Yay Science: Today I took my youngest daughter to a language lab

Lilah, Anika and I took a trip to the Language & Learning Lab near U of T - Lilah so she could take part in a study and Anika so she could see their geckos and meet the staff (possibly so she can take part in tests later).

The test itself was pretty simple in structure - there were too experimenters, a reader and a tester.  The tester sat in a corner and pretended to work while the reader read to Lilah a short story from a picture book - very slowly and deliberately, and twice through.  The books were about some unusual animals and how they ate and what they did, and were accompanied by the typical sorts of anthropomorphized drawings you see in kids' books.

The reader left the room, and the tester sat across from Lilah, showed her a photograph of the real animal from the story, said she wanted to learn about the animal, and asked Lilah some yes/no questions which required indirect inferences drawn from the story (ie. if the story talked about an animal living on the back of a hippo, the question might be "Does [animal] care about hippos?").

Anika & Lilah were given some small toys, they took the girls picture, they explained the study to me, I asked some dumb questions, and we left.

The study itself is trying to tease out how kids learn about the real world from picture books.  It seems intuitively obvious that kids learn the lessons we want them to learn about real things from picture books, but I can also see how that's a pretty huge assumption, and there's a lot to unpick there.

It was an interesting morning, the staff at the Lab were really nice and friendly, and science FTW!

Science as Metaphor Destroyer

I'm almost done Metaphors We Live By.  Lakeoff & Johnson spend the last third or so of the book arguing against the objective/subjective worldviews, in favour of a more inclusive Experientialist coneptualization, which, in summary, suggests that objective concerns of figuring out what the world is really like, consistent applications of fairness, &etc. have to share space with the fact that human understanding is contingent on our intuitive faculty, which operates at a basic level on a web of meaning which is often formed of loose, surface-level similarities between foundational concepts.

Whew.

Anyway, what it made me think is that science often functions as a metaphor destroyer.

I came to think of the use to which language could be put as a spectrum, with poetry on one end and science on the other.

Poetry is applied language sloppiness - loose associations between concepts with fuzzy boundaries to form surprising juxtapositions.  A good poem should feel like an amorphous mass of meaning which produces an emotional response.

Science is applied language precision - pinpoint, strictly exclusionary concepts with absolutely no definitional overlap and extremely focused meanings.  And the logical endpoint for progressively destroying ambiguity in language is the use of mathematics.

Poetry lives in intuition, but science allows you to transcend intuition, which is both a strength and a weakness, in terms of it's role in understanding.  For example, I've never read an attempt at communicating an intuitive grasp of quantum psychics that didn't serve to deepen my confusion.  This because an analogy relies on the trick of finding similarities between two concepts, in order to convey an experience the reader has never had, in terms of an experience the reader has had, and leveraging that similarity into communicating the intuition.  You can even "build" an unfamiliar concept out of the building blocks of other concepts, if you careful exclude those facets of meaning which aren't relevant.

The thing about quantum psychics is, it's so foreign to our experience as macro-level animals that there's simply no conceptual building blocks available, except the math.

LessWrong: The burden of existential risk

The official topic last week was Existential Risk (that set of things that could kill all humanity:  environmental degradation, new & exciting diseases, unfriendly artificial intelligence, nanotechnology "grey goo", &etc.), but our actual discussion was kind of all over the place.

How I've come to see the psychological toll of thinking about existential risk is this:  we both have an inflated sense of our own responsibility for doing something, and a strong sense that we lack any agency whatsoever, because the problem is so huge and daunting.  It's the type of problem people can only solve in large groups, where all the individuals are pulling in the same direction towards the goal.  We feel the fear driving us to get everyone on board, but it's hard to convince people to care about something highly abstract and far-feeling.  Environmentalism is an exception to this, because we can see, more or less directly, the effects of environmental degradation, and because we have easy-to-process metaphors (everyone understands and dirty house or a dirty street, and can scale that up in their minds to a dirty world).

I humbly suggest:  in order to be an effective agent of change on such a big problem, you first have to learn how to live with the problem in a healthy, more-or-less self-interested way.  And the way to do this, counter-intuitively, is to work on all the little problems in your life.

The reason this works is because fixing little problems gives us back our sense of agency in our lives.  And it's subjectively true: completing a task that we've procrastinated on for too long feels very energizing.

Do enough of this, and the big, scary problem is still a big, scary problem, but now we are approaching it from a frame of being an active participant - this is called "being in a higher energy set".

The idea of an energy set is from Athol Kay's new book, The Mindful Attraction Plan.  He doesn't address existential risk specifically, but gives a lot of very practical advice to approaching Big Life Problems like unemployment, bad relationships, &etc.

A quote from the book:

"The universe, or at the very least our planet, is a giant energy set.  You may be simply one tiny speck in a sea of humanity, but your best actions can reverberate out into the lives of others.  What you send out comes back eventually.  While I don't believe in prayers magically supplying you with things you need, I do have a low-key faith in the universe being one giant reflective field of intention."

Shame

Another thing we talked about at LessWrong on Tuesday (this is many Tuesday's ago, as I've been extremely busy and haven't been able to put time in here) was the difference between shamae and guilt.  As I recall we couldn't quite reach consensus - at least one person thought there was no real distinction, some thought shame and guilt were feelings for processing the transgression group norms vs. self-norms.

Youtube blogger Typhon Blue has an interesting treatment of shame as part of her "Threat Narratives" series.  I'll paraphrase her:  Shame is a way of dealing with group norms.  When an individual is in some way violating these norms, the group will say something like:  "We value you intrinsically, but this behaviour is toxic and unacceptable.  Please go off and deal with your shit, and come back when you feel you can start to work for the good of the group again."

At the meeting, some of us agreed that shame or guilt was characterized by a slightly uncomfortable feeling in your stomach or gut.  And you can see above the metaphors for toxicity, vomiting and evacuation - a person is expelled (vomited) from the group, so they can work out whatever is causing their bad behaviour - which will also involve some kind of expulsion in the psychological sense.

As moral psychologists (that is, psychologists who study morality, not psychologists who are moral) like Jonathan Haidt have pointed out, this metaphor of toxicity and expulsion is suspiciously prevalent when we discuss issues of group norms - for example, objects can become "contaminated" by the moral actions of people who owned or handled them - this is, I suspect, is why so many people who aren't Neo-Nazis collect Nazi memorabilia.  It's also why I wouldn't show up to work sporting a tiny moustache (the only time I've seen such a moustache on a man, it was on a member of the punk band the Murder Junkies, and he was *obviously* being provocative).

Evolution uses existing adaptations for multiple purposes when it can, and I suspect this is what's going on here.  Shame and morality have appeared just recently, and I think they have co-opted our existing adaptations that deal with illness, or rotten or contaminated food, to deal with behaviours which violate group norms, or are in some sense maladaptive.

(Edit - I just came across this, from blogger Ricky Raw of therawness.com:  "If a guilty person did something wrong and no one else knew, they would still feel bad, because even though their image is still intact, it’s their actions and the content of their character that matters to them. If a shame-prone person did something wrong and no one else knew, they would not feel bad because as long as their image is fine, everything else is fine, regardless of whether their actions are morally right or wrong. To a shame-prone person, actions are only “right” or “wrong” to the extent that they damage his or her reputation or image, regardless of the actual intent and impact of the actions. To a shame-prone person, actions only matter when they damage the image, cause feelings of exposure and embarrassment, and reveal that they are flawed to their core, making them feel like frauds.")

LessWrong Thursday: Fights over Words

(LessWrong Toronto has a weekly Tuesday meeting - check out our meetup page!  Because it generally takes me two days to do up a post, it's LessWrong Thursday!)

This week, we discussed Lukeprog's article "Pluralistic Moral Reductionism" - which is philosophical fancy-talk for the understanding that when people talk about moral concepts like "good" or "right" they define those terms differently ("pluralism"), and may smuggle in their own preferences and perspectives in the meanings of the words themselves, so it's really important to explicitly define your words ("reductionism").

Folks had lots of interesting stuff to say, as always - one thing we discussed that stuck out to me was when the conversation turned to gay marriage.  One of our members observed that in discussing the issue with folks in the "anti-" camp, the thing that most came up was strong reservations about changing the definition of "marriage" - which they saw as having a long history, being the traditional mating system of their ancestors.  What they objected to, it seems, is not being inclusive of gay people, but with the purity of the word.

This is a "fight about words" in a different sense than that which arises over the definition of "sound" in the tree falling in a forest problem.  This is a word overstuffed with meaning and nobility, which encapsulates aspects of civilization, institution and religion, and is tied strongly to our future as well as our past.

Even though I am very pro marriage equality, I can identify with this sentiment.  Getting married and having kids in a more or less traditional manner has been one of the great boons of my life.  My intuitions on this are not structured in such a way as to be exclusionary, but I can understand how one might feel changing a concept which holds a central place in one's life as a violation.

As it happens, I believe marriage is going to drastically change in structure in the coming decades due to various social convulsions we're experiencing now around sexual politics and relationships, and in terms of the past, the meaning & structure of marriage is nowhere near as stable as the tradcons think it was.  That, and the simply awful outcomes for gay people if we don't update our institutions to address their needs means marriage equality wins.

Impulse

...as I reach for the pack of large (about four inches in diameter, apiece) cookies, something happens in my forebrain, cascades through my nervous system to my muscles, resists the physical momentum of my arm, and stops my hand.  I grab a piece of fruit instead.

An impulse, in physics, is something that changes the momentum of an object (like my muscles acting on my arm and hand).

In signal processing, an impulse is an impossibly narrow peak.

In audio (and signal processing in general), we have a tool called a low-pass filter, which attenuates out high frequency information and leaves low frequency information alone.  In other words, it smooths out the wrinkley bits of a signal.

This is the schematic for the simplest version of a low pass filter, called an RC network, because it consists of a resistor and a capacitor.  A capacitor is is essentially two metal plates, separated by a bit of air - when you put it in a circuit, the plates have to "charge up" before current will jump across the air gap, so a capacitor has an impedance which is inversely proportional to the freqency (or angular momentum, or velocity) of the current.

Higher frequencies will tend to "drain" into the capacitor (indicated by "C"), instead of being applied across the load "VC."  The more "impulse-like" parts of the signal are drawn off from the smoother parts.

In psychology, an impulse is a sudden wish or urge.

A test for impulsivity (among other things) in children is the Marshmellow Test - in which a marshmellow is placed in front of the child, and they are told they can earn a second marshmellow if they can refrain from eating the first for fifteen minutes or so.  Here's my oldest daughter, Anika, taking the Marshmellow Test (ya, I'm mean)...

At fifteen minutes, it's a bit long and boring, but you can watch how Anika copes with this challenge, highlights at 1:30, 2:20, 3:40, 7:30, 8:00 & 13:00.

She looks away, she distracts herself, she whines and cries, she hides under the table, &etc.

In the same way a capacitor shunts off noisy impulses to smooth out a signal, Anika is shunting off the emotional energy involved in resisting that oh so tempting marshmellow into these behavioural outbursts.  Impuse control (in psychology) is like a high pass filter (in signal processing).

This is strictly a metaphor - I would be very surprised if it correlated with anything which actually went on in a human brain.

The Solution of my Problems

"An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkely, took a seminar in metaphor from one of us.  Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor.  The expression was "the solution of my problems" - which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipatitating out others.  He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind.  And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful.  It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all.  All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form.  The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out.  And since you do not have complete control over what goes into the solution, you are constatly finding old and new problems precipitating out and present problems dissolving, partly because of your efforts and partly despite anything you do.

The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems.  It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were "solved" turn up again and again.  The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever.  To treat them as things that can be "solved" once and for all is pointless.  To live by the CHEMICAL metaphor would be to accept it as a fact that no problem ever disappears forever.  Rather than direct your energies toward solving your problems once and for all, you would direct your energies toward finding out what catalysts will dissolve your most pressing problems for the longest time without precipitating out worse onces.  The re-appearance of a problem is viewed as a natural occurrence rather than a failure on your part to find "the right way to solve it."

George Lakeoff & Mark Johnsen

Metaphors We Live By

Traditionally, we model problems and solutions in a strictly linear relationship:  I desire some outcome, so I perform actions x, y & z to achieve it.  The weakness of the linear model, which is elegantly accounted for in the chemical metaphor, are unintended consequences and trade-offs.

It's not an especially happy perspective, but if you take the view that life is a long series of problems, it's easy to see how problems and solutions connect with each other - we get into romantic relationships to solve the problem of loneliness, but this introduces the new problem of having to live with someone who's preferences conflict with ours, so we have to negotiate that.  Then we have too many quarrels and break up, and now we're back to the problem of loneliness.  &etc.

The chemical metaphor captures offers a more realistic, anticipatory model for how solutions are implemented in reality - our actions (getting into a relationship) are going to have unintended consequences (fighting), which will involve making trade-offs (compromising on our preferences to keep both partners happy).

In a sense, the biggest problem of our lives is acquiring and maintaining happiness.

You can kind of see this everywhere - computers are probably the best example of a solution to a problem (that we didn't know we had...) with massive unintended consequences and trade-offs entailed.

Another example is cars - the biggest unintended consequence is traffic accidents.  A solution - the self-driving car - is in the works.  How will self-driving cars entirely restructure the way we do transportation?  An interesting exercise is to write down everything you can think of.  Then, read the article Forbes recently published on the subject - you'll probably be surprised.  Now think of the potential for unintended consequences...