Culture is Powerful

http://firefly.yourjapan.jp/post/2/212
Roadrage is an almost non-existent phenomenon in Japan. Japanese drivers draw upon un-natural reserves of patience as they inch through traffic jams kilometers long. I [an Australian in Japan] am unable to do this - I'm either zooming down the middle on my scooter, or banging my head on the steering wheel in frustration.
Many people here believe roadrage is natural and understandable. It's part of the human condition. It's logical. It's well and good. It can't be got rid of.

But that's all false. It's just memes giving people entrenched hangups. It's pointless, bad, and as any Japanese person can tell you, it does not have to be that way.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Top 10 Reasons I Hate Children

  1. They are so stupid: they won't do what you say no matter how much sense it makes.
  2. They are so smart: they cleverly find their parents' vulnerable spots.
  3. They are so gullible: TV commercials can make them want anything, within seconds, no matter how stupid and boring it is.
  4. They are so stubborn: parents can't make them want or do anything, no matter how wise or fun it is.
  5. They don't respect boundaries: they often make messes outside their own rooms.
  6. They don't let their parents intrude: they never organize their own rooms the way their parents suggest.
  7. They are too noisy: especially in public (where it is illegal).
  8. They are too quiet: they never tell their parents what's going on with their lives.
  9. They won't eat right: they refuse to finish what's on their plate even after their father (a trained and certified accountant) announces that they will soon die of malnutrition.
  10. They won't eat right: they eat too much. Childhood obesity is now an epidemic.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (3)

Questions About a Brain Chip

On the TV show Buffy, Spike has a chip in his brain. Don't worry if you haven't seen the show, it's not important for understanding this entry. The chip prevents him from hurting humans: if he does, it causes him excruciating pain.

How could a chip like that work? How does it know when to cause him pain? It can't see who he's hurting, so it must be reading his thoughts. How can it do that? Maybe it can read the state of the neurons its next to. But that won't help unless all the relevant ones are concentrated in one place. From what we know of brains, they aren't. Maybe it somehow can scan the entire brain. If so, consider that this chip would work equally well if you just placed it next to someone's head: you could read their brain. So that's some pretty advanced technology, but Buffy does not take place in the future.

So suppose this chip can scan the whole brain. Will that help? Only if it can process all that data in real time (it causes the pain immediately). To process the amount of data in a brain, in real time, I think you'd need a computer about as powerful as ... a brain. But this chip is much smaller than a brain, including its high tech brain scanner. And our best computers aren't nearly as fast as our brains: they are around 500 times slower (source).

Another issue with the chip is: how does it cause pain? It could zap Spike's brain with electricity. But that would cause brain damage, which is never mentioned. It could hook into the brain and send brain signals which say Spike is in pain. Hooking into the brain so that it can send signals is pretty high tech itself. But worse, how can it know what signals to send? And if it can only send signals to a few neurons where its located, then will it always be able to send the necessary signals? We don't know exactly what it would take to calculate how to send pain signals, but if we expect they are like other thoughts, then constructing them would require comprehension of much of Spike's brain state. It would be a bit like trying to manipulate someone: you have to understand what sort of things they are thinking and feeling, and they figure out how to take advantage of those. It sounds like a task that requires creativity. So the chip would need (artificial) intelligence software. Alternatively, maybe there is a special part of the brain that causes pain when stimulated. If so, that may solve the pain-causing issue, but at the cost of locating the chip in a worse place for the purpose of reading Spike's thoughts.

On the show, we receive contradictory information about how the chip works. In one scene, Spike tries to punch Buffy a few times, but isn't hurt. He says that he knew she would dodge, and the chip only hurts him when he intends to hurt a human. So according to this, the chip must read Spike's thoughts, and reacts entirely based on them. This is roughly what we've been assuming above.

But in another scene, they are unsure whether a person is part demon. Spike punches her to find out: the chip hurts him, and everyone agrees this proves that she is human. But how is that possible? If the chip only knows what Spike knows, and works based on his intentions, then it can't be used to find out if someone is human. If Spike doesn't know, the chip doesn't know either.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)
I'm involved in an argument about libertarianism, public goods, and knowledge here:

http://www.settingtheworldtorights.com/node/105#comment-4734

My comments in the argument are, I think, the same quality of writing as most of my blog posts. So if you think my blog is worth reading, you should go read this as well.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

James Randi on Astrology

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Dp2Zqk8vHw

Randi gives people horoscopes supposedly made by professionals based on their date and place of birth. He has the people rate the accuracy, and scores pretty high. Then he tells them that they all got the same horoscope!

Derren Brown did the same trick.

What can we learn about people from this? One thing is that they have certain sorts of broad similarities. If you talk about those areas, pretty much anyone can relate to what you say. Those areas include having a family, a love life, relatives, feeling misunderstood, and having insecurities. Those are just some obvious ones. I'm not an expert and I haven't even thought about it much. I'm sure there are others. You could learn them just by reading some horoscopes.

Despite everyone having similarities, horoscopes don't work perfectly. Another thing going on is that people focus in on the parts that seem right and ignore the ones that seem wrong. They help it to work.

That's what they do if they are friendly or sympathetic, at least. Other times people can be hostile to something and focus on the parts they disagree with. That often happens in arguments between people who strongly disagree. Sadly, it does an effective job of preventing people from learning from each other.

Elliot Temple | Permalink | Messages (0)

Emotional Literacy

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/21/nedu21.xml

They now teach, in school:

- "emotional literacy"

- meditation

- "channelling" negative emotions

- how to "dump" your boyfriend or girlfriend

Within the article, this is slammed:
"My view is that it is actually harmful. The more we talk about self-esteem in schools, the more kids become obsessed with their emotions and the more they have emotional problems. Children who talk about being 'stressed' play the role of being stressed. It normalises and promotes the behaviour."
The telegraph introduces the dissenting voices in an unfair way: "However, a few dissenters have raised concerns"

Considering that emotional literacy courses are *not* the mainstream, how can the vast majority of people who don't take or want them only be "a few" dissenters?

But really the worst thing, I think, is how normal breakups are. It is expected to have a lot of "broken hearts". The idea of being "crushed" when people break "commitments" isn't notable. Our society does its very best to ignore how much people are hurt by breakups, and to ignore how many breakups our institutions of dating cause.

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Updates

Hi! As you can see, I've updated my blog. I wrote my own blogging software in Ruby on Rails. I've also imported all my old posts from previous blogs. Here are some statistics on the posts I gathered:

Total: 1178

Hidden: 484

Shown: 694

Rank 1: 227

Rank 2: 325

Rank 3: 148

(Rank 3 is the best. Rank 1 is the worst and is hidden by default.)

I wrote a command line program for posting to my blog, which I prefer to a web interface (but I have that too). Maybe that will mean I'll post more. It opens Textmate for writing the post, which is a much better text editor than Safari or Firefox.

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