My blog which I started here three years ago and promptly abandoned for two years after making the first couple entries has now arrived at a steady state. This post is a short explanation for what has been here for the last six posts and what I intend to write here for the foreseeable future. It may look random, but there is a method behind the randomness.
It is a system with four subsystems. The system is to report my recreational research which others might find useful. The four subsystems are those of the poet, the philosopher, the psychologist and the theologian. This post is labeled: literature. The subject is my writing. Every fourth post will be labeled: literature. The subjects will rotate regular; from my poet-self, next to my philosopher-self, next to my psychologist-self, finally to my theologian-self and then repeating, in order. The other three labels are: philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics. So far, I have kept to this system for six posts, every five days over the last thirty days.
The next post, on philosophy, is nearly complete; the one after that, on psychology, is close to a first draft. There are a number of other planned posts, some of which are now nothing but one sentence fragment. There is also a four-page glossy brochure, which a few folks in real life have seen. On page one I have the Coleman-Smith-Rider-Waite "Hermit" image. There is also an original drawing, a slogan, a sigil, and a number of other characteristics which I try and bring into my writing and hazards to avoid. Pages two through four have a similar form, symbolized by the Fool, the Chariot, and the Magician. The other features are tightly parallel in a format which is loosely patterned after an Occult Table of Correspondences such as Aleister Crowley's 777.
In addition to a catalog of my recreational research activity, this blog also serves as an association record. A couple years ago I took a class at the Houston Jung Center on Active Imagination, which was Jung's term for his trance technique. Active Imagination is closely related to self hypnosis. I asked the teacher what process goes on in our minds when we find ourselves daydreaming or in reverie and we are thinking the weirdest thing; and we stop and ask ourselves, "whatever made me think of that?" We try and work it backwards, but we are lost in a wilderness of weird grouped thoughts. She said it is an association process, like free association in Freudian Psychoanalysis. My blog posts are a map of this association process in my recreational research.
26 August 2010
21 August 2010
The Fall
In his book Waking Up, which is his interpretation of George Gurdjieff's spiritual and psychological work, Charles Tart has a repeating proverb which he stumbled upon in his Gurdjieff studies:
There is no God but Reality
To seek Him elsewhere
Is the action of the Fall.
The Fall is an origin myth, which may be found in a wide variety of traditions. In modern Western Civilization, we have the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The ancient Greeks had Prometheus and Pandora. In India we are in the age of the Kali Yuga. Fallen. The story is so common that it was a foundation for Carl Jung in his theory of the Collective Unconscious.
I have been writing some Artificial Neural Network software, and I realized I know very little about human brains, human organs, animal physiology, cells. So, I have been on a remedial Biology study course. This has taken a couple odd turns. One of them ended up on a theory of the origin of these Fall legends. Through the mechanism of hyperlink clicking I journeyed from Biology to Evolution to Evolutionary Psychology to its critics. This explanation of The Fall is very simple, so for now I am going to tentatively accept it as very probably the truth.
We know from Anthropology and Sociology that a stable network of closely associated humans has a maximum number of 150. Field workers find that simple forager tribes will divide into two when they grow to near that number. The Sociologist Nan Lin has spent his career trying to quantify social capital and studied a number of human networks and records a similar finding. Attention is a limited resource, and humans just cannot keep close track of more than 150 family and friends and neighbors and co-workers.
The most popular family in the United States of America just married off Chelsea Clinton. I did not read much about it, but I did see in the New York Times there were 600 guests at her wedding. Assuming Chelsea invited 150, the groom invited 150, her parents invited 150, and his parents invited 150, there is yet another instance of our familiar number showing up.
The first tribe of foragers that approached 150 and broke up a million years ago (or whenever) would be the original Fall event. And after that it happened thousands and tens thousands and hundreds thousands times on every continent except Antarctica, implanting some form of the myth into nearly every tradition. There is even one academic who thinks labeling the previous condition "paradise" is not too far off:
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond.
One of my favorite treatments is the short novel by Albert Camus, The Fall. The main character Clemence is one of the best examples in literature of the fellow who stoops in order to conquer. It is a pitiful position, and Camus tells it well in a modern version. Clemence's fall is from the upper rungs of his society's status ladder. He retains his dignity with a perverse attitude. He cannot make you love him, but he does have the power to make you hate him. It is pretty sick but it is not illogical.
There is no God but Reality
To seek Him elsewhere
Is the action of the Fall.
The Fall is an origin myth, which may be found in a wide variety of traditions. In modern Western Civilization, we have the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The ancient Greeks had Prometheus and Pandora. In India we are in the age of the Kali Yuga. Fallen. The story is so common that it was a foundation for Carl Jung in his theory of the Collective Unconscious.
I have been writing some Artificial Neural Network software, and I realized I know very little about human brains, human organs, animal physiology, cells. So, I have been on a remedial Biology study course. This has taken a couple odd turns. One of them ended up on a theory of the origin of these Fall legends. Through the mechanism of hyperlink clicking I journeyed from Biology to Evolution to Evolutionary Psychology to its critics. This explanation of The Fall is very simple, so for now I am going to tentatively accept it as very probably the truth.
We know from Anthropology and Sociology that a stable network of closely associated humans has a maximum number of 150. Field workers find that simple forager tribes will divide into two when they grow to near that number. The Sociologist Nan Lin has spent his career trying to quantify social capital and studied a number of human networks and records a similar finding. Attention is a limited resource, and humans just cannot keep close track of more than 150 family and friends and neighbors and co-workers.
The most popular family in the United States of America just married off Chelsea Clinton. I did not read much about it, but I did see in the New York Times there were 600 guests at her wedding. Assuming Chelsea invited 150, the groom invited 150, her parents invited 150, and his parents invited 150, there is yet another instance of our familiar number showing up.
The first tribe of foragers that approached 150 and broke up a million years ago (or whenever) would be the original Fall event. And after that it happened thousands and tens thousands and hundreds thousands times on every continent except Antarctica, implanting some form of the myth into nearly every tradition. There is even one academic who thinks labeling the previous condition "paradise" is not too far off:
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race by Jared Diamond.
One of my favorite treatments is the short novel by Albert Camus, The Fall. The main character Clemence is one of the best examples in literature of the fellow who stoops in order to conquer. It is a pitiful position, and Camus tells it well in a modern version. Clemence's fall is from the upper rungs of his society's status ladder. He retains his dignity with a perverse attitude. He cannot make you love him, but he does have the power to make you hate him. It is pretty sick but it is not illogical.
16 August 2010
Visualizing the Golden Age of Neurolinguistic Programming
On a group weblog where I participate, several people have expressed an interest in Neurolinguistic Programming. This is a subject in which I have done enough work that I feel I can provide a useful introduction and reference list for the beginner or novice. I am not certified as a Master Practitioner, but I have read all the basic texts and taken several seminars; I have taken a number of seminars from people who have personally studied under Richard Bandler and John Grinder, including two seminars led by Steve Andreas, who edited the books where I would recommend anybody begin. These are transcripts of Bandler Grinder seminars:
Frogs into Princes
Trance-formation
Reframing
Using your Brain for a Change.
A more systematic and comprehensive treatment, suitable for beginners is the following:
NLP The new technology of achievement, edited by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.
If you want to get technical and theoretical, the books to read are:
Patterns of the hypnotic techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.; Vol I by Bandler and Grinder; Vol II by Grinder, Delozier, and Bandler.
The structure of magic; Vol I by Bandler and Grinder; Vol II by Grinder and Bandler.
The oldest of these books were published in 1975; the newest of the Bandler Grinder books was published in 1985. As near as I can determine, the field has been stale since 1985 and the innovators have stopped innovating. It is a mystery to me how and why this came about; I have some idea about it, but shall leave that for another post.
In addition to the above listed books, in the past week I have spent around three hours reading the Wikipedia artiles on Neurolinguistic Programming topics. The Wikipedia is uneven; if you want plot synopses for Star Trek episodes, the Wikipedia is superb. If you want information about the BP Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster, the Wikipedia is useless. For Neurolinguistic Programming, the Wikipedia is quite good. It is better than the average book on the subject you can find today in your local bookstore. Some of those books are lousy. The worst shortcoming I saw (I did not read every single entry) in the Wikipedia collection is the article on Rapport; the rapport techniques are some of the most important results of the original Neurolingustic Programming work.
The hottest Neurolinguistic Programming specialists in the United States in 2010 are the speed-seduction (pickup artist) people. They seem mostly a misapplication of NLP; that is going by what I have seen which is not much of a large group. Surely somebody in that crowd knows what they are doing but I have no idea who it would be. If that seems a little harsh, take a look at that Amazon page linked above and see what else the people who buy that NLP Technology of Achievement book link to.
A difficulty with Neurolinguistic Programming as presented in the Bandler and Grinder seminar transcripts is concentration on visualization. The phobia cure, the reframing technique, the swish pattern, and the rapport tools all work well for visually oriented people. Almost all of the examples in their seminars are dependent on visualization. This is a skill with a large variance and I am not good at it. Or perhaps I am not good at it in the context of communicating with people. Visualizing a geological structure from reflection seismic images or visualizing art work or architectural drawings are visual tasks which seem natural for me, but observing the visual details of humans I am talking to and trying to get along with is not a skill which I have used successfully more than one time in about a hundred hours of practicing.
The one time I did use it successfully was in a T group on hypnosis and the seminar leader and the person I was working with and several of the other participants all applauded my great expertise. It may have been mostly luck, because every subsequent attempt I have made since then was a failure.
The largest benefit I have gotten from my NLP studies is using the Milton model and the Meta model to frame my objective experiences in a subjective fashion to benefit my peace of mind. The Milton model goes from specific and local to general and global. The Meta model goes from general and global to specific and local. The Meta model can be used in an extremely similar manner to the Albert Ellis Rational Emotional Therapy technique where you identify and challenge irrational beliefs. An example of an irrational belief would be something you tell yourself like: "I always get screwed when they calculate the salary raises."
We all have unpleasant experiences that are part of our lives. Lovers reject us. We break bones. People dent our cars when they are not watchful of how they are moving. I could make a long list here. What Albert Ellis invented, and what Bandler and Grinder productively use their Meta model for, is that your own description in your mind of these events can influence wide areas of your life experience. (Ellis invented this as an approach to psychotherapy. The idea goes back to the ancients. It is one of the foundational concepts in Stoicism and Buddhism. It is in the very first verse of the Dhammapada.)
To illustrate this with a personal example, I got laid off on 31 March 2010. This does not mean that I am a loser, unless of course it might, if I repeat to myself in the ensuing four months a few hundred times that I am a loser. Applying the Meta model to this calamitous event means that I describe it to myself with a set of exact specific details. It was near the equinox. The camellias had bloomed but the azaleas had not yet bloomed. There was one man who decided I had not done enough for him lately. There was a small group of people who communicated true friendship and camaraderie to me during their farewells. I got a nice severance package. Suddenly all my time is free time and I get to learn the definition of personal responsibility. And so forth. My layoff is this set of extremely specific facts tied to one point in the four dimensional time and space continuum that we are all traveling through. The Stoics and the Buddhists and Albert Ellis and the Neurolinguistic Programming Meta modelers prescribe to glue it on that one specific point and do not allow it to diffuse to any other elements of my life experience and this enables me to have more peace of mind.
The Milton model is the inverse process, specific to general. Another personal example: yesterday I had a terrific workout. I did 2000 jump ropes, 800 squats, 550 abs, and 250 arms in 102 minutes. At the end of the workout I was completely spent. This delightful happenstance also had specific time and space bounds of narrow limit. Milton Erickson would say spread it around. When I cook my dinner, write this blog post, perform the research for the business I am creating--really any waking moment of the day--I can do any task with energy and determination and tenacity because it is purely subjective and pleasurable to view myself as an energetic and determined and tenacious man. I have one objective data point here to support this view; it is a trivial matter to extrapolate it to hell and back as some are fond of saying in the earth science businesses. This is a formula for bliss consciousness technique. You can use it to go about in the world and radiate loving kindness to every human you encounter. Win friends and influence people!
These are not things you need to study Neurolinguistic Programming specifically in order to learn, but you can find them well presented in those books and seminars. The material they have, which is unique, is the rapport material. This involves careful observation of others: their respiration, skin condition, level of arousal, postures, where their eyes focus, blinking rate, pupil dilation, and many other characteristics of their organism. The seminar transcripts are filled with data such as these and the use to be made of them. In seminar rooms I have seen others use these type observations powerfully for rapid psychotherapy and change work. I myself have had little success using these tools, and sometimes I feel intrusive or creepy or stalky when experimenting with them. I think it would be fascinating to perform a Rupert Sheldrake sense-of-being-stared-at experiment where the staring experimental subject is an expert NLP creep.
Sheldrake's research is controversial. There are more mainstream fields of Psychology research which could also benefit greatly by incorporating the NLP rapport tools. One example is the Paul Ekman micro-expression work which has received much positive attention of late. As far as I know, Ekman and his co-workers look almost solely at facial expressions. The Neurolinguistic Programmers in their rapport examples look at a wide variety of similar phenomena.
I conclude with a quotation from James J. Gibson, late emeritus Psychology researcher:
"I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There are some 20.000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality. They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is to consolidate our scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware!"
This post was written in collaboration with my friend Zhanar Suleimenova, who learned her NLP in Novosibirsk with books which have not yet been translated into English.
Frogs into Princes
Trance-formation
Reframing
Using your Brain for a Change.
A more systematic and comprehensive treatment, suitable for beginners is the following:
NLP The new technology of achievement, edited by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner.
If you want to get technical and theoretical, the books to read are:
Patterns of the hypnotic techniques of Milton H. Erickson, M.D.; Vol I by Bandler and Grinder; Vol II by Grinder, Delozier, and Bandler.
The structure of magic; Vol I by Bandler and Grinder; Vol II by Grinder and Bandler.
The oldest of these books were published in 1975; the newest of the Bandler Grinder books was published in 1985. As near as I can determine, the field has been stale since 1985 and the innovators have stopped innovating. It is a mystery to me how and why this came about; I have some idea about it, but shall leave that for another post.
In addition to the above listed books, in the past week I have spent around three hours reading the Wikipedia artiles on Neurolinguistic Programming topics. The Wikipedia is uneven; if you want plot synopses for Star Trek episodes, the Wikipedia is superb. If you want information about the BP Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster, the Wikipedia is useless. For Neurolinguistic Programming, the Wikipedia is quite good. It is better than the average book on the subject you can find today in your local bookstore. Some of those books are lousy. The worst shortcoming I saw (I did not read every single entry) in the Wikipedia collection is the article on Rapport; the rapport techniques are some of the most important results of the original Neurolingustic Programming work.
The hottest Neurolinguistic Programming specialists in the United States in 2010 are the speed-seduction (pickup artist) people. They seem mostly a misapplication of NLP; that is going by what I have seen which is not much of a large group. Surely somebody in that crowd knows what they are doing but I have no idea who it would be. If that seems a little harsh, take a look at that Amazon page linked above and see what else the people who buy that NLP Technology of Achievement book link to.
A difficulty with Neurolinguistic Programming as presented in the Bandler and Grinder seminar transcripts is concentration on visualization. The phobia cure, the reframing technique, the swish pattern, and the rapport tools all work well for visually oriented people. Almost all of the examples in their seminars are dependent on visualization. This is a skill with a large variance and I am not good at it. Or perhaps I am not good at it in the context of communicating with people. Visualizing a geological structure from reflection seismic images or visualizing art work or architectural drawings are visual tasks which seem natural for me, but observing the visual details of humans I am talking to and trying to get along with is not a skill which I have used successfully more than one time in about a hundred hours of practicing.
The one time I did use it successfully was in a T group on hypnosis and the seminar leader and the person I was working with and several of the other participants all applauded my great expertise. It may have been mostly luck, because every subsequent attempt I have made since then was a failure.
The largest benefit I have gotten from my NLP studies is using the Milton model and the Meta model to frame my objective experiences in a subjective fashion to benefit my peace of mind. The Milton model goes from specific and local to general and global. The Meta model goes from general and global to specific and local. The Meta model can be used in an extremely similar manner to the Albert Ellis Rational Emotional Therapy technique where you identify and challenge irrational beliefs. An example of an irrational belief would be something you tell yourself like: "I always get screwed when they calculate the salary raises."
We all have unpleasant experiences that are part of our lives. Lovers reject us. We break bones. People dent our cars when they are not watchful of how they are moving. I could make a long list here. What Albert Ellis invented, and what Bandler and Grinder productively use their Meta model for, is that your own description in your mind of these events can influence wide areas of your life experience. (Ellis invented this as an approach to psychotherapy. The idea goes back to the ancients. It is one of the foundational concepts in Stoicism and Buddhism. It is in the very first verse of the Dhammapada.)
To illustrate this with a personal example, I got laid off on 31 March 2010. This does not mean that I am a loser, unless of course it might, if I repeat to myself in the ensuing four months a few hundred times that I am a loser. Applying the Meta model to this calamitous event means that I describe it to myself with a set of exact specific details. It was near the equinox. The camellias had bloomed but the azaleas had not yet bloomed. There was one man who decided I had not done enough for him lately. There was a small group of people who communicated true friendship and camaraderie to me during their farewells. I got a nice severance package. Suddenly all my time is free time and I get to learn the definition of personal responsibility. And so forth. My layoff is this set of extremely specific facts tied to one point in the four dimensional time and space continuum that we are all traveling through. The Stoics and the Buddhists and Albert Ellis and the Neurolinguistic Programming Meta modelers prescribe to glue it on that one specific point and do not allow it to diffuse to any other elements of my life experience and this enables me to have more peace of mind.
The Milton model is the inverse process, specific to general. Another personal example: yesterday I had a terrific workout. I did 2000 jump ropes, 800 squats, 550 abs, and 250 arms in 102 minutes. At the end of the workout I was completely spent. This delightful happenstance also had specific time and space bounds of narrow limit. Milton Erickson would say spread it around. When I cook my dinner, write this blog post, perform the research for the business I am creating--really any waking moment of the day--I can do any task with energy and determination and tenacity because it is purely subjective and pleasurable to view myself as an energetic and determined and tenacious man. I have one objective data point here to support this view; it is a trivial matter to extrapolate it to hell and back as some are fond of saying in the earth science businesses. This is a formula for bliss consciousness technique. You can use it to go about in the world and radiate loving kindness to every human you encounter. Win friends and influence people!
These are not things you need to study Neurolinguistic Programming specifically in order to learn, but you can find them well presented in those books and seminars. The material they have, which is unique, is the rapport material. This involves careful observation of others: their respiration, skin condition, level of arousal, postures, where their eyes focus, blinking rate, pupil dilation, and many other characteristics of their organism. The seminar transcripts are filled with data such as these and the use to be made of them. In seminar rooms I have seen others use these type observations powerfully for rapid psychotherapy and change work. I myself have had little success using these tools, and sometimes I feel intrusive or creepy or stalky when experimenting with them. I think it would be fascinating to perform a Rupert Sheldrake sense-of-being-stared-at experiment where the staring experimental subject is an expert NLP creep.
Sheldrake's research is controversial. There are more mainstream fields of Psychology research which could also benefit greatly by incorporating the NLP rapport tools. One example is the Paul Ekman micro-expression work which has received much positive attention of late. As far as I know, Ekman and his co-workers look almost solely at facial expressions. The Neurolinguistic Programmers in their rapport examples look at a wide variety of similar phenomena.
I conclude with a quotation from James J. Gibson, late emeritus Psychology researcher:
"I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There are some 20.000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality. They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is to consolidate our scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware!"
This post was written in collaboration with my friend Zhanar Suleimenova, who learned her NLP in Novosibirsk with books which have not yet been translated into English.
11 August 2010
one hot tamale
It is 103 degrees fahrenheit, 46% relative humidity, and the heat index is 122. Aye aye aye aye aye aye aye. This happens every August on the Gulf Coast. The first year I lived here I spent the entire summer as air conditioned as I could possibly be. There were August weekends when I would stay inside my apartment from Friday evening until Monday morning and not even consider going outside. I don't suppose I will ever get used to it, but I have come to some understanding of summer weather adaptation.
An advantage to working from home is that I do not get blasted with air conditioning 40 hours a week from the office 75 degree climate control. This is not a panacea. Yesterday I went someplace in the middle of the day. The worst part was that my car was parked unshaded for two hours and when I got in it to come home there was a cooking interval of around ten minutes before the air in the car was cool, and during the first minute it must have been 125 degrees in there. Just those ten minutes of overheating had me so tired when I got home that I took a forty minute nap even though I had eight hours of sleep the night before. If I stay inside during the hot part of the day, my adaptations protect me from nearly any effects.
My thermostat is usually at 82, so it is warm, but it is not at all uncomfortable. I open the windows at sunrise and leave the air conditioning off until I feel the need for it. This was usually around 10:00 a. m. for the last week, although this morning I did not turn on the air conditioning until 11:00. So unlike last summer, when the apartment was closed up from around June 1 until around October 1, this summer I have flooded the apartment with fresh air every morning. Also I have been taking sunrise walks in Bear Creek Park and on the Addicks Reservoir dam which get me out into nature, in touch with our roots. Sometimes I see raccoon, skunk, possum, hawk, or fox. I usually see deer and toads and egrets and butterflies and vultures. I always hear frogs and crickets and crows. I have not yet seen a rattlesnake, but I know they are out there. This is the first time I have been active outdoors through the whole summer in years.
A website concerned with the hazards of civilization is the Anthropik network. They are a thoughtful group and their viewpoint is quite interesting, even though I do not agree with it. They are pessimistic regarding our culture's destiny--peak oil and environmental ruin and more. I am not pessimistic at, but I do agree with them that time spent attending to the natural world is vital to our being. I like this summer a whole lot more than I liked the last four. In my living room with the windows open and the crickets chirping away on a warm summer morning it is almost like a paradise.
An advantage to working from home is that I do not get blasted with air conditioning 40 hours a week from the office 75 degree climate control. This is not a panacea. Yesterday I went someplace in the middle of the day. The worst part was that my car was parked unshaded for two hours and when I got in it to come home there was a cooking interval of around ten minutes before the air in the car was cool, and during the first minute it must have been 125 degrees in there. Just those ten minutes of overheating had me so tired when I got home that I took a forty minute nap even though I had eight hours of sleep the night before. If I stay inside during the hot part of the day, my adaptations protect me from nearly any effects.
My thermostat is usually at 82, so it is warm, but it is not at all uncomfortable. I open the windows at sunrise and leave the air conditioning off until I feel the need for it. This was usually around 10:00 a. m. for the last week, although this morning I did not turn on the air conditioning until 11:00. So unlike last summer, when the apartment was closed up from around June 1 until around October 1, this summer I have flooded the apartment with fresh air every morning. Also I have been taking sunrise walks in Bear Creek Park and on the Addicks Reservoir dam which get me out into nature, in touch with our roots. Sometimes I see raccoon, skunk, possum, hawk, or fox. I usually see deer and toads and egrets and butterflies and vultures. I always hear frogs and crickets and crows. I have not yet seen a rattlesnake, but I know they are out there. This is the first time I have been active outdoors through the whole summer in years.
A website concerned with the hazards of civilization is the Anthropik network. They are a thoughtful group and their viewpoint is quite interesting, even though I do not agree with it. They are pessimistic regarding our culture's destiny--peak oil and environmental ruin and more. I am not pessimistic at, but I do agree with them that time spent attending to the natural world is vital to our being. I like this summer a whole lot more than I liked the last four. In my living room with the windows open and the crickets chirping away on a warm summer morning it is almost like a paradise.
06 August 2010
Whitman the psalmist
A literature professor told me a few years ago that the poetic structure and voice of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was very close to that of the King James version of the book of Psalms. The King James Bible was the one book in everybody's house when Walt grew up and he was taught to read from it. Among the easiest books to read is Psalms, so he naturally became a psalmist in style. I have looked for confirmation of this idea intermittently and have not yet found a good source.
I decided to perform a short experiment. I examined one of my favorite Whitman passages, the last stanza in Song of Myself. Then I went to the Psalms, started at Ps. 23 and searched forward until I found one that was roughly the same length. This was fast as I chose Ps. 26 to be close. Then I counted the feet.
Song of myself, stanza number 52
King James Psalm 26
1Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity: I have trusted also in the LORD; therefore I shall not slide.
That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works.
I decided to perform a short experiment. I examined one of my favorite Whitman passages, the last stanza in Song of Myself. Then I went to the Psalms, started at Ps. 23 and searched forward until I found one that was roughly the same length. This was fast as I chose Ps. 26 to be close. Then I counted the feet.
Song of myself, stanza number 52
King James Psalm 26
1Judge me, O LORD; for I have walked in mine integrity: I have trusted also in the LORD; therefore I shall not slide.
2Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart.
3For thy lovingkindness is before mine eyes: and I have walked in thy truth.
4I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in with dissemblers.
5I have hated the congregation of evil doers; and will not sit with the wicked.
6I will wash mine hands in innocency: so will I compass thine altar, O LORD:
7That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works.
8LORD, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine honour dwelleth.
9Gather not my soul with sinners, nor my life with bloody men:
10In whose hands is mischief, and their right hand is full of bribes.
11But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity: redeem me, and be merciful unto me.
12My foot standeth in an even place: in the congregations will I bless the LORD.
___________________________
By my counts, Whitman Song of Myself stanza 52:
7 verses; syllables 22, 29, 39, 31, 29, 20, 26; total 203, average 29;
Psalm 26:
12 verses; syllables 29, 15, 18, 18, 22, 20, 20, 21, 15, 14, 24, 20; total 236, average 20.
This was a fun experiment. From two data points we cannot conclude Psalms is written in decameter and Leaves of Grass is written in pentadecameter, but it might be that Whitman did represent a shift of line lengthening, or a consideration of Psalms as being a book of poetry, first. At the time he began many poets were grooved upon the pentameter line, and poets as late as Alfred Lord Tennyson were concentrating on pentameter. The literature professor is not at all contradicted by my findings.
I have been playing with Natural Language Processing and it seems it would be feasible to construct a line analyzer and construct statistics in an automated fashion for all of the Psalms and Leaves of Grass and quantify this idea. I do not personally know any Natural Language Processing practitioners; perhaps this is a trivial exercise they all do in their first semester class.
As a public speaking exercise, I have been reading aloud from Psalms and Leaves of Grass. My teacher who told me about the resemblance also told me that the voice of Leaves of Grass is the voice of American public discourse. He said any time Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama gave a speech, it echoed Whitman. He told me professional political speechwriters read Leaves of Grass over and over to use as a template. If one can internalize that voice, it will make his own voice more listenable. I have been doing these readings for around a year and a half, but have not noticed much effect yet.
One thing is unarguable. Whitman is the voice of the psalmist in that he lived one of those verses in Psalm 26--he told us all of God's wondrous works. At times it can seem as if Whitman was obsessed with Ps: 26.7.That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, and tell of all thy wondrous works.
01 August 2010
my first pagan supper
Lammas is the first of August. If you know nothing about the pagan holiday calendar, it is almost the simplest possible system. There are four major holidays: the two solstices summer and winter; the two equinoxes spring and fall. There are four minor holidays which are almost exactly in the middle of the four equally spaced main ones. Everybody knows about Halloween and May Day, but the other two are a little more obscure. The other two go by different names; I use Candlemas for the one around 1 February and Lammas for the one around the 1 August.
Candlemas might with a small amount of distortion masquerade as Saint Valentine's Day. My calculation would place it 45 days after the winter solstice so for 2010 that would be 21 December + 45 days = 5 Feb 2010. The current imbolc wikipedia page has 2 Feb as the day, which is very close, but 14 Feb is not so close. Lammas has nothing close to it at all in mainstream culture. I would offer that it is the most obscure of the pagan holidays.
The first time I attended a pagan holiday celebration, it was Lammas. I had no idea what I was agreeing to. It was a friend of a friend invitation deal. He was my friend as well, but not close. I was close friends with Ann and she was close friends with this fellow Bill, who I knew and did not dislike at all; but we really did not have much in common. I rated an invitation to the holiday dinner at his parents' house because I had a car, and I could transport Ann. Dinner was scheduled for 9:00 p.m. which is a little late, but the sun sets after 8:00 p.m. on the first of August and that is when his parents scheduled it.
We set out from New Orleans to Mandeville around 8:00. It was myself, Ann, and Ann's sister Jamie. It is amusing in retrospect that Bill had a crush on Ann, Ann had a crush on me, and I had a crush on Jamie. All of these feelings were unreturned, at least on that night. The sun was setting when we arrived at Bill's parents' house. At the house were Bill, his parents, his sister, and one other dinner guest. She was a pagan priestess and friend of the family. They all greeted us real friendly and said some brief informal friendship blessing with a sincerity which was closer to incomprehensible than it was to touching. It was confusing.
We had dinner on their back deck next to their swimming pool. They brought out huge platters of food--jambalaya, beef stir-fry, beans, other vegetables, salads--there was enough food to feed thirty people easy. Bill's mom lit candles around the edge of the deck and the priestess said some foreign prayer while holding a carved malachite knife over a big mug of mead. I would guess the prayer was in Gaelic. Then they passed the mug of mead around and everybody took a sip out of the mug. They served many bottles of wine with the dinner.
After awhile I had to use the restroom. The priestess was disturbed that I was "breaking the circle" but Bill's mom insisted this was not a problem and she quickly hushed. We did not discuss pagan religion much, or if we did I do not remember that part. The food was very good. Other than the short prayer and the circle of candles business, I don't recall anything that was different from a typical dinner party.
On the wikipedia Lammas page they have the following Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet quotation: "Come Lammas Eve at night shall she [Juliet] be fourteen."
That was the only Lammas celebration I have ever participated in. I have a friend who considers it a big deal. She calls it Lughnasa (just like in the movie, Dancing at -) and every year she goes to a large group camp where they burn bonfires and dance naked and sacrifice a goat. For all I know she is totally making up the parts about the nudity and animal sacrifices.
Candlemas might with a small amount of distortion masquerade as Saint Valentine's Day. My calculation would place it 45 days after the winter solstice so for 2010 that would be 21 December + 45 days = 5 Feb 2010. The current imbolc wikipedia page has 2 Feb as the day, which is very close, but 14 Feb is not so close. Lammas has nothing close to it at all in mainstream culture. I would offer that it is the most obscure of the pagan holidays.
The first time I attended a pagan holiday celebration, it was Lammas. I had no idea what I was agreeing to. It was a friend of a friend invitation deal. He was my friend as well, but not close. I was close friends with Ann and she was close friends with this fellow Bill, who I knew and did not dislike at all; but we really did not have much in common. I rated an invitation to the holiday dinner at his parents' house because I had a car, and I could transport Ann. Dinner was scheduled for 9:00 p.m. which is a little late, but the sun sets after 8:00 p.m. on the first of August and that is when his parents scheduled it.
We set out from New Orleans to Mandeville around 8:00. It was myself, Ann, and Ann's sister Jamie. It is amusing in retrospect that Bill had a crush on Ann, Ann had a crush on me, and I had a crush on Jamie. All of these feelings were unreturned, at least on that night. The sun was setting when we arrived at Bill's parents' house. At the house were Bill, his parents, his sister, and one other dinner guest. She was a pagan priestess and friend of the family. They all greeted us real friendly and said some brief informal friendship blessing with a sincerity which was closer to incomprehensible than it was to touching. It was confusing.
We had dinner on their back deck next to their swimming pool. They brought out huge platters of food--jambalaya, beef stir-fry, beans, other vegetables, salads--there was enough food to feed thirty people easy. Bill's mom lit candles around the edge of the deck and the priestess said some foreign prayer while holding a carved malachite knife over a big mug of mead. I would guess the prayer was in Gaelic. Then they passed the mug of mead around and everybody took a sip out of the mug. They served many bottles of wine with the dinner.
After awhile I had to use the restroom. The priestess was disturbed that I was "breaking the circle" but Bill's mom insisted this was not a problem and she quickly hushed. We did not discuss pagan religion much, or if we did I do not remember that part. The food was very good. Other than the short prayer and the circle of candles business, I don't recall anything that was different from a typical dinner party.
On the wikipedia Lammas page they have the following Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet quotation: "Come Lammas Eve at night shall she [Juliet] be fourteen."
That was the only Lammas celebration I have ever participated in. I have a friend who considers it a big deal. She calls it Lughnasa (just like in the movie, Dancing at -) and every year she goes to a large group camp where they burn bonfires and dance naked and sacrifice a goat. For all I know she is totally making up the parts about the nudity and animal sacrifices.
27 July 2010
What do you want to be when you grow up?
On 29 August 2006 I spent two days at the Johnson O'Connor foundation doing a full aptitude test suite. One of these was invaluable. Almost all of them were interesting. Altogether it was useful, although some of them seemed a little pointless. One of the ones which seemed the most pointless was the area in which I scored the best.
Psychometry is a quicksand swamp of muck. We may have all experienced our eyes glazing over at all the arguments regarding IQ, G factor, The Bell Curve, &c which seems like it was only a short while ago. The Bell Curve was published in 1994. Aye aye aye aye aye aye aye. I am not going to get into that at all, except I will say I am grateful that in my life so far I have had no practical application for this concept of IQ. My high school did a test which I saw the score on, but I do not believe they did anything with the information except collect it. One time a few years back when I was into joining things like the Audobon Society and the Green Party I visited with the Mensa folks. I met with them one time and neither they nor I were interested in more.
Anyway, my aptitude test experience was two days, twenty-seven tests, and an hour to ninety minutes to review the results with a Johnson O'Connor consultant. The most valuable result was the vocabulary test. It was like an SAT or GRE vocabulary test; they give you one word and four alternative closest synonyms and you pick one. As I recall there were fifty words. If you count every one of the four alternatives it was 250 possible words. When I sat down and took that test I was confident that I knew every single one of those 250 words with lexicographic mastery. Apparently I did not because I did not get the top score on that vocabulary test. I got a good score. You might think it a very good score. When I handed the answer sheet to the test supervisor I thought the score was going to come back 99 out of a possible 99 and I was disappointed when I saw the score I did get the next day.
I did not tell them this. But I listened very closely when they were talking to me about vocabulary. The fellow who founded their foundation, O'Connor, was keen on the importance of vocabulary and how critical it is for our success in life. The consultant who I talked to about my test told me that the highest vocabulary scores that they measure are top corporate executives. I have no idea how they classify a person as a top corporate executive. He made it sound like the one common feature of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is that all those guys have killer vocabularies. In any event I have spent some time since August of 2006 working on my vocabulary and I consider that part of the test to have been useful, the most useful result of my test experience, and so useful that it alone was worth the time and expense of taking the tests.
One of their memory tests I completely bombed. It was like a "Where's Waldo?" game board with twenty or so images totally unrelated with no context and they gave you two minutes to try and memorize what all was there; then they showed you a bunch of pictures one after the other with one of the images missing and you were supposed to tell them what was missing. All the other memory tests were normal to above normal, but that one was almost my worst result of all the 27 tests.
The test I did the best on was called Foresight. Here is how they tested us for foresight on the day that I took the test. I am seated at a desk with a stack of blank, unlined printer paper, 8.5 X 11 inches, and six sharpened number two pencils. The tester says: "write anything that comes to mind for a few minutes and I will come back and tell you to stop".
I was told I scored the highest anybody ever got on that test in the current archived records of Johnson O'Connor . (The score was the number of words written in the fixed (15 minute?) time frame.) Now see, if I was truly foresighted I would have known that test was of dubious value and I would have conserved energy to display aptitude on something that could make me some money like vocabulary. The thing which I would like to know and forgot to ask is whether they tested me for vocabulary, then foresight; or if they tested me for foresight, then vocabulary. I know for sure the mental energy I was using on the foresight test was higher than on the vocabulary test. When I was taking the vocabulary test I was coasting. I was sure that I knew all that stuff. When I was filling those blank sheets of paper my brain was turning over at Formula One race car revolutions per minute.
I scored one other 99 and it was described as Ideaphoria, lumped together with Foresight in a Category (the twenty seven tests were lumped into twelve categories) labeled "Divergent Thinking". Like the foresight test, I really cannot make the connection of what psychometric protocol could be going on here. This was kind of like the Where's Waldo? memory puzzle, except they laid out playing card size pictures, 8 or 10 or 12 at a time, and I had to sort them into pairs of what is most closely related to what else. I would call this construction of abstract connection, not ideaphoria; and like whatever aptitude I supposedly demonstrated on the foresight test, I don't see see any clear connection to practical application of this clever aptitude I supposedly possess.
Another thing I found useful is they measured color vision, rhythmic sensibility, pitch perception, handedness, footedness, eyedness, and the only thing I knew before taking their tests from this set was that I was right-handed and not color-blind. There is a difference between not being color-blind and having high visual color acuity. This is the old Wittgentstein grue game although it goes back to Heraclitus and before. My blue is your green and your yellow might be my orange. If you do not see crap designs all over the place on the web your visual color acuity might not be too hot. Some of those are painful to look at. The other day I wanted to read a story on the Rolling Stone web site, but I could not bear to look at the page it was so badly done.
Lastly I have some information which might be useful to people who are interested, but not interested enough to pay the Johnson O'Connor fee. Part of the service they provided was a set of booklets called Self-directed search, from Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. This is not a measurement of aptitude. It is a measurement of interest; what you would enjoy as opposed to what you would excel at. A few months before I went to Johnson O'Connor, I went to the Houston Community College counseling center and they provided this exact same material for free. And they had a career counselor there who showed me what vocational certificate programs they had available which might interest me--network communications engineer, &c.
Psychometry is a quicksand swamp of muck. We may have all experienced our eyes glazing over at all the arguments regarding IQ, G factor, The Bell Curve, &c which seems like it was only a short while ago. The Bell Curve was published in 1994. Aye aye aye aye aye aye aye. I am not going to get into that at all, except I will say I am grateful that in my life so far I have had no practical application for this concept of IQ. My high school did a test which I saw the score on, but I do not believe they did anything with the information except collect it. One time a few years back when I was into joining things like the Audobon Society and the Green Party I visited with the Mensa folks. I met with them one time and neither they nor I were interested in more.
Anyway, my aptitude test experience was two days, twenty-seven tests, and an hour to ninety minutes to review the results with a Johnson O'Connor consultant. The most valuable result was the vocabulary test. It was like an SAT or GRE vocabulary test; they give you one word and four alternative closest synonyms and you pick one. As I recall there were fifty words. If you count every one of the four alternatives it was 250 possible words. When I sat down and took that test I was confident that I knew every single one of those 250 words with lexicographic mastery. Apparently I did not because I did not get the top score on that vocabulary test. I got a good score. You might think it a very good score. When I handed the answer sheet to the test supervisor I thought the score was going to come back 99 out of a possible 99 and I was disappointed when I saw the score I did get the next day.
I did not tell them this. But I listened very closely when they were talking to me about vocabulary. The fellow who founded their foundation, O'Connor, was keen on the importance of vocabulary and how critical it is for our success in life. The consultant who I talked to about my test told me that the highest vocabulary scores that they measure are top corporate executives. I have no idea how they classify a person as a top corporate executive. He made it sound like the one common feature of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is that all those guys have killer vocabularies. In any event I have spent some time since August of 2006 working on my vocabulary and I consider that part of the test to have been useful, the most useful result of my test experience, and so useful that it alone was worth the time and expense of taking the tests.
One of their memory tests I completely bombed. It was like a "Where's Waldo?" game board with twenty or so images totally unrelated with no context and they gave you two minutes to try and memorize what all was there; then they showed you a bunch of pictures one after the other with one of the images missing and you were supposed to tell them what was missing. All the other memory tests were normal to above normal, but that one was almost my worst result of all the 27 tests.
The test I did the best on was called Foresight. Here is how they tested us for foresight on the day that I took the test. I am seated at a desk with a stack of blank, unlined printer paper, 8.5 X 11 inches, and six sharpened number two pencils. The tester says: "write anything that comes to mind for a few minutes and I will come back and tell you to stop".
I was told I scored the highest anybody ever got on that test in the current archived records of Johnson O'Connor . (The score was the number of words written in the fixed (15 minute?) time frame.) Now see, if I was truly foresighted I would have known that test was of dubious value and I would have conserved energy to display aptitude on something that could make me some money like vocabulary. The thing which I would like to know and forgot to ask is whether they tested me for vocabulary, then foresight; or if they tested me for foresight, then vocabulary. I know for sure the mental energy I was using on the foresight test was higher than on the vocabulary test. When I was taking the vocabulary test I was coasting. I was sure that I knew all that stuff. When I was filling those blank sheets of paper my brain was turning over at Formula One race car revolutions per minute.
I scored one other 99 and it was described as Ideaphoria, lumped together with Foresight in a Category (the twenty seven tests were lumped into twelve categories) labeled "Divergent Thinking". Like the foresight test, I really cannot make the connection of what psychometric protocol could be going on here. This was kind of like the Where's Waldo? memory puzzle, except they laid out playing card size pictures, 8 or 10 or 12 at a time, and I had to sort them into pairs of what is most closely related to what else. I would call this construction of abstract connection, not ideaphoria; and like whatever aptitude I supposedly demonstrated on the foresight test, I don't see see any clear connection to practical application of this clever aptitude I supposedly possess.
Another thing I found useful is they measured color vision, rhythmic sensibility, pitch perception, handedness, footedness, eyedness, and the only thing I knew before taking their tests from this set was that I was right-handed and not color-blind. There is a difference between not being color-blind and having high visual color acuity. This is the old Wittgentstein grue game although it goes back to Heraclitus and before. My blue is your green and your yellow might be my orange. If you do not see crap designs all over the place on the web your visual color acuity might not be too hot. Some of those are painful to look at. The other day I wanted to read a story on the Rolling Stone web site, but I could not bear to look at the page it was so badly done.
Lastly I have some information which might be useful to people who are interested, but not interested enough to pay the Johnson O'Connor fee. Part of the service they provided was a set of booklets called Self-directed search, from Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc. This is not a measurement of aptitude. It is a measurement of interest; what you would enjoy as opposed to what you would excel at. A few months before I went to Johnson O'Connor, I went to the Houston Community College counseling center and they provided this exact same material for free. And they had a career counselor there who showed me what vocational certificate programs they had available which might interest me--network communications engineer, &c.
22 July 2010
arcane arcana
On the first page of my glossy brochure I have a copy of the Rider-Waite-Coleman-Smith seven of cups minor arcana Tarot image. Like this one:
link.
This is an obscure image which means many things to different people. That wikipedia article for example, is a mess. Regardie's Golden Dawn textbook describes the card as Lord of Illusionary Success. My interpretation of the card is the simplest I have seen. To me, this card is isomorphic to the first command: Thou shalt have no gods before Yahweh. It is a caution regarding false gods, seven of which are shown which do not lure everyone; everyone is lured by at least one of the seven. In order, the false gods we are to be wary of are:
A sex object, a ghost, a snake, a palace, jewels, a laurel wreath, a dragon. The sex object and the palace and the jewels and the laurel wreath are pretty obvious. The snake to me would represent dangerous substances--alcohol, tobacco, &c. The ghost to me would represent a dead relative with an inappropriately large influence--like if you were Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader is your dad, then Darth could be the ghost. The dragon is a mythological distraction. Like if you thought you were writing the great 21st century American novel or epic poem. The wikipedia article has something about wishful thinking in it. That would be close to the meaning of the dragon.
In my Tarot interpretation sheet this is my notation for seven cups: beware false gods.
If you are like most of the people who I am acquainted with, you should be wary of worshiping the number on your 401K statement, the price listings of your neighborhood housing market, and your credit rating. Obviously these are all important and affect our material well-being. They are not worthy of worship.
link.
This is an obscure image which means many things to different people. That wikipedia article for example, is a mess. Regardie's Golden Dawn textbook describes the card as Lord of Illusionary Success. My interpretation of the card is the simplest I have seen. To me, this card is isomorphic to the first command: Thou shalt have no gods before Yahweh. It is a caution regarding false gods, seven of which are shown which do not lure everyone; everyone is lured by at least one of the seven. In order, the false gods we are to be wary of are:
A sex object, a ghost, a snake, a palace, jewels, a laurel wreath, a dragon. The sex object and the palace and the jewels and the laurel wreath are pretty obvious. The snake to me would represent dangerous substances--alcohol, tobacco, &c. The ghost to me would represent a dead relative with an inappropriately large influence--like if you were Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader is your dad, then Darth could be the ghost. The dragon is a mythological distraction. Like if you thought you were writing the great 21st century American novel or epic poem. The wikipedia article has something about wishful thinking in it. That would be close to the meaning of the dragon.
In my Tarot interpretation sheet this is my notation for seven cups: beware false gods.
If you are like most of the people who I am acquainted with, you should be wary of worshiping the number on your 401K statement, the price listings of your neighborhood housing market, and your credit rating. Obviously these are all important and affect our material well-being. They are not worthy of worship.
17 July 2010
To be like an ape man
On the Theory Attraction 26 June post I had a cherry pick rip out of the context quotation from one of the papers in Tooby and Cosmides Adapted Mind. A cheap shot. I decided to take a pass at a costly shot and did a bit of research. I read Steven Pinker How the Mind Works (660pp) and I read Jablonka, Lamb Evolution in Four Dimensions (462pp). After all of that I feel pretty mellow towards Pinker and Tooby and Cosmides, but far less mellow towards the clan of internet goofballs promoting the greatness of Evolutionary Psychology, and the findings (read: thoughtful speculations) of Evolutionary Psychologists towards the mating behaviors of men and women in the twenty-first century.
This was actually re-reading. I first read Pinker's book shortly after it was published in 1997, and I first read Jablonka and Lamb's book shortly after it was published in 2006. Both of these books were well-received, had glowing reviews in the New York Times (probably where I heard of them), &c. Both of these books reward a close reading and can give nearly anybody much to think about. The thing which I did not really appreciate before this week was how measured the authors are regarding their claims. Jablonka and Lamb believe that Pinker is wrong, but they do not believe he is a bad scientist or a crackpot or anything such as that. Pinker believes the Evolutionary Psychology claims are true, but far from proven.
The most interesting book, to me, by far, is Jablonka and Lamb's. Their argument is very long but I think I can fairly summarize the gist of what I like the most. Evolution and genetics are only partially understood. They are best understood for the E Coli bacteria, the nematode, the fruit fly, and the laboratory mouse. Even in these four cases there remain some profound mysteries. Nobody knows how genotype produces the full complexity of the phenotype. 20 000 or 30 000 or 40 000 genes work in very mysterious ways in order to provide the complete map of instructions to make a working living organism. And there is a bunch of DNA (well over 50%) which is not part of any specific gene with any known function. Also there are proven instances of evolution which is a direct result of processes other than random genetic mutation and natural selection. Epigenetic evolution and even Lamarckian evolution are documented in modern experiments with the E Coli and the fruit fly.
They feel it is a fascinating time to be doing Biology. And I loved reading this book even though some of their examples are tough slogging in the complexity of the arguments and the technical vocabulary.
Similarly Pinker is not nearly as definitive about the greatness of Evolutionary Psychology as many of his readers are. The leading entry in his index is Tooby (36 entries). So he is unambiguously a proponent. But to be an enthusiastic proponent of something is not necessarily the same as taking an oath and testifying on the witness stand to its scientific facticity, and Pinker did not do anything like that as near as I could tell. And I looked pretty close because I really wanted to cherry pick his book for a stupid quotation. There was none to be found. You cannot write a 660 page book without some serious flaws. And Pinker's book does have some big ones. But overstating his claims is not one of them.
His biggest flaw is he seems intent on titillating. The example of the Polly Klaas killer is typical in this regard. The victim was a twelve-year old female and the killer is awaiting execution for her rape and murder. According to Pinker he has gotten far more lonely heart pen pal letters than any other notorious convict in the world. This is a great titillating fact for the National Enquirer or similar tabloid publication. For making a science argument or trying to construct nomological deductive reasoning for science issues this is poor. Pinker does this over and over. Another example. He mentions as supporting "evidence" that Solomon had 700 wives and concubines. There is no historical record of any such thing. That is not evidence for his argument.
The worst part is not his book by itself. The worst part is the ideas in it have spread far and wide and we now have a group of even looser writers and thinkers all over the internet who write as if an understanding of chimpanzee and gorilla mating behavior is all one has to have in order to understand human mating behavior. Pinker never makes that claim but he writes many anecdotes such as the above and then summarizes with some sort of remark about how ape-like it is. Then after, other folks make the claim and pretend it's science, not stupid.
One of them was in the New York Times Sunday magazine for another of his whack ideas. (He has a few whack ideas, but also some really good ideas which is why I read his blog and try to look past the whack stuff that gets put up there.) Robin Hanson is an Economics professor at George Mason U. He studies Evolutionary Psychology by way of Freakonomics. There are many interesting Psychology and Economics overlaps. Why people think airplanes are more dangerous than cars, prisoner's dilemma situations, many others. The article in the Sunday magazine was his cryonics subscription (he has a contract to have his head frozen after he dies) and his wife's complaints about it. His cryonics is nothing to me and appears to have no influence, but the point is the man is in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.
My remorse over cherry picking the Tooby Cosmides book went poof when I saw Robin Hanson in the New York Times Sunday magazine. If it had been published a couple weeks earlier I would have missed out on 1000 pages reading.
This was actually re-reading. I first read Pinker's book shortly after it was published in 1997, and I first read Jablonka and Lamb's book shortly after it was published in 2006. Both of these books were well-received, had glowing reviews in the New York Times (probably where I heard of them), &c. Both of these books reward a close reading and can give nearly anybody much to think about. The thing which I did not really appreciate before this week was how measured the authors are regarding their claims. Jablonka and Lamb believe that Pinker is wrong, but they do not believe he is a bad scientist or a crackpot or anything such as that. Pinker believes the Evolutionary Psychology claims are true, but far from proven.
The most interesting book, to me, by far, is Jablonka and Lamb's. Their argument is very long but I think I can fairly summarize the gist of what I like the most. Evolution and genetics are only partially understood. They are best understood for the E Coli bacteria, the nematode, the fruit fly, and the laboratory mouse. Even in these four cases there remain some profound mysteries. Nobody knows how genotype produces the full complexity of the phenotype. 20 000 or 30 000 or 40 000 genes work in very mysterious ways in order to provide the complete map of instructions to make a working living organism. And there is a bunch of DNA (well over 50%) which is not part of any specific gene with any known function. Also there are proven instances of evolution which is a direct result of processes other than random genetic mutation and natural selection. Epigenetic evolution and even Lamarckian evolution are documented in modern experiments with the E Coli and the fruit fly.
They feel it is a fascinating time to be doing Biology. And I loved reading this book even though some of their examples are tough slogging in the complexity of the arguments and the technical vocabulary.
Similarly Pinker is not nearly as definitive about the greatness of Evolutionary Psychology as many of his readers are. The leading entry in his index is Tooby (36 entries). So he is unambiguously a proponent. But to be an enthusiastic proponent of something is not necessarily the same as taking an oath and testifying on the witness stand to its scientific facticity, and Pinker did not do anything like that as near as I could tell. And I looked pretty close because I really wanted to cherry pick his book for a stupid quotation. There was none to be found. You cannot write a 660 page book without some serious flaws. And Pinker's book does have some big ones. But overstating his claims is not one of them.
His biggest flaw is he seems intent on titillating. The example of the Polly Klaas killer is typical in this regard. The victim was a twelve-year old female and the killer is awaiting execution for her rape and murder. According to Pinker he has gotten far more lonely heart pen pal letters than any other notorious convict in the world. This is a great titillating fact for the National Enquirer or similar tabloid publication. For making a science argument or trying to construct nomological deductive reasoning for science issues this is poor. Pinker does this over and over. Another example. He mentions as supporting "evidence" that Solomon had 700 wives and concubines. There is no historical record of any such thing. That is not evidence for his argument.
The worst part is not his book by itself. The worst part is the ideas in it have spread far and wide and we now have a group of even looser writers and thinkers all over the internet who write as if an understanding of chimpanzee and gorilla mating behavior is all one has to have in order to understand human mating behavior. Pinker never makes that claim but he writes many anecdotes such as the above and then summarizes with some sort of remark about how ape-like it is. Then after, other folks make the claim and pretend it's science, not stupid.
One of them was in the New York Times Sunday magazine for another of his whack ideas. (He has a few whack ideas, but also some really good ideas which is why I read his blog and try to look past the whack stuff that gets put up there.) Robin Hanson is an Economics professor at George Mason U. He studies Evolutionary Psychology by way of Freakonomics. There are many interesting Psychology and Economics overlaps. Why people think airplanes are more dangerous than cars, prisoner's dilemma situations, many others. The article in the Sunday magazine was his cryonics subscription (he has a contract to have his head frozen after he dies) and his wife's complaints about it. His cryonics is nothing to me and appears to have no influence, but the point is the man is in the Sunday New York Times Magazine.
My remorse over cherry picking the Tooby Cosmides book went poof when I saw Robin Hanson in the New York Times Sunday magazine. If it had been published a couple weeks earlier I would have missed out on 1000 pages reading.
12 July 2010
Astrology and Linear Algebra
There was a small exaggeration in my last post on Science (3 July) and I said religion and science are never mixed in my mind. There was actually one event of religion and science mixing. What happened was I was trapped in a situation with no graceful exit. It was after a Society Exploration Geophysics convention in a city several hundred miles away. I was flying home. I was sitting in the coach section reading my copy of Manly Hall "Secret Teachings of All Ages". Next to me was a stranger, a professional colleague, which was fairly obvious as he was reading a book about measuring the magnetism and gravity fields of Earth. Nobody but a geophysicist is likely to ever read such a book.
After we had read our books for a couple hours, I asked him if he was a geophysicist. (As if I was pretending that you do not know after two hours what book the person sitting next to you in coach is reading.) Me too. Then he asked me what I was reading. I told him "metaphysics" and I showed him the cover. He asked me if there was any Astrology in the book. I told him there was. He told me he was an Astrology student when he was not working as a geophysicist. I can not usually handle such conversations with any skill and usually exit from them as quickly as possible but there we were sitting right next to each other for another forty minutes and we were going to talk about it.
So I improvised. I told him that my view on Astrology was it was like a complete valid vector basis set which spanned the space of human experience. If you do not know much Calculus, that is like a higher dimensional generalization of what x and y do for a two dimensional plane in Cartesian coordinates in high school analytic geometry. (x,y) is the basis set--the two numbers are independent and any point in the plane can be specified by a unique pair; we say x and y span the two dimensional plane. Mathematicians can take this to any number of dimensions to infinite series and infinite sets.
I told him the Astrological representation to me was like just about any other system in Manly Hall's book: Kabbalah, Alchemy, Freemasonry, Hellenistic Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, &c-- any of these systems provide a valid basis set which spans human experience in this universe--although Astrology was not one that I knew much about or was motivated to use.
Some people are really into it. I know a woman who owns 500 books, and 475 of her books are on the subject of Astrology. I know a man who I once gave a small number of Astrological chart details and he inverted the data for the day and time and longitude of the subject's birthday which blew my mind. He said, "it is just a clock, man." So I do not doubt there is a power there and I can respect it, but it is not one that I choose to use.
So we ended up having a nice conversation in spite of my lack of interest in Astrology. I have since done a few things with the Astrological system. Some Tarot workers consider Astrological data in construction of Tarot card interpretations. We are recommended to use a signifier or marker card which derives from our horoscope. The details are not really important here, but I am an Aquarius according to the Astrologers which means I should use the Knight Swords for my signifier card. Except this does not seem to work so well for me.
When I go to the fourmilab your sky website and put my birth information into the sky map widget the Sun is not in Aquarius. The Sun is in Capricorn because all the zodiac constellations have precessed a month since the standard Astrology star ephemeris was built. So I performed an experiment. I decided the ephemeris is obsolete and I am Capricorn. The proper signifier card for me as a Capricorn is the Knight of Pentacles. And as a matter of my own factual experience, since I started using the Knight of Pentacles for my Tarot signifier card about two years ago, my Tarot readings make much more sense and are far more informative than they were when I was using the Aquarius card.
This proves absolutely nothing but I found it interesting. Another thing which the fourmilab sky map is good for is to get a second opinion on this Age of Aquarius business. You can see the sun moving across Pisces and into Aquarius exactly as they map the constellation boundaries. According to their data we don't even really get close to Aquarius for another hundred years and we are all still unambiguous Pisces people. There may not be a single person alive on the planet right now who will be alive when the Age of Aquarius arrives.
After we had read our books for a couple hours, I asked him if he was a geophysicist. (As if I was pretending that you do not know after two hours what book the person sitting next to you in coach is reading.) Me too. Then he asked me what I was reading. I told him "metaphysics" and I showed him the cover. He asked me if there was any Astrology in the book. I told him there was. He told me he was an Astrology student when he was not working as a geophysicist. I can not usually handle such conversations with any skill and usually exit from them as quickly as possible but there we were sitting right next to each other for another forty minutes and we were going to talk about it.
So I improvised. I told him that my view on Astrology was it was like a complete valid vector basis set which spanned the space of human experience. If you do not know much Calculus, that is like a higher dimensional generalization of what x and y do for a two dimensional plane in Cartesian coordinates in high school analytic geometry. (x,y) is the basis set--the two numbers are independent and any point in the plane can be specified by a unique pair; we say x and y span the two dimensional plane. Mathematicians can take this to any number of dimensions to infinite series and infinite sets.
I told him the Astrological representation to me was like just about any other system in Manly Hall's book: Kabbalah, Alchemy, Freemasonry, Hellenistic Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, &c-- any of these systems provide a valid basis set which spans human experience in this universe--although Astrology was not one that I knew much about or was motivated to use.
Some people are really into it. I know a woman who owns 500 books, and 475 of her books are on the subject of Astrology. I know a man who I once gave a small number of Astrological chart details and he inverted the data for the day and time and longitude of the subject's birthday which blew my mind. He said, "it is just a clock, man." So I do not doubt there is a power there and I can respect it, but it is not one that I choose to use.
So we ended up having a nice conversation in spite of my lack of interest in Astrology. I have since done a few things with the Astrological system. Some Tarot workers consider Astrological data in construction of Tarot card interpretations. We are recommended to use a signifier or marker card which derives from our horoscope. The details are not really important here, but I am an Aquarius according to the Astrologers which means I should use the Knight Swords for my signifier card. Except this does not seem to work so well for me.
When I go to the fourmilab your sky website and put my birth information into the sky map widget the Sun is not in Aquarius. The Sun is in Capricorn because all the zodiac constellations have precessed a month since the standard Astrology star ephemeris was built. So I performed an experiment. I decided the ephemeris is obsolete and I am Capricorn. The proper signifier card for me as a Capricorn is the Knight of Pentacles. And as a matter of my own factual experience, since I started using the Knight of Pentacles for my Tarot signifier card about two years ago, my Tarot readings make much more sense and are far more informative than they were when I was using the Aquarius card.
This proves absolutely nothing but I found it interesting. Another thing which the fourmilab sky map is good for is to get a second opinion on this Age of Aquarius business. You can see the sun moving across Pisces and into Aquarius exactly as they map the constellation boundaries. According to their data we don't even really get close to Aquarius for another hundred years and we are all still unambiguous Pisces people. There may not be a single person alive on the planet right now who will be alive when the Age of Aquarius arrives.
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About Craig
- Craig
- Houston, Texas, United States
- I have been living in the lovely neighborhood of Spring Branch in the great city of Houston since late in 2005. I started out with the idea of making this blog about my life in this neighborhood. That did not last long. Right now I am posting every five days on the alternating topics of literature, philosophy, psychology, and metaphysics. This project has been ongoing since July 27, 2010 and I believe it will continue for at least a few more months.