idiolect.org.uk

the obvious in psychology

I mean, Christ, I'm not the first to say it, but some psychological research is just so obvious I want to bite out my own eyes. To pick unfairly, and at random, something I came across today, why exactly are we doing research like this? -

"Women's and Men's Personal Goals During the Transition to Parenthood" (Salmela-Aro et al, 2000)
Abstract: To investigate how women's and men's personal goals change during the transition to parenthood, the authors studied 348 women (152 primiparous and 196 multiparous) and 277 of their partners at 3 times: early in pregnancy, 1 month before the birth, and 3 months afterward. At each measurement, participants completed the Personal Project Analysis questionnaire (B. R. Little, 1983). The results showed that during pregnancy women became more interested in goals related to childbirth, the child's health, and motherhood and less interested in achievement-related goals. After the birth women were more interested in family- and health-related issues. These changes were more substantial among the primiparous than among the multiparous mothers. Although the men's personal goals changed during the transition to parenthood, these changes were less substantial than those found among the women. description and explanation in psychological science.

Can this be as pointless as it sounds? Women worry more about impending motherhood while pregnant, and less about other things. Hold the front page.

Now there's a few arguments you can make for researching 'common sense'.

you confirm 99% of it, but you falsify 1% of it, and that's the important bit.

common sense is just a set of circumstance-variable prejudices. Not only does 'common sense' contain multiple, often erroneous and/or contradictory, positions, but it's easy for people to say that's just common sense after the fact.

it might be obvious that something is so, but exactly how is it so? Women deprioritise career-goals during pregnancy - obviously. But how much do they do this? What is the variation? How does this change across demographics? Across cultures? Across generations? (this said, if this is the main justification for the research then there is a fairly major problem with the communication of it).

And don't think that I'm just talking about social psychology here. The brainporn fetish of cognitive neuroscience is just as much to blame. The next time I see a functional imaging study that demonstrates that a task involving mental activity requires various different bits of the cortex I shall weep.

The added difficulty for social psychology is that most of the concepts involved
have already had been explored with far greater finesse and insight than science can ever manage by millennia of culture activity. If you're going to do some research here you need to bring some added value. Here's my provisional list of those cases in which this might be possible:

When we know something to be true, but we need to know exactly how true it is - the extent, the variability, the limits of the effect and the interaction with other factors.

When we know something to be true, and science can show that it isn't.(eg
graphology, people wouldn't electrocute others just because they are ordered
to by a scientist). [and related to this]

When the common sense perception of individuals is persistently biased (eg self-rating of ability to detect lies, judgements about how fast queues move, perception of sleep duration among insomniacs, etc)

When we know something to be true, but we don't know how or why it is true (enter, stage right, cognitive neuroscience and recourse to explanatory primitives from lower levels of description)

when the free rider problem isn't

Great post at ambiguous.org about the free rider problem, and why it often isn't. Read it for yourself, but essentially it says - and illustrates - that our dislike of social cheaters often leads us to want to make 'fair' systems that are working just fine despite- or because of- their tolerance for some degree of free-riding (thank to Matt at Interconneted.org for the link)

Quote #27

You don't need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Don't even listen, simply wait.
Don't even wait.
Be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you.
To be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Franz Kafka

The only true life i have is the life of my brain...

Just found some transcriptions of Utah Philips' Stories, from which this, a favourite of mine:

That's when [Fry Pan Jack] told me - you know, he'd been tramping since 1927 -he said, "I told myself in '27, if I cannot dictate the conditions of my labor, I will henceforth cease to work." Hah! You don't have to go to college to figure these things out, no sir! He said, "I learned when I was young that the only true life I had was the life of my brain. But if it's true the only real life I have is the life of my brain, what sense does it make to hand that brain to somebody for eight hours a day for their particular use on the presumption that at the end of the day they will give it back in an unmutilated condition?" Fat chance!

fundamentalism in consumer culture

If, like i said, social isolation is necessary to maintain ideological isolation, then here's an extra irony to consumer culture: as The Market spreads across the world promoting Democracy and Freedom, it also extends the kind of atomisation that allows people to live in different social worlds than their neighbours and hence allows more ideological extremism.

Ideological divergence because of more social isolation vs ideological homongenisation because of an increasingly similar macro-economic condition (ie consumer society).

How the two forces will play out beats me

describing systems / systems for describing

Systems theory, like catastrophe theory before it, is a descriptive theory not a predictive theory. Which, means that it's harder to say if it's any use (and, indeed, you can always re-phrase any discoveries within that framework using the language of the old framework, once you have made them).

Given this, we'd expect the most utility of systems theory to be in fields which are suffering most from a lack of adequate epistemological tools. Which is why, I guess, I'm convinced of the necessity of some kind of systems thinking in cognitive neuroscience and for social psychology.

And why, maybe, to date the best systems theory work in psychology has been in developmental psychology

The World Knot

In a review by Steven Poole of Edelman and Tononi's Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination I found this:

...they claim that Schopenhauer called the problem of consciousness the "world knot", and adopt this lovely image as their catchphrase. But that is not what Schopenhauer said. What he calls the "world knot", in On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, is "the identity of the subject of willing with that of knowing". Edelman and Tononi give a remarkably rich and provocative hypothesis of the subject of knowing, but the will soars free, as yet untethered by physical explanation.

Great image - very norse - and the identity of the subject of will with the subject of knowing is definitely a biggie, both for the psychology and metaphysics of consciousness.

Quote #25, Neoteny

Reading Tom Robbin's Still Life With Woodpecker on the tube this morning i was pleasently surprised by this:

"Neoteny" is "remaining young", and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals -- although a case could be made for the dolphins -- because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature

Ha! And with that, I'm off to the Hay Festival.

Links for 28th May '04

Marketing (rant warning)

Geoffrey Miller thinks marketing is the greatest invention of the last 2,000 years

Hmmm...

What he writes make me feel uncomfortable in a way I can't really put my finger on. This means that either

a) he is right, and I'm a damn liberal who can't face up to the truth

b) he is wrong, but in ever so subtle a way

He says Almost everything we can buy is the result of some marketing people in some company thinking very hard about how to make us happy.

Surely, it's more accurate to say that almost everything we can buy is the result of some marketing people in some company thinking very hard about how to make us buy their stuff. This is an important difference.

If, like he notes, the marketing orientation has become common in companies that make things for individual customers, like clothes, cars, televisions, and movies. It remains rare in heavy industry that produces steel, coal, oil, and paper, where the immediate consumers are other businesses

isn't this because businesses are subject to a different set of irrationalities than individual consumers?

One important difference might be that businesses consumers aren't divided and vastly outsized by their producers in the same way as individual consumers.

Marketing makes us technology’s masters. This renders most of Marx irrelevant. What can alienation and exploitation mean when business listens so hard to our desires?

I guess alienation can only make sense if people can become alienated from their own desires. Which is kind of a psychological-level version of Marxist false-consciousness anyway, and remains a pretty dirty theoretical trick.

Doesn't mean it isn't true though.

Like fish unaware of water, we do not realize that we live in the Age of Marketing...Democracy is simply the marketing concept applied to government.

And there are different types of democracy, and democratic failures, just like there can be different types of markets and market failures. I have to be suspicious of anyone who tries to sell me One Market, or one notion of Democracy.

Is the marketing revolution a good thing? On the upside, it promises a golden age when social institutions and markets are systematically organized to maximize human happiness.

There's that mistake again - maximising fallible human choices isn't the same as maximising human happiness. But then, it's hard to know what other indexes to use.

On the downside, marketing is Buddha’s worst nightmare. It is the Veil of Maya made scientific and backed by billion-dollar campaigns. It perpetuates the grand illusion that desire leads to fulfillment..It is the enemy of human consciousness, because consciousness is content with its own company, and needs nothing from the world. The trouble is not that marketing promotes materialism. Quite the opposite. It promotes a narcissistic pseudo-spiritualism based on subjective pleasure, social status, romance, and life-style.

A moment of clarity mixed with a moment of nonsense.

Marketing brings more immediate problems. Like democracy, it forces intellectual elites to confront our patronizing attitudes towards the masses. Elites do not always like companies and states that provide what the people want....Marketing, like democracy, is anti-arrogance, anti-power, and anti-idealism....For the elite, marketing’s populism can be an alarming prospect....Cultural elites usually take a dim view of uncultured human nature to justify denying the power of choice to ordinary people. Fear of an economy based on market research, like Plato’s fear of democracy based on universal suffrage, is based on contempt for our species. Elites hate to recognize the marketing revolution because they hate to admit that contempt. Marketing is the most important invention of the last two millenia because it is the only revolution that has ever succeeded in bringing real power to the people.

I look around at the six billion, as we break in waves of hunger a desire upon the eroded shore of history, and I wonder how we feel about our new, real, power. Power given to us - yes given! - by the wonderful power of marketing, marketers and the corporations that employ them.

It is not just the power to redistribute wealth, to split the social cake into different pieces. Rather, it is the power to make our means of production transform the natural world into a playground for human passions. Marketing is not just the icing on the material world. It has become the recipe, the kitchen, and the cook.

But marketing isn't just a tool for working out what human desires are. Human desires are not some inviolate essence. They are created by social influences- created, evoked, and manipulated. Consciousness is not content with its own company, and needs nothing from the world. Consciousness is inherently social. We gauge our own status by social comparison, we want what others want, we believe what others in our tribe believe.

Marketing is not an innocent observer in this scenario, no more than markets are spontaneous entities existing aside from politics and culture. All markets are designed by a set of socially sanctioned forces, and all marketing serves interests other than those of the consumers.

brainporn

There's a difference between scientific explanations and explanations involving science.

Something for the fMRI crowd to look out for, me thinks. I'd like to know a little more than function X activates region Y of the brain please.

visualisation of the dynamics of neural pruning

Via futurepundit

A time-lapse 3-D movie that compresses 15 years of human brain maturation, ages 5 to 20, into seconds shows gray matter - the working tissue of the brain's cortex - diminishing in a back-to-front wave, likely reflecting the pruning of unused neuronal connections during the teen years. Cortex areas can be seen maturing at ages in which relevant cognitive and functional developmental milestones occur. The sequence of maturation also roughly parallels the evolution of the mammalian brain, suggest Drs. Nitin Gogtay, Judith Rapoport, NIMH, and Paul Thompson, Arthur Toga, UCLA, and colleagues, whose study is published online during the week of May 17, 2004 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Yummy, mpeg here

The Development Set

The Development Set
By Ross Coggins

Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet-
I'm off to join the Development Set;
My bags are packed, and I've had all my shots,
I have travelers' checks, and pills for the trots

The Development Set is bright and noble,
Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;
Although we move with the better classes,
Our thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton hotels in scattered nations,
We damn multinational corporations;
Injustice seems so easy to protest,
In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

We discuss malnutrition over steaks
And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.
Whether Asian floods or African drought,
We face each issue with an open mouth.

We bring in consultants whose circumlocution
Raises difficulties for every solution-
Thus guaranteeing continued good eating
By showing the need for another meeting.

The language of the Development Set
Stretches the English alphabet;
We use swell words like 'epigenetic',
'Micro', 'Macro'. and 'logarithmetic'.

Development Set homes are extremely chic,
Full of carvings, curios and draped with batik.
Eye-level photographs subtly assure
That your host is at home with the rich and the poor.

Enough of these verses -- on with the mission!
Our task is as broad as the human condition!
Just parry to God the biblical promise is true:
The poor ye shall always have with you.

Petty, unoriginal griefs

Neil has some thoughts on The Black Rider:

*what is it* I'm actually enjoying about this? It's not the emotional resonance of well-drawn characters or the powerful realism of great acting or the engaging originality of cleverly-devised plots- I guess it's the triumph of style over substance in both cases, but what style ;-) I also wondered whether one of the reason burlesque does work is because its cliche-laden expressions of cheap sentiment are actually a more realistic representation of a life characterised by the mundane scope of petty, unoriginal griefs, loves and yearnings than the grand passions and higher purposes portrayed elsewhere, but by treating it all with such irony manages to get away with the dramatic equivalent of adolescent poetry- expressing feelings in cloying and cliched terms that are utterly heartfelt and engulfing.

links for 23nd of May

How Creationists do peer-review

Interesting post over at Panda's Thumb on the 'peer-review' system of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design - which is an Intelligent Design organisation (ie Creationist front).

The thing i love about the creationists is that they can be so good at hitting upon genuine problems within evolutionary theory, and science and general, but their solutions are so WRONG.

Anyway, one comment on the post is interesting

Do y’all mind if I ask another stupid question?

Is this site named “Panda’s Thumb” or is it, “Get Dembski”?:)

Here’s my background:

1. I am an attorney, specializing in cancer cases;
2. I, therefore, have to hire zillions of experts (pathologists, biochemists, oncologists, etc,) at usurious rates (sometimes up to $500/hour!)
3. I, therefore, have to cross-examine the other side’s expensive, well-qualified experts at trial;
4. I, therefore, know just enough science to make me dangerously, incompletely informed;
5. I also get to see, first hand, numerous schisms in the scientific/medical community on numerous issues;
6. But, I rarely see the rancor and teeth-gnashing exhibited in this debate, Evolution v. ID.

That's the thing isn't it - just enough science to make me dangerously, incompletely informed. Now with a topic as large as evolution, who has the time or intellect to get completely informed? Apart from geniuses and fanatics, none of us. So we have to fall back on meta-theory to make decisions about which theories to accept. And part of meta-theory is world-view (ie axiom 1: believe the bible vs axiom 2: believe scientific orthodoxy).

The creation-evolution debate will be an endless chase of fact, challenge and refutation until people start discussing why they believe things or why anyone should believe anything.

And then we wheel out the two real strengths of evolutionary theory
1. Parsimony - which also implies, incidentally, that even if evolutionary theory was wrong, there's no good reason to believe that the Christian bible is right).
2. Generativity - the ability of a research programme to generate new insight over time, rather than just adjust itself to new evidence in an ad-hoc manner is crucial.

Read the full post here

Quote #24

Ain't no money in poetry
That's what sets the poet free
Now I've had all the freedom I can stand

- Guy Clark, Cold Dog Soup

oral fixations

Links for 20th of May

fundamentalism

hypothesis: ideological isolation is impossible without social isolation

falsifying counter-examples anyone?

The mechanics of option paralysis

A book review in the New Yorker by Christopher Caldwell of Barry Schwartz's 'The Paradox of Choice'

Schwartz looks at the particular patterns of our irrationality, relying on the sort of research pioneered by two Israeli-American psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky. It turns out, for instance, that people will often consciously choose against their own happiness. Tversky and a colleague once asked subjects whether they’d prefer to be making thirty-five thousand dollars a year while those around them were making thirty-eight thousand or thirty-three thousand while those around them were making thirty thousand. They answered, in effect, that it depends on what the meaning of the word “prefer” is. Sixty-two per cent said they’d be happier in the latter case, but eighty-four per cent said they’d choose the former.

[and]

Research in the wake of Kahneman and Tversky has unearthed a number of conundrums around choice. For one thing, choice can be “de-motivating.” In a study conducted several years ago, shoppers who were offered free samples of six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of twenty-four. This result seems irrational—surely you’re more apt to find something you like from a range four times as large—but it can be replicated in a variety of contexts. Students who are offered six topics they can write about for extra credit, for instance, are more likely to write a paper than students who are offered thirty.

[and!]

Nor is the “paradox of choice” limited to the shopping aisle. It helps explain why so many people at age thirty are still flailing about, trying to choose a career—and why so many marriageable singles wind up alone. You await a spouse who combines the kindness of your mom, the wit of the smartest person you met in grad school, and the looks of someone you dated in 1983 (as she was in 1983) . . . and you wind up spending middle age by yourself, watching the Sports Channel at 2 a.m. in a studio apartment strewn with pizza boxes.

[and, after discussing one, solution, that of limiting choice, Caldwell discusses the extent to which consumers are already using their freedom of choice to choose, in effect, a limiting of their choices]

Robert Reich, in his recent book “The Future of Success,” notes that modern consumers, like corporations, respond to the marketplace by “outsourcing” choice. They hire experts—critics, in the old way of looking at things. While many experts, such as interior decorators, offer personalized service and charge a mint, the masses have access to choosing services that are essentially free. That, in effect, is what a “brand” is.

One function of certain New Economy innovations is to make choosing easier by automating it. TiVo, in theory, allows television addicts to lose themselves in ever more programming choices, but it can also be used as a filter, a means of allowing viewers to dispense with choosing altogether. Internet grocery services, such as Peapod, allow shoppers to fill out a template that protects them from having to rechoose every week. In practical terms, the Peapod shopper is confronted with far fewer new brands and choices than was a suburban housewife pushing her cart down a grocery aisle during the Kennedy Administration.

[although this does look like one kind of solution i'm yet to be convinced that this is the way forward - the consumption of a tailored set of limited choices customised to my desires seems very limiting for the potential of human growth, certainly bad in terms of social capital (lots of bonding, no bridging in the terminology) and pretty sinister in implications for social control as well

but Caldwell is off to other terrain for the end of the review...]

...the phenomenon—sometimes called the “hedonic treadmill” can also explain why disaster, whether bankruptcy or incapacitation, seldom burdens our spirits for very long.

Strangely, we lose sight of our human resilience when we make big choices. People are consistently puzzled that so many things they had dreaded—from getting fired to being ditched by a spouse—“turned out for the best.” Gilbert and Wilson even speculate (in a diplomatic way) that our inability to forecast this adaptive capacity spurs some people to a belief in God. “Because people are largely unaware that their internal dynamics promote such positive change,” they write, “they look outward for an explanation.” A tendency to overestimate the joy we’ll get from buying baubles and winning honors is only half of a complex predisposition. The other half is our enormous capacity for happiness, even in the absence of such things. The surprise isn’t how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.

[all book reviews should be like this!]

links

brighton dawn

My friend jenny sent me this picture from a few weeks ago at a party in Brighton. I've no idea who these people are but i didn't want to delete the picture, so i put it here.

thinking faster

Via steveberlinjohnson.com (in this edited excerpt Steve Johnson is quoting Antonio Damasio)

On the face of it, idea that the speed of modern life will lead to cognitive overload is a familiar complaint: cultural critics like David Shenk and the late Neil Postman have warned of the dangers of accelerated society. But Damasio has a twist: he's not saying that the brain can't keep up with the society -- he's saying that part of the brain can't keep up with the society, while another part, thus far, has been game to go along for the ride.

"We really have two systems that are totally integrated and work perfectly well with each other, but that are very different in their time constants. One is the emotional system, which is the basic regulatory system that works very slowly, with time scales of a second or more. Than you have the cognitive system, which is much faster, because of the way it's wired, and because a lot of the fiber systems are totally mylenated -- which means it works much faster. So you can do a lot of reasoning, a lot of recognition of objects, remembering names, in just a few hundredths of a second. And in fact it has been suggested that we're optimizing those times -- that we're working faster and faster...

[however] there is no evidence whatsoever that the emotional system is going to speed up...In fact, I think that it's pretty clear that the emotional system, because it is a body regulatory system, is going to stay at those same slow time constants. There's this constant limit, which is that the fibers are unmylenated. So the conduction is very slow." In a sense, this is an engineering problem: The system that builds somatic markers -- the system that encodes the stream of consciousness with value -- works more slowly than the system that feeds it data to encode. The result is not a short-circuit of our cognitive machinery. (We can in fact process all that data, and perhaps more.) The danger comes from the emotional system shorting out.

show it like it is

Via Dave does the blog

The story is told of Picasso that a stranger in a railway carriage accosted him with the challenge, “Why don’t you paint things as they really are.”

Picasso demurred, saying that he did not quite understand what the gentleman meant, and the stranger then produced from his wallet a photograph of his wife. “I mean,” he said, “like that. That’s how she is.”

Picasso coughed hesitantly and said, “She is rather small, isn’t she. And somewhat flat?”

— Angels Fear, by Gregory and Mary Catherine Bateson

Civilisation and its discontents

chomsky in the UK

Chomsky is in the UK in May

The 2004 Royal Institute of Philosophy Annual Lecture will be given by Professor Noam Chomsky and is called, 'Simple Truths, Hard Choices: Some Thoughts on Terror, Justice and Self-defense'. Professor Ted Honderich will preside.

The lecture will take place on 19 May at 5.30 pm in Logan Hall, The Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1. The lecture is free and open to the public. There are no tickets, and no reservations can be made. We suggest you arrive early to be sure of a seat.

And, guess what, he also has a blog now!

Innate Landscape Preferences

Young children (eg age 8) say they prefer savannah landscapes over other types of natural landscape (Balling & Falk, 1982). Older children and adults don't exhibit this preference. The evolutionary psychology interpretation of this is that there is an innate preference for the environment within which modern humans evolved, but that this preference is over-ridden by lifetime development of aesthetic preferences which are influenced by your personality and environment.

Or, put another way, you're born with a feel for the plains of east Africa, but as you get older you can grow to love the flats of Peckham.

In lots of ways this seems like a typical piece of evolutionary psychology. It could be true - and if it was true it might be interesting - but there's no reason why it has to be true. Has the experiment been replicated? Has it been replicated cross-culturally? Has it been replicated when controlling for scene complexity and for the adaptive value of the landscape (ie the prospect-refuge affordances). The answers to these questions seem to be either 'no' or 'not alot' (ie not very well). Obviously i could be wrong and some more delving into the literature might turn up some more references [1].

It also seems to be crying out for a replication with pre-linguistic infants using a preferential-looking paradigm...

[1] I think my further reading would begin here:

Appleton, J. 1996. The Experience of Landscape. Revised edition. New York, Wiley.

Orians, G.H. & Heerwagen, J.H. 1992. Evolved responses to landscapes. In Barkow, J.H., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (eds) The Adapted Mind. Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 555-579.

http://www.ub.rug.nl/eldoc/dis/ppsw/a.e.van.den.berg/c2.pdf

Links for 8th May 2004

My photos

Redesigned and updated my photo gallery, didn't I.

It has captions, and sections, nows. And doesn't use any javascript, just PHP (and not too much of that either). Lovely

Myth busting: metabolism while watching TV

I've been told this so many times, and it feels so right it should be true: your metabolic rate while watching television is lower than when you are unconscious. It should be true, but it isn't

Buchowski MS, Sun M. (1996). Energy expenditure, television viewing and obesity. International Journal of Obesity Related Metabolism Disorders. 1996 Mar;20(3):236-44.
Abstract: OBJECTIVE: To measure energy expenditure (EE) of television viewing, sitting, and resting and duration of self-selected television viewing in obese and non-obese men and women. DESIGN: Cross-over randomized study consisting of two separate 24-h stays in a whole-room indirect calorimeter. SUBJECTS: 123 obese and non-obese healthy men and women (age: 38 +/- 9, BMI: 29.4 +/- 7.9) MEASUREMENTS: Rates of energy expenditure during resting (RMR), sitting (EEsit) and television viewing (EEtv) using indirect calorimetry technique on two separate 24-h stays in a whole-room indirect calorimeter. Physical activities and work of body movements during these periods using a large force platform system located inside the calorimeter. RESULTS: Rates of EE for television viewing, adjusted for differences in body composition were 18% higher than resting metabolic rate (RMR), but similar to rates of other sedentary activities. There were no significant differences between obese and non-obese subjects in metabolic rates during resting, television viewing, and other sedentary activities. Average time of self-selected television viewing was significantly greater in obese than in non-obese subjects and also in women than in men. CONCLUSION: EE rate for television viewing in adults is higher than RMR and similar to other sedentary activities. Obese adults choose television viewing as a form of leisure activity more often than non-obese individuals and as a result they could significantly reduce other forms of physical activities and total daily EE.

Mind Shut Closed

Steve Johnson's Mind Wide Open gets a bad review. Although the review is great fun to read, it's because it contains more about the review than the book. It concludes:

The idea that brain science is somehow going to do something which will "exceed the wildest dreams of poets and philosophers" is very light and very ignorant. It is, however, a characteristic idea of our time.

Which is true, as far as it goes, but he also says:

Equally, our minds work on the basis of myriad assumptions. If these are exposed as the deterministic workings of mere chemistry, then we might not even be able to get through the day, never mind the next million years.

which Paul Myers characterises well as

Well. I guess we'd better stop studying the brain then, shouldn't we? Who knows, we might actually learn things about how it works that don't involve angels or ghosts, and then people will get depressed.

The great thing about consciousness is it's sheer obstinacy in the face of contradictory evidence. We don't need to worry too much about the existential dangers of too much scientific information (the damage has already beeen done in that respect). We do need to worry about the social use, misuse and abuse of scientific information...But that's another story.

Links

charity efficiency

So someone suggested last night that Oxfam waste our money. The specific claim being (if i remember right) that 'there was a report' saying that even though they pay less than the commercial sector to their employees, and they use volunteers to do work for free, they are still an inefficient beaurocracy squandering cash in only the way well-meaning but incompetent lefties can.

Well, I couldn't find any hint of this report by looking on the internet, although i did find this from Oxfam Ireland

We strive to keep our administration costs to an absolute minimum in order to ensure that the value of each euro/pound that you donate is maximised. During the 2002/2003 period, 90 cent/pence in every donated euro/pound went towards supporting our overseas programmes and campaigns work...When you make a donation to one of our Emergency Appeals, 100% of your donation goes directly to that Emergency relief effort...Did you know that for every pound or euro donated, there is the possibility of us raising a further four pounds or euros from other European (both government and other institutional) funding sources?

The annual report of Oxfam UK (the third biggest charity in the UK, incidentally) gives their accounts. So, next, I looked at this and the accounts for Cancer Research UK (who are the biggest charity in the UK) and two other international development charities - Christian Aid and Action Aid, comparing the total income, charitable expenditure and admin and management costs for each charity.

So Oxfam have about the same admin costs as other international development NGOs and about the same charitable spend as another charity of comparable size. But I guess a lot depends on what they include under 'charitable spend'. This here is a pretty crude index of efficiency.

Simply put I don't have the expertise to assess if, or if not, Oxfam are being more or less inefficient that anyone else. What they do, and the scale they do it at, makes comparisons difficult. My ignorance of the subject doesn't help either. Does anyone have any advice or leads on this - i'd love to hear more about how to tell if a charity is spending money well?

This guy seems to have looked into it and to have been satisfied with what he found out. There's an article about league tables of charity spending efficiency, and why they can be misleading, here, which seemed important.

For me I think the more important thing is what the money is being spent on (which is what I think Emily was getting at when she started the conversation and concluded by saying, "I just don't want them spending my money on bibles" i guess). Given that Oxfam operates in 75 countries, provides emergency disaster relief but also - and this is the majority of their work - invests in long-term development work, including lobbying and policy work to challenge the institutions and structures which keep under-developed parts of the world under-developed, I'm going to continue giving them my money and not worry about the efficiency which which they spend it - it's got to be better than not giving anything at all.

Oxfam International
The Trade Justice Movement

'You tell em Jack'

Spotted by/at alittlepoison.com:

George Bush, 21st September, 2001: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”

Jack Straw, March 15th, 2004: “the truth about these fanatics is that unless you are 100% with the terrorists, you are seen to be 100% against them.”

Something to be clever about

Richard Dawkins, writing for The Edge, says

In a 1968 book review of THE DOUBLE HELIX, anthologised in PLUTO'S REPUBLIC, the distinguished biologist Sir Peter Medawar wrote that if a young man as talented as Jim Watson had been born British, especially in the Cambridge of his and Crick's time, he would have been steered towards literary studies:

"It just so happens that during the 1950s, the first great age of molecular biology, the English Schools of Oxford and particularly of Cambridge produced more than a score of graduates of quite outstanding ability ‹much more brilliant, inventive, articulate and dialectically skilful than most young scientists; right up in the Watson class. But Watson had one towering advantage over all of them: in addition to being extremely clever he had something important to be clever ABOUT."

More on neural plasticity

Via http://www.cns.caltech.edu/~carlos/coolpapers/, a list of 'cool scientific papers':

Jennifer Linden (neuroscientist) wrote:
Here are my paper suggestions. It's been years since I read these papers, but I still remember them -- the experiment is truly beautiful. The background: Normally, each eye innervates a single tectum in the frog, with no competition between the eyes. The experiment: What happens when you implant a third eye in a frog, so that two eyes are forced to innervate the same tectum? The result: ocular dominance stripes, in an animal which normally doesn't have them. A beautifully clean demonstration that ocular dominance stripes arise from competition between the two eyes, rather than from some kind of pre-established pattern of innervation.

Constantine-Paton, M. and Law, M.I., "Eye-specific termination bands in tecta of three-eye frogs", Science 202 : 639-641 (1978)

Law, M.I. and Constantine-Paton, M., "Anatomy and physiology of experimentally produced striped tecta", Journal of Neuroscience 1 : 741-759 (1981)

Quotes #21 and #22

Taking about the transition from naive ignorance to profound ignorance in the pub last night, this quote came up :

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it's just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

- Ch'ing-yüan

The quote reminded me of a Chinese poem which touches upon the same distinction

Mount Lu in misty rain; the River Che at high tide.
When I had not been there, no rest from the pain of longing!
I went there and returned.... It was nothing special:
Mount Lu in misty rain; the River Che at high tide.

Both are in Alan Watts' book The Way of Zen