To fully define the movement of an object, you need six numbers. All movement is a combination of ALONG an axis (translation) and ABOUT an axis (rotation). An object can move in any of three dimensions, and can rotate about any of three axes. Together these are known as degrees of freedom.

But movement, speed, velocity, rotation – they’re not fixed quantities. They’re a description of something in relation to its surroundings. If I throw a baseball 90 mph, it’s only moving 90 mph with respect to the ground, which has the good manners to appear static. In actuality, the ground is moving thousands of kilometers per hour – the earth is spinning on its axis, rotating about the sun, and moving through the galactic plane all at the same time. Not to mention the motion of the very galaxy itself, which is simultaneously rotating and moving away from the big bang. But since we’re moving at the exact same speed along with the ground, it appears perfectly still.

When you impart a translation to an object, it’s distributed about the object equally. Split a baseball moving at 90mph in half, and each piece will now be moving 90 mph in the exact same direction, no matter which way you chop it. Rotation, on the other hand, is different. If your cut is perpendicular to the axis of rotation, there is no change. But if it’s even slightly askew, if there’s any component of it that’s along another axis, the pieces will each have their own unique rotation. Rotation describes movement about an axis, but that axis, unlike translation, is dependent on the structure of the object itself.

If you abstracted an object down to a series of points with connections between them, the individual points would have no rotation, just a combination of translations and accelerations. Adding the translations and accelerations of all the points together would produce a resultant translation and rotation. Movement, then, is a combination of an object’s relationship with it’s environment and it’s relationship with itself.

Even in our most basic interpretation of how the world works, the subject/object duality rears its head.

Earlier this evening I had a conversation with my girlfriend about something she’s studying in college. When mentioning what the subject was, she left out a critical word so I was unable to understand what the hell she was talking about. The conversation quickly switched tacks to whether she had, in fact, left the word out or not. I insisted that she hadn’t said it, she insisted (equally insistently) that she HAD in fact said it, and I simply didn’t hear it.

Unfortunately as we are not perfect Bayesians, we refused to follow Aumann’s Agreement theorem and were unable to come to a common decision – we were forced to agree to disagree. In lieu of laying out the he-said-she-said, I will cut to what I will charitably call the interesting part:

Me: Ok, it’s certainly possible that I didn’t hear you say the word, but it seems just as likely that you left the word out – there’s no prior reason to expect me to have made the error. On the other hand, this is something that happens to you ALL the time – you frequently continue a conversation in your head without speaking the words you’re thinking. Given that, isn’t it much more likely that YOU forgot to say the word?

Her: Yes, but I KNOW I said it!

-fin

The interesting part is that knowing it was much more likely she made the error wasn’t enough to override her intuition. She was positive that she said it, and nothing could sway her. Our intuitions are POWERFUL, and the mind isn’t set up for logic to override them, no matter how bullet proof it is. This is something worth keeping in mind – no matter how rigorous your chain of logic, no matter how meticulously you lay out the argument for evolution or against free will, you’re not going to convince anyone that hasn’t learned to question their gut reactions.

[Special bonus paragraph: I have strong intuitions that my judgment about things is generally unreliable. If I choose to trust this intuition, then I should immediately ignore it. But if I choose to ignore it, that means I've trusted it. An Epimenides paradox lurking in my own brain!]

Until the development of writing (which is only a few thousand years old) speaking would have been the primary method of transferring information among groups of people. As I’ve mentioned before, the human brain has enormous sections devoted to nothing but language processing. We’re capable of recognizing thousands of different words, of speaking many different languages, of picking out speech from a sea of noise. In a sea of good-enough mental modules, language processing is one of the few things that really does work amazingly well.

It works so well, in fact, that we’re capable of pulling out a large amount of information beyond just the spoken words. We recognize tone, pitch, emotion, inflection – we pick up on the subtlest nuances and use them to assist our judgments. We’re noticeably handicapped when these are absent – part of the skill of writing is choosing words that add back in the information lost due to them not being spoken.

Speech patterns also seem to be strongly used as in-group identifiers. We prefer those we can communicate easily with, and don’t wish to associate with those who sound sufficiently different. Strong accents have a negative effect on employability, and a negative effect on perceived guilt during court proceedings. Blacks with noticeable speech patterns earn 12% less than whites OR blacks without noticeable speech patterns and with similar levels of skill. And I myself have noticed that I’m much more cognizant of a person’s speech patterns than other, more obvious differences such as skin color and gender.

It seems possible that inter-group conflicts are the product of a language barrier, not of a racial, religious, or economic one. A quick bit of googling reveals at least some evidence though it’s mostly of the sort of language being an additional cause, rather than the primary one. Language plays such a fundamental role in our thought processes that this seems to be an area ripe for insight.

Prospect theory is a psychological/economic theory created to describe people’s decision-making process. It can be simplified in one delightful bit of alliteration – Losses Loom Large. Though it manifests in different ways, people tend to biased against events where there is a possible loss, and tend to favor out comes that are certain. For example, when offered a choice between getting 50 dollars or a 50% chance of 120 dollars and a 50% chance of nothing, people will almost always pick the certain $50, despite the fact that the second has a higher expected value ($60).

This, of course, isn’t rational. Big deal – nothing in our brain is. At least, it’s not rational if you consider it by itself, in carefully controlled experiments. But consider the effects when this works in concert with the rest of the brain. For instance, another well known and rather pernicious bias is the overconfidence effect. A variety of studies have shown that people GREATLY overestimate their own judgment – from more than 50% of drivers asserting that they are above average in driving skill, to people’s answers that they rate as ‘99% certain’ actually being correct only 40% of the time. Overconfidence about losses and gains, combined with our bias towards optimism, would mean that actual gains would likely be much smaller than what we predict and actual losses would be much worse. And in the evolutionary environment ‘much worse’ means that a tiger eats you – losses would, in fact, loom large. So prospect theory and overconfidence/optimism bias would dovetail nicely into a crude approximation of a rational judgment (a few thousand years ago at least – it’s much less suited for the modern era)

I am not sure if this is actually how the brain works. But the larger point is that the brain is akin to an enormous rube-goldberg device – it’s made out of a motley assemblage of bits and pieces, but it does get the job done. We’re here at the top of the food chain. Our irrationalities can’t be corrected one by one, and our thought processes can’t be optimized on a case by case basis. If you want to improve your brain, you need a larger blueprint to go by.

An opinion, like anything else you might have, has benefits and costs. The benefits are obvious: they help us carve up the world into manageable chunks, and provide a foundation to build further knowledge on. Forming opinions/beliefs/interpretations is essential to effectively navigating the world.

But what often goes ignored are the costs of having an opinion. And they can be steep. For one, the design of our brain and it’s many heuristics (availability, anchoring, certainty, confirmation) means that once something goes into our mind, it burrows in deep, and is difficult to root out. The difficulties of changing an opinion mean you’ll be less likely to properly incorporate new evidence that contradicts your belief (you may even end up more certain than you were before). What we think is who we are – we can easily fuck ourselves up if our opinions are poorly formed.

It’s hard work having an opinion. If you want it to be good, one, you have to keep it current, staying abreast of the latest news that might effect it. If you think Obama is ruining the country, you need to be informed of how he’s ruining healthcare, the war in Iraq, and the economy on a week-by-week basis.(Full disclosure – I do not think Obama is ruining the country).

It’s also STRESSFUL having opinions. An opinion, in large or small part, becomes a piece of your identity. An attack on it gets interpreted as an attack on you. Opinions are, inevitably, a breeding ground for conflict – having one means keeping your fight or flight instinct on high alert, being ready to defend it at a moments notice.

Ultimately, having an opinion is a lot like having a kid. Whether it was carefully planned or on accident, you now have something you need to take with you everywhere, keeping it fed, nurtured, and making sure no harm befalls it. As such, treat it like one – carefully plan all the options instead of jumping in headfirst without thinking it through. The results, for better or worse, will stick with you for quite some time.

Believe it or not, I try very hard to avoid waxing about topics I don’t know anything about. The fact that I do it so often goes to show how difficult that actually is. It’s our lot to be convinced of our certainty, information be damned.

But I’ve noticed that certainty tends to correlate with a certain amount of knowledge. If we know absolutely nothing about a topic, we don’t form an opinion on it – there’s not enough information for an opinion to crystallize around. You won’t see me writing strongly worded posts on quantum computing or the lifespan of main sequence stars, as my knowledge on them extends very little past “awareness of their existence”. And if we’re well versed in a topic, we know exactly what makes certain things difficult or impossible to answer, we know the limits of the state of the art, and we know the myriad factors that must be taken into account to get any sort of result. Ask me how much load can be applied to a building before it will collapse, and I will proceed to rattle of a dozen or so reasons why it’s impossible to do so.

But between those points, between “just above zero” and “well-informed” lies a vast space of half-right thoughts, confused premises, and over-simplifications. This is the realm of the dilettante. This is the knowledge danger zone.

The knowledge danger zone is where our certainty heuristic kicks in, whispering suggestively that watching MSNBC every day makes us a financial expert, or that reading the newspaper gives us a firm understanding of the political landscape. And the danger zone really is enormous – it doesn’t take much information to make us think we know all about something – it can be as little as a campaign commercial, or a fact half remembered from high school, or a story heard second or third hand. And it takes quite a bit before we begin to realize how complex a topic really is. So for the vast majority of subjects, unfortunately, this is where we live.

This is where it becomes important to articulate exactly what it is you know, and how you know it. To do your best to trace out the line of reasoning that generated the opinion you find yourself voicing. You will likely end up surprised-slash-appalled. Finding yourself saying “I think the economy is definitely going to recover because a television host said so” is a great step towards reconsidering the strength of your convictions.

Remember: Qualify your statements. Rein in your certainty heuristic. You have nothing intelligent to say about the vast, VAST majority of subjects.

First things first, the results.

If you count this post and yesterdays (something I initially wasn’t planning on doing) I wrote 20 posts, 4 short of my goal. However, I also slept for 9 of the 24 hours of the challenge. I suspect had I timed my sleep schedule a bit better, I may have been able to do all 24.

The most striking part of the experiment was how mentally draining even writing a 300 word post is. I found myself struggling and needing to take breaks after writing just 3 in a row. At the end, I realized I wouldn’t finish when I was simply unable to write anything at all. The only reason I’m able to write this is it’s merely a recounting of experience (and even then, I am having trouble with it). I’ve dodged the more difficult aspects of writing so far with this blog project, but it’s clearly very grueling when done in large volumes. I am skeptical at being able to complete an entire novel in a month, but I will try nevertheless.

I’m finding it difficult to articulately describe my mental decline (though that may be because I am still in the throes of it). Some aspects are obvious – frequently substituting incorrect words (ie: live for life, difficulties for difficulty, etc), being unable to summon the correct word (right now I cannot for the life of me remember the word that means ‘brilliance’, but related to mental function), or simply having nothing to say. But the exact mechanism, likely buried somewhere deeply in my subconscious, escapes me. It’s as if, in addition to the more obvious declines, I had a limited supply of insightful things to say, and I used them up much quicker than I expected. It’s ALSO as if I have a filter to prevent me from putting down godawful writing that wears out much quicker than expected. (Hence the quality of this post).

Even with stopping short of my goal, I would consider these some of my weaker posts. Some may be thrown out, or at least heavily revised. Still, I’m glad I made the attempt – I learned a bit about the limits I can push myself to (they are not as far as I would like). We return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow – thank you for your patience.

Next month, for those not aware, is National Novel Writing Month. I am not interested in writing novels. What I am interested in though, is improving my writing. And as I’ve yet to produce anything of substantial length, placing myself under the constraint to write an entire novel in a month, having to churn out pages and pages of material a day, will serve as excellent practice. As such, I will be participating. If the end result meets my rubric of publishability – if I deem it worth reading – I shall find a home for it on this site. If it doesn’t (and I strongly suspect it won’t) I may put it up anyway with a strongly worded message of caution, or I may let it stagnate on my hard drive.

However, my schedule is already fairly tightly packed – preparing for grad school, reading, and this blog consume the vast majority of my free time. So I was unsure how I would find the time to write 10+ pages a day. Ultimately, I decided to solve the problem by forcing myself to operate under ANOTHER constraint – I will write 24 blog posts in the next 24 hours, and use them for the month of November while I tear my hair out trying to write a book. I promise none of them will be as navel-gazing as this one turned out to be – no “post 17 omg this is so hard I dunno if I can make it!” They will bear the official stamp of Hegemonicon quality, whatever it may represent.

Consider this and the next post (Saturday’s, where I reveal the results of my little experiment) the bookends to those 24 posts. It’s certain to be unpleasant. But the more unpleasant it is, the more I’m likely to learn. Pushing myself closer to the edge is important because the edge is where the growing takes place.

If you are like me (and if you are reading this blog, you are – my condolences) you frequently find yourself unable to express your beliefs effectively. (By beliefs here I am referring to any knowledge or interpretation of knowledge that exists in your brain.) Someone says something fundamentally misguided, but when you go to disagree with them, you find it difficult to summon the actual reasons behind your disagreement. We get the result of them – a strong reaction to a perceived falsity – but the actual beliefs don’t become available. And so we stumble through a murky chain of reasoning, frustrated that we can’t convey what we know is an open-and-shut fact.

Part of the fault lies with our brain design. The conscious mind doesn’t seem to be in the business of making decisions. Rather, it’s job is to interpret, explain, and learn from decisions that have already been made. The most famous illustration of this are the Benjamin Libet experiments, which I’ve mentioned before. In them subjects pressed a button, and reported the moment they decided to press a button. The subjects showed that subconscious activation of the pressing precedes conscious activation – decisions bubble up to the conscious, not filter down from it. The same thing happens when you put your hand on a hot stove – a low-level ’switch’ moves your arm before you even become aware that there’s a problem. For whatever reason (possibly an attempt to create a believable chain of cause and effect) your brain reinterprets this as a conscious decision. But really the decision had already been made.

As if that weren’t enough, the explanation-machinery is so insistent that there must be a reason for things that if one isn’t supplied (say because the proper memories can’t be retrieved) then it has the tendency to make one up. So instead of patiently searching for the right reasons for our beliefs, the brain scrambles for the first semi-plausible explanation it comes across. Instead of trying to make sure our emotions properly fit the facts, we work backwards, looking for facts that line up with our emotions. Unless you’ve carefully researched and rehearsed your topic, unless you know it so well that it’s become a second nature to you, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to explain it on demand – even if the proper facts are sitting right there in your brain.

It’s this simple fact that I believe underlies the vast majority of arguments. If you and everyone else could perfectly articulate your beliefs and your reasons for holding them, you’d simply be able to lay out all the information and everyone would arrive at the same decision. This, essentially, is what Aumann’s agreement theorem states – that two perfectly rational people cannot agree to disagree, they must converge on a common answer. Unfortunately, we’re not perfectly rational – most of the time we’re simply taking out subconscious’s word for it.

The first mover advantage is the well-known effect where the first company to occupy a particular market is able to gain a significant advantage, as they are able to sell and improve their product while competitors scramble to put out a similar offering. Companies spend billions of dollars on research and development attempting to create new products and capitalize new markets. The more difficult something is to create, the longer it will take competitors to catch up. 90% of success, as they say, is just showing up.

This, however, doesn’t always work. A second mover can gain a significant advantage by simply waiting to see what the first mover does. It doesn’t have to spend all those R&D dollars developing new methods or tracing false leads – it gains the benefit of the first movers’ mistakes without the expense of making them. If you’re walking through the jungle, it’s much easier to be second in line than to be the one carving the trail.

Of course, without a first-mover advantage there’s little incentive for innovation. The patent system is designed to protect this with what amounts to a guaranteed first mover advantage that exists for 17 years. Copyright and intellectual property have the same purpose (though I can’t quite fathom the reasoning behind the length of their terms). These are needed for areas where it DOESN’T take a long time to catch up, where once a thing has been created it becomes trivial to create it again.

Which things, then, are simple to re-create, and which are difficult? The ones that are simple are the ones that can be fairly easily be broken down into constituent parts. If you’ve invented a new kind of sprocket, it’s fairly trivial to break it apart and see what makes it tick. The same thing goes for a song or a piece of software. The ones that are difficult are the ones that cannot be broken down into it’s constituent parts. The ones where the advantage lies in the process, not in the product.

If you’re selling a product, it can always be reverse-engineered and then built in China for cheaper. A process, however, is much more difficult to unravel – the creators themselves may not know exactly how it functions, enough to recreate it from scratch at least. Things are always some combination of product and process, but the more integral the process becomes, the harder it is to shake you from your position. Top companies, it seems – the Googles, the Apples – make process such an important part of their product development that they essentially become uncopyable.

It’s trivial to recreate product. It’s hard to recreate process. Don’t focus on what you’ve made – focus on what you’re able to make.