Current category: cognition
Blog home
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.
email me if you have any questions or comments.
Using WordPress
2.2
Over the weekend, I went for a walk and listened to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s talk at the Long Now (viewable at the Whole Earth site, and summarized here). I’ve been doing this for a few weekends now - I can never pay enough attention to listen to a talk like that if I’m at home because I get distracted, but going for a nice long hour-and-a-half walk is a good way to burn off some energy and get educated at the same time. I recommend the Long Now podcast if you’re looking for good talks from interesting intellectuals.
Taleb recently published The Black Swan, a follow-up to his original book, Fooled by Randomness, and uses the talk to discuss some of the ideas from that book. I won’t try to summarize the whole talk but he made two key points that I want to record for future reference. Both points derive from how our intuitions and our mental tools are not equipped to handle nonlinear models. This may seem like an abstruse topic but had very real consequences in the subprime meltdown, when investors theories’ did not take into account non-linear exponential failures of their models.
Taleb posits two worlds: Mediocrestan and Extremistan. He describes Mediocrestan by having the audience imagine a group of 100 people and their distribution of weights. Then he says to determine how the average weight of the group would change if we added the heaviest person in the world to that group. It turns out to not affect the average that much - even if we add a 1,000 pound person, it shifts the average by only 0.5% or so. This is the world of the normal Gaussian distribution that we understand very well with standard deviations and the like.
Now do the same thought experiment, but use people’s wealth instead. Imagine a group of 100 typical people, and their average wealth. Now add Bill Gates to the group. At this point, 100 of the 101 people in the group are below average in wealth, and Bill Gates has approximately 100% of the wealth of the group. This is the world of Extremistan, where outliers can blow up the normal distribution. This is the world of the Black Swan.
And what’s interesting is that we are so bad at dealing with Extremistan. We just don’t intuitively get it, even though we are surrounded by examples of it. Finance and wealth. Book publishing (a significant portion of all book sales are Harry Potter books). The music industry. eBay. We live in an Extremistan world, but our intuition (evolved in a simpler time without network effects) is still stuck in Mediocrestan. So we have to beware of our instincts, because they will get the wrong answers. And we have to beware of charlatans using Mediocrestan theories because they are calculable - it’s like physicists treating everything as a simple harmonic oscillator because that’s the only equation they can solve.
Another example of Extremistan comes from a completely different source. I’m currently reading Poor Charlie’s Almanack, a book of the wisdom of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s investment partner. Munger notes: “If you look at Berkshire Hathaway and all of its accumulated billions, the top ten insights account for most of it.” He also quotes Buffett as saying:
“I could improve your ultimate financial welfare by giving you a ticket with only twenty slots in it so that you had twenty punches - representing all the investments that you got to make in a lifetime. And once you’d punched through the card, you couldn’t make any more investments at all. Under those rules, you’d really think carefully about what you did, and you’d be forced to load up on what you’d really thought about.”
The typical investment strategy is diversification - invest in lots of things and trust in the average, which would work in Mediocrestan. Buffett and Munger have internalized the idea of Extremistan in investing and exploited it to their advantage by realizing that there will be successes wildly out of proportion to the norm and targeting only those investments.
The other illustration of nonlinearity that Taleb used was to imagine an ice cube melting into a small puddle. Now imagine starting with the puddle and trying to reconstruct what the ice cube looked like. You can get the volume of the ice cube, but you can not derive the shape of the ice cube because there are an infinite number of shapes that could have melted and left that puddle. In other words, there is not sufficient information in the final state to determine the initial state; information is lost in this process. He uses this observation to illustrate why he doesn’t trust theories; because the observable world does not constrain theories enough, many theories can fit existing data without providing predictive power.
This multiplicity could also be illustrated by taking the sequence: 1, 2, 3. What’s the next number? Most of us would answer 4. But the answer could be anything from 0.1 to 100,000. I can construct an equation that would give any answer you chose as the fourth entry in that sequence. There are an infinite number of possibilities that fit the available data. Taleb reminds us of this multiplicity and displays extreme skepticism when decisions are made based on believing just one possible theory.
Taleb’s ice cube reminds me of a discussion from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig quotes Poincare as saying “If a phenomenon admits of a complete mechanical explanation it will admit of an infinity of others which will account equally well for all the peculiarities disclosed by experiment.” This is the dirty secret of science - theories are worth nothing, because an infinite number of theories can explain any experimental result, including such outlandish ones as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Popper’s claim that theories must be falsifiable to be scientific is a consequence of this - every theory is always one experimental observation away from being disproven. Scientists live in a world where they are sifting through an infinity of possible theories, trying to choose one that best fits their observations, but knowing that their theories can never be proven true, only proven false.
I don’t really have any deep analysis here. I liked the visual imagery Taleb used to illustrate his points, and wanted to record that in this post. After listening to his talk, I may have to get The Black Swan from the library this summer to see if the rest of the book is of similar quality.
I spent the weekend at BarCampNYC3, an unconference in the mode of the BrainJams I once attended. It was great to meet a bunch of new people, including some nextNY folks I had never met in person, and to get the chance to talk about interesting topics for a couple days.
One session I attended early in the weekend was led by Joe Fernandez, on how to measure influence in the social web. This started a great discussion, as we first had to agree what influence meant. The marketers in the room translated it into how much money can we make from this person’s recommendation? If Bob has 1,000 readers, but only 5 of them buy the product, and Alice has only 10 readers, but 7 of them buy the product, who is more influential? Bob’s got the bigger audience, but Alice has more influence, as measured by the dollars.
We also discussed social influence. What does it mean to be a thought leader? Somebody mentioned the Fast Company article on whether the idea of Influentials is valid. Somebody (not me!) brought up Clay Shirky’s new book. Rohit Khare mentioned his work on leveraging not just the social network, but also the documents as rated by that network (which makes sense when we realize that documents only have value when creating a connection). Lots of interesting ideas floating around, and Sanford Dickert suggested that we do another session to try to come up with a better definition.
On Sunday, Sanford led a session where we tried to derive an equation measuring influence. Sanford’s background is in robotics, so he was applying systems theory and feedback loops to the problem. We spent some time discussing what the equivalent concepts of inertia, friction, and dampening might be (we came up with the acceptance of the current worldview, the difficulty of forwarding a new idea/concept on, and the natural decay of interestingness of a new idea over time as possible analogues).
Sanford led a later session on “Web 3.0″ where he tried to build on these ideas of influence, and what that would mean for designing social applications. One marketer in that session suggested that marketing was making potential customers want what you have. I thought that was too simplistic and Machiavellian, but it got me thinking.
I realized that this might be a good situation in which to apply actor-network theory as a framework for thinking about this problem. Actor-network theory is all about evanescent indirect connections between people that need to be re-established. It’s also about how every element in the network has an effect on every other element - all participants are “actors” in that they have an effect on the network. Objects that have no effect are not actors and can be removed from consideration. But there are rarely direct connections between network endpoints - all effects must be traced through mediators which can alter the message in surprising ways. Actor-network theory is about observing the network and tracing the connections between different actors and seeing the effects of mediators.
So I started mulling the idea of trying to trace the network between the product on one end and a customer on the other end (my notes from the session say, in contrast to the earlier claim, that “Marketing is building a connection between the product and the person”). The product has certain characteristics, the marketer advertises some of those characteristics, the newspaper reviewer might write about the product and its characteristics, a friend might read the reviewer and think highly of the product, and mention it to the eventual customer who happens to have a need for a product like that.
I wanted to write up these ideas this evening, so I went back to review my posts about actor-network theory from years past, and discovered that I had already written a post on applying actor-network theory to marketing. Clever of me, eh? Go read that post now.
One thing I don’t address in that post is how to create a mathematical model of influence. I was talking about it with Sanford later, and suggested that it’s a tricky problem because influence is such a personal thing. I may be influenced more by a famous person like Oprah or by my good friend. Also, a person’s influence is not invariant - I may trust my geek friend for a recommendation on which laptop to buy but not at all on where to eat. So the model would need coefficients of influence for each connection between nodes on each topic, with those coefficients varying depending on results.
I wonder if a neural network might be the way to model this sort of thing. Our brain can be modelled as a collection of neurons, each of which influence each other with certain coefficients that are strengthened or weakened based on how well their outputs contributed to desired outcomes. Perhaps our networks can be modelled in the same way. This would play into my idea of cognitive trust, where I suggest that once we trust other people enough, they’re just an extension of our own brain. I certainly have people like that, where I don’t even bother having opinions on certain topics like cuisine and fashion because I can always call my friends to get a more informed opinion. In some sense, my outsourcing of taste is the ultimate in influence.
I really need to find the time and energy to do some programming. It wouldn’t be that hard to create a toy model of an influence network built off a neural network model. And it would be interesting to see how that model corresponded with real world tastes. Maybe I should throw it at the Netflix data to see what happens. But that might have to wait for the summer when classes are over.
Technorati tag: barcampnyc3
A friend’s 7-year-old son recently challenged me to a game of chess. I’ve never played chess seriously, and had not played a single game since before he was born. I quickly found myself in a struggle - I made a mistake early and he took my queen. I eventually fought back to a mostly equal position, and we agreed on a draw as we had to leave for the wedding we were both attending. It sounds embarrassing to feel lucky to pull out a draw with a 7-year-old, but I later found out that this son of two MIT graduates with PhDs had been studying chess for a year with his school teacher. Okay, it’s still embarrassing.
Chess is hard because of the combinatorial explosion of possibilities - each move creates new possibilities and analyzing them all consciously takes more brainpower than anybody except Deep Blue has. So how do chess experts play the game successfully? Another friend at the wedding had been a chess master when he was a teenager, and I asked him about his strategies. He claimed that when he was playing, he had memorized all possible openings through fifteen moves, so while the other player was expending conscious effort to analyze the opening series of moves, he was playing without thinking because he already knew the best move in each position. That left his conscious brain available to analyze the deeper strategy in the game and plan for the midgame, giving him a competitive advantage.
The key word in the previous paragraph is “conscious” - our conscious brain has very limited computing power. To be successful at any task, we have to offload as much processing as possible to our unconscious brains. We have to build cognitive subroutines and embed the pattern recognition into our brains so that the conscious brain doesn’t need to think - we just recognize the input pattern and make the appropriate response. This is what made my friend successful as a chess player - his unconscious brain was just using pattern recognition to decide on the next move, saving his conscious brain CPU cycles for strategic analysis.
This sort of unconscious pattern recognition is present in all games. Whenever we first play a game, we’re trying to remember the rules, and struggle just to make legal moves. As we learn more about the game, we take advantage of our brain’s continuous projections described in On Intelligence - we compare the projected results of our moves with what actually happened, and store the results. Now the legal moves are automatic and require no thought, and we’re thinking tactically about sequences of moves. We can now embed that sort of tactical thinking into another layer of patterns on top of the “legal moves” neuron layer, e.g. learning to automatically set up the sequence of card play necessary for an endgame squeeze in bridge.
For an expert, these layers can go many levels deep. I’m reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin, the chess prodigy who was made famous by the film Searching for Bobby Fischer. He describes the several levels of chess knowledge that he grew through as a child, from understanding how the pieces moved, to practicing end games with his teacher to understand the area controlled by each piece, to understanding the interactions between pieces in the midgame, etc. He explains how he couldn’t even think about the higher levels of chess until the lower levels were automated to the point of unconsciousness, and describes how the same process applied in his learning of tai chi.
One interesting result of this theory of learning is that it’s impossible to become an expert without having practiced the basics so much that they are unconscious. Because the conscious mind has such a limited capacity, we have to know one level so well that it has been relegated to the pattern-matching unconscious before learning the next level. Joel Spolsky has a great anecdote in his article on interviewing describing how his calculus professor gave an algebra problem to students on the first day of class. The people who were able to answer it without thinking were the ones who got A’s in the calculus class - they had embedded algebra into their unconscious so they were able to focus their conscious brains on calculus, giving them a huge advantage of their classmates. Joel applies this theory to interviewing by giving straightforward programming problems to his interviewees and keeping the ones that blaze through the problems as fast as they can talk.
I had another interesting conversation last week about an article called “In Defense of Memorization”, which laments the demise of memorization of poetry as an educational technique. The article observes that “memorizing poetry turns on kids’ language capability. It not only teaches them to articulate English words; it heightens their feel for the intricacies and complexities of the English language—an indispensable attainment if they are to go on to speak, write, and read English with ease”. By memorizing and reciting poetry, they are building the neural pathways that recognize how good literature fits together, and are more likely to be able to use those patterns in their own writing.
That may sound like a stretch, but it has been shown to work in the area of music with the Suzuki method. The Suzuki method taught music as if it were teaching a language. It starts at young ages, when children’s brains are most plastic and able to accept input (I started violin lesosns at age 3), and depends as much on listening to music as practicing it, because we learn languages by listening first and talking second. A heavy emphasis is also placed on memorization, which I didn’t appreciate at the time, but I think has to do with building in these unconscious patterns. It’s about practicing and repetition until the act of playing becomes totally unconscious, leaving the conscious brain able to think about the music rather than the mechanics of making the sounds.
Because of the Suzuki method, I have an intuitive understanding of classical music that dwarfs my analytical understanding. I’ve taken only one music theory class in basic harmony and counterpoint, and remember none of it. But I recognize what music “should” do in ways that I can’t even explain.
This post is a reminder to myself that becoming good at something requires putting in the time to learn the basics to the point of unconsciousness. It requires time and effort and work and pushing myself past the point where it’s fun - there was always a point when rehearsing a piece with the chorus where I was so tired of rehearsing the same piece repeatedly, but being in a group helped me to push through that dip to the next level of musical understanding. It’s also a reminder that if I’m struggling with something, I should step back and rehearse the basics again until they are unconscious. Speaking of which, I should go break out the Radio Shack chess computer I have and play a few games to start learning those patterns.
This wasn’t at all the book I was expecting when I ordered it, but ended up being much more satisfying. I thought it was going to be some tract on how and why the brain feels happiness, and what we can do to make ourselves happier. Instead Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, explains how the brain functions, and then shows why we consistently make the same types of mistakes in trying to find happiness.
Gilbert’s main thesis is that the reason we have so much trouble making ourselves happy is that we are taking action on behalf of a future version of ourselves. It turns out we are _terrible_ at predicting what that future self is going to want. Our brain has evolved with blind spots and shortcuts that make it impossible for us to predict the future, even our own future. Yet it leaves us believing in our predictions, unable to recognize those limitations.
One thing that made me happy was a chapter on “the Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye”. Gilbert shows that our brains do not store all the raw details of our experience in memory - it stores a small set of key features. When recalling the experience, “our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating - not by actually retrieving - the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory” (he cites Daniel Schacter’s book Searching for Memory). This reweaving is very sensitive to the conditions of recall - it’s easy to influence how the reweaving takes place. Gilbert cites one study where subjects were shown a set of slides depicting a car accident where the car failed to yield at a yield sign. Half of the subjects were asked “Did another car pass the red car while it was stopped at the stop sign?”, and then were asked to select the slide they’d seen between one with the car at a yield sign and one at a stop sign. 80% of the subjects that had been asked the question pointed at the slide with the stop sign (90% of the control group answered correctly). It makes you wonder about eyewitness testimony, doesn’t it?
Another thing our brain is poor at is projecting into the future. Gilbert uses the analogy of looking at things that are far away - they are small, smooth, and lacking in detail. When we project more than a few days into the future, our brains see events with the same lack of details, but without the developed filters to remind us that the details are missing. So we imagine only fuzzy good things for the future event, and then when the day arrives, we are confronted with messy reality.
Our brain also does some sneaky stuff when we project how we will feel in the future. The analogy Gilbert uses is that when we imagine something (say, a penguin), we don’t get confused and actually start thinking there’s a penguin in the room with us. Our brains are well-trained to override our imagination with reality, and we know which is which. But when we project how we will feel in response to an imagined event, our present feelings will override our projected feelings without any such awareness of the override mechanism. The brain’s “Reality First” policy “that makes it difficult to imagine penguins when we are looking at ostriches also makes it difficult to imagine lust when we are feeling disgust, affection when we are feeling anger, or hunger when we are feeling full.” We project that we will feel in the future the same way we are feeling now.
I’ve definitely confronted this one in my personal experience. After a long day at work, I might get home and not want to do anything. If I haven’t made plans, I’ll sit at home and mope because I can’t think of anything I want to do. If I’ve made plans, though, I’ll go out and have fun - my brain was tricking me into thinking that nothing would make me feel good because I wasn’t feeling good at the time. So I particularly liked this insight because it gives me more ammunition to get myself moving when I’m feeling mopey in the future.
One last section that I really liked in the book was discussing how the brain exploits ambiguity to get the best possible result. “We ask whether facts allow us to believe our favored conclusions and whether they compel us to believe our disfavored conclusions. Not surprisingly, disfavored conclusions have a much tougher time meeting this more rigorous standard of proof.” Our brains focus on the aspects of our experience that make us happy. For instance, he cites one study where he asked a group of people to define what “talented” means. “Talented” is a fuzzy word, so it’s not surprising that there were a variety of definitions offered. Also not surprising is that each person defined “talented” in a way that included them as somebody that was “talented”. Exploit that ambiguity!
Gilbert says we can think of this as a
“psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness… A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it… We need to be defended - not defenseless or defensive - and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts.
This immune system kicks into gear when we have intensely unhappy feelings. We find ways to believe that we’re better off now that we’ve been dumped or lost our jobs, but not when we stub our toes or get in the wrong line at the grocery store. “The paradoxical consequence of this fact is that it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.”
It’s also triggered when the suffering is inescapable. For instance, we will accept far worse behavior in our families than we would with our friends, because we can’t choose our family. The immune system kicks in because “it is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience“.
I’ve now covered a total of about 10 pages out of this 260 page book. There’s lots of great stuff in here. I’m fascinated by the brain (I even split off and populated a new cognition category recently), and I’ve speculated before on some of the ways in which our brains fill in the blanks so these sorts of findings fascinate me. The brain is a complex thing, and reading a book like this which provides scientific backing to several of my wacky theories is gratifying.
However, it’s not a self-help book. It’s not going to teach you how to be happy. But it does provide an understanding of how the brain works and the things it’s doing beneath the surface. Knowing those tendencies can help one consciously compensate for them, like realizing that nothing will sound like fun when I’m feeling depressed so I have to just make myself go out. Because one of the things that makes us happy according to the book is feeling a sense of control, this book will make you happier by understanding your brain better and thus giving you more control over how it feels.
This week’s New Yorker has an article describing Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project. I’ve heard about this project for years, and I’ve never understood what the point is. Collecting all of those pictures and articles and emails about one’s life just creates an overwhelming mass of data that can’t be processed effectively. It’s like the shoeboxes (or now file folders) of photos that we all have that we never look at because they’re not organized and we can’t find the one we want.
The dumbest thing I read in the article was their failed attempt to write software to do “auto-storytelling”.
“What we’re storing, really, is snippets and scenes and episodes,” he says. “A movie tells a story, and we’re not doing that.” What Bell and the others imagine, ultimately, is a function by which a computer assembles a person’s autobiography, which he or she authorizes and passes on.
What they’re talking about is creating the self story. But no computer can do that. They are operating under the misguided belief that facts alone tell the story of one’s life. I mention it in that post, but history is so much more than a recitation of facts. It’s the assembling of facts retroactively into a pattern that allows us to make sense of the facts, to tell the story.
We don’t know what the facts mean to us until we look back later and find out what happened - then we know which facts mattered. Let’s imagine that I’m out at the bar having a drink. I see a cute girl, talk to her for a bit, and get her number (indulge my fantasy here for a second). Is this fact significant in my later life? We can’t tell at this point. Maybe I get dissed after one date. Maybe we go on to have a long-term relationship. The fact of me meeting her in a bar stays the same, but the story changes depending on what happens.
The whole point of telling a story is that it lets us understand the underlying patterns that drive events. Stories are our way of making sense of the world. We feel uncomfortable when events happen that are beyond our understanding. As soon as we can come up with a story that explains what happened (even if it doesn’t fit the facts exactly), we feel better. “He dumped me because he wasn’t ready for a real commitment.” “She dumped me because she thought I didn’t make enough money.” “I got fired because my boss had it in for me.” The story doesn’t even have to make sense to somebody else - the story is the way of coping with the unexpected sequence of events.
Another problem I have with the MyLifeBits project is that it’s inefficient and unhelpful. I don’t want raw mass data dumps of my life. If I were a manager, and I asked my team to get me the sales numbers, I would be furious if they just dumped spreadsheets on me. They need to analyze the data, figure out the trends, and summarize it for me in what is essentially the story of sales.
I’m reading the book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert cites research saying that our brain does that analysis for us. Our brains don’t remember all the details of our lives - it remembers key points, the bits that differed from the routine, the outline of the story. When we are reconstructing what happened, our brain fills in all sorts of details that may not be strictly factual, but that were irrelevant to the story so they weren’t stored. The brain stores the high-level management report, not the original raw data.
There are risks associated with that approach. As a trained scientist, I understand the importance of keeping the raw data around so that I can go back and re-analyze it later. But re-analysis takes time and energy, so it makes sense that the brain evolved to optimize for efficiency. One of Gilbert’s points is that we are deluding ourselves if we think we remember the raw sensory data, and we need to take into account the high-level nature of our memories. But I’ll get to that in a separate book review.
Scientists and engineers love raw data. It has a primal quality to it, a sense of endless possibility - who knows what patterns will emerge? But raw data is incomplete. It doesn’t mean anything. It needs us to make sense of it, to find the patterns, so that we can use those patterns to make future decisions. Without stories to bind it together, raw data is useless.
I’d much rather have this blog than MyLifeBits. This blog is where I take all of that raw data from my life and simmer it down into key points that I want to remember. This is where I record the stories and thoughts and ideas that help me make sense of the world, that I can use to make decisions. It may be a compressed representation (the backup is only 4MB), but it’s far more helpful to me than the reams of data coming out of MyLifeBits.
Following up on the previous post about discipline, I think another reason for discipline is that it’s necessary to achieve mastery. I was reminded of this while reading Artful Making, by Robert Austin and Lee Devin. They relate the process of management to the making of collaborative art, such as putting a play together. I’ll review the book in a future post, but the point that struck me was their emphasis on iterations - trying things over and over again in different ways to see what works and what doesn’t.
Their description reminded me of being in the chorus. There’s always a rehearsal or two in the middle of preparing for a concert where it gets really tedious - we’re past the point of learning the notes but not quite to the point of making music. The notes are there, but they’re not quite locked down to the point where we can forget about them and concentrate on the higher level music. So we have to run parts over and over again until it becomes automatic. It’s boring, it’s annoying, but it’s necessary to get to the point where we’re not singing notes, but making music.
This relates back to my theory of cognitive subroutines. When we do something over and over again, we’re ingraining it deep into our brain so that it can be handled unconsciously, leaving our limited conscious brain to concentrate on other things. While the adage says “Practice Makes Perfect”, my music teachers told me that it should be “Practice Makes Permanent”. If we do something enough times the same way, we’ll do it automatically without thinking about it.
Why is it necessary to be able to accomplish the task unconsciously? So that we can think about other things. In chorus, it’s only when I can sing the notes automatically that I can pay attention to the lyrics and the musical shape. In volleyball, I have to be able to hit the ball consistently and automatically before I can start paying attention to reading the court and “hit ‘em where they ain’t”. In frisbee, I have to be able to make the throw without thinking before I can start reading the field and figure out how to beat the defense. And then, all of these can be taken one step further when that level of expertise is mastered (but I haven’t gotten there myself).
This idea of mastery is also covered by Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, where he describes how firefighters make rapid and correct decisions in the field. They have been in so many situations that they know what to look for at an unconscious level, and thus can react immediately.
The key to this level of mastery is the iterations. It’s doing it over and over again until the reactions become automatic. It’s being in the situation enough times that you’ve seen everything that can happen and know how to react. When you’ve played a game enough times, whether it be hearts or World of Warcraft, you won’t be surprised by most situations that occur - you’ve confronted the situation before, tried a few different responses, found one that worked, and now use it without thinking in that situation, leaving your brain to concentrate on other goals.
Doing something enough times to lock it in at an unconscious level is tedious. It’s not fun, whether it’s practicing that scale on the violin or doing volleyball drills or writing code. And that’s where the discipline comes in. It’s being able to push through the iterations, to deliberately practice, to get to that next level. And the iterations can’t be done mindlessly - you have to know what results you are planning to achieve. To push through those iterations requires a level of passion, a desire to be the best. Passion enables discipline which enables mastery.
Now I just need to figure out what I feel passionate enough about to push through to the next level. Or learn some discipline.
P.S. Along those lines, Scott Berkun posted an essay yesterday on How to stay motivated. I really like Berkun’s writing, like his previous book on The Art of Project Management, so I wanted to give a shout-out about his new book on The Myths of Innovation, which is winging its way to me from Amazon right now.
But in Ender’s mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can’t all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they’re needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every new problem he faces. As if he conceives of a new universe to live in, every hour a new one, often hopelessly wrong and he ends up making mistakes and bad judgments, but sometimes so perfectly right that it opens new things up like a miracle and I look through his eyes and see the world his new way and it changes everything. Madness, and then illumination. (Xenocide, p. 439)
My worldview tends to be flexible in a lot of ways. I can often see both sides of an issue, and string ideas together as necessary to support each side. I see the world of ideas almost as a game, where the different ideas are game pieces and I can put them together in different combinations to serve my purposes at any given point in time. Occasionally, I find a pattern of ideas that I find useful, where things just click into place (”Madness, and then illumination”). I tend to keep those patterns around by recording them here in my blog, like the idea of cognitive subroutines. But the churning never stops.
I had a couple experiences in class earlier this week where this came in handy. In one class, we were having small group discussions, and towards the end, we were trying to summarize the group’s opinions about our reading, and I was able to string the discussion ideas together into a coherent pattern to present to the class on behalf of the group. In my other class, we had to do a group presentation and I ended up answering the questions at the end, because I quickly saw ways to reassemble our group ideas into a new pattern that tangentially related to the question.
One question that often comes up when I describe things in this way is where truth fits into all of this. In other words, is it a good thing that I have an affiinity for what would be called spin in politics? Or does it demonstrate that I have no morals, no regard for the truth, and will do whatever is expedient for me?
Is there such a thing as the Truth? I’m not sure there is. So much of what we observe is influenced by our previous experiences that I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to have a truly objective point of view. Books like Latour’s Politics of Nature and Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action and Wilson’s Quantum Psychology describe the context-dependent nature of thought, and lectures like Hacking the Mind remind us how our brains can be fooled in all sorts of ways. I could throw around terms like “social construction of facts”, but the basic idea is that “truth” is a really tricky concept and depends a lot on what other people think. Truth evolves; the truth about the Earth went from being the center of the universe, to circling the sun, to being an insignificant mote. For there to be universal undisputed Truth, there would have to be an omniscient impartial observer to decide on what Truth is. God serves that purpose for a lot of people, I suppose, but since He is not available to me to communicate the Truth in any situation, I think it’s equivalent to there being no such observer.
So let’s say that playing games with ideas loses us the concept of absolute Truth. What do we gain, if anything? I would argue that we gain better communication. If we insist on the concept of Truth, then if somebody disagrees with us, it is because they are wrong. At best, they may be misinterpreting the Truth. This immediately sets up the conversation as being confrontational and a zero-sum game, where if one person is right, the other person is wrong. If we instead see the conversation as an opportunity for both sides to learn and to come to a mutual agreement, the conversation is much more productive.
To be an effective communicator, you have to be able to put things in terms that your listener will understand. Whether you want to call it sales or framing or storytelling, putting the ideas together into the right pattern is what lets us get our point across to our listener. This is important because better communication is what connects us and lets us create bigger achievements than any of us could achieve on our own. Being able to bridge the gap between people’s minds is at the root of a lot of problems I see around me, from management screwups to politics to discrimination.
And sometimes that communication can’t happen when people are concerned with the Truth. For instance, the difference between good storytellers and bad ones is that the bad ones don’t know which details to leave out. They see the story as a sequence of events, and in an attempt to be completely truthful, they include every element. The good storytellers know their audience and tailor their story appropriately, including details that will connect to the audience, and leaving out ones that won’t. Are they less truthful? Perhaps. But I think the connection to the audience matters more.
A similar example is the Dilbert-ian engineer who always talks in jargon and can’t help giving every last bit of detail about what they’re working on. They are holding to the idea that more information is always better, because Truth is what matters. But because they can’t communicate with the rest of their company, they end up being useless and ineffective, complaining about how their project was screwed up by “politics” (and, yes, I used to be one such engineer). One has to ask whether it’s more important to be “truthful” and make sure every detail is technically correct in one’s explanation, or to use a simplified explanation that isn’t perfectly accurate but gets the idea across so that other people in the company can use it.
I really like that quote at the top of the post, from the third book of the Ender series. It describes my mind in a lot of ways. One of the reasons I continue to blog is that it lets me take a snapshot of the “idea-machine”s going through my brain so that I can later refer to them and/or mock them if need be. I try to keep my mind flexible, to continue to try new patterns. I’m not always as successful at it as I would like, but it’s a good goal because it will make me a more effective communicator, and I think that’s the key.
It’s been way too long since my last pretentious philosophical post. I’ve got about three half-written, but none of them have really come together yet. But tonight, I’m posting something, dammit!
I actually want to revisit my completely uninformed picture of what goes on in our brain. Long-time readers may remember my series of cognitive subroutines posts, which were mostly superceded by the book On Intelligence. Basically, it’s the idea that our brain is just a pattern-forming and pattern-recognition machine.
I was reminded of this over the weekend when I went to play volleyball out on Long Beach, accessible from the LIRR. I haven’t played seriously since leaving Stanford eight years ago, and I think I’ve played volleyball once in the past two years. So it took me a while to do anything right. The ridiculous wind didn’t help. But by the end of the day, as I got back into it and the wind died down, the muscle memory kicked back in (as it did with skiing), and I was able to start getting some good hits and passes (my setting is still atrocious though) (Oh, and regardless of how well I played, it was awesome to be out on the beach all day even if I got a bit toasted).
It still amazes me that my body remembers this sort of stuff. I haven’t done it in years, I don’t practice, and yet it’s still there when called upon. Hitting a volleyball is one of the most complex athletic actions there is, because it involves your legs, torso and arms, all coordinated with a ball travelling through the air. And yet, my ability to hit was lying there dormant, waiting to be used. It wasn’t quite as if I’d never stopped, since my consistency wasn’t great, but it was far better than I had any right to expect given the years away.
I think our brains stores lots of other dormant patterns as well. I was thinking of how our personality changes when we’re around people that have known us a long time - we tend to revert the person that we were when we first met those people. In the TEP community, I’m always going to be “Young Perlick”, the gawky 16-year-old freshman. To my parents, I’m always going to be their little baby. And those expectations feed back on us and reactivate those dormant patterns of behavior. So even though I’ve been living on my own for years, when I’m in my parents’ house, I still feel like a kid. The contextual cues of our environment determine who we are.
I’ve been wondering if I could leverage this sort of contextual reactivation of dormant patterns to recall things I learned once but have long forgotten. For instance, two of my coworkers were playing around with some logic notation that I learned back in high school when I took a number theory class at nerd camp. And it surprised me that I remembered it. I didn’t remember the other things I learned in that class, but I wonder if I were plopped into the right environment whether it would start to come back. Along similar lines, I did get into that Master’s program in Technology Management at Columbia. I haven’t taken classes in over eight years. I don’t know if I remember any math. But I’m kind of relying on the idea that once I’m back in that environment, my unconscious brain will kick in and pull all of those patterns from long-term storage. At least I hope it does 
Another area in which I’ve noticed this phenomenon of pattern reactivation is with books. When I pick up a book that I’m only partly through (which right now I have way too many of), if it’s a good book, it’s really easy for me to get back into it. Good sci-fi or fiction will carry me along and suck me right back into the story (I lent my coworker my copy of Sources of Power, and she reminded me of his description of stories as encoding patterns that we have learned and are trying to teach others, which reminds me of my thoughts about stories. Anyway.), which reactivates the patterns. Really bad books are the opposite, such as Shadow Puppets, where I had to re-read several chapters before realizing I’d already read it.
And the same holds true for non-fiction - good non-fiction is creating patterns in my head that help me make sense of the world around me, that are reinforced by my daily experience. I remember what’s going on because the patterns of ideas are being woven into my personal collective. Sometimes, like with Latour, the patterns are very large and different, so it takes me a while to incorporate them. Other times, like with business books, you can get the idea by reading the first 20 pages. Either way if the patterns are both strong and aligned with my idea framework, they are very easy for me to get back into after some time away. If they are weaker or less relevant, I can’t manage it, and the book never gets picked up again.
I’m not quite sure if this really tied anything together, or was just a sprawling ramble through a bunch of different areas, with a really tenuous hand-wavey connection. But that’s y’all’s problem. I’m heading to bed.
way too many of: I went to the library a couple weekends ago. Plus I got a big Amazon order two months ago. Plus I went to that used book store last week. So I’m partway through many books, with many more waiting on the shelf. A quick collection of the ones I’ve started (and not counting the ones I’ve started but have put down and will probably never finish - these are the ones I intend to finish. Really. Honest.):
Quick - find the common thread between all of those books… I have really odd reading habits, don’t I?
Jofish recently pointed me at a recording of Cry If You Want To, a song performed by the Holly Cole Trio. I really liked it, and started listening to it regularly. Interestingly, the more I listened to it, the less I appreciated it. It became a song I listened to as a whole, without listening to the individual lyrics that had struck me the first time. It became background music.
This actually happens to me a lot - when I get new music, I listen to it all the time for a while, and then it gets completely absorbed into my brain and I tend to stop paying attention to it unless I make a special effort to do so. And there are certain albums which have a totemic power to me that I don’t want to lessen by ever listening to them without paying full attention, so they only get played when I’ve blocked out a chunk of time such that I can listen to the whole thing.
This experience got me back to thinking about the amazing pattern building properties of our brains. When we first encounter something, the details are what we notice - we can’t absorb the whole thing, so we are often distracted by less important details. As we grow more familiar with the object, we begin to see it as a whole, and not as the sum of its elements. We are no longer the blind men feeling a wall, a spear, a snake and a tree - we see that it’s an elephant.
But the flip side of this is that as we grow to perceive it as a whole, we sometimes lose track of those details. We don’t appreciate the many different ways in which an object can be experienced. We forget what drew us to the entity in the first place.
Along similar lines, sometimes we also lose our appreciation for an experience through repetition. It becomes something that we’ve seen so much that it is no longer interesting, just part of the background scenery. This is the principle behind the Zen View as described in Christopher Alexander’s book, A Pattern Language:
This is the essence of the problem with any view. It is a beautiful thing. One wants to enjoy it and drink it in every day. But the more open it is, the more obvious, the more it shouts, the sooner it will fade. Gradually it will become part of the building, like the wallpaper; and the intensity of its beauty will no longer be accessible to the people who live there.
One of the reasons we enjoy going places with children is that their enthusiasm and glee in seeing new things lets us appreciate those things as if for the first time. Our glazed detachment is ripped away, and we experience it anew. And it’s hard to achieve that on our own - it takes a certain talent to be able to take down our filters built up through experience and look at things with a fresh perspective. The best thinkers have that ability to constantly “forget” what they “know”, and consider other possibilities. And yet children do it effortlessly because they have not yet accumulated the weight of experience that becomes the equivalent of blinders.
At the same time, if we were always experiencing everything anew, we would never be able to make progress. We would be like the sheep who is surprised every morning by the sun rising. As with everything else, there needs to be a balance, in this case between leveraging our previous experience and being able to ignore that experience. Taking an example from the chorus, by the concert week, we have often internalized the music completely such that we’re not even thinking about what we’re singing about, especially when we’re singing in a foreign language - it’s just syllables that go with certain notes. Our conductor fights this tendency by having us write in the translation next to the musical notes so that we are reminded of the meaning. The physical act of singing syllables has to be almost automatic for us to perform, but we take the performance to another level by adding back the meaning to our learned patterns.
One more perspective on the subject - I often use re-readability/re-watchability as my metric for judging books, movies and TV shows. There are books that I read and get everything from immediately, so I don’t feel like I need to ever read them again. There are other books that I can read over and over again and get something new from it each time, as I mention in this post. My theory of the moment is that certain works have a greater depth such that I can revisit them and notice different details depending on my current state of mind. I don’t experience the works the same way each time, such that repetition is rewarded. If the view didn’t change, it wouldn’t be worth looking at again.
This post doesn’t really have a point. I guess maybe it’s just a reminder to myself to occasionally turn off the pattern recognition center in the brain and try to see things with a fresh perspective, difficult as that may be. Either that, or ask a kid for what they think.
P.S. I couldn’t come up with a good name for this post and was throwing around various combinations of repetition, meaning and blindness and ended up with the one that echos “Unbearable Lightness of Being”. This amuses me for some reason.
I was thinking more about the topic of how our mind fills in the blanks last week during the Messiah concerts, particularly in the “He was despised” aria. I meant to write this up on Sunday or Monday evening, but didn’t get around to it. So, of course, I’m writing it up after a two and a half hour chorus rehearsal. Because if I don’t, I’m not sure when I’ll have time to blog again (another rehearsal tomorrow (Thursday) night, plans on Friday night, the BrainJam on Saturday, brunch Sunday morning, ultimate frisbee Sunday afternoon, and then rehearsal Monday-Wednesday evenings (with a special bonus Wednesday afternoon rehearsal), and concerts Thursday through Saturday next week. When did my life get so crazy?)
One of the things I was grasping for at the end of the last post was “something about the connection between how our brains fill in the blanks, and how that reinforces our worldviews”. And I think I have some ideas about that now, with applications and a tie-in to another post I had half-written but gotten stuck on. So this thread will probably be a set of at least three posts, if not more.
One of the things that struck me about how our brains fill in blanks is that I already had a theory for this in one of my cognitive subroutines posts from last year.
When our brain is presented with a situation with certain stimuli, it grabs among its set of cognitive subroutines, finds the one with the closest matching set of inputs, and uses it, even if it’s not a perfect fit.
Or, to use Jeff Hawkins’s terminology, a set of cortical cells are activated by a stimulus, and based on the cells’ responses to other similar stimuli, those weak connections to other stimuli are activated since there are no strong activations from the original stimulus.
Using either formulation, the idea is that when your brain is presented with an incomplete pattern, it grabs among the patterns that it does have to fill out what it doesn’t know. It fills in the blanks. This ties into my statement from the last post where I noted “that when we don’t know something, we tend to assume whatever works to best preserve our worldview.” It’s even worse than that - we don’t assume it consciously. It happens completely automatically.
My point is that my brain is a fantastic pattern recognition machine. It can make a pretty good guess as to what goes in the blanks most of the time based on its previous experience. It is completely necessary for us to perceive the world as a continuous place - we assume that even though we only see the back end of a car poking out of a driveway, there is a front end associated with it. Our senses do this automatic filling in of blanks all the time. One of the insights of On Intelligence is that our cortical cells treat all inputs in the same way, looking for patterns of stimuli that occur together and using those patterns to make predictions about the world around us, whether the patterns are from our senses, or from processing what we think other people are going to do. Patterns are patterns, and our brain’s going to do the best it can to make our perception of the world continuous by filling in blanks wherever it can (as an aside, we have to beware of stereotypes and other breakdowns in the system, where the blanks are being filled in based on faulty assumptions (inexperience, etc.)).
I think I’m going to end this post here. Tonight I took a stab at hand-waving-ly justifying how and why our brains fill in blanks when presented with incomplete patterns, with the relevant point being that it fills in those blanks from its own experience. My next post will be examining the implications of how our brains fill in blanks in an actual real-world scenario (*gasp*). And then there’s a post tying this all into my adapting the global to the local thread. Somehow. It’s all tenuously connected in my head, but I may have to play with it some more to make it work.
—–
“He was despised” is an aria in Part Two of the Messiah for the alto soloist. It’s slow, lugubrious and, frankly, boring, so it seems like it goes on _forever_. And then it repeats, because Handel decided once wasn’t enough. It’s painfully long. I’ve been in several Messiahs at this point, and it just doesn’t matter how good the alto soloist is (countertenor soloist in this case), the aria is just boring. During most of the other arias, the chorus is paying attention to the soloist, admiring their vocal acrobatics; during “He was despised”, I think we’re all struggling to stay awake, staring off into the audience, etc. Or thinking about the cognitive origin of filling in the blanks, like me.
“completely automatically”: I want to mention Brad’s post about choice blindness (pointing at this study) here, even though it’s not entirely relevant to my main point, mostly to illustrate how your brain does all sorts of weird stuff long before stimuli reach your conscious brain.
