For a couple years now I’ve been fascinated by some recent ideas about how complexity evolves. Darwin’s great insight was recognizing how natural selection could create complex traits. All that was needed was a series of intermediates that raised the reproductive success of organisms. But recently some researchers have developed ideas in which natural selection doesn’t play such a central role.

One idea, laid out in the book Biology’s First Law, holds that life has a built-in propensity to get more complex–even in the absence of natural selection. According to another idea, called constructive neutral evolution, mutations can change simple structures into more complex ones even if those mutations don’t provide an advantage. The scientists who are championing these ideas don’t see them as refuting natural selection, but, rather, complementing it, and enriching our understanding of how evolution works.

{ Carl Zimmer | Continue reading | More: Scientists are exploring how organisms can evolve elaborate structures without Darwinian selection }

I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.”

{ John Searle | via Open Culture | Continue reading }

Standard IQ tests are problematic on many levels — not least, because they do very little to tell us about the quality of our thinking. Looking to overcome this oversight, psychologist Keith Stanovich has started to work on the first-ever Rationality Quotient test. […]

I coined the term dysrationalia — an analogue of the word dyslexia — in the early-1990’s in order to draw attention to what is missing in IQ tests. I define dysrationalia as the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. […] Here are some irrational thinking tendencies to consider:

▪ Physicians choose less effective medical treatments
▪ People fail to accurately assess risks in their environment
▪ Information is misused in legal proceedings
▪ Millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry
▪ Parents fail to vaccinate their children
▪ Unnecessary surgery is performed
▪ Animals are hunted to extinction
▪ Billions of dollars are wasted on quack medical remedies
▪ Costly financial misjudgments are made

{ IEET | Continue reading }

Within a week of Random House and Penguin merging to become the world’s largest books publisher with an estimated revenue of $4 billion, the aftershocks have started. The new entity, eager to cut cost and streamline operations, has asked author Vikram Seth to return his $1.7 million advance, a part of which was paid to him for A Suitable Girl, the ‘jumpsequel’ to his best-selling novel, A Suitable Boy.

Seth, one of the world’s bestloved writers, was scheduled to submit his manuscript this June but has been unable to do so, leading to the publishers’ demarche. […]

“It’s possible that Vikram Seth has not started on the book or that it’s nowhere close to completion, which explains the move.”

{ Mumbai Mirror | Continue reading }

In Kafka’s “On Parables” a skeptic says that the abstruse words of the sages cannot really solve the real-life problems we face, since we can never actually “go over” into that fully spiritual realm these words point to. A sage responds by saying (parabolically) that we can overcome all these real-life problems simply by ourselves “becoming parables.”

{ Comparative Literature and Culture | PDF }

Look around the room you are sitting in now. How many right angles can you see? Book-spines, the ceiling, picture frames, door panels, the capital T and L at the bottom of this page, this page itself.

Vision is a form of cognition: the kinds of things we see shape the ways we think. That is why it is so hard to imagine the visual experience of our prehistoric ancestors, or, for that matter, the girls of nineteenth-century Malawi, who lived in a world without right angles. Inhabitants of, say, late Neolithic Orkney would only have seen a handful of perpendicular lines a day: tools, shaped stones, perhaps some simple geometric decoration on a pot. For the most part, their world was curved: circular buildings, round tombs, stone circles, rounded clay vessels.

{ TLS | Continue reading }

Rosa differentiates between mechanical acceleration, the acceleration of social change and the accelerating pace of daily life. The process of mechanical acceleration began in the 19th century in conjunction with industrialization. In terms of the time it takes to travel across the world, for example, it has effectively shrunk the size of the world to one-sixtieth of its actual size.

Today, mechanical acceleration affects the digital sector in particular. But paradoxically, it also goes hand in hand with an acceleration of the pace of life. Even though mechanical acceleration, by shortening the time it takes to complete tasks, was intended to create more available time for the individual, late modern society does not enjoy the luxury of more leisure time, Rosa writes. On the contrary, individuals suffer from a constant time shortage.

The reason for this is our urge “to realize as many options as possible from the infinite palette of possibilities that life presents to us,” he says. Living life to the fullest has become the core objective of our time. At the same time, this hunger for new things can never be satisfied: “No matter how fast we become, the proportion of the experiences we have will continuously shrink in the face of those we missed.” As a result, more and more people suffer from depression and burnout, according to Rosa.

{ Der Spiegel | Continue reading | thanks Rob }

images { 1 | 2 }

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions. You’ll disrupt your sleep, your appetite, and your ability to experience long-term happiness and satisfaction.

If you vocalize your negativity, or even slightly frown when you say “no,” more stress chemicals will be released, not only in your brain, but in the listener’s brain as well. The listener will experience increased anxiety and irritability, thus undermining cooperation and trust. In fact, just hanging around negative people will make you more prejudiced toward others. […]

Negative thinking is also self perpetuating, and the more you engage in negative dialogue—at home or at work—the more difficult it becomes to stop.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

quote { Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 1868-1869 }

Mozart’s opera, whose proper Italian title is Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni (The Punishment of the Libertine or Don Giovanni), has been admired by many enthusiastic opera-goers ever since its first performance in Prague on October 29, 1787. […]

Kierkegaard offers a deep meditation on the meaning of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a splendid treatise entitled “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic” found in his book Either/Or. […]

George Price offers this fine description of the “aesthetic” stage of life as he thinks Kierkegaard sought to depict it:

By its very nature it is the most fragile and least stable of all forms of existence. […] [The aesthetic man] is merged into the crowd, and does what they do; he reflects their tastes, their ideas, prejudices, clothing and manner of speech. The entire liturgy of his life is dictated by them. His only special quality is greater or less discrimination of what he himself shall ‘enjoy’, for his outlook is an uncomplicated, unsophisticated Hedonism: he does what pleases him, he avoids what does not. His life’s theme is a simple one, ‘one must enjoy life’. […] He is also, characteristically, a man with a minimum of reflection. […]

Kierkegaard also uses Faust as Goethe interpreted him, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, as exemplars and variations of the aesthetic stage of existence. “First, Don Juan, the simple, exuberant, uncomplicated, unreflective man; then Faust, the bored, puzzled, mixed-up, wistful man; and the third, the inevitable climax, the man in despair—Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.” Kierkegaard’s discussion of this aesthetic aspect of life “is mainly a sustained exposition of a universal level of human experience, and as such it is a story as old as man. Here is life at it simplest, most general level […] the life of easy sanctions and unimaginative indulgences. It is also a totally uncommitted and ‘choiceless’ life [Don Juan]. But, for reasons inexplicable to itself, it cannot remain there. The inner need for integration brings its contentment to an end. Boredom intervenes; and boredom followed by an abortive attempt to overcome it by more discrimination about pleasures and diversions, about friends, habits and surroundings [Faust]. But the dialectical structure of the self gives rise to a profounder disturbance than boredom; and finally the man is aware of a frustration which nothing can annul [Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew]. Were he constituted differently, says Kierkegaard, he would not suffer in this fashion. But being what he is, suffer he must— in diminishing hope and in growing staleness of existence.

{ Søren Kierkegaard’s Interpretation of Mozart’s Opera Don Giovanni | PDF }

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. Fortunately, new research suggests a simple antidote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction. […]

People who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity. “Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

Eyewitness error is the leading cause of wrongful felony convictions. For example, eyewitness error played a role in 72% of the 302 DNA exoneration cases, and it is estimated that one-third of eyewitnesses make an erroneous identification. In this article, we discuss why jurors and legal professionals have difficulty evaluating eyewitness testimony. We also describe the I-I-Eye method for analyzing eyewitness testimony, and a scientific study of the I-I-Eye method that shows it can improve jurors’ ability to assess eyewitness accuracy.

{ The Jury Expert | Continue reading }

The problem of artificial precision in theories of vagueness: a note on the role of maximal consistency

[…]

[I]f c denotes my coat, and my coat is of a peculiar tint at the borderline between red and pink, on theories of this sort the proposition R(c) :=“My coat is red” is to be considered neither true nor false, but rather true to some intermediate degree. In this line of thought, a much stronger and yet popular assumption is that the real unit interval [0, 1] embodies “degrees of truth.”

{ Vincenzo Marra/arXiv | Continue reading }

art { Josef Albers, Structural Constellation To Ferdinand Hodler, 1954 }

Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness.

{ Sianne Ngai/Cabinet | Continue reading }

In Jorge Luis Borges short story, Funes el Memorioso, the titular Funes suffers a brain injury that results in an inability to forget. At first his altered status feels more gift than impairment. He is capable of fantastic mental feats. He no longer wastes time trying to learn things by repetition. Every important detail is immediately accessible to his extraordinary brain, allowing him to spend less time on drudgery. He is also able to focus and remember minutiae like he was never capable of before. The world unfolds before him in striking clarity. No data point, however inconsequential, escapes his viselike attention to detail. Alas, this becomes his downfall. He loses focus on the important. Not forced to prioritize on initial intake due to a limited storage capacity, he drowns in a sea of the irrelevant.

In his New York Times piece, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” legal commentator Jeffrey Rosen warns of the special problem the web presents, particularly for people’s personal lives. Rosen warns: “we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files.”

Although new tools like Google’s “Me on the Web” are allowing users to better monitor their personal information available on the web, there is no real means of managing this information. This article seeks to explore what it would take to have enforceable “administrative rights” to one’s personal information – the ability to edit or modify one’s online persona just as a webmaster would be able to edit or modify on an individual website.

{ Jamie R. Lund | PDF }

oil on canvas { Till Rabus }

The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

{ John Sifton/Warscapes | Continue reading | Thanks Aaron }

Back in 1996, economist Paul Krugman wrote an essay about the next 100 years of economic history, as if looking back from the year 2096. […]

When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important. Late-20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers. Late-21st-century America is supremely efficient at processing routine information; that is why traditional white-collar workers have virtually disappeared.

… Many of the jobs that once required a college degree have been eliminated. The others can be done by any intelligent person, whether or not she has studied world literature.

{ io9 | Continue reading }

Two notions of reconciliation exist.

The weak or thin conception is akin to “resignation.” It is sought by groups that have waged war against one another but have come to the realization neither can win. Reconciliation in this sense results from an enforced lowering of expectations.

In the stronger sense, reconciliation means a virtual cancellation of enmity or estrangement via a morally grounded forgiveness, achievable only when conflicting groups acknowledge collective responsibility for past injustice, and shed their deep prejudices by a profound and painful transformation in their identities. It is because this process is not possible without a somewhat brutal confrontation with oneself and a painful recognition of one’s own moral degradation that reconciliation is difficult to achieve.

{ ResetDoc | Continue reading }

sonder.— n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own

adronitis.— n. frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone

{ The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows | Continue reading }

photo { James P. Blair }

Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying. We lie to protect our privacy (”No, I don’t live around here”); to avoid hurt feelings (”Friday is my study night”); to make others feel better (”Gee you’ve gotten skinny”); to avoid recriminations (”I only lost $10 at poker”); to prevent grief (”The doc says you’re getting better”); to maintain domestic tranquility (”She’s just a friend”); to avoid social stigma (”I just haven’t met the right woman”); for career advancement (”I’m sooo lucky to have a smart boss like you”); to avoid being lonely (”I love opera”); to eliminate a rival (”He has a boyfriend”); to achieve an objective (”But I love you so much”); to defeat an objective (”I’m allergic to latex”); to make an exit (”It’s not you, it’s me”); to delay the inevitable (”The check is in the mail”); to communicate displeasure (”There’s nothing wrong”); to get someone off your back (”I’ll call you about lunch”); to escape a nudnik (”My mother’s on the other line”); to namedrop (”We go way back”); to set up a surprise party (”I need help moving the piano”); to buy time (”I’m on my way”); to keep up appearances (”We’re not talking divorce”); to avoid taking out the trash (”My back hurts”); to duck an obligation (”I’ve got a headache”); to maintain a public image (”I go to church every Sunday”); to make a point (”Ich bin ein Berliner”); to save face (”I had too much to drink”); to humor (”Correct as usual, King Friday”); to avoid embarrassment (”That wasn’t me”); to curry favor (”I’ve read all your books”); to get a clerkship (”You’re the greatest living jurist”); to save a dollar (”I gave at the office”); or to maintain innocence (”There are eight tiny reindeer on the rooftop”)….

An important aspect of personal autonomy is the right to shape one’s public and private persona by choosing when to tell the truth about oneself, when to conceal, and when to deceive.

{ Judge Kozinski | Continue reading }

photo { Joel Meyerowitz }

Imagine we rewound the tape of your life. Your diplomas are pulled off of walls, unframed, and returned. Your children grow smaller, and then vanish. Soon, you too become smaller. Your adult teeth retract, your baby teeth return, and your traits and foibles start to slip away. Once language goes, you are not so much you as potential you. We keep rewinding still, until we’re halving and halving a colony of cells, finally arriving at that amazing singularity: the cell that will become you. The question, of course, is what happens when we press “play” again. Are your talents, traits, and insecurities so deeply embedded in your genes that they’re basically inevitable?

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }