I like my last year's Rosh Hashanah post. But I can't write the same one twice.
The solar clock is about to tick again, so here we are, at a boundary between two chunks of time. Year past and year to come, entirely different from our humble embedded perspective, and so damn similar when seen from above. Variations on a theme, and year-to-come will be year-past soon enough. My past-self was wont to scoff at such arbitrary boundaries as secular or religious new year's days; my current-self, made less arrogant and more human by the tenderizing mallets of time, is more apt to latch onto them gratefully, as useful and stable landmarks amidst the chaotic swirl. But these two selves are also variants of some common prototype. They are the same, they are both versions of me, yet different.
"The same and not the same" is a rather koan-like phrase but I got it from the title of a pretty good book on chemistry, and as it happens I am starting a new job once again dealing with computational chemistry, which is looking to be the same and not the same as the one that got me out to San Francisco about 13 years ago. Back then my wife was pregnant with our second child who is now about to have a Bar Mitzvah, which is going to be the same and not the same as that of his brother, three years earlier. These two individuals, who in years past might have been thought of as rough copies of their parents, are working hard on differentiating themselves from us and each other, as is appropriate to their age. That process too has probably happened in much the same way for thousands of years, and is utterly different each time.
Another sage once said that history not only repeats itself, it stutters. More recently I read someone complaining that modern life was like trying to keep time to a shoe going around in a dryer (ie, as arrhythmic and unpatterned a sound as can be imagined). Change is accelerating; my ability to deal with it is diminishing, so the older I get the more I cling to whatever stable temporal patterns are available. This particular one has lasted a very long time, and part of the reason for that is its ability to sweep up even the dubious and reluctant into itself.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Friday, September 07, 2012
Illiterate Programming
For some reason, the group I am working with on a pretty complex Rails application does not believe in comments. They are big time adherents to agile methods, TDD, and that sort of thing, and the anti-comment stance seems to be a side effect of that. The reasons, I'm told, is that code should be self-explanatory, and also since comments can't be validated with tests they are likely to become outdated and inaccurate.
Well, the first reason seems like nonsense. I admit to sometimes taking that position myself, but I'm used to working in languages that have more powerful abstraction capabilities than Ruby (and so it is easier to shape programs to match human thought). And even there, it is almost always useful to put in some comments as guides. The Rails/Agile community seems to put a lot of thought into matching up user-visible structure, program structure, data structure, and the natural language ways to describe them, but their tools are really pretty crude and don't work in exactly the places where you need guidance.
For example, I ran across a method called sanitize_structure. Obviously this was supposed to take some representation of a (molecule) structure and produce a new one that had certain features removed, but what were they? There was no easy way to tell. And that's because this operation is not self-evident, it depends on domain knowledge that is not readily captured in standard Rails apparatus.
The second reason also seems pretty nonsensical. Yes comments may become outdated, but eliminating them entirely seems like having your legs amputated to get rid of toe fungus.
Now, this group works much more collaboratively than most places I've been involved with. And that means that perhaps code doesn't need to be as self-explanatory as I'm used to – instead, you are encouraged to go talk to people and get them to explain it to you. Talking is good, although it seems both inefficient and risky as a way to transmit software design information.
But I've really been missing the presence of English language in the code. I've tried addressing this technically – I found an Emacs package that lets me insert annotations into the code that do not get saved in the file but instead live in a side-channel. This means at least I can make my own notes and read them later, although nobody else sees them. And commit messages from source control are also a valuable source of human-scale explanations and design rationales.
A lot of agile seems to involve this kind of over-reaction to very real problems of earlier models of software development. But I guess this kind of over-reaction is fundamental to how any new thing establishes itself.
[to go up a few meta levels – I realized recently that the whole point of most of my work, including the commercial, research, and philosophical aspects of it, might be summed up as exploring ways for reconciling computational technology with the way human minds actually work. And given this, I realized that the agile methodology people might have something to teach me in that regard – that is one reason I took this job. I was pretty certain I would find adapting to agile to be a struggle, and it has been, but I think it will be a productive one. ]
[and more meta – I have been thinking about starting a different blog for technical stuff like this – having a technical blog seems to be practically a job requirement these days – but so far can't be bothered. I'll use tags.]
Well, the first reason seems like nonsense. I admit to sometimes taking that position myself, but I'm used to working in languages that have more powerful abstraction capabilities than Ruby (and so it is easier to shape programs to match human thought). And even there, it is almost always useful to put in some comments as guides. The Rails/Agile community seems to put a lot of thought into matching up user-visible structure, program structure, data structure, and the natural language ways to describe them, but their tools are really pretty crude and don't work in exactly the places where you need guidance.
For example, I ran across a method called sanitize_structure. Obviously this was supposed to take some representation of a (molecule) structure and produce a new one that had certain features removed, but what were they? There was no easy way to tell. And that's because this operation is not self-evident, it depends on domain knowledge that is not readily captured in standard Rails apparatus.
The second reason also seems pretty nonsensical. Yes comments may become outdated, but eliminating them entirely seems like having your legs amputated to get rid of toe fungus.
Now, this group works much more collaboratively than most places I've been involved with. And that means that perhaps code doesn't need to be as self-explanatory as I'm used to – instead, you are encouraged to go talk to people and get them to explain it to you. Talking is good, although it seems both inefficient and risky as a way to transmit software design information.
But I've really been missing the presence of English language in the code. I've tried addressing this technically – I found an Emacs package that lets me insert annotations into the code that do not get saved in the file but instead live in a side-channel. This means at least I can make my own notes and read them later, although nobody else sees them. And commit messages from source control are also a valuable source of human-scale explanations and design rationales.
A lot of agile seems to involve this kind of over-reaction to very real problems of earlier models of software development. But I guess this kind of over-reaction is fundamental to how any new thing establishes itself.
[to go up a few meta levels – I realized recently that the whole point of most of my work, including the commercial, research, and philosophical aspects of it, might be summed up as exploring ways for reconciling computational technology with the way human minds actually work. And given this, I realized that the agile methodology people might have something to teach me in that regard – that is one reason I took this job. I was pretty certain I would find adapting to agile to be a struggle, and it has been, but I think it will be a productive one. ]
[and more meta – I have been thinking about starting a different blog for technical stuff like this – having a technical blog seems to be practically a job requirement these days – but so far can't be bothered. I'll use tags.]
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Personhood USA
First: I thought I was pretty immune to the oddities and offenses of wingnut thought, but I must say I was taken aback to see people parading around a banner with the word "rape", not to protest it but to celebrate the results of it (via Rachael Maddow):
Third: OTOOH, not really. As I've pointed out before, if the proposition above was really adhered to, then the infant mortality rate would about around 50% and we'd be holding funeral services over discarded tampons. [[Update: Guess I'm not the only one to notice that. I think that link is a joke site, but I can't be sure.]]
Alright, all of the above was just an excuse for me to write about a perpetual term that won't leave me alone: personhood, now with its own lobbying group and proposed constitutional amendments. The concept exerts a strange fascination, perhaps because it is obviously a social fiction while at the same time absolutely essential to living life. I wrote my dissertation on a related topic (agency and computation), and apparently that was not enough to get it out of my system.
I suppose it is compensation, or a reflection of a basic maladjustment. I figured out a long time ago that my interest in sociology is directly linked to my difficulties with normal society (to put it simply: being a sociologist is like a fish suddenly noticing that they are swimming in this weird "water" stuff and wanting to have a theory of it – and only a fairly weird fish would feel the need). Personhood is just another aspect of the same dynamic, and no doubt underlying it is that faint trace of Aspergerishness that is so common in my chosen profession.
From my point of view personhood appears to be have maddeningly contrary qualities: fictional yet real, elusive yet mundane, unknowable while necessary. I don't think a constitutional amendment is going to help.
Proposed personhood amendments failed in Colorado two times. Mississippi will be voting on its own personhood amendment this year. In an effort to promote its cause, Personhood Mississippi has started a "Conceived in Rape" tour featuring Rebecca Kiessling, who says she was conceived by rape and was slated for abortion. Kiessling states on her website:Second: OTOH, give them credit for a smidgen of intellectual consistency. If you really believe that any zygote with around 46 chromosomes is a full-fledged person deserving of full legal protection, then why would that protection suddenly be withdrawn just because that person happened to come about as the result of a violent assault? If abortion is murder, then it's murder no matter how the vessel containing the victim might feel about it.
Have you ever considered how really insulting it is to say to someone, "I think your mother should have been able to abort you."? It's like saying, "If I had my way, you'd be dead right now." And that is the reality with which I live every time someone says they are pro-choice or pro-life "except in cases of rape" because I absolutely would have been aborted if it had been legal in Michigan when I was an unborn child.
Third: OTOOH, not really. As I've pointed out before, if the proposition above was really adhered to, then the infant mortality rate would about around 50% and we'd be holding funeral services over discarded tampons. [[Update: Guess I'm not the only one to notice that. I think that link is a joke site, but I can't be sure.]]
Alright, all of the above was just an excuse for me to write about a perpetual term that won't leave me alone: personhood, now with its own lobbying group and proposed constitutional amendments. The concept exerts a strange fascination, perhaps because it is obviously a social fiction while at the same time absolutely essential to living life. I wrote my dissertation on a related topic (agency and computation), and apparently that was not enough to get it out of my system.
I suppose it is compensation, or a reflection of a basic maladjustment. I figured out a long time ago that my interest in sociology is directly linked to my difficulties with normal society (to put it simply: being a sociologist is like a fish suddenly noticing that they are swimming in this weird "water" stuff and wanting to have a theory of it – and only a fairly weird fish would feel the need). Personhood is just another aspect of the same dynamic, and no doubt underlying it is that faint trace of Aspergerishness that is so common in my chosen profession.
From my point of view personhood appears to be have maddeningly contrary qualities: fictional yet real, elusive yet mundane, unknowable while necessary. I don't think a constitutional amendment is going to help.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Transpersonal metacognition: it's on!
I gave myself the fake title "Chair of Transpersonal Metacognition, University of Saskatoon" (on the right column, until I get tired of it and change it) in a fit of amused randomness, but metacognition turns out to be a real thing, if not quite real enough to have its own department yet. I shouldn't be surprised. If I could only take my offhand inventions more seriously maybe I really would be occupying a loftier chair than my decrepit used Aeron.
Anyway, there are over 63K articles returned by Google Scholar with the word "metacognition" in them. The linked one above has lots of intriguing references, like to a study that showed that telling subjects that free will doesn't exist led to more cheating; and research that suggest that metacognition is located in an area of the brain called Bordmann area 10. All of that sounds fascinating but it somehow misses the main point (or at least the point that interests me), it buries the lede, hides the jewel within a bushel of plain oats. That point is that "metacognition" is not some random phenomenon to be isolated and studied, it is very close to the fundamental quality of being human. Somehow turning it into a serious (but ordinary) academic subfield seems to drain it of interest. That is no doubt a problem with me, not with any of the actual work or people working on it.
Metacognition improves upon the completely broken notion of "consciousness". Consciousness is looking at roughly the same phenomenon but in such a way as to make it mysterious. "Consciousness" suggests a magically transcendent form self-knowledge; "metacognition" by contrast suggests that we know ourselves in almost exactly the way we know everything else: partially, murkily, filtered through inadequate representations and built-in biases. We are foreign to ourselves, we take ourselves for objects just like anything else.
What about "transpersonal"? The deep idea there is that our self-cognition and our other-cognition is essentially the same, or at least generated by the roughly the same processes, and we build up our self-image by observing others, and by observing others observing our self. That is to say, our metacognition, even of ourselves, is "transpersonal", which is just another way of stating the conclusion of the preceding paragraph.
Some philosophical works that touch on this: Paul Ricoeur's Oneself as Another, and (in a fairly absurd way) Daniel Kolak's I Am You. Douglas Hofstadter has been obsessed by it in one form or another for decades and in some ways has already exhausted the topic, now that I think about it. Other computational thinkers have tried to create models that embody reflection, introspection, or self-modelling (Brian Cantwell Smith, Jon Doyle, John Batali, Marvin Minsky). But those never seemed to lead anywhere…although apparently there have been AAAI symposia on metacognition, which I am somewhat sorry I never went to (and will likely never, having once more derailed myself off the research track).
This blog post may be a personal apotheosis of meta for me, since it is about (meta) to my own relationship with both the idea of metacognition and the academic instutions of knowledge that study (are meta to) it. And of course that last sentence was one more level of meta, and so is this one.
[And to go meta on a different axis: I'm starting a new job tomorrow so it is likely that this blog might take a turn towards being more about software development and other mundane matters. Or it might get even more random as I use it to vent all the parts of my mind that do not have a professional outlet. Or it might stay just the same, or stop altogether for awhile.]
[And one more: checking my archives, I see I was thinking along much the same lines back the last time I was in the midst of a job change. Scary! Or predictable? I guess it's scarily predictable.]
Anyway, there are over 63K articles returned by Google Scholar with the word "metacognition" in them. The linked one above has lots of intriguing references, like to a study that showed that telling subjects that free will doesn't exist led to more cheating; and research that suggest that metacognition is located in an area of the brain called Bordmann area 10. All of that sounds fascinating but it somehow misses the main point (or at least the point that interests me), it buries the lede, hides the jewel within a bushel of plain oats. That point is that "metacognition" is not some random phenomenon to be isolated and studied, it is very close to the fundamental quality of being human. Somehow turning it into a serious (but ordinary) academic subfield seems to drain it of interest. That is no doubt a problem with me, not with any of the actual work or people working on it.
Metacognition improves upon the completely broken notion of "consciousness". Consciousness is looking at roughly the same phenomenon but in such a way as to make it mysterious. "Consciousness" suggests a magically transcendent form self-knowledge; "metacognition" by contrast suggests that we know ourselves in almost exactly the way we know everything else: partially, murkily, filtered through inadequate representations and built-in biases. We are foreign to ourselves, we take ourselves for objects just like anything else.
What about "transpersonal"? The deep idea there is that our self-cognition and our other-cognition is essentially the same, or at least generated by the roughly the same processes, and we build up our self-image by observing others, and by observing others observing our self. That is to say, our metacognition, even of ourselves, is "transpersonal", which is just another way of stating the conclusion of the preceding paragraph.
Some philosophical works that touch on this: Paul Ricoeur's Oneself as Another, and (in a fairly absurd way) Daniel Kolak's I Am You. Douglas Hofstadter has been obsessed by it in one form or another for decades and in some ways has already exhausted the topic, now that I think about it. Other computational thinkers have tried to create models that embody reflection, introspection, or self-modelling (Brian Cantwell Smith, Jon Doyle, John Batali, Marvin Minsky). But those never seemed to lead anywhere…although apparently there have been AAAI symposia on metacognition, which I am somewhat sorry I never went to (and will likely never, having once more derailed myself off the research track).
This blog post may be a personal apotheosis of meta for me, since it is about (meta) to my own relationship with both the idea of metacognition and the academic instutions of knowledge that study (are meta to) it. And of course that last sentence was one more level of meta, and so is this one.
[And to go meta on a different axis: I'm starting a new job tomorrow so it is likely that this blog might take a turn towards being more about software development and other mundane matters. Or it might get even more random as I use it to vent all the parts of my mind that do not have a professional outlet. Or it might stay just the same, or stop altogether for awhile.]
[And one more: checking my archives, I see I was thinking along much the same lines back the last time I was in the midst of a job change. Scary! Or predictable? I guess it's scarily predictable.]
Friday, August 17, 2012
Portraits of Unicode Characters, #2 of a series — Pile of Poo
As you can see by contrast with the previous entry, the vocabulary of Unicode symbols spans the gamut of human concepts, from the gloriously abstract to the all-too-earthy. However, unlike mathematics where symbolism is in heavy use, and philosophy where it isn't but probably should be, talking about shit is an everyday activity where the use of typographic condensation has heretofor been minimal. And honestly, it kind of misses the point. Part of the point of talking shit about shit and pointing out the bullshit emananting from shitheads is the pleasure of saying the word, molding it to its subject as it were. So substituting a symbol is somewhat unsatisfying.
Like many other misguided efforts at formalization, this seems like it is something of a failure at capturing the richness of the concept that it claims to denote. On the other hand, it is perfect in its crudeness. If it were an elegant symbol then it would be an even bigger failure, but as it is – an unsophisticated pictograph, a rather unwelcome presence amidst all the quietly understated mathematical symbols, an insult to their air of aristocratic disembodiment…yes, it may be the first vanguard of a peasant uprising amidst the typographic populace. Calling bullshit is the first step in developing a more sophisticated form of critique, and feces-flinging is not only an old and noble primate tradition, but apparently an emblem of intelligence.
On the unpower of words
In the East poets are sometimes thrown in prison – a sort of compliment, since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as theft or rape or revolution. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all – a sort of punishment in effect, prison without walls, without echoes, without palpable existence – shadow-realm of print, or of abstract thought-world without risk or eros. ... America has freedom of speech because all words are considered equally vapid.
— Hakim Bey
[not really inspired by current events, but resonant with this little episode.]
Friday, August 10, 2012
Decentralized Intelligence Agency
A few weeks back I realized that my lightly-disguised pseudonym needed a business card of its own for meetups and other halfhearted attempts to be part of the Bay Area scene. Here's what I (or he) came up with:
It's procedurally generated so each one has different colors and other variations, which is kind of fun.
It's procedurally generated so each one has different colors and other variations, which is kind of fun.
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