“questions”
36 posts under this tag.
Yesterday’s postELZR on a recent essay by Thomas L. Friedman made me remember just how good the man is and how much I enjoyed his latest book, The World is Flat. Today I chanced upon this MIT lecture1 in which he discusses the book at length and it may be even even better than the book itself. Friedman’s a master storyteller and shines in front of a live audience. The video quality is pixel-art at best but no matter, I promise you this hour and a half will be one of your day’s highlights (and when you watch it, don’t miss the answer to the final question posed to him: “How can an open society be secure?”).
Friedman himself’s a very interesting man—Mediterranean studies BrandeisWP B.A., married to one of the hundred richest families in America, won every journalistic accolade there is—don’t forget to check out his pedia and this U.S. News & World Report writeup on him (listing Friedman as one of America’s best leaders).
1 While you’re at it, give the MIT Video Index a good browse, there’s good stuff aplenty.
Ours are (by nature) unusually plastic brains whose biologically proper functioning has always involved the recruitment and exploitation of non-biological props and scaffolds. More so than any other creature on the planet, we humans emerge as natural-born cyborgs, factory tweaked and primed so as to be ready to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures: ones whose systemic boundaries far exceed those of skin and skull. ( p5—emphasis added)
Andy Clark’sWP fab Natural Born Cyborgs? is at times techno-lyrical to the verge of incomprehension (or overpretentiousness—normal pretentiousness is of course to be cherished), but there are many thought-provoking paragraphs to be found in this essay of his (also the introduction of his same-titled 2003 bookAM ).
The conjecture, then, is that one large jump or discontinuity in human cognitive evolution involves the distinctive way human brains repeatedly create and exploit various species of cognitive technology so as to expand and reshape the space of human reason. We, more than any other creature on the planet, deploy non-biological elements (instruments, media, notations) to complement (but not, typically, to replicate) our basic biological modes of processing, creating extended cognitive systems whose computational and problem-solving profiles are quire different from those of the naked brain. Human brains maintain an intricate cognitive dance with an ecologically novel, and immensely empowering, environment: the world of symbols, media, formalisms, texts, speech, instruments and culture. ( p4—emphasis added)
Particularly interface-relevant is this gem right here.
The cognitive anthropologist Ed Hutchins WP, in his book Cognition In The WildAM depicts the general role of cognitive technologies in similar terms [i.e. as thought prosthetics], suggesting that “[Such tools] permit the [users] to do the tasks that need to be done while doing the kinds of things people are good at: recognizing patterns, modeling simple dynamics of the world, and manipulating objects in the environment.” This description nicely captures what is best about good examples of cognitive technology: recent word-processing packages, web browsers, mouse and icon systems, etc. It also suggests, of course, what is wrong with many of our first attempts at creating such tools: the skills needed to use those environments (early VCR’s, word-processors, etc.) were precisely those that biological brains find hardest to support, such as the recall and execution of long, essentially arbitrary, sequences of operations. ( p4—emphasis added)
The book itselfAM I haven’t (yet) read. Something at first warned me away from it, making me imagine it would be too repetitive and “impressionistic”. But I just read the quote below, and I’m intrigued. It’s on the wishlist.
These [Alzheimer] patients were a puzzle because although they still lived alone, successfully, in the city, they really should not have been able to do so. On standard psychological tests they performed rather dismally. They should have been unable to cope with the demands of daily life. What was going on?
A sequence of visits to their home environments provided the answer. These home environments, it transpired, were wonderfully calibrated to support and scaffold these biological brains. The homes were stuffed full of cognitive props, tools, and aids. Examples included message centers where they stored notes about what to do and when; photos of family and friends complete with indications of names and relationships; labels and pictures on doors; “memory books” to record new events, meetings, and plans; and “open-storage” strategies in which crucial items (pots, pans, checkbooks) are always kept in plain view, not locked away in drawers.
Before you allow this image of intensive scaffolding to simply confirm your opinion of these patients as hopelessly cognitively compromised, try to imagine a world in which normal human brains are somewhat Alzheimic. Imagine that in this world we had gradually evolved a society in which the kinds of scaffolding found in the St. Louis home environments were the norm. And then reflect that, in a certain sense, this is exactly what we have done. Our own pens, paper, notebooks, diaries, and alarm clocks complement our brute biological profiles in much the same kind of way. Yet we never say of the artist, or poet, or scientist, ”Oh, poor soul—she is not really responsible for that painting/theory/poem; for don’t you see how she had to rely on pen, paper, and sketches to offset the inadequacies of her own brain?”
“I can’t believe THAT!” said Alice.
“Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. ”Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s not use trying,” she said: “one CAN’T believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast
Reading processors
Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,
I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.
, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,
and spacing (pdf),
What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?
Yey! A playlist serendipity has brought me back Roy Vedas’s wonderfully weird Fragments of Life (its weirdness is a fact). If I remember correctly it was Pako who first showed it to me, late nineties, and I hadn’t heard it in years (old, how past starts to pile up). Anyway, it’s definitely one of my favorite songs. Here, enjoy.
That Business: A Changing World textbook has been a lot of fun. It is still a textbook—overly commercial (specially at the beginning), tiresome, and repetitive (a needless box here, a redundant summary there, summaries of redundant summaries)—but it is interesting nonetheless.
Near the beginning, economic systems are dealed in a few pages and there were two things I noticed. The first one was that ubiquitous communism catchphrase:
[In Commnism] everyone contributes according to ability and receives benefits according to need.
I thought it was about time Capitalism (here ’s a wonderful definition) got it’s own catch-phrase. Here’s my stab at it:
In Capitalism everyone contributes according to need and receives benefits according to talent.
“What is honored in a country will be cultivated there,” is a quote frequently attributed to Plato, and I find it useful to compare both catch-phrases. It’s quite a dangerous thing to honor need in your country, to honor effort might sound as a step forward, but it’s still foolish—a farmer pulling the plough himself certainly puts more effort into his crop than a modern farmer with a tractor, is that to be rewarded? Rewarding talent may sound harsh or insensitive but it is the only truly humane thing to do.
The second thing is a simple question. For the life of me, I can’t understand the following sentence:
Socialists believe their system permits a higher standard of living than other economic systems, but the difference often applies to the nation as a whole rather than to its individual citizens.
How do you define the standard of living of a nation and how can it be different from that of its citizens? Can someone help me give this a coherent meaning?
Just ‘cause, how the fuck does one translate this (wonderful) sentence to Spanish?
If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.
(This is just me loud thinking, it has nothing to do with On the language of this blog.)
March 2, 2006 – Update:
Si la tragedia es una experiencia en hiper-apego, la comedia es una experiencia en des-apego, en distancia.
Que tal?
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