Non-Zero Correlations, or, Robert Wright Rips Me Off

Robert Wright's Non-Zero is a very readable non-fiction book that uses game theory to look at our history (social and biological). He traces a through-line in these fields that seems to show a positive direction to our development, defined by (Wright's term) "non-zero-sumness": meaning essentially, both parties in an exchange benefit (a win-win situation). As social and biological complexity grows, non-zero-sumness grows with it - enlarging our "circle of empathy" (first family, then friends- expanding globally).
Below is an excerpt from one of the final chapters, reflecting on the effects (and future possibilities) that the internet could play in this area of non-zero-sumness:

"...But it is evidence that, as global interdependence thickens, long-distance amity can in principle grow even in the absence of external enmity. And it's something to build on. There is no telling what it could mean as technology keeps advancing; as the World Wide Web goes broad bandwidth, so that two people anywhere can meet and chat virtually, visually (perhaps someday assisted, where necessary, by accurate automated translation). One can well imagine, as the Internet nurtures more and more communities of interest, true friendships more and more crossing the most dangerous fault lines - boundaries of religion, of nationality, of ethnicity, of culture.

The common interests that support these friendships needn't be high in gravitas. They can range from stopping ozone depletion to preserving Gaelic folklore to stamp collecting to playing online chess. The main thing is that they be far-flung and cross-cutting. Maybe this is the most ambitious realistic hope for the future expansion of amity - a world in which just about everyone holds allegiance to enough different groups, with enough different kinds of people, so that plain old-fashioned bigotry would entail discomfiting cognitive dissonance. It isn't that everyone will love everyone, but rather that everyone will like enough different kinds of people to make hating any given type problematic...Maybe the world of tomorrow will be a collage of noospheres with enough overlap to vastly complicate the geography of hatred. It wouldn't be 'Point Omega', but it would be progress." pg. 328

If this isn't basically the same argument I put out in part three of this post, regarding the bayonet-loving, vengeful bigot on a houseboat in the Atlantic, I don't know what is. Just kiddin' about the ripping-off part. Wrights got brains like I've got ill-advised purchases. Just kiddin' about the just kiddin part. Just kiddin' about the just kiddin about the just kiddin part.

"Man Cave" Found in Boston

A secret nook was uncovered on December 14th, 2009 at a Boston (Somerville) Commuter Rail station:

An investigation led to a strange discovery hidden in a storage room: a makeshift entertainment center, including three televisions, two DVD players, one VHS player, surround-sound speakers, a video game system, and DVDs, some of them pornographic, a transportation official said yesterday.

The equipment, slyly camouflaged within the commuter rail’s massive Somerville maintenance facility, even had an illegal cable television connection that came through a 1,000-foot cable...“This was very much concealed among maintenance parts and equipment,’’ said the official.

An anomalous event? Perhaps NOT...From the August 3rd, 2009 New Yorker:

Which brings us to Albany, site of the great political tragicomedy of the summer, and last week’s news that state police had raided an illicit rec room in the Capitol complex. The Inspector General’s office, in a press release announcing the discovery, called it a “man cave,” conjuring up images of a dimly lit basement with stained upholstery and an overabundance of electronics. Using tarps, a couple of janitorial workers on the night shift had cordoned off a corner of a state-owned parking garage, which was stocked with sofas, fridges, a TV, and the latest copy of Cannabis Culture. There, while on the clock, they allegedly watched DVDs of “M*A*S*H,” rolled joints, and napped.

 Both Man Caves eerily similar. How to account for their existence? The New Yorker article also included one gentleman's postulation:

The architect Andrés Duany identified a budding crisis in American life: the decline of “male space,” which he defined as zones “where the enthusiasms of Super Bowl day are unchecked year-round,” and where “the men are not factually corrected when they exaggerate.” The den, with its knotty-pine panelling and mounted moose heads, used to suffice, before it was subjected to a cultural makeover and emerged as the “family room,” relegating Dad to the garage.

 Is there a crisis of lost #manspace in modern America? -or just the North-East of it?

With All This Information, Does Theory Even Matter Anymore?

Žižek tells me a story about a friend of his going to meet Noam Chomsky, the "most influential public intellectual" in America. "My friend told me Chomsky said something very sad. He said that today we don't need theory. All we need to do is tell people, empirically, what is going on. Here, I violently disagree: facts are facts, and they are precious, but they can work in this way or that. Facts alone are not enough. You have to change the ideological background."

From The New Statesman interview with Slavoj Zizek

Because of the amount of information out there available/accessable on the internet, what's important is no longer the information but the filtering systems we use to sort and understand it.

Our human filtering systems are our theories, how we choose to see the world. These we cannot help but process information and events through. Even before we consciously process a decision or opinion, the concept has become laden with associations and past-opinions held about it.

This is why it theory is important, contrary to Chomsky above (or Brian Eno here in Prospect Magazine). The vast "synergy of information" (Eno's term) does open innumerable possibilities, but the frame for us to process and view it though can't be made of the facts as well --you can't define something by using itself.

Two posts in two days! My god! 































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How to Improvise: Be Obvious

There are two things to do to improvise: generate, and justify. Both of these things are instinctual (i.e., our brain can do this for us without us forcing it to do so). First, the improvised item must be generated ("improvised"), and then justified within the context of the scene/environment. Here's how to do both (though you already know how to?):

As to the generating, (and the expectation of having to create something "original"): Keith Johnstone writes in Impro:

"The improviser has to realize that the more obvious he is, the more original he appears. I constantly point out how much the audience like someone who is direct, and how they always laugh with pleasure at a really 'obvious' idea. Ordinary people asked to improvise will search for some 'original' idea because they want to be thought clever...
'What's for supper?' a bad improviser will desperately try to think up something original...he'll finally drag up some idea like 'fried mermaid.' If he'd just said 'fish' the audience would have been delighted. No two people are exactly alike, and the more obvious an improviser is, the more himself he appears."

The mind can immediately generate a response for what something (imaginary) is - it is more one's desire to appear imaginative (or the fear that an immediate, subconscious response will negatively reflect on oneself) that slows its expression. Our imagination, then, (*without prompting*) is a near-infinite generator of what something could be. Johnstone again:

"...I explain that I'm not interested in what they did, but how their minds worked. I say that either they can put their hand out, and see what it closes on; or else they can think first, deciding what they'll pick up, and then do the mime [of the object]. If they're worried about failing, then they'll have to think first; if they're being playful, then they can allow their hand to make its own decision."

Johnstone goes on to show this at work - having a student repeatedly take something from an imaginary box, continually changing the context so they can't plan what (potentially 'clever thing') to take next. J-stones:

"If I make people produce object after object, then very likely they'll stop bothering to think first, and just swing along being mildly interested in what their hands select. Here's a sequence that was filmed...I said:
Keith: 'Put your hand into an imaginary box. What do you take out?'
'A cricket ball.'
'Take something else out.'
'Another cricket ball.'
'Unscrew it. What's inside?'
'A medallion.'
'What's written on it?'
'Christmas 1948.'
'Put both hands in. What have you got?'
'A box.'
'What's written on it?'
'"Export only."'
'Open it and take something out.'
'A pair of rubber corsets.'
'Put your hands in the far corners of the box. What have you got?'
'Two lobsters.'
'Leave them. Take out a handful of something.'
'Dust.'
'Feel about in it.'
'A pearl.'
'Taste it.' What's it taste of?'
'Pear drops.'
Take something off a shelf.'
'A shoe.'
'What size?'
'Eleven.'
'Reach for something behind you.'
He laughs.
'What is it?'
'A breast...'
Notice that I'm helping him to fantasise by continually changing the 'set' (i.e. the category) of the questions."

Note this student is not planning these things, but they are being supplied instinctually. I've done this same exercise as a director and the results are the same - eventually the mind supplies its own items without them being consciously planned or strictly supervised.
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If that's the Generating, then where does its counterpart Justifying come in?
We'll call this instinct The Justifier, which responds to the question "why" of "why do i have this thing/how do i justify it's presence?" This is instinctual in a scene because it's the same one we use in everyday life to situate ourselves.*

This Justifying instinct can be nearly as responsive and usable as the generating, particularly following Johnstone's creed of "Be Obvious! Don't try to be clever" -
if in a scene you partner asks why you're holding takeout, the "obvious" answer is because you just got from a restaurant. No clever "an alien from Saturn gave me this doggie bag, its got soup recipes in it."

'The obvious' serves as a much stabler, stronger platform to build the scene on. The takeout's presence could lead to revelation of having eaten with someone, which could cause tension upon returning home, which could lead to something all the more dramatic. An interesting scene has been created with minimal stress or 'i have to be clever!' pressure on the part of the performers.
-
That is all that is needed to improvise - generating, and justifying. Johnstone also recommends the use of 'reincorporation' - using what's already been introduced in the scene - tobuild a story and find an ending. This, combined with Johnstone's concept of Status, mentioned in this previous post, are additional concepts that can be plugged into the base that's created by the generating and the justifying. The fact that improvising is simply what our brain does on its own, means that anyone can improvise. It's not about your funniness, cleverness, or brainpower - all it takes is awareness and using what you have already.

*The Justifier is, I believe, our innate pattern-searching and pattern-recognition mental instincts. "Why would i have this?" is searching for a pattern, and Johnstone's 'Be Obvious' injunction reminds one to be comfortable picking the obvious pattern.

Embracing and Harnessing Randomness and the Unknown

This morsel was too tasty not to repost...a summation of Nassim Nicolas Taleb's ideas from The Black Swan (and his thought overall) that has been clarified though much thought and rewritings of the concepts in different mediums and articles. The article is more than worth reading in its whole.

Let us go one step further. It is high time to recognize that we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. But we don't know it. We truly live under the illusion of order believing that planning and forecasting are possible. We are scared of the random, yet we live from its fruits. We are so scared of the random that we create disciplines that try to make sense of the past--but we ultimately fail to understand it, just as we fail to see the future.

The current discourse in economics, for example, is antiquated. American undirected free-enterprise works because it aggressively allows us to capture the randomness of the environment--the cheap Black Swans. This works not just because of competition, and even less because of material incentives. Neither the followers of Adam Smith nor those of Karl Marx seem to be conscious of the prevalence and effect of wild randomness. They are too bathed in enlightenment-style cause-and-effect and cannot accept that skills and payoffs may have nothing to do with one another. Nor can they swallow the argument that it is not necessarily the better technology that wins, but rather, the luckiest one. And, sadly, even those who accept this fundamental uncertainty often fail to see that it is a good thing.

Random tinkering is the path to success. And fortunately, we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing it--thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, confused scientists and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system.

We need more tinkering: Uninhibited, aggressive, proud tinkering. We need to make our own luck. We can be scared and worried about the future, or we can look at it as a collection of happy surprises that lie outside the path of our imagination.

(clicker for even larger..ooo)

Decisionless Moments

I was involved in 2 decisionless moments today (both with groups) got me thinkin. The first was in a lunch that was being thrown, at work, for a coworker who was getting married this weekend. There were several minutes of sitting in a group, looking at the heaping pile of food on the table. People were hungry, people were able to (socially acceptably) eat, but most noticeably was that everyone was aware of the potential action that could happen at any moment, we were all waiting for something to give and we can start eating. Eventually someone said something about digging in and then the eating started (rapidly).

Other time was driving back to work at the end of lunch- at a busy 4-way stop - myself (i'm a car) and two other cars pulled into the intersection, each of us stopping evenly at the same the distance from each other --- forming a near-perfect square of space from each other (a square? with three cars, brett?). After the briefest of moments i continued straight through the square and out the intersection.

All anybody wanted in either of these situations was somebody to make decision. None of the drivers (the other two cars had drivers, i'm a car, remember) had particularly strong feelings about what the decision was, just for that moment, that pause, we (they, --still a car here) wanted SOMEBODY to make a decision so that we could continue the pattern/learned activity that we had been doing/ knew how to do - driving, in this case [<-said british="" detective="" font="" in="" voice="">

At the lunch, nobody cared enough to decide to say something about digging in (until someone did).

Starting from square 1: When it comes to not-everyday/less intuitive decisions, its only when we care about something enough that we commit ourselves to making a deliberate decision about it; only when our I-give-an-shit level crosses a certain threshold, let's say.

Both of these aimless, decisionless situations i was in today made me wonder how much time we spend waiting for a decision to be made, rather than waiting to make a decision ourselves. i think it's easier to conceive of ourselves individually, with high awareness (of "why" we made that choice) when it comes to the decisions that we make and the things we do day in day out. The situations I was in gave a sort of look-behind-the-curtain at groups of individuals (including myself) who were content to - preferred to? -be buffeted around by the decisions of others or the group. It was when a decision of significance was having to be made that tensions raised/awarenesses increased - once someone (anyone!) made A decision, we knew what to do then: OK, now can drive || OK, now can eat.
If i had to throw a hula-hoop in the dark i'd say there's something to this as far as our actual tendencies when interacting with each other, compared to the idea of the rational, unaffected, individual decision-maker.

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as i've written this post i've doubted more the whole concept, the whole idea, but i had started the writing of it so had to finish it. also felt better about it towards the end

Trilling

Not this, Lionel Trilling...from here

...An even more provocative version of this theme, "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture," was delivered as a lecture in 1955...here Trilling posed the issue as biology versus culture: biology representing the "given," the immutability of man's nature; culture, the forces of society ("civilization," as Freud put it) that strove to alter and overcome biology[...]Unlike most of his listeners, who regarded any idea of a "given" as "reactionary," Trilling insisted that the givenness of our biological condition was, in fact, "liberating"--liberating man from a culture that would otherwise be absolute and omnipotent. "Somewhere in the child, somewhere in the adult, there is a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason that culture cannot reach and that reserves the right, which sooner or later it will exercise, to judge the culture and resist and revise it."

Nice. Trilling again (from article):

"Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination."

Truffles

Truffles Lead to Food Abuse - "Once people felt their goals were met, they tended to reverse their behaviors."