no way obvious. But the value of it increases the more developed this network is, the more meaningful connections have been developed, the more those different resources are lined up, ready to go. Which is the complexity.

The complexity can be increased. How to do so isn't generally clear or understood. How can one weave more useful, far-reaching connections, without merely making it all more complicated and confusing? There's no easy answer, but there are certain indicators. What you're looking for is the tools that appear to make things more simple, while actually connecting you with more stuff. Does it get things together for you, or does it fragment things for you? Is the network becoming smarter, or more confused? Are you seeing synergy emerging, or the opposite?

Self-Organized Criticality

Sat, 5 Jul 2008 00:08:20 GMT

Self-Organized Criticality (SOC) is a theory about some principles that seem to pervade nature and which seems to explain various kinds of complexity very well. One of the most clear explanations is found in the book How Nature Works, by Per Bak, a Danish theoretical physicist who had an important role in developing the theory.

SOC has been applied within a great number of disciplines, but it seems to remain a controversial subject for many scientists. You can guess that from looking at the reviews on Amazon for the book I just mentioned. Half the people absolutely love it, and the other half are bending over backwards to try to discredit it. It is indeed terribly ambitious to try to present a principle that covers so many natural phenomena. The mere attempt of doing so will rub anybody the wrong way who favors reductionism, i.e. reducing the world to smaller pieces that follow clearly defined laws that can be observed repetitively in clearly defined ways. Could of course also be bacause Bak was a pretty obnoxious character who didn't hesititate to tell other scientists off.

Self-Organized Criticality says basically that there are certain dynamic systems that have a critical point as an attractor. I.e. that they "by themselves" will move towards a critical state. There are certain characteristics to such a system, but more about that in a moment.
more >

Complicated and Complex

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:47:20 GMT

In everyday usage, we often use "complicated" and "complex" interchangably. Which makes it a little bit hard to discuss complexity. I mean, the "good" kind of complexity that you find in nature, for example.

We could say that we need the scientific definition of complexity, but science has unfortunately come up with at least 32 different definitions, that don't agree with each other. But if we cut through the confusion a bit, something like this would be workable:

Complicated is when something contains many intricately combined parts. It is something that is hard to figure out. Even if you do figure it out, there's no guarantee that things are put together in a sensible way.

Complex is when something acts as a system, and it is exhibiting systemic properties that aren't obvious. It is something more and different than simply a sum of its parts. There might or might not be many parts, but the result is something not very transparent, which takes on a life of its own in some fashion.

An Airbus A380 is complicated. A jellyfish is complex. The Paris Metro network is complicated. How people use it is complex. Your skeleton is complicated. You are complex. A building is complicated. A city is complex.

One scientific view, which tries to cut through the multitude of definitions of complexity is here. It says basically that complexity is any real world system who's properties can't be explained by being reduced to any one formalism. Formalisms would be stuff like laws of mechanics (vectors, forces), or pretty much any "Newtonian" kinds of laws.

Life is complex. Life forms, eco-systems, the behavior of indivual animals or humans, or groups of them, all of that is stuff that is beyond old-fashioned reductionist science. You can dissect them and catalogue what they're made of, but it tells you little about what makes them do what they do. Consciousness is complex. The tendency of nature to self-organize is complex. The universe is complex.

Many complicated things can be understood by isolating them from everything else, by taking them apart, understanding all the parts, understanding how they're put together, and we might then know something useful that we can apply the same way again and again. We can invent complicated things the same way, by putting together parts we understand, based on principles we understand. That all works quite well for mechanical stuff, and has brought us bridges and automobiles and phone systems and western medicine. Some people are so happy with all of these that they intuitively have adopted the belief system that this really is all that exists: the stuff we can take apart and put back together again.

But the much bigger part of existence is all the stuff that's complex. Life itself is something mysterious and very complex. The fact that we exist at all is quite a mindblower. The fact that the universe exists and that it appears to be somehow ordered and livable, that's quite wild. Consciousness is something strange and hard to fathom. All of that is complex. Stuff that is complex tends to defeat attempts of isolating it and cutting it to pieces. It seems to often relate to other stuff that is outside the part you've chosen to analyze. It is like you can't address complexity without being open to dealing with the whole universe.

All of that makes complexity fascinating to look into, but it requires different models. Where you can reduce complicated stuff into pieces that you can study and understand separately, complexity seems to require the opposite. You need to chunk it up and find what principles appear to be at work. Inductive reasoning, rather than deductive reasoning.

Peer material production

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:40:20 GMT

From P2P Foundation, Raoul Victor talking about how a Peer to Peer society might look like. One of the hard parts would be how to get from a capitalistic production system to a P2P system, presumably not based on money.

From a human point of view, the efficiency of a mode of production is measured by its capacity to allow the human material needs to be satisfied. Capitalism has created an extraordinary network (the world market) allowing existent needs to find, some times at the other side of the world, the means to be satisfied. Demand and offer are confronted and interrelated through the market mechanisms. But it is a relation distorted by commercial exchange and the capitalistic logic based of profit.

In the capitalist market, the needs considered are not all the real human needs. These are limited by the necessity to be solvent. If you dont have money, your needs/desires do not exist in the market, they are not taken into account.

The offer is also limited, restricted: if production can not be sold, sold with profit, it is not done. Non profitable production does not exists in the market. Without profit perspective, fields are lied fallow, factories (even modern ones) closed, workers unemployed.

Only the logic of the capitalist market can explain that to day a child dies from malnutrition every 5 seconds in the world.

A peer society is the only way to interrelate the real (and not the solvent) demand with the real (and not the profitable) potential forces of production, human and material.

I intuitively agree. But how it actually is done, that's the thing. Our capitalistic system is inhumanely cruel and unable to deal with a great number of needs. But it is more efficient and productive than some of the alternatives, like a top-down communist bureaucracy. However, it shouldn't be all that hard to prove that it is hugely more wasteful and inefficient than a networked system that inspires people to produce what actually is needed, and to do so in the most efficient way. That would require, not just that everybody does whatever they feel like, but that there are potent ways of measuring of what is needed, what work is of good quality, etc. There'd still be a great need to way of measuring value.

For most of commonly needed products, we could imagine sorts of super-markets (we should say super non-markets) where goods are free/gratis. These might also be Internet sites. The nature and quantities of the products taken (instead of bought) would be instantaneously registered and the data sent by Internet to centers at different levels (villages, local, regional, worldwide).

That data would be permanently processed at different levels by a set of softwares in order to generate a list of consumption requirements, including as much information as possible: geographical localization, quantity, qualities, etc. The softwares would be constantly developed and improved integrating the final-user desires, systematically collected, elaborated, processed at all levels. That list would be made available to anyone in the planet, giving an instantaneous and permanent list of all the common consumption itches that humans need to scratch.

On the productive side, any center of production would thus have a real and large choice to decide what it prefers to produce, having the security that its product will be useful and used/consumed. It could also make propositions of new solutions to present or future needs/desires.

Every production center, in his turn, would express permanently its needs in order to realize its projects and, as for consumption, through Internet, these would be instantaneously collected, processed and put at public use.

What really would change the world in fairly rapid order would be just that: the ability to view it more clearly. If you actually could SEE, much more clearly than you can now, what is going on, what needs there are, what problems there are, how well the solutions are working, what is being produced, and what isn't - most reasoably rational humans would right away get ideas about what to do, and who to do it with and for.

The biggest problem is blindness. The prices in a market are a way of seeing. If you see that something is cheap or expensive, or abundant or scarce, it tells you something. Not necessarily the truth, but you assume that a whole complicated process already has taken place to establish those conditions. That works, but badly. How about if you actually could access, directly, the real costs of different products, services and activities. And you could see their real value. Do they really work, do they solve any problems? And you could see what is needed in many different areas and how well those needs are met.

That would all require some very fancy data processing which doesn't quite exist. But just imagine it. You're being fooled into paying high prices for products and services that often are of low quality and that could be done much more cheaply. You're being fooled into spending most of your life doing work that isn't actually very useful or needed. You're supporting organizations and electing leaders that don't necessarily do what's best for you or for the world. You do that because you're blind, getting your information from heresay and from the media, so you just give it your best guess and do what other people seem to be doing. But what if you could actually see, in a way that much better approximated reality, what is going on around you and in the world?

Peer production would be a no-brainer, if you had the right information and good enough communication channels. It would also be the end of many other systems that don't actually work very well, but that work in muddy waters.

The Universe as God

Fri, 16 May 2008 13:34:20 GMT

How wonderful. Stuart Kauffman, theoretical biologist and complexity theory pioneer, talks about reinventing the sacred, getting over reductionism, appreciating the awesome wonder of existence, and redefining God to be essentially the creativity of the universe. You just can't explain the complexity of the universe by reducing it all to physics that all were pre-determined. There's an article in New Scientist: "Why humanity needs a God of creativity", there's his excellent entry at Edge: "Beyond Reductionism", and there's his latest book "Reinventing the Sacred".

[T]he unfolding of the universe - biotic, and perhaps abiotic too - appears to be partially beyond natural law. In its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator. If, as a result of this creativity, we cannot know what will happen, then reason, the Enlightenment's highest human virtue, is an insufficient guide to living our lives. We must use reason, emotion, intuition, all that our evolution has brought us. But that means understanding our full humanity: we need Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room.
Reason is an insufficient guide to living our lives: put Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room

Shall we use the "God" word? We do not have to, yet it is still our most powerful invented symbol. Our sense of God has evolved from Yahweh in the desert some 4500 years ago, a jealous, law-giving warrior God, to the God of love that Jesus taught. How many versions have people worshipped in the past 100,000 years?

Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of "God". From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that encompasses all life and the planet itself. From it, we can change our value system across the globe and try, together, to ease the fears of religious fundamentalists with a safe, sacred space we can share. And from it we can, if we are wise, find means to avert wars of civilisations, the ravages of global warming, and the potential disaster of peak oil.

The EDGE article is dense with science, and I understand less than half of it, but very worth reading, even if you don't get it all. So I'm just quoting the easy-to-read conclusions. Remember, this is a hard-core scientist here, not just somebody who writes popular books that involve scientific metaphors.

To ever succeed, this new view needs to be soft spoken. You see, we can say, here is reality, is it not worthy of stunned wonder? What more could we want of a God? Yes, we give up a God who intervenes on our behalf. We give up heaven and hell. But we gain ourselves, responsibility, and maturity of spirit. I know that saying that ethics derives from evolution undercuts the authority of God as its source. But do we need such a God now? I think not. Nor do we need the spiritual wasteland that post-modernism has brought us. Beyond my admired friend Kenneth Arrow, natural parks are valuable because life is valuable on its own, a wonder of emergence, evolution and creativity. Reality is truly stunning. So if you find this useful, let us go forth, as was said long ago, and invite consideration by others of this new vision of reality. With it, let us recreate spiritual community and membership. Let us go forth. Civilization needs to be changed.

Count me in.

(Via BoingBoing)

Kriss Hammond wants to change my financial status

Wed, 14 May 2008 12:45:20 GMT

It took me a moment to remember the story... See, I did this posting in 2005: Jetsetters wants to sue everybody, which was about this fellow, Kriss Hammond, who said he wanted to launch a 10 million dollar lawsuit against me, because I had reposted some articles related to his outfit, Jetsetters Magazine. Articles written by some of his affiliates, specifically with a license to repost freely, with attribution. I don't know why they do that, if they don't want the articles to actually be used. Anyway, I had reposted them automatically, and they weren't particularly good articles or anything. Since the outrageous lawsuit threat was kind of amusing, I looked around a little bit, and found that Kriss Hammond seems do that kind of thing often, and that he runs a somewhat questionable business which involves paying him money to learn how to present oneself as a "travel writer", so that one can get free hotel rooms and that kind of thing. At least that's how I understood it.

I had mostly forgotten about it, until the guy sent me an e-mail yesterday:

Hello Ming the Mechanic, also known as F Funch. We know who you are and where you live and operate. For some time you have had a posting about Jetsetters Magazine on the net that shoiuld be taken down, if you are truly a practioner of change. If you are not truly a practioner of change, we are about to change your financial status, as we did with Carl Parks.

Sincerely,

Kriss Hammond - j...@hotmail.com
Editor - Jetsetters Magazine

Carl Parkes was a vocal critic of the Jetsetters scheme, and is a (real) travel writer.

Changing my financial status, hey, I'd welcome that, but I think he means it as a threat.

I can guess why he doesn't like my previous posting. See, if you look up "Jetsetters Magazine" in Google, there are 48,000 matches, and mine is number 3. That's of course a bit annoying when one is trying to game the search engines with thousands of poorly written travel articles that all link to the Jetsetters homepage.

26 minutes later, Kriss sent me this message:

When we originally posted Jetsetters Magazine articles on GoArticles.com there was no intention for you to use the articles within your site without our permission, which at your own admission, you did. Thank you for taking them down. Also, please remove your Ming the Mechanic reference to us, and in the future stop referencing us in any way or slandering or libeling our name online. We have helped many budding writer enhance their lifestyles, which you and Carl Parks have liebeled and slandered. We have taken care of Mr. Parks, and now are concentrating on you. We can have one of our colleagues call upon you if you wish, at 6 rue Pedro Gailhard, 31100, Toulouse France. Thank you for your understanding and consideration.

It doesn't sound too good that they have taken care of Mr.Parks (it is Parkes, really). Or that he'd like to send some thugs to my door. Then, again, Kriss Hammond doesn't strike me as a very well armed opponent in the legal arena or in any other arena. Anyway, he wasn't done, so 18 minutes later:

We will give you exactly until June 1, 2008 to remove all references online from you as Ming the Mechanic to Jetsetters Magazine and then we begin law suit procedures. We realize you are a professional programmer, and if there is any threats, real or inferred to our websites from you we will incorporate those threats, real or inferred into any existing or pending lawsuit. We will also attach this lawsuit to your chateaux in France through French courts. I don't think you really realize who you are dealing with. Our IT staff is monitoring all our websites for any illegal or illicit activity to them by you or others. We have deep pockets and relish any legal confrontations with you.

Oh no, please don't touch my chateaux. I'd have to live on my yacht if you took them away from me.

Now, today there was a Skype request to add "Kriss Hammond (jetsetters2)" to my contact list, with this reason "Jetsetters Magazine lawsuit". I don't think I want to chat with him on Skype about that at odd hours of the day, so I declined.

I'm very approachable, and normally willing to discuss it if somebody is not happy with something I've posted somewhere. If Kriss Hammond had simply asked me to remove his travel articles back then, I'd just have done so. Oh, I did, but since he also threatened me, I wrote about it. Which I do now as well. You would get much further by being nice, Mr. Hammond.

---

... A day later: Kriss Hammond sent me a couple more messages where he actually sounded more human and friendly. I'm not sure if it is because of my e-mail answer or because he read this message. I sort of suspect the former. Anyway, that's a positive sign. Most people want things to come out well, but sometimes they pick the wrong strategy at first.

Why Denmark is the world's happiest country

Thu, 8 May 2008 23:01:20 GMT

It's an article on Tim Ferriss' excellent blog: "6 Reasons to Visit the Worlds Happiest Country". Makes me feel good about being Danish.

4. The people are beautiful but seem unaware of the fact.

As Bill Bryson once observed: you could cast a Pepsi commercial here in 15 seconds.

Right up there with Argentina, Denmark has a jaw-dropping number of gorgeous people. The truly beautiful part, and unusual differentiator, is that appear blissfully unaware of the fact. There is little LA-style pretension unless you go to a social climber magnet like Club NASA, which helps to pull the mirror gazers off the streets. Go in the spring or summer and there is no need for catwalksthe sidewalks at Nyhavn are good enough. For those feeling the club or lounge itch, Vega and JazzHouse are hard to beat.

5. Danish design is incredible to experience, even for non-designers.

It doesnt cost money to light a room correctly, but it does require culture. This quote from Poul Henningsen, encapsulates the beauty of Danish design minimalism. Much like in Japanese design, form follows function, and half of the time I found myself in a great mood in Copenhagen, I realized it was due to the planned passage of sunlight in Danish architecture, as well as their understanding of interior lighting intensity and placement.

Bigger is not better, as is so often the case in the US, and the tallest building in Copenhagen is a modest 358 feet.

From the sleek silverware of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the most famous chairs in the design world, the Danes have a functional and pleasant feast for the eyes almost anywhere you go, whether the renowned Louisiana museum or your hotel lobby....

Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings

Wed, 7 May 2008 16:35:20 GMT

Decoherence on Metafilter:

Rutgers professor of philosophy Jerry Fodor created a bit of a stir last October when he wrote an article for the London Review of Books arguing that natural selection may not be such a great theory after all, and that a "major revision of evolutionary theory... is in the offing." Not many fellow philosophers and academics agree, it seems. Fodor responds to his critics here and here. Six months later, it's still not entirely clear whether his argument is, as Justin E.H. Smith put it, "irresponsible and stupid or so subtle that none of his adversaries, defending a status quo interpretation of the theory of natural selection, have been able to get it yet."

I think that's a rather brilliant article by Jerry Fodor. He starts off in part by addressing that same issue I just commented on:

Whats wrong with us is that the kind of mind we have wasnt evolved to cope with the kind of world that we live in. Our kind of mind was selected to solve the sorts of problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears thirty thousand years or so ago; problems that arise for small populations trying to make a living and to reproduce in an ecology of scarce resources. But, arguably, that kind of mind doesnt work very well in third millennium Lower Manhattan, where theres population to spare and a Starbucks on every block, but survival depends on dodging the traffic, finding a reliable investment broker and not having more children than you can afford to send to university. Its not that our problems are harder than our ancestors were; by what measure, after all? Its rather that the mental equipment weve inherited from them isnt appropriate to what were trying to do with it. No wonder its driving us nuts.

But his main point is to argue a bit against that fundamental and holy principle of evolution: natural selection.

To summarize a bit: There are two fundamental, but distinct parts to the theory of evolution. 1. All life forms are evolving, later species and variants evolving from early forms, so we seem to have descended from monkeys, for one thing. 2. Evolution is happening by natural selection, i.e. by individuals and traits being selected for because they're better adapted to their environment.

Nobody but religious nuts are disputing evolution according to #1. Most evolutionists also hold #2 as being an inseparable and self-evident component in evolution. But there are many more problems with that, as Fodor points out.

Natural selection is normally presented as working exactly like how it works when somebody selectively breeds some plant or animal to cultivate particular traits. Purple roses, or fluffy short-nosed cats, etc. That selective breeding scenario is easy to understand. But the odd thing is when, in nature, it is coupled with the firm conviction that there surely is nobody there to do the selection. It is actually specifically and emphatically used to try to disprove that there's any mind involved, that there's anybody there who chooses anything. Fodor also thinks there's no mind involved and doesn't believe in God or Mother Nature. I personally would tend to think there has to be some kind of intelligence involved. Anyway, he's mainly addressing the lack of logic in the assumptions that natural selection happens based exclusively on adaptabtion to one's environment. He doesn't provide much of an alternative, but he points out that evolution would happen even without that. See, clearly, all traits aren't selected based on that they're a perfect fit for some environment. Some of them come along in the package of whatever else turns out to be advantageous. Animals that evolve to be more tame also turn out to have more floppy ears and more curly tails, even though that doesn't give them any obvious advantage. It is simply some traits that happen to be connected to the genes that relate to tameness. So, likewise, lots of traits might develop simply because they tag along with some other traits that get emphasized for one reason or another.

So, pigs don't have wings, and have never had wings, and there have never even been any pigs who went extinct because wings weren't a good idea after all. Because wings would be pretty far from the package of traits that go into a pig. A whole bunch of things would have to change at the same time, and that's not where the evolution of pigs is pointed.

I'm no biologist. But I do have a bit of a sense of what's logical and what is not. Evolutionary biology is full of anthropomorphisms that make no sense when coupled with the foregone conclusion that there's nobody there, no intelligence, that it is just all blind accidents. "Natural selection" implies that somebody selects. Genes can't be "selfish" unless they have some kind of mind. Nothing does anything "in order to" have a certain advantage unless there's something there that can make plans and choose among alternatives. So, either they haven't understood the actual mechanism that does this completely automatically, or they're missing the agent that does it. You can't really have it both ways.

Why can't we stick to our goals?

Tue, 6 May 2008 13:57:20 GMT

L.A. Times: "Does your brain have a mind of its own?" - Why can't we stick to our goals? Blame the sloppy engineering of evolution.

How many times has this happened to you? You leave work, decide that you need to get groceries on the way home, take a cellphone call and forget all about your plan. Next thing you know, you've driven home and forgotten all about the groceries.

Or this. You decide, perhaps circa Jan. 1, that it's time to lose weight; you need to eat less, eat better and exercise more. But by the first of May, your New Year's resolutions are a distant memory.

Human beings are, to put it gently, in a unique position in the animal world. We're the only species smart enough to plan systematically for the future -- yet we remain dumb enough to ditch even our most carefully made plans in favor of short-term gratification. ("Did I say I was on a diet? Mmm, but three-layer chocolate mousse is my favorite. Maybe I'll start my diet tomorrow.")...

I thought it was just me. It seems surprisingly hard to make my mentally conceived plans stick. If once in a while I really feel what needs to happen in my bones, or in my gut, it happens. But if it is merely a good idea, however logical, coherent and important I conclude it is, it usually gets overridden by whatever distraction that shows up that feels more compelling in the moment. And my plans are easily forgotten.

The article blames it on faulty evolutionary engineering. I'm not sure I believe in such a thing, i.e. I don't quite believe that evolution is so dumb and blind, but he does have a point. Our animal instincts are well developed. A danger appears and we'll know how to jump aside, without thinking about it. Something delicious appears in front of our nose and we'll be munching on it it no time. Our abstractly thinking mental faculties are much more sophisticated, but at the same time they seem like an after-thought, not entirely wired into the machinery. We can make great plans, based on the processing of abstract information, aimed at desirable long term objectives. But a single piece of chocolate cake or a random interesting website might get us off track.

I suppose some people have something called discipline, which involves subordinating what one actually feels to one's mental plans and ideals. But that just seems so .. brutal. It would of course be better if one's instincts, emotions and physical desires actually were synchronized with the mental planning. Not subordinated to it, as the mental ideas aren't necessarily the ones that are right. But coordinated at least. Maybe I should work on that. Or maybe I'll see what's on TV.

Secrets of the park

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:43:19 GMT

Next to the house we live in on Les Hauts de Ramonville is this huge walled-off area called Domaine Latcore, which used to be the home of Pierre-George Latcore, the airplane manufacturer. One can see his Chateau through one of the gates, but nobody seems to live there, other than some caretakers. Otherwise it supposedly is just a nature preserve. We can see the many kinds of trees in the forest from our kitchen window. Sometimes people are hunting there. But it is a private and closed area and the walls are tall. Would be no easy way of sneaking in there. But I'm terribly curious. Particularly since I concluded that this particular hill must have been the location, 1000 years ago, of Raymond IV's castle Bellevue, from which he took off on the infamous first crusade against Jerusalem with a thousand of his best knights, and lots of hangers-on.

So, I looked in Google Earth, of course, to see what else was in there, apart from what I can see from the outside, like huge sets of stairs leading to the top. But at the time Google only had pretty low resolution pictures, so pretty much all one could see is that there's a little network of roads criss-crossing the area, and that most of them meet in one or two points, one of them seeming to be the top of the hill. ..But now, since recently, they have much better pictures. Nothing very surprising, other than this, on the picture, which seems to be what is found at the top of the hill, behind the chateau. A little round lake, with a bridge out to a little island, with a tower or pavillion. How exciting. There will of course be a hidden trap door at the bottom, leading down to the hidden treasure chamber. OK, I'm dreaming, I don't know if there's supposed to be a hidden treasure there, except for that the gold of Jerusalem sort of disappeared.