Men In Black

About a month ago I caught the second half of Men in Black on television; a superbly made movie in hindsight. There were a lot of things I liked about it, but I think the most important thing was that unlike a lot of science-fiction themed movies, which support their plot with a well articulated con-world, Men in Black simply relies on a series of quirks: tabloid style vignettes portraying the protagonists' and our own lack of understanding of everything happening.

People talk to their friends and see psychiatrists in order to reconstruct their personal narratives—and yet when people do the same thing via religion, it suddenly becomes a debate about religion being "unscientific" or "misleading" or some other nonsense. Just saying.


EDIT: I just realized that the only way I can articulate my defense of religion is with these little vignettes. I have an idea of why, but I don't want to get into a long essay about it (talk to me—or leave a comment if you're interested in that sort of thing.)

The Garden of Platonic Forms

More on this later perhaps; time permitting, but I may have stumbled upon the fundamental essence of post-structuralism:

Literature has no platonic forms, invalidating the underlying assumption since Aristotle that literature is a way to bring us closer to Platonic forms (Plato believed that poetry and drama was "thrice removed from nature", meaning that it was an imitation of an imitation; but Aristotle believed in the power of poetry/drama to bypass the limitations of Earthly manifestations.)

Structuralism was the most rigorous* way of doing this, but eventually saw its own limits; thus becoming a study of this very cycle of interpreting and then finding new meaning by figuring out how the interpretation contradicted itself or simply didn't apply. Perhaps that's why I have as hard a time as the French understanding any real difference between structuralism and post-structuralism.

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*Please take "rigorous with a grain of salt.

Two Social Psychology Observations

Cognitive Dissonance: A long time I wrote that I thought that cognitive dissonance was an evolutionary adaptation that made people in groups more predctable and trustworthy and ultimately facilitated the use of narrative as a social heuristic. I still think this is true, but I also think its function is important on an individual level; in order to explain, I'll point out an observation by the computer scientist and cultural theorist Phoebe Sengers:

In listening to Julie, it was often as though one were doing group psychotherapy with the one patient. Thus I was confronted with a babble or jumble of quite disparate attitudes, feelings, expressions of impulse. The patient's intonations, gestures, mannerisms, changed their character from moment to moment. ...It seemed therefore that one was in the presence of various fragments, or incomplete elements of different 'personalities' in operation at the one time. Her 'word-salad' seemed to be the result of a number of quasi-autonomous partial systems striving to give expression to themselves.

out of the same mouth at the same time.

(Laing 1960, 195-196; quoted in Phoebe Sengers' "Schizophrenia and Narrative")

Sengers uses this example to make a point about how current methods in artificial intelligence (AI) operate: an optimal behavior is selected on the basis of some utility metric without any regard for what was done in the past. This disregard for consistency is optimal for any agent within a game-theoretic model (classical economics, chess, etc.), but if a person were to operate this way, their identity would be completely inconsistent, every action acting completely out of context with any other one. In more simple terms, acting in this manner requires completely throwing out one's identity.

To a theoretical economist, this might be great news; after all, it was once said that consistency is the hobgoblin of all minds; but we shouldn't dismiss the importance of a consistent identity so fast. Reading through Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind, I took note of his explanation of consciousness (synonymous with subjectivity, and in this blogger's humble opinion, narrative) as a more evolutionarily advanced mechanism for self-regulation, the process by which all life forms, from prokaryotes to mammals, fight off external chaos and maintain internal order. Self-regulation is the essence of all life, and consciousness is the most advanced tool for doing so by allowing us to make complex plans and coordinate seamlessly with large groups; but more than that, consciousness regulates itself in the same manner that life-forms do—it is a consistent narrative that maintains itself and in doing so endows us with identity. Without a cohesive narrative, we cannot have a subjective identity; and without a subjective identity, our consciousness, that most crucial of means of human survival, quickly disintegrates. If you don't believe me, read the passage above one more time.

Cognitive dissonance is a way for us to fight external entropy, no different than the regulation of our body temperatures or our immune system's constant attack on what's foreign to the body.

2) Protagonists: On a much shorter note, it occurred to me that the presence of protagonists in stories is possibly a symptom-of/appeal-to our own universally shared narcissism.

If On A Winter's Night...

It was cold as balls tonight as I was taking a walk in only a hoodie and some gloves after a 20 minute workout. A lot of doubts were running through my head and, of course, passing by the scenery of Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo I had the fleeting fantasy of being a twenty-something year old millionaire with a condo perfectly overlooking the East River.

Can't survive on such self-indulging fantasies; and if you have to wait for that moment in your life to find meaning, then million dollars or not, you're stuffed. That tied in with all my Taleb-inspired thoughts about randomness and how to live with it and reminded me of part of why I came to love studying narratives:

Narratives are the only thing that truly belong to us. We can't (for the most part) control what happens to us, but we can choose how to make sense of it. We can't control the material consequences of our situation, but we can choose how they shape our intentionality. I feel as if more than anything, this is what atheists misunderstand about religion; the primacy of subjective narratives over objective facts.*

Narrative lets us live for the moment as connected with the associations of the past and the projections and unknowns of the future.

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*It may be accurate to say that what religion deals with is eminently subjective; the multiplicity of narratives in our lives that can only be understood as subjective experiences.

Intuition and Mathematics: A Defense

Back in my days at Oberlin College, I had a memorably good math professor who I consider to be one of my mentors. Her grasp of the subject and the toughness of her problem sets helped me learn math that I hadn't thought myself capable of learning at the time. There was one point she made, however, that in hindsight I can't help but adamantly disagree with.

She said that intuition was what messed mathematicians up. Her points leading up to the conclusion were valid; mathematics is a language—you have a set of symbols and a set of rules for manipulating those symbols; and to prove something you follow those rules precisely, moving the symbols into the configuration that you'd like. Intuition can fail; but math never lies.

This fact about math has given way to some amazing tools; not least the ability for a computer to prove new theorems by arbitrarily moving around symbols until they find something of note. Truth is, however, that, as far as I know, these automated theorem solvers have proven very little of value compared to the work of mathematicians; most applications of computers to theorem solving are programs that are custom written to deal with the details of making a particular point such as the proof of the Four Color Theorem. But I digress.

My professor was certainly right that intuition is flawed whereas following rules doesn't fail; but what she didn't acknowledge was that our intuition can always be verified by checking the logic of our hunch; we can make a guess as to what the nature of a proof might be; following which we write up a proof to see if it logically works. In fact, I think this process of guessing and verifying is essential to solving problems in mathematics.

This point can be best made by a certain concept known as computational complexity (if you're not a technical person, please don't panic! It'll be clear in a minute.) Computational complexity is a measure of how difficult it is for a computer to solve a problem; different problems are organized into different levels of computational complexity based on how hard they are to solve. I'd like to focus on two, known as P and NP. P stands for polynomial—the problem can be solved by an algorithm in a polynomial number of steps. NP stands for nondeterministic-polynomial—the problem can't necessarily be solved in a polynomial number of steps, but if you were to guess the answer to the problem, you could see whether your guess was right in a polynomial number of steps.

Now, to be fair, it might be the case that there is no problem in NP that is not in P (but it's highly suspected that this isn't the case.) Assuming that this isn't the case, however, then there are a whole slew of interesting problems that can't be easily solved in a reasonable amount of time, but could be proven were somebody to make a "lucky guess."

But how "lucky" is that guess? Our intuitions solve extremely complicated problems with a very high accuracy rate. They don't prove anything, but they make very good guesses with a very high chance of success in a very short amount of time. After all, our brains are some of the most complex computers imaginable, with complex networks made up of trillions of neurons and connections; we can recognize faces, navigate social situations with countless unwritten rules and outsmart a computer at just about anything that's not a game with transparent rules (and computers still can't play Go for shit.)

Our intuition allows us to stumble upon the answer to a problem with a very good chance of success. After that, we can use logic to see if we've done it right—as the P/NP distinction illustrates, verification isn't nearly as costly (in most cases) as solving.

[End of neat, pre-packaged entry; on to messy stuff]

(Warning: I am less sure about the following. Feel free to correct me on this; and as always, argue with me.) Another way of thinking about this is that with each level of computational complexity, the amount of solutions to the problem becomes increasingly non-linear. Logic can only go so fast (at a linear speed, I suspect) and can't keep up with the increasing complexity of problems. Our intuition has two particular strengths:

1) It runs in parallel, which allows us to detect patterns very fast. Our neurons don't even fire all that fast—their effectiveness is in that we can distinguish information using space rather than time. No computer touches us in that regard

2) It is built to approximate and work in probabilities rather than to think of things in absolutes, which is what my professor's argument encouraged mathematicians to do. Approximations don't always solve the problem, but in a lot of cases a small decrease in accuracy (say, a 10% chance you're wrong), can lead to being able to find an answer much more efficiently. So long as we can verify the answer in an efficient amount of time (that's what proofs are for), then mathematicians can have their cake and eat it too.

The Poverty of Online Information

This is a post I wrote for another website, Good to Know, Inc., but I wanted to share it on this blog in its unedited form (since they're likely to make edits to my writing.) Here it is:

Also, I have no idea why the font is being so screwy.

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There are three concepts that, when one looks closely enough, can be seen as a single indivisible triad: narratives, context and memory. They all fundamentally deal with an associative way of thinking and they are noticeably robust: one doesn’t easily forget things (my cousin and I still occasionally debate who was at fault in a scuffle we had when I was seven) and we seem to understand things best when they’re told as a story. They also have another trait in common: they are often lacking if not non-existent when I try to find information from the internet.

Take Wikipedia as an example. It certainly has a wealth of raw information; just about anything one can think of seems to have an article, whether your interest is in hermetian matrices, hardcore bands, Lacanian psychoanalysis or Pokemon trading cards. Even so, I never feel the same sense of fulfillment reading material on Wikipedia that I get from reading a book; I often find myself struggling to walk away with something to hold on to after browsing through this seemingly infinite pool of collective knowledge.

Maybe I’m just of a dying breed of people who hold on to physical books, but more universal reasons seem to be at play. Our brains work in an associative manner; rather than record our memories in a serialized manner like a video camera or a computer’s hard drive, we create memories by connecting various objects, sensations, thoughts, images, sounds and other past experiences. Conversely, we recall memories from the past by seeing, hearing, feeling or thinking something that we’ve associated with it; anyone remember the scene that everybody talks about from Swann’s Way where the narrator takes a bite of a Madeline cookie and his entire past rushes back at him?

A single sensation or reference brings back a rapid cascade of memories and this same phenomenon underlies what might be our memory’s inherent preference for books: we associate its content with the distinct look and feel of the book’s cover, pages, printing, wear and tear. Simply put, you can remember something much better when you attach it to a physical object of some kind.[1] But just as the physical context of knowledge may matter more than we think, so too might the relevance of that knowledge to some larger narrative. The journalist Malcolm Gladwell might oftentimes be criticized for the lack of empirical rigor behind his theses, but I prefer any one of his books to a series of entries on Wikipedia because I believe him to be a masterful storyteller able to weave a larger number of data, anecdotes and ideas into a single story that makes sense of them. Knowledge is much more easily remembered when there is a narrative that brings it all together.

One way of thinking about this is that a narrative introduces redundancy to knowledge. It’s much easier to remember an idea when it’s linked to a number of other ideas as part of a larger theory. If you learn something in a vacuum, there will be nothing to give you any clues to it should you forget it; but by relating it to something else, we have something to remind us of the original idea.

But is it really the case that there are no narratives on Wikipedia? If I look up David Bowie, I’ll find a summary of his life and career and with it there will be hyperlinks to more detailed summaries of particular works or to biographies of his contemporaries; there’s definitely a narrative. Even so, there’s something about Wikipedia that is too summarized and distilled to be the kind of story that sticks well after I’ve finished reading an article. It offers not so much a story as a summary in which details are relegated to the various articles that it links to.

But these links on Wikipedia are inadequate to finish telling the story. They are details that are told in a complete vacuum, unaware of the fact that I came from a page talking about one thing and not another. In Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, the defeat of the United States Navy 7^th Fleet at the hands of Paul Van Riper’s meager force in the 2002 Millennium Challenge War Games is talked about in the context of how human intuition can be more powerful than the world’s greatest computers, but a Wikipedia article summarizing the thesis of Blink could only tell it in sufficient detail by providing a link to an unrelated page summarizing the incident; one that would fail to have the interpretive richness of Malcolm Gladwell’s own retelling.

A story, as opposed to a simple summary or functional narrative, speaks to us about what is not obvious. Whereas summaries compress, stories interpret by bringing together a wealth of information and constructing a unique idea. Furthermore, through this same process of bricolage, a story is filled with a rich variety of prose and impedimenta that allow us to create a rich network of associations and have an experience that is eminently memorable. A summary, as a simple compression of one or more stories, simply doesn’t have the same informational richness as those stories and as such cannot create the strong mnemonic associations that stories do.

At the end of the day, storytelling is something that is hardwired into us. We comprehend and remember things as stories, not data, and the tradition of storytelling has been a universal ritual as far back as recorded history takes us. This natural affinity of ours towards telling stories can teach us a lot about how we learn and should be taken into consideration as we expand our educational tools into the domains of the internet and cloud computing. The ability to express ideas as dynamic and interactive programs as opposed to static texts and the interconnection of vast amounts of user-created data will doubtless allow us to inform and educate in novel ways; but these innovations must cultivate the human faculty for storytelling if they are to be truly effective as pedagogical tools. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected and hyper-abundant in information, context has become the essence of knowledge; and one cannot understand context without understanding stories.

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[1] For further reading on this idea, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notebook, Opacity (http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/notebook.html)