Reflection on the nature of love

Reflecting on a recent, unexpected Christmas event:

Love isn't a feeling. It's maybe a cross between a decision and a reflex, or maybe it's a decision to create a reflex, to do anything you can to help that person. Love doesn't go away even if the positive feelings that made you decide to commit to it do. Love is permanent, in my experience.

-B.C.

Rash Vows

The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of one's self, of the weakness and mutability of one's self, has perilously increased, and is the real basis of the objection to vows of any kind. A modern man refrains from swearing to count the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, not because it is silly to do so (he does many sillier things), but because he has a profound conviction that before he had got to the three hundred and seventy-ninth leaf on the first tree he would be excessively tired of the subject and want to go home to tea...

Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief of love, or aspiration. Short as the moment of his resolve might be, it was, like all great moments, a moment of immortality, and the desire to say of it exegi monumentum aere perennius was the only sentiment that would satisfy his mind. The modern aesthetic man would, of course, easily see the emotional opportunity; he would vow to chain two mountains together. But, then, he would quite as cheerfully vow to chain the earth to the moon. And the withering consciousness that he did not mean what he said, that he was, in truth, saying nothing of any great import, would take from him exactly that sense of daring actuality which is the excitement of a vow.

...It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-favoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.

Source: G.K. Chesterton 

I could not love thee, dear, so much
Loved I not Honor more.

-Max

P.S. I made another rash vow last Friday, December 14, 2018: on my honor, no food shall cross my lips until February 14, 2019, unless I have already reached a satisfactory strength/weight ratio or encounter serious health problems, or unless this vow conflicts with a prior obligation (like taking the sacrament, which obviously takes precedence).

 --

Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false. They are certainly controversial, even among my colleagues in economic history. But far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vacuity. As Darwin himself noted, "false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."[Darwin, 1998, 629] Thus my hope is that, even if the book is wrong in parts, it will be clearly and productively wrong, leading us toward the light. -Gregory Clark, Preface to Farewell to Alms

Great article on roleplaying

I thought this was great: http://darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/models/blacow.html

-Max

 --

Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false. They are certainly controversial, even among my colleagues in economic history. But far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vacuity. As Darwin himself noted, "false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."[Darwin, 1998, 629] Thus my hope is that, even if the book is wrong in parts, it will be clearly and productively wrong, leading us toward the light. -Gregory Clark, Preface to Farewell to Alms

Hooray for F#

Hooray!

I think I'm beginning to grok F# computation expressions. I realized recently that an abstraction I've been trying to create--generalized input/output so you can write the same algorithm and execute it both synchronously (a la Console.ReadLine/WriteLine) and in an event loop like React/Elmish--is really just a form of coroutine. Put it together with a packrat parser and you wind up with something like this:

// types for test scenario

type GetNumber = Query of string

type Confirmation = Query of string

type InteractionQuery =

    | Number of GetNumber

    | Confirmation of Confirmation

module Recognizer =

    open Packrat

    let (|Number|_|) = (|Int|_|)

    let (|Bool|_|) = function

        | Word(AnyCase("y" | "yes" | "true" | "t"), ctx) -> Some(true, ctx)

        | Word(AnyCase("n" | "no" | "false" | "f"), ctx) -> Some(false, ctx)

        | _ -> None

module Query =

    open Packrat

    let tryParse recognizer arg =

        match ParseArgs.Init arg |> recognizer with

        | Some(v, End) -> Some v

        | _ -> None

    let confirm txt =

        InteractionQuery.Confirmation(Confirmation.Query txt), (tryParse Recognizer.``|Bool|_|``)

    let getNumber txt =

        InteractionQuery.Number(GetNumber.Query txt), (tryParse Recognizer.``|Number|_|``)

#nowarn "40" // recursive getBurgers is fine

[<Theory>]

[<InlineData(4,true,0,"That will be $8.00 please")>]

[<InlineData(4,true,3,"Thanks! That will be $11.00 please")>]

[<InlineData(3,false,3,"Thanks! That will be $6.00 please")>]

let ``Simulated user interaction``(burgers, getFries, tip, expected) =

    let interaction = InteractionBuilder<string, InteractionQuery>()

    let rec getBurgers : Interactive<_,_,_> =

        interaction {

            let! burger = Query.confirm "Would you like a burger?"

            if burger then

                let! fries = Query.confirm "Would you like fries with that?"

                let price = 1 + (if fries then 1 else 0)

                let! more = getBurgers

                return price + more

            else

                return 0

        }

    let getOrder: Eventual<_, InteractionQuery, _> =

        interaction {

            let! price = getBurgers

            let! tip = Query.confirm "Would you like to leave a tip?"

            if tip then

                let! tip = Query.getNumber "How much?"

                return sprintf "Thanks! That will be $%d.00 please" (tip + price)

            else

                return sprintf "That will be $%d.00 please" price

        }

    let mutable burgerCount = 0

    let question = function

        | Confirmation(Confirmation.Query txt) ->

            if txt.Contains "burger" then

                if burgerCount < burgers then

                    burgerCount <- burgerCount + 1

                    "yes"

                else

                    "no"

            elif txt.Contains "tip" && tip > 0 then

                "yes"

            elif txt.Contains "fries" && getFries then

                "yes"

            else

                "no"

        | Number(GetNumber.Query txt) -> tip.ToString() // must always answer question by typing text

    let resolve =

        let rec resolve monad =

            match monad with

            | Final(v) -> v

            | Intermediate(q,f) as m ->

                let answer = question q

                let m = f answer

                resolve m

        resolve

    Assert.Equal(expected, getOrder |> resolve)

The neat things about this are manyfold:

(1) You can query for numbers (tip amount), yes/no confirmation, or anything else that you want, and it all comes back strongly typed in the context of the algorithm you're executing (getBurgers).

(2) Even though the unit test executes the workflow synchronously via resolve, executing the same logic via React is straightforward: you just take the Intermediate and render the question (q) via React, and dispatch the answer (in string form) back to f. So you can write your business logic without any reference at all to your UI abstractions, and yet it still works in React event loops.

(3) The parser (active patterns in Recognizer) is easy to read and extensible: it looks almost exactly like BNF grammar.

(4) I think it's probably possible to make the parser give you hints about productions that were being matched at the time it ran out of input, so you could give the user hints about what valid inputs they could type next. You could use this in e.g. mobile web development to show autocomplete buttons with the most likely valid responses.

(5) BTW I really like using string format as a canonical form because it's very amenable to pedagogy (teaching the user how they would replicate via text commands the thing you just did on their behalf via the GUI) but you could pick a different canonical form if you wanted to, as long as it's something your event loop knows how to supply.

I'm really happy because I've been working on this problem on and off for probably at least a year, and I finally have a design pattern for user interaction that actually feels _clean_. And in the process I corrected a lot of my misconceptions about computation expressions and what they are good for, and now I have a fairly compelling example to show people of why programming in F# is better/easier/cleaner than C#. :)

~B.C.

 --

Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false. They are certainly controversial, even among my colleagues in economic history. But far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vacuity. As Darwin himself noted, "false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."[Darwin, 1998, 629] Thus my hope is that, even if the book is wrong in parts, it will be clearly and productively wrong, leading us toward the light. -Gregory Clark, Preface to Farewell to Alms

ThingTracker

Ahahaha, this makes me happy. I've been wanting an app like this for ages and I finally made it: just something to track stuff on a daily basis, like how much money I spend or how much exercise I do.

Integrating with Facebook identity and Azure cloud data storage turned out to be a real learning exercise.

Disclaimer: I know it is ugly. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to be easy for me to use. I may or may not invest in prettying it up and showing nice graphs of all the things you're tracking, but for right now it's enough that it shows me what's going on.

https://maxwilson.github.io/ThingTracker/

 --

Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false. They are certainly controversial, even among my colleagues in economic history. But far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vacuity. As Darwin himself noted, "false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."[Darwin, 1998, 629] Thus my hope is that, even if the book is wrong in parts, it will be clearly and productively wrong, leading us toward the light. -Gregory Clark, Preface to Farewell to Alms

Religion: What Difference Does It Make?

One way my religion has recently changed my life: I'm naturally very sympathetic to the need for law, justice, fairness, etc., so my natural inclination with respect to illegal immigration is to say, "Wait your turn. Don't break the law to cut in line and come here early. That isn't good for anybody."

But this scripture gives me pause: 'Wherefore, I, Lehi, prophesy according to the workings of the Spirit which is in me, that there shall none come into this land save they shall be brought by the hand of the Lord.' (2 Nephi 1:6)

And so when I see the news about the migrant train headed for the southern U.S. border right now, instead of being upset, my current inclination is to say, "I do not know what should happen. I will wait and see what happens." The Lord is able to do his own work. He doesn't need my opinion.

New position: neutral.

-Max

 --

Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false. They are certainly controversial, even among my colleagues in economic history. But far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vacuity. As Darwin himself noted, "false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."[Darwin, 1998, 629] Thus my hope is that, even if the book is wrong in parts, it will be clearly and productively wrong, leading us toward the light. -Gregory Clark, Preface to Farewell to Alms

On /Lamb/ movie and odd friendships

I just saw (part of) a movie called Lamb and I need to vent about how mad it made me at the main character. I hesitate to call him the "protagonist" but from a literary standpoint he's at least the deuteragonist.

I was prepared to be uncomfortable going in because it's got a reputation as a "weird" movie, about a friendship between a middle-aged man and an eleven-year-old girl. What what I wasn't prepared to feel was outraged. Fear not, it's not a Lolita storyline, it's not like that, but it turns out I can get mad over much subtler things like dishonesty and selfishness.

Here's the thing: ever since I was a kid, I've always been willing to transcend both space/time and age boundaries. I *am* conscious of age barriers in dating relationships but not in other kinds of relationships. I was nice to substitute teachers in middle school because I recognized that they were in a tough situation and I kind of pitied them. I feel older than my biological parents, emotionally and spiritually and behaviorally, and have at least since the age of twelve or so. I'm perfectly willing to learn from experiences I haven't actually had yet including parenting, and you'll occasionally see me comment in Sunday School about things like what we learn from raising our kids or how it feels when your kids go astray--this may seem odd to some but to me it's just me trying to project my knowledge back in time so I can be my full self even before I become myself. I still see myself as older, in many ways, than even the physically oldest men and women in my social circle; I try to treat kids with respect the way I would have wanted to be treated at their age, because you never know how old someone really is inside; and my best friend is an eleven-year-old (who nevertheless has a lot of catching up to do before she'd be anything like a peer).

So if there is anyone who ought to be able to relate to the social discomforts of an "odd"-looking friendship, and having it anyway, it is me. I was afraid that I might see too much of myself in the movie and it would make me uncomfortable.

But what I wasn't prepared for was to see a friendship so superficially similar yet fundamentally opposite to what I believe in. If you have seen the movie you may recognize some of these elements, but here are some: David lies to Tommy (the girl) about his name. He tells her he's "Gary." He lies to other people in his life. He's having an affair with a younger woman named Linny at work, and he lies to her about his home life. His boss at work confronts him about how his affair is really causing problems for Linny's prospects of promotion, and David shows no remorse. He gestures in the direction of doing the right thing--the first time he pretends to "kidnap" Tommy but really just drops her off at her apartment, he says, "You should probably tell your mom about this," but later on he gets more and more selfish and secretive. He influences her for good in some ways--she stops dressing provocatively after that first "kidnapping" trick, and she stops wanting to smoke--but in other ways the effect of their relationship is to socially isolate her (as well as him). He gets her away from bad friends but doesn't help her make new, better ones. He maintains the outward form of equality between them, offering to take her home instantly if she decides that's what she wants, but for me the final straw and the thing that made me quit in outrage was when she says, "I think I might want to call my mom," to tell her that she's okay and not to worry... instead of instantly obliging, he asks her, "Tomorrow?" and she says yeah, and he starts asking her what she'd tell her mom, clearly wanting to change her mind. I couldn't stand to watch any more and in fact I wanted to tell him off. "That's not friendship! That's selfishness!"

I think Tommy deserves a good life and good friends, and to the extent I kept watching it is because I wanted to see her get good things, but at a certain point in the movie I felt like watching any more would make me complicit in the same kind of thing as David: putting my emotional needs before hers. So instead I'm rewriting it in my head as a half-hour-long movie, and the next thing that happens is Tommy says firmly, "No. I need to call my mom," and she gets up and does so, and then they get in a fight and she realizes what he's really like, and goes home. And then she hurts, because that's what betrayal does to us, and she gets stronger, and some day she finds better friends.

I'm really, really mad at David Lamb. Tommy's a fictional character, and so are you, Lamb, but you are breaking her heart, you selfish jerk. She deserves better. And so did your wife, I bet, and even Linny, and your boss, and everyone around you. You're nice but you aren't good.

 --

Doubtless some of the arguments developed here will prove oversimplified, or merely false. They are certainly controversial, even among my colleagues in economic history. But far better such error than the usual dreary academic sins, which now seem to define so much writing in the humanities, of willful obfuscation and jargon-laden vacuity. As Darwin himself noted, "false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness: and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened."[Darwin, 1998, 629] Thus my hope is that, even if the book is wrong in parts, it will be clearly and productively wrong, leading us toward the light. -Gregory Clark, Preface to Farewell to Alms

Historical evidence

Looks like horses may not have been extinct in pre-Columbian North America after all, according to the DNA evidence.

Link: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/neanderhorse/

-Max

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

The Parable of Two Programmers

[re-posting from https://realmensch.org/2017/08/25/the-parable-of-the-two-programmers/]

The Parable of the Two Programmers

Neil W. Rickert

Once upon a time, unbeknown to each other, the "Automated Accounting Applications Association" and the "Consolidated Computerized Capital Corporation" decided that they needed the identical program to perform a certain service. Automated hired a programmer-analyst, Alan, to solve their problem.

Meanwhile Consolidated decided to ask a newly hired entry-level programmer, Charles, to tackle the job, to see if he was as good as he pretended.

Alan, having had experience in difficult programming projects, decided to use the PQR structured design methodology. With this in mind he asked his department manager to assign another three programmers as a programming team. Then the team went to work, churning our preliminary reports and problem analyses.

Back at Consolidated, Charles spent some time thinking about the problem. His fellow employees noticed that Charles often sat with his feet on the desk, drinking coffee. He was occasionally seen at his computer terminal, but his office mate could tell from the rhythmic striking of keys that he was actually playing Space Invaders.

By now, the team at Automated was starting to write code. The programmers were spending about half their time writing and compiling code, and the rest of their time in conference, discussing the interfaces between the various modules.

His office mate noticed that Charles had finally given up on Space Invaders. Instead he now divided his time between drinking coffee with his feet on the table, and scribbling on little scraps of paper. His scribbling didn't seem to be Tic Tac Toe, but it didn't exactly make much sense, either.

Two months have gone by. The team at Automated finally releases an implementation timetable. In another two months they will have a test version of the program. Then a two month period of testing and enhancing should yield a completed version.

The manager of Charles has by now [become] tired of seeing him goof off. He decides to confront him. But as he walks into Charles's office, he is surprised to see Charles busy entering code at his terminal. He decides to postpone the confrontation, so makes some small talk then leaves. However, he begins to keep a closer watch on Charles, so that when the opportunity presents itself he can confront him. Not looking forward to an unpleasant conversation, he is pleased to notice that Charles seems to be busy most of the time. He has even been seen to delay his lunch, and to stay after work two or three days a week.

At the end of three months, Charles announces he has completed the project. He submits a 500 line program. The program appears to be clearly written, and when tested it does everything required in the specifications. In fact it even has a few additional convenience features which might significantly improve the usability of the program. The program is put into test, and, except for one quickly corrected oversight, performs well.

The team at Automated has by now completed two of the four major modules required for their program. These modules are now undergoing testing while the other modules are completed.

After another three weeks, Alan announces that the preliminary version is ready one week ahead of schedule. He supplies a list of the deficiencies that he expects to correct. The program is placed under test. The users find a number of bugs and deficiencies, other than those listed. As Alan explains, this is no surprise. After all this is a preliminary version in which bugs were expected.

After about two more months, the team has completed its production version of the program. It consists of about 2,500 lines of code. When tested it seems to satisfy most of the original specifications. It has omitted on or two features, and is very fussy about the format of its input data. However the company decides to install the program. They can always train their data-entry staff to enter data in the strict format required. The program is handed over to some maintenance programmers to eventually incorporate the missing features.

SEQUEL:

At first Charles's supervisor was impressed. But as he read through the source code, he realized that the project was really much simpler than he had originally thought. It now seemed apparent that this was not much of a challenge even for a beginning programmer.

Charles did produce about 5 lines of code per day. This is perhaps a little above average. However, considering the simplicity of the program, it was nothing exceptional. Also his supervisor remembered his two months of goofing off.

At his next salary review Charles was given a raise which was about half the inflation over the period. He was not given a promotion. After about a year he became discouraged and left Consolidated.

At Automated, Alan was complimented for completing his project on schedule. His supervisor looked over the program. With a few minutes of thumbing through he saw that the company standards about structured programming were being observed. He quickly gave up attempting to read the program however; it seemed quite incomprehensible. He realized by now that the project was really much more complex that he had originally assumed, and he congratulated Alan again on his achievement.

The team had produced over 3 lines of code per programmer per day. This was about average, but, considering the complexity of the problem, could be considered to be exceptional. Alan was given a hefty pay raise, and promoted to Systems Analyst as a reward for his achievement.

[Different people might get different things out of this parable. To me it's a reminder to take time to relax and think things through. -Max]

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

That's Life

Here's a story about Xave that I like to tell people. It's the meanest thing I ever did to my little brother:

Once upon a time, I must have been maybe fifteen or so and Xave would have been maybe eight years old, and Xave really, really wanted someone to play Life, the board game, with him. I think he asked my sisters and they must have said no, so he came to me and was like, "Max, will you please play Life with me?" I was going to say no but then I had an idea which struck me as hilarious, so I said, "Okay Xave, if you give me five dollars, I'll play Life with you." He was only a little kid but he must have had some Christmas money saved up or something because after some hemming and hawing, he came up with a five dollar bill. I put out my hand and he put the five dollar bill in my hand. Then I put it in my pocket and went back to what I was doing. "That's life," I said.
And I never gave him the money back.

I feel bad about it now but at the time I was laughing too hard inside to think about the ethics of robbing a little kid of his Christmas money for the sake of a joke.

~BC

--

If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Faith and rationality

Hey Elder Wilson,

I had a discussion recently with a cousin who is disaffected with the Church, and it occurred to me that it might be worth sharing part of my response. I don't know if you've thought very hard about proof and faith and knowledge, but at your age I was very uncomfortable even talking about "what if" scenarios involving impossible counterfactuals because I didn't have a framework for thinking about it, and I wasn't comfortable making predictions anyway. (E.g. at your age I wouldn't have felt comfortable saying that Jesus not returning to Earth by 2618 A.D. is a zero probability event which cannot happen unless the Church isn't true. It would have felt presumptuous, even overconfident. But I'm not your age any more.)

Anyway, one reason faith is so important is that even though a given exercise of faith is not guaranteed to always work out the way you hope (even if everything I believe is completely true!), if you don't act on faith at all you'll never gather the necessary data to even know. So you act, then observe, then evaluate, then update your beliefs and act again, then iterate from there.

In other words, having faith is rational! There is no conflict between reason and faith (acting before gaining a sure knowledge of a thing) if you keep an open mind, as long as what you have faith in is actually true. And faith in the Son of Man's teachings, and His continuing leadership, is a true faith.

See examples below.

Max

A cousin wrote:

<<The real question I'm trying to bring up is this: If the Word of Wisdom was not correct, how could you figure this out? If scientific studies about the benefits of green tea are meaningless because the Word of Wisdom is correct no matter what, then scientific studies about the dangers of alcohol are also totally meaningless. >>

Max wrote:

If the Word of Wisdom were bogus, there are a number of ways one could know it. For example, that would imply that Jesus Christ will not be returning to Earth at any time (I am here discounting other Christian religions because frankly I don't find them credible; I've long said that if I were not a Latter-day Saint I could only be an atheist, although atheism has huge problems of its own--anyway, the point is that the only hypothesis I'm comparing to the truth of the Church is atheism). If humanity is still ticking along as usual 600 years from now, I will cheerfully acknowledge that this is a 0% probability event under the doctrine of the restored Church of Jesus Christ, and that since it has (hypothetically) happened anyway, this totally disproves the Church. There are other hypothetical events of low-but-not-0% probability which would constitute strong evidence against the Church but not a total disproof, just something that you'd have to weight against other evidence for and against. For example, while my experience with tithing is that the Lord is very proactive about blessing those who show trust in him by paying it, it is also the case that sometimes the Lord gives us trials (see Job), so let's call it a 10% chance that you could pay tithing faithfully for a year and still be in some sense worse off than if you didn't pay tithing. In the Bayesian sense, that would be strong evidence against the Church (even if the Church is completely true!), and so if the Church is indeed true you'd expect to see a lot of evidence conflicting with that evidence against it (lots of things that are very improbable if the Church is false, such as having more peace and a happier home life from devoting time and attention to scripture study). If instead all of the indicators come up negative--if everything you'd expect to be true if the Church is true turns out to be false--then you can treat the Church as untrue. I mean, don't expect _me_ to treat it as untrue in that case, because the results of my experiments are obviously different than your hypothetical results, but you could reasonably just conclude in that case that the doctrines of the Church just don't work for you. (You may or may not turn out to be correct, but you're not being unreasonable.)

F# and Javascript interoperability

Interop is a hugely important part of a programming language's value proposition. For example, F# would be far less interesting for web programming if it didn't integrate so nicely with amazing Javascript libraries like Pixi and React.

Because it does integrate nicely, you can use amazing algorithms for AI/etc. in F#, and you can attach it to amazing UI (thanks to Javascript interop + WebGL via Pixi) as well as to amazing UI on a desktop machine (thanks to WPF/UWP/Windows). And you're using the SAME F# code for both use cases, which is great if you want to e.g. do the same sanity checking/validation of user inputs on both client-side (for usability) and server-side (for system integrity), without duplicating code.

F# is amazing, but good interop with Javascript makes it twice as amazing.

~B.C.

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Machiavelli, on the three types of intellects

[T]here are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others; the first is the most excellent, the second is also excellent, but the third is useless. -Niccolo Machiavelli

I mostly have the second class of intelligence--I'm good at following ideas that other people have already come up with. In a few areas I have the first class and am able to generate good ideas before other people do. I hope I do not fall into the third class very often or in very many areas.

-Max

--

If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

True genius

From a discussion on Einstein's intelligence vs. van Neumann's.

I'll end the argument right now. Here's a quote from Eugene Wigner, a Nobel-prize winning physicist who was friends with both Einstein and Von Neumann:

"I have known a great many intelligent people in my life. I knew Planck, von Laue and Heisenberg. Paul Dirac was my brother in law; Leo Szilard and Edward Teller have been among my closest friends; and Albert Einstein was a good friend, too. But none of them had a mind as quick and acute as Jansci [John] von Neumann. I have often remarked this in the presence of those men and no one ever disputed.

But Einstein's understanding was deeper even than von Neumann's. His mind was both more penetrating and more original than von Neumann's. And that is a very remarkable statement. Einstein took an extraordinary pleasure in invention. Two of his greatest inventions are the Special and General Theories of Relativity; and for all of Jansci's brilliance, he never produced anything as original."

——————————————————————————————————————————————

In terms of precocious, "gee whiz he can calculate Pi to the 23,000th decimal place in his head!" Johnny was unmatched. Nobody - [with] the exception of Ramanujan, whose talents in mathematics were unparalleled - could match Johnny's eidetic gifts. But that raises an interesting question about what we mean by "intelligence."

If we ranked geniuses by IQ tests then I doubt any man of the last 120 years, perhaps with the exception of Poincare, would beat John Von Neumann (or perhaps some janitor working nights at MIT would win, these things are hard to predict and, more importantly, meaningless). But is intelligence simply the summation of an IQ test? Truly "smart" people know the answer is no. You can be more brilliant and creative than somebody with a higher IQ than you. Such metrics are too simplistic to capture the totality of what we mean when we say "intelligence." Creativity is intelligence. Abstract, conceptual thinking is intelligence. Mathematical deduction is intelligence, but so is literary deduction.

I've noticed the same thing. IQ matters. It matters tremendously, and those with higher IQs will have easier and more successful lives than they would with lower IQs. But something extra is required for true genius, and some people have it and some people don't. I sometimes think of IQ as being how well-greased your brain is--how quickly you can learn and how fast you can answer questions--but for true genius you apparently need to be good at thinking of the right questions to ask your brain.

-Max

--

If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

[Speculation] Inducing anti-paranoia

From http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/, this interesting observation:

Paranoia is a common symptom of various psychiatric disorders – most famously schizophrenia, but also paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, sometimes bipolar disorder. You can also get it from abusing certain drugs – marijuana, LSD, cocaine, and even prescription drugs like Adderall and Ritalin. The fun thing about paranoia is how gradual it is. Sure, if you abuse every single drug at once you'll think the CIA is after you with their mind-lasers. But if you just take a little more Adderall than you were supposed to, you'll be 1% paranoid. You'll have a very mild tendency to interpret ambiguous social signals just a little bit more negatively than usual. If a friend leaves without saying goodbye, and you would normally think "Oh, I guess she had a train to catch", instead you think "Hm, I wonder what she meant by that". There are a bunch of good stimulant abuse cases in the literature that present as "patient's boss said she was unusually standoffish and wanted her to get psychiatric evaluation", show up in the office as "well of course I'm standoffish, everyone in my office excludes me from everything and is rude in a thousand little ways throughout the day", and end up as "cut your Adderall dosage in half, please".

Hmmm. This raises a few questions in my mind:

(1) Would it be possible to deliberately induce paranoia in one's self through pure psychology, by looking extra-hard for ambiguities that can be interpreted as negative social cues?

(2) Would it be possible to do the opposite, and deliberately not notice possible negative cues if they are ambiguous?

(3) What would be the pros and cons of each approach, and what would be the likely long-term outcomes?

Prima facie it seems reasonable to believe that anti-paranoia (i.e. optimism) would lead to other people having more positive experiences with you, because people like being liked, so in a sense it would probably be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It might also lead to you getting more easily exploited by those who genuinely have bad intentions: con men, narcissists, and the like.

In the short term, interpreting ambiguity in a neutral or positive sense ("I guess she had a train to catch") could lead you to overlook some negative social signals and cause some awkwardness (which you might or might not notice). But if the signal is persistent (e.g. if you have terrible body odor and people avoid you) sooner or later someone will signal you in a way that you will notice. As long as you don't retroactively internalize the prior ambiguities--as long as you respond only to the signal that you actually get--there shouldn't be much harm done, to you or to them. And you'll avoid the psychic stress and relationship harm that comes from imputing negative social cues where none were intended.

I'm reminded that "happiness is a dominant strategy" and it seems likely that a mild degree of anti-paranoia is probably a healthy strategy too, for yourself and other people. I wonder if that's why Down's Syndrome kids have a reputation for making their families happy? Anecdotally I observe that they seem largely immune to negative social cues, nor do they give off any negative social cues.

I wonder if I can induce temporary, mild anti-paranoia in myself as an experiment. Or, if I already have it, if I can induce some more.

-Max

P.S. Would it be beneficial to reify an anti-paranoid attitude as a social contract? "If you have something negative to say to me you'd better say it loud and clear or I won't notice." It's worth considering the likely consequences.

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Re: Inferential distance

The conclusion seems to hint at "talk more carefully" but what's necessary is in fact to "listen more carefully before you talk." If a given person's attention is a nonrenewable resource, you need to make sure you understand where they're coming from before you start trying to engage with them.

If argumentum ad populum is fundamental to my mode of understanding the universe, wouldn't it be nice if you knew that about me BEFORE launching into a pitch based on carefully defined terms and logical implications? Either you know an argument which is going to persuade me ("recently, more scientists are concluding XYZ") or you don't, but if you do, you don't want to inoculate me by feeding me an unpersuasive argument first ("you already believe ABC; ABC -> XYZ; therefore XYZ"). And if you don't know an argument which is going to persuade me, wouldn't you at least like to know beforehand that you're wasting your time?

Listen first, then talk. (At least if you are interested in persuasion, as opposed to e.g. killing time.)

On Sat, Jul 28, 2018 at 11:50 AM, Maximilian Wilson <wilson.max@gmail.com> wrote:

[This is one reason I find conversations with certain people frustrating. E.g. on D&D message boards. Things that seem obvious to me are not always obvious to them, and they demand "proof" of trivialities, like the relative worthlessness of Improved Critical. Anyway, "inferential distance" seems like a useful concept. -Max]

https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/idea-inoculation-inferential-distance-848836a07a5b

Excerpt:

Inferential distance is the gap between [your hypotheses and world model], and [my hypotheses and world model]. It's just how far out we have to reach to one another in order to understand one another.

If you and I grew up in the same town, went to the same schools, have the same color of skin, have parents in the same economic bracket who attended the same social functions, and both ended up reading Less Wrong together, the odds are that the inferential distance between us for any given set of thoughts is pretty small. If I want to communicate some new insight to you, I don't have to reach out very far. I understand which parts will be leaps of faith for you, and which prerequisites you have versus which you don't — I can lean on a shared vocabulary and shared experiences and a shared understanding of how the world works. In short, I'm unlikely to be surprised by which parts of the explanation are easy and which parts you're going to struggle with.

If, on the other hand, I'm teleported back in time to the deck of the Santa Maria with the imperative to change Christopher Columbus's mind about a few things or all of humanity dies in a bleak and hopeless future, there's a lot less of that common context. Even assuming magical translation, Christopher Columbus and I are simply not going to understand each other. Things that are obviously true to one of us will seem confusing and false and badly in need of justification, and conclusions that seem to obviously follow for one of us will be gigantic leaps of faith for the other.

It's right in the name — inferential distance. It's not about the "what" so much as it is about the "how" — how you infer new conclusions from a given set of information. When there's a large inferential distance between you and someone else, you don't just disagree on the object level, you also often disagree about what counts as evidence, what counts as logic, and what counts as self-evident truth.

--

If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

--

Be pretty if you are,
Be witty if you can,
But be cheerful if it kills you.

If you're so evil, eat this kitten!

Inferential distance

[This is one reason I find conversations with certain people frustrating. E.g. on D&D message boards. Things that seem obvious to me are not always obvious to them, and they demand "proof" of trivialities, like the relative worthlessness of Improved Critical. Anyway, "inferential distance" seems like a useful concept. -Max]

https://medium.com/@ThingMaker/idea-inoculation-inferential-distance-848836a07a5b

Excerpt:

Inferential distance is the gap between [your hypotheses and world model], and [my hypotheses and world model]. It's just how far out we have to reach to one another in order to understand one another.

If you and I grew up in the same town, went to the same schools, have the same color of skin, have parents in the same economic bracket who attended the same social functions, and both ended up reading Less Wrong together, the odds are that the inferential distance between us for any given set of thoughts is pretty small. If I want to communicate some new insight to you, I don't have to reach out very far. I understand which parts will be leaps of faith for you, and which prerequisites you have versus which you don't — I can lean on a shared vocabulary and shared experiences and a shared understanding of how the world works. In short, I'm unlikely to be surprised by which parts of the explanation are easy and which parts you're going to struggle with.

If, on the other hand, I'm teleported back in time to the deck of the Santa Maria with the imperative to change Christopher Columbus's mind about a few things or all of humanity dies in a bleak and hopeless future, there's a lot less of that common context. Even assuming magical translation, Christopher Columbus and I are simply not going to understand each other. Things that are obviously true to one of us will seem confusing and false and badly in need of justification, and conclusions that seem to obviously follow for one of us will be gigantic leaps of faith for the other.

It's right in the name — inferential distance. It's not about the "what" so much as it is about the "how" — how you infer new conclusions from a given set of information. When there's a large inferential distance between you and someone else, you don't just disagree on the object level, you also often disagree about what counts as evidence, what counts as logic, and what counts as self-evident truth.

--

If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Weight-loss schedule

Intended schedule:

Apr 28: [read Obesity Code, changed some habits] 310 lb.

May 31: [today] 286.6 lb.

June 30: 260 lb.

July 31: 230 lb.

August 31: 200 lb.

Sep 30: 180 lb.

October 31: 165 lb. [stable hereafter]

This is an intention, not an oath, but I believe it is a realistic intention. If I can do it faster, I will. This will roughly double my strength-to-weight ratio (since it turns out that, contrary to my prior understanding, your body does NOT need to ever burn muscle to fuel your brain, unless you're already out of fat) and I already have some ideas of what I want to do with that extra strength. I foresee a lot of hiking and pushups in the future. Maybe some day I'll give the Great Wall of China another shot.

-Max

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Hypothesis: literal meaning of the word "Mormon"

[From a 2013 post in another conference which, I think, never made it onto this blog. -Max]

I think I'm the only person I know who has a theory as to the literal meaning of the word "Mormon," as in Mosiah 18:4.

I think it has something to do with the concept of reclamation or restoration. First we have the verse (Mosiah 18:4) where Mormon attempts to explain the name as follows:

And it came to pass that as many as did believe him did go forth to a place which was called Mormon, having received its name from the king, being in the borders of the land having been infested, by times or at seasons, by wild beasts.

So the name 'Mormon' is appropriate for... a place which had formerly been infested by beasts but isn't any more? And it's a name which is important enough and appropriate enough for Mormon to not only mention the name but give the etymology, which isn't usually the case except for a few names like Irreantum.

Then throughout the remainder of the chapter, the name Mormon is heavily emphasized in a way which makes it clear that it is fraught with meaning to Alma's people in their own new start:

7 And it came to pass after many days there were a goodly number gathered together at the place of Mormon, to hear the words of Alma. Yea, all were gathered together that believed on his word, to hear him. And he did teach them, and did preach unto them repentance, and redemption, and faith on the Lord.

8 And it came to pass that he said unto them: Behold, here are the waters of Mormon (for thus were they called) and now, as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another's burdens, that they may be light;

...

16 And after this manner he did baptize every one that went forth to the place of Mormon; and they were in number about two hundred and four souls; yea, and they were baptized in the waters of Mormon, and were filled with the grace of God.

29 And this he said unto them, having been commanded of God; and they did walk uprightly before God, imparting to one another both temporally and spiritually according to their needs and their wants.

30 And now it came to pass that all this was done in Mormon, yea, by the waters of Mormon, in the forest that was near the waters of Mormon; yea, the place of Mormon, the waters of Mormon, the forest of Mormon, how beautiful are they to the eyes of them who there came to the knowledge of their Redeemer; yea, and how blessed are they, for they shall sing to his praise forever.'

He uses the word 'Mormon' nine times in describing the purification of the Nephites. Try to find a word or concept that fits better into verses 4,7,8,16,29, and 30 than 'reclamation' and then account for the fact that active verbs in English are sometimes passive in Hebrew and vice-versa, and it could be either 'reclamation' or 'restoration', emphasizing either the actor who reclaims or that which is redeemed.

Also look at 3 Nephi 5:12, Alma 5:3, Mosiah 25:18, Mosiah 26:15, and consider how much more meaningful and poetic each of these verses would become if the hypothesized meaning/wordplay were present in the original tongue. Not to mention Moroni's choice of title: "The Book of Mormon."

[Moroni--I see what you did there!]

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Doubt your doubts

[written to a friend publicly wrestling with doubts about the Church, rejecting some doctrines and scriptures while expressing a desire to find a way to still believe in the rest]

I want to echo those who express appreciation for your forthrightness, [redacted], and I can relate to having doubts, although for me it's doubts about my relationships with other people. I read [redacted]'s comment above, for example, and think, "Yeah, I know what that uncertainty feels like. That sounds like my relationship with (for example) dear Katherine Morris back in the day: lots of rational reasons to think the friendship is just over, forever, and walk away, but I feel somehow that I shouldn't walk away, but I don't know if I'm just being stupid in not listening to reason." It kind of leaves you feeling bad about yourself no matter which road you choose.

For what it's worth, I *did* eventually walk away. (Several times, but the last one finally stuck.) And yet here we are years later, good friends, the kind I always wanted us to be. So my rational doubts weren't wrong, and yet my feelings/inspiration/intuition about what we ought to be wasn't wrong either. Reason and faith turned out to be compatible after all, and it just took time to get there.

I can think of at least one other important relationship which took a similar path, and it's taught me not to give up on my feelings too early. (Not the same thing as emotions in this context BTW.) I now think that it's okay to walk away, instead of beating my head on a brick wall, but if I do that I am not obligated to conclude that my feelings about what ought to be are wrong--better to adopt an attitude of "wait and see." And if I don't walk away from someone, I don't have to feel bad about that either.

Religious doubts and interpersonal doubts aren't exactly the same thing, but for me it was. I have an easy time trusting Heavenly Father and a hard time trusting human beings (for completely logical and rational reasons!). If you have an easier time trusting human beings and a hard time trusting in God and/or the Church (for completely logical and rational reasons!) then I sympathize, and hope things work out well for you.

--

If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

A proper ally

And I, the Lord God, said unto mine Only Begotten, that it was not good that the man [Adam] should be alone; wherefore, I will make an help meet for him.

"Meet" means "equal to" or "fitting for." Another translation might be, "I will make for him a proper ally."

Lucky Adam. Someday I hope to have a proper ally to watch my back, too. But for now it is better to go to war alone: a false or incompetent ally is worse than none at all. (It increases the number of exposed targets, without yielding a corresponding defensive benefit.)

~B.C.

P.S. This does not mean I would never aid someone who increases my own risk. I know how to make sacrifices. There have even been a few girls whom I would have gladly married if they had needed me to. But I'm very aware that I'm better off because they did not need any such thing from me, and I'm not going to feel guilty about that.

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Science of fat storage (The Obesity Code)

[Dear J., you might find this interesting. -M.]
So... I'm normally pretty skeptical of nutritional fads and medical findings, because I often feel like it's not really grounded in good science. But I feel like I can recognize solid science when I see it.

My friend Eric Mueller recommended a book to me called The Obesity Code, in which the author (a kidney/diabetes specialist by the name of Dr. Jason Fung) advances the hypothesis that obesity is essentially a hormonal imbalance (high insulin levels leading to insulin resistance), and I find the claims impressive, consistent with my own experiences, and persuasive.

One key fact, supported by many, many case studies (Dr. Fung describes so many case studies that it starts getting tedious), is that your brain can adjust both appetite (calories in) and metabolism (calories out) and tries to balance them against each other. If you try to feed someone more food than they'd naturally eat, not only do they lose appetite and resist eating that much, but even if you do get them to overeat, their metabolic rates go up too. (I'm oversimplifying because there are multiple ways to body consumes energy, from raising your temperature to motivating movement to depositing it in stool.) If you decrease food consumption, metabolism slows too--not perfectly but pretty close, which is why obesity is something that generally takes years to develop instead of being something that can happen to you in a single month of really bad decisions in college. And it's also why trying to "Eat Less [calories], Move More" practically never results in long-lasting weight loss, even in studies where we measure the participants and know that they really are exercising more and eating less.

But the argument (as I understand it) goes that this metabolic homeostasis (keeping calorie intake and metabolism close to each other) is regulated by hormones (chemical signals sent to each cell of the body), and there's excellent evidence (detailed in the book) that the key hormone is insulin. High insulin levels tell cells to store energy; low insulin levels tell cells to release energy; insulin levels rise after a meal (especially carbohydrates without fiber), telling your body to store food. Normally that is fine, but here's the sticky point: when your insulin levels are high all the time from constant eating, your liver and muscles develop insulin resistance (respond less and less strongly to a given dose of insulin) but your brain, which regulates your appetite and metabolism, does not. Over a period of years or decades, your insulin levels get higher and higher as your insulin resistance in your muscles and liver get higher and higher (because more insulin is needed to do the job), but the parts of your body controlled by your brain get more and more inclined to store energy. Then if you ever manage to lose weight, your insulin resistance outside your brain is still as high as ever, so your body still keeps insulin levels high, so your non-insulin-resistant brain is still very willing to return your body to its previous weight.

I'm about halfway through the book so I haven't finished reading all the science yet, but it's obvious at this point what the conclusion is: in addition to eating fewer foods that boost insulin production and insulin resistance (i.e. eat fibers, whole grains, and avoid sucrose and fructose like the plague, especially soft drinks, because fructose boosts your liver's insulin resistance due to being metabolized only in the liver)--in addition to that, it's important to be hungry more often. 21st century humans spend waaaay too much time in a "fed" state (insulin excess) and often the only time we spend in an "unfed" state (insulin deficiency) is when we're asleep. For decades I've thought that you need at least 500 calories per day or so to prevent muscle loss--I'd been told that your brain can't metabolize fat, so your body winds up burning muscle to fuel your brain, but that turns out to be untrue. There is nothing wrong with occasional fasting, and the world record is a guy who (back in 1973) went 382 days without eating, under medical supervision, and came out of it much thinner but perfectly healthy and ambulatory. [ref: http://cristivlad.com/total-starvation-382-days-without-food-study/] So clearly being hungry isn't going to kill you or liquidate your muscles.

So that's basically it, apparently. Reduce insulin levels by eating fewer highly-processed, sugary carbohydrates, and by being hungry more often and for longer periods of time. (Dr. Fung recommends skipping or delaying breakfast, which is something I like doing anyway.) These are things, I think, which I can actually be quite good at doing, now that I understand specifically what I'm trying to accomplish. I've always been better at absolutism than moderation, and "don't eat right now" is a much easier message for me to get my head around than, "Eat right now but don't eat very much." (How much is "very much"? If eating is sort of bad right now, why am I eating at all? Etc.)

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

Black Panther movie

I just realized one of the reasons I didn't enjoy Black Panther very much. Movies about fighting for its own sake bore me, and Black Panther was set up as a movie about who gains political control of a country whose system of government centers on who can beat whom in a fight. There were a lot of fights during the movie, most of which didn't accomplish anything, and then the dramatic question ("Who will retain control of the country?") was resolved in a fistfight, because of course it had to be, since that was how the country's rules were set up.

No wonder I didn't really connect with it emotionally as much as I was hoping to.

~B.C.

--
If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

[Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? is a riff on the old classic, Can A Biologist Fix a Radio?

Here's one passage that caught my attention.

~Max]
http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268

...What constitutes an understanding of a system? Lazbnick's original paper argued that understanding was achieved when one could "fix" a broken implementation. Understanding of a particular region or part of a system would occur when one could describe so accurately the inputs, the transformation, and the outputs that one brain region could be replaced with an entirely synthetic component. Indeed, some neuroengineers are following this path for sensory [26] and memory [27] systems. Alternatively, we could seek to understand a system at differing, complementary levels of analysis, as David Marr and Tomaso Poggio outlined in 1982 [28]. First, we can ask if we understand what the system does at the computational level: what is the problem it is seeking to solve via computation? We can ask how the system performs this task algorithmically: what processes does it employ to manipulate internal representations? Finally, we can seek to understand how the system implements the above algorithms at a physical level. What are the characteristics of the underlying implementation (in the case of neurons, ion channels, synaptic conductances, neural connectivity, and so on) that give rise to the execution of the algorithm? Ultimately, we want to understand the brain at all these levels.

In this paper, much as in systems neuroscience, we consider the quest to gain an understanding of how circuit elements give rise to computation. Computer architecture studies how small circuit elements, like registers and adders, give rise to a system capable of performing general-purpose computation. When it comes to the processor, we understand this level extremely well, as it is taught to most computer science undergraduates. Knowing what a satisfying answer to "how does a processor compute?" looks like makes it easy to evaluate how much we learn from an experiment or an analysis.

...Lesions studies allow us to study the causal effect of removing a part of the system. We thus chose a number of transistors and asked if they are necessary for each of the behaviors of the processor (Fig 4. In other words, we asked if removed each transistor, if the processor would then still boot the game. Indeed, we found a subset of transistors that makes one of the behaviors (games) impossible. We can thus conclude they are uniquely necessary for the game—perhaps there is a Donkey Kong transistor or a Space Invaders transistor. Even if we can lesion each individual transistor, we do not get much closer to an understanding of how the processor really works.

This finding of course is grossly misleading. The transistors are not specific to any one behavior or game but rather implement simple functions, like full adders. The finding that some of them are important while others are not for a given game is only indirectly indicative of the transistor's role and is unlikely to generalize to other games. Lazebnik [9] made similar observations about this approach in molecular biology, suggesting biologists would obtain a large number of identical radios and shoot them with metal particles at short range, attempting to identify which damaged components gave rise to which broken phenotype.

[Also, don't miss this comment on alpha waves]

In neuroscience there is a rich tradition of analyzing the rhythms in brain regions, the distribution of power across frequencies as a function of the task, and the relation of oscillatory activity across space and time. However, the example of the processor shows that the relation of such measures to underlying function can be extremely complicated. In fact, the authors of this paper would have expected far more peaked frequency distributions for the chip. Moreover, the distribution of frequencies in the brain is often seen as indicative about the underlying biophysics. In our case, there is only one element, the transistor, and not multiple neurotransmitters. And yet, we see a similarly rich distribution of power in the frequency domain. This shows that complex multi-frequency behavior can emerge from the combination of many simple elements. Analyzing the frequency spectra of artifacts thus leads us to be careful about the interpretation of those occurring in the brain. Modeling the processor as a bunch of coupled oscillators, as is common in neuroscience, would make little sense.

[And this part about culture, funding, and goals moving forward is important I think.]

...Culturally, applying these methods to real data, and rewarding those who innovate methodologically, may become more important. We can look at the rise of bioinformatics as an independent field with its own funding streams. Neuroscience needs strong neuroinformatics to make sense of the emerging datasets and known artificial systems can serve as a sanity check and a way of understanding failure modes.

We also want to suggest that it may be an important intermediate step for neuroscience to develop methods that allow understanding a processor. Because they can be simulated in any computer and arbitrarily perturbed, they are a great testbed to ask how useful the methods are that we are using in neuroscience on a daily basis.

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."

When Upon Life's Billows: Counting My Blessings

Money can't buy happiness but a lack of money can sure buy insecurity, especially if you have no family and no friends with money. I've been really poor but I'm not any more, and I have to admit that I really enjoy not being poor.

I was talking to someone the other day about social capital and how nerve-wracking it must be to be the first one in your family to ever go to college, and have to learn the ropes on your own. (How do you get a job? How do you afford tuition? What happens if you're struggling in a class? Etc.)

Anyway, I feel very lucky to be as comfortable as I am. I'm grateful to Heavenly Father for giving me opportunities. I am waaaaay more comfortable living among human beings this way than I would be living on my own on a desert island with whatever furniture I could carve out of coconuts.

~B.C.

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If I esteem mankind to be in error, shall I bear them down? No. I will lift them up, and in their own way too, if I cannot persuade them my way is better; and I will not seek to compel any man to believe as I do, only by the force of reasoning, for truth will cut its own way.

"Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else."