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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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I’m attending the Hackers on Planet Earth conference this weekend. I’d heard about this several months ago, just before I moved to New York and signed up then, because it was a cheap conference and sounded like it could be interesting. This is the conference associated with 2600 Magazine, which has been around forever. Anyway, I’m not really a hacker, but I’m interested in some of the same topics, so what the heck.
I think my conference fee paid for itself last night by getting to see a talk by Mike Murray on “Hacking the Mind: Hypnosis, NLP, and Shellcode”, described in the program as:
The similarities between the methods used to exploit a computer network and the language patterns involved in hypnosis and neuro linguistic programming (NLP) are striking. In this talk, nCircle’s director of vulnerability research Mike Murray (who is also a Master NLP practitioner and certified clinical hypnotherapist) will demonstrate the use of hypnotic language patterns, metaphors, and other patterns of influence, as well as showing how a good hypnotist structures inductions in a similar way to the methods of a skilled computer hacker. Hypnotic analogues to buffer overflows, shellcode, and other types of computer attacks will be demonstrated, leaving the audience with a deeper appreciation for language patterns and their effect on the human mind.
As somebody who continues to be fascinated by manipulation techniques, this was probably the talk I most wanted to see at the conference. And it was far far far better than I could have expected.
Murray posted the slides to the talk, but they don’t give any sense of how masterful a performance he gave. He structured the talk to illustrate the techniques he was discussing, and it was so seamless that even though he was telling us exactly what he was doing, it worked anyway. Brilliant stuff.
For instance, he discussed the techniques of buffer overflow using open loops. There’s the well-known information nugget that people can only remember 7 +/- 2 chunks of information at a time. Once you get past that, he claimed that in some sense, you are talking to the operating system of the brain directly. How do you overflow the buffer? You open up a bunch of “loops” and never close them. A loop in this case is a thread, or, as he used it, a story.
He started the talk with a series of four or five stories, and just as he got to the climax of each one, he would say “That reminds me…” and start another story. But the previous story was still there hanging. And as he got into the talk and described buffer overflows, it was obvious that what he was doing was overflowing our brains with threads. I actually started scribbling down the stories so that I could offload them from my brain in hopes of staying clear. And yet I was definitely drawn in - I got a physical buzzing sensation in my ears, and my perception of his voice got much louder, so something weird was happening in my brain. Very spooky.
The next technique he mentioned was using ambiguous content, so that the person can make it specific to their own experience (shades of filling in the blanks posts that I have yet to write). For instance, when hypnotizing someone, he could say “you will feel a sharp tingling sensation in your left leg”, but then he’d be right only some percentage of the time, and if he’s wrong, it breaks the trance. If instead he says, “You feel a sensation in your leg. Focus on it.”, then however they are feeling they stay in the trance. Another example he gave was “You will continue to breathe, focusing on the breath”; as he quipped, “I know they’re breathing - if they’re not, I’ve got a whole other set of problems”. This is reminiscent of the political training that I took:
His [Bob Mulholland's] example was make your message “Stop Bush!†If you leave it at that, the person that sees it applies their own context and interprets in terms of their own personal woes. If you keep on going and say “Stop Bush because he’s against gay marriageâ€, then maybe that person goes “Well, I don’t know how I feel about gay marriage, so maybe I don’t agree with this campaigner.†Use the voters’ ability to supply context to your advantage.
Another technique was injecting your own code to be run in somebody else’s brain. That means understanding the unconscious brain, which he says is all about patterns (shades of On Intelligence) and stories (I love stories). I loved the description of Milton Erickson (who I have to read now): “You walked into his office and sat down. Then, Milton told you a story and you found yourself changing.” That sounds so cool.
The last technique was also brilliantly introduced. One slide said “What if there was a language pattern in the world that could ensure that anyone who heard it would execute the program you chose?” Then he said “Can you imagine what such a pattern would be?” Then he said “Don’t you think …?” and we started laughing as we realized the answer. As his next slide put it, “The question can not be avoided by the unconscious mind”. To process the question, we have to evaluate its content. We run the code. It’s similar in principle to the “Don’t think of an elephant” gimmick, where you have to think of an elephant as part of processing the statement. Ask people questions; make their brains make the connections and do the work. If you tell people something, they won’t respond - if they come up with it on their own in response to a question, it’s theirs.
Absolutely brilliant talk. I hung out afterwards in an informal Q&A session with him and several others just so I could hear more stuff. I had actually read several of the books he recommended (including Cialdini and Blink), but I want to follow up on Milton Erickson, and possibly Gregory Bateson, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, as well. Also, he pointed people at the NLP Canada blog, which I plan to start reading - NLP Canada is where he trained.
P.S. One thought I had later in the evening while discussing this with a friend who I happened to meet at the talk: the idea of open loops may explain the flow of great conversations. As the participants start threads, they remind people of other threads, and all of these open loops are left hanging, leading the conversation participants into a state of mutual hypnosis. That’s why it takes time for a great conversation to get rolling, for the open loops to pile up. It’s why any interruption tends to destroy the conversation; the context switch flushes all of the open loops. It’s why the great conversations I’ve had which last for hours often feel like they’re in a timeless state where I have no idea how long we’ve been talking - I’m in a hypnotic state. I’m not sure this is valid, but I think it’s a really fascinating possibility.
Tonight, the New York Philharmonic gave a free concert in Central Park. I’d been thinking of going, but then Nate and Beth (last seen in this post) said they were organizing a picnic so that cinched things.
It was awesome. Beth got there around 5:15 (for the 8pm concert) to snag a great spot, people brought blankets, wine and snacks, somebody contributed a little table for the food. I think the group ended up being around 20 people or so by the end, with all sorts of random connections in there; only Beth knew everybody (I only knew Nate and Beth and my friend Ann who I’d invited). We were a bit worried because there was the possibility of rain in the forecast, but it was sunny when we got there.
Alas, by the time the music actually started, there was a hint of a drizzle. Not enough to bother breaking out the umbrella for (except to cover the food), but water falling from the sky. After the first piece (Chairman Dances, by John Adams - typical John Adams - inoffensive minimalist melodic music), the drizzle had stopped, but they announced that due to an incoming front which they predicted would arrive at 9:50pm (remember this!), they were going to skip intermission, and only do the 1st and 4th movements of Beethoven’s Fifth, which had been scheduled for the second half. We booed, of course - New Yorkers are hilariously prone to booing.
The second piece was one I’d been looking forward to - Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto, performed by Leila Josefowicz, who I’d seen performing John Adams last year in New York. She was fabulous again, at least based on what I could hear from the speakers. I thought the piece was interesting for the first two movements, with lots of good rhythmic ostinato that Josefowicz really dug into, but the last movement was kind of by-the-numbers Romantic with lots of scale-like runs.
Then, as stated earlier, they did Beethoven’s Fifth, skipping the middle two movements. I was sitting there enjoying the familiar strains of the first movement and just had this big involuntary smile on my face. This was a genuine New York experience, enjoying a picnic in Central Park with new friends, surrounded by people as far as the eye could see, and the downtown skyline rising behind them. Evenings like these are why I came to New York.
After they rushed through the Fifth (seriously, the first movement was taken faster than I’ve ever heard it before), there were fireworks! (Oooh! Aahhhh!!) The fireworks ended at 9:42 or so. People started getting up to move out. At 9:45, strong gusts of wind started blowing across the park. And, unbelievably, at precisely 9:50, it started raining. And not just raining, but pouring. Lighting, thunder, rain coming down so hard that even with an umbrella, I got soaked. And the people without umbrellas? It was all over. Thousands of people trying to make their way out of the park in the driving rain was pretty hilarious. Several folks in the crowd (including myself) were just laughing because it was raining so hard. It would be pouring, and then, it would start raining even harder. It was just ludicrous. But we all made it out of the park, crowded onto the subway, and thence home. And now I’m writing about it!
My company organized a Yankees game trip, and I had to go cuz it’s Yankee Stadium (thus completing my collection of “real” baseball stadiums, counting Wrigley and Fenway as the others). Yankees against the Mariners, nothing too exciting.
The highlight for me was A-Rod completely self-destructing. I’m anti-A-Rod, partially because he sold out (admittedly, I wouldn’t turn down $25 million/year) and because he never comes up in the clutch. I’m somewhat influenced by the Sports Guy on this one, as in this column:
Two classic A-Rod moments from the last 48 hours: The crushing DP with the bases loaded on Sunday night at Shea, followed by the homer in the ninth with the Yanks down by eight runs at Fenway. He’s the best. Three separate readers e-mailed me to tell me they won money on the DP, including San Diego’s Brad Garey: “I made a $5 bet with my father, father-in-law, and brother-in-law that A-Rod would ground out in an inning-ending double play. They took the bet and, of course, I am now $15 richer.” Ladies and gentleman, your 2005 AL MVP!
A-Rod was already struggling on the evening, having committed three errors. Then he came up in the bottom of the seventh inning. They actually intentionally walked Jason Giambi to load the bases to get to A-Rod. One out, bases loaded, two-run lead. A chance to break the game wide open. If he makes any sort of decent contact, he at least scores a run. I turned to my co-worker, calling the double play. I was wrong - he struck out swinging instead. Absolutely pathetic. He got booed coming off the field, and didn’t even come out of the dugout again - he couldn’t take the heat so they sent out a defensive replacement (Nick Green?! Seriously? They replaced a $25 million player with a guy I’ve never heard of?).
The other highlight was that because A-Rod choked, the game remained close, so it was still a 2-run lead in the top of the ninth. And that meant it was time for Mariano Rivera. Watching him come running in from the bullpen with Enter Sandman blaring, as the stadium goes electric with energy; that was awesome. I had been looking forward to seeing one of the top relief pitchers ever pitch in person. He immediately gave up a double and a single to put runners at the corners. Then he got mad. His next pitch audibly POPped into the catcher’s mitt. A strikeout, a pop up, and a strikeout, and the game was over. Totally great to watch a master at work.
Oh, and I missed out on a foul ball by a couple feet - it actually hit my coworker and I couldn’t quite snag it before it ended up in the row in front of us. Closest I’ve ever come to getting a foul ball.
Fun night.
P.S. Sorry for the slow-responding web page yesterday - the feed provider for my del.icio.us links decided to switch locations, so I had to update that.
Bats came to town, so I finally made the time to go see Sweeney Todd on Broadway, with the lovely and talented Patti Lupone. It was pretty awesome. Not as awesome as the the definitive Sweeney Todd version, but I might be slightly biased.
One of the amazing things about the production was that there was no orchestra. The cast members were also the orchestra. So they would be playing instruments when they weren’t singing, and sometimes even while singing or moving. The two romantic leads played matching cellos, Pirelli played an accordion, Toby played the violin, several people took turns on the keyboard, and Patti played the tuba. With pizzazz. And it all worked. It was pretty inspiring to see these ten people create all of the music themselves. The spareness of the orchestration also brought out the weirdly wonderful dissonant harmonies of Sondheim, which was neat.
The staging was also fantastic. It was a simple set: a few chairs, some shelves at the back of the stage, a ladder and a coffin centerpiece. Yet they fluidly rearranged the pieces and moved themselves around to create all of the different scenes without missing a beat. One thing Batman commented on is the way they effectively used vertical space to create distance. In a couple scenes, they had two folks talking to each other while standing on chairs, while something else was going on at stage level, and it created an effective separation between the two scenes. They also managed to move all the scenery around while keeping track of their instruments. It also led to entertaining bits for those of us that knew the work; there was one bit where Antony was playing the keyboard at the back of the stage, but I knew that he had to come rushing into the scene in a second, and I was wondering how they were going to manage that. Toby leapt to the back of the stage, slammed Antony out of the way to start playing the keyboard, and in one motion, Antony ran to the front of the stage to make his entrance. Nice bit of staging. Another bit of staging that amused us was at the end when Johanna is hiding from Sweeney, she ducked behind her cello.
It’s hard for me to judge the production fairly, since it’s always going to be compared to the one I did. But I think the quality of voices in the San Francisco version was higher, probably because they could get pure singers instead of multifaceted performers. And there are a couple times where I felt that the show missed the wall of sound that we generated with a full orchestra plus 30 chorus members (especially in the “Swing your razor wide, Sweeney” choruses). But this show had its own charm; the charm of the exquisitely designed miniature rather than the extravaganza.
Afterwards, Bats and I had dinner at the confusingly named Chelsea Grill of Hell’s Kitchen. We managed to get a table right on the sidewalk, so we got to enjoy watching the people of New York wander by. The food was excellent (I had “Bacon-wrapped BBQ meatloaf”, which was every bit as sinful as it sounds) (plus the waffle fries were tasty), we enjoyed a beer together, and we managed to still get Bats on his train. Barely.
A very pleasant evening out. I’d forgotten how much I like the theater. I need to go more often.
P.S. Oh, one other random New York moment. Before the show, I was scanning the crowd while waiting for Bats and saw this woman who looked familiar. I thought to myself, she looks just like somebody I knew in the San Francisco Ultimate League. Then she saw me, and did the same sort of double-take. So I wandered over and said hi. She was in NYC on vacation, I told her I’d moved here, etc. So random. But excellent. It reminds me of why I’m here - New York is where things like this happen.
Things I’ve been doing in New York:
That’s it for New York experiences for now. I am sure there will be others in the future. I’ll keep on exploring.
Tonight was a good night.
It started off with seeing Kid Beyond, live-looping beatboxer extraordinaire, at the Living Room. Andrew was fantastic live as always. Alas, the Living Room was too small a venue for him - it ended up being standing room only as we were packed in like sardines at the back, and had a hard time seeing. But still pretty awesome.
Dylan’s friend Nate showed up, as did Nate’s friends Beth and Dan, so we all went out afterwards to The Library, a nifty little East Village bar, which was having Zombie night. Dan got painted up with zombie makeup, Evil Dead was on the big screen, all good.
Oh, and Beth was wearing a shirt that said Chicago Men’s Volleyball, so I asked about that, and it turned out it was her boyfriend’s, who she had met playing volleyball. When she found out I used to play, she was totally psyched, and recruited me to be a sub for her league team. It’s some stupidly large league (30 divisions of 10 teams each), so that should be a great way to meet some more people, especially since Beth promised to introduce me to her tall volleyball-playing friends.
Later on, we went next door to Julep, which had a pool table. Dan and I challenged on, and we won, which was awesome, especially after the two women we defeated told us that they had held the table for a few hours against all comers. I played a couple games, then passed on the table to others in our group. Dan put on 80s hair metal (there’s a Poison/Cinderella concert later this summer that he’s trying to talk me into attending), and then asked me what my favorite 80s hair metal band was. I went with Def Leppard, which he granted as pseudo-hair-metal, we put on “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, and everybody in the bar started rocking out. I need to get that album.
Anyway. Good evening. It’s nice having a crowd to go out with.
More tomorrow on identity - I had originally planned to write up some thoughts tonight, but it’s too late and I’m too tired.
Gosh, what have I been up to since my last journal post two weeks ago?
The day after that post, I went to see my first Dorkbot in NYC, which was excellent. I really enjoyed John Arroyo’s presentation on rhythmic research. He’s using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to analyze drum beat patterns in songs. Originally he was doing it to help classify music into different categories, but then once he had the principal components, he realized it would be interesting to use them to generate music as well. Very cool stuff. I was one of only a few people who had any idea what he was talking about (since I used PCA extensively for data analysis at one point), which was also fun.
Jeff Han’s presentation on his multi-touch interaction research was jaw-dropping. He was only showing videos and people in the audience were audibly gasping (oh, wait, maybe that was just me). If he’d had a live demo, he never would have gotten out of there. Check out the videos on his site; the ideas his group has for how to use a multiple touch interface are pretty well thought-out and make for some neat possibilities.
In a random coincidence, I ran into mim, who turned out to be a classmate of the first presenter, John. Small world. So mim and his friend and I went out to dinner at some place around the corner, the name of which I’ve forgotten, but which was really good.
That was Wednesday night. Thursday night I packed, and Friday night I flew back to Oakland for Seppo’s wedding. In another coincidence, my mom was in town for a trip with some high school friends that weekend, so we met up for brunch on Saturday morning before I ran off for the wedding on Saturday afternoon. Sunday was an all-day brunch affair at the Isle of Tortuga, and I flew back Monday.
On Wednesday, a couple of the boys from Squid Labs were in town for some reason, so I had dinner with them and some of their pals. After dinner, Limor showed us around Eyebeam, the gallery at which she is artist in residence, and then we headed back to Wonderland to hang out. Wonderland’s an awesome space - a warehouse loft where about ten people live, all of whom seem interesting. I need to go hang out there more.
Thursday and Friday night, I was studying for the GRE, which I took on Saturday morning. I’m planning to apply to an executive master’s program in technology management at Columbia, and they wanted GRE scores. Apparently, ETS only keeps official scores for five years, so my scores from 1993 (!!) are long gone. It was no big deal. The computer-based version of the test was pretty entertaining; because I knew it used adaptive questioning, where it picks out questions based on how I answered previous questions, I started meta-analyzing how I was doing by the questions it was giving me. At one point in the verbal, I got three sets of reading comprehension questions in a row, which made me wonder if I’d missed a question on the first set. But given that it was starting to make up words by the end, I was pretty sure I was doing well. It was also nice to be able to go at my own pace - I test fast, so I was out of there in less than two and a half hours rather than the four hours alloted. And being able to get the scores right away is pretty gratifying, although I’ll have to wait and see how I did on the essay writing sections.
Wes is in town this weekend, so he got a bunch of his friends together to all meet each other last night. Unsurprisingly, it’s an interesting group of folks, with an eclectic mix of geeks, singers, and artists. Fun times. I might write up thoughts on one of the conversations after this. Oh, and for my own reference, one of the folks last night recommended Cast Party, an open mic night at Birdland, where lots of Broadway folks hang out and try out new material. Sounds like a fun time - I might have to check it out one of these weeks.
Today I took the west-side bike trail all the way up to the northern tip of Manhattan. It ends around 205th st or so. It’s a wonderful ride - up in the northern part of Manhattan, it goes through some trees and there’s not many other people around. In places, there were trees blooming with flowers, a definite sign of spring. And being out near the river on a nice sunny day was excellent. The bike ride definitely had my legs hurting a bit by the end, which made me feel pathetic until I got back and Google-mapped the ride and found out that I’d ridden about 18 miles, which seemed a bit less pathetic than I’d originally feared.
Oh, one last New York experience. I was walking back from the grocery store yesterday afternoon, when I heard somebody say “Perlick?!” It was a friend of mine from MIT who I hadn’t seen in several years. He’d been a grad student at Berkeley, disappeared into his thesis for a while, and I never knew where he’d ended up. Apparently he’s doing a postdoc at Princeton now, and is often in New York on the weekends. And I ran into him on the street. New York is so cool! Yet another advantage of walking everywhere rather than driving - more opportunities for chance collisions.
P.S. Question for my small but loyal readership - my posts will generally split into one of two main categories: journal posts about things I’m doing, and thought posts about things I’m thinking. Oh, and review posts about things I’ve been reading if I ever get around to catching up on my backlog of book reviews. Right now you can separate them out by subscribing to individual RSS feeds (e.g. the journal feed or the thoughts feed), but if you just visit the main page or use the main feed, they’re all mixed together. Do people mind this jumbling? Would it be more convenient if I did journal type posts at a separate location? If you have an opinion, either comment or email me. If you’re fine with the status quo, do nothing. I’m just feeling guilty because I’m doing less thought posts and more journal posts because I’ve been running around so much, doing fun things. But maybe that’s okay.
So in the spirit of my last post, let’s recount some new experiences of the last week, aka a “This is what I’ve been doing” post.
Last Wednesday, I went to see a talk by Natalie Jeremijenko at the Whitney Museum (I got a free ticket through the dorkbot list), who I first saw speak at Jofish’s recommendation at the 4S conference. Man. She’s really odd. I don’t understand how her brain works at all. She’s an enigma - I can’t really peg her. She started her talk by dissing the Whitney for not showing some art that a friend of hers submitted for their current biennial exhibition. Then she spent some time talking about how towers change when people become more expensive than materials. I wasn’t quite sure what her point was. But I have to admit that trying to figure it out was somewhat entertaining.
She pointed out the orwellian implications of the public transit signs that say “If you see something, say something” - we are being encouraged to surveil each other and report to authority, rather than actually doing anything ourselves. It tears at the social fabric to give up responsibility of ourselves and our surroundings like that. I liked the idea of the Anti terror line, where people call in to report abuses of authority and stuff - sweet - opposite of the tips line.
The Facemask project was also interesting - “who has the evidence?” of air pollution - “who can participate in the political decisions?”
But her talk really demonstrated that she really has no attention span, wandering all over the place. She took a quick digression to rant about how the signs of “don’t feed the animals” is ludicrous because it implies we shouldn’t interfere with them, but we can change the climate, which is way more interfering. She’s an interesting but hard-to-follow speaker, because she wanders through something interesting but then wanders off. Alas. Still, a good excuse to get out and be exposed to a different viewpoint.
Saturday evening, I had my housewarming party. About ten people showed up, which was surprisingly gratifying, given that I’d only been in New York for a month. It was a little bit of a weird dynamic between the techies and non-techies, but I think it was fun. And, hey, any event where conversation goes til 2:30 in the morning is a success in my book.
On Sunday afternoon, it was an absolutely gorgeous day, so I took my first bike ride in New York City. I biked out to the Hudson River, where there’s a bike path that extends the length of Manhattan, and then up to the Upper West Side, and over into Central Park, which was _packed_. I had entertained thoughts of finding a little quiet space to myself in the sun to read, but there was no hope of that - every bit of lawn was filled with people. On the plus side, cars were being kept out of the park, so I rode the big loop road around Central Park. That was fun, seeing all of the different areas and activities available in the park in quick succession as I rode on by. The only thing I didn’t see was an ultimate frisbee game, which was mildly bumming. But I’ve looked it up online and now know where they allegedly play, so I’ll check again in a couple weekends. But in any event, it was really fun to get back on my bike and zoom up and down the island. And I’m really glad I have the mountain bike - I hit some potholes while negotiating the city streets that would have destroyed a road bike.
On Monday evening, my friend Qw. convinced me to try his Kundalini Yoga class. He’s really into it, going every day, and I figured that I need to be more willing to give things a shot, so what the heck. It was surprisingly physical, holding some of those poses. And there were a couple times where my comical lack of flexibility was a problem. But it was an interesting experience. I don’t think it’s for me, necessarily. It might be good for me - I’m totally unable to “empty my mind” at this point, and maybe studying yoga for a while would help with that. On the other hand, I’m not sure I like the inward-focused nature of it - I spend enough time in my own head as it is. One of the points of me doing activities is to go out and be socially interactive, which is why I liked chorus and ultimate. So I think I’ll try a few other things and see whether they work for me any better.
That’s the wrap-up from my world. Work proceeds apace. I’m handling most tech support emails, starting to handle tech support phone calls, and have to devise a scalable computer backup solution soon. Plus there’s some ideas about starting to build up our customer community a bit that I’m mulling but don’t have time to really do anything about.
Oh, and the last new experience? Posting a blog post from my couch because my DSL is finally installed! Now I can truly call this home.
Yes, that’s right, I finally found a place in New York. It took about a week in all. But a very long, stressful week. The sequence of events went something like this:
Just to put this into perspective, it took much less time and effort for me to BUY a condo in Oakland than it did for me to RENT an apartment in New York. It was easier to get approved for the mortgage, it was definitely easier finding a place (although that was because Robyn Mohr was excellent), and much less stressful.
But it worked. I even started my job yesterday! So far I’m mostly configuring my computer and playing around with the company’s products, but they’ve got a lot to put on my plate. Oh, and I’m thinking of applying for this master’s program in Technology Management at Columbia. Feedback is appreciated.
Crazy week. Once my stuff arrives tomorrow, and I spend the weekend putting my apartment in order, I can actually start enjoying New York. Woo!
P.S. More interesting thoughts when I get my life in order. And it’ll help once I actually get internet at home - DSL will take a couple weeks to be installed and unfortunately there are no unsecured wireless networks visible from my apartment. But that’s the way things go.
P.P.S. Thanks to everybody who listened to me kvetch over the past couple weeks - I’m better now. It continues to amaze me how easily I can keep in touch with folks across the country with the internet and cell phones, not to mention jet planes. It’s a good thing I changed my cell phone plan from 400 to 1500 minutes a few months ago; in the month to March 14th, I used approximately 1300 minutes, which stupefies me.
P.P.P.S. Come crash at my place! Contact me if I don’t send you the new address in the next couple days as I catch up on correspondence.
Douglas Hofstadter, of Godel Escher Bach fame, gave a lecture at Stanford this evening. I happened to hear about it, and convinced DocBug to go with me (which worked out great when I didn’t allow enough time for traffic because he was able to save me a seat despite a standing-room-only crowd). Hofstadter’s a great speaker. Interesting and personable, with entertaining stories to illustrate his points. Plus he used hand-drawn transparencies on an overhead projector. Old skool, dude.
I was intrigued by the title of the talk, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition”. I thought I might agree with it, but I wanted to hear more about where he was coming from. I liked one story he told to illustrate what he meant: his one-year-old daughter was playing with a dustbuster. Press the button, it made noise. Press the button, it made noise. Then she found another button on the dustbuster. She pressed it. It did not make noise (it was the one to open the dustbuster and empty the filter). And then she looked at her father as if to say “Yo, what’s up?!” (note: not actually how he phrased it). Making the analogy from her own experience, she had expected all buttons on this object to make noise.
Hofstadter’s theory is that all thinking and cognition comes back to this same core use of analogy to one’s own experience: “This is like that other thing, so it should behave similarly”. I think I may agree with him. I had started a series of posts a couple months ago (part 1 and part 2) that was exploring that cognitive process of how we fill in information that we do not know by assuming it was like our previous experience (I need to go back and finish up that series of posts). Along similar lines, Hofstadter made the point that there is no cognitive difference between a single memory trace and a category or concept. As soon as we have a single cognitive element, we can relate other cognitive elements to it. He used the example of the statement “Maybe there are two or three Einsteins in the audience”; there was only one Albert Einstein historically, but he defined a genius “category” into which others can now be placed.
One thought-provoking point was on the process of chunking, where we group things together, and then group the groups, and so on up the chain (e.g. labradors and retrievers and poodles are grouped into “dogs”, and then dogs and cats and monkeys are grouped into “mammals”, and mammals and reptiles are grouped into “animals” and each category becomes more abstract). Hofstadter said that we build up these groups from specific examples, and so we can always deconstruct the groups by looking inside. What struck me about this point was that there are times when I am asked to look inside an abstract concept and I feel like I have to construct its constituent members on the fly, rather than deconstructing the concept from the way I originally made it. But when I started to think of examples from my own experience, I realized that they were all abstract concepts that I had not devised (e.g. somebody once asked me to explain some economic principle that I’d quoted from The Economist). It was somebody else’s abstraction, which is why I had to struggle to construct its constituent members. This process of being able to use somebody else’s abstractions (or analogies as Hofstadter would have it) is interesting, especially in the sense that we can use them even if we did not construct them ourselves. But I’m not sure where I’m going with this, so I’ll stop now.
Another point I really liked was that he emphasized that these analogies are entirely in our heads. They may relate to things in the outside world, but the analogies are between our mental representations of those things. We sometimes project these mental analogies to the outside world, but it is not the world’s fault when they don’t apply.
He mentioned the idea of “unlabelled concepts”, but then skipped over it because he was running out of time which was a disappointment because I’m intrigued by it. The example he used in passing was that there are certain experiences he had had, but completely forgot about, because there was nothing for the experience to relate to and no easy way to label it. But when a new experience evoked the old one (e.g. his one-year-old’s disappointment with the Dustbuster reminded him of one of his own childhood disappointments), the analogy tied the experiences together. I’ve definitely felt this experience myself, when a bunch of unrelated concepts finally align into a structure and everything locks together into an “Aha!” moment. I tend to think in architectural structures rather than bilateral analogies, but I think it’s the same idea.
One minor quibble I had is that he stretched the idea of an analogy so far that it was unclear what he meant by it at the end because he used it differently in different situations. But since I’ve done the same thing myself, I’m sympathetic.
It was an interesting talk. I liked that he took a radical position, and tried to defend it. I’m not sure he entirely succeeded, but he got me thinking, and that’s a good thing. The talk reminded me that I need to do more things that make me think, whether going to good talks, or reading books, or talking to people that challenge me. I let myself get too lazy and set in my thinking habits. And I really enjoy stretching my mind - I could feel my mind revving up trying to take Hofstadter’s ideas and relate them to my own experience and figure out if they made sense to me or not. More thinking. Less lazing about. Since I’m currently unemployed, I have no excuse for not getting back to blogging about abstruse philosophical concepts again.
Bug and I chatted for a bit afterwards, and I brought up my difficulty with the construction of chunking, and he asked me a really good question, which is how do we decide which analogies to make? We have a network of analogies in our mind, and we get a new concept (whether an experience or an object) - where do we hook it into our network and why? I said that it was probably a matter of feature recognition - what other things already in our minds did it most closely resemble? Bug pushed back and said, okay, what are the features and how do we measure similarity/resemblance? He suggested that it comes down to our own experience. We make analogies based on the ways in which we’ve perceived and experienced things, like Hofstadter’s one-year-old with the dustbuster.
One thing I thought of on the drive home was that this network of analogies is one of the reasons I sometimes get tangled up when I’m trying to explain something. I’ll relate it to one thing, and then when that explanation doesn’t seem to work, I’ll relate it to another thing. And they’re all connected in my head, but the connection may not be obvious to somebody else who does not have the same experiences as me, so I end up confusing them more (I was chided recently to “keep my story straight”). I need to remember to make the connection between viewpoints more evident, especially when switching. Of course, if the person I’m talking to believes there’s only one “true” way of looking at things, changing viewpoints will only confuse the issue. But that’s a separate personal jihad.
Okay, this is totally scattered and incoherent, but I’m going to post it anyway. Editing is for wusses.
