Childishness

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.
- Bryan White

I love climbing trees. Some people seem to think that is a pastime reserved for young children, and when I tell people I’ve been up a tree I’ll sometimes get a comment about it being a bit immature. Of course when I ask why, there’s never an answer.

“Immature: a word boring people use to describe fun people“.

What is it about this need people have to “grow up”? To shed childlike ways and become more “adult”?

Life is about having fun and enjoying the moment. And that is a child-like approach that adults all to often forget. Too many grown ups focus on the future, or obsess about the past. As a good friend likes to say: “why so serious?“.

Granted, there may be certain aspects worth throwing aside, as Oscar Wilde says: “I’m not young enough to know everything“, but I think many child-like attitudes are worthy.

I’ve written before about the importance of having a childlike attitude of openness to your experience, where everything is novel and worthy of focus, even the small and seemingly mundane things. The problem with too many adults is that they get tunnel vision and don’t see much of the world any more. Some even get to the point where they think they know all they need and don’t grow any more.

Coming back to the climbing, I love rock climbing. People often talk about how one “should” climb, the proper techniques and so on. There is a place for that, yet there’s a professional climber who says he aspires to a child-like attitude with his climbing, where there is no right or proper way to get to the top. Rather he says it’s better to just do what comes naturally for your body. Einstein said “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education” and I think I see what he meant.

Children are more trusting, more humble, and more willing to question and learn, the latter being something which we should always be doing. Tom Stafford writes that Children are curious, and curiosity leads to exploration, which is a vital part of our development. Who would want to stop growing?! Kurt Vonnegut said, “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different”.

Another consideration is the source of our learning. I love learning about philosophy and psychology. There are so many great sources. People sneer at some sources, like the films The Matrix and Kung Fu Panda. But why? Why limit yourself and say that one particular source of wisdom is better than another?

Only an “adult” would do that.

A most tiresome book says: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me“.

Me, I aspire to a child-like attitude in these ways.

C. S. Lewis sums up my point nicely: “Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence“.

Beware Crowds – Logical Fallacy #58

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
- Mark Twain

Argumentum ad Populum, or appeal to the crowd, is a logical fallacy which asserts that a proposition is true because many people believe it.

I most often see this at work in a group of people when someone who has been disagreed with, looks at the rest of the group and simply replies “come onnn“, as if to say, ‘everyone else agrees with me, why don’t you?“.

I’ve seen companies justify poor corporate practice with a similar argument: “you’ve got to understand the market, this is what everyone else is doing right now“. My response is usually of the form: “do you want to follow the crowd, or do you want to stand out from your competitors“?

It’s often used in conjunction with the Appeal To Tradition fallacy which says that because people have believed something for a long time, it’s therefore true.

Socrates spoke about the ills of following the crowd. He said that it’s important to know your own mind and not hold an opinion simply because it’s held by the majority.

For contrarians such as myself, he also warned against the opposite approach, which is disagreeing with something simply because it’s a view held by the majority.

People follow the crowd for different reasons:

• an assumption that many people can’t be wrong
• a lack of confidence
• a conformity that comes out of wanting to fit in
• apathy
• a striving for unanimity, i.e. not wanting to rock the boat.

And sometimes it’s simply not possible to find the time to figure everything out for yourself.

While there are some valid arguments for the wisdom of crowds it does not apply in all circumstances; James Surowiecki asserts that a crowd decision is only wise if each individual came to their decision independently after considering the information they have, rather than just following the majority view without considering what they know first.

Also, what we know as a society, even as a species, is built on what our peers and predecessors have learnt – what some call our collective intelligence. However we need to be discerning in what we accept.

While we can follow the crowd consciously, it’s worth being aware of the ways in which we unconsciously follow the crowd. Solomon Asch demonstrated that we do this to a shocking degree.

So it’s worth considering what view you hold on a topic, rather than being concerned about what other people think. After all, the people I most respect are those that hold true to their own well-considered beliefs. It comes down to being true to yourself.

Don’t be a sheep. Make up your own mind.

Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It by Steve Taylor

Who has time? Who has time? But then if we never take time, how can we have time?

- The Merovingian

You may read the title and say “control time perception? Yeah, right“.

But consider: when you were 8, how long did the summer holidays last? And how long does it seem to take for 6 weeks to fly past these days?

Taylor says that our perception of time speeds up as we get older because we repeatedly do the same things, and take less notice of them. Kids see things with eyes wide open because everything is new to them. They take in everything around them like sponges. The implication is that doing things you haven’t done before will slow down your perception of time. Similarly taking your time to enjoy what you are doing, taking in all the information available, even when doing something mundane like the washing up, will add to the experience, and slow down time.

If something is new, then you remember more things about it, so in hindsight it also seems to have taken longer given the extra details.

Think about your daily commute to work. You do it so regularly, sometimes you don’t recall a single part of the journey and it seems to go past quickly. Contrast this to going somewhere  you haven’t been before and it will appear to take longer.

I read elsewhere that when an event has an emotional impact on you, you will remember more, so becoming emotionally engaged with your experience will mean it seems to take longer.

I remember an incident when my car went out of control at high-speed and my perception of time passing slowed down to a surprising degree. I was acutely aware of the car and its handling, the environment, and my actions and physical state. I had a meta-awareness, which enabled me to watch how I was reacting so that I could consider each possible action before I chose to carry it out. Both in the moment and in hindsight, that hyper-awareness meant an event that happened in seconds, seemed to take an age.

As a result of these observations, Taylor advises that we avoid just sitting in front of mindless tv programs, or playing simple computer games, as that simply absorbs you so that time goes by without you being aware.

Clearly, the assumption implicit in his advice is that people want time to go slower. They want to appreciate the life they have and if one perceives it to have taken longer, then all the better.

He moves on to discuss the ‘zone’ that sports people get into; e.g. Jimmy Connors used to say how big the ball seemed, how slow his opponent was, and how he had so much time to make his decision. I’ve experienced the same when I’ve been on top form in various areas, such as when playing my guitar, the implication being, that when you become experienced and intuitive with your chosen practise, you have more ‘brain-space’ to think about other things, thus experiencing the feeling of having more time.

He also talks about thought-chatter: the annoying thoughts that flit across the front of your brain when you stop doing stuff. These are generally about the past or the future. When you are able to quiet these (through meditation for example) you can then enjoy the present and not be limited by the past or the future.

His writing style is annoying; he repeats himself and sometimes talks nonsense. He could have written a book with more impact in a quarter of the space. For example, when he said “scientists are often suspicious of anecdotes, preferring to stick to hard facts which they can verify through experiments, But surely there are some cases where anecdotal evidence is so widespread…” he sounded rather foolish. Of course when “anecdotal” evidence is widespread, then it is no longer anecdotal. It didn’t help that he was spouting some nonsense about transcending time altogether so you can predict the future.

But his main message is a fantastic one: to enjoy the time you have, to keep your experiences rich, varied and new, and enjoy the small mundane things too.

I think Athlete say all he’s said very simply in their beautiful song Vehicles & Animals. To paraphrase: young children enjoy the present with contentment; open your eyes with a child-like attitude and take in the world around you in the same way.

Taboos. There to be broken.

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
- Albert Einstein

Given I’m discussing taboos in this post I should give a health warning – some of the following points may make you feel uncomfortable. But that’s the point – breaking through this discomfort is what I’m trying to convince you to do.

Here goes…

A subject should not be avoided just because society deems it taboo. A question should not be out-of-bounds because some people find it uncomfortable. In fact, areas that are taboo, by their nature, tend to be important things that need to be discussed.

For example the British National Party are renowned for the racist views of their members. Does this mean we shouldn’t let them discuss their ideas in the public sphere? Absolutely not. To ban the discussion of ideas that one thinks morally questionable is to push them underground. To push such ideas underground means that the arguments and counter arguments are not heard. If a person sympathetic to such arguments hears them, perhaps in a local pub where the BNP are quietly recruiting, they are more likely to sign up because they are not aware of the arguments that would enable them to disagree. So having their leader Nick Griffin on the BBC’s current affairs program Question Time was a good thing.

Tim Harford bravely asks some taboo questions about racism in his excellent book The Logic Of Life. He discusses “rational racism“, i.e. when it can be advantageous to be racist. When we ask such taboo questions and understand such motivations then we can work to avoid them.

Setting up the rule that “we don’t talk about that kind of thing” is counter productive. If some ideas or histories are not allowed to be questioned, not only does it hold back society, but it causes the very problems those that want to stop the questioning are afraid of. If a positive principle is never questioned for many years, when it is questioned in the future, for some people it will fall down like a deck of cards as the counter arguments are not well known.

Glenn Greenwald makes this case strongly, concluding: “Criminalizing ideas doesn’t make them go away any more than sticking your head in the sand makes unpleasant things disappear. If anything, refusing to confront them makes them stronger“.

And so to one of the greatest taboos: the holocaust. This is an area where historians absolutely should be able to question facts about the events that are claimed by others. When historian David Irving questioned some aspects of what happened in Auschwitz he was prosecuted under the crime of holocaust denial. While he has a history of supporting Hitler, and supporting some of his approaches, that’s no reason to make this particular question an issue for the courts, and trying to limit his right to free speech and enquiry. It’s exactly the kind of thing Orwell wrote about in 1984. So if we hear counter arguments to what we consider an important truth, it will ensure that our body of arguments and evidence is kept strong and well for future generations.

Aristotle said “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it“. So along these lines, some have suggested that siding with Hitler rather than Stalin may have been a more morally acceptable approach based on the fact that many more people got killed because of Stalin. Is it wrong to have such a discussion? How so? It is only by asking such difficult questions that we can understand better how to be more moral individuals.

People look at acts of cruelty such as the 2011 massacre in Norway by Anders Breivik and say he’s a monster, he’s evil. I’ve written about this before – people use these arguments to close down debate so they don’t have to put themselves in the position of considering how a person might rationally conclude that such actions could be considered morally defensible. Again, this taboo doesn’t help society become more moral – it hinders any such growth.

In many circles it is taboo to question whether or not homosexuality is innate. The assumption of many”antigay” types is that sexual orientation is a choice, whereas the gay friendly usually assume that it is an unchangeable part of someone’s nature. It seems to be an assumption based on what conclusion supports their agenda rather than something based on evidence. Personally I couldn’t give a damn. It shouldn’t matter whether it’s genetic or not; rights should be universal and discrimination illegal regardless of whether choice is involved. But if these questions can be discussed more openly, when some firmer evidence comes in one way or the other, we’ll be better prepared for it.

Religion is a big taboo on which I’ve often commented. Whether christianity or islam, they should be questioned to destruction. If an idea is good or worthy then it will stand up to criticism. If it is not, it will fail and we will move on to find a better idea. Tom Holland’s documentary questioning whether Mohammed existed, and putting an alternative interpretation on the origins of islam is absolutely valid, regardless of whether the interpretation is right or wrong. Yet many people suggested that this was too sensitive a topic. As Holland said: “The origins of Islam are a legitimate subject of historical inquiry“.

Noam Chomsky said “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum“.

So question taboos. Question the orthodoxy. Ask questions that might “offend” people. Question things that one “shouldn’t” question.

Tony Benn said “I think the key to any progress is to ask the question ‘why’ all the time. And of course questions can get you into a lot of trouble … [but] without questions we won’t make any progress at all“.

Guns, Death and Compassion

Here’s yet another comment on the Newton school massacre.

This time from me.

And this is the thing: I genuinely don’t understand why we have so much news coverage, so much focus on the victims, so much consideration of how to avoid such an awful event in the future, so many statesman-like speeches and commitments to “do something”.

My question is: what is special about this event?

When yet another child is killed by a US drone in Pakistan (178 in the last 7 years and counting) do we see weeping parents? Do we follow the memorial services and hear messages of condolences from the local politicians and imams? Do we consider what went wrong and how to avoid the same terrible things from happening again? Do we open up ourselves to understanding what it would be like to be in their shoes, to be the grieving mother or the orphaned child?

Do we bollocks. We call it collateral damage. Or even “bug splats”. People say it’s just something that happens in war, something out of our control, they don’t put such a high value on life… or so the ludicrous post-hoc justifications go.

More than 30,000 people are killed by guns in the US every year. Over half of these are suicides. More children have been killed by accident every year than all the mass shootings over the last couple of decades put together. What about these deaths? Why don’t we pay more attention to these?

After September the 11^th, I was again shocked at the furore in the media and western societies.. But what about the recent Rwandan genocide, I thought? When we had a 2 minute silence at the office I found myself wondering: Why are the people who suffered and died in America so important? We didn’t have a silence for so many other tragedies. At the same time as the terrible events of September 11^th, the holocaust in Democratic Republic of Congo was going on. Between 1997 and 2003 well over 5 million people were murdered, not to mention the rape, torture, and other horrors. I didn’t even read about it until 2002 and I read the papers daily over that period. I’ll just mention that statistic again – 5.4 million people were killed. A familiar sounding figure – close to the number of Jews killed by the Nazis. I’m not making crass comparisons for the sake of a competition here – I’m pointing out that these heart-rending atrocities merit equal attention.

When all those Japanese people died in the 2011 tsunami I felt awful for them. That this story was suddenly eclipsed by the story of the nuclear power station was again inhumane. No one died from radiation poisoning. But once nuclear power got involved, I stopped seeing any mention of the 20,000 people who died from this horror, not to mention the hundreds of thousands more affected by it all. Why was that? Perhaps it was something to do with the fear of nuclear power being stronger than the sympathy for the victims?

When I raise this point, most people realise the greater context, understand the unhealthy media bias, and show some empathy with others in horrendous situations around the world. However, worryingly some small-minded people actually accuse me of being heartless. Is it heartless that I feel some measure of pain, not just when a nice middle class white person dies, but when an impoverished person is killed far away from me in a culture of which I know little? Surely this is the antithesis of heartlessness.

People are people, regardless of where they happen to have been born.

I once read that ‘good and bad’ are defined as how things affect oneself, whereas ‘right and wrong’ are the affects of one’s actions on another. The latter category is also known as morality.

Could it be that people make more of a big deal of issues that affect people who are closer to them in culture, colour and proximity?

I’m no psychologist (and wouldn’t like to judge the motivations of others in this regard) but it’s pretty easy to label this as a selfish attitude.

I wholly understand the underlying fear, but personally, the fear of such things happening to me takes second place to empathy for other people.

As such, I’ll go so far as to say that the current media obsession with the minutia of this particular tragedy actually demonstrates a lack of moral values.

This powerful article, in which I read the above comparison, describes these issues well. At the end of the article a commenter said:

“Our Professor told us one day that a newspaper had approached him to commission a piece of research to let them quantifiably determine how newsworthy a story involving fatalities would be. He just told them to divide the number of deaths by the distance in km to the incident. No, I am not joking.”

So in conclusion, let’s have some more empathy. And let’s apply that empathy with a bit more equality.

An Unfebuckinglievable Review

My blog has been going strong for most of 2012 so, in keeping with tradition, here is a small selection of the best posts of the year.

The good thing is, as well as being the most popular, these posts are my favourites too.

Enjoy.

Offence and Censorship

The most popular post of the year, describing why I get so annoyed when people use the offence argument to silence views they don’t like.

Nature – It’s Good Isn’t It?

A fun rant about the stupidity of asserting that something is good because it’s “natural”.

Does Knowledge Diminish Beauty And Awe?

People often make the assertion that understanding how something works somehow removes its magic. Here I say why that is so dumb.

My Story (Burning Flesh)

A little story I wrote to make clear my contempt for the disgusting message at the centre of a certain belief system.

Islam – The Untold Story by Tom Holland

I’ve been getting a lot more hits from the middle east after reviewing this documentary questioning the origins of Islam. Here’s the overview of a debate I went to on the same subject.

Bounce by Matthew Syed

The most popular book review of the year in which the ex-table tennis champion Matthew Syed explains that talent is not innate.

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell

In this book Bertrand Russell gives an incisive view of what makes us happy.

Tube Talk

Remembering the time a chap foolishly tried to convert me. Bit of a shame I had to leave him when I did as I was only warming up – I’m not sure how his faith would have managed if I’d have had some more time with him.

5i5i

Collective Intelligence

Thomas Malone runs a fascinating group called the MIT Centre for Collective Intelligence. He is working “to understand the conditions that lead to collective intelligence rather than collective stupidity”.

(He has a good grounding having studied maths, computer science, economic systems and cognitive psychology.)

Here are the key points from an interview he recently gave about his work.

He describes the internet as a form of collective intelligence drawing particular attention to Linux and Wikipedia. He thinks “they’re just barely the beginning of the story. We’re likely to see lots more examples of Internet-enabled collective intelligence – and other kinds of collective intelligence as well – over the coming decades”.

As such he says his group is trying to find out how “people and computers can be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any person, group or computer has ever done before”. He says that “if you take that question seriously, the answers you get are often very different from the kinds of organizations and groups we know today”.

A major key to understanding this is finding a measure of collective intelligence using “a single statistical factor that predicts how well a given group will do on a very wide range of different tasks”.

Interestingly “the average and the maximum intelligence of the individual group members was correlated, but only moderately correlated, with the collective intelligence of the group as a whole”.

He found that there were two factors that had the most influence on his measure of group intelligence:

“The first was the average social perceptiveness of the group members. We measured social perceptiveness in this case using a test developed essentially to measure autism. It’s called the “Reading the Mind and the Eyes Test”. It works by letting people look at pictures of other people’s eyes and try to guess what emotions those people are feeling. People who are good at that work well in groups. When you have a group with a bunch of people like that, the group as a whole is more intelligent.

The second factor we found was the evenness of conversational turn taking. In other words, groups where one person dominated the conversation were, on average, less intelligent than groups where the speaking was more evenly distributed among the different group members.”

I find this area of discussion particularly interesting working, as I do, on large IT projects. Their success is significantly influenced by the way the people work together given the processes and personalities involved. Also as the problem domains of human endeavour become ever more complex, it’s less easy for individuals to solve problems, and it’s group efforts that are required – the Large Hadron Collider is a great example.

It’s interesting to contrast his work with the principles in James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom Of Crowds which talks about bringing the knowledge of individuals to bear on a problem. He claims that wise decisions are made by taking the average of the decisions of a group of individuals providing that three conditions hold: diversity of experience among the individuals, decentralisation of knowledge and independence of decision-making across the group.

In this fun article Tom Stafford writes that we rely more on our environment for intelligence than we like to think. Whether it’s Google and Wikipedia or people and our surroundings. He describes how we take so many cognitive short cuts that we actually don’t bother remembering many things, for example, if the people around us are likely to remember them for us. He says “our minds are made up just as much by the people and tools around us as they are by the brain cells inside our skull“.

Malone suggests: “You might well argue that human intelligence has all along been primarily a collective phenomenon rather than an individual one. Most of the things we think of as human intelligence really arise in the context of our interactions with other human beings. We learn languages. We learn to communicate. Most of our intellectual achievements as humans really result not just from a single person working all alone by themselves, but from interactions of an individual with a culture, with a body of knowledge, with a whole community and network of other humans.

I think and I hope that this approach to thinking about collective intelligence can help us to understand not only what it means to be individual humans, but what it means for us as humans to be part of some broader collectively intelligent entity.“