Philosophy of the Void

The Red Sox just beat the Yankees to proceed to their first World
Series since 1986.  In the process, they also became the first
baseball team to come back from a 0-3 deficit in postseason play. 
I was a little surprised that the 0-3 statistic stood for such a long
time.  I looked up historical results for the Japan Series
(equivalent of the World Series in Japan), and it’s happened three
times since the 1950s.  I suppose numbers like that take on a life
of their own after a while.  The newspaper headlines after game
three more or less treated the series as over.  On the other hand,
the Red Sox have been dealing with even worse jinxes, it probably
didn’t matter that much.  I really salute the players.  The
managing wasn’t all that great.  Leaving Varitek in with Wakefield
pitching in game five was really scary, and I really don’t understand
why Pedro was on the mound - it just got the Yankees fans back into the
game and makes winning the World Series tougher.  Anyway, insomnia
in New England will continue for another while…

It worked!  While I was writing the little paragraph about
writer’s block, I remembered an interesting idea I had recently. 
Last month, I created an excel spreadsheet that would tabulate how I
felt about my life every month.  For starters, I decided I would
use a number between 1 and 10 for how things are going.  I’ve long
suspected that a number like this would move in predictable
cycles.  Unfortunately, my memory about overall feelings in a
given week or month are generally not reliable after a while, and I
don’t keep a diary.  Hence, the idea of keeping a
spreadsheet.  I think the ideal would be to go by days or weeks,
but that’s a pretty big task, so I’m sticking to months for now. 
If I find any interesting results, I suppose it will become a new blog
entry in the future.  It would be fun if more people participated
in this and we could actually compile a dataset…

I haven’t posted for a long time now.  I’ve come up with several
interesting ideas for a blog posting, but they never seem to make the
cut.  I don’t know if this is because my standards have suddenly
become high or I’ve hit a patch of writer’s block.  If the latter,
I suppose writing about writer’s block might somehow alleviate it so
here I am.

Rational choice theory in political science has made much of the fact
that it is seemingly irrational to vote in a large-scale
election.  This is because the probability that your single vote
will determine the outcome is generally very close to zero, while the
act of voting entails some small but real costs.  Even in a close
election like Florida in 2000, an individual’s vote would really
“count” only if the margin of victory was exactly one vote.  

I wonder if we couldn’t improve the political system by actually
associating individual votes with real value.  One way to do this
would be to tie the financial compensation an elected official receives
with the number of votes received in the most recent election. 
Another way would be to do the same with some element of political
authority.  For example, the Congressional two-thirds majority
currently needed to override a Presidential veto could be increased or
decreased as a function of the percentage of the popular or electoral
college votes the President received.  Using electoral college
votes as an example, George W. Bush won in 2000 with only about 50%,
whereas Ronald Reagan won in 1984 with nearly 98%.  Using this
number in place of the standard two-thirds would give greater force to
what is usually called a “popular mandate.”  The President who
wins with overwhelming popular support would actually be given greater
control over national policy, albeit within limits.  Putting this
type of mechanism in place would benefit voters by giving political
officials an incentive to work for votes beyond the threshold (usually
50%) required to enter office. 

When I approach something new, I always seem to behave the same
way.  First, I will try a lot of different things, particularly
things I find exotic.  If I don’t find something I like, this will
tend to go on for a long time.  If I find something I like (and
usually this won’t take very long), I will stick with it indefinitely
in a very stubborn, repetitive way.  I can think of several
examples.  When I was in grade school, I came to be fascinated
with those cool pencil cases that had hidden gadgets (thermometer,
magnifying glass, pencil sharpener, etc.) in them that you could
release by pushing little buttons.  I finally got one when I was
in third or fourth grade.  All the gadgets were busted by middle
school, but ended up keeping it through high school.  When I first
started listening to pop music, I was in Japan, and the first CD I
listened to was by Mr. Children. 
I liked their music, and my friends will tell you that I follow this
band like a cult nearly a decade later.  When I was an
undergraduate, I started drinking coffee.  After a while, I
decided that I like tall mochas with a touch of whip cream and vanilla
essence.  The folks at the local coffee shop start making this the
moment I walk in the door now.  On the other end of the spectrum
are things like alcoholic and carbonated beverages, authors,
philosophers, U.S. Presidents, and conspiracy theories, for which I’ve
never really found a favorite.  

I wonder why people develop favorites.  Favorites range from those
that make you who you are - significant others, friends, religions - to
those that seem pretty trivial - brand name clothing, TV shows, pencil
cases.  What determines the things we develop favorites for and
the things we don’t really care about?  I suppose it’s a lot of
coincidence and some natural proclivity.  You could say human
beings are the face of randomness.  I guess orderly thought is
necessary to reach an understanding of that though.

I recently read an interesting article about animal intelligence. 
Apparently, dogs are better than chimpanzees at distinguishing human
signals, even though chimpanzees are generally thought to be more
intelligent.  This is not particularly counterintuitive, since
dogs evolved alongside humans, and natural selection probably favored
those that could understand some human communication.  

It is also suggestive about different forms of intelligence. 
Modern education emphasizes things like problem solving and creative
thinking, things that a chimpanzee would presumably have an advantage
in.  On the other hand, it does not stress aptitude in picking up
signals from other people, i.e. interpersonal communication, although
development of this skill is presumably one of the goals of putting a
large number of children in close proximity.  I wonder why this is
the case.  It would not seem too difficult to design a class where
school children are taught how to capture and understand the emotions
or intentions of others at a reasonable level of subtlety.  

An obvious counterpoint would be that formalization is unnecessary
because life experience and the family will pick up the slack. 
This is undoubtedly true to some extent.  On the other hand, if
English were not taught in the education system, I’m quite sure it
would be picked up to varying degrees at home and through the
necessities of life.  My point being, keeping this skill out of
the education system probably disadvantages two classes of people:
those who are naturally inept, and those who come from backgrounds that
are not conducive to development.  The first group might benefit
considerably from rigorous training where they cannot pick things up
naturally.  I suspect people who fit into the second group are on
the rise, given the proliferation of nuclear families and single
parents/children.  

On a related note, keeping “dog” skills out of the education system
also stacks the decks against a particular type of intelligence. 
A place like Harvard selects students based on chimpanzee skills, and
the distribution of dog skills is either comparable to the rest of the
population or below average.  Formally including dog skills in the
education system would provide two benefits.  First, overachievers
would be motivated to acquire such skills.  Second, I suspect this
would substantially increase the correlation between academic success
and success in life.  

Here’s a post that
proves I spend way too much time waiting for my tall mocha every day at
Starbucks.  Apparently Starbucks has a sweepstakes
right now where you can join an Earthwatch field research expedition in Costa Rica to help out with forest restoration. 
Strikes me as a little bizarre, but it?fs an interesting concept and I
guess it plays well with their earth-friendly image.  What I found very weird, though, is that
although the pamphlet states that ?gno special skills are needed?h and the
promotion is open to all residents of the US and Canada (except those in Hawaii
and Quebec), the official rules go on to state that ?gIf a resident of Canada
wins a prize, they will be required to correctly answer a timed mathematical
skill question… before the awarding of the prize?h  Umm… 
Say what?  I did a quick search on
the internet, and it looks like they had the same stipulations for an earlier
promotion to Italy.  Somebody is either playing a very subtle joke or they have some
serious issues…

Note: see comments.

There’s much talk of performance enhancing drugs in sports these days,
particularly steroids in baseball.  The objections are on several
levels.  There are obvious health concerns, since some of the
drugs have side effects that can cause harm in the long run. 
People also feel that medical enhancements give an unfair advantage to
players who use them, whether across time or in direct
competition.  Is it really a great accomplishment when an athlete
on drugs shatters old home run records?  There’s also a related
concern that sees drug use as a form of cheating.  It detracts
from the purity of human accomplishment by adding an extra factor to
the basic mix of talent and hard work.

This gets me thinking, why don’t we raise similar
concerns about the quality of our art?  At least for a century or
so, creative artists have clandestinely or openly relied on various
illegal drugs and narcotics for creative inspiration.  A US government
experiment
from the 1950’s demonstrates the effects of LSD on an artist’s
sketches.  If the source of creativity is drug induced chemical
reactions in the brain, does the art really have value?  We’re no
longer really celebrating the unique talents or inspiration of the
artist.  For sure, not everybody can become a Picasso by taking
drugs, just as most of us couldn’t get into the Olympics by taking
steroids.  But isn’t there something impure and objectionable to
creativity that requires performance enhancing drugs?  I don’t
have an answer to this question.  After all, spontaneity and
randomness in nature can be breathtakingly beautiful.  Similarly,
the output of unusual chemical reactions in somebody’s brain can surely
produce compelling results.  It would be interesting and
informative, though, if museums created “drug-free” zones devoted
exclusively to artists who do not rely on drugs - just to get a sense
of how much creativity human beings can muster on their own.

Computers seem to epitomize the human pursuit of convenience. 
People really care about reducing the number of clicks to accomplish a
simple task.  If you can ctrl-alphabet something, it’s considered
a drastic improvement over moving your hand to the mouse and clicking
through a few menus.  The services offered by Google
are a good example of this.  All you really have to do is type in
“www.google.com” and then your search phrase.  But if this is too
tedious, you can download their toolbar
so you can just type in the search phrase into a little box at the top
of your browser (this actually has a nice highlight feature that’s
really useful for doing searches).  Apparently, even this is too
much for some people, so you can download their deskbar to do a search without even opening a browser.  

I’m not really sure what makes us do this.  Part of it is probably
just a sense of satisfaction of having improved something, regardless
of whether it really matters.  I have to admit to spending some
time figuring out the shortest way to walk from my apartment to the
subway stop, even though the difference involved was probably on the
order of half a minute per trip.  On the other hand, I guess
sometimes these little conveniences have a big impact.  A while
back I downloaded Mozilla, a
browser that lets you “tab” websites so you can bookmark a whole bunch
of favorites.  After I tabbed all the websites I usually visit, I
spend a lot less time on the internet now.  So maybe it just comes
down to trying a lot of little things because sometimes they really
matter.  Like writing a weblog, maybe. 

Today, I dropped part of a paper clipped document as I was using it to type a paper.  The odd thing was, it seemed to me that my brain registered the fact that it was a paper-clipped document before another part of my brain reacted by being surprised that part of the paper fell away.  After the fact, my brain seemed to construct a story about how it was first surprised and then understood that the document was separable because it was paper clipped.  The human brain seems naturally hard-wired to construct rational stories out of discontinuity.  It is well known in statistics that people are apt to find read patterns into random or uncorrelated scatter plots.  Notions of “luck” probably stem from something like this.  I suspect the prevalence of conspiracy theories is also due to brain activity of this sort.  It is also tempting to attribute elements of religion to the brain’s tendency to create stories out of disjuncture.  Somebody told me once the reason why monotheism is superior to polytheism is because it represents progress in the efforts of mankind to debunk stories that attributed various patterns in nature to the intention of deities.  If this is so, it seems to me monotheism is an odd place to stop.  In any case, the issue seems to be more about recognizing the possibility of randomness rather than descending into total randomness.