The Willpower Paradox

I feel vindicated!

This is something of a personally important issue for me, I guess. I wasn't exactly brought up under the slogan of 'believe in yourself and anything will be possible', but it's a common enough refrain that I was familiar with the idea and sorely confused by it. I'm pretty sure I was born a realist, and my nascent love of science was very clear that if you thought you could do anything just by mustering sufficient determination the laws of physics were going to have some harsh words with you. (Everyone thought this was nit-picking, of course. I was also born a pedant.)

As I continued to try to justify my unfounded thoughts on the matter it also occurred to me that determination was far less important to your success than accurate judgement - since, after all, if your ideas are wrong your inner drive is worthless and if your ideas are right then your determination just hastens what is ultimately inevitable! At some point I discovered and became obsessed with the reductio ad absurdum and the idea that submitting your own ideas to reckless assault for the slightest weakness was the only sure way to guarantee you were right, to prove that it was impossible to be wrong! Oh, and G. K. Chesterton's introduction to Orthodoxy - "I can show you the homes of the supermen... the men who truly believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums" - didn't hurt either.

So basically, I'm really enthusiastic about self-doubt, and I hope you'll forgive me if I point you in the direction of two much-better-written articles - at Scientific American and Nowsourcing - and simply seize a shamelessly egotistic opportunity to relish my own correctness.

Versus Society

I'm sorry, I've had very little time to continue my posts lately and this may continue into next week. In lieu of a proper post, I'd like to leave you with some examples of what I mentioned briefly last time.
Here are some historical instances when a behaviour was diagnosed as a psychiatric disorder based principally on the Deviance criteria, of whether an individual behaves in accordance with their society. Most of these have either been formally overturned by the DSM or ICD or both, or are controversial while they remain documented.

• Hysteria
• Drapetomania and Dysaethesia Aethiopica
  
• Sluggish Schizophrenia, which I learned of recently in The Secret History of Moscow, a fascinating urban fantasy by Ekaterina Sedia. (Also refer to Punitive psychiatry in the Soviet Union.)
• Hospitalism, in which the deaths of infants due to the failures of hospital care were essentially attributed to suicidal depression in the infant
• Imbecility
  
• General Paresis
  
• Homosexuality
  
• Excited Delirium
• Neurasthenia
  

And yes, it is possible that such disorders continue to exist as defined by modern psychiatry as well. It's worth thinking about the various personality disorders, which are essentially various personality types which the patient extends to the point of disorder; or Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which if it were regularly diagnosed in adults and not just children could easily be abused for political purposes. It's also worth considering whether this may be the case for many other more stereotypical and more 'obvious' mental ailments for which deviance is the most prominent diagnostic criterion.

The Psychology of the Mundane

Congratulations. You are, most likely, not crazy.

The reason I feel comfortable stating this is simple. Insanity is, ultimately, a (non-quantitative) measure of normalcy based around how well a person is able to interact with other people around them. It can have a variety of causes, ranging from the individual's genetic heritage to chemical imbalances derived from their environment, to how they understand and behave toward their own personal history. Psychopathologists and abnormal psychologists have developed a variety of approaches to studying, explaining, and treating such problems, appropriate to the individual problems as they are discovered and recognized, but because of the diversity of the field and the nature of the problem it's difficult to speak of as a whole. How do you distinguish someone with actual mental problems from someone who's just rather strange?

To address this issue, four basic questions are used to determine whether a person is insane:

• Deviance: Are the person's thoughts, emotions, or behavior typical of their culture? (Note the specificity of 'their' culture. This is not used to condemn an entire culture or subculture that deviates from the rest of society; it's been a huge problem historically, as I'm sure you can imagine.)
• Distress: Is the person troubled or deeply emotionally affected by the way they think and act? Do they feel in control of themselves?
• Dysfunction: Is the person impaired in their ability to survive? Can they get by in life on a day-to-day basis?
• Danger: Is the person prone to violent or injurious behavior, to themselves or to others?

The vast majority of humanity is self-organized into social groups that promote their own utility and well-being, and most of those people who aren't have physical conditions or circumstances that prevent them from doing so. Therefore, most human beings are, by definition, not crazy. That probably includes you, no matter how really angry or lonely or loopy or rebellious or unsympathetic you've felt recently - if the biggest obstacle to obtaining everything you want in life is the unfair perversity of the cosmos, you're not insane.

So, if you're one of those people, congratulations. You're adapted to society. You're normal enough to get by. You're not less special. You're better off.

Okay. Now flip the coin over and stare at the other side.

If insanity doesn't mean a lot of things you thought it did, the same is true of sanity. Sanity doesn't mean you know what you're doing. Sanity doesn't mean your beliefs and thought processes are true to reality. Sanity doesn't mean you're rational. Sanity doesn't mean you understand. Sanity means you're adapted to society and you're normal enough to get by.

Society is a vast and amorphous beast, a picture puzzle where the pieces are constantly moving and being joined to other pieces and all kinds of different pictures can be created from largely the same pieces... a piece that is considered insane in one particular subset of society may be perfectly well-adjusted to another. And then we could consider phenomena like hallucinations in the sane which 10% of healthy, sane individuals will experience at least once in their lifetimes, despite being almost universally associate with insanity in the popular mindset.

But more importantly than any of that, as far as I'm concerned, is the sticky ethical morass of whether being well-adjusted to human society is in itself a good thing. There is a long, long list of psychological observations demonstrating that human beings do not think clearly or reasonably, do not understand the world around them, do not understand each other, and even do not understand themselves... when you think you have a pretty good understanding of it all, and so does everyone else. It's called cognitive bias.

The Colour of Insanity

Two excellent writers I follow have been independently writing on the same subject: Kyle (A Deeper, Darker Ocean Green), in Psychopath, and Nixie (Musings from the Well), in an entire series (!) called Disturbing the Disturbed. Both would like you to know that you are not a psychologist, you don't actually know what the signs of mental illness are because everything you've heard about them is the second-hand grossly-oversimplified theme park version, and, basically, you just don't know enough facts yet for your self-diagnosis to be worth sixpence.

Go on, go and read. They are fascinating. Detailed. And right.

Don't fret, though. You're not less special because you're not crazy. In fact, you already have enough of your own psychological problems to get in the way of accurately understanding yourself and the world around you without having to claim psychological and emotional disorders as well!

So, next week, we get to talk about normal psychology and cognitive biases.

Can someone explain this?

Psychology and sociology experiments are unique among the sciences in that the test subjects who volunteer for them are generally capable of understanding the implications of the experiments' results. If the premise of the experiment requires deceiving the test subject in some way - as must be done sometimes, in order to simulate a situation for the test subject to act in - it may be that upon full disclosure of the experiment and its results, the test subject's reactions at the time may be cast in an entirely new light. This phenomenon is known as inflicted insight, and experiments which may cause it are strongly discouraged if not outright forbidden by ethics committees.

My question is - why?

What inflicted insight basically amounts to is exposing the less savoury or comfortable facets of a person's own psyche and forcing them to confront them. How could this be considered an undesirable result? The test subject believes something about himself or herself that is wrong, and the researcher is not only helping him or her to Know Thyself - in the best possible circumstance I can think of, I might add - but also preparing evidence that this problem is possible, for the scientific community, to better help other people who may have a similar reaction but were not fortunate enough to participate in the experiment personally.

Here's an example. The Milgram experiment is a famous one in which the unknowing test subject is asked to help with a simple negative feedback test for a 'slow learner'. Whenever the 'slow learner' - portrayed by an actor - gives an incorrect answer, the test subject is to press a button which, they are told, will deliver the learner a 15V electric shock that increases by 15V every time the button is pressed. The test continues until either (a) the test subject refuses to continue a total of five times (a list of four specific responses for the experimenter to use are prepared beforehand; after the experimenter has used all of them and the test subject still refuses, the test ends) or (b) the test subject uses the highest possible setting - 450V.

The hypothesized percentage of test subjects who would complete the test was 1.2% (with a range of 0% to 3%). While every test subject questioned the experiment at some point, 65% of them administered the final 450V shock rather than give up, and of the 35% who gave up none of them went to check the health of the learner or insisted that the experiments cease entirely with other test subjects. (They were informed of the true nature of the experiment afterwards during debriefing.)

Other variations on the experiment demonstrated that there was no significant difference behaviourally between male and female subjects, though female subjects reported higher levels of stress, and indeed there were only three factors that seemed to influence the outcome: compliance decreased when the subject and researcher communicated by phone (greater separation), when the experiment was conducted by an unknown institute rather than Yale (though the difference was not statistically appreciable), and when the subject interacted more directly with the victim. Experiments were also conducted in which the button was real and connected to a puppy, to eliminate the possibility that the subjects in earlier tests were subconsciously picking up that the button did nothing, with no change.

Such experiments would not be permitted today due to reasons of inflicted insight - taking the form in this case of "Here, mate, you just proved you would have electrocuted someone with a learning disorder because an authority figure told you to. And so did most of the other people who signed up to do this. Don't you think there might be something wrong with that?"

There is a coda to this story: a later survey conducted revealed that 84% of responding test subjects were 'glad' or 'very glad' to have participated, and 15% were neutral. Many in fact wrote letters expressing thanks.

I don't know, what do you think?

The chief drives of the human-being-as-biological-organism are supposed to be food and sex.

Most of the modern world's social ailments, though, can be linked to a surplus or shortage of one or both of these - obesity, anorexia, health fads, body-image disorders, divorce, infidelity, depopulation, and infanticide all come to mind.

This thought is incomplete. The existence of a connection is self-evident, but I'm not sure what it might be or whether it's even significant.

I am, however, reminded of the two injunctions carved over the Oracle at Delphi, as recorded by Socrates through Plato. I spend a lot of time thinking about Know Thyself; this seems to be an apt reminder (and, personally, rather a needed one) of the necessity of Moderation in All Things.

Happy Thanksgiving.

...an Eternal Golden Braid

Continued from last week, when we were discussing strange loops!

Quick review: a strange loop is anything that linearly relates to itself - if you pick some one action to perform on it, you'll eventually return to exactly where you were when you began.

Now - per the last example last post, human consciousness is itself a strange loop, as shown whenever you think about thinking, or think about why you think or feel the things that you do. So it should be no surprise that philosophy, psychology, mathematics, art, and so on can all be shown to be complex, tangled hierarchies full of strange, looping structures. Here's a couple more examples, for fun:

• Storytelling. Structures which return the characters to the place they started from at the beginning - physically, mentally, emotionally - are common throughout great literature. The Hero's Journey is a perfect example - albeit an overly specific, misleading, and rigidly stratified one. In the Iliad, the Greeks go to war; in the Odyssey, the last of them finally comes home. (In the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus almost gets home but fails.) There and Back Again. Don Quixote. The answers are always in the place you started, but you need the intervening book in order to recognize them.
• Feynman diagrams. Antimatter and matter are always created together in nature, and annihilate each other when they converge again. Feynman diagrams are just how scientists keep track of their interactions. Particle creation and annihilation is happening constantly, everywhere, and usually the two particles that formed together also destroy each other shortly thereafter - the diagram looks like this (incoming energy waves convert into two particles with mass, which move apart, collide again, and re-release the energy). You'll notice, though, that the regular particle is marked with a forwards arrow, and the antiparticle is marked with a backwards arrow - because one possible interpretation of the math is that there is only one particle and it appears to sometimes be an antiparticle because at that point it has begun moving backwards in time. In other words, the particle is 'creating' and 'destroying' itself, in a single infinitesimal moment, forever.
  
• Fractals. You can zoom in indefinitely and get the same image you started with, yes? Well, not for all fractals - the famous Mandelbrot Set, for instance, is unimaginably more complex than that.
• Let's talk (briefly) about the Mandelbrot Set. Do you know the coordinate plane? With an origin and a defined axis, you can locate any point P(x, y), x units left or right and y units up or down. One of the many, many things we can do with this is to apply a formula to P to define a second point - call it P1. Let's say that if P is x units right and y units up, we'll start at the origin, and move (x squared minus y squared) units right, and (twice x times y) units up. Then, we'll move it x more units right, and y more units up, and call that P1. X and Y can be absolutely anything, and we'll always get another point... so let's say that we take what we just did to turn P into P1, and do it to P1 to get P2, then P3, P4... and so on. We'll do it forever. (Mathematicians have sneaky tricks to find out what happens if you keep doing something forever.) If we keep going forever, we'll find that either our point is now racing toward the edge of the coordinate plane, an infinite distance away - or it's still meandering about, passing by our original point P every so often. Every point that hangs about when you do this is part of the Mandelbrot Set; in this picture, these are the points in black (the non-black points are coloured based on how quickly they run for the horizon). But if the point keeps doubling back on itself when we keep doing the same thing... the Mandelbrot Set consists of all of the points that generate strange loops from a given formula. Awesome? Awesome.
  

Moving on.

Strange loops can be bewildering at times because our minds are adapted to a conventionally categorical, hierarchical way of thinking - the classic riddle of shallow philosophy, "the chicken or the egg", writ large. The two hands cannot actually be drawing each other, after all! That looping sort of cause and effect makes no sense to our ordinary perception.

So it's very helpful that Hofstadter addresses this. None of the loops we've discussed, he points out, are actually self-sustaining or self-perpetuating. Rather, we can restore part of our usual understanding of things by noticing that every point of the loop has both an internal cause - somewhere else in the loop - as well as an external cause, generally one single one for the loop as a whole. You stand on any step of the Penrose staircase by climbing there from a lower step - and because Penrose conceived of the staircase. Characters reach the fulfilment of their stories with the unnoticed aid of their author. A quine is produced by being run, but only because it was first run on a computer. (The bits that make up computer memory are also strange loops, tiny tiny circuit segments that continuously feed themselves their own voltage as new input.) The trigonometric functions, and fractals, and especially the Mandelbrot Set, were discovered by expanding upon math that was already known. Particle-antiparticle pairs form from errant energy waves nearby in the universe. The Liar Paradox needs someone to say it or there is no "I" to be lying and not lying.

You'll notice I skipped humans, because the human mind is more complex than any of these - it is a self-modifying strange loop. In this sentence, I am now making you aware of the fact that you are thinking about strange loops, such as this sentence and your thoughts. You've just added an additional metarecursion onto that cycle, and you can keep doing that to potentially infinite degrees, limited only by your boredom! But for the moment I'm going to tie whatever cycle you're currently on back to this sentence by noting that by thinking about that uppermost layer and the process by which your mind reflects on itself you've constructed a strange loop of strange loops. With my help, of course. This blog post provides initial external instigation. ;)

My point is, though, that your mind doesn't necessarily need the external instigation. I have no idea how many strange loops that cycle in the last paragraph, for instance, and you might have easily realised the loop of loops without my assistance. This is because your mind is a more complicated, tangled, crazy, and wonderful place than you may have ever realised before! :D

I'm not going to be able to finish this in only two posts. Next time: we have to go deeper.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I just realized I've never actually discussed Gödel, Escher, Bach in detail here before, and then I went and made reference to it in my last post. Shame on me. It's awesome.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, whose subject cannot be really concisely explained. It's about everything. At it's core, you could say it's mostly about human consciousness. And music. And math. And art. (Kind of as implied by the title. You remember Kurt Gödel, right?) And puns, and palindromes, and Möbius strips, and vinyl records that destroy the record players that play them, and the holism/reductionism dichotomy, and computer programming, and artificial intelligence, and Charles Babbage's parable of Achilles and the Tortoise, and... and, it's amazing and you should go read it. Skim the parts that are too jargony for you, if you must, but keep going through it.

Let's talk about a construct that Hofstadter introduces, called a "strange loop". It's a shorthand way to talk about things that linearly relate to themselves. It'll probably be clearer if I discuss examples instead of trying to define it:

• You've seen M. C. Escher's lithograph of the endless stairs? (The artwork is called 'Ascending and Descending', by the way. The structure itself is called a Penrose staircase, after the fellow who actually invented it - if you can tell me who famously used the correct name, you get an imaginary cookie.) That's a strange loop. You start anywhere on the stairs, and do nothing but walk up - linearly, one direction - and you still return to the point you started from.
• A quine is a computer program that, with no input, produces its own exact source code as output. This is a strange loop - you proceed linearly down the generations of output, and each one is still the same code with which you began.
  
• The trigonometric functions are a strange loop. For the function y = sin(x), the rate at which y changes with respect to x changing is y' = cos(x). The rate at which y' changes is y'' = -sin(x). The rate at which y'' changes is y''' = -cos(x), and the rate at which y''' changes is y'''' = sin(x) = y. Applying one procedure over and over takes you back to the original result.
• The Liar Paradox - "I am lying right now" - is a strange loop. The thought process goes, if you are lying, then that statement is a lie, so it must not be true that you are lying right now, so you must not be lying. But if you're not really lying, then when you say you are lying you must be telling the truth, in which case you really are lying. Paradox.
  
• The way your mind itself works is a strange loop. This is the process called introspection - you are able to recognize that your brain is producing thoughts, and this recognition is itself one of those thoughts.

People tend to think of strange loops as tricksy, exotic, complicated, mind-blowing things, but in reality, they're everywhere. People just tend not to notice them, or to think too hard about them, when they encounter them in real life. It's both frustrating, and depressing.

I'll elaborate on the significance of this next week, but in the meantime, you can go to another fantastic strange loop by following this elegant and finely-crafted link.

Use the force

Take a slinky and stretch it out so that it's fairly taut - across a room, say. Wiggle one of the ends up and down. Notice how whenever you disturb part of it, the disturbance moves away down the length of the slinky?

This is what in physics we call a wave - a disturbance that moves. There's a whole bunch of interesting stuff that happens with it that you can play with (what happens when the disturbance reaches the end of the slinky? is a good place to start), but there's one thing in particular I want to draw your attention to.

Disturb the slinky again and pay close attention to the little loops that compose the spring. What you should notice is that while the disturbance as a whole travels away, the individual pieces of matter basically only move back and forth in line with however you disturbed it; up and down, side to side, whatever. This shouldn't be a huge surprise, right? It's not like you grabbed part of the slinky and threw it across the room or something. The particular loop of the slinky you disturbed just pulls on the neighboring loops, which pull on their neighbors, and so on; it's a function of the fact that the slinky is springy and tries to return to its original shape due to tension forces. The "wave" isn't an actual object, it's just a description of the process as a whole.

So then what happens if you set up something, like a domino chain or something, next to the far end of the slinky and then disturb the slinky sideways? You can try it if you like, though what happens is essentially what you'd expect - the wave propagates down the slinky and runs into the dominoes and knocks them over.

But we just said that the wave isn't a physical object. It's just a little disturbance in the force (heh heh); you just accomplished the same thing as if you'd thrown a baseball down to the other end of the room to knock the dominoes over, only the only thing that moved across the room is a mathematical description of the force and energy transference taking place in the slinky. No actual, physical object crossed the room at any point.

Of course, you could argue that the same thing happens if you just stretched out a chain of dominoes across the room to reach the domino on the other side, but each individual falling domino moves slightly towards the next one. There's a net motion involved in the right direction. But with the slinky, each little bit of matter only moves from side to side (if you were careful). Not only does no object cross the room, no object even moves in the right direction to cross the room.

Congratulations. You just affected an object a whole room away from you with nothing but the power of math.

Groups

I am not a Christian.

There are lots of people who think that this term is used far too often, by people who call themselves this simply by habit, or preference, without actually understanding what it means and living it. These people tend to prefer to call themselves "believers" or "followers of Christ" or something equally ethereal and pleasant-sounding, to distinguish themselves from the petty heathen who have mistakenly confused their own beliefs for the perfect and life-changing doctrines espoused by our Lord Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately for the proliferation of these terms, the people who use them almost never agree on the manner in which one's life should be changed, and consequently are as disunited amongst themselves as the remainder of the church that they criticize.

I am not a believer or follower of Christ.

In the common parlance, people tend to refer to the kind of people who believe that their beliefs are right and everyone else's are wrong as "fundamentalists" (typically described as "taking the Bible literally"), because that is so mean to all the people who are wrong to actually tell them so, and it is wrong of you to do that! (And fundamentalists advocate, like, killing people who disagree with them, but we only mock them, so we must be better people than they are!)

I am not a fundamentalist.

In lieu of continuing this ridiculous pattern further than necessary, I will also proclaim the following: I am not an American. I am not a Caucasian. I am not a brunette. I am not a gentile. I am not a logician. I am not a scientist. I am not an artist. I am not a philosopher. I am not a body. I am not a soul. I am not a mind. I am not a human. I am not a person.

At least, not in the way you are probably thinking of any of those things.

The thing is, those things are all categories. Categorizing is a human and, you may be surprised to hear me say, good thing to do. We have to stick labels on things in order to make sense of the universe, and just because we label it doesn't mean that the label is arbitrary or wrong, like so many nominalists would have you believe. But, when we do this, we tend to assume that labeling something is like placing it into a file instead of a pasting a sticker on it. Truth is, if everything exists outside your own head, it has to be the latter.

If we describe something as a door, what we're really saying is that this thing can be opened and closed, and when it's open you can walk through it.

If we say something is an electron, we mean it's tiny thing possessing a certain amount of charge, and a certain amount of mass energy, and behaves like this in these situations.

If we say something is a fact, we mean that it's a statement about the universe (and usually, that it happens to be empirically true).

If we say it's a number, we mean it's a abstract object that can be counted or measured.

In fact, the only real noun in English, or any other language, is "thing". Every other noun just means "thing with descriptions X, Y, Z, etc", "thing with adjectives". Some of these properties are extremely complex, like for words like "human", but it can still come down to something like "thing that is alive, and as an adult is able to walk on two legs (things used for walking), manipulate things with two hands (things used for manipulating, that have smaller things on them that can grip other things), and talk, see, taste, smell, and hear with a head (thing attached to another thing that is able to react automatically and contemplatively in a lot of different ways to things around it) and performs abstract and conceptual thought and communication, OR is descended from another human".

All I'm saying is that you have an independent existence from any of these stickers, and if you and the sticker don't match, the sticker is wrong. Object-oriented linguistics, if you will. I think this is important, because being capable of abstract and conceptual thought means that we end up fixing or adjusting what each sticker means constantly, and a lot of the time something that the sticker used to accurately describe no longer does. Especially when we start referring to the collection of all objects with a particular sticker on it as part of some uniform whole, as if the sticker was there first. No, I'm not being a pedant about this whole thing.

But perhaps I'm being a little pedantic.

A puzzle

You have a rectangular field containing an irregularly-shaped pond whose area you wish to know.

The tools you have at hand are the property deed for the field, a cannon, and an infinite number of cannonballs.

How do you find the area of the pond?

I am being lax

At this rate, I might as well change my name to "Once a Month".

Not done explaining Godel yet, sorry. But I highly encourage you to go check out this essay, as it is pretty awesome.