Psybertron Asks

Thanks to Piers Young at Monkey Magic for the link to this article from Discover.

A good summary of issues based on interviews by Tim Folger with working scientists in the field, many of whom I’ve quoted before on psybertron. Strange how the multiverse idea is still seen as the most convincing solution to the fine tuning problem – it was David Deutsch and quantum information people that first alerted me to that. Like if string theory is no explanation (because it simply supports just about any empirical outcome) multiverses are really just the same solution. An explanation of “anything” is not a theory of everything, it’s a theory of nothing. Infinitely many possible universes to account for the “coincidence” of finding ourselves in this Goldilocks (just-right) universe by chance. No wonder people prefer “god” to the “oops” argument.

Still think the problem is the view of the appearance of coincidence and the scientific knee-jerk to explain that coincidence objectively, whereas there is a subjective, anthropic angle to the perceived improbability in the first place. What we should really be looking for is an existing mistake in explanations of what has already been perceived and “accepted” as proven science … Island, I believe you are onto something. See previous “anthropic” threads.

This is just the usual conspiracy vs cock-up perception. When “low quality” things (bad things with bad explanations) look well organized and “intentional”, there is invariably a cock-up or two behind the scenes, and the embarassment factor in exposing cock-ups invariably leads to actions that “look like” intentional cover-up. A double-whammy for the conspiracy theorists. Pretty basic organizational behaviour theory in my book. Science is made of people, like anything else, and one thing people are very badly programmed to do is learn from mistakes.

So it goes … roll on wisdom.

Had one of those transatlantic (twelve hours of sunset) opportunities to get a bit of reading in last week, a week in Boston. (Incidentally encountered Steven Pinker in the hotel bar, though left him undisturbed deep in conversation with another, having just explained he was my second favourite evolutionary psychology / linguistic philosopher, after Dan Dennett whose Dangerous Idea I had just recently finished re-reading.) Anyway, departing Gardermoen, I picked-up a double anthology of Kurt Vonnegut, his “Welcome to the Monkey House” and “Palm Sunday” collections of short stories, articles, speeches and auto-biographical sketches.

Wonderful stuff, such varied material with such uniform wit. From the Mills-n-Boon-esque piece entitled “Long Walk to Forever” by the women’s magazine that published what turns out to be the true story of how KV met his future wife, to the sci-fi offerings of “The Barnhouse Effect” and “The Euphio Question”. Lots of material drawn from his Cape Cod home experience, the scripted romance of “Who Am I This Time” and the wonderful punchline to “The Hyannis Port Story”

Apart from the intriguing family-life back-story to his own biography, my favourites are the “Nazi Sympathizer Defended At Some Cost” (Celine) and its counterpoint “Nazi City Mourned At Some Profit” (Dresden – the subject of best-selling “Slaughterhouse Five”). Turns out my Vonnegut readings, all since his death last year, Cat’s Cradle and the latter he rates as his 5 out of 5 efforts. Blogged reviews of both. A lasting impression of Slaughterhouse Five is “So it goes …” as individuals die along the way, but I hadn’t noticed the “…” and affectation of my own punctuation I seem to have avoided so far …

Turns out to have been a feature KV had picked-up from Louis Ferdinand Celine … someone new (1894 – 1961) to add to my reading list.

Blogging a lot of links to Peston’s Picks these days. Same subject, but for a change this one has an optimistic silver-lining tone after so many panic-stations downers recently.

Be interesting to see what Goodwin does with his wealth and knighthood, once he goes (if he goes). Might he stay on as the manager who “serves” his people – wishful thinking ? But I’m watchin’ fella.

Not seen TRIZ before. I can see why the references to it that I did come across (more below) don’t bother to explain the “romantic Russian acronym“. Just follow the Wikipedia link if you must know.

It’s a diagramming notation (now even annotation / mark-up) and a methodology for describing and finding innovative solutions to problem situations, and it seems to have got visibility in the modern BPM world (Business Process Modelling) having orginated with Genrich Altshuller in 1946 in the Soviet Union in connection with invention, innovation and creativity. (Given my history and interests, suprised I’ve not come across it … you live and learn, never too late, etc … I wonder if it’s any good ? I shall download and play with it, and find out.)

Anyway, I came across its evolution and exploitation in SouthBeach Notation. Which in turn I had come across in a comment (an unashamed plug) in Robert Peston’s Picks on the subject of how concerted global governmental intervention was needed as a “circuit-breaker” as a brake against the “Minsky moment” when markets flee from capital in a self-fulfilling spiral. (BTW making these kinds of connections is precisely what blogging is about, it is never a substitute for jounalism, just an alternative – linkable – medium.)

I was in fact about to blog a link to this role of public intervention in otherwise free markets, into a free-markets discussion in another place ….. This is of course one reason why a share of private-profits must be used to fund public-losses in a “free” market that is to be tolerated in a public environment.

On that original subject …. the financial crisis … interesting that other comments (on Peston’s blog and on MoQ Discuss) recognize that the falling numbers themselves are not really the issue … markets go down as well as up, we are often reminded …. and taking a holiday is as good a break / brake as anything. Roll on real pramatists.

As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve had an enforced hiatus from blogging due to the relocation to Oslo. Two things to note:

(1) After doing some essential overhauls just before going offline in the US, I had added a “simpler” previous posts & archives link to the side-bar, and noted slowness in the rendering of the blog-pages, but I hadn’t noticed the connection. Thanks diagnostic help from Deamhost, I can see the problem and will fix soon, hopefully today. Apologies for the inconvenience, your patience is appreciated.

(2) Secondly, the day we left, a colleague in the US returned the last of 3 Dan Dennett books I’d lent him. “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (1995). Re-reading it at every available moment travelling and waiting in the last week or so has reminded me why he is my favourite current philosopher. He’s an excellent scientist, philosopher and philsopher of science. He knows when he’s being philosophical, when he’s needing to be scientific, and has the patience of a saint to expose and explain counter arguments whilst recognizing that few have simple logical outcomes beyond the pragmatc “policy” of “significant value-adding” …. and the wit to pull it off.

I can see so many points of contact, that anything I write should be closely linked to Dennett. My whole agenda is a subset of Dennett’s I reckon.

A dense summary – Wherever the intelligence lies, causation, how things came to be the way they are, is an engineering question – creativity is a selection from available options, optimal only so far as permitted by current historical and environmental constraints – you can only ever get there from here. Intention is an explanatory stance in the observer’s hindsight, as if it were in the active participants. The whole thing is a narrative that works. That narrative is an organisation of semantics from available information, information itself being significant difference; Stasis, being or remaining the same is of lower interest, than difference or change. Value-adding is about adding significant value to the narrative. First-cause is simply the cause before the earliest one so far explained in the narrative, but is not in itself a reason to presume a miraculous sky-hook, except as a holiday from explaining and philosophising, and never a reason for a sky-hook as an alternative to a crane later in the engineering narrative.

OK so another football story.

Relocating from the US to Norway, visiting in the UK along the way we’ve been a little out of touch without the internet until yesterday. We missed that Reading’s first away win of the season was Wolve’s first home defeat 3:0 last Tuesday, after the 4:0 win against Swansea last Saturday, and yesterday we caught the 3:1 win against manager-of-the-month Burnley on-line. We are in unheard of territory … goals-for averaging 3.5 per game, and the highest goal-difference in the Championship, now only 2 points behind Wolves and 3 off Birmingham in top spot.

We’ll be changing the club name from Reading Royals to Reading Irish next.

Twice in as many days … another footbal story, two actually.

Great to see Blades get the decision on the Tevez fiasco at West Ham two seasons ago and love or hate him, great to see Warnock happy. No amount of compensation fixes it of course, but justice is done. (I love the Warnock quote thanking the “independent” witnesses, explaining that whilst he gave his own evidence, he’d “got carried away”. No, really ?)

And the Reading “goal that wasn’t” story. Good news that the league didn’t recommend a replay – what a precedent that would have set ! Coppell said he would be OK if a replay was awarded, but Boothroyd didn’t actually ask for one, so fair play all round, almost ….

• (1) I don’t agree with the general ine of blaming the Lino, just because he admitted the error. The Ref is in charge, and when he conferred with the Lino (which he rightly did), about the ball crossing the line (the Lino was right to raise his flag, the ball did cross the line) the Ref should have asked the Lino to confirm and re-confirm when he thought the ball had crossed the line, not just his opinion that it was a goal … no one in play had claimed a goal … the ref had good reason to doubt his Lino. (But I am in favour of TV / Electronic tools for “ball in play” decisions, though ony when the ball is dead, if that makes any sense.)
• (2) The Reading players and management should have either persuaded the Ref he was wrong on Watford’s behalf at the time or, if they couldn’t convince him, gifted Watford a goal immediately afterwards. There are precedents for such sporting conduct on the pitch. Here’s hoping the fortuitous draw doesn’t prove decisive for either team in the end of season placings.

[Post Note – guess that would make more sense if I pointed out that we were long-term Reading FC season ticket holders (home and away), are life-time members of the supporters trust and still consider Reading as “home”. Like, we’re positively interested in Reading’s results.]

Just a quickie update.

I’ve pruned the overloaded side-bar – by using a simpler collapsible “previous posts” javascript, and removing a couple of dozen old, redundant or little-used blog-roll links. I’ve also moved the Pirsig / MoQ links to the newer [Pirsig] page, and added additional internal navigation links to that page. The original Psybertron Pirsig Pages are still there, but increasingly being absorbed into the re-organized page, where there is still more work planned. (There is a redirect on one of the old pages which should be invisible to the user … any problems let me know.)

The ongoing re-organization will next affect the [Manifesto] page, where I intend to add an editorial policy and an introduction to the newer projects. Time to move on.

PS – anyone detecting performance issues with the Psybertron site, please let me know. It seems to me that the active PHP & MySQL pages are rendering very slowly ? Still investigating.

Humiliated.

Headless chickens.

Privatisation of profits, socialisation of losses.

Staunching the flow of blood, but not fixing the wound.

A real downer from Robert Peston commenting on the (proposed) US bail-out of the banking industry, and a whole spectrum of comments from his readers. I’m no expert of international banking, but the scale of the numbers, means we need to understand where this might be leading. Since the markets already appear to have taken the bail-out into account, what if Congress rejects the proposal ?

Despite it being an important part of our lives, I suspect this is only the second post in the 7 year history of Psyberton on the subject of football (real football that is, played with the feet). I’m making this posting because this is a wonderful illustration of why objective logic is a useless decision making tool, which is of course a large part of my agenda here.

Circular (strange-loopy) arguments are so much better.

Notwithstanding Sir Alex’s paranoid reasoning, referee Halsey was indeed right to give “serious foul play” as his reason for Terry’s red-card / sending-off last weekend, and wrong to be persuaded to rescind it. It was an absolutely blatant so-called “professional foul” …. no-one at all seems to be arguing with that. It was so blatantly professional that clearly Terry’s and everyone else’s calculations (except Halsey’s) was banking on a yellow-card warning only, based on the “not the last man” defence.

Rules evolve, like everything else. As soon as the last man defence (post-rationlization) becomes part of the reasoning in the decision (a-priori) to actually make the “professional foul”, it moves on from simply being part of the rationale; onto a meta-level, another cycle of a strange-loop, to become part of the foul itself. It excludes itself from application of the new/old rule. The reasoning for applying the more lenient view arose in the days before the offenders had that objective rule available to them in making their cynical calculating rule-breaking decision, before that strange-loop had happened. Once it has happened, game over … and remember evolving psychology really is a game, just like football is a game … effectively the new (now old) rule has a new(er) interpretation / manifestation in real life, beyond the sterile realm of pure objective logic.

Rules are for the guidance of wise men, and the enslavement of fools. (Douglas Bader ?)

Wisdom comes from going round a few loops. Well done Mr Halsey; stand by your own gut feel, and help evolve the human species out of this mess.