Looking for the Magic Answer

From Looking for the Magic Answer, interview with Noam Chomsky, 17 years ago:

The question that comes up over and over again, and I don't really have an answer still -- really, I don't know any other people who have answers to them -- is, "It's terrible, awful, getting worse. What do we do? Tell me the answer." The trouble is, there has not in history ever been any answer other than, "Get to work on it."

There are a thousand different ways to get to work on it. For one thing, there's no "it." There's lots of different things. You can think of long-term goals and visions you have in mind, but even if that's what you're focused on, you're going to have to take steps towards them. The steps can be in all kinds of directions, from caring about starving children in Central America or Africa, to working on the rights of working people here, to worrying about the fact that the environment's in serious danger. There's no one thing that's the right thing to do. It depends on what your interests are and what's going on and what the problems are, and so on. And you have to deal with them. There's very little that anybody can do about these things alone. Occasionally somebody can, but it's marginal. Mainly you work with other people to try to develop ideas and learn more about it and figure out appropriate tactics for the situation in question and deal with them and try to develop more support. That's the way everything happens, whether it's small changes or huge changes.

If there is a magic answer, I don't know it. But it sounds to me as if the tone of the questions and part of the disparity between listening and acting suggests -- I'm sure this is unfair -- "Tell me something that's going to work pretty soon or else I'm not going to bother, because I've got other things to do." Nothing is going to work pretty soon, at least if it's worth doing, nor has that ever been the case.

Inside Job

Finally saw Inside Job the other day, and it did pretty well in explaining what seemed to have happened. I felt that more could have been put at the door of the ratings agencies - private companies whose function is written into law, lets not forget. For example look at the graph in this Reuters blog post by Felix Salmon - is shows the world issue of AAA bonds since the 1990s. They went from non-existent to being about half of all issued bonds by 2006. As Felix says:

That’s possibly the most horrifying bit of all: it simply defies credulity for anybody to be asked to believe that more than half the bonds issued in any given year are essentially free of any credit risk.

An article in today's Guardian about the Black-Scholes equation is also pretty interesting. Ian Stewart (Professor of Maths at Warwick) points out that the financial industry has repeatedly used equations beyond their stated limits and then got us all into a mess. His paragraph at the end caught my eye:

Despite its supposed expertise, the financial sector performs no better than random guesswork. The stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere. The system is too complex to be run on error-strewn hunches and gut feelings, but current mathematical models don't represent reality adequately. The entire system is poorly understood and dangerously unstable.

This ties into my earlier blue-screen metaphor for the crash, but also his statements that the stock market has spent 20 years going nowhere gave me a jolt. Having grown up in the 80s I guess I'd internalised the conventional wisdom that over the longer term the stock market is always a good bet. But if you look at the recent era, the era of super fast transactions and derivatives, it certainly no longer seems to be the case. Since the mid 90's the FTSE 100 has just been bouncing from about 3500 to about 6500 and back again. If you look for an inflation adjusted FTSE 100 it looks even bleaker. But in the meantime, the trend has been for people to base more and more of their savings and mortgages on stock-market products. Hmmmm.

Good Will Hunting

This thread on mefi got me thinking about Good Will Hunting. Its a long time since I saw GWH but I remember being annoyed by the "Hollywood" smart person aspect. I think there's a scene where he flicks through his girlfriend's textbook for 20 mins and then does all her homework for her. Savants exist in some fields but not like that. Good Will Hunting is to 'intelligent' as Rambo is to 'resourceful with guns'.

But I did like this monologue:

Why shouldn't I work for the NSA? That's a tough one. But I'll take a shot. Say I'm working at the NSA, and somebody puts a code on my desk, something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cuz I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East, and once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hiding. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. Now the politicians are saying, "Oh, send in the marines to secure the area", 'cuz they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, getting shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number got called, 'cuz they were pulling a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there taking shrapnel in the ass. He comes back to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cuz he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so that we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the little skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're taking their sweet time bringing the oil back, of course, maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, it ain't too long till he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work. He can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is giving him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starving 'cuz every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're serving is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what did I think? I'm holding out for something better. I figure: fuck it, while I'm at it why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected President.

Cognitive Surplus

I've had a quote rattling around in the back of my head for a while, about the time taken to create Wikipedia versus time spent watching TV. I found the original source when I started reading Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus:

"Imagine treating the free time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind of cognitive surplus. How big would that surplus be? To figure it out, we need a unit of measurement, so lets start with Wikipedia. Suppose we consider the total amount of time people have spent on it as a kind of unit - every edit made to every article, and every argument about those edits, for every language that Wikipedia exists in. That would represent something like one hundred million hours of human thought* ... One hundred million hours of cumulative thought is obviously a lot. How much is it though, compared to the amount of time we spend watching television?

Americans watch roughly two hundred billion hours of TV every year."

* Of his Wikipedia time estimate, Shirky says: "Martin Wattenberg, an IBM researcher who has spent time studying Wikipedia, helped me arrive at that figure. It's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but its the right order of magnitude."

That one comparison alone gives plenty of food for thought. Shirky's style is to carefully reinforce subtle points by repeating similar examples (often with similar paragraph structures) which can make the book seem repetitive. But he is repeating in order to tease out the subtleties; every example he gives in the book is saying 'people can work together to do stuff' - which is obvious - but the value in his examples is the deeper anaylsis of how they are working together, why, and how more of the same can be made to happen.

See also this Guardian Review

Near the end of the book, one paragraph in particular really stood out for me, not because it was about anything internetty, but because Shirky casually crystalised a thought that I had been struggling to form - about 21st century politics and how it is converging on variations of 'free market with state support for some things', with the 'big ideas' of the 19th and 20th Century now seeming hopelessly simplistic:

"Neither perfect individual freedom nor perfect social control is optimal (Ayn Rand and Vladimir Lenin both overshot the mark), so it falls to us to manage the tension between individual freedom and social value, a trade-off that follows the by-now-familiar pattern of having no solution, just different optimizations that create different kinds of value, and different kinds of problems that need to be managed."

Review of "Outside"

This Metafilter comment from mefi user aeschenkarnos back in March 2008 is a fantastically written review of the multiplayer video game "Outside". It already been widely quoted elsewhere, and its well worth quoting in full here.

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of "now what?"

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player's ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players' tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely "survive". What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.

Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it's extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.

The game world is immense, perhaps unfeasibly so. The sheer amount of resources that went into development of the Outside environment is staggering to consider. Outside is a world of tremendous size, containing examples of every known real-world terrain type and inhabited by every known real-world animal. On the other hand it is somewhat lacking in the traditionally expected, more interesting, zones where the developers would be given the opportunity to show off their skills in varying the physics and graphics of the game. There are, for instance, no zones where gravity varies to any significant degree.

The respawn rate of objects and players is ridiculously slow. A dead player can expect to wait for years to respawn, and will be set back to zero assets and a tiny, nearly helpless form. Death is hardcore, and resurrection all but impossible. Outside is not a game for the QQers out there!

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game's social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches.

Aeschenkarnos, March 2008

Eeeee Eee Eeee

In 'Mrs Dalloway', Virginia Woolf expertly conjured what it feels like to be in the mind of a wealthy middle class woman going about her business in London as she prepares for a party and meets and old flame. In 'Eeeee Eee Eeeee', a short, unusual book, Tao Lin expertly conjures what its like to be in the mind of a bored, depressed Domino's pizza worker in Florida who misses his ex-girlfriend and feels like he has no future.

There is lots of repetitive language, several beautifully written passages of whimsical daydream-philosophising, and lots of bears and mooses. Tao tries to describe the aim of the book in this interview:

Eeeee Eee Eeee is written from an existential point of view, meaning it tries not to block out any information. Or that is how I wanted it to be. In order to have morals one must block out information and make assumptions. Eeeee Eee Eeee does not have morals. It doesn’t teach you anything. Or maybe it does. Since I wrote it instead of killing myself or taking anti-depressants and watching TV every day maybe that means the book is life-affirming. If you look at both me and the book then maybe the book is moral and teaches you something. If you look at just the book, it doesn’t teach you anything.

Here's some of the passages that struck me as interesting:

What frightened him (although sometimes calmed him) was the first of those thoughts, about not knowing how to be happy; there was something irreversible about it, except possibly by potion or true love, like in every movie by Disney, as it was like a fairy tale in that sketched out, theoretical way. But it was a fairy tale gone wrong, without any domestic whimsy or fast-moving plot, and in real time, without any pleasant summations of long periods of despair, loneliness, and ennui. It just didn't seem good, or allowed.

Near the end, there is a long monologue by the 'president':

Why are we born? Why do we die? Where do we go when we die? Where did consciousness come from? Politics does not acknowledge those questions. Politics says 'Have we blocked out enough information so that the word "progress" has meaning? How do we distract from the mystery and oneness of existence?'. Politics is a pretend game where it is very important to block out the information that it is a pretend game. I'm the president, I think. There is no good or bad. You arrive. Here you are. No one tells you what to do. So you make assumptions. Or you believe someone else's assumption. A common assumption is that pain and suffering is bad. But how do you know if an action will increase or decrease net pain and suffering in the universe from now until the end of time? You can't know. Impossible. You don't know if drawing your friend a picture will or will not cause fifty thousand years of suffering to ten million organisms on Alpha Centauri one billion years from now. So you create context. A common context is one's life plus the next few generations, not including animals, plants or inanimate objects, and only on Earth, with the emphasis on one's own country. So now you've made an assumption and also blocked out more than 99.9% of the universe, 99.9% of all life on Earth, and an infinite or unknown amount of time.

Most of the book isn't like that though, most of it is about pizza, boredom, and bears carrying blankets. Its a short book though, so the strangeness casts a spell rather than becoming a burden.

Gestalt Prayer and Beyond Perls

Gestalt was originally a German word roughly akin to 'shape' or 'form'. Its English meaning is generally one of unity, holism, and a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Gestalt Prayer was written by Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy (not to be confused with Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy and definitely not with Gestalt psychology).

The Gestalt Prayer

I do my thing and you do your thing.
I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

(Fritz Perls, 1969)

In the 1970s it was popular on posters like these:

... although the posters tended to omit the rather less lyrical final line.

Taken on its own (rather than interpreted through the lens of Gestalt Therapy) it's quite a confident message of emotional independence, of sorting your own 'thing' out before getting tangled up with anything else. A little bit too hip though, and delivered with a shrug and swagger rather than a wise stroking of a goatee beard.

In the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (1972 vol 12 no 2), Professor Walter Tubbs published a poem called Beyond Perls in response. It has a mini-following of its own (apparently its quoted in The Road Less Travelled), and is much more of a wise-stroking-1970s-beard poem. Apparently the 'I and Thou' bit is a reference to Martin Buber, and presumably Professor Tubbs was also weaving various other thinkers into this. But its clear enough that it can be understood without reference to any particular therapy tradition:

Beyond Perls

If I just do my thing and you do yours,
We stand in danger of losing each other
And ourselves.

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations;
But I am in this world to confirm you
As a unique human being,
And to be confirmed by you.

We are fully ourselves only in relation to each other;
The I detached from a Thou
Disintegrates.

I do not find you by chance;
I find you by an active life
Of reaching out.

Rather than passively letting things happen to me,
I can act intentionally to make them happen.

I must begin with myself, true;
But I must not end with myself:
The truth begins with two.

(Walter Tubbs, 1972)