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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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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.
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“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.
As mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been reading a book called Mediated, by Thomas de Zengotita, which examines the ways in which a pervasive media has altered the way in which we perceive the world. He has lots of interesting examples, but today’s topic will be his discussion of the demise of heroes in a mediated culture.
Most of us know Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, that he gave the Gettysburg address, that he learned his lessons on the back of a coal shovel, and that he was assassinated. And that he was a great man. Notice how there are lots of blanks in that knowledge. de Zengotita’s premise is that it is precisely because of those blanks that most people consider Lincoln a hero. When there are blanks in what we know about somebody, we can idealize them by filling those blanks in ways which are wholly positive.
Such blanks would no longer exist in today’s paparazzi culture. For any given celebrity, one can learn _everything_ about them, from what they like for breakfast, to how they spend their free time. They are no longer heroes, standing at a distance, with us able to place them on a pedestal and idealize them. Celebrities today are “real” people, with all of the faults and problems that “real” people have.
An example that de Zengotita uses to illustrate how quickly things have changed - FDR was in a wheelchair during his entire presidency sixty years ago. And his constituents had no idea. Can you imagine anything like that happening today? Bill Clinton couldn’t keep his hands off an intern behind closed doors, and it was worldwide news. There are no access barriers any more, no mystique. We can’t have heroes, because heroes need to be removed from everyday life; once it’s revealed that they’re just regular people, the mystique is gone.
I think this is an interesting phenomenon because it illustrates something rather fundamental about the human psyche. I kind of touch on this in my localized generalities post, but one of the amazing things about the human mind is how it effortlessly and automatically fills in gaps in its knowledge; so effortlessly, in fact, that we barely even notice that we’re doing it. It is relatively rare to find people who know what they do not know; most people make assumptions and then are dismayed and shocked when others do not share those assumptions (e.g. my reaction to discovering Orson Scott Card’s reactionary political views). Such assumptions lead to the kinds of confusion I talk about in my thinking different post.
This phenomenon of filling in the blanks is why I think horoscopes and Tarot cards are fascinating. They make general pronouncements, and our brains figures out how to adapt those pronouncements to our own life. “You will take a journey” can be interpreted as a physical journey (business trip or vacation) or emotional journey or spiritual journey. But our brains flip through the possibilities and decides on an appropriate interpretation, and all we can remember later is how well the predictions matched our life, when it’s our brain that did the matching (see the sci-fi book Code of the Lifemaker for some scams that psychics use along these lines). I enjoy looking at horoscopes and Tarot cards precisely because they’re fuzzy - by observing the interpretations I make, I can find out what my brain is concerned with.
I think it’s also interesting that when we don’t know something, we tend to assume whatever works to best preserve our worldview. We think the best of our heroes, and the worst of our villains. We almost would prefer not to learn the “facts” rather than disrupt our images. I have definitely noticed myself being afraid to go talk to speakers I respect after talks, for fear that my idealized picture of their brilliance will have to be replaced by the mundane realization that they’re just people. And I’d be loath to watch a documentary on what a good person Karl Rove is (not that one exists, but you get the idea).
There’s something here, something about the connection between how our brains fill in the blanks, and how that reinforces our worldviews, but I can’t quite get a handle on it today. There’s the connection between horoscopes and de Zengotita’s discussion of the demise of heroes, but I can’t figure out how to generalize it. I started writing this post hoping that it would emerge in the writing, but it didn’t. Alas. I’ll poke on it more later, but I’ll put up what I have, and maybe somebody else will have an idea.
I’ve been meaning to read this for a while, and I added it to my last Amazon order, but didn’t get around to reading it until a few weeks ago. Jeff Hawkins was one of the driving forces behind Palm and Handspring, and now that he’s set for life, he’s indulging his childhood dreams of trying to understand the brain by starting the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, which is apparently now the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. In this book, he pulls together a layman’s overview of neuroscience literature that he finds interesting, and then espouses his own theory of how the brain (or at least the neocortex) works.
Here’s the basic idea of his theory. The neocortex is composed of pattern-recognition elements that are wired to remember events that occur together. It’s a hierarchy of pattern-recognition elements that breaks people’s perception of their environment into manageable chunks. In other words, when I look around the room, I don’t see ten million pixels; I see my desk, the computer, the wall, etc. Even if I look at my desk at different angles, my brain perceives it as a single object.
Another aspect of this is that these elements are learning new patterns all the time. When we learn to drive and first get out into traffic, it’s terrifying because our brains are overloaded trying to filter all of the myriad visual information around us. As we grow more used to the speed of traffic and learn what’s relevant, the visual load is automated and pushed down to a subconscious level of the hierarchy. The same holds true for recognizing positions on a gameboard. None of this is particularly novel (I espoused a similar idea in my cognitive subroutines proposal).
The novel bit is that Hawkins noticed that our brains do more than perceive - they are actually continually making predictions. Here’s an obvious example: when you’re scanning your home, you can notice when something is NOT there. How is that possible? It’s not there, so you can’t see it. But your brain has developed a model of what IS there, and is making a prediction for what it should see, and when something doesn’t match its prediction, it alerts the conscious mind that something is wrong. This makes a ton of sense. Our brain adapts to the familiar, but if something changes, it needs to turn all of its attention to understanding why there’s a discrepancy. I thought this insight alone made the whole book.
As an aside, this also explains why most people suck at estimating probabilities. Our brains are wired to remember the abnormal and outlandish because they break the routine patterns that we have learned. We don’t remember the 99% of the time when things go as we expect them to, because it’s all handled subconsciously. So we significantly overestimate outlandish risks because they break the pattern and come to our conscious attention.
Another discussion that I liked was Hawkins’s description of “invariant representations” (which I allude to in my post on localized generalities). Basically, because the neocortex is hierarchical and each level is always making predictions, each level can notify the level below it what it should be looking for. In other words, if one level keeps track of things in my office, it can notify the level below it that it should be looking for a desk, and that it should figure out how to interpret the raw sensory input in such a way that it looks like a desk.
As another aside, this also explains why we often see what we expect to see. Our entire sensory system is designed around the principle that it should adapt its interpretation of raw sensory data to match what the levels above it think it should be seeing. This applies not only to physical things like desks, but also when we see patterns in random data, or “interpret” data in such a way as to support our point of view. Our brains are wired that way.
I thought the book was decent. The predictive aspect of the brain and the discussion of localized generalities were “Oh, wow” moments, as I immediately saw how they filled in gaps in some of my theories. Most of the rest of the book was an explanation where he handwaves how the current understanding of the neocortex can support his theory. There’s some minorly interesting stuff in there about how the various neocortical layers are connected in a way that might be hierarchical in the way he suggests, but that’s mostly of relevance to the neuroscience geeks.
I’m mostly kicking myself after reading it, though. I was moving along the same lines with my cognitive subroutines theory, but I was a couple years too late (as well as lacking any sort of intellectual rigor). And I’ve already discussed how my localized generalities post was the same idea as the “invariant representations”, without the neuroscientific backing. So I’ve got some good ideas; I just need to develop them, and do the legwork to support them more fully. In my copious free time.
P.S. Speaking of which, wow, that was quite a lull in posting for me. It’s been crazy. My company is trying to finish up projects for two different clients before Thanksgiving, so I’m spending a lot of energy there. I had the conference in LA a few weekends ago. Last weekend was a company outing to Monterey. There’s all sorts of other social stuff going on. So on the few nights that I’ve had at home alone, I’ve been so exhausted that I have just collapsed comatose onto the couch to watch TV rather than blogging. But I wanted to get up the CellKey prototype pictures tonight, and then figured I should clear out the backlog of book reviews that has built up. I actually finished all of these books a few weeks ago (and then spent last week catching up on my backlog of The Economist), but they’ve just been sitting on my desk since then.
One thing that I noticed in the comments on my “designing for the collective” post was that I have been using Latour’s term “collective” in an extremely fuzzy way, where I change what I mean by it depending on the point I’m trying to make. This got me thinking as to whether this was an appropriate thing to do or not. Problems in communication are often due to imprecision of language, and I was wondering whether my lack of clarity was allowing me to avoid or ignore problems with my line of thought.
After tossing this around for a while, I realized that one of the issues is that “collective” is an extremely general term. Even as Latour used it, it can refer to a wide array of organizations. And yet there was meaning to be extracted from this general term, as he found ways to adapt it to specific situations that he constructed and discussed.
My theory of the moment is that generalizations are useful in part because they are somewhat vague on specifics. They can be adapted to the needs of the local situation. Admittedly, I’m biased since I tend to be a deductive thinker. But let’s consider the extreme opposite case, somebody who observes all of the details around them, but can’t separate the underlying commonalities from those details. They would not recognize that a traffic light is a traffic light whether it’s aligned vertically or horizontally. They would think that different fonts represented different languages. I’m being silly for the sake of argument, but you get the idea. Looking for the underlying general principles in specific situations means throwing away some of the specific details. In the case of traffic lights, it’s the colors and order of the lights that matter, not the orientation. In fonts, it’s the general shape of letters, not the specific details of serifs.
The really brilliant people, the deep thinkers, are the ones who are able to identify useful separations between the general and the specific. They can extract generalizations that apply to a variety of situations that had been heretofore thought completely separate. I’ve discussed the power of theories that apply across different areas before. It’s important to remember that such generalizations are only mental tools. They are not necessarily “right” or “wrong”, because they are both - they are “right” in the sense that they unify observations across several disparate situations, but “wrong” in the sense that they might not apply exactly in any of those particular situations. So they should be judged on whether they are useful or not.
Too many people adopt an all-or-nothing approach to generalizations of this type. In the “all” case, they take the results of the generalization and apply them indiscriminately without regard to specific examples. Prejudices are a good example, where the person will ignore the evidence in front of them in favor of their prejudice.
In the “nothing” case, they think the theory is completely useless because it does not explain all of the details; a lot of critiques of evolution fall along these lines, trying to disprove just one element of evolution (from carbon dating to the fossil record), then standing back and saying “If that one thing is wrong, then the whole thing must be bogus”. Of course, their disproof is often faulty, but that’s another rant.
The true use is somewhere in between, because generalizations are tools. They may not apply in all situations. The user has to take responsibility and decide whether they are appropriate or not, and if they use them, to adapt them to the local situation. This adaptation is like the premise of “Web 2.0″, taking the general tool and building a local adaptation. All of the details might not be right, but the general principle may provide insight that is not apparent from the observations of the specific situation. And it can work the other way - the specifics can help inform revisions of the generalization. One analogy I came up with is that it’s like being under a good manager, one who outlines the overall goals of the project, but leaves it to the employees to figure out how to accomplish those goals using their skills. The relationship works both ways - general goals flowing down, specific plans flowing up - to achieve success.
So this is my theory of why I think some of my posts and theories are sloppy in their language. I am trying to get to general principles and sometimes let the details slip. One of the things I need to work on is to try to figure out how to apply some of my theories to specific situations, going from a descriptive mode to a prescriptive mode. But this idea of the general being adapted to the local is a powerful one that I want to continue exploring.
P.S. In an amusing coincidence, I had sketched out the ideas in this post the morning before I read the “invariant representations” section of On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, which are much the same idea. He’s coming at it from a neuroscience perspective, I’m coming at it from the realm of ideas, but it’s the same idea (finding general representations and applying them to specific situations). So, as usual, that was both satisfying (because my ideas aren’t totally crackpot) and disheartening (he’s already published). I should have read the book long ago - my cognitive subroutines posts are pretty congruent to his theory of intelligence. More coming when I finish it and write a review.
As previously noted, I’m reading Paul Dourish’s book, Where the Action Is, in which he explores the branch of philosophy called phenomenology as a possible theoretical basis for embodied interaction. In particular, he mentions the work of Heidegger, about which I know nothing but a couple brief summaries I have read. But the concept which I want to address today is Heidegger’s exploration of equipment use, in which he divided equipment into “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand”. As Dourish explains:
These are ways, Heidegger explains, that we encounter the world and act through it. As an example, consider the mouse connected to my computer. Much of the time, I act through the mouse; the mouse is an extension of my hand as I select objects, operate menus, and so forth. The mouse is, in Heidegger’s terms, ready-to-hand. Sometimes, however, such as when I reach the edge of the mousepad and cannot move the mouse further, my orientation toward the mouse changes. Now, I become conscious of the mouse mediating my action, precisely because of the fact that it has been interrupted. The mouse becomes the object of my attention as I pick it up and move it back to the center of the mousepad. When I act on the mouse in this way, being mindful of it as an object of my activity, the mouse is present-at-hand. (p.109)
We’re all familiar with this concept. When we pick up a hammer and hit a nail, we’re not thinking about the hammer, we’re thinking about the task of hitting the nail. The hammer is invisible to our conscious thought; it has been absorbed into our extended self (Me++ explores similar ideas).
Dourish uses these philosophical concepts as a way to build a theoretical basis for designing embodied interaction. He talks about a bunch of different things, which I’ll explore more when I do a formal review, but for now I’m going to restrict the discussion to understanding how and why different forms of interaction can morph from “present-at-hand” to “ready-to-hand”, from visible to invisible, from outside my personal collective to inside.
While reading later in the book, it occurred to me that one of the keys, if not the key, to this transition is feedback. I am a tremendous believer in the power of feedback to effect changes in the world. It’s something I see everywhere, from the importance of aligning company processes with goals in Built to Last, to advocating using the feedback of others to change oneself.
How is it relevant in this particular situation? I believe that consistent and reliable feedback is necessary before an object can transition to the “ready-to-hand” state. If something is acting as an extension of oneself, it can not have an identity in its own right. It must behave exactly as one expects in response to one’s actions. If it doesn’t, if it starts behaving in an unexpected fashion, then the tenuous connection that has “coupled” it to one’s consciousness is broken, and the “ready-to-hand” status is lost. Dourish’s example of the mouse that reaches the edge of the mousepad is a good example of this transition. When the mouse is “ready-to-hand”, I move it up and the cursor goes up, so after a few moments, the mouse has disappeared from my consciousness, because when I think up, the cursor goes up. It is only when the feedback is unexpected, when I think up, and the cursor does not go up because the mouse has hit the edge, that the connection is broken.
Dourish mentions feedback in passing a few times, but I think it is central to this particular issue. Of course, I haven’t finished the book yet, so it may yet make a more prominent appearance. But that’s why I’m writing this now, so I can feel all clever if it does.
This connection of feedback with making things “ready-to-hand”, making things disappear from one’s consciousness as they are absorbed into an extension of oneself has some interesting consequences. For instance, it ties in readily with this post on cognitive trust, where I say “as we learn to trust and respect [a coworker], we can learn to call upon them with little more overhead than we do a subroutine in our own head” - our coworker has become reliable enough in our eyes that they essentially become “ready-to-hand”.
I noticed this recently in my own life, actually. In my previous jobs, I was always in direct contact with my “customers”, because I was writing prototype software for my coworkers’ use. I didn’t worry too much about specification requirements or software process, because if I started coding and I ran into an ambiguity about what they wanted, I’d turn around in my chair and go “Hey, how do you want this to work?”. At my current job, however, I am at least two steps removed from the customer. The customer talks to the president of the company, and the president talks to us. The feedback loop is much longer because if there are any questions, it has to be relayed to the president, who then has to take it to the customer when she gets a chance, etc. So I’m starting to learn that I need to be much more proactive about clarifying requirements and specifications as early as possible in the software design process. At my old job, I hadn’t even been aware of how much I relied on the instantly accessible nature of my coworkers; they had been “ready-to-hand”, used without thinking. Now that the feedback has become much more distant, my link to the customer has been broken and I am aware of the customer’s existence as being “present-at-hand”, an entity in their own right.
I think this mutual dependency between tight feedback loops and the “ready-to-hand” status of something (or someone) is something to be aware of in design. Certainly one of the things that makes software so hated is that feedback is often inconsistent and reliable. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. And yet with our computers, we often repeat the same action over and over… and get different results. We don’t know what makes the software work. We develop elaborate incantations to invoke the blessings of the software gods (”Oh, I know that if I press this button, then call this from this menu, and then press F3, the report works, but if you do it the other way, it crashes”).
This actually ties into Lucy Suchman’s book as well, where she talks about patterns of conversation. One thing she mentions is that when we are talking to somebody, we assume that they are offering appropriate feedback to us. She cites a particularly thought-provoking study where they had students talking to a “psychiatrist” through a computer screen, but were only allowed to ask the “psychiatrist” yes or no questions. Of course, the “psychiatrist” was a program that randomly answered yes or no without any understanding of the questions. And yet the students were able to extract useful information from the conversation, hypothesizing mental models for the “psychiatrist” that resolved even seemingly contradictory answers. Suchman uses this understanding to illustrate how important it is for software to present appropriate feedback in response to a user’s actions; if the software doesn’t, the user will construct an incorrect mental model which will be detrimental to future interactions with the software.
An ideal tool is one that is “ready-to-hand”, that disappears from consciousness. We should aspire to create and design such tools, whether we work in software or any other form of design. And that means being ever aware of the importance of consistent and useful feedback.
In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to think about how to connect the ideas in this post, where I describe how we have different groups of people in different contexts and often find them difficult to identify them outside of the context in which we know them, and this post, where I build off of the idea of cognitive subroutines and claim that “we are different people in different situations in a very real sense”. So while I was sitting last night in the chorus through the first three movements of Beethoven’s Ninth, I thought about it.
And the answer is pretty obvious. If we are actually different people in different contexts, then of course it’s difficult for us to identify people from a given context when we’re in a different one. We’re not the same person.
Let me take a step back here and reconstruct my meaning for those who may not have been following along for months. I have this notion of cognitive subroutines (which I also came up with during a concert oddly enough), which is that our brain identifies patterns that we perform often and creates a “subroutine” that will let us quickly call that pattern. These patterns encompass both physical activities like learning to spike a volleyball and mental activities like stereotypes and mental models. A followup post suggested that these subroutines were like computers in another way, establishing the importance of context:
They have a certain set of inputs which defines their behavior, much like a function prototype defines the inputs for a computer function. 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. In other words, these cognitive subroutines are called in an event-driven fashion based on incoming stimuli.
From there, we got to the idea of identity as context, where if the way we react changes based on our environment, then we are different people in different environments. The set of brain patterns/cognitive subroutines that get activated change. So the people I recognize in my chorus context are tied in with the environment of being in rehearsal, sitting in Davies Hall. When I see them out and about (or on BART), they are not processed by the same set of routines, so I fail to identify them immediately. My internal processor thrashes, and eventually loads the right context, but it takes time. (Wow, and if I wanted to get ubergnurdly, I’d start speculating about caching here, but I won’t).
So, having resolved that particular connection, and still being in only the second movement of the Ninth (we don’t sing until the fourth and final movement), I continued doing some exploration work. In particular, I started thinking about the second question I brought up in yesterday’s post - what’s the connection of all of this stuff to the Latour-ian madness I’ve been going on about? In particular, I wanted to connect the idea of cognitive subroutines with the idea of a personal, internal collective. I came up with a rough idea, so I’m throwing it out there for further refinement.
Cognitive subroutines are reactions that have been embedded and institutionalized into the collective. In the Latour process, collectives are exposed to new unknown stimuli, and either reject them or figure out a way to incorporate them into the collective. My theory of the moment is that one way such stimuli can be incorporated is by prescribing a standard way of responding to them; in other words, developing a cognitive subroutine. From then on, the collective will respond consistently when exposed to that now-known stimuli.
I think it’s a good start, because it brings the cognitive subroutines back out of the subconscious and puts them up for the discussion inherent in Latour’s model. We may have an ingrained reaction, but when we are exposed to new stimuli or when we discover unexpected consequences of our already constructed responses (in the same way that asbestos was handled by the collective in Latour’s book), we can examine the reaction and decide to change it. It gives us the responsibility for the consequences of our actions, even when they’ve been built into our subconscious. And it forces us to strive towards self-awareness as the best defense against complacency, as discussed in the comments on this post.
I think that captures the idea as I worked it out last night. Let me know if I make any sense. Tomorrow I’ll try to finish up another post that’s been half-written for a while, which ties into the ideas of mental models and classification systems.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering why I’m not posting much, as usual, it’s been busy. New job still keeping me hopping, this week and next week are concerts weeks with the Ninth (concert reviews forthcoming in a sec), plus ultimate frisbee on Mondays, and occasionally I like to relax, unforgivable as that may be. The car has still been behaving - could it actually be fixed?
After the disjointedness of my last post, it’s probably worth going to check out the comments, because I think I clarified some of what I was thinking with the help of my commenters. What I want to talk about today is how we use classification systems, and more broadly, mental models.
Let’s start with the fundamental assumptions I’m making: that there are a myriad of classification systems available to us, and that none of them is the One True Way, and that each of them has advantages and disadvantages. Given those assumptions, how do we decide which one to use at any given time? It’s a matter of finding the right fit between the task we are trying to accomplish and a classification system that will streamline that task. To use a non-classification-system analogy, neither Cartesian nor polar coordinates is “right”, but each system has its uses; when you are dealing with a linear problem, Cartesian coordinates work better, but for trigonometric problems, polar coordinates are far easier.
I made this point in the last post, but it’s worth restating: Classification systems are a cognitive tool. Like any tool, there are appropriate and inappropriate uses. Being aware of the limitations of our tools is an important aspect of mastering them. In particular, the main limitation is that any classification system is going to leave us with blind spots (as a side note, while re-reading this, I just realized this also ties in with the filtered world views post). When a form asks us to classify our ethnicity, we are reduced to one of a handful of options, and any sort of complexity is going to be glossed over and lost to the system. And, of course, any information about ourselves that is not related to ethnicity will also be lost. Looking at a population based on the results of that form will give us a very distorted view.
And the same is true of any other classification system. Each one introduces simplifications for the sake of making the data more manageable. So what are the advantages of these simplifications? By making the data more manageable, they can make trends more evident, allowing us to develop generalizable theories about the data. As most of my readers are scientists of one form or another, they are familiar with the feeling of finally hitting upon the right data representation, and everything just falling into place in our model. It happens in programming as well; with the right data structure, programming becomes much easier, whereas with the wrong one, every task becomes a kludge.
Given the ways in which data models and classification systems can streamline our solutions, the importance of choosing the right one when beginning a task becomes evident. I’d like to imagine that we can train ourselves to be like a master craftsperson in his/her workshop, surveying the tools available to them, and choosing just the right tool for the job. And I think most of us do this at a subconscious level, as described in Sources of Power, where Klein describes a “Recognition-Primed Decision Model”, wherein people develop subconscious models of situations, and react accordingly. In time-critical situations, we may have to depend on our subconscious to do the right thing. But that can also lead to critical errors, as our subconscious models blind us to other inputs that would lead us to choose different actions; Klein describes several such breakdowns in the book, including the case of the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iran Air commercial passenger plane.
Such breakdowns indicate to me that being able to consciously examine our mental models and assumptions should lead to better decisions (it can also lead to paralysis-by-analysis, but I’m going to ignore that for now). It’s important to be able to step back for a second, and ask whether there are alternative ways of looking at the task before us. This requires a certain flexibility of thinking, of being willing to admit that there might be other options available, and that one might have chosen less-than-optimally before. But far too many decisions are made once, possibly based on an incorrect data model, and never re-examined.
I wonder how we can train ourselves to become better at this skill of looking at problems with fresh eyes. I think it all comes back to my continued campaign for people to be self-aware, aware of the choices they make, the blinders they put on, the ways in which their mental models may torque their perceptions, etc. Since I continually struggle with my own self-awareness, I’m not sure why I think I have any authority on advocating it to others, but that’s another story.
Thinking on why I think I have made strides in self-awareness, here are some pointers. I have surrounded myself with good friends who are intelligent and observant. I have learned to trust their opinions and to listen to their advice, for the most part. I am still working on learning to open up and ask for help, and to be secure enough to admit when I am wrong, but that’s part of it as well. I need to do a better job of cultivating a diverse set of friends to be exposed to a wider variety of viewpoints. Hrm. There’s a lot more thinking to be done on this topic. I’ll pick it up another time. I’d love to hear any thoughts any readers have.
