The imbalance of Evil

On this day, many things:
1148
Louis VII of France lays siege to Damascus during the Second Crusade.
1411
Battle of Harlaw, one of the bloodiest battles in Scotland, takes place.
1487
Citizens of Leeuwarden, Netherlands strike against ban on foreign beer.
1534
French explorer Jacques Cartier plants a cross on the Gaspé Peninsula and takes possession of the territory in the name of Francis I of France.
1567
Mary, Queen of Scots, is forced to abdicate and is replaced by her 1-year-old son James VI.
1715
A Spanish treasure fleet of 10 ships under Admiral Ubilla leaves Havana, Cuba for Spain. Seven days later, 9 of them sink in a storm off the coast of Florida. A few centuries later, treasure is salvaged from these wrecks.
1847
After 17 months of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City. Celebrations of this event include the Pioneer Day Utah state holiday and the Days of '47 Parade.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of Kernstown – Confederate General Jubal Anderson Early defeats Union troops led by General George Crook in an effort to keep them out of the Shenandoah Valley.
1901
O. Henry is released from prison in Austin, Texas after serving three years for embezzlement from a bank.
1911
Hiram Bingham III re-discovers Machu Picchu, “the Lost City of the Incas”.
1915
The passenger ship S.S. Eastland capsizes while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew are killed in the largest loss of life disaster from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes.
1922
The draft of The British Mandate of Palestine was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations; and which came into effect on 26 September 1923. The beginning of the end.
1923
The Treaty of Lausanne, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in World War I.
1929
The Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it is first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928 by most leading world powers). This is truly precious.
1943
World War II: Operation Gomorrah begins: British and Canadian aeroplanes bomb Hamburg by night, those of the Americans by day. By the end of the operation in November, 9,000 tons of explosives will have killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed 280,000 buildings.
1969
Apollo program: Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
1974
Watergate scandal: the United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
And, finally, 2009
The MV Arctic Sea, reportedly carrying a cargo of timber, is allegedly hijacked in the North Sea by pirates, but much speculation remains as to the actual cargo and events. An astonishing story.

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Thailand launched airstrikes against Cambodian military targets along their long-disputed border, escalating tensions between the Southeast Asian neighbors.

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The Pirates' second-round pick Angel Cervantes commits to UCLA instead of signing an MLB contract.

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A Belgian regulator has upheld a complaint against a ticket inspector for saying “bonjour” in a Flemish-speaking area.

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The general practitioners know less and less about almost everything, and the specialists know more and more about almost nothing.

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The imbalance of Evil

Mr. Kohberger shows we are stalked by the bell curve. But the curve is only an estimate of how typical one thing is among many.

Freud dominated medical classrooms and offices for decades. His teachings saturated the culture. People's lives were impacted, if not changed. Research was conducted, and therapies were applied. People changed their view of their lives, their experiences, their friends, and their families. 

Lives and actions became indirect and symbolic. 

And derivative. Life and growth lost any hope of independence. The best we poor souls could hope for was to make peace with our inevitable tendencies and conflicts. We were all to spend our lives at a table negotiating a treaty with demons.

And then Freud, and it, melted away.

Royal wrote about Freud recently. "Freud, who wrote influential tomes like The Future of an Illusion (i.e., religion) and Civilization and Its Discontents (everyday sadness), was almost blind to the rise of the greatest evil of his time: Nazism. He only survived by fleeing from Vienna to England just before the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany. His awakening came too late to save his sisters, all in their eighties; one died in Auschwitz, another at Theresienstadt, and two at Treblinka. Even then, the master of the human psyche didn’t really take the full measure of the most obvious, real-world evil in his day. "

Freud viewed evil as some manifestation of the unconscious mind's repressed instincts. Or something.

After fleeing the continent, apparently, he wrote a letter from the safety of London saying that he expected the Catholic Church would sort out the Nazi problem.

One would have expected more. You would think a guy who imagined the basics of relationships was partly due to infant incestuous homicidal lust could do better. But the creative genius in Freud did not recognize evil when he saw it. Perhaps he felt it represented some subterranean thought, some deep-water prowler in us that needed to be talked out.

What it needed was war, death, and atomic weapons to bring the evil to despair and surrender. That seems to be a bit much for an unresolved psychological imbalance.

And a philosophy that does not recognize evil probably needs rethinking.

Sowell, Child Psychologist

The only outliers in this culture without a platform are the homeless.


                             Sowell, Child Psychologist

From the City Journal on the remarkable Thomas Sowell

Sowell’s work at times does reflect episodes from his life—often painful ones. The most striking example concerns his son, John Sowell. John was born healthy and seemingly normal, but as time passed, it became clear that something was wrong. Well past the age when most kids begin speaking in full sentences, John would scarcely utter a word. To outsiders, and even to Sowell’s then-wife, it seemed a clear case of mental disability. Yet Sowell wasn’t convinced. Speech problems aside, John was unusually bright: he could pick child locks before he could walk, for instance. And he had a prodigious memory: he once knocked over a chessboard mid-game and put all the pieces back in their former places. Given these underlying signs of intelligence, his failure to grasp even the simplest words was all the more mystifying. Yet hope came when, around age four, John slowly started to speak, and final vindication came when he grew up to become a well-adjusted young man.

Decades later, after his son had graduated from Stanford, Sowell set out to explain the puzzle. The result: the first academic study ever to explore the phenomenon of late-talking children who are unusually bright but not autistic. Drawing on this original research, as well as anecdotes, data, and history, Sowell wrote two books: Late-Talking Children, in 1997; and The Einstein Syndrome, in 2001. The second—named after history’s most famous late talker—won praise from Steven Pinker as “an invaluable contribution to human knowledge.” But apart from child-psychology specialists like Pinker, and parents of late talkers, these books received little public notice. Yet they represent a remarkable achievement: in an era of high academic specialization, it’s vanishingly rare for a scholar to break new ground in a field in which he has no formal training.

"Lateral Thinking"

In chess, why does white move first?


                               "Lateral Thinking"

Edward de Bono, a Maltese physician and medical researcher turned his back on academia to become a student of creativity. de Bono’s "Lateral Thinking" is a classic in unexplained psychology. A lot of soft science have imaginative writers. In his first book he attacked traditional logic, identifying it as the enemy of insight and invention:

By far the greatest amount of scientific effort is directed towards the logical enlargement of some accepted hole … Yet great new ideas and great scientific advances have often come about through people ignoring the hole … This hole-hopping is rare because the process of education … is designed to make people appreciate the holes that have been dug by them … Many great discoverers like Faraday had no formal education at all, and others like Darwin or Clerk Maxwell had insufficient to curb their originality.

To demonstrate the limitations of orthodox hole-digging, de Bono proposed this dilemma. Whether it reveals a different thinking process is debatable but it is a clever little story with a folktale feel. But this is what all stories are: insights from another lens. Whether it classifies as a philosophy....

A London merchant owes a large sum to a moneylender, and is in danger of being imprisoned for his debts. The moneylender, who has designs on the merchant’s daughter, suggests a bet. He will take two pebbles from his garden path, one black and one white, and place them in an empty money-bag. The young woman will pick out one of the pebbles. Black: she’ll become the moneylender’s wife, and the debt will be cancelled. White: she’ll stay with her father, and the debt will still be cancelled. Reluctantly, father and daughter accept the bet. However, as they stand in the moneylender’s garden, the young woman notices that the two pebbles that he picks up, placing them quickly in the money-bag, are both black. What should the young woman do? How can she think her way out of her predicament?

According to de Bono, logic demands that she either refuses to take a pebble, or take the black pebble and sacrifice herself. What this situation requires, he maintains, is the wide beam of lateral thinking, which will shift attention from the pebble that is selected to the one left behind. Through lateral thinking, the woman will discover that she has a counter-ruse at hand. Pick a pebble from the bag, fumble and drop it on the path, and while cursing her clumsiness, declare ‘Never mind – if you look into the bag, you will be able to tell which pebble I took.’

The Prisoner's Dilemma

One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.--Sowell


The WSJ does not like Trump but they had a scathing editorial on the illegality of the impeachment circus, comparing it to "a bill of attainder."

I was happy about the Astros. Hudson looked like the guy the Pirates gave up on.

The cost of implementing a wealth tax and annually assessing assets often costs more than the tax actually raises in revenue. In France, for instance, the administration cost was double the revenue raised. As such, it's not surprising that the country dropped its wealth tax in 2018.

“The public discourse on global warming has little in common with the standards of scientific discourse. Rather, it is part of political discourse where comments are made to secure the political base and frighten the opposition rather than to illuminate issues. In political discourse, information is to be ‘spun’ to reinforce pre-existing beliefs, and to discourage opposition.”--Lindzen

No. 361: On April 25, 2003 the crew of a Chinese fishing boat noticed a periscope drifting above the surface of the water. The fishermen notified the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) which promptly dispatched two vessels to investigate to find all of the crew members of the submarine dead from suffocation.


                                   The Prisoner's Dilemma

Wikipedia has a good explanation of the "prisoner's dilemma." Try as I might, this always seems more complex a problem than as it is presented.

"The prisoner's dilemma is a standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely rational individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher while working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and named it "prisoner's dilemma", presenting it as follows:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:

• If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison
• If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve three years in prison (and vice versa)
• If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve one year in prison (on the lesser charge).

It is implied that the prisoners will have no opportunity to reward or punish their partner other than the prison sentences they get and that their decision will not affect their reputation in the future. Because betraying a partner offers a greater reward than cooperating with them, all purely rational self-interested prisoners will betray the other, meaning the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them to betray each other.  The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads both of the prisoners to betray when they would get a better reward if they both kept silent. In reality, humans display a systemic bias towards cooperative behavior in this and similar games despite what is predicted by simple models of "rational" self-interested action.^"

Remedial Ed

There are some seriously unhappy people out there. Fortunately for them, schools have recognized the truth of life and are willing and able to explain their problems to them: Specifically, one is either a victim or an oppressor. And it's a lot easier than the Id and the Super ego.

"When I came to UC-Berkeley and took the ethnic studies class, I realized the inequalities I saw all my life were the result of blatant racism…The ethnic studies class I took made me realize that even though I identified as a person of color, my life was influenced by many representations of white supremacy, two of the most significant ones being colorism and heteronormativity…. Additionally, ethnic studies made me realize that white supremacy is not only reflected through colorism but also through heteronormativity. These expectations of sexuality were an imposition by settler colonialists.

I realized that my parent’s expectations of me being heterosexual and feminine could be traced back to the heteronormativity imposed by white settlers. All my life, I had been colonized… I will no longer allow white supremacy to control my life and will continue to be a critic of its different manifestations. I will continue to decolonize myself by changing old attitudes and habits. Ultimately, ethnic studies fundamentally changed the way I view the world. It empowered me by showing me how I was being oppressed and how I was oppressing others."

---From UC-Berkeley student Lupita Lua’s op-ed “Color Blind-ed“

Forer, Horoscopes and You

In 1949 the psychologist Bertram Forer asked his students in Los Angeles to fill out what he told them was a personality test, the ‘Diagnostic Interest Blank’. When Forer handed back the ‘results’, he told his students that they were based on the tests. In fact, he had culled 13 broad-brush statements from published horoscopes, including such devastating insights as ‘You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage’ and ‘At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.’ 

Every student was asked to assess the test’s accuracy on a scale of 0 to 5, where 5 indicated perfection. Their average score, astonishingly, was 4.26. The psychologist Christopher French, who researches paranormal beliefs at Goldsmiths, University of London says that most of the 13 personality descriptions in Forer’s original test are ‘two-headed statements that describe the human condition – and that’s why they resonate so much’. If they don’t describe you, French delightedly tells his own students, ‘you’re probably a psychopath’.

But the universality of the statements is only part of the point: Forer’s experiment demonstrated that the statements were not perceived as universal but as highly individual. (from McConnachie)

Jaynes, Nagel and Consciousness

The origin of consciousness has become quite the topic. How does "consciousness" evolve? In Mind and Cosmos Thomas Nagel gets positively mystical about it (and earned the enmity of many of his determinist friends). Julian Jaynes had a different view.


Julian Jaynes published only one book, in 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which tells the story of how mankind learned to think. The American Journal of Psychiatry called Jaynes “as startling as Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams.” Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness—“a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can”—as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist. The field of psychology, he wrote, was little more than “bad poetry disguised as science.” In 1988, when Life asked Jaynes and several other thinkers to comment on the meaning of life, he responded that he had no answer. “Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself,” he said. “Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.” He concluded that consciousness had no location in the brain. Instead, it was a function of language. “There is no such thing as a complete consciousness,” he writes. “All about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past.”
He divides thinking up with the cutting edge the self-conscious mind studying itself. This was the tipping point. Everything earlier was a hallucination where problems and conflicts could not be resolved and defaulted into confusion like magic and religion.

He has a cultist following, especially with the evolution of the computer. There are small societies devoted to him. But his insights, while interesting but vague, are somewhat sad. And it showed. He became an alcoholic. He held the same job, never gaining tenure, for the rest of his career. He lived alone in a single room on Princeton’s campus, a bachelor all his life. He gave lectures around the country but complained that there was “something wearing about them, as if I should have to try to interest anyone.”

Limits From Without and Within

This is from Jim Leff's Blog, a very interesting observation on limits:


"In the style of yoga I practice, doing a handstand without the support of a wall is considered very difficult. I've been practicing for 30 years, and only two of my toes actually touch the wall, but if I push off, I get very teetery and soon fall over.

There's a different school of yoga where handstand without a wall is considered easy...so even beginners manage it with no problem!

My style of yoga once taught that headstand (not handstand) without a wall was easy. And so I've always found it easy. In the past few years, however, they've started teaching that it's hard, so very few experienced students can do it. People marvel at my wall-less headstand ability!

None of this makes sense to most people. It's incompatible with how we model human learning to work. But this is absolutely how it works.

It all does make sense to me, however. This has become my model, and it feels natural to me. Yet, even so, I absolutely can't hold a handstand without a wall. Mentally understanding it all doesn't change anything."

Reward Limits

Behavioral scientists divide tasks--job or school--into two categories. An algorithmic task has a set of established behaviors for success. There is a sequence, or algorithm, for it. A heuristic task has no algorithm, no prescribed pattern of behavior. Often described as "trial and error," the heuristic task must be worked through, experimented with, and solved. Algorithmic work follows successful pathways, heuristic work requires innovation. Something new.

 

This academic sounding separation is becoming more important and practical. Most jobs in the United States up until the last decades have been algorithmic. Production lines, clerking, warehousing--most jobs had predictable assignments and definable paths. But the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work. It may be that the nature of modern work has changed but an easier explanation is that  routine work can be out sourced or automated while artistic, empathic, non-routine work generally cannot.

 

Which brings us to Sam Glucksberg. His work--from the 1960's--is summarized in Daniel Pink's book "Drive: Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us." Glucksberg, a psychologist now at Princeton University, took two groups and asked them to solve a puzzle. The first group was told they were being timed to establish a norm for how long the puzzle solving should take. The second group was offered incentives. The fastest 25% would get five dollars, the fastest puzzle solver would get twenty.

 

The the incentivized group took nearly three and a half minutes longer than the control group to solve the puzzle. Longer.

 

There are a lot of explanations for this but one possibility is significant: The creative forces necessary to solve the puzzle were blunted and narrowed by the demand of time created by the incentive. Rewards are helpful when the path is straight but limiting when creativity is demanded. Focus eliminates breadth of thinking, expansiveness.

 

Now, just for fun, how would you classify the American education process, algorithmic or heuristic?

Can the Filter Be Uncreative?

The test:
The following triplet, 2-4-6, follows a rule.
Give a triplet exhibiting the same rule.

The usual answer:
8-10-12, on the assumption the rule is ascending even numbers.

BUT;
There are many answers here. In this particular example, the rule was ascending numbers so the triplet 7-9-11 or, better, 7-8-10, is a more accurate description of the triplet rule.

This is the "confirmation bias" of British psychologist Peter Wason. Rather than science working by falsifying hypotheses as Karl Popper said, we collect evidence in support of an argument.

The history of evaluation also carries a tremendous directional pressure. For example, ulcer disease investigation for years had certain preconceived notions reinforced by the greatest minds in medicine. The idea of infection was never purposely excluded, it was just crowded out by consensus.

Now imagine an organization trying to evaluate something on which its very existence depends. Or a government program. Or a pharmaceutical firm evaluating a drug of its own creation.

Worse, imagine a well meaning scientist with a political bent evaluating data.

The Real Gender Politics

A recent Gallop Poll on public support of nuclear power showed some interesting things. General American public support for nuclear power stood at 57% in 1994; 57% in 2011 before Fukushima ( March 11, 2011, the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986) and is 57% in 2012. But there was a fascinating gender difference: Men overwhelmingly support the use of nuclear power 72% to 27% while women oppose using nuclear power, 51% to 42%.

One can assume the cross sections are similar, the education and backgrounds equal, the information available the same. How could there be such a huge difference? Is it a question of how one assesses risk? Or maybe risk tolerance? Is it a confidence in or a technical understanding of science or its application?

Here are two subsets in species homo sapien with wide variation in the assessment of a very important question.

Certainly there is no "right answer" here, only how people balance and weigh. The most we can expect is objectivity and honesty. But it does make one wonder about the implications of the hope for "consensus."

The Smiling Ape

We are not thinking beings who feel, nor are we feeling beings who think. We are a complex mesh of thinking moderated by emotion-driven values--or so says David Brooks in his new book.

This notion seems a part of a growing consensus among physiologist and thinkers as to how the human brain works, a consensus that inherently raises suspicion because there is nothing science hates more than momentum. None the less it is gratifying to see and hear concepts in neuroscience that confute last century's vision of humans as blind, reactionary beings in thrall to subconscious conflicts that each individual must untwist and resolve before they can become functional. (Happiness is a further away land.)

Thus far integration with others, especially from infancy, seems to be key. And this continues with growth, the emotional reward of integration flowering in the rational decision-making of adolescence and adulthood. It offers great reward--and challenges. The virtual office--distant, separated and filtered--is unrewarding and must be solved. A caring, involved teacher might overcome a distant or absent parent -- or the damage may be already, irretrevably done. The remarkably personable politician can succeed and advance without any management ability at all. The soldier can fight and sacrifice with his comrades completely absorbed in his unit without regard to its objective.

So families thrive, the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, at Thermopylae the Persians never had a chance, the Japanese have their nation leveled and there is no looting, the White Rabbit goes twenty-four hours under Nazi torture before giving up his friends.

Certainly there are downsides. Unengaged children grow up as shards in a cultural web, angry mobs show up at some vague target, the less rational have little to modulate. But at least there may be a positive interaction between the rational and emotional. At least that honing of the human mind over the last 500,000 years may have created a sharper point that has driven, and been driven, through history without the burdens of self destructive conflicts and doubt and with values that can make us proud.

At least we may have a chance.