Social Mode

The world is full (might even be the RESULT OF) of mental, logical or physical oscillations – which to me is a better phrasing for “paradox”.

Consider:

This sentence is false.

“Be spontaneous”

Wave-Particle properties

Optical illusions:

The bar is actually the same color throughout

Behavior is controllable but unpredictable (similar to determined and unpredictable)

Behavioral Cognitive Neuroscience (which is it? what is it?)

Chicken or the Egg

Truthiness

Spencer Brown Forms

My conjecture: The universe has far more of this oscillation than it has definitive statements. It is the result of the physical reality that the universe is at the edge of order and chaos. It is determined and unpredictable. A lot our math attempts to distill this edge into something manageable, tamable, but it’s impossible.

AND

If it were possible, then the universe, certainly as it is, wouldn’t exist.

For it is this edge of order and chaos that creates the struggle. Very little nicely falls into place. Matter and energy bounce around dynamically. Species compete. Markets go haywire.

It’s all like a puzzle where the pieces never quite fit. There’s always something that falls outside of the puzzle, or pieces that morph trying to fit and so on. As such the puzzle itself changes.

Ok, i’ll try to get away from metaphor and metaphysics.

In nature, selection by consequences, genetic drift, ecological competition all are forms of struggle.

In physics, motion of molecules, quantum effects,space-time, relativity all involve struggle (the struggle between frames of reference, energy transfer, measurement uncertainty, information transfer)

In human behavior, conditioning, value generation, behavior extinction, selection by consequences are all the struggle of competiting values, ratio strain and so on.

What If:

Evolution followed regular rules that were perfectly predictable.

Photons were just particles.

Humans only ever operated under absolute values and rules.

Where would change come from? Without change, how would we observe anything? (think about it, if nothing changes, what’s there to observe…) Without anything to observe, no information transfers from thing to thing. and so on. Basically, you end up with nothing or something very simple that isn’t much more than nothing.

This post might be complete crap or it might not.

Mental Oscillations

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Jul 24
Perhaps a refresher in real numbers would be useful.

Perhaps widdle this question down. Does pi exist?

The area of a circle is pi r^2. So, you can never really accurately figure out exactly what pi is so you really can’t figure out the area of a circle. But….. you can fill a circle and measure the area, no?

So, again, does pi exist even though you can’t completely tell anyone how much it is or even write it down. We are forever away from really knowing pi.

No?

There are infinitely many numbers like pi. Perhaps these are useful fictions.

Does it matter?

It depends on your world view.

Consider it and get back to me. Or, ignore it and move on.

Do Real Numbers Exist?

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Jul 23
“In a world view and in a regional view, it would be irresponsible if we didn’t use technology and science.”

it would be? what the heck does anyone mean by irresponsible? what are we comparing or what is our basis of responsibility?

There’s no universal answer to that question. To you it’s irresponsible to not use technology and science. To others it’s irresponsible to use technology and science. And many variations in between. There’s no final arbiter of responsibility. If there is, let me know. I’d like to talk to that authority because I have many questions needing a final judgment.

Do I think “science” gets us closer to what is actually happening? sure. Does that make science the way to live your life? I don’t know. No one can define the goal or the success metrics of life or existence so it’s hard to say what the best approach to existence is.

Is this a metaphysical argument with no bearing on the real world? naw. the fact is, none of us know what the deal is with life, success, responsibility. I suppose we can define it or whatever. It’s pretty arbitrary no matter how you slice it.

Do I think a science of behavior (and every other well thought out empiricist science) is a useful approach to living? Sure, with caveats. If your goal is to survive and thrive in your lifetime within our societies, a knowledge of human behavior is extremely useful! To some, I’m not sure that’s their goal. For nature, there’s no real goal so we don’t get the benefit of appealing to a universal goal ( or even a species goal!)

So, what really is the point?

No, really, what is the point?

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Jul 23
There are many writings in science, law and politics these days that amount to a plea to use the laws that exist in the natural environment to better accomplish common objectives. The argument goes that in order to extend our life on earth and boost the quality of the 28,500 days* we have, we need to play to our strengths. Right now, our strength and the strength of many industrialized nations is the strengths that comes from science and technology.

In a world view and in a regional view, it would be irresponsible if we didn’t use technology and science. That technology includes and an empirical approach to behavior that rubs the status quo proponents the wrong way. Use of what is known about the how we learn and how we behave can help prevent some of the ills and dilemmas that we’ve put ourselves in. It can also prevent others from occurring. Just as assuredly, changes are sure to cause new forms of discomfort. The individual and the society will have to work to deal individually, culturally, politically and environmentally with an empirical behavior analysis that takes a less emotional approach to behavior. Compared to the slaughter of people and cultures, this discomfort is actually a reprieve from what we can expect without change in the voodoo logic and the mumbo-jumbo of 3000 year old superstitions and traditions.

This isn’t a new idea, just a new appeal to the world inhabited by users of science and technology. Someone said in the early 70’s:

“2500 years ago it might have been said that man understood himself as well as any other part of his world. Today, he understands himself least.”

Look at what has happened since that statement…! That makes it a particularly poignant when amplified repeatedly by the disturbing events each of us has had to endure in that period. Things that could have been prevented, avoided or better managed if there had been a different view of “man”.

Due to technology society gets to see war real time; gets to see live video cam death in hospital wards, in police stations, on the campuses and via natural disasters. We get instant access and feedback in almost every media channel available to man. Thus, those that posit that a scientific approach to behavior is a threat to our way of life, look around. For those that claim a sectarian approach to behavior is not possible are reminded that the same things were said about chemistry, biology and physics as some brave explores went about figuring out how those parts of the world work. Anyone frightened by science that keeps him/her alive to protest is in a vulnerable state and is dangerous.

Without a comfort zone we almost all are scared. With a comfort zone we may be still using leaches to clean blood, sage to protect us from evil spirits or apricot pits to cure cancer. [Yes, some reading this may still be favoring one or more of these remedies, but…]

To prevent some of the things that we don’t like happening we’ll have to give up something. Nothing in life or Nature is free. Chemistry, biology and physics gave up ‘stuff.’ Now it is our turn. And, as frightening as it is, we need to find others that can help us make the adjustments over time. Others will help us learn to attend to the natural rules that have always been there but were ignored. Others can help dissolve conflicts over competing beliefs and traditions. We humans are great at adjustments and adaptations so it is clean this can work. It an adjustment how you came to read blogs on the Internet? However, if you like the state of the world, the relationships you have with the institutions, agencies and forces that inhabit your world, then you don’t need to do anything. You get to take the cultural Quaalude and pull over. Ok.

What’s the Point?

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Jul 23
The universe, the world, biology, human behavior is determined and unpredictable.

Business models will always be inaccurate as business is unpredictable and almost intractably so.

Software will always ship with bugs. No amount of qa can squash them all.

Your best approach to product development is to try things and try a lot of things and see how they catch on. Attempting to predict user preference or consumer demand beyond an educated guess is a waste of time, money and energy.

Time is intervening variable. What we care about and what we actually measure when discussing time is change – the change in position relative to gear ticks, the change in position of the planets relative to each other, the change in our bodies relative to our experiences and so on.

If not you, someone else. That holds for discoveries, jobs, relationships. We’re all interchangeable and we will be interchanged. The systems operate with or without us, sometimes “we” impact the system, sometimes we don’t.

Human cognition and the increase in our life spans is not “breaking the design” or “breaking from the constraints” of evolution. The consequence of big brains, complex nervous systems can play out exactly as we are. Other biological strategies are possible and have been “successful” at sustaining a species. We do not know how we sustain the species by increasing life span and expanding knowledge, we can only observe and won’t know unless we persist as a species long enough or we die off (then we really won’t know).

There is a formal limit to knowledge. The formal limit is far greater than our practical limit.

Philosophy provides little real insight into how it all works yet we all have a philosophy due to the practical limit of knowledge.

We are not even close to our practical limit of technology.

Math is a useful tool. It is not pure and it is not objective truth.

Science is highly relative to/subjective of the person/people doing it. It is a narrative, not statements of absolute truth.

If a theory takes longer than observation to explain something, it has little value.

We will never be able to predict the markets completely – never well enough to avoid the big shocks.

I’ll have more statements later this week.

Of course, I’ll even back these up!

~R

Statements

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Jul 22
Have you ever played Civilization, the computer game?

Determined and yet unpredicable

If you haven’t, it’s really fun. However, that’s not the point of this post nor the title.

What makes Civ or Sim City or any of the other sim games so interesting is that they are a great example of what it means to be completely determined and yet totally unpredictable.

So what, you say? It’s a computer game.

Ah, I contest this game is far more like the real world than one might suspect. Yes, I can “freely” control what I do with my civilization – move my citizens around, build different things, arm, disarm, trade, war, research, pray, etc. etc. However, I’m actually quite forced into almost every move once all the contingencies come home to roost. Did the computer just attack me? Do I have the money? Do I have the people? How much power do I have? All of those and more filter the space of all possible moves. Perhaps there’s a few “free” choices left on each move that become probabilities but even those are held under control based on contingencies (like my preferences for how to move).

So why then are the games (life?) unpredictable? For one, initial conditions. The set up of the geography, placement on the map, type of people and so forth change every time you start the game, so the game (under the same predetermined moves) takes a completely different form. I’m always careful in discussing initial conditions because you can’t really ever make a claim as to what a real “initial” condition is in the real world (or even the game), as something must determine the initial condition you are looking at (even if it is a “random number generator).

Amazingly, it’s not just interesting initial conditions. Simple rules (even the most basic rules you can imagine) can operate in fully unpredictable ways. examples: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Rule110.html and http://www.johnkyrk.com/DNAtranscription.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_number. These three examples all of very simple rules of operation (how you generate them, how they evolve, etc. etc), yet their outcome/their behavior/their product is not predictable.

I digress (and don’t you hate when people say “I digress”?).

Perhaps my silly use of computer games does nothing for my argument about there being things that completely determined and unpredictable. I could, of course, turn your attention to cellular automata or turing machines or some other simple system -some of these types of systems are unpredictable and they all are completely determined. Unfortunately, many folks will complain that these aren’t “real world.” The real world is full of indeterminism and lots of messy things that aren’t like computer games or automata.

It’s true that the world is full of systems that aren’t computer games or automata! However, it’s not obviously true that these systems are indeterminate! How can we figure that out?

One way, if I can show you determined systems that exhibit the same behavior as the supposed indeterminate systems, that’s some evidence for determinate systems.

If I can drill down on your indetermined system enough I will like find your “rules” that drive it. That’s my conjecture. Send me a system, and we can discuss. (markets, DNA, whatever you want).

Human behavior exists in this world of determined and the unpredictable. Reinforcers/consequences, conditioned stimuli, unconditioned stimuli, discriminant stimulus — (biology + genetics + nervous system + environment) — control the behavior. Layers of rules applied to a complex biological system. It’s all weirdly determined but completely unpredictable.

Falsify my claim.

Suppose this is true. So what? The implications are relative to you. If indeterminism services your world view or scientific approach, perhaps the implications are grave.

Determined and Unpredictable

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Jul 22
We all know that if you want to get your point across you need to begin teaching it early and with much fanfare and pomp. Families use holidays and traditions to cement the family unit and the values they collectively hold every time there is a birthday party, birth, wedding or death. Clearly getting to the youth early makes them become part of the unit early and potentially moves to maintain them in the fold for as long as possible.

It is not surprising then that the Catholic Pope Benedict XVI moved to get to the important stuff at the World Youth Day this week in Australia. I’ve been to one before and they are something to behold! Clearly the faithful and searching youth need to know what’s most important in their life. What great timing. He gets to tell the gathering eager searchers how to make the world a better place.

Worldwide AIDS/HIV fight…? No…

Condemnation of sexual abuse by priests…? No…

End to war..? No..

End of 43 years of impotence on genocide in Europe or Africa? No..

Return of art from the masses taken for “safe keeping”…? No…

Lead a simple life…? No…

Support of sex education in poor nations…? No…

The Pope attacked moral relativism! Right! The Pope made it clear what the enemy was and attacked – again – the idea that there are no absolute truths.

Nothing infuriates the Catholic Church and some less voracious church fathers as much as relativism (the denial of absolute truth which they, not surprisingly, are in charge of) that leads to moral relativism that leads to – according to their thinking – preventing ‘human minds’ from the ability to arrive at truth. For Catholics, denial of an absolute reference denies God.

But wait, there’s more. Some have referred to the subject matter as the “dictatorship of relativism” (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger). In this sense, any thinking is to be done, any evaluation, they will do it.

“Relativism… …has made ‘experience’ all-important. Yet experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards…”

Those would be the standards we’ve seen in the news for the last 20⁺ years (for actions of 60⁺ years) and that resulted in 3 excommunications out of the 244 priests that have been dismissed for inappropriate actions. Nineteen have served jail time. Oh, those absolute truths…!

Pope attacks moral relativism

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Jul 17
Consider that Ernest Jones, the colleague and biographer of Sigmund Freud has said that science has dealt three heavy blows to mankind’s self-love (narcissism; separation above and from other animals) above all else. One was the cosmological and it was dealt by Copernicus; the second was biological and it was dealt by Darwin; the third was psychological…and struck at the belief that something internal to man…called ‘will power’ dictates one’s behavior.

What causes man to behave as he does if it isn’t the ‘will power’, credit, blame and other properties of the autonomous man?

(No, this is not a trick question.)

Chasing the autonomous man…

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Jul 17
I propose one hard test for the progress of comp sci. I’ve laid the ground work for a computational engine that can write late night talk show monologues as well as the human writers.

Do you think it’s possible?

Here’s my basic idea…code forth coming.

—GENERATIVE JOKE ENGINE——

Some Basic Info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_humor

Mathematicas and Humor, a book by John Allen Paulos

Philosophy of Humor/Theories of Humor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_humor
http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/humor.htm

Some useful mathematical theory
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory

Liguistics
http://www.tomveatch.com/else/humor/paper/humor.html

Joke Generator
http://grok-code.com/12/how-to-write-original-jokes-or-have-a-computer-do-it-for-you/

Potential Ideas
Simple Program based on Replacement rules of Subjects, Relationships, Events

Simple Program of puns, word combinations, definition crossing

Simple programs and then an rich interface that uses and avatar or on screen talent to “tell” the selected jokes. Would prefer it to all be computer based as we want to find out whether the “telling” of a joke contains a lot (most?) of the humor.
How to do this:

Prep: Create a database of common objects, slang terms, relationship descriptions

a) parse the news each night for subjects, relationships, objects, events

b) enumerate all jokes (basically sentence combinations) using replacement of subjects, objects, relationships with objects in the prep database.

c) run training algo against real monologues (what jokes are likely to be used based on past jokes)

d) tune it

e) create inflection and pausing algorithm that “tells the joke better”

We can exclude the use of existing monologues to train the algorithms and instead use an audience (internet visitors) to rate the jokes and monologues. The algo can then learn what replacements, what structures, and what styles work best. Though i think using existing monologues is realistic as most writers and comedians borrow from successful previous work to save a long, boring training period.

Exhaust all possibilities of jokes using replacement rules. Then run this model against actual jokes used on late night television.

Analyze how many of the actual jokes we found. Push this analysis to back in to give weighting to the generated jokes to predict late night monologues.

Can we ever replace monologue writers?

Can a Computer Beat a Writer?

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Jul 16
I’m interested in spelling out a general theory for gameshows.

Why: It’s fun. It seems to be possible. Its worth a lot of money.

What Makes You Think Its Possible: 50 years of gameshows and we seem to have a handful of models that work well. Work well => stay on the air => audiences find it interesting => advertisers want to spend money.

What is the Structure of This General Theory:
- Enumerate the basic types of games
- Enumerate the gaming environment
- Identify and Classify the game playing behaviors
- Identify and Classify the game outputs
- Enumerate the game playing strategies and classify their outcomes
- Vet against upcoming shows
- Summarize and conclude
- Produce show based on theory
What Does My Intuition (previous experience) Tell Me Already:
- There are 2 main types of games: skill and no skill (“luck”)
- There are 5-8 variants on those two types in each One Player, Two Player, and Multiple Players
  - One Player
  - Two Player – sometimes the “house” is the other player
  - Multiple Players
  - Variant Breakout
    - Skill
      
      Physical Skill – speed strength
      
      Knowledge/Factual Skill – huge base of facts needed
      
      Reasoning/Logic Skill – no prior knowlege required (Gambling strategy games included)
    - No Skill
      
      Physics
      
      Probability
  - We’re left with 15-24 actual game engines (there will be all sorts of environmental variations that turn these 15-24 games into a near infinite variety)
  - The outcomes/stakes at play can all be consider environmental factors (yes, they may change how the game is played but the rules of the game engine won’t change)
- The Environment can be classified easily
  - Host
    - Famous
    - Non Famous
    - Involved in Game/Vs. Player
  - Audience
    - Big
    - Small
    - Live
    - Involved in Game Directly
  - Music
    - In studio
    - Added in after
    - Ambient
    - Part of Game
  - Lights
    - Involved in Game directly
    - Spotlight
  - Time Limits
    - Time limited game
    - Timing based game
  - Stakes/Risk
    - Risk to player
    - Risk to vs. player
    - Large Stakes (define)
- Game theory will be useful in picking out strategies
- List of Gameshows
- The stimuli and operants and schedules can be identified and classified
  - audience feedback
  - lighting and music
  - real money present
  - touches from host
  - interaction with family
  - ….
What the heck would I do with all this?

Use it to come up with new shows and improve existing shows!

Get published!

While I work on this, check out all these papers.
Gameshow – Is There a General Theory?

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Jul 16