Holding the cat, I looked in the mirror and was startled. Fluffie’s face is asymmetrical, but I couldn’t have told you which side has this or that feature. (Can you say without looking which was Moshe Dayan’s good eye?) And yet her mirror image was strikingly strange.

I’ve had similar experiences a few times before: seeing my face without glasses or beard; seeing my father in person for the first time in a couple of years. At such moments I see – briefly – what the face ‘really’ looks like, before the reality fades into the familiar symbol. Such abstraction is necessary, of course, but I wonder whether there might be some benefit to lifting the veil more often.

“I have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country, a state, nor to a circle of friends, nor even to my own family.”

Found in Quotations from Mathematicians

Animation of Congress. For those three of you who haven’t seen it: Keith Poole‘s team at U.Houston tabulated the roll-call votes in Congress from 1879 to 1998 and did a factor analysis; the two dimensions shown in the animation are enough, they say, to ‘predict’ the vast majority of votes.

2010: New site.

Stephen Jay Gould, in one of his Natural History essays, wrote:

I believe that any solution to this key puzzle in Darwinian biography must begin with a proper exegesis of intelligence – one that rejects Charles Spearman’s old notion of a single scalar quantity recording overall mental might (called g or general intelligence, and recently revived by Murray and Hernnstein as the central fallacy of their specious book, The Bell Curve – see the second edition of my book The Mismeasure of Man). Instead, we need a concept of intelligence defined as a substantial set of largely independent attributes.

(I have read neither of the books mentioned, but when does that stop anyone?)

The thesis of The Bell Curve, I gather, is that the races (whatever that means) have different distributions of g, though these differences are dwarfed by the variation within each race: the area under any two such bell curves overlaps except at the fringes.

Current enlightened thought says that intelligence is a composite of several uncorrelated talents, and ‘general intelligence’ is about as meaningful as the sum of your age and your shoe size. But is that a fatal fallacy? If ‘average sum of age and shoe size’ is found to differ between two groups, isn’t that a sign that their ages and/or their shoe sizes differ? At most we might find that if the components were weighted differently (say by using European rather than American shoe sizes) the ranking would change.

If g is a composite, I’d expect the gaps to be bigger (though not all in one direction) if the components are measured separately – rather than vanish, as I assume TBC‘s denouncers want us to think.* But Gould says it’s fallacious to measure g at all; implying that g is not even a composite, but measures something completely meaningless.

What gives? <whine> Do I gotta read another book? </whine>

*This sentence rewritten after discussion with an old friend. The original version implied that all the spreads are in the same direction, i.e. that the median White is much brighter than the median Black in each of the seven-or-so ways.

In the New Yorker, a review of The Myth of the Paperless Office. (Link from Monty Solomon on a private list.)

Paper enables a certain kind of thinking. Picture, for instance, the top of your desk. . . . The piles look like a mess, but they aren’t. When a group at Apple Computer studied piling behavior several years ago, they found that even the most disorderly piles usually make perfect sense to the piler, and that office workers could hold forth in great detail about the precise history and meaning of their piles. . . .

But why do we pile documents instead of filing them? Because piles represent the process of active, ongoing thinking. The psychologist Alison Kidd, whose research Sellen and Harper refer to extensively, argues that “knowledge workers” use the physical space of the desktop to hold “ideas which they cannot yet categorize or even decide how they might use.” The messy desk is not necessarily a sign of disorganization. It may be a sign of complexity: those who deal with many unresolved ideas simultaneously cannot sort and file the papers on their desks, because they haven’t yet sorted and filed the ideas in their head. . . .

It is pleasant to have my inability to classify my papers ratified – rationalized? – by a scientific authority figure.

Of course a desktop (even extended to the floor) is a limited space. Perhaps the killer app for VR will be bigger offices, with unlimited space for small tables among which one can ‘walk’ to find the right pile of papers. (For better visual memory cues, the space ought to have some arbitrary shape features: tables of different sizes and heights, wall decor and so on.)

But I’ll probably still wish for an AI assistant to help organize the stuff.

New Scientist: Neural network ‘in-jokes’ could pass secrets

This reminds me of a discussion, years ago on Extropians, of “Schelling points”: for under-constrained problems there may be a cultural preference for particular solutions. For example, if I ask you to meet me in Paris on a given day (but have no time to say more), and you’ve never been there before, you’ll go to the Eiffel Tower — but if we have previously met in Paris, you’ll go to wherever we met before. At least, that’s how I’ll bet.
These are examples of Schelling points, as I (mis)understand the notion.

But.
I know two people who have various things in common.
Suppose I tell each to meet the other in Chicago on a given day.
If they know nothing about each other, they’ll go to some generic Chicago landmark.
If I tell each that the other studied physics at UChi, they’ll go to the site of Fermi’s reactor, I guess.
But if I tell Bruce only that David is a science fiction fan, and tell David only that Bruce teaches physics, they’ll probably go to two different places.

I’m not sure what this thought-experiment tells us, if anything. 😉

Jay Zilber argues:

The human race is perpetually at war — not simply between the good guys and the bad guys, nor even between liberals and conservatives. If only it were so convenient to draw the lines in this struggle so starkly, but it’s more complicated than black hats and white hats. Forgive me the cliche, but it’s the whole dual-nature-of-man hat. It’s a war between the Thinkers and the Feelers.

Okay, a promising start; I particularly like the disclaimer, that it’s not about good vs evil. But he blows it later on:

But in the end, it is the Thinkers — those whose words and deeds are governed by Intellectual Honesty, those who demand adherance to high standards of critical thinking, both by their opponents and of themselves — it is the Thinkers who hold the high moral ground in any argument. By definition.

Are there no Corrupted Thinkers? I suggest that Communism would be impossible without them. The boy who ratted on his parents for ‘hoarding’ (i.e. declining to play their assigned rôle in Stalin’s famine) was following a Thinker impersonal code, albeit an artificial one, rather than natural Feeler impulses. (Or so I have always imagined. Because I’m a rather stiff Thinker, it didn’t occur to me until just now that he was a brat who wanted to get back at his family for some slight. Still, it was Thinkerish to applaud him for it.)

The evils of Stalin and Pol Pot were built of lies, and probably were ultimately rooted in personal hatreds — but they were packaged in Thinker language like “the good of the greatest number” and carried out inflexibly. Even we Thinkers can get it wrong sometimes.

I’m disappointed to find a fellow INTP arguing in such reductionistic bipolar terms; it reminds me of how Leftists like to lump fascists and libertarians together as “far Right”.