omenti

preview season

As many of you know I like to celebrate major accomplishments of friends.  This time I'll offer previews from two good friends as well as another that could have an impact on education.

 

The first is  Juliette Powell's second book.  The A.I. Dilemma: 7 Principles for Responsible Technology is the working title and it's a further development of her dissertation at Columbia.  I've been fortunate enough to have read the nearly-final draft.  Well balanced and accessible to non-specialists, it's going to be an excellent resource for people trying to sort out promises and pitfalls that can impact much of the future.  One person who had an advance look will be using it as required reading for a college course.  Be on the lookout!

 

The second is from Sarah Pavan.  One of the best beach volleyball players in the world, she's also a clear and deep thinker.  As I've aged I've learned to learn from those outside my area.  She's  been a source of ideas. At the elite level women's beach volleyball is a mental game with communication being one of the defining aspects.  A few months ago her teammate of five years decided to quit the team.  Sarah was faced with finding someone with the necessary complementary skill set as well as the drive, passion, ability to communicate and chemistry.  Canada only has a few candidates, but Sarah found the right one in Sophie Bukovec.  I expect to see them developing as a team over the next year as they focus on the Paris Olympics in 2024.

 

 

And finally potential news from what I consider the most important college course in the country. Sense & Sensibility & Science is a course at Berkeley developed and taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology departments.   Here's an overview:

 

This is a course on the ideas from science that are most widely useful for everyone. Many insights and conceptual tools from scientific thinking are of great utility for all kinds of reasoning, from reading the news critically to making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The focus in this course is on the errors humans tend to make, and the approaches scientific methodology has developed (and continues to develop) to minimize those errors. The course includes a discussion of the nature of science, what makes science such an effective way of knowing, how both non-scientific thinking and scientific thinking can go awry, and how we can reason more clearly and successfully as individuals, as members of groups, and as citizens of a democracy.

Every day we make decisions that can and should be informed by science. We make decisions as individuals, as voters, and as members of our various communities. We make decisions as students and parents and policy makers. The problem is, we don’t do it so well—a fact sadly apparent in political debates. It’s easy to blame poor decision-making on the greed, irresponsibility, ignorance, or incompetence of other people. But the problem seems to be more basic than that. It seems we face a paradox. Living in a democracy means that everyone’s view counts the same as everyone else’s. But to make decisions informed by science, we often need to defer to those with relevant expertise. Therefore, we shouldn't rely on a democratic system to make the best decisions. Or should we? This basic tension between science and democratic decision-making serves as a unifying theme for Sense & Sensibility & Science (SSS), a course that aims to equip students with basic tools to be better thinkers. We will explore key aspects of scientific thinking that everyone should know, especially the many ways that we humans tend to fool ourselves, and how to avoid them—including how to differentiate signal from noise, evaluate causal claims, and avoid reasoning biases. We’ll then look at the best models for using science to guide decisions, since the rational and arational (e.g., values, fears, and goals) then have to be combined. We will explore these themes experientially, often with in-class activities and discussions, and we will culminate in two open-ended projects to design better methods of deliberation and decision making, first as groups, and then as individuals. Co-taught by faculty from Physics, Philosophy, and Psychology, S&S&S fosters intellectual advancement for interdisciplinary knowledge seekers.

 

Browse through the topics and resources section.  You'll get something reading the recommended materials and thinking about the topics.  It's one of the few places outside the community where I've seen scientific optimism discussed. A book is being developed aimed at college students, although it should be widely applicable.  There's a serious need to put together something like this at the high school level even though many states would probably label thinking about the process of science as 'woke'..

feel free to comment!

fairness, inclusivity, safety and social convention

There's so much that isn't fair in this world, but most competitive sports make an attempt to provide a reasonably level playing field through the establishment and enforcement of rules and categories.  Rules vary from sport to sport but some constants are the elimination of performance enhancing drugs, a degree of safety for participants, and the creation of categories.  Some sports allow a certain amount of violence or danger balancing what the fans and athletes want vs modifications to the rules that might make the sport less desirable.  In other words there's a social convention.  Sometimes that social convention changes after serious injuries or deaths.  Positive change has come in world rugby in the past few years, but other sports are more resistant to change.

 

More recently fairness and inclusivity have come into play.  Categories exist to prevent grossly unfair contests.  You don't want a wrestler up against someone half their weight.   Twenty year olds don't compete with ten year olds or seventy year olds. Men and women usually are have categories of their own in most sports.  And para-athletes generally have separate competitions with a dizzying set of subcategories to allow fairness given a wide range of capabilities.  Fairness comes first in these, but it allows inclusivity to play and potentially succeed in a given sport.   But like so much else in the world there's change.

 

South African Oscar Pistorius became a below-the-knee amputee in both legs as a child due to a congenital defect.  Using racing blades, he became a good sprinter - an Olympic class sprinter.  There was controversy about how much of his performance came from him and how much from the blades?  Are blades as good as or better than real lower legs?    He was charismatic and there was a large amount of social pressure that running should be inclusive.   A few calculations were done early on followed by a few real tests with this unusual subject.  Some of the early results indicated the energy return from the carbon-fibre blades was the same as the achilles tendon - in other words no advantage.  That was the message the public received. The more careful work that followed has shown he had a significant advantage from lower contact time with the ground and added leg length - enough that 'he was probably a good, but not elite runner turning in performances well beyond his athleticism.  The blades are performance enhancing prosthetics.  

 

Performance-enhancing blades raise an interesting question.  What if a world class runner adopted them?  Would a 9.30s 100 meter dash be fair?  How about a 1hr 50m marathon?  Would elite runners have to get amputations to compete?  Fortunately the really elite runners are staying away from this, but now we have another very good runner trying to compete.  Sports physiologist Ross Tucker has a great interview with Peter Weyand - one of the best biomechanics physiologists on the science and pseudoscience involved.  If you're interested in these things start at about 26 minutes in this episode. 

 

There will be innovation.  What happens in field sports that demand good court vision with augmented reality glasses?  Will they be banned and in what sports?  Will performance enhancing prosthetics for stick and racket sports come about?  What is pure and fair and where does inclusion fit in?

 

And now to a socially charged issue: transwomen and female sports.  To first order biological sex has two categories while gender is a continuum.  I think that gender should not be a category for discrimination, but that biological sex should be used to establish categories for fairness and, in some sports, safety.  There's a good deal of solid science that shows male puberty results in advantages in size, muscle mass, VO₂ max and a few other metrics.  These advantages are important in most sports and would exclude biological women from the elite and next to elite categories in most sports where men compete.¹ Testosterone is cited as the advantage, but suppressing it later in life only results in a small drop in performance (there are a few poorly done studies that claim otherwise).   This has become a social issue with a rightwing party calling for blanket bans in many activities including sports.  There's been pushback by allies.  In some cases female athletes have been threatened by sponsors to not speak out and go along with inclusion rather than fairness.   Should transathletes compete with men, females, or have their own category?  That seems to be a social decision that only a few sports bodies have addressed at this point. 

 

I'll admit to a bias.²   I believe in solid science and fairness. I think transwomen need to compete with men or have their own category. Politically I'm on the left on most issues and think transpeople should work and live how they want, but that doesn't extend into sport where categories exist for reasons of fairness.  Fairness to women overrides scientifically unsupported inclusion in my mind.

 

__________

¹ A chart showing the performance difference between biological male and female elite athletes. Longitudinal studies show a drop in male advantage from 5 to 30% after three years of testosterone suppression and a non-longitudinal study showed a similarly small drop after about 15 years. 

 

 

In the real world this means a transwoman swimmer who was poorly ranked as a male was able to easily defeat all of his NCAA female competitors even with a few years of testosterone suppression.  In sprinting it has been shown that biological Olympic gold medal females don't even make it into the top 2,000 for men.  It has been posited man ranked 1,000 could easily beat any women even if he had testosterone suppression that dropped his advantage by 30%.

² I have an involvement with beach volleyball and love both the men's and women's game.  I know a few Olympians on the women's side who sometimes train with amateur men who easily outpower them.  The fact the women are less athletic doesn't make their game less interesting..  it's just that the two styles of play are very different.

 

chindōgu flavored technologies

Chindōgu is the curious Japanese art form of inventing gadgets that seem to a clever solutions to  problems, but which end up causing more problems than they solve.  You may have seen examples like:

toilet paper dispenser hats: you never run out of tissue when you have to sneeze

baby mops: a baby outfit that also mops the floor

umbrella ties

many more .. search the Internet

 

To keep the art form pure you're not supposed to make money - almost guaranteed as the public will see the gadget as useless and won't buy it.  (there was a tragic mistake - the selfie stick started as chindōgu)  I know of an engineering professor who taught a course on creative engineering using it as a vehicle for student projects.

 

For a few years I've found it useful to extend the term to cover technical and social technical inventions that are seen as solving problems by the maker, but are clearly clueless.  A few examples from the past month:

Flat panel displays in cars are a bit of automotive chindōgu.

Blockchains are an example of computational chindōgu.

Meta's Horizon Worlds is pure techno-social chindōgu.

 

Perhaps you might find hunting for this kind of chindōgu useful.  I find it to be a nice way of thinking about what might represent meaningful and useful longterm change.  And of course sometimes you label things incorrectly and have to come back and rethink.  That may be even more useful.

 

And then there are potlatches..  the destruction of wealth to impress and gain status.  Fully autonomous (class five) vehicles, NFTs, Facebook's version of the meta verse, hydrogen powered cars ...  

 

 

 

 

 

an almost lost word from the dictionary

Reading an obscure paper from the 1880s a word stopped me - apricity.  It seemed like I had come across it before and there were hints from the context, but it was time for the OED.¹  I pulled out the first volume of my old compact edition - the one with the magnifying glass - and found it.  An obscure word dating to 1623 meaning the warmth of the Sun in the Winter.

 

The warmth of a bright Sun on a clear cold Winter day.  That's something that captures most of us know - the radiant heat of the Sun isn't perturbed by the cold air and can be quite comfortable.  Then it hit me I heard the word in a John McPhee lecture in Princeton.² A few decades had passed since he wrote Coming into the Country, but it was about three Alaskas including a look at the Winter.  A perfect word for some of the days.

 

A day of apricity can make snow melt in subzero air temperatures on  Southern-facing roofs only to freeze into beautifully clear long icicles at the edge.  This type of ice formation is often free of bubbles producing beautifully clear ice.  If you have wide enough icicles you might try making an ice lens and starting a fire.

 

Such days are made for outdoor recreation if there isn't any wind.  Perhaps more importantly the basic principle - heat transfer by radiation - can keep heating expenses down.  Heating and moving air to fill rooms is enormously inefficient. If you aren't moving around much you might try a small radiant heater and point it at the area where you are. Heat what you need to heat with infrared light. Direct sunlight is the same...  sit in the Sun.  These measures, plus wearing warm indoor clothing and being somewhat active lets you get away with low thermostat settings.  And be on the lookout for apricity as that can give a big psychological boost!

 

Another Winter word I like is tingilinde. It's a constructed word based on J.R.R. Tolkien's elfin language Quenya meaning the sparkle of the starlight reflecting on the snow on a dark moonless Winter night.  Such sights could be spectacular in Montana away from town when it was really cold and a bit of new snow had fallen as tiny ice crystals. Another great spot is Yellowstone .. super cold air forms the right kind of ice crystal snow near the hot springs and geysers.   Once it was magical - the cold starlight reflecting from millions of tiny diamonds along with the greens and reds of a bright aurora dancing overhead.   On such nights you don't notice that it's really cold.

__________

¹ The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is the 1928 edition.  Devilishly small print that requires a magnifying glass, but the real OED and only about $80 (still a lot back then!) rather than the fortune the full dictionary went for.  There's a lovely bit of historical fiction on the dictionary and the people who made it happen:  The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams.  It's set in the time and place with many of the characters, but focuses on what was left out..  those who weren't white, male and of a certain class.  Recommended!

² McPhee is a great writer - a master of the creative non-fiction genre.   

 

 

 

the oscillating mind and the default mode network

666/(6 + 6 + 6) = 37

and

333/(3 + 3 + 3) = 37

37 and 73 are reversible primes , 37 is the 12^th prime and 73 is the 21^st - another reversible pair

and ....

and ....

and ....

 

It arrived in a lovely wooden box with polished brass hinges and was written in a nearly calligraphic hand. Skipping about fifty pages was the conclusion that said its author had found the number 37 was key to gravity and electromagnetism and was being unfairly ignored.

I thought about the first two statements for a few seconds  - they were of the form (100x + 10x + x)/3x  or 111x/3x = 37 for the integers x = 1 through 9.  No surprise.  

__________

 

Universities with famous physics professors get a lot of mail from people out to prove something.  The amount of effort is often as astonishing as how wrong the work is.  Some universities farm out this mail to upperclass undergrads and grad students as a filter as well as an education.  It's true that every once and awhile there's an unknown genius - Ramanujan's letter to Hardy being the most dramatic example in history - but those days are probably gone and Ramanujan was already known in India. 

 

Creativity isn't terribly useful without background and a level of competence. But where does it come from?  I'm certainly no neuroscientist, but talk to a few and there's quite a bit of new work going on these days.  Some of it is from fMRI imaging..  a technique that can map active areas in the brain while a person is thinking.  It seems most early work would have subjects were told to rest between tasks while new trials were prepared.  The machines are quite noisy and produced enough data that it only made sense to run them during the active trial.  Finally someone decided to look at what was going on when minds were just wandering.

 

Your brain accounts for about a fifth of your resting energy demand.  Surprisingly focusing and thinking deeply about something uses about the same energy as an unfocused wandering mind.   When fMRIs were finally used to look at the unfocused wandering state it was found the brain was lit up, often with widely separated areas firing at the same time.  It's known as the default mode network.  Mind wandering - like when you suddenly realize you can't remember anything about the past six miles you've driven - accounts for nearly half your waking mental state.  

 

Some cognitive neuroscientists - Moshe Bar for example - believe these ramblings may be associated with mood - ruminating ramblings and their connections can lead to worrisome states while creative wanderings can lead to happy moods (this is speculation and there are many other states). It's also noted that your more conscious states can range from exploratory to exploitatory.  You seem to be able to know when you should focus and get something done or be open to new things.  

 

Much of what Moshe says squares with how I think about creativity. That doesn't mean it's right, but it strikes this non-specialist as being on the right track.    I try to leave the day open and certain times and remove distractions to allow for small creative moments and put myself in the mood by drawing.   More important is building a supply of seemingly unrelated potential connections through reading, hobbies, travel, friends and so on.  In my case a curious set of friends is central.

 

The most creative organizations I know tend to have a number of foci and unrelated specialists.  I have a relation with one that has almost no overlap with what I do, but pre-pandemic they'd fly me out for a couple of days every year to wander around and drop in on their folks as well as give a little talk.  They seem to value it, but I'm the one who probably benefits the most.   In a few of these companies internal measures of creativity dropped during the pandemic.  Perhaps those semi-random face to face interactions are very important.  It's possible, but difficult, to recreate some of that online despite what Meta would try and tell you:-)

 

Of course there's a bit of speculation here and what works for one person may not for someone else. Major creative moments are rare, but at least we can make the smaller ones more likely.  And hopefully blending these moments of creativity with a background of expertise can be useful. 

 

I wish I could have kept the wooden box.  It was beautifully made. But its content made a big impression.