Psychology – Page 31 – a sibilant intake of breath

Googling the Cyborg

In his engaging essay “Googling the Cyborg”, William Gibson effectively argues that the expectation that ‘the cyborg’ will be a human being with an electronic eye and a robot arm is mistaken. The cyborg – he argues – exists in the physical interactions between human beings and machines: “The electrons streaming into a child’s eye from the screen of the wooden television are as physical as anything else. As physical as the neurons subsequently moving along that child’s optic nerve”. (The terminology there is strangely incorrect. Cathode ray tube televisions emit photons, which are produced when the electrons fired from the back of the vacuum tube hit a phosphor screen – and the optic nerve is made of neurons, it isn’t a channel that conveys them. No matter.)

Gibson argues that the cyborg is the “extended communal nervous system” that humanity has grown for itself, with all these sensors and processors and network connections.

He also argues that there is a short-changing that occurs, when we deny that the humans who are behind machines are using them as true extensions of their own being. In the context of remote-controlled rovers on Mars, he says:

Martian jet lag. That’s what you get when you operate one of those little Radio Shack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an airbase in California. Literally. Those operators were the first humans to experience Martian jet lag. In my sense of things, we should know their names: first humans on the Red Planet. Robbed of recognition by that same old school of human literalism.

Gibson, William. Distrust that Particular Flavor. p.251 (hardcover)

I am not sure what should be counted as the first cyborg on Mars. Specifically, did it need to be able to move on human command? Or is moving camera shutters enough to count? In any case, hardly anyone knows the name of the person who was controlling it when it first activated on the Martian surface.

The government that hammers tent pegs up our noses

A pattern seems to have developed in the legislative politics of a certain northern country.

The people in power boast that they are going to do something dramatic but somewhat foolhardy: “Watch! I am going to hammer this tent peg up your nose!” or “Let’s make the census optional!” or “Let’s throw people in jail for harmless marijuana offenses!” or “Let’s allow the police and spies to watch everybody’s internet use!”.

After this declaration is made, both the political opposition and experts in the field bring up some of the very reasonable objections to the proposal: “What about my brain?” or “The whole point of a census is that everyone completes it” or “That’s pointless vindictiveness for a non-offence to society” or “That’s an insanely over-reaching way to catch only the stupidest criminal web users”.

But the issue has already become a matter of pride and honour for the government of the day, so they cannot back down or change plans. Occasionally, public and political opposition to the proposal are strong enough to stop it, at which point the government becomes bitter and petulant, stressing how everyone will need to live with the terrible consequences of not following the government’s plan. Often, however, they are able to circle up successfully around their bad idea and turn it into law.

This pattern of behaviour is likely to persist for as long as the opposition is leaderless and split.

Even those who favour the party in power probably realize that the political system only works properly when there is a credible opposition. If there is nobody else who looks capable of forming a government, there are few real checks on the power of the people in charge. That leads to them expressing their own psychological excesses and frustrations in ill-conceived legislation, which is bad for everybody.

Repeated ad infinitum

XKCD is right, this is worth a look today:

List of common misconceptions
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Note:

Nero didn’t fiddle while Rome burned.
The ancient Greeks knew that the Earth was spherical, and how large it was.
Napoleon was not short. He was slightly taller than the average Frenchman.
The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free slaves in the northern states.
The Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space using the naked eye.
People did not evolve from chimpanzees.

Etc, etc, etc.

Risk/efficiency trade-offs in pathfinding

Finding my way to a new building, it struck me that two major strategies are possible in urban pathfinding. You can try to follow the most efficient path or you can try to minimize your odds of getting lost. Call those the ‘efficiency’ and ‘reduced risk’ approaches.

Each has some level of appeal. Nobody wants to take an unnecessarily circuitous route, when there is a shorter one available. At the same time, it is foolish to take a path that is nominally shorter but which involves much higher risks of getting lost or having other sorts of trouble.

Shortcuts are a classic example. They speak out to the part of us that seeks efficiency, but they carry special risks. When you deviate from the conventional path, you open the possibility of arriving much sooner than you would otherwise, but you also open the possibility of arriving much later or not at all.

Personally, I am willing to trade a fair bit of efficiency in exchange for simplicity. Even if I can conceivably save time by cutting corners, I prefer to stick to simple routes that I can remember and understand. Subways are good for this – they don’t take you as close to your destination as buses often might, but they are easier to understand.

As an aside, the worst ever solution to the risk/efficiency problem is the ‘try and buzz the head waiter’s home island with your cruise ship‘ strategy. In choosing people to captain cruise ships, there should probably some process to screen out those with such reckless tendencies…

Being unwell

I’ve noticed something that is both odd and somewhat rational: I find that I feel much sicker after I have seen a doctor and had them share my concern. Before seeing a doctor, I always have a nagging sense that I am going to see them about something excessively trivial and they will feel as though I am wasting their time. It’s a bit of a relief, then, when a doctor expresses agreement that you were right to see a doctor and that some sort of medical treatment is suitable.

At the same time, you lose the psychological possibility that you are making far too big a deal out of something tiny. Doctors – after all – face a never-ending stream of sick people. What seems worrisome to you is likely to seem trivial to them. So, when a doctor says that you were wise to seek medical treatment, it is both an affirmation of your inexpert medical judgment and cause for concern, in that nobody likes to have any kind of medical issue.

This is a phenomenon I have experienced before. For instance, after I broke my collarbone, it actually felt much more painful after I had seen the x-rays. They were like a validation of what my brain was thinking already, and they sharpened the experience of being injured.

(I am fine, incidentally. I just need some rest and antibiotics, administered every six hours to stabilize their concentration and reduce the odds of spawning antibiotic resistant prokaryotes.)

Ironic liberal / big government libertarian

When I think about how to characterize my political views, it seems as though there are philosophical positions that I find appealing, but which need to be tempered in response to the strong counterarguments against them.

Ironic liberalism

I can see the sense in what Richard Rorty calls ‘ironic liberalism’. All that old-fashioned stuff about the rights of human beings deriving from god is woefully out of date. All the evidence we have suggests that there is no god (or, if there is, that it is a malicious or indifferent entity). Furthermore, the conversation in political philosophy has largely abandoned theological justifications. Now, we don’t have a terribly convincing story about where rights come from. That being said, I think it is clear that treating people as bearers of rights is a good way of ordering the world. As I understand it, ironic liberalism is about taking that observation and running with it. We have no fundamental reason for believing that people have rights, but the world seems to work better when we act as though they do – so let’s act that way, and let the feelings and consequences follow. Let’s take it seriously when someone asserts that they have a right to do something or have something provided for them (though, upon reflection, we may disagree with their claim). Similarly, we should take it seriously when someone asserts that their rights have been violated.

Rights are not an inherent property of the universe, but they are a good concept that allows us to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of different kinds of human interaction.

Big-government libertarianism

In my experience, libertarians say two kinds of things: rather convincing ones, and exceptionally stupid ones.

A good example of the first case is: “People should have the right to do what they wish with their bodies”. I don’t think it’s an absolute right, necessarily, and I realize that there are situations where people can be pressured into acting against their own best interests. That being said, the general principle that people have a greater interest in their bodies than anybody else – and that our bodies can realistically be thought about as our own property – seems convincing to me.

This general libertarian strand, which asserts that we should be free to make choices as we like so long as they do not harm other is both convincing and politically pertinent. It is connected to debates on topics like drug policy and legislating morality.

A good example of a stupid thing libertarians say is: “We don’t need to regulate health or the environment, because the market will handle it”. Without government regulation, I am sure the abuses committed by corporations and individuals agains their fellow citizens would be hugely more severe. Nuclear power plants would probably routinely dump radioactive waste directly into rivers; sugar pills would get sold as essential medications; the most awful stuff would end up in the meat people buy; and problems like climate change and ozone depletion would be totally ignored, at least until they became incredibly extreme.

Libertarians simply fail to understand how willing people are to act in a selfish way that is harmful to their fellow human beings. The allure of the quick buck at somebody else’s expense is considerable, as demonstrated by much of human history.

We need government to act as a fair dealer, and as an entity that thinks about the long term. Government needs to do things like recognize when dangerous excesses are building up in the economy – whether they take the form of frothy stockmarket conditions, bubbles in property values, or overly rapid inflation. We need a government that acts as an effective intermediary between individuals and large, powerful entities like corporations. We also need a government that keeps itself honest, by having mechanisms to prevent the capture of politicians or civil servants by the industries that they are meant to regulate.

We also need government to provide things that are good for society as a whole, but which individuals are usually unwilling to provide. This includes assistance to the sick, mentally ill, homeless, and so on. It includes education for everybody and fair access to the legal system. We need to have a government with the resources to perform these tasks well. That is partly because it is good for everybody when these kinds of public goods are provided. It is also because the provision of such goods is necessary to respect the rights of individuals (even if those rights are just a highly convenient fiction).

To summarize, we should take rights seriously even if we cannot say with an entirely straight face that they even exist. At the same time, we should be libertarians who truly recognize the essential and unique role played by government and who are happy to make the contributions in terms of time, taxes, and political participation that it takes to keep an effective government operating.

My first exposure to the value of mindfulness

After having my interest piqued by some iTunes University lectures, I have been reading Mark Williams’ and Danny Pengman’s book Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. In the midst of a number of urgent projects, I am reading it in fits and starts, so I am not really following the program as prescribed. From the outset, I have also been deeply skeptical about how useful a program that essentially consists of guided meditation could be for managing stress.

Already, however, I think I have taken one fairly valuable thing from the book. When a person is nervous about a subject – and particularly if they are prone to anxiety – it is exceptionally easy to get into a spiral of connected painful and frightening thoughts. For example, something might remind me of the ongoing covert war that is happening in Iran. That, in turn, makes me think about the assassination of scientists, the possible bombing campaigns that could occur against Iranian nuclear facilities, the terror of nuclear weapons themselves, the danger of conventional or nuclear war in the region, and so on. Confronted with thoughts that have powerful emotions linked to them, the mind goes into a ‘problem solving’ mode, but in relation to problems I can do nothing about. The result is counterproductive attempts to either minimalize the seriousness of the issue being considered, or try to find some trite mechanism for explaining why I shouldn’t be worried. “We’re all going to die sometime” is the sort of pathetic rationalization the brain sometimes coughs up when presented with a mortal problem well beyond the capacity of a single human to solve.

My very preliminary understanding of mindfulness is that it is all about being able to pause for a moment and just see things as they are, without wanting or trying to change them. You can simply say: “The possibility of war in the Middle East is deeply frightening”. Looking at the emotional situation that way, simply as an expression of fact, without creating a mental map of linked fears or deploying psychological self-defence strategies, seems to allow the mind to recognize the fear and move on, without trivializing or ignoring the reality of it. It’s possible to just say “that’s tragic” or “that’s terrifying” without getting caught up in the hopeless task of trying to immediately remedy the problem.

This also works with some of the other substantial fears that crop up periodically in a person’s thoughts: from the inevitability of aging and death (both for yourself and for family and friends) to the frightening state of the global environment to the countless terrible injustices that are always ongoing around the world. All of those observations are accurate, well-justified, and emotionally charged. Nothing we can do will make any of those things go away. But pausing for a moment of honest recognition can allow us to keep functioning, despite the frightening and overwhelming character of the world.

A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI

Graham Chapman, one of the Monty Python gang, drank himself to death at 48, having already been an alcoholic for 23 years when he was 37. He died exactly 20 years after the first recording of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI was published nine years earlier, written by Chapman, his long-time romantic partner David Sherlock, Alex Martin, David Yallop, and Douglas Adams. As you might expect from the autobiography of a man who quite knowingly drank himself to death (he was a doctor, after all), the book is pretty depressing in places. Despite that, I thought it conveyed an honest and intimate perspective of a man who was generous and humanitarian but who often struggled with life.

I am not sure what to make of a self-confessed “liar’s autobiography”. The whole concept of autobiography is that a person uses a reasonably honest re-telling of their life events to share their experiences and personality with you. When you don’t know which (if any) experiences are genuine, it makes it difficult to know what Chapman and his cabal of co-authors were really trying to convey. If the general thrust of the anecdotes is reasonably accurate, it seems fair to conclude that it was easy to be drunk nearly all the time and have a great deal of casual gay sex in England at the time when Monty Python was performing and making films. The book includes quite a few rather terrifying and tragic stories, including hangings, physical assaults, aggressive police questioning, and perilous mountain climbing accidents.

A Liar’s Autobiography is also a reminder of how all fame is fleeting, and perhaps provincial as well. Chapman is constantly name-dropping, but the names he uses to try to impress readers are virtually all totally unknown to me. The book is aggressively non-linear, and features relatively little discussion of how Monty Python worked. There is more, all told, on the many sufferings associated with alcoholism, from the chronic liver damage that accompanies ongoing drinking to the agonies of withdrawal after a high level of dependence has been reached.

In an epilogue, fellow Python Eric Idle calls Chapman “the only true anarchist in Monty Python”. Chapman himself explains that he is “against any large organization, communist, capitalist or religious, that pretends to know best”. Chapman expresses a libertarian view of how the state should let people use their own bodies how they like:

I’ve always believed that people should be allowed to do what they want with their bodies. After all, it’s all they’ve got. I agree with that law that it is wrong for everyone to go round poking other people with sharp pointed sticks, but if someone wants to poke himself with a sharp pointed stick, that’s fine by me. They can go and batter themselves to death with huge lumps of poisoned granite for all I care.

This seems somewhat linked to Chapman’s rather mechanistic view of life itself. People, he says, are “tubes – hollow cylinders of flesh”.

Eric Idle’s epilogue summarizes this book better than I can: “What shines through in this book is the staggering honesty – the brilliance of truth that only a self-proclaimed liar could achieve. Facts and stories that we would have murdered our grandmothers to conceal are cheerfully paraded for our edification. This is life viewed as comedy, that only a doctor faced constantly with the physical comedy of our bodies can see”.

Gabor Maté on addiction and drug policy

Please listen to this podcast:

Gabor Maté on The Human Face of Addictive Behavior

Maté makes some excellent points about the psychological basis for addiction, as well as the serious problems with our current approach of treating addiction as a crime.

Maté makes a powerful case that criminalization of drug use is ineffective and unethical, and that we could do much more to lessen human misery by pursuing harm reduction approaches.

[Update: 28 Oct 2020] Broken link replaced

Advice to supervillains – killing your own scientists

One classic mistake made by cartoon supervillains concerns the complicated piece of machinery that is inevitably at the heart of their secret plan. It might be a time travel device of some sort, or a machine that strips the opposing superhero of their power, or a key part of a world domination scheme.

As a way of illustrating just how evil and ruthless they really are, supervillains will often kill the whole team of scientists who built the thing, perhaps by having them all drink poisoned champagne. This does make a certain measure of sense. Killing the scientists keeps them from going off and telling people about what they did, which could cause problems for you.

That being said, I strongly object to the timing that is frequently used for these killings. The supervillain will kill off the science team right before testing the device for the first time. As anyone who has worked on anything remotely technical and complex can tell you, this is the worst possible time to kill off all the people involved. Chances are, the machine will not work properly on the first try and that the only people who can figure out what went wrong are the people who designed and built the machine.

By all means, kill the science team once you are confident that you have a machine that will do what you want. Build it, test it, build an improved model, build a backup copy or two, and then hand out the glasses of killer champagne.