Easier said than done

Epictetus wrote:

15. Remember, you must behave as you do at a banquet. Something is passed around and comes to you: reach out your hand politely and take some. It goes by: do not hold it back. It has not arrived yet: do not stretch your desire out toward it, but wait until it comes to you. In the same way toward your children, in the same way toward your wife, in the same way toward public office, in the same way toward wealth, and you will be fit to share a banquet with the gods.

I am thinking about friends who are far away and I am not a very good Stoic.

Near the beginning of The Port-Royal Logic there is a brief and somewhat odd discussion of the Pyrrhonists and the Academics, and I guess Michel de Montaigne:

We may indeed easily say outwardly with the lips that we doubt of all these things, because it is possible for us to lie ; but we cannot say this in our hearts. Thus Pyrrhonism is not a sect composed of men who are persuaded of what they say, but a sect of liars. Hence they often contradict themselves in uttering their opinion, since it is impossible for their hearts to agree with their language. We see this in Montaigne, who attempted to revive this sect in the last century ; for, after having said that the Academics were different from the Pyrrhonists, inasmuch as the Academics maintained that some things were more probable than others, which the Pyrrhonists would not allow, he declares himself on the side of the Pyrrhonists in the following terms : “The opinion,” says he, “of the Pyrrhonists is bolder, and much more probable.” There are, therefore, some things which are more probable than others. Nor was it for the sake of effect that he spoke thus : these are words which escaped him without thinking of them, springing from the depths of nature, which no illusion of opinions can destroy.

Antoine Arnauld, Pierre Nicole, The Port-Royal Logic, 1662, translated by Thomas Spencer Baines, 1861.

I love the last sentence here: “And don't you try to get out of it by claiming a sense of humor, either.” To me it hardly seems probable that Montaigne was not just saying that for effect. It's too perfect.

Stoicism, Christianity, and Mother Goose

I read the Handbook of Epictetus. It's very brief, just a few pages really. I'll quote a few paragraphs that should make it clear what Stoicism is about. (I'm quoting a recent translation by Nicholas P. White which I really like. The translations I found on the Web seem stilted, or florid, by comparison; though Higginson isn't bad. Of course you can try the original Greek.)

Some things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions—in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, or our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing. (1.)

You are foolish if you want your children and your wife and your friends to live forever, since you are wanting things to be up to you that are not up to you, and things to be yours that are not yours. (14.)

If you are fond of a jug, say “I am fond of a jug!” For then when it is broken you will not be upset. If you kiss your child or your wife, say that you are kissing a human being; for when it dies you will not be upset. (3.)

Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. (8.)

The best of it is extremely well said, but the content is troublesome. If the sample above does not convince you that you should prepare yourself to be unperturbed when your wife and children die, then the rest won't either. Still, given that you're reading this, something of Stoicism is very likely in you. It's in Western culture.

I guess none of the quotes I picked addresses the evident problem of whether a Stoic may act, or whether he must be distant and docile at all times. The Handbook doesn't seem to offer a head-on answer. Modern Christianity's interpretation of Stoicism does, though.

God, grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

the courage to change the things I can;

and the wisdom to know the difference.

—Reinhold Niebuhr, around 1944.

The wisdom, that is, to know what is up to us and what is not up to us. It is exactly this wisdom that is on offer in Epictetus: nothing is up to us except how we see things and how we comport ourselves. I think I like the modern Christian philosophy, demanding as it is of courage and wisdom, better. But then, I tend to like messy, perilous things in principle even when they are not so enjoyable in practice.

The Wikipedia article on the serenity prayer offers this lovely postscript. I have no idea why this rhyme is not a widely-known classic.

The philosopher W.W. Bartley juxtaposes Niebuhr's prayer with a Mother Goose rhyme (1695) expressing a similar sentiment, but without comment:

For every ailment under the sun

There is a remedy, or there is none;

If there be one, try to find it;

If there be none, never mind it.

Crowd vs. Committee

I just found this in an old notebook. Apparently I wrote it a couple years ago. Most of it seems to make more sense to me now.

Wisdom of Crowds	Design by Committee
Both: Participants may be biased.
Bias averages out	Bias creates “riders”
Not much work	Lots of work
No consensus required	Seeks consensus. Decisions may be postponed to avoid stirring up trouble.
Minority (“special”) interests can be publicised but are often ignored	Minority interests are not ignored
No experts—skepticism (Presumption is that a random individual is not an expert.)	All experts—openness
Lossy, mass communication (of arguments, etc.)	Tedious explicit communication
Both: No overarching design or uniting vision.
Nobody cares	Possibly competing visions
Simple output.	Unbounded complexity in output.
Immediate feedback.	Long-term, invisible feedback.
Individuals have low individual impact.	Individuals are influential.
Neglecting the topic somehow doesn't matter.	Neglect causes warts (that is, areas where the design is painfully bad —ed.)
Product needn't be understood (markets)	Product is ideas.
Mechanism for approaching a good result exists (market; averaging)	Democracy (voting) and consensus are the only such mechanisms.
Interfaces are well-defined before work starts (ballot; prices)	Interfaces have to be designed.
Individuals can't introduce bureaucracy	Individuals sometimes manage to introduce bureaucracy

This week I learned...

• A shibboleth is language that sends cultural signals beyond its plain meaning. The word comes from a fairly amazing Bible story.

  Now I want a word for language invented to annoy, like “Democrat Party”.

• Aristotle believed slavery to be “expedient and right”. All the best arguments by learned apologists for slavery in the U.S. South were from his writings, particularly in the Politics.

• Incidentally, Aristotle thought democracy was a crummy form of government. And, in his ideal society, homeschooling would be banned.

• There are expressions of the Golden Rule in the scriptures of many religions.

• I don't understand what this means, exactly, but the x86 instruction set contains an FNOP instruction. The manual describes it as a floating-point no-operation instruction. How this might be different from a regular NOP I don't know.

• So there's a widely known interview question: write a function to count the number of bits of a 32-bit int that are set to 1. This function is called the population count—that link describes a surprising use for it.

  The last time I tested this, summing 4 queries into a 256-value lookup table is fastest for 32-bit integers, faster than the awesomely clever bit-twiddling solution. I shouldn't have been surprised. The lookup table fits easily into cache. The bit-twiddling solution has a lot of dependencies; the CPU can't find any instruction-level parallelism there.

  Anyway, what I learned a week or two ago is that future Intel chips will have an SSE instruction, POPCNT, that does this, in parallel, for several words at a time. (Someone I mentioned this to commented that he doesn't want to be fired for pronouncing that.)

• Often when I write these blog entries, I'm still unsure of the significance of some of the things I've just learned. For example, I learned something about Java monitors (or pthreads condition variables, which are the same thing). When thread 1 notifies, waking thread 2 on a separate CPU, the lock associated with the monitor ensures that CPU 1's writes are flushed to main memory and CPU 2 sees them before thread 2 starts running. There's no need for write-barrier magic in Object.notify itself.

• Apple's Shark profiler has a feature that lets you compare two profiles. But the result is calculated by comparing percentages, not comparing the absolute number of samples. So, for my purposes, useless.

• The .mshark files produced by Shark are gzipped binary property lists, but the actual samples are stored in there as raw binary data which I haven't tried to decipher.

Neurology on the edge

Benjamin Libet conducted this experiment in the 1970s. Apart from one or two electrodes on the scalp, there's really nothing creepy about the experiment. Until you read about the results.

Libet asked his experimental subjects to move one hand at an arbitrary moment decided by them, and to report when they made the decision (they timed the decision by noticing the position of a dot circling a clock face). At the same time the electrical activity of their brain was monitored. Now it had already been established by much earlier research that consciously-chosen actions are preceded by a pattern of activity known as a Readiness Potential (or RP). The surprising result was that the reported time of each decision was consistently a short period (some tenths of a second) after the RP appeared.

—from “Pre-empted decisions”, a page on Conscious Entities

The RP starts to ramp up as much as 0.3 seconds before the reported decision time. It continues to increase after that, leading up to actual hand movement about 0.2 seconds later.

What does this mean? All the test subjects, of course, felt they had consciously chosen to move. But if unconscious brain activity precedes the conscious experience of decision-making, then surely we must conclude that the decision is not consciously made. Effects don't precede causes.

Now there are countless philosophical objections to this conclusion. Some philosophers claim that to interpret this result at all competently, you have to be well-versed in the philosophy of the mind. Which seems reasonable enough, but it's a deep field with centuries of literature in many languages. So this prerequisite rules out anyone who has spent his life studying anything as patently irrelevant as mere neurology. To say nothing of random bloggers.

I'll wade in anyway, of course. Just don't get the impression I know anything about this subject. I don't.

There's a really nice, compelling interpretation that permits free will. It goes like this. The way the mind interprets time is anything but objective. In the Libet experiment, what's happening is that the mind shifts the experience of deciding to move forward in time and shifts the experience of motion backward in time, effectively bringing them closer together. So the conscious decision to act actually does cause the RP ramp-up. But the subject incorrectly reports the decision as having happened later, because his brain has deceived him about the timing.

Why would the brain do this? It seems likely to me that there's an evolutionary benefit to perceiving decision, action, and effect as a single event. I don't think we're equipped to deal with that kind of time lag consciously. Just think—there's a half-second lag between when you decide to move a muscle and when it moves. Have you ever played the piano? If you were aware of this lag all the time, could you do that? Could you run? Could you fight?

An article, “Free Will and Free Won't” (in American Scientist; $12 to download the PDF from their site), puts the Libet experiment alongside four or five other rather clever experiments into will and consciousness. Then it starts talking about alien hand syndrome. The brain is strange.