Chaos

Another subject which ought to be touched upon here is that of alcoholic drinks. Myself, I have never liked them, not even the ones that people who don't like alcohol are supposed to like anyway. I think (for instance) that grape juice happens to be one of the most delicious drinks in the world, and that to let it ferment in a jar until bacteria have destroyed most of the delectability is not the best way to drink it. I know full well that all of this is simply because I haven't acquired the proper taste for alcohol yet.

However, the amazing thing is that many people my age consume alcohol despite this intrinsic barrier. Actually, this is not quite so amazing, as alcohol has many things going for it, including its attraction as a frowned-upon and forbidden beverage. Particularly amusing can be the ways in which it lowers one's natural inhibitions, leading people to consume it to the point that it removes the stomach's natural inhibitions about jumping through one's esophagus and spilling its contents on the floor.

More to the point, there are certainly inhibitions that I'd like to lose, but there are also ones worth keeping. Drinking alcohol is, more or less, like chopping down a rainforest in order to get rid of all the sickly and dying trees. There have to be better solutions.

And, in fact, why shouldn't there be? Why do people think that it is so hard to change their own inhibitions, and permanently so? It is precisely because the timing of pleasure and pain is reversed from that of drinking: with the latter, pleasure comes before pain; with the former, pain comes before pleasure. Some philosophers would, after arguing as I have up to this point, condemn drinking as laziness---an unwillingness of people to change their own inhibitions because of the barrier of pain involved, versus the comparative ease of drinking in moderation.

However, I would disagree. Particularly in college, the opportunities to drink in moderation are few and far between. Since one cup lowers one's inhibitions to drink further, and the peer pressure to drink is already very high (especially considering the popularity of Beirut), the natural result when someone brings a keg to a party is general intoxication that night, and general splitting headaches the next morning.

I would argue instead that drinking is a form of false laziness. Proper laziness is a virtue, namely, the virtue of spending the least amount of work required to accomplish projects to your satisfaction, so that you can therefore satisfactorily accomplish many more projects with the same amount of work. In fact, if you add up the total amount of pain which results from drinking in college, spending the time to remove your own inhibitions in another way suddenly seems much more appealing, especially because they will be gone all the time instead of just when you drink.

To put things more bluntly, I would argue that removing your inhibitions permanently is not nearly as bad as getting 50-100 splitting headaches and being occasionally covered in your own vomit. Once you get out of college, of course, this line of reasoning no longer applies, since by then you've most likely learned to drink in moderation. However, for those still at that stage in their lives, I'll elucidate this point more clearly in the next post.

Some few minutes ago, an anonymous commenter suggested that my time would be well-spent chasing after the opposite sex. Realizing that it was high time to update this page, and that this was indeed a topic barely touched upon prior to this date, it seemed natural to discuss the issue of relationships.

I must confess that, prior to last summer, I had firm plans to be a bachelor. This was more or less a decision I had reached in high school; since none of the other students really shared or understood my love for certain topics (philosophy, for instance), I never felt the type of connection to them that is prerequisite to any solid relationship. In college, where this was no longer a problem, I still held out on account of a conviction that romantic entanglements would degrade not only my will to embark on astonishing, ridiculous projects, but also because I did not feel the need to share my life with anyone else.

However, last summer was the first time that I had actually lived in something approaching isolation; by chance, a cousin of mine (who happened to be not-yet-married) was going overseas during the summer, and he agreed to let me stay in his apartment while I was working in a summer internship. The experience quite shattered my expectations: rather than accomplishing a huge list of things I had set out to do, the loneliness of the place quite killed any desire that I had to do work. I discovered that, as surprising as it might seem, that society in moderation actively helped the creative process. I also missed a great many people and felt for some of them, at last, the first breath of love.

One of the most magical things about love is that when you first come across it, you completely fail to understand it. This is both good, as the real thing would be terrifying to behold for one previously unaccustomed to it, and bad, as there is the danger of vastly overestimating the strength of your feelings when they first appear. At some point, however, one realizes that it makes no sense to be afraid of love if it will actually help you out in the long run. In my particular case, the people to whom I feel attracted are exactly those who it would make perfect sense to eventually live with---they have universally been well-educated, personable people who are fine musicians and have a serious interest in the sciences, philosphy, and artistic creation.

At the same time, I can well imagine that there are people who are attracted by attributes which are, shall we say, less than practicable. Hence, the adage, "Love is blind." Now, here comes the useful point of this entire post: it is in general very easy to figure out what attracts you to other people. So much so that you can actually make a list in advance, before you get involved in a relationship, and decide if it's in fact possible for an individual to indeed possess all of these characteristics and yet be a stable, reasonable partner. And, if it's not possible, you can start crossing off items on your list, until you reach a point where you discover that there exists someone that you'll still love a great deal, but who won't have horrible personality problems or disappear with someone else at a moment's notice. That way, you can more efficiently seek out people who might be worth living with, and, at the very least, you'll know in advance that you'll have a life of unhappiness when Cupid smacks you straight in the face along with a struggling quadriplegic Latvian alcolholic...

As a footnote for the anonymous poster, and for my parents should they (Heavens!) be reading this, there is no need to worry about that, as I am currently single, thank you very much.

Who is a genius? That's the question at the end of the previous post (which I suggest you go read before looking at this one). There, I outlined a definition for how one can tell who is a genius after the fact. But what, one wonders, about before the great, mind-boggling discovery? How can one tell who is a genius before they actually accomplish something?

I've already argued that the ability to absorb knowledge is a wildly inaccurate indicator of genius. Actually, any sort of early ability at all is only a rough predictor, because idiot-savants exist who can do cube roots to twenty decimal places in their head but can't handle simple abstractions like imaginary numbers. As a matter of fact, I don't know what the real answer is.

I would like to consider instead an interesting possibility (which could be quite wrong). Namely, that the question is irrelevant because people don't actually become geniuses until they've taken the time to learn something thoroughly well, by which time their insight follows nearly immediately.

In particular, I'm challenging the assumption that certain people's brains have a sort of "latent" genius implanted in them from birth. Genius, when it happens, no doubt occurs because someone's neural network was configured in just the right way to spot the insight that everyone else missed. It makes little sense (to me at least) to assume that the network was configured this way from conception---that would be as if the baby Einstein had a little piece of his brain marked with the tag "This spot reserved for general insightfulness about relativity."

Rather, it would seem more likely that people have networks which are each quirky in their own special way, so that rather than the solution being always a product of the genius, the problem floats around until someone with quirkiness in just the right spot comes along and says "Aha!" To put it another way, it's not that a particular genius searches very rapidly through all avenues for a solution, but rather that the problem searches through all possible experts at all possible times during their cranial development until it finds one that can solve it, who we then label a "genius."

Naturally, some people are more susceptible than others to acts of genius, but that may be because many problems depend on finding a certain type of quirkiness. In fact, genius demands a certain type of quirkiness, which is one that asks questions where others do not. The key to genius is to ask those questions at the right point, instead of wasting lots of time asking questions fruitlessly.

It's taken many years, but I've finally come to the conclusion that genius and knowledge are not the same thing. When said that way, this seems really obvious, but the real sticking point for most people is that they often fail to recognize when one is masquerading for the other. In particular, they often pin the label of "genius" on someone who is capable of accumulating knowledge very quickly, when a genius is in reality someone capable of quite different things. The most egregious example of this happens in schools. "Ah," people will say, "Billy is a genius. He skipped a grade and took number theory in high school and cleaned up on the SAT and was doing ridiculous research projects before he went off to college, etc., etc. I haven't a chance of doing anything intellectual as well as he."

No doubt Billy is brighter than the average bulb in the socket, but is he a genius? I think not necessarily so; indeed, what being a genius entails is a matter deserving of an entry by itself. However, I think that the defining characteristic is that a genius, presented with roughly the same information as an expert in the field, can demolish existing conceptions of what is possible. It is with this sort of genius that one may feel properly astonished, as the genius is capable of things which are simply beyond the imagination of experts and laymen alike. It does not matter when the genius acquires whatever background knowledge is requisite for the discovery. An expert may learn all of it in a day, and the genius might struggle though it over several years, but no-one will stop to ask questions about that when the genius wins the Nobel Prize.

I have not yet made it clear, however, how weakly knowledge acquisition and genius are correlated. Rather than the usual anecdotes about Einstein in college (he was a terrible student) or Feynman's IQ (which was 120), I'll make an attempt at some more convincing statistics. The Westinghouse Science Talent Search was historically the best-known and most prestigious science competition in the United States. It is geared toward precociously bright high-school seniors who have happened to engage in research projects (usually with some faculty mentor). Of all the submissions, perhaps 15% are marked as semi-finalists, totalling roughly 10,000 individuals in the period from 1942 (the start of the program) to 1982. Exactly six of those individuals are now Nobel Laureates.

Six, no more, no less. The number of Nobel Laureates in the sciences who were born recently enough in the US to have been eligible for the Westinghouse competition is thirty-six (data collected from the Nobel Prize Internet Archive). Namely, 83% of the best minds in recent history either did not hear about the competition, submitted a paper which got rejected, or simply had no research worth speaking of at that time. Due to the massive publicity associated with the competition, the first option probably covers no more than 10% of the missing Laureates. Thus, we are left with at least three-quarters of the Laureates who were apparently not among the 10,000 best and brightest students in high school over those four decades.

What is even more illuminating is a glance over the submitted papers in that time period. Yes, the papers are advanced for high school students, but the overwhelming majority of them would be considered ordinary college theses instead of ground-breaking research. Namely, almost everyone who appears to be a "genius" in high school or college will go on to become an expert in something, but will rarely become a genius. The experts will certainly do good work in their areas of interest, but their contributions are more closely aligned: certainly some experts will be better than others, but they will only be distinguishable by those already very, very advanced in the field.

This is both heartening and disappointing. Heartening for the "almost-geniuses" because it means that most of those who we thought to be out-of-reach in college will turn out to be not quite so clever when they run out of new things to learn. Disappointing for the "geniuses-elect" because those who we consider far-behind-us will most likely catch up eventually. The real question, therefore is, "How do we tell who is a genius and who is not before they actually accomplish something?"

I will answer that in the next entry.

When I pointed out the inconsistencies of all philosophies based on moral systems, I carefully neglected to explain my own philosophy on life. I spent a long time trying to figure out some complicated scheme, and then (immediately after attending an absolutely fabulous orchestra concert) I had a bit of an epiphany. Deep down, I am not a complicated person. My philosophy on life is simply to enjoy it and help others do the same, which is more-or-less the very same philosophy of Winnie-the-Pooh.

The real thing to understand about this is that we do not act according to a system of rigorous laws. We act on a system of ideals, some of which we value more than others. What these ideals embody is really an arbitrary product of our social history. Truth and beauty, for instance, are often considered virtues. What does beauty entail, however? What was thought to be marvelously handsome in the seventies and eighties is now never seen in public. What music captivated people five hundred years ago is now thought to be at best quaint and at worst an assault upon the ears. And, concerning truth, would we really prefer to live in a world where everyone knew everything about everyone else?

Certain forms of beauty and certain forms of truth do inspire great emotions. Yet, in the creations of animals, which they themselves see to be beautiful, we can see only complexity. The Bauer Bird is the perfect example of this: the male's vast constructions of twigs, rare shells, and curiosities are to us no more than random piles of refuse (rare refuse though it might be), whereas to the female Bauer Bird, they inspire feelings of love and companionship. No doubt the Bauer Birds view our art with much the same whimsical eye, seeing us fussing over intricacies that it has no hope of ever understanding. Who is to be the universal judge in these matters?

In the end, after much thought, the remains only a grand sense of arbitrariness, which suggests to me that different philosophical systems are simply different and not necessarily better than one another. I happen to be the type of person who is just suited to Winnie-the-Pooh's philosophy. I like helping other people; I like doing silly and crazy things in my spare time; society tends to look with fond bemusement on both, so all involved are better off. Other people are more suited to rigidly upholding their ideas of Truth (must... not... lie... to... axe-murderers) and Beauty (cannot... go... out... without... makeup).

Am I missing something by being this way? Is there some grand cosmological principle which dictates how life should be lived? I don't think so. Not even the religions of the world have any clear answer on what, for instance, is the best occupation to have in life. Most of them do have some guidelines, acquired from long experience with what leads to pain and suffering, but those are most often already integrated into the society in which the religion persists. As such, I am most likely already following them unconsciously. Would I get any enjoyment out of piercing my ears? No. I've been conditioned to think that men wearing earrings look stupid. Does it actually look stupid? That depends on who you ask. Does the fact that women wear earrings make them more beautiful? Society says, of course, "Oh yes, that's just the perfect spot for a bit of jewelry." If there is some universal principal buried in this madness, it quite escapes the Little Brain to imagine what it might be.

I was lying in bed last night, realizing that I hadn't done any good philosophizing in a while, so I thought for some time about the question of beggars. So far, whenever I've passed them on the street, I've rarely given them any money, using the excuse that I've not properly considered the question of whether it's useful to give them money or not. The question turns out to be exceptionally subtle.

The arguments for giving them money are simple, so I won't mince words: a) they will benefit substantially more from the money than you will, b) altruism always gives metaphysical satisfaction, and c) they are less likely to use illegal or violent means to obtain subsistence. The arguments against giving them money are more complicated. Firstly, there are no guarantees that the recipient will use the money as intended. Five years or so ago, I was traveling in Boston and came across a beggar calling out, "Give me money, money for drugs and a gun;" another time, I noticed an apparently blind man on the street wearing high-end Grado SR-80 headphones. Secondly, even if the recipient uses it for food, it will almost certainly be used inefficiently; since storage spaces are limited, bulk savings are impossible, and, furthermore, it's less likely that they will travel long distances to get better deals. Thirdly, there's the question of being deserving: how does one know that the beggar in question is not a criminal? How does one know that the beggar has tried to get jobs elsewhere? Why does any one person deserve any more than one's bank account divided by the population of the earth?

I'll answer the last two questions first, since they are comparatively easy. We all have hierarchical loyalties, probably first to our family and friends, then to our city or state, then to the country, and perhaps only then to all fellow human beings. If you value your city more than others, then you must remember that your city also includes beggars, who consequently have more claim on your support than those in other places. Secondly, I happen to believe that it doesn't matter whether a beggar is lazy or not. This is really a question of human kindness: if we kick and scream whenever something like the dodo goes extinct, we ought to care a just a little bit about the less mentally willing members of our own society. If, on the other hand, you are a cold, cruel bastard with a heart of steel, consider point (c) above the next time you get your wallet stolen.

But the rest of the questions are real sticklers. Every time you give money to a beggar, you're also potentially lining the coffers of drug dealers, pimps, casinos, and giant capitalist corporations. What is to be done about this delicate situation? It'd be nice if one could just reach into a pocket and pull out a loaf of bread or something useful but non-convertible.

Fortunately, there is a mostly reasonable way out of the difficulties. One cannot judge character well without being around a person for some time, but that is exactly what happens with the people managing homeless shelters and food kitchens. Coincidentally, these places also have modern inventions like refrigerators and voluminous cabinets as well as trucks in which large quantities of food may be transported. So, the real thing to do is to count up the number of homeless people that you pass each month and donate a dollar for each of them every once in a while to the local homeless shelter. If you miss the feeling of handing goods directly to the masses, don't forget that the shelters also accept volunteers.

I just read an article about Intelligent Design in which the author defends it as a scientific theory. To do so, he makes three points:

(1) The truth of an idea is not decided by popular vote.
(2) The truth of an idea is independent of its political, religious, and philosophical implications.
(3) The truth of an idea is independent of whatever propaganda may be associated with it.

All three are excellent points, with which I completely agree. However, as with every single other article on Intelligent Design that I've ever read, the argument is incomplete. Not all truths are science, and not all science is (absolutely) true; specifically:

(4) A scientific model must be a tool to predict the outcome of future events.
(5) The predictions of a scientific model must reasonably approximate the truth.

For instance, the statement "I did laundry today" might be a truth, but true statements which do not involve predictions are not science; they are at most history.

That is why Intelligent Design is not science: one cannot predict from it either the frequency or the nature of new creatures appearing on the Earth. In contrast, Evolution is widely accepted as a scientific theory because it has been remarkably successful at describing changes in microorganisms (such as drug resistance); its consistency with the fossil record of larger animals suggests its applicability for them as well, but the time scales are such that no-one expects to be able to test that aspect of the theory within our lifetimes. This is not to say that Evolution is absolutely true, but only that it is the best available model at the present time to describe future events.

Furthermore, (as it is not science) Intelligent Design has no place in science classrooms. Science classes are useful precisely because they give students tools with which to predict reasonable outcomes. Future investors, for instance, learn to avoid perpetual motion machines and people claiming to be able to transmute metals. Future parents learn why genetic diversity helps reduce the likelyhood of children with horrible birth defects. Intelligent Design, bereft of the ability to make predictions, is at best a discussion topic for students of history.

In the past few weeks there's been a great deal of hoopla over remarks Larry Summers (the President of Harvard) made about the innate differences between women and men. In essence, he put forth that one of the reasons why women aren't represented as well in academia is because men have a higher natural variance of abilities; that is, because men are over-represented among the very smartest and very stupidest extremes of the poupulation.

Lots of people got very, very angry over this, and at first I could not understand why. Among other things, it is actually plausible that the current spread in abilities is higher among men than women. A number of other areas exhibit this strange duality; for instance, women in Britain file more insurance claims than men, but men pay higher premiums because they have more serious accidents.

Then, I came across the following quote, courtesy of the conservative blog EuroPundits:

If, in court, everyone is innocent until proven otherwise, in international politics, particularly when it comes to the Middle East, the usual suspects are, unless proven innocent, the actual culprits.

And it made me feel very, very angry, too. The common theme between this quote and the one that Summers made is that they are both plausible descriptions of the world. However, they are both incredibly insidious because the average listener is unprepared to distinguish between correlation and causation.

Though it may be true at the moment that major governments in the Middle East are responsible for much of the terror and chaos that occurs there, this condition need not hold universally. For instance, the more likely it is for Syria to be blamed for terrorist attacks, the more likely it is for another terror group to commit a crime with the knowledge that Syria will take the brunt of the international outrage. But the more important underlying fallacy is the assumption that Muslim nations cannot achieve internal peace when left to their own devices. So high is the correlation between terror attacks and Muslim nations that many assume terrorism to be a natural result of the religion itself.

However, one of the many lessons of history is that rules do not matter if people are bent on breaking them. Despite the shared commandment that "Thou shalt not kill," we have had thousands of needless wars between Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike. Despite the shared commandment that "Thou shalt not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor," this exact covetousness is what drives many a nation's market economy. In more recent events, death threats from right-wing nationalists have Israelis worried that a repeat of the shooting of Yitzhak Rabin will occur and prevent the peace accords with Palestine from being carried out. Regardless of whether Islam forbid anything, there would be Islamic terrorists simply because of poverty, misery, and anger in the slums of Middle Eastern cities.

I won't say that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, but I think it has more to do with who terrorists attack as compared to whether they attack. In the Middle East, a cultural feeling of Anti-Americanism (possibly fueled by an inferiority complex, but definitely supported by propaganda from many Middle-Eastern governments) gives the United States status as a desireable target; the fact that we have a Christian majority makes us only more attractive. Try saying the word "infidels," or better yet "Philistines" out loud some time; they both have a satisfying ring to them as they invoke feelings of intellectual and moral superiority (which have no basis in reality). Surprise, we have gangs and hoodlums and murderers (even in the Bible Belt) too; I'm being a little facetious, but just think of all the horrible things that they would do, too, if they weren't incapacitated by drug abuse!

As for women, a Harvard Professor (Howard Georgi) put it best when he said that we encourage women to be average but that we encourage men to be adventurous. Three days ago, I heard a girl say that she didn't want to do math in grad school because the work scared her. I have never heard a guy say that, even though it's obvious that some of them are also frightened. With the girl, it was a severe impediment; with the guys, it was simply something that had to be overcome. The human spirit was meant to be adventurous whether it belongs to a man or a woman. Period.

I only wish that my parents had told me that.