Stargate: Universe

As you may have gathered by now, I’m a great fan of the Stargate franchise. Its mixture of tongue-in-cheek action, applied ethics, and heroic adventure is fantastically fun, as long as it’s not taken too seriously.

I’m not a fan of SG-1’s successor series, Stargate: Atlantis, for a variety of reasons and despite its having some truly entertaining characters. Its writing team just couldn’t manage to create a balanced ensemble cast and properly integrate the discovery of Ancient technology into their plots; they had no long-term planning, and their primary villains were just silly. (The Wraith are the worst thing to happen to the franchise in a very long time, IMO.) Several cast members were reduced to secondary support roles, and more obnoxiously, their character concepts were never developed to any real degree or even discarded altogether.

But I had high hopes that things would turn around with SGU, and the first episode (especially the third part of it) had enough meat to it that I was encouraged. Since then, the show has basically failed to deliver. It’s been far too much like a soap opera for my tastes – character flaws are fine, but the constant harping on sex and fan-service-for-guys is annoying. There really are no strong, well-developed female characters despite having lots of interesting guys. And Chloe still doesn’t seem to have a purpose either in her own person or as a character on the Destiny – in every episode, she’s either moped or gotten weepy, and the one time she was ever useful was briefly assisting with first-aid in the middle of a montage.

Now, the first seasons of science-fiction shows are often very rough. SG-1 in particular had a difficult first season, with the writers and characters eventually finding their voices as time passed. I’m hoping that the first six episodes were an extended pilot of sorts for SGU and that things will pick up. But if it doesn’t, and the show becomes another Atlantis, I’m going to leave. I never hated SGA – I just cared less and less about the show until it wasn’t worth the bother to tune in. But there are elements in SGU that I’m beginning to actively dislike.

Telford’s Query

Stargate: Universe fan-spec ahead. Regular readers might not want to bother.

Everyone is rushing to hate on Col. Telford, with the last scene of the previous episode vaguely implying that he’s either going to seduce Young’s wife while pretending to be him, or blackmailing her somehow.

But there are other possible alternatives. For example:

“Mrs. Young, were you aware that I’m HIV-positive?”

Beautiful

The Elder Sign

Presented without comment:

Elder Sign Ad

Useful Aphorisms

“Quantity has a quality all its own.”
- Joseph Stalin

“If you don’t control your mind, someone else will.”
- John Allston

Pound of Feathers, Pound of Gold

Which weighs more: a pound of feathers, or a pound of gold?

Close consideration of this riddle – and the conditions under which people tend to get it wrong – is helpful in understanding the limits of human rationality. It is a specific example which leads us to general principles of rationality failure.

These sorts of riddles and similar interpersonal language tricks (such as “Stupid says what?”) are especially popular among children but not among adults. Why is this the case? Partly because adults are more likely to have previously encountered and become familiar with their patterns, but there are other factors – including one very relevant one. Children tend to have less-developed capacities of impulse control.

It takes very little analysis to discover the ‘trick’ in the question; the concepts involved are relatively simple. But we’re confronted with the fact that people do answer it incorrectly, and that by manipulating aspects of the context in which the question is delivered, we can significantly increase the chance people will fall for it. What does this imply? That analysis is not being conducted in the erroneous cases, and that context is a contributing factor to whether people successfully engage in conceptual analysis. Specifically, that context determines whether people will counter their impulses long enough for analysis to be completed.

The key to these sorts of riddles is time pressure. If people feel free to take as much time as they like thinking over the question, they rarely fall for the trick. But if they’re trying to answer rapidly, they’ll screw up. Examples of situations that often result in such behavior include: competing against others to see who can be correct first, trying to demonstrate competence by investing little effort in answering, or encountering the question as part of a limited-duration examination. If several superficially-similar questions whose answer depends on retrieving facts from memory rather than performing logical analysis of the question are asked before the riddle is presented, that also tends to result in a wrong response.

The error occurs because of our weight-related associations with the concepts of ‘feathers’ and ‘gold’, our conditioned assumptions about the sorts of questions people are likely to ask, and a failure to inhibit the first impulses towards response. Feathers are far less dense than gold; any given volume of feathers will weigh far less than the same volume of the metal. Questions about a property rarely contain their own answers in a trivial way – we do not expect the defined quantities in the question to be equivalent relative to the property being asked about. And – this is the most vital aspect – it takes longer for our brains to process the question at a conceptual level than it does to activate our associations.

In the state of nature, organisms are often under intense pressure to produce results quickly. If they take too long, the resource they’re trying to exploit may be taken by a competitor – or worse, they may become exploited resources by a predator. So stimulus-response methods which produce generally-useful reactions tend to be favored over extremely accurate and precisely analysis that takes longer. As a consequence, natural modes of though available to humans favor rapid responses more than rigorous correctness – and in much the same way that the limits of our visual processing systems lead to optical illusions, which can be understood and thus constructed, the limits of our conceptual processing lead to inherent tendencies towards fallacies of reason, which can be exploited to produce riddles and language gags.

Just as other aspects of our behavioral response involve the repression of rudimentary reflexes, our thinking involves the inhibition of associational activation and reflexive reactions. The “more advanced” cognitive functions can take place only because the simpler, less resource-intensive, and faster functions are prevented from initiating responses before them.

In the wrestling match between the modern functions and the ancient ones they try to control, the more subtle and advanced features are at a distinct disadvantage. Which brings us to the next post.

Thoughts on Hospitalism

A few people have commented on the similarity between puerperal fever, the cause of which was discovered by Ignaz Semmelweis, and hospitalism.

There are certain regions of overlap between the two examples. In both cases, a great deal of suffering and death was iatrogenic – that is, caused by doctors and their treatments. And in both cases, the problem was mostly resolved once the causes were generally understood. The differences are important, however: puerperal fever was considered a normal, if very serious, risk. Hospitalism deaths were always considered to be a morbid deviation from a healthy baseline. Of greater concern is nature of the relative causes: the high incidence of puerperal fever was the result of doctors not knowing about germ theory more than any particular thing they did; although midwives were far less likely to conduct internal investigations without pressing need, a large amount of direct physical contact is pretty inevitable. Hospitalism, in contrast, did not occur in anything approaching a ‘natural’ post-birth environment. It was caused entirely by the interventions of medical professionals. Thus, every attempt to improve things made them worse instead.

Failing to prevent harm, and actively inflicting harm, are distinctly separable.

Seasonal Complications

There were complications associated with the six inches of wet, heavy snow we received last night. Given that the local arboreal landscaping has not yet lost their leaves, large amounts of snow accumulated on branches. The resulting destruction not only damaged hundreds of trees around town and caused major traffic impediments, it broke a number of power lines. Much of town is without power, and even the traffic signals are no longer functioning.

I only hope that the power is back before I return home tonight. If I can’t get my heat to function properly, my pipes could freeze – and that would be extremely bad.

Snowing

It’s snowing. October 15th, and it’s already snowing.

It’s not even Halloween yet, for crying out loud, and it’s snowing!

Anything people had left in the community garden – and there were quite a lot of squash and gourds left lying about – has probably frozen solid. Everything frost-tender has died. We had a cold, short growing season and now an early freeze – this is just terrible. I hate to think what this implies about the upcoming winter.

Priorities

Have I mentioned the webcomic “pictures for sad children” yet? It’s wonderfully horrifying. There is clearly something deeply wrong with its author, John Campbell.

start w/what you can handle