E.O. Wilson has a story in the New Yorker! About ants! It’s not great as literature, per se, but it is quite interesting. Imagine ant fanfic: that’s basically what this is. Like a preening middle schooler, he tries to show off all the fun little things he knows about how ants live. That’s not meant as too much of a knock, because maybe that’s the point: the story’s not about immersing yourself in the characters so much as about conveying knowledge about the characters. Read it and learn.
Well it’s that time of the year again – time to predict the decline of America. The two currently making the rounds are in The Atlantic and Foreign Policy. Everyone’s worrying about how China’s going to eclipse the USA soon, and the other members of BIC aren’t far behind. Of course, what should really matter is GDP per capita, where we’re realistically doing pretty darn well – though I still think these statistics are misleading (maybe a better calculation is here?). But in terms of world power, we’re unerringly headed down a much more multipolar path – especially if Europe can ever get its act together.
But as the Atlantic article points out, in a lot of ways we’re already doing pretty poorly. Take infrastructure, for instance; driving in San Diego often feels like you’re in a warzone with all the potholes, and the rest of California isn’t doing much better. Of course, part of this has to do with the time they were built. Go look at China’s shiny new highways in sixty years! But that’s also the problem – our infrastructure is old, and we’re not doing enough about it. And everything we need to do – improve education, stop discouraging immigration, improve our transit system – is being held back by conservative fears. Sometimes people have a hard time realizing they’re not as great as they think they are.
But nothing ever stays the same; everyone likes to talk about how people said the same things about Japan twenty years ago, and look how that turned out. Of course, they’re assuming that we’re not going to be the ones making the mistake this time, but on the broader point they’re right. The future is never how you predict it will be. There’s one thing that will remake the world in ways that we can’t imagine, and no one’s thinking about the consequences of it: artificial intelligence.
No, I’m not talking about the talking robot, super-intelligent type of AI. I’m talking about the kind we have now. The boring kind. The kind that can beat grandmasters at chess, clean your carpets, and find answers to your questions. How many people are really aware of how large of a paradigm shift this will be? What happens when we can automate intelligent work? Plenty of financial services are already done by computer – and can dominate slower, human-based stock investing techniques. There’s plenty of chatter about news aggregators that can read clips of information on the internet and actually write news stories – so long news journalists. People will still clearly be employed in the future, my point is that things are going to change so dramatically, how can we begin to predict what will be happening in the world in the next fifty years?
I like population numbers. I like maps. I like empires. I like history. Here’s a list of the largest empires throughout history, with all sorts of fancy stats. Things you’ll learn:
- In the fifth century BC, the Persian empire had 44% of the world’s population
- In 1870, the British Empire accounted for 35.9% of the world’s GDP, followed closely by America’s 35% in 1945
- Nazi Germany’s economy was roughly half the size of Britain’s in 1938
- India in the second century BC had a larger population than China in the 1100s
Also, from a different source I found out that in 1913, Europe was more populated than China and it combined with its former colonies in North America made up 33% of the world’s population.
Michel Gondry really makes my feet itch. Road trips are always an adventure – even when you’re bored out of your mind, you’re in a new place, visiting new towns, finding a new state of mind.
This essay about the destruction of old borders in Europe, and the creation of new ones, is both fascinating and captures the feel of the continent spot-on. I hope it becomes a longer essay, there’s rather a lot to say about where Europe’s heading and how that will change the sense of identity for many, many people:
Yet, while attending several celebratory conferences over the last few months about the revolutions of 1989, I found myself thinking about the new walls that have risen within and around Europe. The same Schengen agreements that create a zone of free internal movement for all but a few EU members require the construction and defense of a single external European frontier. This is as it must be; but with the result that someone from beyond the zone, from Belarus or from Turkey, may find herself refused entry. The difference between not needing a passport at all and needing a special visa is considerable, and creates a distance that can be psychologically and politically damaging.
Europe itself seems much further from the United States than it did twenty years ago. In western Europe, the election of Obama has undone some of the feeling of estrangement that resulted from the American decision to invade Iraq; while in some east European countries, such as Poland, Obama sometimes takes the blame for the weakened American position in world affairs. In the meantime European and American society have become increasingly incomprehensible to one another. Standards of living in several west and central European countries are now much better than in America. I did not expect twenty years ago that poor Poland could become so quickly comparable to the United States in its infant mortality rates and life expectancy. Its downtowns feel safer and its public transportation is better. Although Poles and other east Europeans are more likely than West Europeans to repeat the rhetoric of economic libertarianism, they accept the fundamentals of the welfare state that in America are now so contested. It is no easier to explain American debates over health care reform in Warsaw than in Vienna.
Yet all is far from well within Europe. In much of central and eastern Europe, nationalist populism—whether in Russia, Poland, Hungary, or Austria—is more resonant than twenty years ago. Throughout the continent, pedagogical systems have remained national, or, in such cases as Russia and Ukraine, become so. Young people in almost every European school system learn versions of history more appropriate for the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.
Here’s an interesting Financial Times article on the ecology of stray dogs in Moscow:
The dogs divide into four types, he says, which are determined by their character, how they forage for food, their level of socialisation to people and the ecological niche they inhabit.
Those that remain most comfortable with people Poyarkov calls “guard dogs”. Their territories tend to be garages, warehouses, hospitals and other fenced-in institutions, and they develop ties to the security guards from whom they receive food and whom they regard as masters. I’ve seen them in my neighbourhood near the front gate to the Central Clinical Hospital for Civil Aviation. When I pass on the other side with my dog they cross the street towards us, barking loudly.
“The second stage of becoming wild is where the dog is socialised to people in general, but not personally,” says Poyarkov. “These are the beggars and they are excellent psychologists.” He gives as an example a dog that appears to be dozing as throngs of people walk past, but who rears his head when an easy target comes into view: “The dog will come to a little old lady, start smiling and wagging his tail, and sure enough, he’ll get food.” These dogs not only smell who is carrying something tasty, but sense who will stop and feed them.
The beggars live in relatively small packs and are subordinate to leaders. If a dog is intelligent but occupies a low rank and does not get enough to eat, he will separate from the pack frequently to look for food. If he sees other dogs begging, he will watch and learn.
The third group comprises dogs that are somewhat socialised to people, but whose social interaction is directed almost exclusively towards other strays. Their main strategy for acquiring food is gathering scraps from the streets and the many open rubbish bins. During the Soviet period, the pickings were slim, which limited their population (as did a government policy of catching and killing them). But as Russia began to prosper in the post-Soviet years, official efforts to cull them fell away and, at the same time, many more choice offerings appeared in the bins. The strays flourished.
The last of Poyarkov’s groups are the wild dogs. “There are dogs living in the city that are not socialised to people. They know people, but view them as dangerous. Their range is extremely broad, and they are predators. They catch mice, rats and the occasional cat. They live in the city, but as a rule near industrial complexes, or in wooded parks. They are nocturnal and walk about when there are fewer people on the streets.”
It’s an interesting story of what happens when a domesticated animal is, in a sense, redomesticated, or undomesticated. These dogs have also learned how to use the subway system to get from place to place. Surely that is a novel behavior you wouldn’t expect from animal psychology? What’s interesting is that not all the dogs have learned how to do this but, presumably, are able to pass on the ability to other dogs who follow them. Do we have a little animal culture here?
To win the hand of Michal, King Saul’s daughter, the young David must prove his manliness by performing posthumous circumcision on a hundred slain Philistines. The episode recalls the ancient Egyptian practice of keeping dead enemies’ manly appendages as trophies of war. In a memorable putdown elsewhere, the Prophet Ezekiel derides Egyptians as priapic fornicators whose “emissions are like those of horses” (Ezk. 23:20).
In court we swear to tell the truth with a hand placed on the Bible. But in the book itself, Jacob, nearing death in Egypt, asks Joseph to swear an oath not to bury him there by “put[ting] your hand under my thigh” (Gen. 47:29). Earlier in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, who touches “the hollow of his [Jacob’s] thigh” (32:25). “Thigh” happens to be a biblical euphemism for male genitalia; it’s from Jacob’s “thigh” or “loins” that his numerous offspring sprang. The practice of swearing an oath while touching one’s or someone else’s testicles was common in the ancient Near East (Abraham also orders a servant to do just that in Genesis 24:2). Its linguistic memory survives in our word “testify”—testis being the Latin both for “witness” and the male generative gland.
…Taken together, the Bible advocates a rather curious set of “family values.” Take incest. Adam and Eve’s sons and daughters couldn’t have perpetuated the human race without it. And while early Israelites prized virginity, they also considered it a mark of hospitality to offer their wives and daughters to male guests for complimentary sexual services, just as it was a father’s right to sell his daughter to be a “maid servant” (Ex. 21:7).
In the famous story of Sodom, Lot, the nephew of Abraham, volunteers his virgin daughters to placate randy Sodomites seeking to “know” his male guests—two angels in disguise, as it happens. Later, while he’s in a drunken stupor sheltering in a cave after God’s destruction of Sodom, Lot is raped by these same daughters to “preserve the seed of our father” (Gen. 19:32).
Edge.org’s question of the year this year was a little boring, sadly. It is normally a chance to hear interesting people give interesting answers to interesting questions. This year is about the Internet. Boo, navel-gazing. As always, there’s still some interesting answers. Here’s one that I particularly liked by Steven Quartz:
Consider, for example, our tendency to reduce human thought to a few distinct processes. We’ve been doing this for a long time: Plato divided the mind into three parts, as did Freud. Today, many psychologists divide the mind into two (as Plato observed, you need at least two parts to account for mental conflict, as in that between reason and emotion). These dual-systems views distinguish between automatic and unconscious intuitive processes and slower and deliberative cognitive ones. This is appealing, but it suffers from considerable anomalies. Deliberative, reflective cognition has long been the normative standard for complex decision-making — the subject of decision theory and microeconomics. Recent evidence, however, suggests that unconscious processes may actually be better at solving complex problems.
Based on a misunderstanding of its capacity, our attention to normative deliberative decision-making probably contributed to a lot of bad decision-making. As attention turns increasingly to these unconscious, automatic processes, it is unlikely that they can be pigeon-holed into a dual-systems view. Theoretical neuroscience offers an alternative model with 3 distinct systems, a Pavlovian, a Habit, and a Goal-Directed system, each capable of behavioral control. Arguably, this provides a better understanding of human decision-making — the habit system may guide us to our daily Starbucks fix (even if we no longer like it), while the Pavlovian system may cause us to choose a pastry once there despite our goal of losing weight. But this too likely severely under-estimates the number of systems that constitute thought. If a confederacy of systems constitute thought, is their number closer to 4 or 400? I don’t think we have much basis today for answering one way or another.
Consider also the tendency to treat thought as a logic system. The canonical model of cognitive science views thought as a process involving mental representations and rules for manipulating those representations (a language of thought). These rules are typically thought of as a logic, which allows various inferences to be made and allows thought to be systematic (i.e., rational).
I tend to think that we have a further problem. Since we have ‘consciousness’ and ‘free will’, people have this feeling that we should be able to remember everything we do, and have reasons for doing it. Of course, neuroscientists know that every memory is a poor reconstruction of something that happened in the past; and further, we know that we perform actions all the time that are outside of our conscious perception, and sometimes even inaccessible to our conscious mind. Think of all those times someone mumbles a few words, then refuses to admit that they said anything at all when questioned. How weird is it that a perfectly healthy person can say something, and not remember it at all?
What it comes down to is the fact that most of our intuitions about how we work and reason and live are wrong, and even though we have some evidence of how different processing streams work in the brain, we’re a long, long way off from understanding how we think.
Here’s why I’ll end up 5′2″ by the time I die:
Degeneration with age interferes with the normal process of regaining height, and by 60 a loss of two inches is not uncommon.
There are 23 jellylike intervertebral disks that act as shock absorbers between the spinal vertebrae, Dr. Härtl said. The disks, which are as much as 88 percent water, are compressed during the day as standing, moving and vibration squeeze out fluid. Then at night, when the body is flat and at rest, the disks reabsorb fluid like sponges.
As we get older, degenerative processes interfere with reabsorption, Dr. Härtl said. Blood supply and circulation diminish, and the disk material stiffens.
Evidently, vowels that you form in the back of your mouth (like the o in “two”) make people think of big sizes; people associate vowels formed in the front of your mouth with small sizes. At least, they do in the US. Does this mean that each culture has specific linguistic hacks built into it? How much of this is biology, and how much culture? Man, it really makes economics seem deficient, huh? Here’s some basic vowelconomics research:
In one experiment, researchers told consumers the regular and sale prices of a product, asked them to repeat the sale price to themselves, and then, a few minutes later, told them to estimate the size of the discount in percentage terms. Products with “small-sounding” sale prices (like $2.33) seemed like better deals than products with “big-sounding” sales prices (like $2.22).
In another experiment, the researchers used a pair of sale prices — $7.88, which sounds “big” in English, and $7.01, which sounds “small” — but are the other way around in Chinese. Chinese and English speakers had opposite perceptions of the products’ relative value.
Ever since the days of Cesare Beccaria, the 18th-century philosopher and death-penalty opponent, classical deterrence theorists had focused on credibly threatening individuals; Kennedy’s first innovation was to focus on increasing the legitimacy of law enforcement in the eyes of groups. “The legitimacy element has risen in my mind from being an important element of the strategy to the most important element,” Kennedy told me. Convinced that the best way to increase legitimacy was to enlist what he calls the “community’s moral voice,” Kennedy set out to deter the most dangerous young gang members by persuading their friends and neighbors to pressure them into obeying the law.
America has one of the largest prison populations in the world. How can we reduce it? This article offers several ideas, focusing mostly on courts being less capricious and more respectful. What I like the most, though, is focusing on groups of people. Humans are such social animals, conforming to social pressures, I would think this would be target A.
[Update: Of course, using groups can backfire:
While social cues grease the wheels of interaction in subtle ways, they can also create hazards. In a gripping chapter on disasters, Vedantam describes the snap decisions made by employees of one brokerage firm in the south tower of the World Trade Center in the crucial minutes after the first plane hit on Sept. 11. The group on the 89th floor reached the consensus that they were not in danger — and perished. The group on the 88th floor ran for the stairs and survived. While everyone felt they were making autonomous decisions, the decisions were really made by the group. “Group decisions provide us with a signal,” Vedantam writes. “The details about individuals — who did what, who felt what, who thought what — is noise.” He cites another analysis, of response to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, in which two different groups escaped at different rates. What mattered wasn’t what floor the groups were on but how large they were. “Groups seek to develop a shared narrative as an explanation for what is happening,” Vedantam writes. “The larger the group, the longer it took to arrive at a consensus.” His conclusion? “People can undermine themselves — and reduce the overall survival rate — by trying to help one another.”
The point is that group pressure is very powerful - which I suppose the quote above illustrates.]
I have vague recollections of seeing a video where someone’s skull was wide open while scientists prodded it with some instrument of torture. Poke here, the person moves their mouth uncontrollably; poke there and they see everything in red. I was blown away; it was far and away one of the coolest things I’d ever seen, and is almost certainly one of the main reasons I got interested in neuroscience. I saw it in fourth or fifth grade, so I had recently been worrying that it was something of a fake. Nope! I just found out that it was Dr. Wilder Penfield who performed these experiments. He would operate on people with severe epilepsy and attempt to destroy the cells that caused the disease. Before he did that, however, he’d stimulate their brains with an electrode and ask them what they felt. Classic neuroscience right there, folks.
So watch these poor saps get their brains prodded! It is one of the coolest things you’ll ever watch.
Joakim Dahlqvist does a lot of cool stuff, but look at this: Aristide and Podalida, fascinatingly complicated worlds, drawn with ink. You pan through and zoom in on these landscapes with a google maps-type interface…give it a look (and his other stuff too). It’s like Where’s Waldo, but for grown-ups.
This cartoon describing the difference between Huxley’s A Brave New World and Orwell’s 1984 makes me rethink how I feel about them. It’s eerie how little of Orwell’s vision has come to pass – despite, or perhaps because of, how much it scares us and has entered into our consciousness – and how much of Huxley’s vision has. The precursor to both of these books, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We has shades of both; Orwell and Huxley took different threads and ran with them in different directions. His book is the worst prediction (a mix between 1984, A Brave New World, and THX 1138), but possibly worth rereading to mine for ideas. As we proceed into the future, maybe the question is – how much of a dystopia is A Brave New World, really?
Or have I just not read that book in a really, really long time?
