The Great Abbreviators

Aldous Huxley wrote an extended new introduction to the 1958 edition of his Brave New World. It is worth reading in its entirety but the opening paragraphs are a great insight.

The soul of wit may become the very body of untruth. However elegant and memorable, brevity can never, in the nature of things, do justice to all the facts of a complex situation. On such a theme one can be brief only by omission and simplification. Omission and sim­plification help us to understand -- but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our compre­hension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formu­lated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

But life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything. In practice we are generally forced to choose between an unduly brief exposition and no exposition at all. Abbreviation is a necessary evil and the abbreviator's business is to make the best of a job which, though intrinsically bad, is still better than nothing. He must learn to simplify, but not to the point of falsification. He must learn to concentrate upon the essentials of a situation, but without ignor­ing too many of reality's qualifying side issues. In this way he may be able to tell, not indeed the whole truth (for the whole truth about almost any important sub­ject is incompatible with brevity), but considerably more than the dangerous quarter-truths and half-truths which have always been the current coin of thought.

With the dense complexity of our productive lives and the plethora of cheap informational fodder via the internet, brevity is at an ever greater premium.

I think we have a long ways to go to master the art of pertinent abbreviation, the reduction of the complex to its fewest elements without losing predictive value. The simple model is only useful to the extent that it provides easier access to an idea that is still useful in its simplified form.

I suspect that for this reason (difficulty of reducing complex ideas to simple models), that the more complex a society, the more important that there be a shared culture. That shared culture makes the rendering of complex ideas into still useful simple models much easier because of shared knowledge and values. Absent that shared orientation and knowledge, every step towards reduction requires discursive explanation, defeating the goal of simplification.

Is it then true that increased societal complexity must also be yoked to increased consistency within the culture? I have a suspicion that there is some feedback mechanism going on between productivity, complexity, and cultural homogeneity. Increased productivity is dependent on increased complexity and increased complexity is dependent on increased cultural consistency. Perhaps.

The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us

From Informing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

This was written 26 years ago in 1990, just before the global adoption of the internet. Some of it reads in a dated fashion and I think some of Postman's argument comes across as nannying ludditism. However, I think there is merit to the core of his argument and some of it is even more pertinent today than at the time.

Now, I think I can begin to get at this by telling you of a small experiment I have been conducting, on and off, for the past several years. There are some people who describe the experiment as an exercise in deceit and exploitation but I will rely on your sense of humor to pull me through.

Here's how it works: It is best done in the morning when I see a colleague who appears not to be in possession of a copy of {The New York Times}. "Did you read The Times this morning?," I ask. If the colleague says yes, there is no experiment that day. But if the answer is no, the experiment can proceed. "You ought to look at Page 23," I say. "There's a fascinating article about a study done at Harvard University." "Really? What's it about?" is the usual reply. My choices at this point are limited only by my imagination. But I might say something like this: "Well, they did this study to find out what foods are best to eat for losing weight, and it turns out that a normal diet supplemented by chocolate eclairs, eaten six times a day, is the best approach. It seems that there's some special nutrient in the eclairs - encomial dioxin - that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate."

Another possibility, which I like to use with colleagues who are known to be health conscious is this one: "I think you'll want to know about this," I say. "The neuro-physiologists at the University of Stuttgart have uncovered a connection between jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than 1200 people over a period of five years, and found that as the number of hours people jogged increased, there was a corresponding decrease in their intelligence. They don't know exactly why but there it is."

I'm sure, by now, you understand what my role is in the experiment: to report something that is quite ridiculous - one might say, beyond belief. Let me tell you, then, some of my results: Unless this is the second or third time I've tried this on the same person, most people will believe or at least not disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they say: "Really? Is that possible?" Sometimes they do a double-take, and reply, "Where'd you say that study was done?" And sometimes they say, "You know, I've heard something like that."

Now, there are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results, one of which was expressed by H. L. Mencken fifty years ago when he said, there is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it. This is more of an accusation than an explanation but in any case I have tried this experiment on non-professors and get roughly the same results. Another possible conclusion is one expressed by George Orwell - also about 50 years ago - when he remarked that the average person today is about as naive as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.

But I think there is still another and more important conclusion to be drawn, related to Orwell's point but rather off at a right angle to it. I am referring to the fact that the world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact - whether actual or imagined - that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. No social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical or spiritual reason. We live in a world that, for the most part, makes no sense to us. Not even technical sense. I don't mean to try my experiment on this audience, especially after having told you about it, but if I informed you that the seats you are presently occupying were actually made by a special process which uses the skin of a Bismark herring, on what grounds would you dispute me? For all you know - indeed, for all I know - the skin of a Bismark herring could have made the seats on which you sit. And if I could get an industrial chemist to confirm this fact by describing some incomprehensible process by which it was done, you would probably tell someone tomorrow that you spent the evening sitting on a Bismark herring.

Perhaps I can get a bit closer to the point I wish to make with an analogy: If you opened a brand-new deck of cards, and started turning the cards over, one by one, you would have a pretty good idea of what their order is. After you had gone from the ace of spades through the nine of spades, you would expect a ten of spades to come up next. And if a three of diamonds showed up instead, you would be surprised and wonder what kind of deck of cards this is. But if I gave you a deck that had been shuffled twenty times, and then asked you to turn the cards over, you would not expect any card in particular - a three of diamonds would be just as likely as a ten of spades. Having no basis for assuming a given order, you would have no reason to react with disbelief or even surprise to whatever card turns up.

The point is that, in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.

[snip]

The situation we are presently in is much different. And I should say, sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious. It is rather like the shuffled deck of cards I referred to. There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore, in a sense, we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything. The skin of a Bismark herring makes about as much sense as a vinyl alloy or encomial dioxin.


[snip]

And something else, which once was our friend, turned against us, as well. I refer to information. There was a time when information was a resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their environment. It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion.

[snip]

The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.

[snip]

Now, into this situation comes the computer. The computer, as we know, has a quality of universality, not only because its uses are almost infinitely various but also because computers are commonly integrated into the structure of other machines. Therefore it would be fatuous of me to warn against every conceivable use of a computer. But there is no denying that the most prominent uses of computers have to do with information. When people talk about "information sciences," they are talking about computers - how to store information, how to retrieve information, how to organize information. The computer is an answer to the questions, how can I get more information, faster, and in a more usable form? These would appear to be reasonable questions.

[snip]

The message is that through more and more information, more conveniently packaged, more swiftly delivered, we will find solutions to our problems. And so all the brilliant young men and women, believing this, create ingenious things for the computer to do, hoping that in this way, we will become wiser and more decent and more noble. And who can blame them? By becoming masters of this wondrous technology, they will acquire prestige and power and some will even become famous. In a world populated by people who believe that through more and more information, paradise is attainable, the computer scientist is king. But I maintain that all of this is a monumental and dangerous waste of human talent and energy. Imagine what might be accomplished if this talent and energy were turned to philosophy, to theology, to the arts, to imaginative literature or to education? Who knows what we could learn from such people - perhaps why there are wars, and hunger, and homelessness and mental illness and anger.

As things stand now, the geniuses of computer technology will give us Star Wars, and tell us that is the answer to nuclear war. They will give us artificial intelligence, and tell us that this is the way to self-knowledge. They will give us instantaneous global communication, and tell us this is the way to mutual understanding. They will give us Virtual Reality and tell us this is the answer to spiritual poverty. But that is only the way of the technician, the fact-mongerer, the information junkie, and the technological idiot.

Here is what Henry David Thoreau told us: "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." Here is what Goethe told us:
"One should, each day, try to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it is possible, speak a few reasonable words." And here is what Socrates told us: "The unexamined life is not worth living." And here is what the prophet Micah told us: "What does the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" And I can tell you - if I had the time (although you all know it well enough) - what Confucius, Isaiah, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, Spinoza and Shakespeare told us. It is all the same: There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.

It is not clear to me that philosophy, theology, the arts, imaginative literature and education are an alternative, and as Postman implies, a better path to glory. But I do think that Postman makes a strong argument that information out of context is no real panacea either.

A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.

From London Historians' Blog, Disaster at Drury Lane. From a February 24th post.

On this day in 1809, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane was destroyed by fire. Theatres were always burning down, so nothing really unusual in fact. What made this conflagration different, is the involvement of the magnificent Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Dublin-born, Harrow-educated Sheridan is one of my favourite Londoners. A duellist, MP, playwright, impresario and much besides, he obtained full ownership of Drury Lane in 1778. In 1791 he demolished the 120 year old building which had opened in 1674 (replacing the short-lived 1663 original), and built a fabulous modern theatre more to his liking and ambition. Designed by Henry Holland, it opened in 1794, apparently with the latest fire-prevention features. Here is Rowlandson and Pugin’s depiction of its interior, only a year before disaster struck.

Sheridan himself witnessed the destruction of his beloved theatre from the street, glass of wine in hand, remarking laconically: “A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.”

All professions are conspiracies against the common folk

From Informing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman.

The great English playwright and social philosopher George Bernard Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the common folk. He meant that those who belong to elite trades - physicians, lawyers, teachers, and scientists - protect their special status by creating vocabularies that are incomprehensible to the general public. This process prevents outsiders from understanding what the profession is doing and why - and protects the insiders from close examination and criticism. Professions, in other words, build forbidding walls of technical gobbledegook over which the prying and alien eye cannot see.

Big data of yore

Big data in the past. Staff sorting 4M used #London Underground tickets to analyse line use in 1939 by Gerry Cranham pic.twitter.com/hehzQJJEeG

— Sir William Davenant (@SirWilliamD) February 26, 2016

Everyone is 30% poorer than they were

An interesting example of burying the lead from Black Wealth Barely Exists, In One Terrible Chart by Richard V. Reeves and Edward Rodrigue.

The chart they want to focus on is this.

Race gaps in wealth – already wide – widened further during the Great Recession. The median wealth of white households is now 13 times greater than for black households – the largest gap in a quarter century, according to analysis by the Pew Research Center. Black median wealth almost halved during the recession, falling from $19,200 in 2007 to $11,000 in 2013:

Click to enlarge.

Throughout their article, Reeves and Rodrigue orient around race as the salient point. But it is only salient if there is evidence of discrimination. Since there is no such evidenced advanced, the implication is that race is not salient and that the divergences are attributable to other, more mundane causes such as cultural differences in savings rates, hours worked, risk taking, etc. By failing to identify actual causative factors, Reeves and Rodrigue do the disservice of misdirection.

By focusing on race only, they also seem to completely miss the elephant in the chart. Reeves and Rodrigue focus on the fact that six years earlier whites were ten times wealthier than blacks and now (2013) they are thirteen times wealthier. We know why that happened and it wasn't racism. Government policy deliberately made it easier for minorities to obtain mortgages by waiving earlier requirements in terms of income levels, down payments, etc. When the recession came, minorities were, as a results of these policies, far more exposed to the collapse of the real estate market because 1) a higher percentage of their wealth was tied up in real estate, 2) they had lower financial capacity to deal with market variations, and 3) the real estate they had acquired was of the type and in the locations most vulnerable to devaluation.

Reeves and Rodrigue want to make this wealth disparity about race when it is about personal choices influenced by government policy. Or, more specifically, bad financial decisions made as a result of bad government policy (even if well intended policy).

The big issue revealed in the chart is not an increasing disparity in wealth between race classifications. The unmentioned elephant is that both groups have seen a fall in their wealth of between 26-42%. Basically, everyone is about 30% poorer than they were six years ago. That's the critical thing.

Race obsession has many negative consequences. An inability to see the big picture is one of them.

. . . but Gay is not above belaboring the point

From a review of three books, As a God Might Be: Three Visions of Technological Progress by Meghan O’Gieblyn. O’Gieblyn has this passing aside.

No exception is Malcolm Gay’s The Brain Electric: The Dramatic High-Tech Race to Merge Man and Machine, which traces the development of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), electrodes surgically implanted in the brain. In an early chapter, Gay looks to history to assure us that BCIs are merely the latest instance of a very old trend: “In some essential sense, we’ve been enmeshing our lives with tools ever since Homo sapiens emerged from the hominid line some 200,000 years ago.”

Gay recalls the development of eyeglasses, pens, the spear, and the wheel—technologies all, lest we forget—noting that humanity resisted each of them. Writing was once feared as the scourge of civilization; the printing press was met with great hue and cry. The moral of the story is self-evident, but Gay is not above belaboring the point.

An amazing amount of assortative mating within psychiatric disorders

A suggestive piece from Assortative Mating—A Missing Piece in the Jigsaw of Psychiatric Genetics by Robert Plomin, Eva Krapohl, and Paul F. O’Reilly. Can only be taken as indicative at this point without further and more robust testing.

The topic of assortative (nonrandom) mating might seem esoteric or even salacious. For example, in lectures you have to point out to students that random mating is not about promiscuity. In this issue of JAMA Psychiatry, Nordsletten and colleagues1 report the first general population study to date of assortative mating for psychiatric disorders, which may help to solve 3 puzzles in psychiatric genetics: Why are psychiatric disorders so highly heritable when they are associated with reduced fecundity? Why are some psychiatric disorders so much more highly heritable than others? Why is there so much genetic comorbidity across psychiatric disorders?

Those are three interesting questions. They map to three general puzzles as well: Why are there always dysfunctional poor regardless of societal averages, why is there higher fecundity among the poor, and why do familial dysfunctions propagate across generations?

Addressing their posed questions:

The research capitalizes on the powerful population registers in Sweden, which contain diagnostic information, including psychiatric diagnoses, on all individuals admitted to Swedish hospitals since 1973. The registers yield huge samples of cases (eg, more than 70 000 individuals diagnosed as having schizophrenia). Using other registers to track couples via their children, the investigators were able to measure assortative mating levels within and between 11 psychiatric disorders.

Although you can see assortative mating for physical traits, like height and weight, with your own eyes, the correlation between spouses is only approximately 0.20 for these traits. For personality, assortative mating is even lower at approximately 0.10. In contrast, Nordsletten and colleagues find an amazing amount of assortative mating within psychiatric disorders. Spouse tetrachoric correlations are greater than 0.40 for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and schizophrenia. The next highest spouse correlation emerged for substance abuse (range, 0.36-0.39). Assortative mating was significant but far less substantial for other disorders, such as affective disorders (range, 0.14-0.19).

The article then goes on to explore the implications of these findings.

Helping the poor usually entails some complex variety of solutions to address a large portfolio of dysfunctions and incapabilities (behavioral and otherwise). That is why it is so hard to address. If the answer was a simple as transferring resources for a given time, we'd be in good shape. Instead, many solutions have to work together to tackle the entirety of the pathologies that cause the poverty in the first place. A challenge reflected in the final observation from the paper.

Beyond genetics and genomics, assortative mating matters because it means that the person closest to an individual with a psychiatric disorder is also likely to have psychiatric problems, which could exacerbate problems for both spouses and their offspring.

Not just the spouse and off-spring. If you are trying to assist an individual in addressing their multitude of issues, if those in their relational networking are similarly afflicted, then it is yet harder to create the conditions to make the necessary changes likely to help them break free from the behaviors and capabilities causing their problems.

Rat cyborgs - I fear research may have just taken a wrong turn

Alternatively, the future isn't turning out how I hoped. From Intelligence-Augmented Rat Cyborgs in Maze Solving by Yipeng Yu, et al.

Cyborg intelligence is an emerging kind of intelligence paradigm. It aims to deeply integrate machine intelligence with biological intelligence by connecting machines and living beings via neural interfaces, enhancing strength by combining the biological cognition capability with the machine computational capability. Cyborg intelligence is considered to be a new way to augment living beings with machine intelligence. In this paper, we build rat cyborgs to demonstrate how they can expedite the maze escape task with integration of machine intelligence. We compare the performance of maze solving by computer, by individual rats, and by computer-aided rats (i.e. rat cyborgs). They were asked to find their way from a constant entrance to a constant exit in fourteen diverse mazes. Performance of maze solving was measured by steps, coverage rates, and time spent. The experimental results with six rats and their intelligence-augmented rat cyborgs show that rat cyborgs have the best performance in escaping from mazes. These results provide a proof-of-principle demonstration for cyborg intelligence. In addition, our novel cyborg intelligent system (rat cyborg) has great potential in various applications, such as search and rescue in complex terrains.

The critical question is whether the control rats were just ordinary rats or New York City subway rats.

Pop culture, Aurelius, and Socrates - What do these have in common?

From Marcus Aurelius's Meditations Book VIII, 11 we have:

This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material? And what its causal nature (or form)? And what is it doing in the world? And how long does it subsist?

This entered the, somewhat, popular vernacular as

Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?

through Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs. Lecter's rendition is more obviously expansive than George Long's original translation but is not obviously a wrong translation.

Long's translation point us to the substance, material and cause. Lecter's rendition points us up one level of abstraction to "What is it in itself?"

I have no idea which translation comes closest to Aurelius's original intent but it is interesting to me on two counts. There is only a slight difference in wording but it points in substantially different directions. Secondly, I wonder if it makes much difference? Lecter is more forceful in driving to the abstract but Aurelius's does not preclude reaching the abstract. In that regard, Long's version is more expansive. A person can answer in the more concrete way or the more abstract way.

Indeed, in the movie, this is how it plays out. Lecter wants to get Starling to the more abstract level of answer but her first inclination is towards the more concrete.

Hannibal Lecter: I've read the case files. Have you? Everything you need to find him is right there in those pages.
Clarice Starling: Then tell me how.

Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice: simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius, "Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?" What does he do, this man you seek?

Clarice Starling: He kills women.

Hannibal Lecter: No, that is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does, what needs does he serve by killing?

Clarice Starling: Anger, social acceptance, and, uh, sexual frustration …

Hannibal Lecter: No, he covets. That's his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer, now.

Clarice Starling: No. We just …

Hannibal Lecter: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day.

I enjoyed Silence of the Lambs but purely as raw entertainment. I did not recognize at the time just how classical it was. We have Lecter quoting a Roman philosopher and questioning Starling in a Socratic fashion.