Is this thing on?

This Is Your Brain on Kafka

Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains.

That's the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What's more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.

In the first of two experiments, 40 participants (all Canadian college undergraduates) read one of two versions of a Franz Kafka story, The Country Doctor. In the first version, which was only slightly modified from the original, "the narrative gradually breaks down and ends abruptly after a series of non sequiturs," the researchers write. "We also included a series of bizarre illustrations that were unrelated to the story."

The second version contained extensive revisions to the original. The non sequiturs were removed, and a "conventional narrative" was added, along with relevant illustrations.

In other news, Reader's Digest files for bankrupcy. Hope for the human mind?

New Scientist recently published a special issue, The Folly of Growth, ostensibly an expose of flawed economic theory.

As you can deduce from this blog and writings elsewhere, New Scientist is my favourite magazine, and I have read practically every issue the last twenty years. While generally of quality there have been some duds among the articles and issues. This issue is among the worst.

New Scientist has changed through generations of editors, but retaining many of the strengths and weaknesses. It has never done economy well, and most of the time it has been weak in information technology, doing better these days.

Whatever your viewpoints this issue was bad economics, anyone reading it would not learn anything about economy from it, and whatever they learned would be more likely to be wrong than right. Through a Global warming thread in the forums I was pointed to a rebuttal from The Register (of all places), as the errors were basic and numerous that saves me some time.

What dismayed me more with this issue was bad science. I would love to see a scientific outlook on the "dismal science", where you can find much folly indeed. New Scientist here wasted a good opportunity. I know how hard it is to make a special issue work well, you depend greatly on the contributors and the editors to turn the disparate articles into a coherent whole, and reject the articles that can't be improved. I don't know who declined to participate, but of the contributions several articles should never have been published in New Scientist.

Several contributors were recycled from the old-style ecological movement. This in itself was bad judgement, they have repeatedly been shown to have poor domain expertise. Traditionally ecologist have had poor grasp of economy and vice versa, which can seem odd given that both are working with complex dynamic systems that in many ways are similar.

I would pick out Tim Jackson's article Why politicians dare not limit economic growth as particularly badly written, he should stick to writing letters to the editor, or at least do some research. I pick on him for an article with no substance and horrible style.

Originally posted by Tim Jackson:

The message from all this is clear: any alternative to growth remains unthinkable, even 40 years after the American ecologists Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren made some blindingly obvious points about the arithmetic of relentless consumption.

The Ehrlich equation, I = PAT, says simply that the impact (I) of human activity on the planet is the product of three factors: the size of the population (P), its level of affluence (A) expressed as income per person, and a technology factor (T), which is a measure of the impact on the planet associated with each dollar we spend.

Take climate change, for example. The global population is just under 7 billion and the average level of affluence is around $8000 per person. The T factor is just over 0.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide per thousand dollars of GDP - in other words, every $1000 worth of goods and services produced using today's technology releases 0.5 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. So today's global CO2 emissions work out at 7 billion × 8 × 0.5 = 28 billion tonnes per year.

I in particular take exception to this language, I don't expect to see arguments by the "blindingly obvious" in New Scientist, this is a scientific journal, not a religious one. If this had been a post in our own Debates & Discussions he would be promptly shot down.

This is not to say that there was no thought-provoking content in this issue, but what was there to be found was badly edited and hidden by the chaff. The editor of New Scientist, Jeremy Webb, may right that NS should be an ideas magazine and not do proper science the Custodian of Truth. The open questioning approach of NS is why I am a fan of the magazine after all, other magazines tell you what science "has discovered", no questions asked. The Folly of Growth had preciously little opennness however.

As an example of an almost-good article asking an important question I would highlight Does growth really help the poor? Unfortunately the article is only half-done, but it was a good start. Fundamental questions like this, testing whether the economic system actually achieves what it proclaims to do, would be within the domain of New Scientist to ask. Unfortunately they forgot to be a science magazine this time.

I came across this report on a study by Jonathan Huebner showing that the rate of technological innovation is slowing down, and that by this rate we will be down to the Dark Ages level by 2024 (a curiously precise prediction, but presumably by comparing the technological advances of the millennium 500-1500 with the current trend).

There is no doubt this study is seriously flawed, the data picked can be seen as arbitrary and even misleading, but it is no more flawed than the other hypotheses and studies around. Self-styled futurists tend to be highly myoptic. It is a natural phenomena, you are highly aware of the changes happening to you, but less to to your parents and their parents' parents. In particular I admit a strong scorn of the singularitons claiming our world will enter a technological apocalypse in the near, but conveniently distant, future. My claim is that revolutionary, paradigm shattering, Oedipal changes are getting rarer as we live a longer productive life. Of course that is far from the whole story, but over time extrapolations always fail.

In a particular area the field may be stable or stagnant for a long time, experience rapid technological growth, and then fade into the background. This can be seen in the ages, we have had the non-starters of the Atomic Age followed by the Space Age, with the more successful Information Age which too will fade. The myoptic bias is to count the changes that are important to us now, and discount the changes that were important to us then, or will be in the future. We will have no greater problems living in our future than our predecessors have living in our present, as long as we can adjust to that change in focus. All that changes fast now will change slowly in the future.

My magazine of choice, (The) New Scientist, released its first issue 50 years ago, and more recently followed up with a hefty anniversary issue.

Reading news (or watching or browsing them for that matter) is a waste of time if you want to be informed or enlightened. I have argued before that instead of following flickering interpretations of what just happened it is better to use sources like New Scientist get an insight into what is going to happen.

Self-conscious at 50, New Scientist looked backwards for its New Zeitgeist in news articles past, as well as forward in inviting predictions for the following 50 years. While both are good reads, true to form it is the present, in the "Big Questions", that this issue shines. One present but unasked question is the role of science itself.

A test to determine the kind of action a scientific branch has is to look at the reaction. Since the time Galileo run afoul of his pope astronomy has annoyed nobody (well, dark astronomy annoyed me, which shows promise). The last public uproar based on physics were the anti-nuclear demonstrations in the 80's. There may be sufficient smokestacks left to give chemistry a bad name, but this is not where the battles lie. Meanwhile information has been the most recent inclusion into the physical system, and with the widest impact the last few decades. That notwithstanding all the theory was fairly established by the time the first issue of New Scientist was published, and thereafter nothing much has happened, and not that much is going to happen either.

Advances in physical science and computer science is now in the realm of usability studies and market research. It is no longer iconoclastic in nature, fundamental world views are no longer turned over by breakthroughs in physics. We will probably never return to the rapid and fundamental advances in the golden era of the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The physical sciences are a part of the establishment. Einstein is an icon, and we use quantum physics when we try to understand the world. If you observe two connected butterflies causing a storm a cat will die while staying alive, therefore if something is sufficiently garbled it is scientifically proven.

Biology on the other hand is upsetting. Christians largely in USA and Muslims largely outside of USA are rallying against Darwin, in a truly impressive display of rear-guard action. What other scientific theory of that venerable age can still muster the troops this way? But it isn't just the implicit threat to creation myths that gets us going. Genetic engineering, cloning, stem cell research... You name it, we protest against it.

Back to the big questions and the long forecasts. With some exceptions we were relieved of the hyperbole. Fifty years is not a long time, half a lifetime or thereabout. The world in the 1950s was very different in flavour to ours, but it wasn't truly alien. The world in 2050 won't be either. The forecasts in physics were largely completist in nature, reminiscent of card collectors, "if we just got these two missing cards we're complete". Based on past experience we will learn more if this completition project fails, but in any case an uninspiring outlook for us non-collectors.

I am much more enthralled that we are well on our way to discovering our past. Thanks to the invention of writing we have known tales from the past for quite many generations now, but what about the unwritten stories? Fossils may be among the oldest things around, but they have been new to us. As Andrew Knoll noted, most of the the artifacts of life and civilization remain in the ground undiscovered, but fifty years from now most will have been found. Non-intrusive survey methods will cover all the land mass as well as the seas. Digging for artifacts and fossils will not be the only way of inquiry. From the human genome project of the last decade, the neandertal genome project is well on its way. We are set to discover not only who we are but how we got to be, much of it from archelogical evidence in living genes in addition to communing with the recent dead.

Applied biology is provocative enough. But when it really goes home to ourselves it will be hard to ignore. Several of the articles touched the fleeting worry that when science has disposed of free will the way it did to phlogiston or the aether, what would prevent us from doing harm as it isn't our fault anyway?

This is reminiscent of when 18th and 19th century science gutted God good, the raised concern was how a society could survive and prosper without the fear of God to scare people into subordination. As you know we still turned out pretty allright. Demystifying our own behaviour will not make us into irresponsible people even though in a deeper sense we aren't responsible for ourselves. Put the other way around proving the illusory existence of self would not turn previously selfish people any more selfless. I may not exist but I still want that car.