Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Race and IQ

Andrew Sullivan has re-opened the 'Race and IQ' can of worms. I would call it a debate, but it's really more like a can of worms.  The issue is that tested white folks have apparently scored a little higher than tested black people, although worse than some tested Asian peoples (after correcting as far as possible for cultural biases and test biases and so on, and on enough different occasions by different researchers that its not feasible to assert that it isn't systematic).  Bill Saletan at Slate made the same attempt a few years ago. Everyone acknowledges that the distribution is very wide in all populations, and so one way to prove you're stupid is to think a small statistical bias tells anything about a pair-wise comparison of you against Obama, for example.

The problem with 'race and IQ' research is that both race and IQ are (19-20th Century) proxies (approximations, fudge-factors) - one for genetic (and maybe epigenetic) heritage, the other for effective learning, problem solving and relative economic or social success. Intelligence is not a thing in itself - it is many faculties and the balancing and managing of them. Both are now too vague to be useful to science ('race' is especially poor*). These days you have to tie to a specific gene at the race end, or to a neurological mechanism at the other.  So race and IQ is superseded for serious science.  The fact that you can get some suggestive correlations at human scale is not interesting, except to bleary old duffers with an unacknowledged desire to honour the traditions of their ancestors, or to people designing bob-sled teams**.

* It is usual to reference the far greater genetic variation within races than between them (which is OK, but, because a few very small differences can be very powerful in physical appearance and hence other traits, it is not necessarily convincing against evidence on a specific issue). Chimp troops really don't mix that much and are far more different from each other than any two modern humans. The other face, and maybe a bigger problem, is that the 'races' were interpreted on appearance without reference to genetics and if you subdivided everyone's family group you would find people groups that were all wrong for their apparent type.  There's more variation between different African regional populations and the inhabitants of the rest of the world.


**Cool Runnings reference

Saturday, November 26, 2011

Painting Fakes

I recently discovered the work of Jon at Painting Fakes through Another Something (see the blog roll).

The blog title is explained in this post (currently linked to from the lead post, but I hope most of my readership are reading from the distant future, ruefully, from which vantage the link may be helpful).

I hope you enjoy it.

BattleTech

I read my first BattleTech novel today.  It was a gift from my brother-in-law, who rolled his eyes as he handed it over.  It was not a very good novel, and if anything a closer examination of the world of BattleTech made it seem less convincing. Powerful, machine-mounted laser weapons missing?  At ranges of a few hundred meters?  Interstellar travel is mastered, but nukes and anti-matter and space bombardment and artillery are not effective?

 But, I'm pretty sick and exhausted, and the characters were better than you might expect, and I was reminded that I had quite enjoyed playing MechCommander.

It's always worth Googling things, too, because I was amazed to find Mechcommander 2 was released as an example with source code by Microsoft. It is minus all the supporting video and animation, and I'm not sure about the in-game art.  Unfortunately it was a Windows XP game, I'm not sure I'll be able to get it running on Windows 7.  Maybe Wine?  Or I do still have the windows Me machine...

Update: Full release (which was made available free by the original publishers at the same time that Microsoft used it as an example) allegedly available here. Smaller download too.

Emergence

I wish I could believe that people using the word emergence really understood that 'emergence' exists because we do science at different levels of description, and that emergent properties are just those that are reliable enough to allow a convenient description in terms other than basic physics.

Better than Music Creator 6

Owing to some difficulties with MC6 (notes played back through Synth1 were often dropped, and I was able (and prone) to hide tracks but not unhide them because MC6 borrows code from big brother Sonar X1, and hiding has been blocked out less completely than it should have been) this morning I switched back to Music Creator 5. 5 has less of a 'pro' UI look and feel. On the other, quite important, hand, MC5 plays all the notes you give it to play, and it genuinely doesn't know how to hide tracks.
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Friday, November 25, 2011

Hegelians of the world, unite!

In a talk today, the speaker referred to his marxist, protesting past in the seventies several times, and then said he was an old Hegelian. I thought 'Oo-Aah' or maybe a 'Go Bears!' would be in order in other circumstances - there should be something for Hegel fans too. Maybe if you recognise the other as your essence, a serious spoken 'You are!' would be appropriate.
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Friday, November 18, 2011

Cakewalk

Just a brief plug for Cakewalk Music Creator 6. It is an astonishingly serious music package sold for under $100 (currently USD$50).  There are some rough edges, and I've had some difficulties - but mostly because there is much more under the hood than you expect.  And the difficulties I've had have been addressed efficiently and (even when they're really my problem) politely.  Arianna Huffington apparently said 'Self expression is the new entertainment' - which is partly true.  It's becoming more popular.  And this blog, and Music Creator show why - its getting very easy to access great tools.

Autarchy

Just a brief note of something I still need to know more about - J. Bernstein talked about Hegel using the word/concept autarchy.  You will recall that Gene Wolfe, another source for this blog, centered his surviving humanity in the Autarch, who rules the commonwealth from the House Absolute.

All roads lead to all roads.  It's so darn interesting.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Perpetuity

Have you noticed that there are a lot of perpetual motion machines, insanely efficient engines or pumps or gearboxes or power generation systems on the internet?

I think most of them survive indefinitely because to seriously test them would often require that they be professionally constructed, instrumented into a high quality test rig, and then tested by independent professionals, all of which are beyond the reach of inventors.  Until that happens, the inventors can continue releasing video's of themselves with mockups, diagrams about how they work, and excited testimonials.  They always approach universities and research institutes and companies looking for investment and validation, and they almost never get it.  Who wants to spend $500,000 to show that something is not a perpetual motion machine?  If the claims are more compatible with thermodynamics, they are still likely to violate other constraints - be impossible to build, or be unmaintainable or just unbalanced.

What is needed is a sort of reverse KickStarter or Pozible, in which sceptics, institutions and companies volunteer small amounts of their resources to collectively clear away the rubbish by testing it properly.  There is no shame in NASA spending $5000 to disprove an outlandish claim if many other institutions joined in.  Perhaps it could be called KickOuter or ImPozible.

(Interestingly, the best candidates would still attract the most funding (except from bully-boy sceptics, I suppose).

Monday, November 14, 2011

Hegel & Christianity

Listening to the next lecture, J. Bernstein was going into the way the loss of Kant's imperious Law was too much for many.  And then I recognised another way to understand what Hegel is doing.

He has set out to remove the 'dirensions', the divisions - self and other, mind and body, self and world, individual and society that seemed insuperably present in the best systematic philosophy.  The morality that he is advocating is the freedom of the Christian under grace.  The division between the Law, goodness and the person is erased through Christ, and realised in the Christian through faith.

Hegel is saying that the force of morality is in the situation, not in some abstract law.  The good in loving someone is loving them, not satisfying some remote Law or third party.  So then, if the moral force is in the particulars of the situation, it becomes possible to achieve creative, positive goodness, not just a jury-rigged approximation of the good which is actually bad.  Not merely possible, but continuously there in our work and life.  This is Christian. This vertigo of forgiveness and welcome into the creative universe of  being no longer under Law but under Grace.

It is odd that Luther figures in Hegel as a German, protestant, analogue of Descartes, of the upholding of conscience (conscious in Descartes) above external authority.  I think Luther was mostly about the end of the line of division between God and man, because that's what he found in Paul, who is all about Jesus being all about reconciliation.  Neither greek nor jew, slave nor free, male nor female.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

The Big U

This is not a post about Neal Stephenson's first novel. Perhaps it should have been.  He writes some killer novels.

I've been feeling gloomy the last few days.  You read about my farcical Thursday and disappointing Friday.  Further disappointment on Friday afternoon when I proofed a report I've been working on and realised it needed more work than I thought..  Further disappointment when I got the nanoKontrol more or less working in an hour last night, but found today I will need to do far more to have it really seamlessly integrated - I need to learn about Cakewalk's implementation of a midi-learn mechanism (ACT), and I need to design a scheme for it to map usefully to the K5000, Synth1, Cakewalk's mixer and throughout, Cakewalk's transport controls (stop, play etc). My friend's mythTV which I built for her is not working well. Listening to J Bernstein I realised I have to be doing close-reading of my own if I actually want to understand Hegel. I have not nearly learned as much as I could.  I got an email reminding me I could enter a screenplay in a competition if I would just sort the structure and finish it. As Hegel and Hajime Tanabe (and Heidegger I suppose) remind me, you don't learn something without confronting that you don't know, that you are something with no way to be in the situation: you have to face up to your 'nothingness'. You find that who you are is wrong about the world. It's very lowering.

My experience is that I then don't learn at once.  I learn by a series of digressions and misunderstandings, and as each one shows its failure, I lower my estimate of my own understanding even further, and at long last, listen and learn.  Eventually, I have made all the mistakes there are to make, and I might start to exercise a little familiarity and have some success.

Today I was thinking of this as a big U.  From the top, I look across and see a lovely vista of  MythTV leading to years of seamless entertainment, nanoKontrol leading to home studio greatness leading to extra income and notoriety, philosophy mastery as a path to lucidity and purchase in the world of ideas, screenwriting as a way to have an impact on society, even if its just to give an alternative 2hrs of tedium*. Serious work as a way of earning my living, some dignity, and helping clients and colleagues.

But then I start, and the descent down into the bottom of the U is painful and hard.  I have to face my shortcomings, misunderstandings and hubris again and again.  And I really hate that, far more than any normal person (or just as much, but with much scanter resources of courage and tenacity). So much so that this blog probably owes most of its existence to my refusal to keep trying at any one thing.  I look down into the big U and 'the grave opens up before me like a big hole in the ground.'**  And I run, and write a blog post or read an article or ten instead of solving a problem.

One good thing about this blog is that I find writing things out can clear my mental image.  I realised that there are four things I want to control with the nanoKontrol and that it has four 'scenes' - perfect. It also can act as a Pennebaker Essay, helping me process this and see a U, where I have historically looked back and see only the climb down and from the perspective of having won through, the climb down looks doubly ridiculous.

* all the possible readings of this are meant.
**  Blackadder season 2.

Hegel & Community Conscience

Jay Bernstein began his lectures with a few remarks about the task Hegel (with much of continental philosophy) undertook: to translate what was good from the Christian world into the real world, to move from transcendant to entirely immanent, because (as he would say "spoiler alert") - 'there is no God'.  I have thought throughout that what Hegel is doing is more seriously informed by Christianity than our reading of him - much of what he says works as well as theology as in any of the fields he's addressing.

Today I have reached the lecture on morality, which is where he finds people often want to part ways with Hegel. Hegel's project has been to knit back together the things that were not understandable together: society and the individual; the individual's subjectivity and the world's apparent objectivity; reason and the rump of heart and passions and body.  In Kant's theory of morality there are some parallel problems: the reason of the individual is presumed to fully apprehend the situation and to be able to fully determine the morality of an act, although some good intentions have bad results. To Kant, the reason, locked away from the passions, and without access to things in themselves, can nevertheless reach toward a good will.  Hegel says that this is to take as a task an unachievable aim; and more that its unachievability is the condition of the possibility of this kind of morality.  This moral bar set impossibly high is, on Bernstein's reading, attractive solely for social control, and is not a real morality.  It's what parents invent about right and wrong to control their teenagers.  Adults wanting a moral realism find in Hegel that they are defined by the Other; that therefore they are to some extent constitutively committed to certain things (acting beneficially toward others); that in engagement with others they are always acting and defining themselves, but that their acts are subject to redefinition by the community.  So conscientiousness (having a conscience) is a social-historical stage of society.  It's not an infallible internal guide. It's 9/10ths in intersubjectivity, out there in society.

Now, I am probably misunderstanding something simple and key here, but it seems to me that communities are usually terrible repositories of morality.  I once sat in a meeting with business people, and we talked about our achievements.  One man had project managed a housing project which realised the highest prices per square foot for inner city units that the city had seen in years.  Another had turned a chain of petrol stations into major profit centers by extending the range of things you can buy, and turning the attendants into chocolate-offering robots*, fattening and impoverishing the weak of will.  The third was a woman who had used the power of a subsidised foreign supplier to put a major Australian foundry out of business.  All three achievements were, I thought, terrible. They made things worse. But the little community we were closed ranks and marvelled at how noteworthy and therefore good these people were.

The problem with this account of Hegel is that you lose from Kant the possibility of universal, true moral aim points.  You gain by losing the impossibility of totally moral life (with the infinite psychological burden and splitting it entails), but on Bernstein's reading the community is in fact a more than adequate resource. (His strongest argument would be that it is all we really have, anyway, and we're doing OK.  Hegel and Bernstein are somewhat conservative).  I think the breakdown case is (as usual) honor killing and female genital mutilation.  These are strong community values in their communities, but also wrong.  I think I am missing from Bernstein how Hegel's dictum that the particular is the universal, and how the exact situation is what has to determine the right and wrong of your action, apply in those cases. Are we to believe that honor killers don't act with a great sense of righteousness and a good conscience, and that if they understood truly they would feel different?  Maybe we are, but that's not coming through, and if it were I would take quite a lot of convincing.

I think the Christian, though, is in a rather nice position, because we are in community with Jesus. Hegel is probably more on-board with this than Bernstein acknowledges.  He (Jesus) becomes the church's Other, defining its existence and instituting it; and instituting all the individual Christians through conversion to Him. The judgment promises to be based on both intentions and actions/outcomes; and it promises to be full of forgiveness (which I haven't got up to in Hegel yet). The Christian gets the best of Kant (universality) and the best of Hegel (particularity).

* In the original sense of hapless drudges.

Friday, November 11, 2011

Super-conscious self

When I bought my iPod (2nd hand) the seller left some content on it, including some talks by a positive thinking guru. His technique was a snake-oil for getting behind your thrownness and choosing your mood by imagining greatness was just now beginning like the dawn, and that soon all would be well. One of his more amazing assertions was that positive expectation would control reality - that setting off visualising the empty carpark near the door of your destination could really produce an empty car park there.

Yesterday and today i've been at 6s and 7s. Traveling to Sydney early, my flight was canceled. Then we had no hire car, and getting one was expensive. Then we missed a turnoff and spent 40minutes in Sydney peak hour fighting our way back, but I narrowly managed to check in. But then I had booked a flight back to Melbourne's other airport, and it was too pricey and long bus rides to get to the right airport and collect my car.
This morning I was riding to work and thinking that my allergies were bad, and suddenly remembered that i had an appointment for a desensitization shot in ten minutes. I madeit to the shot, but got to work quite late, and discovered that I had missed a talk by David Snowden, a guru of knowledge management and decision elicitation.
What does it all mean? Nothing? I need to pay more attention? Diarise more? Brain is doing its best with actual evidence; and can't do much with what it doesn't know, and can't do anything without the body.
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Thursday, November 10, 2011

Kontrol

I've just bought a Korg NanoKontrol from Music Workshop (geelong) for $59 delivered through their ebay store.

It is a USB device that shows up at a new midi port, and can be configured to map any movement of sliders, knobs or button presses to any midi CC number.  There are 9 sliders and 9 knobs on the NanoKontrol, but only 8 on the NanoKontrol2, so don't miss out on the original. (I think the NanoKontrol2 boasts more accurate sliders.  Big deal.  Anyone, as Archie Moncrieff says, can play accurately. I play with expression.)

My K5000W synthesiser offers at least 16 tweakable parameters on every complete sound, and often more: filters, cutoff, resonance, the various effects that go into each sound, and so on.  But the K5000W (unlike the K5000S) does not have 16 knobs on the front. Kawai used to offer a 16 knob box called the Macro Control Box, but they were $300 and have become as rare as hen's teeth.

But more than that - since I was last getting musical, things have changed.  Basic PCs are now able to cover all the bases of a big studio setup with digital modelling.  There are several standards, VST & VSTi, DirectX instruments and effects and so on.  Notably Mylo's hit albumn 'Destroy Rock & Roll' was recorded? assembled? using a midi controller keyboard and software instruments and effects.  Only vocals needed to be recorded.

The other important thing use for me is Synth1, a VST that emulates the Clavia Nord Lead (a virtual analog synthesiser with magical properties and redness).  It sounds awesome, and is free.

The nanokontrol is a beautifully fit piece of tech for the time. It is like an axe handle that you can plug into most of your possessions so you easily can swing them around and have them wreak their effect in many new.

Here is a cool demo.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

This is That Recognised

It was about halfway through the 40th lecture of J Bernstien's Hegel course. He dropped a Hegel quote, and I realised that I had just been reconstructing him from Heidegger, Searle and others.
The quotes:
+Man Is Recognition.
+Spirit: the we that is an I, the I that is a we.
+And Bernstein - Hegel wants to say (of the universality of the work of reason in the finite mind) 'It's institutions all the way down...' (institutions are how we become I, two become one)

So all that Resolution, and This is That talk was just me badly reconstructing Hegel from Heidegger, Searle and the New Testament.
Those posts were:


These are by no means a guide to what Hegel says. But as I am starting to get what Hegel is saying, these seem more successful (where they resemble things Hegel says) and less (because they don't resemble it very clearly or coherently).

And so, this is that in another way.  This blog is what I accused Sam Harris of. Publishing before doing the reading.
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