Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

It’s really difficult to come up with a baseball statistic that does the work it’s supposed to do. I was thinking about RBIs today, which seem like they should be a great statistic. But of course RBIs reward people who come later in the batting order and thereby are more likely to have runners to bat in. So one possibility is to compute the “runners exploited percentage” (my bad term, not someone else’s): if you had three runners on base one time and hit a home run, had two runners on base another time and struck out, and had one runner on third base a third time and hit a single, then your REP would be 5/9 — you got five runners home when you could have gotten nine (had you hit a home run every time you came to bat).

The trouble here, I think, is that the statistic would systematically disadvantage batters who get walked a lot. You want to give credit to batters with a good eye, though possibly less credit than you’d give to people who produced runs for you. But a fast runner with a good batting eye — who walks a lot and then steals when he’s on base — is worth an awful lot, and he ought to get credit for it. The RBI won’t give him enough credit, nor will the REP.

The more I think about it, the more I like the Linear Weights system proposed in The Hidden Game Of Baseball: it tries to compute the total number of runs created by a player, using a linear combination of home runs, singles, doubles, triples, home runs, stolen bases, times caught stealing (which counts negatively), walks, and so forth. It’s not perfect — it’s not clear, for instance, that these quantities are independent and hence ought to be summed — but it’s a start.

I did a really bad job the other day explaining what Bel Canto is all about. Let me see if I can do a better job at it now, having finished it and been blown away by it.

First of all, I should just mention the visceral reaction the book caused in me. It is a tragedy, in large part because you know from the start what’s going to happen to everyone. I think it’s the measure of a great book that you know its destiny but you’re always hoping that somehow the cards will fall differently. (This is an especially good measure of the strength of a nonfiction book. I call out for your attention The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes and Abraham Lincoln by David Herbert Donald. My heart was racing as the bomb flew to its delivery point above Hiroshima while reading Rhodes’s book, and as I read Donald’s I hoped against hope that Lincoln wouldn’t be assassinated.)

The premise of Bel Canto is that a group of terrorists in an unnamed South American country has taken over the vice-presidential mansion during a state dinner in order to capture and ransom the president. The president, however, is at home watching his favorite television drama, the viewing of which cannot be interrupted under any circumstances. So the terrorists — who executed the takeover perfectly otherwise — are wondering what to do with the 200 dinner guests. All they wanted was the president; the mission was supposed to be over in minutes.

Guests and terrorists settle in for a long standoff. A Swiss diplomat delivers food every day, but otherwise the house loses contact with the outside and becomes its own world. One of the terrorists — a girl who at first pretended to be a boy, perhaps to get more respect from the hostages — asks one of the hostages (a professional translator) to teach her Spanish. A young terrorist boy watches the daily chess games between one of the generals and one of the hostages, and eventually gets up the nerve to ask if he can play this mysterious game whose rules he’s only learned by watching. (The general only speaks Spanish, and his opponent only speaks Japanese, so no one bothers to explain the rules to onlookers.) The guest of honor at the dinner is a Japanese businessman, Mr. Hosokawa, whom the South American country hopes will build a factory there. For his birthday, they’ve brought his favorite opera singer, an American woman named Roxane Coss (the single ‘n’ in ‘Roxane’ is sic). She speaks only English.

So one of the first things to note is the relatively small number of characters. There are perhaps only six characters whom we should care about in this book, and each is drawn exquisitely.

Next is that this world is entirely fantastical within the house, yet the reader completely forgets about it. In particular, the reader quickly forgets that there are any hostages in the house; it seems that they’re all just having a fun time hearing the opera singer sing, learning new languages, and so forth. We forget the real world (not only the real real world, but the real world inside the book) just as the characters do.

That’s why I find Patchett’s book such a marvel. It’s built on virtually nothing. It is built purely on the hopes of the reader and the characters — that despite all appearances, we may for just a moment be able to build a world that violates everything we know about reality. And yet within that unreality, Patchett creates the most wonderful, lifelike characters. It’s as though the people are all real, and they’re all doing real things that real people would do, and yet the world has been subtly altered — so subtly that you never would have guessed anything changed.

When the imaginary world that the characters have built comes tumbling down, it is perhaps the most heartbreaking couple pages I have ever read. Like I said, the reader knows that it’s coming, the characters — in some remote part of their brains — know that it’s coming, and yet that knowledge doesn’t lessen its force at all. Have you ever had a fling that you knew wasn’t going anywhere, but about which you managed to delude yourself into dreams of lifelong perfection? That is the sustained note of this book.

Roxane Coss is central to the book, as the one reason that everyone bonds. Even though the terrorists have spent their lives in the jungle, most are illiterate and none speak Italian, they all somehow know the heartache in the words that Roxane sings. There are at least six languages represented among the hostages and terrorists, and the only one who can speak them all is Mr. Hosokawa’s translator. Most everyone must settle for routes other than language — music, lovemaking, games of chess, or pure emotion. Among lesser authors, this would be a trite and hackneyed device; Ms. Patchett turns it into a completely believable instrument for people to cycle through all the emotions that one would feel when cooped up with dozens of other people for months: love and laughter and resentment and wounded pride and frustration and an indefinable claustrophia. The music carries all of this, believably. This book needs to be turned into a movie, but only a movie that could weave the lightest, gentlest, and most complicated of soundtracks amidst the subtlest acting. These are not characters; they are real people listening to music that keeps them alive. It would take the deftest directing hand, and I’m not sure anyone is up to the task. Books or movies that traffic in real human yearning are few and far between. Bel Canto is one such book.

I’ll have more to say on this later, when I don’t have to get to sleep, but: Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto must have been a terrifically hard book to write. The basic premise is highly limiting: terrorists take a bunch of people hostage at a state dinner one night, and . . . well, to cut out a lot of detail that basically is the book, music lifts everyone’s spirits and brings the terrorists together with the hostages.

I feel like I’ve just destroyed the book, but I don’t have the energy to craft a paragraph that does it justice. What’s astonishing is how well Patchett rolls with the structure. Her book, to me, has a drifting soundtrack loping in the background, curling like fine smoke around all the actors. Every now and then the music swells, and for just an instant the reader is completely transfixed. I just passed a scene that left me breathless and tearful, and it took me completely by surprise.

When an author can sneak up on me like that and completely flatten me, astonishment seems like the only appropriate reaction. I’m curious how Patchett will complete her symphony.

Eugene Volokh has a really tantalizing idea:

Within about ten years, there will probably be software that can merge people’s photographs and voices with movies that depict someone else. This is of course often already done manually with photographs; but a sophisticated computer program can do it automatically and seamlessly, for a whole movie. And it can deal with multiple scenes where the person is shown from different angles doing different things.

. . .practically, the most common use of this would probably be for pornography. Consumers would buy the program; get ordinary, nonpornographic photographs of celebrities or of acquaintances; merge the photograph with a pornographic movie; and then be able to watch pornography that “stars” whomever it is they lust after. Some such merged movies might be sold to others, but many will be just made at home, to fit the user’s own personal preferences.

Imagine making a movie of yourself engaged in acts of really insane depravity with your nextdoor neighbor. Imagine that you really dislike your professor, so you create a video of him engaged in acts of really insane depravity with someone other than his wife (or someone of the same gender).

Now, if it becomes this easy to create do-it-yourself porn, it surely would be just as easy to forge someone’s presence in, say, a bank security video. This raises other technical difficulties, of course, but the point is simply: will video evidence be a thing of the past?

The Nation has an interesting piece about intellectual freedom at the journal Foreign Affairs, particularly efforts to suppress Henry Kissinger’s involvement in Pinochet’s Chile. Worth the quick read.

Absolutely hilarious Crooked Timber breakdown of the ticking-nuclear-bomb dealie:

The ticking nuclear bomb scenario is more plausible, of course. We capture some Al Quaeda guy, and though we don’t torture him, as we don’t know about the bomb, he folds like a cheap suit anyway, destroying his life’s ambition, by telling us that there is a nuclear bomb set to go off in Manhattan, but that he doesn’t know where it is. Then Bruce Willis and the FBI rappel into Osama Bin Laden’s secret hideout, and arrest him, and he’s all “you didn’t read me my rights”, and this one straight-laced FBI agent starts to Mirandize him, but then Bruce Willis is all: “you have the right. . .to get your ass kicked!”, and he goes buck wild on Osama, and he totally caves and tells them where the bomb is and what the disarm code is. So then, Bruce Willis is racing through the streets of New York, and maybe some funny things happen like a hot dog vendor gets in his way, and he has to drive up on the sidewalk. I was thinking he could maybe be in a taxi with a driver who has a humorous subcontinental accent, but that’s optional. And then Bruce Willis gets to the bomb, and it has a big red digital readout that’s counting down under one minute, but first Bruce Willis has to fight this one super-strong Al Quaeda guy who knows Islamic martial arts, and at the start of the fight Bruce Willis is totally getting schooled, and blood is coming out of his nose and stuff, but at the absolute last second he hits the guy with a tire iron, and then he enters the code right as the digital display ticks down to 0. We’ll all wipe our collective foreheads and say “phew” when that happens, I can tell you!

Now, you may object to the aliens in my example above, but of course you can just replace them with a genocidal tyrant and his henchmen, and the whole world with your entire ethnic group, and mind-control rays with hideous torture under which you will beg for death but it will be denied. See? All tidy. So, basically what I’m saying is, shut the fuck up about that bomb.

There is substantial middle ground in the abortion debate, but no one is supposed to live there. We’re supposed to be either Pro-Choice or Pro-Life, and we’re supposed to run in entirely opposite directions.

Well, let me be very clear that many abortions look like murder to me. Let me also be very clear that I think Roe v. Wade was a stretch, and that this issue should be decided by the legislature. Let me be even clearer that I want abortion to stay legal, because I know that there are lots of good reasons why women would have abortions. I also believe that doctors are a better judge of these reasons than legislators. And I believe that the long-term goal of the U.S. should be to reduce the number of abortions that women seek. It should do this through increased awareness of birth control, better sex education, and so forth.

Let me also be clear that ending a fetus’s life within the first few days after conception doesn’t seem nearly as morally wrong to me as many third-trimester abortions. But not all third-trimester abortions: if a doctor believes that there’s a good reason to end the fetus’s life in the third trimester (say, the mother’s life is in danger), then I’m likely to feel fine with that. But if the doctor knew about the risks months in advance and did nothing to carry out the abortion then, then this just seems reckless. How many third-trimester abortions needed to happen in the third trimester? I have no idea; I’m looking for answers.

And yet we’re all supposed to be Pro-Choice or Pro-Life.

The German city of Munich will begin its Linux migration — a $40 million contract — on July 1. This is a big deal. I suspect this is how Linux will get adopted: a few large installations here and there switch over, the installers find certain challenges that they need to overcome (maybe Wine or CrossOver Office need to be changed a little bit to make them more usable, say), and the changes work their way back into the codestream and help everyone. (Though CrossOver Office isn’t open-sourced, Wine is.) Then the next time Linux wins a large installation, it’s easier for that team, and so on. The spread is geometric. At least I hope that’s how it works.

I’m curious whether the total cost of ownership of a given Linux client machine at a large installation is lower than the cost of a comparable Windows machine, once the cost of paying for administrators, licensing, and so forth is factored in.

. . .comes from the ever-quotable Adam Kessel, a newly-minted law school grad and my Linux daddy (so now I know what to answer when someone asks me who my daddy is). He emailed me today to say that “One nice thing about using Evolution over mutt is that Hebrew spam renders properly” (hyperlinks mine), then pointed to graphical proof. For some reason this crystallizes the Adam-and-Steve sense of humor for me.

Sweet: Adam just bought a few 200-gig hard drives off PriceWatch for about $100 each. I picked up one of those as a backup medium. (Hard drives have been failing all over the place recently, and I want to be reassured.)

50 cents per gigabyte; damn. I remember there was a great deal of excitement some years ago when the price of a megabyte went below $1. (I remember that PC Magazine predicted that only high-end graphic designers would bother with one-gig hard drives.) At that price, 200 gigabytes of storage would cost more than $200,000. But of course, all the movies, MP3s and so forth that people think of today just wouldn’t have occurred to someone buying a $1-a-meg drive. Ripping a sixty-megabyte album would cost at least three times as much as buying the CD itself.

It definitely gives one pause about technological prognostication. My friend Seth often reminds me of the first automated clothes dryers: they involved a machine that mechanically grabbed wet clothes and hung them out to dry; it didn’t occur to the inventor to put the clothes in a rapidly spinning heated drum. The metaphors that we use to imagine technology are, of course, based on what we’ve already seen. So people shouldn’t be blamed when they say things like, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” When the world that you’re used to defines a “computer” as “a piece of big iron in a clean room,” your view of what people might do with their machines is different than the view you’d have if everyone has a computer on his desk.

There’s another lesson in here about the myth of consumer choice (your choices are inherently limited by what you believe is possible, and your beliefs are limited by what you’ve seen), but I’m too tired to write about it right now.

According to the BBC, the U.S. is demonstrably holding a prisoner in Iraq in violation of the Geneva Convention. The Pentagon is apparently taking steps to fix this, first of all by notifying the Red Cross.

It’s not clear how the world learned about this prisoner, but it makes me wonder how many others are being similarly mistreated. These are frightening times we live in.

I wrapped up How The Mind Works today. Lots and lots to argue in there, but I think that’s the point. He’s laying out all the possibilities for where evolutionary psychology might take us.

And thumbs up to him for ending on a controversial note (not that the rest of the book was any less controversial): following up on a suggestion of Chomsky’s and McGinn’s, Pinker proposes that perhaps philosophical problems are insoluble because our minds were not designed to answer those sorts of questions. Our minds, says Pinker, were designed to tackle fundamental problems of interacting with the world that our ancestors would have faced; they were not designed to contemplate, for instance, whether they have free will.

It’s reasonable to suppose that we have fundamental cognitive limitations. But Pinker’s suggestion seems to suffer from at least two flaws: 1) it’s undertheorized, and 2) it defines “what is soluble” as “what we have solved.”

It’s undertheorized because the natural next question is, “Fine: if the brain has fundamental limitations, then draw for me a sketch of the outer limits of its understanding.” Does the mind have an architecture of generalization built in that allows it to extend beyond the biological demands of our ancestors? For instance, formulating a Big Bang hypothesis certainly wasn’t something that conferred a reproductive advantage on ancient man. Yet we’ve come up with it. Everything we encounter in the world is finite, and yet mathematicians have come up with internally consistent theories of large and small infinities.

So it’s at least conceivable that we’ve evolved a set of tools which push beyond the bounds of what’s immediately necessary, because every scrap of generalization will help us in more and more situations. Mathematics may have begun with, say, keeping track of agricultural surpluses, but part of our brain helps us generalize. Pinker never tells us why we should expect any limits to this generalization.

Pinker is also in danger of defining what’s soluble by what we’ve solved. He admits that we’ve constructed elaborate scientific theories, and even that bits of philosophy often break off and become formalized enough that they turn into branches of science; his favorite example of this, if How The Mind Works is any indicator, is the computational theory of mind.

So it often happens that problems which formerly seemed intractable get solved when we think about them in a new way, or get some new tool — e.g., the computer — to address them. If Pinker recognizes this, why doesn’t he admit the possibility that many difficult questions about human existence could one day be solved? He seems quite optimistic about the possibility of replicating a human mind on a computer; why, then, shouldn’t the computer be able to answer many of our most difficult philosophical problems? Why, indeed, shouldn’t we be able to answer the meta-problem using the mathematical theory of computation? That is, why shouldn’t we be able to prove that certain philosophical problems are or are not soluble?

I’m certainly interested in the meta-problem, and I wish Pinker had delved into it more deeply. It would be phenomenally valuable to know, for instance, that a certain well-formalized statement of the free-will problem is not derivable from any reasonable set of axioms.

But of course, answering such questions isn’t always the point. An ethical question we’ve heard a lot about in recent days illustrates the point: if we had captured a suspected terrorist, who we were pretty sure knew the whereabouts of a ticking nuclear bomb in lower Manhattan, and only by torturing the terrorist could we extract the bomb’s location, would we then be justified in torturing him?

This is a philosophical question whose point, I think, is to test the limits of people’s thinking. The question has an answer inasmuch as torture can be demonstrated to lead to certain ends, and inasmuch as those ends are compatible with other ends. (For instance, is torture ever compatible with constitutional democracy?) But even without an answer, thinking about these questions is helpful.

Having hashed it out with myself, it seems that either Pinker misses the point, or that he has a far more limited view of the human mind than he ought to. I, at least, remain hopeful.

Neat!: OpenTextbook.org is building an open-source math textbook. What a great idea. I hope it takes off.

There’s that Hitler quote about how a million dullards don’t equal one great man. Over time, I come to believe the truth of that statement less and less. It’s true in certain domains, probably, but there’s a lot to be said for emergent behavior (an anthill possesses intelligence that no one ant has) and for large collaborative projects (each node is quite a bit smarter than an ant). At the very least, we can visualize the contributors to an open-source textbook project as a large squadron of editors.

There’s already plenty of precedent for a free, open-source, online mathematics textbook. See MathWorld, for instance: a kind of online mathematical dictionary that is also available in print. A network of volunteers contributed to the site, which Eric Weisstein maintained as a labor of love. After a while, Weisstein got it published by CRC Press. When he kept publishing the online version, CRC ordered him to take it down; the case languished in court for years, until — through machinations that I’ve not bothered to investigate thoroughly — Wolfram picked it up.

There’s also the WikiPedia and PlanetMath, if one wants other examples. Both are great resources, though of course I’m not a professional mathematician; hence my credentials for verifying the information up there aren’t pristine. But that’s partly the point: someone starts a post about topology, say, someone else adds something, someone else edits what the others have published, and pretty soon a math professor can just tack on his own area of speciality. In other words, open-source math saves labor.

I’m pretty thoroughgoing about my free-information desires. I’d like to see every academic journal online and free. As far as I understand, professors make no money when they submit a journal article; they write such articles to gain credentials, which might speed their path to tenure. So professors would seem to have no incentive to keep journals expensive and closed-source. Textbooks might be a different story: I imagine that professors earn royalties from textbooks, though for some very abstruse material there can’t be enough readers to bring them very much money at all. Offhand, I’d assume that it’s the rare textbook which professors would have any incentive to keep closed-source. Though I invite academic readers to chime in.

Someone needs to do an in-depth theoretical analysis of the benefits accruing to society when information is distributed for free on the web. The negative effects come from decreased incentive to produce (you get less money, you write less), whereas the positive effects come from increased education, among other things: the more free mathematics on the web, the more people can educate themselves without spending $150,000 on four-year temples. Certainly for some disciplines, educating yourself will be harder than others (I can’t see someone getting a thorough knowledge of physics, complete with experimental methods, unless he goes to college). So maybe our theoretical analysis should start with one field and focus on the open-sourcing benefits there. How much would society benefit if, for instance, every mathematical paper and book ever written were on the web for free? I bet this is a question we could answer. And I bet the answer would fall heavily on the side of the open-source community.

I was curious how many cousins I should be expected to have, under the assumptions that every generation produces a fixed number of offspring and that there is no inbreeding — even between 20th cousins. (Generalizing so that the number of descendants per person is an independent and identically distributed draw from a given probability distribution, e.g. the exponential distribution, wouldn’t be hard.) So I wrote a l’il sumpin’ (40K PDF). If people have two kids per generation, then I should have more 17th cousins than there are people in the world; if the average is closer to 3, I should have more 16th cousins than the world has people.

I’m about 100 pages from the end of Steven Pinker’s book How The Mind Works (previously blogged on the subject of evolution). While I have to grant the man a lot of credit for his writing style — funny, clear, often insightful — I’m getting the same feeling of vague creepiness that reading some of Richard Posner’s books (e.g., The Economics of Justice) gives me. It is the feeling that standing before me is a True Believer, who is trying to paint the entire world using a brush intended for housepainting. He has precisely one tool at his disposal: in Pinker’s case it is the theory of evolution, and in Posner’s it’s the hypothesis that what is good for society is a policy of wealth-maximization. There is substantial overlap between them; the evolutionary rationality that Pinker describes can compute probabilities and behave in a way that maximizes various expected values. In neither case — Pinker’s or Posner’s — is this a voluntary process, necessarily: the brain hasn’t been wired to allow us to compute these probabilities at a conscious level, but we behave as though it has.

But the world gets complicated: there’s more than one person in the world. I may be trying to maximize the probability of passing along offspring, but so are you. So are the other 6.3 billion people alive right now. So are all the world’s animals and vegetables. Natural selection is an enormous game (in the technical sense) played out over millions of years.

In the midst of this complexity, I hope I’m forgiven for some skepticism about the explanation for even very low-level processes, like the design of the human eye. Higher-level processes, like mate selection? Forget it. I can accept that one of the factors feeding into marriage is that we’ve been genetically programmed to find those people who maximize the probability of our genes carrying on for another generation. But there’s a lot left to explain. Pinker discusses the special bond we have with our biological children, and the lack of a bond between us and stepchildren. He points to a fair bit of evidence that the “evil stepmother” fable shows up across cultures. Fair enough. But how does he explain all the world’s good stepparents? How does he explain rare events that seem to serve no evolutionary purpose? Pinker’s “model” (I hesitate to call it that, because it seems so free of actual mathematics) predicts that altruism toward one’s kin will be much stronger than altruism toward strangers. For genetic reasons that makes sense; your family is much more likely to help you than strangers are, hence devotion to your family is likely to pass your genes on to a new generation. But then how does a Mother Teresa come about? We’ve had millions of years of evolution; why wouldn’t she have been selected against millennia ago?

It’s the exceptions that trouble me. If there were any mathematics behind these models, I imagine there would be a straight line superimposed over a widely-scattered random spray of points. The noise seems as though it would overwhelm the signal. Pinker shows us the signal and leaves out the noise.

Then there’s the matter of biological plausibility, which Pinker seems to come within a hair’s breadth of violating at all times. Gigerenzer et al.’s book Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart argues pretty convincingly that strong assumptions about the Bayesian makeup of the brain simply couldn’t be how we operate: the computations are far too complex (computing posterior probabilities only became feasible with the advent of computer simulation), and we often have to make very quick decisions that a Bayesian brain wouldn’t have time to do.

Pinker comes close to proposing a Bayesian model for eyesight. A ray-tracing program that predicts how light would look after bouncing off a complex surface is solving a problem that’s inverse to what the brain has to do: the brain must ask, “What must the world look like that would create the pattern of light I have in front of me?” This problem is unsolvable as stated: multiple worlds could create a particular light pattern. So then How The Mind Works goes into a fantastic, lengthy, and super-interesting discussion of the sort of assumptions that the brain must append to the world: assumptions about the world’s essential regularity. Various optical illusions trick us into seeing something that isn’t there, precisely by exploiting assumptions about the world that don’t hold. Having reduced the space of possible models down to something manageable, the mind — Pinker suggests — chooses amongst the models by picking the one that maximizes a Bayesian likelihood ratio:

How does our 3-D line analyzer use Bayes’ theorem? It puts its money on the object that has the greatest likelihood of producing those lines if it were really in the scene, and that has a good chance of being in scenes in general. It assumes, as Einstein once said about God, that the world is subtle but not malicious.

But again, this is very very hard. And it’s not even clear that the problem is well-specified, even after eliminating some models that don’t meet regularity assumptions. Pinker mentions this problem elsewhere in the book: if I want to figure out the probability that I’ll get cancer, should I look at the set of all males born in Vermont in 1978 who don’t smoke, who weigh 155 pounds, who have been at one time or another unemployed, who graduated from college, and who have white middle-class parents? Make the reference class too small, and I’ll be its only member. Make it too large, and the probability you get out the other end will be a really bad approximation. So which reference class is your brain supposed to be picking?

This could then turn into a long discussion of how the brain might assign probabilities to events. Gigerenzer et al. make a good case that simple assignments of probability — those that don’t, in fact, use all the available information, and that don’t use statistical models with certain optimality properties (like least squares, or the Bayesian approach) are better in the wild: they’re more “ecologically rational,” to use Gigerenzer et al.’s phrase. They show in a wide range of datasets that simple rules generalize more easily than complicated statistical procedures like neural networks or least squares. We could use a more complicated procedure like the Akaike Information Criterion that chooses the number of parameters in the model to maximize generalizability, but then we get even further from a plausible model of what the brain is actually doing.

To Pinker’s credit, he is an experimentalist, and the beginning of his book is devoted to the great modeling power that computers bring us. Want to hypothesize about human nature? We don’t need vapid theorizing anymore: we can simulate a mind on a computer — the blankest of slates — and build in all the assumptions that our brain is supposed to adhere to. The trouble is that How The Mind Works only uses computer models a little bit — to show us how they might work in specific circumstances (say, figuring out where the light on a fanfold object is coming from). Everywhere that these models might cast some doubt on his own work, they’re mysteriously absent from Pinker’s book.

My point here is twofold. One is that Gigerenzer et al. have made me skeptical of any very complicated model of how the brain works. The second point is that any part of this discussion is enormously complicated and would require a book-length treatment of its own; Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart is one such treatment, and it only touches on a small part of what Pinker discusses.

Pinker and Posner can afford to talk this generally about their subjects, because there’s no peer review to call them on their individual claims; peer review for a book is much different from peer review for a scholarly article, and both authors’ books count more as polemics. I worry that by skimping on this much detail for subjects that demand it, both authors will have convinced the world that a particular simple dogma describes it well, without really giving credit to all the nuanced arguments against them.

I’m curious what my readers think: what surprise last-minute event before November will turn the election Bush’s way? Will it be something rather minor, like “discovering” an awful scandal in Kerry’s past that he doesn’t have enough time to refute (even though it’s false)? Or will there be a terrorist attack on the U.S.? Maybe we’ll invade someplace new under slowly brewing pretexts (e.g., Syria)? Will Osama bin Laden be caught in the waning days of the election season? Or maybe something even more dire will end all elections from 2004 on?

What do you think? What’s in store for us in October?

Adam Kessel points us to a severe Linux security hole, but also reminds us that “even a major exploit like this one pales in comparison to any one of the dozens of trivial Outlook or IE cracks that are circulating.”

So perhaps it’s valuable to point out precisely why this new exploit is so much less awful than a traditional Windows exploit. The Linux exploit allows anyone with shell access to your Linux machine to lock it up, requiring a reboot. All one has to do is download the code, compile it with gcc, and run it. Most kernels lock immediately; a few don’t. But the important thing to note is that only those users who have shell access stand a chance of making this happen. And shell access is hard to come by. On my machine a total of seven people (including myself) have such access, and most of them don’t even use it. The result of a hacker exploiting this vulnerability is that the system would lock up; no one would gain root access (i.e., no one would become the all-powerful user who can mess up any other user’s files).

In contrast, take one of the many Windows vulnerabilities — particularly the ASN.1 vulnerability, which is fairly typical:

A security vulnerability exists in the Microsoft ASN.1 Library that could allow code execution on an affected system. The vulnerability is caused by an unchecked buffer in the Microsoft ASN.1 Library, which could result in a buffer overflow.

An attacker who successfully exploited this buffer overflow vulnerability could execute code with system privileges on an affected system. The attacker could then take any action on the system, including installing programs, viewing data, changing data, deleting data, or creating new accounts with full privileges.

Two details about this vulnerability are important to bring out: 1) anyone in the world could attack your Windows system this way, meaning that the total number of potential attackers is conservatively in the thousands; and 2) a successful attacker could completely destroy your machine.

And of course there’s already a patch for the Linux vulnerability, whereas Microsoft is famous for taking months to deploy fixes.

Let’s hope the mainstream press doesn’t start claiming that Linux is just as insecure as Windows. We know better.

If Paul Krugman didn’t exist, it would be necessary to create him (my cache).

. . .And then there’s David Brooks, again trying to encode the nation in binary. I continue to assert that Krugman and Brooks appear near each other on the Times’s op-ed page so that the latter’s vacuity can stand out all the more clearly.

Jack Balkin has a characteristally well-written piece on the Pentagon torture memo — the one which claims that torture laws don’t bind the president. Balkin argues persuasively that the memo is legal hogwash, that it obviously promulgates an unconstitutional doctrine, and that carrying out its dictates would bring impeachment on the president. All of this is, I suppose, subject to the inevitable vicissitudes of case law (i.e., principle isn’t everything), but Balkin at least seems quite confident that this memo is unenforceable. Which makes it a bit easier for me to breathe.

I’m reading Steven Pinker’s fascinating and very well-argued book How The Mind Works, whose primary thesis is that the mind is a collection of modules specially evolved for our ancestors’ needs. There are modules for processing visual data, modules for hunting down animals, and so forth, but we don’t have modules evolved for living in large anonymous cities or negotiating traffic. It obviously has to be more precisely stated than that (maybe we have a more general module that includes the ability to negotiate traffic, say), but that’s the idea.

And it’s the lack of formal mathematical models that’s rather irritating to me. In part it’s because I just left Gigerenzer et al.’s Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart, about a set of sketchy but useful experiments on the structure of inference rules in our minds; that book was all experimental. Before that it was a book by Herbert Simon, who carries a flame for logical positivists.

The part that’s getting to me about Pinker’s book right now has less to do with him and more to do with the theory of evolution, which in many presentations — including Pinker’s — comes off sounding like a clever collection of just-so stories. I’m thinking particularly of how Pinker explains the development of insect wings:

The theory of the evolution of insect wings proposed by Joel Kingsolver and Mimi Koehl, far from being a refutation of adaptationism, is one of its finest moments. Small cold-blooded animals like insects struggle to regulate their temperature. Their high ratio of surface area to volume makes them heat up and cool down quickly. (That is why there are no bugs outside in cold months: winter is the best insecticide.) Perhaps the incipient wings of insects first evolved as adjustable solar panels, which soak up the sun’s energy when it is colder out and dissipate heat when it’s warmer. Using thermodynamic and aerodynamic analyses, Kingsolver and Koehl showed that proto-wings too small for flight are effective heat exchangers. The larger they grow, the more effective they become at heat regulation, though they reach a point of diminishing returns. That point is in the range of sizes in which the panels could serve as effective wings. Beyond that point, they become more and more useful for flying as they grow larger and larger, up to their present size. Natural selection could have pushed for bigger wings throughout the range from no wings to current wings, with a gradual change of function in the middle sizes.

The Kingsolver and Koehl paper, for those who are curious — I know I am — is

Kingsolver, J.G., & Koehl, M.A.R. 1985. Aerodynamics, thermoregulation, and the evolution of insect wings. Differential scaling and evolutionary change. Evolution, 39, 488-504.

I admit at the outset that I’ve not read the paper. But Pinker’s description has the backward-gazing feel of a lot of descriptions of natural selection: here’s this thing that happens now, and here’s this possible explanation — among thousands of possible explanations — for what could have happened. We get these all the time. (“There could be a gene for math proficiency because . . .”)

Now, obviously this explanation holds more than the standard pseudo-evolutionary crap. For one thing, presumably scientists studying insects could test this model against other data, and it’s not immediately falsified by a quick glance at the facts. But somehow its applicability seems really limited. It seems undertheorized. I want a theory that will tell me that birds have wings and humans don’t, at the same time that it tells me that fish live in the water and birds don’t, at the same time that it tells me that cheetahs run fast and humans don’t run nearly so fast. All the explanations I get from “pop evolution” are backward-looking and limited; they explain small areas of form, but not much beyond that.

And again, without much knowledge of the evidence, it seems that these areas have to remain undertheorized. Does the geological record tell us much about how insects used their flaps, for instance? I’m skating on thin ice at this point, of course, but it seems like a long leap to assume that the wing used to be a thermal insulator, despite its lack of physical implausibility. (From Pinker’s description, I’m hesitant to say “plausibility” outright.)

Where’s the theory that will predict for me something I’ve never seen? Where’s the equivalent of the atomic theory to tell me that there must exist an element with atomic weight 244? What does evolution predict that we’ve never seen?

I’m sure the answer is “a hell of a lot, actually.” I need to read Stephen Jay Gould’s magnum opus; perhaps it will answer all these questions.