Check out this article “Intentional action and Asperger Syndrome” in Psychology Today. I spotted it in BoingBoing.
I’m disappointed at the lack of analysis in the article. Would you like to hear MY theory?
Think of side-effects: Results of an action are sometimes inseparable. We seek a desired result, and in the process we get some inseparable side-effect. So far, so good? Sometimes we require that separation and won’t settle for a particular side-effect. But, that is not usually what is on offer, so we have to keep searching. That extra time spent searching is experienced as a cost, too. We will sometimes take the lesser of two evils - supposing we actually do that cost-benefit analysis.
In the article, the two related examples differ in the side-effect: In one example, the goal of getting the biggest smoothie means also getting a commemorative cup you didn’t want. In the other example getting the biggest smoothie means paying an extra dollar. The researchers asked: Do you experience these side-effects as an intentional choice?
In a sense, when you make a choice, you are signing on to all the side-effects - even ones you don’t know about. So I understand the point of view that any side-effect you are aware of immediately becomes a part of your intent.
The article contends, assuming I still remember it accurately, that a person with Asperger’s syndrome does not experience those side-effects as intentional at all, whereas a normal person (control group?) makes distinctions: the unwanted commemorative cup vs. spending the extra dollar.
I think I agree to a lot of side-effects that I regret - and I can’t stand to admit that I agreed to them, so claiming them as my “intent” seems wrong. It manifests as a feeling that I didn’t get enough choices to really get what I intended. I can live with the poor choices I am forced to make to ‘satisfice’, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept them as my intention.
Not the cup or the dollar.
Posted in ontology | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 04:31:00 GMT
I was reading the chapter on Haussmann’s transformation of Paris in the 19th century in “Cities In Civilization” when I came across some untranslated French. It is common for an author to provide translations for such quotes.
An observer in 1882 described the traffic situation in Paris as “le dernier mot de l’obstructionnisme”.
And that was one of the shortest examples. So it was over to Google Translate for some answers.
That was when I remembered that I wanted to road test the machine with some Japanese. Well, it didn’t take long to find a stinker.
Japanese is not like English. Maybe that’s why I found it so durned interesting.
As you can see, I’ve taken the liberty of color coding the sentence. This will allow you to see how different the grammar is, and I hope it helps understand what went wrong with it over at Google.
Here we have a transitive verb “To Eat”, and ostensibliy we have a subject and an object… Then it gets weird. In Japanese, there are postpositional particles (which often function like English prepositions) that mark the role of a phrase within a sentence. With no spaces between words, you have to rely on other strategies. “Wa” marks the end of a “Topic” which replaces another marker - obscuring the role of that phrase. “Sae” adds the idea of “even”, thereby replacing another marker - which is also now missing, obscuring the role of that phrase, too. What we do know is that “tabenai” is the negative version of a transitive verb requiring an object to make sense. We’ve definitely got a subject and and object here in this sentence (sometimes we don’t have them - they could be implied because they showed up in previous sentences…), but which one is which? Cat or Fish?
Google (#1) thought Fish was the subject, and Cat was the object. How naive. They were probably relying on phrase order to figure it out. Phrase order is not that important in Japanese. In the English version, you know immediately from context that this is wrong - but that doesn’t prove anything: Nonsense can still be grammatically correct. It’s a theory. Isn’t that exciting? Every little sentence needs a theory. I love that. “The fish” is wrong, anyway: it’s quite clearly ”this fish”, and “Even this fish do not eat my cats” forces the verb into “would not eat”. So that’s two problems already. “Uchi” and “neko” are neither singular nor plural, so it could be “my cat”, “my cats”, “our cat”, or “our cats”. I see why they picked “cats”: Doesn’t “eat” suggest an ongoing or habitual activity where the object is likely to be plural? I’ve become more sensitive to the way some English nouns like “fish” can be a substance - an indistinct quantity. One or many fishes can still be described as “fish”.
The textbook I took the example from (William McClure’s “Using Japanese: A Guide to Contemporary Usage”) supplied (#2). This represents the theory that Cat is the subject and Fish is the object. I agree. They editorialize thusly: “Sae places extreme emphasis on the noun in question, and is often followed by a negative”. There is another thing the Topic-wa construction can do: Provide a contrast. I only mention it because it’s a perfect way to pull an object to the front of the sentence. Here in this sentence, the contrast is this fish versus all other fish (the “not this fish”).
I moved the “not” for #3. It’s subtle, I know, but I like it. I just had to have the last word.
As I think about it, the textbook is less concerned with giving a natural-sounding English version than you or I would be. In fact, most of the Japanese textbooks I have seen do the same thing: English translations that make the subtleties of the Japanese examples more explicit, at the cost of sounding ridiculous.
I like to pull “not” to the beginning of the English version, even though there is nothing wrong with #2 here. The distinction may not be completely neutral, but having both versions available is nice when you have to fuss with the rhythm, timing, cadence, or alliteration of the larger utterance this sentence would appear in. On the face of it, though, as a stand-alone sentence, I get inspired by the distribution of the “Noun-sae, Verb-nai” construction in the Japanese version to produce another distributed construction in English. I just feel a little uncomfortable leaving the “not” with the verb when that “even” is there: Better perhaps to have them together. And I wonder if #2 is not simply trying to leave as much of the original as unmolested as possible.
The only thing left now is the “yo”. I was looking for some reason “yo” would inform the emphasis in the English version, and I didn’t find any. In Japanese, in addition to “phrase particles” (“wa” and “sae” in this example), there are sentence particles. The sentence particles typically indicate the speaker’s understanding of who knows what. That can be powerful in a language of subtlety: If I don’t want you to think I’m claiming to know more than you do, I might turn a statement into a question, or an imperative into an invitation. That’s part of the famous “can’t say no” reputation of Japanese, having the option to shift to the less confrontational version in every circumstance. “Yo” is the strongest member of the group: It means that I don’t think you know about the content of the preceding statement. It’s not so imposing when it refers to personal facts - in this case literally the inner workings of my house, and the dietary habits of its feline member - which won’t cause much embarrassment when I imply that you don’t know. So with the English translation, it might be nice if we could capture that revelatory tone. But the emphasis provided by “sae/even” seems to do the trick.
Posted in computer-interface, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 06 Nov 2008 01:52:00 GMT
Elections are one of the times I really feel my irritation with mainstream media. They get so excited about announcing the results as early as possible (their job) that they run the risk of screwing it up (not their job). “Dewey Defeats Truman!”
So the TV networks break in with special coverage of… what exactly? They don’t have the answers yet. The polls close on the west coast at 11pm EST - if you can assume you know who won in what states the moment that happens - and, California counts for quite a lot of Electoral College votes.
The excitement is real enough, but that’s not an excuse for wasting an entire evening of newscast blabbering on about what little you know so far. It’s a pleasant surprise to wake up in the morning and know for certain who won.
My Concession Speech:
As our Time Zone approaches the 9 o’clock hour, I am feeling gravity’s pull. The people have spoken, and… I don’t know what they said. Surely the Reef will have it on the big-screen TV, along with some fine domestic micro-brewed beverages. About seven beers changed on Friday and it’s going to take me a while to taste them all at the rate I’m going.
Also, I got an important-looking piece of mail for my old roommate. One of her doctors still had her listed at my address. For all I know, it’s just a packet of junk, but to be on the safe side, I can look for her at the bar - the only place I ever see her anymore - and possibly hand it off to one of our mutual bartender friends for safekeeping. They are sure to have her phone number.
An Interesting Fact:
Today is the second time I voted for the guy that won… In the presidential election. I was just a little too young to vote in 1988, and it bugged me. In 1992, I walked into my local junior high school and voted for Bill Clinton. Sixteen years ago. Sometimes I voted for somebody I knew would not win. There was a transcendental meditation party fielding a candidate in ‘96; Nader got my vote in 2000 because I wanted a good showing for his party and I didn’t have to worry that Gore wouldn’t win DC. If I remember correctly, I voted for Kerry - I really like brie cheese, by the way.
Today I am back in alignment with the will of 51% of the people.
Tonight I dream of presidents who do not grin like an idiot; Presidents who take ideas seriously; Presidents who display genuine concern; Presidents who speak to me.
I watched the election results at the bar, and I didn’t expect there to be an answer until tomorrow. There were dozens of fanatical supporters - people waking up from a nightmare. Now the streets of DC are a party, like the day they tore the Berlin Wall down. People in this town believe tomorrow is going to be a better day. I hope they’re right.
It appears to be done.
Posted in politics, bar-scene | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 05 Nov 2008 02:04:00 GMT
As of 9am, I haven’t voted yet. The polls open at 7, and I meant to show up early, but I did not wake up in time to line up that early… I got there precisely at 7 to find the line snaked around the block.
As I half-suspected, first thing in the morning is no longer the appropriate time for me to vote. Since I don’t have a specific place I need to be, I shouldn’t delay anyone who does. My hope is that, line the crowd on the 42 bus - favored by Dupont and K Street office workers living in fancy Mr. Pleasant townhouses - everyone will be gone by 10. At the very least the line will be back down to manageable size. I brought a granola bar something to read while I waited, but once I had the issue framed in terms of inconveniencing people that wouldn’t be back home in time to vote tonight, waiting to take advantage of the lull was a no-brainer. And my polls are just a block away - I can check back often to sample the progress of the line.
After the first overcrowding disappointment, I doubled back to the little coffee shop to sit and write. I miss the morning staff, especially one woman who would banter with me in half-English, half-Spanish. But there was no banter today, because it was all she could to to tend to the line. These construction workers in front of me were incredibly indecisive - or maybe I thought they were done ordering when they hadn’t even started yet. Between the inane radio-DJ chatter over the speakers and the conversations of the other patrons, it was not an environment conducive to writing. But I filled a page with one or two quick ideas, then went for another survey of the voting queue.
It was the same length an hour after opening! Who knew I had so many neighbors? - the voting precinct is about a four-block radius, and some of the other voting locations seem like a very short walk from my place. How come I never meet all these people in daily life? I was looking for the precise end of the line when I bumped into someone I actually did know. My new ping-pong partner Leah. She had me fooled for a second. “I didn’t know you voted here!” She never changed her address after splitting with her husband, so based on that address, she was in the right place. Does this strike anybody else as a weakness in our system? All that nomadic mobility? The state-by-state demographics are always in flux. A system based on fierce state loyalty is probably cheating us out of fair representation.
Everyone Was Gone At 10…
Well, not… everyone. But, the line to sign in was entirely inside the lobby of the building when I arrived at 9:45. I was back home before 10.
Posted in politics, urban-studies | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:56:00 GMT
Over at Seed’s Science Blogs there is an interesting little piece by Jonah Lehrer (author of “Proust Was A Neuroscientist”) where he compares the current financial market crisis with the overfishing of Atlantic cod…
“People love models, especially when they’re big, complex and quantitative. Models make us feel safe. They take the uncertainty of the future and break it down into neat, bite-sized equations. But here’s the problem with models, which is really a problem with the human mind. We become so focused on the predictions of the model - be it the cod population, or the risk of mortgage derivatives - that we stop questioning the basic assumptions of the model. (Instead, the confirmation bias seeps in and we devote way too much mental energy to proving the model true.) It’s not just about black swans or random outliers. After all, there was no black swan event that triggered this most recent financial mess. There was simply an exquisite model, churning out extremely profitable predictions, that happened to be based on a false premise. Hopefully, the markets will recover quicker than the Atlantic cod.”
Posted in economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sat, 01 Nov 2008 17:27:00 GMT
Thanks again to Jason Kottke for pointing out an interesting thing I might have missed: Obama has apparently read Michael Pollan and taken him seriously (…full Time interview with Obama here. A book excerpt and Pollan interview here ).
My dear sweet mother has been telling me all my life that “they’re messing with the food”. As a kid I already knew her theory that chemical additives and cheap substitutions were causing the rise in childhood allergies. I took it seriously, even when I was skeptical (in fact maybe I owe my skepticism to her).
It’s the same old story of Prometheus that we get into with every new technology, isn’t it? Ham-fisted attempts to take the benefit of a new idea ignore the dark side of tinkering with nature and suddenly you’ve got high rates of cancer in your neighborhood, or soft cadmium leaching into your bones - and you don’t know why.
But that’s okay - they assure us - it will all be fixed in version 2.0… I’ve got as much enthusiasm for new technology as the next guy, but it does seem to be a youthful obsession - I could be losing my grip on it. And, technology is mute on the problem of risk management and quality assurance - those things are up to us. Which takes me right back to externalities and the temptation to cheat for higher profits. And the need for us to all make these decisions together. One of the effects of profit is to abstract away all those externalities, making them seem not to be anyone’s fault in particular.
The Pollan article is right up my alley: It’s another angle on the Peak-Oil Problem. I just wrote a big thing on inflation last night, then spent part of this morning editing it, and it just occurred to me that cheap energy will naturally worm its way into everything we do. I see an analogy with money bidding up derivatives in lieu of raising consumer prices: Supply and demand operating on ingenuity. But, the ingenuity is only in plentiful supply because the raw inputs are so cheap. Pull that pin out of the machine, and the whole thing could fall apart. If cheap energy boosts the process at every stage, then prepare to see the process decidedly unboosted.
This is all to remind us that economics is not just about money. Much of the theory of economics has developed in recent centuries, long after money hit the scene. To live life obsessed with money is to ignore the processes by which wealth is actually created; It results in all manner of streetcorner hustle - no matter if you’ve got a three piece suit and a downtown office suite.
It also emerges that people will play some dangerous games with nature when they’ve got their eyes on the dollar. Well intentioned folk come up with reasonable standards for the mass market, then ingenuity strikes: Every loophole is exploited, studies are commissioned to find the minuscule benefit in an additive. From Pollan’s book “In Defense Of Food”:
Yet as a general rule it’s a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound “whole-grain goodness” to the rafters. Watch out for those health claims.
Posted in politics, economics, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:23:00 GMT
What do you want to do?
Is it profitable?
No?: Then forget it. It can’t be done.
Or, maybe… Someone will contribute: Grant money, a government subsidy, a tax break. Maybe someone will look the other way on ‘externalities’: let you cut costs by dumping, pick up the tab for the social fallout so that you don’t have to… Is it profitable yet?
ROI And Discount Rates - A Diversion
Something I learned in a Project Management class has never sat well with me… I knew something was wrong at the time when my classmates couldn’t explain how the professor came up with the discount rates in her example. I jumped to the conclusion that she didn’t know herself. My classmates had only the thinnest grasp of the foundations - they clearly weren’t comfortable tinkering with the numbers beyond the examples from the blackboard. Perhaps this is just one of my bad habits: Asking too many questions… And there was a lot of grumbling from both sides when I would ask questions about this. Everyone just assumed that I was an idiot - Questioning the gospel. The answers tended to go around in circles - circular logic. The answer given was “Cost of Capital”, but with every step away from the core of the material in search of answers, people got understandably wary that it would never end, and irritated with me for caring. So much for education: We were spending a lot of time memorizing acronyms from Earned Value theory of Cost Control. We were too busy to learn about Asset Pricing Models or some-such.
Discount rates make sense in a stable environment: A volatile environment is precisely the situation where you run into difficulties. What’s in store for the future? Inflation? Hyper-Inflation? Maybe Deflation? What discount rate should you choose when you make descisions about a reasonable Return on Investment? In a deflationary period, you could make a profit even with a nominal loss.
But as you may or may not have discovered, supply and demand on money is affected by ‘substitute goods’. Also, if everything is a transaction, how can money be created or destroyed? - Even with taxes or fees, isn’t there a kind of ‘conservation of cash’? When the stock market goes down, it means money is being pulled out. Doesn’t that money have to go somewhere? Money taken out of stocks gets put somewhere else: A bank account, then maybe commodities, durables, consumables. But the seller of those items receives the money. And the taxman takes his cut. No money created or destroyed - just ‘redistributed’. Help me out if I’m working with any bad assumptions here. When you lose money on stocks (or gold, or land, or antique cars), it is actually on a pair of transactions. Same thing when you win: Buy low, sell high. Why doesn’t everybody get to do that?
Inflation is often blamed on the volume of money - the ‘Money Supply’. That’s a big theme in that book “The Great Wave” that I’m reading. And in those plumbing models from 20th century economics. Money supply is more than just cash, depending on your definition, it includes a bunch of I.O.U.s in transit - checks in the mail, but also ‘corporate paper’ and some other financial instruments you and I will probably never encounter in real life. Anything that increases the supply of this definition of money creates a bidding war on anything hard cash can be traded for, and that causes inflation. The only problem with that is we tend only to notice inflation on everyday items. If some complicated theory is used to price financial instruments, the rising prices on things like stocks, bonds, or Collateralized Debt Obligations are either some indication of economic health, or just another place to stash big stacks of money that don’t raise the price of bread, milk, gasoline and washing machines. Bubbles can happen in anything from Internet start-ups to real estate, and the general effect there is once again to prevent all that money from bidding up the price of consumer products.
From “The Great Wave”, I learned that inflation doesn’t affect all products the same way. In historical periods of inflation (the very Great Waves Fischer is referring to), prices on raw commodities go up faster than manufactured goods: Food and fuel that even the poor must consume vs. Fancy goods that only the wealthy would buy anyway.
Many governments have tried to print their way out of a budget crisis, and that makes everything worse. Just look at Argentina, or Weimar Germany… Inflation erodes the value of the cash you’re holding. It punishes the creditor because the money is worth less when they get it back… Enter the discount rate. Let’s jigger it so the debtor has to pay back a little more the longer they wait to do it. Whatever the payment schedule, we can tack on 10% to what’s left unpaid.
Now it’s investing time. I’ll have to measure my ROI against inflation: I’ll want a higher percentage than the inflation that I can expect over the life of the investment - If I stuff the money in my mattress, it’s losing value, so I am virtually forced to invest it in something. There is even some risk to the mattress strategy - maybe the house burns down. Within a certain range, investing is stimulated. Outside of that range, not so much… During deflation, that mattress strategy starts looking pretty good. During deflation, the value of the money you hold is going up, so why would you loan it out to anybody? On the other hand, if inflation gets too high, you’ll have some trouble finding a high enough ROI. Demand all the profits you want, but will any venture be able to provide them?
Did you figure out what the discount rate should be yet?
Then we should add in the ‘risk premium’: If the investment is risky, the discount rate should be higher. The investor should get something extra back, since he might not get anything at all. Paying that back can be tricky, so the expectation of a high profit goes up too.
We’re back to the beginning now: It’s not the good ideas that will win, but the profitable ideas. One school of thought holds that the profitable is the good. But since high profits are often the cover for some negative externality, maybe the ideas attached to them are not so good.
Have I Rambled Too Far?
What is altruism, after all? If we want to give something away, where is a good place to do the giving? Should we give a boost to the profit extractors, or the good ideas that won’t profit left to themselves?
At Wikipedia I read: “For an investment to be worthwhile, the expected return on capital must be greater than the cost of capital.”
Can you refine your definition of “worthwhile”? Isn’t it also worthwhile to achieve a desired goal, even if you should lose some money in the process? Isn’t that a vehicle for altruism? Don’t governments generally engage in that type of behavior to provide for the society in general? By losing money on an investment, you pass along wealth to some effect: But be careful when you do - It might improve life for the masses, or it might ‘line some billionaire’s pocket’.
Posted in economics, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:28:00 GMT
It is very cold in my apartment, for reasons that I do not understand. Only a few weeks ago, workmen came to test the radiators - it was a success. The radiators proved that they could get hot when it was not necessary for them to be hot. Today they need to be hot and they aren’t. I have exercised the “stay in bed” option, after trying out the “walk around in slippers”, and the “drink hot liquids” options. It’s like I’m living in the woods or something.
Look on the bright side, though: I like gloomy fall weather. It threatened rain all day yesterday, then finally delivered. Today I assumed from the weather maps I saw that a cold front would pass by and the sky would clear. So far it has not happened. I thought heavy wind usually drove away the clouds (notably not true in a hurricane - but is that usual?).
I don’t talk much about sports here - mainly because I don’t care - but, last night was potentially the closing game of the World Series, and my roommate Phil invited me to come out and watch part of it on the big screen TV at the Reef… So we braved the cold drizzle to have a pint and watch some baseball. Phil is rooting for the Phillies, and when we get into a conversation about it, I occasionally introduce myself to people as Ray. (Some of you won’t get that joke, but I can assume these people will - just tailoring my performance to the audience…)
Maybe I should bite the bullet and get up - take a hot shower, put on several layers of clothing (maybe a coat, too)… I suppose I should go shopping - there’s an errand I need to run for my sister - and then it’s back to the books: I’m brushing up on my Windows admin skills with a skim through the debugging book and a couple other security and programming tomes. The blog won’t write itself (lazy blog! the nerve…), and I’ve got several economics questions I’ve been meaning to explore lately, not to mention all those photographs to sift through and process.
Posted in ontology, bar-scene | 1 comment | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:09:00 GMT
Aside from the obvious adding of more photos… Wait: Adding more photos is the problem.
Vanessa remarked “Finally some organization for the photos…”, but I don’t see that at all. I see my folder of ~3500 photos, and I don’t think of organization. But, there are an astronomical number of different ways such a collection could be organized. I won’t consider them all, it’s a waste of time.
I’ve also been looking at a lot of photographer’s sites on the web for inspiration - both in the taking of photographs and in the presentation. A lot of these sites are flash-heavy, which is always a bit discouraging to me. If you’ve got the resources, then hey - knock yourself out - but, that kind of excitement is probably just going to overheat my computer.
This is one of my favorites so far: Zeynep Öztayinci - I’m a fan of the print textures there in particular, whereas I might expect to find them annoying in other images.
I wouldn’t look for such a total solution, since I’m not only a photographer - but it might not be so bad under a different domain name to call more attention the photos specifically.
XML
Although I abandoned an attempt at using XML the first time around, I can see it out there on the horizon, beckoning me. And, this is why: Hierarchy, plain and simple. There are going to be themed sets. As I add more photos, I am going to benefit from having a sensible framework.
The XML option serves two masters well: The Interface and the Database. What you see today on the gallery page was simply an expedient. I simply haven’t prepared very many photos yet for that format. I need a system to annotate the photos, perhaps with category tags - that suggests a database. I’m tired of naming the image files, but I don’t want to leave them with the original filenames the camera assigns - that also suggests a database.
I knew why I wanted to index the pictures in an XML file - because I can write scripts to dump the database to an XML file, and with a small collection I can write the file by hand as I pin down the finer points of the design. Unfortunately, the Javascript code to read the little file I wrote wasn’t working - and I couldn’t see why not.
So the current direction is to rewrite what I have and pin down that XML format. Books on my shelf like “Document Design” or “Service Oriented Architecture” might help. We’ll see…
Posted in web-craft, photography, databases | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:19:00 GMT
Among the other books I am reading right now, I started re-reading David Hackett Fischer’s “The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History”. I wanted to consult it after reading some of the Floyd Norris Blog at the New York Times this afternoon. I read “Great Wave” a couple years ago, and I suppose I am instinctively looking for background material in making sense of the current economic situation. Here’s a little gem from the introduction:
“The economic consequences of decelerating population growth are[:] slowing demand and downward pressure on prices throughout the world, which lead in turn to severe financial crisis in economies that were organized on expectations of very rapid growth.”
This cuts right to the heart of the matter: ”expectations of very rapid growth”. If we are having trouble because of our expectations… Is there anything we can do?!?!
Posted in books, economics | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Sun, 26 Oct 2008 03:45:00 GMT
