Category: Uncategorized

Posting policy, that is.

This whole blogposting thing has become increasingly slackadesical, and I’m the first to admit that. Mainly because the poverty of posting means there’s no-one else to do the admitting. The ridiculous thing is I have a stack of things to talk about, but they just get furled up or store away in a text file (normally a never-to-be-sent email, which I find functions quite nicely as an on-the go appendable list).

My attempt at a remedy is this: one post every three days, while offering comment free linkage on other days. That is, a one-liner like “Sebastian really hits it with this post: {link}” or “This story describes some interesting biotech developments, but there is some sinister goings on: {link}. Copyright of biological materials is going too far”. If I am in danger of spilling over into more, even a paragraph, I’ll finish it off and shelve it for the next post day, and replace with a link instead (hell, there’s millions of them). Link days may have more than one link, and may quote where appropriate. The Glenn Reynolds model of blogging, I guess. Items that ‘only’ get a link may later get upgraded to a post, in that I think of some interesting angle that I want to add. This counts as a post, so two link days to come. Goodies every day, with a personal touch as regular as I can make it.

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*With apologies to Stephen Sondheim

This is so good I just have to reproduce it verbatim::

Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

by Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David

from Journal of Personality & Social Psychology. 1999 Dec Vol 77(6) 1121-1134

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Hat tip to the ever-mocking John

This is me, sorta. Me of three years ago, so more or less me – less hair, more innocence, I imagine.

Julian Baggini talks about a phenomenon, here, which I imagine many people likely to read this have encountered, of forming substantive and functional relationships through the internet. By this I don’t mean on-line social forums like Friendster, Myspace and hi5 (although I’m not knocking them either – they seem fun, if a bit of a time drain, and if I were single I’m sure it would be an outlet for a bit of wishful thinking: a venezualan supermodel-jetski racer! And we’re connected through bobs mate tonys mate steves acquaintance tim. It’s onnnnnn. ). Dr B is remarking on the work and productive partnerships that can arise when people have never met, and seem all to the good for that. As he puts it

… online collaborations can be supremely efficient. The qualities I identified in my co-author, Peter S Fosl, which made him a good collaborator, were all manifest in our email communications and in his work. He was knowledgeable, clear, flexible, enthusiastic about communicating ideas and responsive to suggestions and advice. What more did I need to know? Whether he liked his lattes skinny?

I can cheerfully second this, as it’s precisely how my involvement with Mind Hacks began. I only knew Tom from his website: assured, stylish and highly informative. When, after some purely pixel-based interaction, he offered me the chance to get involved in a project he was in, I jumped at the chance. If I had known that he is, like me, a guy who wears t-shirts and eats at Thai veggy buffets, I would have recoiled in horror. Well, I wouldn’t, but for the job at hand (contributing to a neuroscience fun-guide) person-to-person contact was unneccessary for me to make the judgments. Having said that, if a professional relationship was the main, formal game, then meeting in person translates to those bonus levels on Mario games that are just as vital as the game itself.

While writing this, I began to consider whether this argument holds for well-defined tasks like writing book sections according to a specified format, but not for open-ended development, like (say) free-forming the future of a fresh or neonatal project. Then I realised: hey, someone’s done some experimental work on this- and it’s me!

I exaggerate for gut-wrenchingly comic effect, of course. Brainstorming research from the 50’s onwards was shown that groups underperform relative to the sum of what they produce individually, both at producing ideas 1 and retrieving memory content 2, and don’t seem to produce emergent new memories. A common explanation for this is social loafing 3 the term coined for the free riding that occurs when responsibility is diffused amongst a variety of agents. A related issue is production blocking, where the delays people face before speaking may lead to them to forget their ideas, or supress them because they seem less relevant or original later. Often good intentions of facilitators of group discussions may compound this, by enforcing turn-taking or other systems that might in the interests of balance interfere with fluidity and hence output. (Of course, output may not be the most valued measure, and in some cases, such as a focus group it might make sense to privilege balance over prolificity.)

This dim view of mass brainstorming is tempered by findings that its negative effect attenuates when a dyad (group of two) is made up of good friends or partners 4; the explanation offered is that individuals have a ‘cognitive style’ that people can become familiar with, so when one is on a roll the other doesn’t interject, or can pick up and develop vague wavings into something genuinely useful. And if you send your mind a’thinking down this merry alley, the level of performance should be due not merely to the interactors but the interaction.

As the mind goes, so the research proposals follow, and a group of researchers 5 successfully eliminated the output shortfall produced by group colloboration by mediating their interaction through a computer-based file-sharing procedure. Through this participants were offered questions to which they could append comments; they could then view other comments and append comments to that. Production blocking was eliminated because one can immediately respond with ideas without interruption, and even though some degree of social loafing could still have been operating to impair performance, groups did better than the sum of the efforts of their members working alone, and increasingly so for larger groups. The ‘me’ bit of all this was some undergrad work I carried out extending this effect to collaborative memory, rather than ideas, and showing that two heads can be better than one, if they interact in this fashion. Not my idea, I was under the tutelage of John McCarthy, who I haven’t seen for ages but whose site confirms he is still doing fun stuff, which is actually pretty Mindhackish. Hmmm. Maychance I’ll give him a buzz sometime….

With good reason, other people have picked up the ball with this work and run with it.This paper, for example, details a computer environment in which people can contribute to solving or exploring questions, in a more sophisticated manner. And in a sense, we are all already converts to this perspective, no? Who can doubt that, for all the noise in amongst the signal, that the interated and interconnected debate you can find in a blog comment thread allows for the screening of useful ideas in a way that a face-to-face argument would rarely do? Putting aside the availability of such variety of viewpoints and information that the internet provides, there is a good case that it’s developing in such a way to structurally promote the flourishing of new ideas in a way that has never been universally achievable before.

Clearly I’m not bringing up anything new here, and I think Eldan,Tom and Matt would have a lot more to say about this, which I would love. I just felt like mapping out a geneology of the research that lines up with these changes in our information and interaction environment.

1 Lamm, H., Trommsdorff, G.(1973). Group versus individual performance on tasks requiring ideational proficiency (brainstorming): A review. European-Journal-of-Social-Psychology, 3(4), 361-388.

2 PR Meudell, P.R., Hitch, G.J., Kirby, P. (1992). Are two heads better than one? Experimental investigations of the social facilitation of memory. Applied Cognitive Psychology.

3 Steiner, I.D. (1972). Group process and productivity. Academic Press, New York.

4 Wegner,D.M., Erber, R., Raymond,P.(1991). Transactive memory in close relationships. Journal-of-Personality-and-Social-Psychology, 61(6), 923-929

5 Valacich,J.S., Dennis,A.R., Connolly, T.(1994). Idea generation in computer-based groups: A new ending to an old story. Organizational-Behavior-and-Human-Decision-Processes, 57(3), 448-467

This project here probably has some sputtering into their creme brulee, but the idea of compressing great works of philosophy whilst retaining the “in their own words” attraction of going to the originals is a wonderful thing. The pitch, itself compressed to it’s standout points is

There is no taking-part in the ‘Great Debate’ of Western civilisation, the debate about who we are, how we should be governed, how we think and how we ought to behave, without some familiarity with the, remarkably few, thinkers in whose language and idiom the talk is conducted….So, here are the most used, most quoted, the most given, sources of the West. The books that have defined the way the West thinks now, in their author’s own words, but condensed and abridged into something readable….it becomes possible to read the whole thing as a single narrative, as the story of Western Thought

The story of Western Thought in a month of lunchtimes? That’s got to be the ultimate democratisation of information. More power to us.

Go here to see my account of what Ian Penton-Voak has to say about Personality in the Face. It’s kind of fun.

I’m up on Mind Hacks now – my intro post is here, and I should be a creature feature on the site in the future. And, if you’re coming here from the site, then welcome and look around. And I know it’s a terrible design. That’s why Matt is a web guy, and I’m a neurosciency guy. Only Matt knows tons about neuroscience too. And Tom has a great looking site.

But they can’t do this, can they

[does intricate footshimmy]

Didn’t think so.

“Vote for the greatest cartoons”, C4 urges. Ok, I say, breezily. “Thanks – now we’ll do one of those annoying top 100 programs you hate so much!” Damn you, I snarl. Why didn’t you warn me before I wasted my time? “Actually, the page was clearly labelled to that effect, Alex.” Ah. yes. Well, at least it means I’ll be able to watch tons of clips of cartoons, rather than faded popstars talking about how it was a crazy time for everyone. “If you had a TV.” If I had a TV.

My (unranked) ten votes were for

• Akira – Obviously – broke anime from its ghetto in the West, and unprecedented in its scale and technical achievements anywhere. Just a wow piece of work.
  

• Battle of the Planets – Bizarre and totally of my youth, I wonder whether footage will be shown, as I suspect it is now nestled somewhere within my body cavity, shaping my future and making me walk a little funny.
  

• Dungeons & Dragons – Just because I still really, really want to find the Dungeons and Dragons ride – and for the end music. But seriously, it was a perfectly constructed quest comic, onscreen, every week.
  

• King of the Hill – For being so genuine, and so genuinely funny, that it makes the world a better place.
  

• Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies – With a catch-all like this, how could you not? You may have hated half the characters, but there was always one, right? I’m partial to a bit of Duck, myself.
  

• Powerpuff Girls – For being the perfect exemplar of nu-cartoon – a splash of kid-anime, a does of retro, sardonic, peppy and a-ok by me.
  

• The Ren and Stimpy Show – For being horrible genius.
  

• The Simpsons – I shouldn’t need to justify this.
  

• Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – Mainstream cartoons for adults? Would we even be asking these questions if RR hadn’t come along? Well, yes, but this sure smoothed the ride, a wonderful work of pizazz, imagination, and attention to both period and the medium. Acting to imaginary weasels as a hard boiled american private dick sent our Bob ‘oskins a bit loopy, which considering the cockney horror that Dick van Dyke inflicted in a similar format some 30-odd years before with no apparent damage seems mighty unfair.
  

• The Wind in the Willows – A bit of bias here, as my aunt wrote the screen-play, but this is a wonderful work – puppetry/stop motion rather than cartoon, and showing the power of those models to convey pathos, warmth and danger.

They have suggestions for what should be added, but this proves rather difficult for my floaty-lite memory; what to do but rehash childhood favorites, or list animes that ‘ought’ to be seen ad nauseum? I went for

• Cities of Gold
  

• Nightmare Before Christmas
  

• South Park the movie (They have the main series, but I would vote for this as a separate, splendiforous effort)
  

• The Raccoons
  

• I am not an animal (as much a cartoon as south park is, and truly twisted)

Any thoughts on obvious stuff I am missing? Clearly my cartoon archives need updating.

A very small part, alas.

This week, I have been mostly

• playing with Emacs, LaTeX and R; more fool me, I suppose, but the depth of my disillusionment with MSWord shows no signs of stopping, and with a XXX-page thesis to right over the next 10 months, now is the time to make the (free) plunge. Better earlier, but still. If this resonates with your inner spell-checker, then read this and muse (or see PDF here).
  

• Reading – I will have a fuller booklist when I hit my post-present stride, but for now I should commend
  

  Kukla, Andre (2001). Methods of theoretical psychology. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. UK / US

  for managing to set me straight about the flaws in induction, the lack of a rationale for preferring simpler theories and several other ‘smell the coffee’ moments without freaking me out in the process

  Baggini, Julian (2004). What’s It All About? GRANTA UK / US

  for cool analysis, warmly given, that reassures me that maybe I have, roughly, got it sort of, well, right…
  

• eating. Apparently, the new posh Christmas lunch is a turkey stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck stuffed with a pigeon stuffed with hundreds of scorpions. Ok, so not the last bit. Anyway, Sunday pm I knew what they were going through. Is it bad when you sweat gravy?

Speaking of anyway, I’m ditching the crisp cheeriness of December London in favour of heatless, foreboding Stockholm, realm of the ice-bears. I’ll catch y’all in ’05.

Harry’s Place links to a comment from a blog called Iraq the Model , outlining his general lack of contact with left-wing weblogs. Various people ponder the significance of this – is the state of the Iraqi people not of interest to the left?

I want to address why such an imbalance might be so, but should note that it may not be true, that is, it may not generalize. The blog in question has a linkslist which could be enough to send me away with a shudder on a bad day (I’m prepared to give anything a try, but some sites just reek of unpleasantness, and have too low a signal-noise ratio to be worth bothering with), and a cursory click through the archives encounters the tired conservative smear that if you criticize the war, you are betraying the memory of the dead troops . Maybe it’s generally of a better pallor than that, but it doesn’t augur well. Given people tend to link to birds of a feather (unless it’s for the purposes of derision), this may mean a whole lot of very little.

But let’s beg the question for the time being, and assume that the spectrum of politics (barring position on the war) of Iraqis that blog maps across left and right sensibilities. Why might we see more links from the right than the left?

Well, take me. I fall left, broadly speaking, and I don’t link to Iraqi blogs. In fact, I don’t warblog. Be happy that I don’t! My knowledge on the subject is not enough to produce interesting copy for you, my loyal readers reader. I’m interested in what goes on, and I try to follow it within my abilities, alongside manifold other world events.

Such a position isn’t really available to the good-faith pro-war blogger. Being pro-war impels one to be extensively involved in it, both during and the aftermath. Anything less would be both irresponsible and immoral; this applies to any major project – you wouldn’t install a funfair in a public area without seeing that it was desired and safe, and ensure that its impact was observed – but particularly one where the moral calculus involves justifying the killing of people. The onus doesn’t work quite the other way; much like religion, even the faithful must admit they are non-believers more often than not (if not, what’s your opinion on Chad, Guinea, Uzbekistan, Indonesia…the moons of Jupiter?). Hence there are many people who did not support the war, and for whom Iraq, though important, is one issue, not the issue.₁

As a consequence, this group (which includes myself) has no special desire to immerse itself in info about Iraq. Genuine news about the situation is going to be attended to, but Iraqi man on the street saying “today I felt safe, and a soldier was nice to me” isn’t information high on my premium. I have a stake in Iraq, as we all do in the long term, but I have a stake in a lot of other places, too. However, if I was pro-war then I would have far more staked in Iraq than on most other issues, and be hungry for confirming evidence of the arguments that led me to advocacy in the first place. Investment is asymmetrical between the pro and anti war camps, and seeing as the architects of the war were on the right, and the party most firmly behind it the Republicans, the pro-war population skews decidedly right (notwithstanding whether there are good left-wing reasons for supporting the war, as HP has argued). And as hits from these factions accrue, you’re going to see the predictable ingroup feeding frenzy in which big names cite a source and it trickles down to all the little fish. Iraqi blog X makes a comment that seems like it might undercut former candidate Kerry, Superblog links with a “heh, indeed! Kerry’s out of touch with the Iraqi people”, and X hits the reading lists of 50 foot soldiers.₂

So this putative imbalance doesn’t surprise me so very much, as the pro-war camp should be invested most in Iraq. Of course, in a perfect world, we’d all be fully informed about Iraq, and Sudan, and Kazakhstan. But we can’t, and there seems to be a sensible case for a difference in how we allocate our resources contingent on one’s stance toward the particular issues. Oh, that I could know it all about Iraq! But as Theodore Zeldin₃

said,

What to do with too much information is the great riddle of our time

And sadly, I’ve just added to that.

1 There is another section which I can’t account for: the anti-war brigade for whom Iraq IS the issue – the nemesis of the self-proclaimed pro warriors. Are they silent on the thoughts of the Iraqis? Could it be that they consider the musings of guys with websites secondary to general measures (deathcounts etc), and if so is this a shortcoming (ignoring personal testimony) or an advantage (a focus on the verified facts)? Or are there other sources that the Iraqiblogger/prowarblog axis simply doesn’t cover? I’m curious.

2 Furthermore, this may well form a positive feedback loop. If X gets a sudden influx of readers for saying something that gels with a core blog readership, lots of things happen. Cynically, they may feel that stance needs to be consolidated to maintain these readers, and to auger more recommendations. Emotionally, they are going to feel kinship with those people who are responding enthusiastically to what they wrote, which may lead to a genuine willingness to overstate similarities and minimize differences (your standard in-group/out-group process). Rationally, they may feel impelled to go back to those linking sites and check them out, thus being exposed to arguments, conceits and framing of issues that place them further in this camp. So one might imagine a centrist (or even centre-left) local blog-zone becoming ideologically gentrified due to special attention from the right end of the blogosphere. Now, that has to be a sentence no-one has written before. Combinatorial language system, I salute you! UPDATE: Aspects of this (mainly the first and perhaps second processes) go by the fantastic slogan of “Feeding the Beast”, as I have recently been reminded.

3 Thanks to Tom, Matt and the amazing Mind Hacks for orientating me to this quote in the sea of bits in which it swims.