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.

More Borgstromancy

More of the informal work of Jenna K. Moran, taken from this rpg.net thread.

The phone call is coming from *inside the house!*

The butler did it.
. . . well, the butler, and Cthulhu.
Cthulhu did most of the butchery.
But the butler let him in.
And held his knife.
And dusted him off afterwards
To help him disguise himself as the Christmas Tree.

He’s actually . . . Luke’s *father*.
But more astonishingly
Luke is *his*.
In episode three Luke warps too fast around the sun
Due to a problem with communication
And winds up in the past.
He builds two robots
And saves some whales
And has sex.
That’s why almost a quarter of his genes are an exact match with his own.
Remember, kids!
Midichlorians measure inbreeding!

The Iron Giant is friendly.
He loves people.
In fact, he loves them too much.
Just like Big Bird.

The owls are not what they seem.
They are luxury sedans with smooth, precise shifting,
High engine rev,
And dynamic performance.
See?
It’s a funky show.

Star Trek is based on the true story
Of Rasputin
And his faithful half-Vulcan companion,
Ivan.

What is the Matrix?
A tissue of false fate
Woven in the Wyld.

Sing, oh muse, of the wrath of Achilles
Sing, oh muse, of the birth of Ganesha
And of Iron John
And of that place
East of the sun, west of the moon.
And of all the old stories
Told by the Wyld
Before they were e’er told by men.

Superman comes back to life
Again
Later on.
Only now,
He’s radioactive.

The Bed of Procrustes

It’s time for another “Favorite Words” – something I haven’t done in quite a while. And I’ll combine it with “Useful Aphorisms”

This is more of a phrase than a word per se, although the adjective Procrustean will do just fine in a pinch.

Wikipedia actually has a good article on the phrase’s mythological origins and some of its uses here. Long story short: it signifies enforced conformity by referring to a famous host/bandit who invited travelers to stay the night and then trapped them on an iron bed; if they were too short for the bed, they were stretched until they fit, and if too long the excess was chopped off.

To be “normal” is a splendid ideal for the unsuccessful, for all those who have not yet found an adaption. But for people who have far more ability than the average, for whom it was never hard to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work–for them restriction to the normal signifies the bed of Procrustes, unbearable boredom, infernal sterility and hopelessness. As a consequence there are many people who become neurotic because they are only normal, as there are people who are neurotic because they cannot become normal. For the former, the very thought that you want to educate them to normality is a nightmare; their deepest need is really to be able to lead “abnormal” lives.

- Carl Jung, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul”

The Purpose of Power is Power

You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, educating, and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price for maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.

- from “Muad’Dib, The Religious Issues” by the Princess Irulan

- Frank Herbert, “Dune”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the nature of power. What it’s good for, what its limits are.

It’s increasingly clear to me that power, used in ways that are not compatible with the maintenance and continued existence of that power, tends to expend itself. Power that persists usually concerns itself with itself and its perpetuation. But there are inherent trade-offs that cannot be avoided.

Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the path to slavery.

- Frank Herbert

What is power to be used for? What goal is the end to which power is the means? Those who have purposes for their power will sometimes find that purpose in conflict with the perpetuation and increase of the power itself, and so must choose. Those whose purposes include the use of power in a certain way will face even more conflicts and more choices. But those who seek power only for the purpose of possessing and exercising power will not be conflicted, and will be forced to no difficult choices.

Maintaining a democratic system and keeping it functionally in touch with reality is an example of having standards for the use of power. Demagogues and popular tyrants – the most obvious threats to any democracy – are examples of seeking power for power’s sake.

I don’t think this is a conflict we can win.

Treating the Weapon

The man known as Paracelsus (see also Wikipedia’s entry) was unpopular and vilified in his day. But roughly thirty years after his death, his beliefs were taken up by those who wished to overturn Galenic physics, and so he ended up becoming highly influential and seriously affecting the development of medicine.

Many of his ideas are now recognizable as being worthwhile, although many are absurd, obvious superstitions. It’s worth crediting Parcelsus for what he got right, given that he represented a serious break with the worst elements of medieval thought, but his views were far from a modern understanding.

One of his more peculiar ideas was that injuries caused by weapons were best treated by ministering to the weapon responsible – or, if that were unavailable, to a stick coated in the blood of the injured person. The weapon (or stick) was rubbed with various ointments, wrapped in clean linens, and put away in a warm, dry place. To keep the weapon from spoiling.

No, really.

What is extraordinary about this belief was how long it was adhered to. I recall reading about how advocates of this method kept pestering the rebels in the American Revolution to treat gunshot injuries this way – particularly how one man claimed he had done a careful comparison of standard treatments and Paracelsus’, and found that weapon treatment was superior.

Thing is, he was right. What he didn’t realize was that treating the weapon was absolutely useless. It had no effect. It did nothing – except displace the normal treatments. The standard responses to such injuries were actually worse than doing nothing.

This highlights the importance of always keeping a control group when evaluating a method of doing something. If you don’t know what doing nothing looks like, you can’t judge what effect doing anything else has – including whatever it is that you want to test.

There’s a saying that resulted from this:

Treat the wound, not the weapon.

there should be another:

Test your assumptions, not your hypotheses.

Testing your hypotheses is important, but it can’t be done until your basic assumptions are validated.

The Accidental Discovery of Ambroise Paré

In the sixteenth century, exciting new advances in technology led to horrifying developments in warfare. For the first time, physicians were forced to confront injuries caused by bullets and shrapnel. Not themselves, of course – surgery and the treatment of wounds were beneath the dignity of physicians, who hired surgeons to deal with such butchery.

In the 1500s it was commonly believed that gunshot wounds were poisoned. We now recognize that high-velocity projectiles often carry foreign matter into a wound and contaminate it, leading to infection and possibly gangrene. Several hundred years before the germ theory of disease was widely adopted, however, everyone was completely ignorant of the nature of infection. Since bullet wounds were ‘poisoned’, they of course had to be cauterized with oil. Burning-hot oil.

During the Siege of Turin, 1537, a young barber-surgeon named Ambroise Paré was overwhelmed by a flood of casualties, so much so that he ran out of oil for cauterization. In desperation, he made a mixture of egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine, applied this concoction to the patients, dressed them with clean bandages, then left them for the night. Upon returning next morning, he observed that the patients so treated hadn’t succumbed to sepsis as he feared and were doing well, while the cauterized patients were in agony. Curious, he observed the progression of healing and noted that the non-cauterized patients not only were in significantly less pain but actually healed faster than those scaled by hot oil.

Shocked, he realized that his duty was not simply to provide treatment but to minimize or avoid suffering, and that the standard therapy that everyone used was both tortuous and inferior to simpler methods. His findings were not warmly received by physicians and surgeons at the time, and although his work was well-appreciated by both the military and the monarchy it was rejected for decades by the medical establishment.

Paré went on to challenge many of the surgical dogmas of the time, and although he was often ridiculed for his positions, we recognize them today as obvious. He was the first person to refrain from castrating men who needed surgery for hernias, for example – the belief at the time that eunuchs did not develop hernias was a simple superstition. More generally, he did not resort to surgery unless he felt it was absolutely necessary – a major break with the attitudes of his time. Sadly, the modern era has reverted back to the attitudes of Paré’s contemporaries in some ways.

His most famous saying, which despite being reduced to a cliché through overuse remains in frequent use today, is

I dressed the would, but God healed it.

The theism implicit in the saying is outmoded, but in the real world, humility never goes out of style.

Progress

A reasonable starting point for a discussion of the many-body problem might be the question of how many bodies are required before we have a problem. Prof. G.E. Brown has pointed out that, for those interested in exact solutions, this can be answered by a look at history. In eighteenth-century Newtonian mechanics, the three-body problem was insoluble. With the birth of general relativity around 1910, and quantum electrodynamics around 1930, the two- and one-body problems became insoluble. And with modern quantum field theory, the problem of zero bodies (vacuum) is insoluble. So, if we are out after exact solutions, no bodies at all is already too many.

- Richard Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams and the Many-Body Problem

Pretty Standard, Really

Thanks to The Agitator’s Radley Balko, who directed my attention to this particular story.

Take a look at this: Oncologist Defends His Work at a V.A. Hospital.

It would be nice to say that this sort of thing were an uncommon aberration in the medical treatment of veterans. It would be even nicer to say that it’s an aberration in medical treatment in general. Unfortunately, no one even loosely familiar with the practice of medicine in this country could honestly express either of those sentiments. This sort of thing happens pretty constantly.

Physicians don’t want to ruin the careers of other physicians. They know that they will make all sorts of stupid errors themselves, and statistically every doctor kills at least one patient in their career. Not loses one patient. The death will occur directly from physician error.

There is an old saying: “The innocent love justice, while the guilty love mercy”.

Doctors just love mercy. Unfortunately, their unwillingness to censure others means that even physicians who are acting grossly irresponsibly are not confronted or stopped, patients are not told about major ‘errors’ even when they’ve been repeated over and over and clearly are not due simply to chance or a fluke of performance, and it takes a monumental effort to stop doctors from maiming and killing.

Things You Know That Ain’t So

It’s not the things you don’t know that get you, but the things you know that ain’t so. – Attributed to Samuel Clemens

There are many situations in which we don’t care so much about the total overall accuracy of a source or a process, but want to specifically find their errors. Usually it’s because we want to correct the errors or avoid them in the future ourselves.

In such cases, I’ve generally found that the most effective way to do this isn’t to closely examine the topics and conceptual places that get lots of attention from others. Even slight uncertainties will probably have been noted and fiercely debated already. Instead, it’s more productive to take a look at the places few people think are worth examining, or that have been wrongly passed over as already-known, because that’s where uncaught errors will accumulate.

When I started investigating medical errors and issues, I expected that I’d find mistakes and some uncertain grey areas that should probably be looked at again. What I actually found was that there were countless obvious problems that few people bother looking at once, much less twice.

I’ll be discussing these issues, some of which are resolved but whose implications are not acknowledged, some of which still occur, in the near future.