What to think about everything, or 'Life is NP-Hard'

This post was entitled 'What to think about everything', and waiting in my drafts.  Naturally I got excited, but it turns out that it was not populated. I've no idea what I would have said, but anyway...

The world is a place full of entities and possibilities, because its always developing through time.  The brain is nature's way of keeping the world's tendencies to kill your genes from developing into actualities.  The mind is the brains way of keeping the brain's tendencies to kill you from developing into actualities.

The brain is solving the problem of Abduction - relating a schema of the super-sensible to a limited observation of a reality in motion is an NP-hard problem (C.S. Pierce first showed that thinking depends on abduction; there are a variety of papers on it but Bylander et al 'The Computational Complexity of Abduction' 1991 is pretty good). NP-hard in a large world means that you can't solve it fully in a reasonable amount of time*, unless you can reduce by orders of magnitude the number of involved entities by:

• lumping up sensations into objects which are cleanly defined by not being other objects, excluding them from their space.  Sensations denote limbs and a body which is really just one bear that can be treated as a point, in relation to the question of what to do next.
• expecting repetition of familiar scenarios.  Run away.
• importantly, being set up to be pretty darn insensitive to things that don't matter, like 'what if this bear just a regular cuddlepie who are not out to kill us?' meh. No one cares about that. Assume everyone's out to kill us, especially people who look like they don't have our genes.
• Being sensitive to generalisation logic, to reasoning with representations rather than imagining entire entities.  I really like Lukacs Kaiser's paper on building a logic detector and solver for tic-tac-toe, connect-four and other simple games. It shows the potential power for symbolic reasoning to play games, and I think games, narrative and dynamic logic are going to get unified pretty thoroughly pretty soon.
• Letting a really simple brain (the emotions) cooperate with you and run the mechanics of the limbic system and what not, and even take over entirely at times, causing you to punch people, cry, or start a blog.
• Making contingent decisions and commitments that will be modified soon.

Over time, the disintegrated solvers get fine-tuned to my environment and it becomes possible for them to be more and more integrated.  For me at least, many of those integrations didn't come up with more than a fractious truce.  My emotions are kept at arms length a lot of the time, and I don't feel very much, and I don't imagine how something would feel for myself in the future or another person in the present all that well.  My reasoning has not been very purposive - I hardly plan, am often unproductive, and get motivated about weirdly small things, and deeply dejected about normal size things, like having a job and a few extra-curricular commitments. (To illustrate agonizing about the very small, I spent a number of hours agonizing about buying a couple of computer components totalling about $30 which I don't need.  They were heavily marked down.  But I couldn't (or didn't try to) imagine a me in the future who just didn't care that he didn't have them, or a me who did but was disappointed, or a me who suddenly saw what that $30 could have gone toward.  I stalled in the emotional desiring and the super-ego's denial.)  My reasoning is also unmotivated by anything except deeply personal felt trouble.  The mere promise of approval and acceptance, of satisfaction in a job done (whether well, or medium) moves me very little, unless the job is immediately in front of me.

I've been reading 'The mindful way through depression' by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He points to a similar phenomenon in depression, of using the reasoning ('doing') executive brain parts in fruitless wars against desire; in inquisitions against feelings of disappointment or remembered shame; and (I suspect this in my case very much) in abdicating to the emotions when pressed to work hard at something that doesn't seem immediately personally relevant (item 0 -> coaching the emotional brain into useful contribution by putting the right prompting and questions to it).

These two (and other faculties of body and mind) are me.**

*Well, we can't at the moment. Some problems that are NP-hard have no conventional (Turing/von Neumann etc) computing algorithm that completes in polytime, but Shor's algorithm is a famous example that means a quantum computer could complete it in polytime.

** The recent PEL podcast on Lacan suggested that this unification of the divided subject, taking responsibility for all the internality (however it was produced. Mostly made of externality (cultured stuff)) was the goal of psychoanalysis.  This is a Pennebaker Essay on how I overcame the major psychic division and became cheerful, emotionally alert and productive. 

Chess and automaticity

I have played an awful lot of chess to be as bad at it as I am. I have a chess app that sees two moves ahead, and I beat it about one time in ten. The problem is that I play intuitively, doing things that I believe will be good ideas, usually because I've done them before - they are the kind of thing I do. I long ago took the correct insight that conscious processing of all possibilities will not be powerful enough to always win, and now act as though unconscious/automatic processing will refine itself over time into an unbeatable victory engine. In fact, conscious processing is the way to begin accumulating unconscious patterns to allow deeper insight into the future. Without puzzling it out, I have not improved.

This is a bit of a bad mental habit for me, which may be related to my mother praising 'cleverness' rather than 'effort.' This was heavily reinforced by schooling in a system that required respectful behaviour and a home life that fore-armed me with ideas. I think I actually did about 5% of my assigned homework, and so my facility with everything skilled, from algebra to music to Japanese to essay composition remained almost static.

At the moment I am struggling to become a skilled researcher instead of just a magpie-minded popinjay. But this long habit of believing that effort is a sign you should just give up, because you are innately unqualified and can't become qualified is hard to break. I need to get a virtuous dopamine circle going around reading things and learning, instead of a vicious shame-spiral at not already knowing them.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Pandora

Whenever I'm feeling low, which happens reasonably regularly, I begin to imagine that the world is in a shape that would fit a variant of the Pandora myth - that all the ills in the world have been unleashed, and that at the bottom of them was hope.  In the original myth (as I recall it), hope is there to counteract the ills - people get sick, but maybe they'll get better.  People die, but maybe the people left will live on, remembering them, and founding families that give the lie to death overall.

But, when I'm feeling low, it seems that hope is there to give all the ills teeth. Hope is what persuades you to press your teeth to the grindstone of your suffering. Buy a house, have a family, seek out work you imagine you'll enjoy - that way the ills will have more to work on.

Perhaps you can't identify with this (I think its slightly buddhist, although getting all upset about how upsetting everything can be is not).  Let me say to you who somehow are not depressed: an Avatar sequel is almost certain.  How about now?  Avatar, but derivative. Yikes.

Anyway, to get back to feeling low - its almost always a result of being laid low by something, or realising it after a period of poor outcomes.  Finish a report that looks dumb, enter a competition and get nowhere, complete something overdue and get two more assignments in its place.  The solution is to 'take up arms against a sea of troubles' by:

• exercising;
• organising;
• making some decisions about what you care about and how to do something about it;
• go to bed earlier
• ease up on the coffee
• ease up on the lollies, pastries, peanut butter from a jar
• stop ditzing on the internet and build something good!

All of these involve a degree of hoping in a certain mode; hoping of myself and my immediately visible sphere.  And

Vulnerability

Brene Brown has a couple of great TED talks on vulnerability and shame and whole-hearted living.

This is the first, on vulnerability. I have talked abou this as liability.

This is the second, at TED, on shame.

An interesting distinction is that guilt is rectifiable discrepancy from society; shame is unrectifiable cut-offness from society.

Dad joke: I guess that's why Tobias Funke wears cutoffs.

Empathy & Beauty

I recently did a few of the tests from Simon Baron-Cohen's work on Systematizing vs Empathizing brains.  In his research, men are biased toward systematizing, such that there is a part of the systematizing curve in which women are almost never found, occupied by 5% of men.  Similarly there is a region at the empathizing end where nearly no men exist, but 5% of women spend their lives.  There were two self-report tests which didn't seem terribly reliable (Do you often say things that offend people without realising? - I don't know - I may not realise.)  But there was also a test of looking at just eyes and reading the expression.  I scored 24/36.  Asberger's suspicion starts immediately below 22, average is 29 for men and higher for women.

I hate being bad at things, and having lacks.  I spend a lot of mental energy worrying because I am aware of times past when I lacked empathy.  I respect and value it, but by working hard I can remain only in the bottom quartile of insensitive jerks. Although I hate it, there's not much to be done.

I take some encouragement from this poem (quoted from here):

               Pied Beauty
                         Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

All things Counter, Orginal, Spare, Strange - 

Spare in this context I take to mean, sparingly made, made out of not quite all the parts.  As I am.

Breaking

In social psychology, 'breaking' is behaving without any reference to social norms.  Stanley Milgram was apparently happy to do it as a hobby - arriving for dinner he would skip greetings and proceed to counting the cutlery.

Bible study is a social gathering with a lot of norms.  Often there will be a short prayer time, where people share a personal concern, and someone else prays for them.  (There is a norm about not praying for your own stuff, so structures that ensure you know who you will be praying for are important - otherwise there's no guarantee everyone gets prayed for - also a terrible solecism.)

So I was sitting next to Chris, an IT guru - maybe a 'systems analyst' describes it.  He hacks Unix like other people hack cheese off a block the size of a car battery.  What was Chris's prayer point?  Was his boss on his case? Did he have a sick friend or relation? Was he feeling stressed and rundown?

Spam.  Chris wanted me to pray against spam emails. Why?  'They're very annoying.'

Although I joined a long period of hysterical laughter, I didn't think spam was absolutely outside God's concern - it's wasteful of time and intellect and processing power.  (Side note: If, as in Lawnmower Man, an AI decided to ring all the phones on the planet, or email all the email addresses on the planet, it would almost certainly be ignored.)

So I attempted to formulate a prayer beseeching the Lord to stifle spam.  I will leave this account there.  It's literally hysterical - I feel my (metaphorical) womb rise up and enter my brain.

insane difficulty

'The revolt of nature against man' begins GK Chesterton in 'The Club of Queer Trades', has been reduced to a singular condition. It is the small things rather than the large things which make war against us and, I may add, beat us. The bones of the last mammoth have long ago decayed, a mighty wreck; the tempests no longer devour our navies, nor the mountains with hearts of fire heap hell over our cities. But we are engaged in a bitter and eternal war with small things; chiefly with microbes and with collar studs.'

Being familiar with what Heidegger calls obstinacy, described above as revolt, I am often found cursing loudly at my computer when (for example) I try to hook up the audio, and the ports are tiny, dark, snarled in cable and inaccessible. Often I exclaim at the 'insane difficulty.'

The thing is, the problem is always that I'm doing it wrong. There is a way that will work, but I haven't found it, and am instead repeatedly trying things that don't work. When I get rid of the insanity, I greatly reduce the difficulty.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Arson

Simone at AnotherSomething's school was burned in an arson attack. I am something of a pessimist, and while I totally sympathise with the loss and the insult, I couldn't see it as hard to understand - in fact I would think this sort of thing is almost over-determined.

The first candidate is the arsonist, looking for a mostly wooden building that will certainly be empty in the middle of the night, and which people care enough about to notice the attacks.

The second candidate is the person for whom school functioned as a giant, long-running hell of having 'not good enough' stamped on them by the adult world of the state and by their peers. If they have hated us, we need to remember that they think we hated them first.

The third candidate is perhaps the dux or the prop of the first fifteen at an elite private school, celebrating the end of their academic year with a hearty 'sod the proles'.

Each of these may be present in a single person - they seem to me to draw energy from resentment, from a self defined by weakness and lacks.

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.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Raising Arizona

In Raising Arizona, the union of opposites becomes home to a baby. The criminal dad's fugitive friends see a lot of potential - 'awww he's a real little tearaway' 'a hellraiser for sure'; the policeman mum's friends see a lot too - 'Look how straight up, he goin' be a police for sure.'

My father and I have our share of depression - its mild but it runs deep. (How deep? I call it our share because i sometimes think if more people were out of denial about the awful wrongness of modern life, doing their share, I could be relatively chipper.)

When my son was starting to cry recently, he joked 'The depression sets in.' Hopefully we can do better for him. I hope we can teach him his life rests on greater courage than the troubles of any day.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Us men don't like this civilisation one bit

So Bob Ellis, retired labor speechwriter, has a bee in his bonnet (bat in his belfry?) about how left wing politicians are always being destroyed by sex scandals, and it seems so unfair that only feminism can explain it. Idiot.  A longer critique by John Birmingham here.

He is in company with Scott Adams, who drew fire for his 'Pegs and Holes' blog post about how men can't get no satisfaction because of society as constituted, and that this makes them unhappy. In fairness, Scott is making the same observation that Freud made in 'Civilisation and it's Discontents', and pushing back (as Freud pushed back) against 'unrealistic' expectations gaining moral force. If he had read Freud, or thought about it at all, he might have realised that there is more to being a satisfied man than having a satisfied penis.

The problem for both these doofuses (doofii?) is that these expectations became expectations because of the moral force, not the reverse. The problem is not feminism, it is of creating and sustaining a just society. Keeping one's pants on is the creation of, and a sustaining of, the kind of trust that can enable anxiety-free sex. Don't let anyone say it can't be done by any man; but don't think creation of something this good will be easy.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Interpreting my dream

I have had a question from the reader, and have responded as follows, which I thought might be of interest to posterity:

My theory of dreams (based on what I know of the relevant science from John Kihlstrom at Berkeley's course on Consciousness and a few other relevant inputs) is that your brain takes itself off-line from most of the motor systems, and cycles over a lot of content from memory (today and elsewhere) during REM sleep which is a very low activation and a very great rest.  Your brain is at its free associative best shortly before and after waking up (I think its Alpha wave), and so those memories that are being chewed over (which can be remembered feelings calling up appropriate scenes rather than the other way around) get assembled into a story if you retain any of them as you wake.  If there is anything to be made of dream interpretation, it comes from asking the question of what story you made of the raw ingredients - what was in the observer that got imposed on the memories.

For my dream, I think the key part of the story is that having seen a monster, I immediately assumed his 'parents' made him that way for their own purposes and that he was lonely.  And I thought that was terrible. I am hypochondriac enough to see myself in the monster, and anxious enough about parenting to wonder whether all my talk of tristrapedia's is going to turn out to be abuse. I'm also anxious about my biceps, because I haven't been exercising as much as I was.  

I don't really think there's a dangerous level of monsterism in this.  You give your children the best you've found or won for yourself, and hope they are like enough to you that it does them some good. If you can give them some guidance into your roads not taken, so much the better.

Why am I so excited about resolution?

Basically, because I have always been the most irresolute person you can imagine:

• I misapprehend things in real life.  I accidentally bought a two-door car two years ago and didn't realise it was two-door until a friend asked 'Oh, I thought you weren't going to get a two-door car.'  Also I am always misreading situations as the perfect opportunity to trot out some philosophical wisdom.  Very often, I do this conscious that it is discontinuous with the conversation and will be difficult for people to relate to. (challenges to recognition)
• I refuse to recognize that things are as good as they are going to get, and be happy and knuckle down and rock on.  I spend a lot of my day looking for something even more interesting than what I'm doing now, or more enjoyable than what I should be doing.  (challenges to courage)
• I refuse to resolve tensions.  Since my post 'Belly' some months ago, I've been doing a lot of exercise and wishing I weren't so fat.  Yet faced with biscuits, or, as I was on Thursday night, 3/4 of a brie, I treat them as food, not as treats with a big downside.  Then I sit around thinking 'I can't  believe I ate the whole thing.'  Existing trapped between two conflicting desires is burdensome.  (problem solving)

I remember reading a lot of books as a teenager about lone-wolf assassins living by the creed from Heat 'Have nothing in your life you can't walk away from in 30 seconds.' They often did immoral things, but they were always on the side of the angels in the end (and very often they died of doing right).  Honestly, I would have been better to read Ayn Rand - at least her sociopaths are socially useful constructors who enjoy life.  What I took was the conviction that a sort of Nietzschean 'brief habit' - identity of convenience - would be all the resoluteness I would muster, and that faced with danger or opposition I would fold my principles away into those invisible dimensions and do what I needed to to survive. Given the extremely mild moral challenges I confronted myself with, this boiled down to resisting 'everything, except temptation' - being lazy, timid, distant in relation to social life and work, while being floridly self-indulgent in private.  

The problem I have now is how to develop a power of resolution - by making a resolution?

Eccentric, Deluded.

My father requests a post on differentiating normalcy, eccentricity or oddness and delusion and detachment from reality.  So here goes my whole interim yet not original theory of consciousness.  There are four parts:

Experience, Recognition, Analysis (a word for what Consciousness does, but still looking for a better word), and Acts (things you do. Not resting).  You can crudely put them in a diagram.

The ERAA 'loop'

This is a very simple structure:

·         Experience really happens to you, the real you’re in.

·         Perception brings it into mental handling: there are some problems with it, so it gets its own arrow.

·         Recognition is the basic way we relate to the world.  It draws a collection of situations and the practices appropriate to them.  It is continuous, fast, parallel and automatic.

·         That collection of situations and practices is the background – a non-representational totality of familiarity accumulated from experience, which stands under words and thoughts in understanding.

·         Recognition Refers interpreted situations minimally to the conscious understanding.  The very familiar is assumed, and the unchallenged assumption becomes very familiar.

·         The Analytic part of the mind, the consciousness, is a slow-time, one thing at a time zone.  There are a bunch of different faculties and intelligences up here, and the decision making space in which you can revise understandings.

·         Resolve.  The resolving power of consciousness is often referred to as decision making, but I think it manifests a little differently for different personality types.  An insight that enables understanding can be referred to the recognition to reframe a perception and render it familiar.

·         Automaticity of recognition and of action is obvious in walking and balancing, in the way we understand other people immediately by their expressions.

·         Controlled actions are under moment to moment supervision from the analytic consciousness. We use them where there are no automatic resources available.

This structure is modestly well supported in a few fields.  Philosophy (Hume, Hegel?, Heidegger, Searle) furnished the Background.  Heidegger describes most of this, but I believe he would find the separation of a box for analytic understanding troubling.  It is a little like the notion of the pure subject at the heart of all of us, which he would say is just an artefact of things we are familiar with.  Automaticity is a well-supported interpretation of some well-known psych experiments (e.g. Stroup interference - with the off colour words (Green, Brown) words).  The whole thing is not too far from the decision ladder in Cognitive Work Analysis, nor from Recognition Primed Decision Making in Cognitive Task Analysis, although anything with Cognitive in its name is probably in some denial of Heidegger's point that the background is not fully representational - you will find it exhausting to try to enumerate the knowledge embodied there. This point is also supported by Wittgensteins investigations into how things mean. It is also mappable (in military theory) to John Boyd's Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) 'loop' and to the Act, Sense, Decide, Adapt loop of the Adaptive Army program.

So then, to a question my father asked about eccentricity, oddness and delusion.  These are problems with recognition.  A paranoic has a problem with their brain chemistry and their world is almost literally a nightmare.  Because of the intensity of the psych distress, their recognition reads the world as situations appropriate to that.  People around them are either enemies or allies, and people who they should love but feel nothing about, they may assume are robot replacements. The problems with recognition occur when your background of practices and experiences are not applicable to your world.

Within the communal background, we stake out our little patch, and we tend to do it as if in a campsite – watching our neighbours cautiously, setting up close but not too close. Eccentricity is, I think, about taking a space at a distance from the center of gravity, but maintaining (at least in affection for it) that it is the center of some deeper reality as an important personal commitment, a defining comitment.  The eccentric may choose to move as they move through life.

Delusion afflicts us all when we misrecognize.  Delusion as mental illness is being trapped in misrecognition either because the referring function is ineffective, or because the conscious- analytic parts are not able to find a resolution, or because the resolution is ineffective.  These situations can develop because of brain damage, drugs, or commitment to propositions that are not part of the conventional background. Bad 'propositions' (in which I would include deep ideas, inchoate senses of self etc) can be received from the outside world or manufactured to protect and paper over weaknesses, flaws and incapacities.  

Zizek says the lesson of psychoanalysis is that 'our story', the account we would like to give of ourselves to justify ourselves to others, is a lie we manufacture so we can stand the sight of ourselves.  This, though, may be true of the person crowding into the center as much as the fringe.  

I feel like the question is a good one to set up an Intervention on me for maintaining a delusion as a philosophic blogger...  I may keep you posted.

Supernormal Stimulus

-edited to increase number of sequiturs -


The question of an R18 classifications for videogames is wandering the ether in Australia.  There is a distinction being drawn between violent media and interactive violence, so R18 content can appear in films, but if a game uses the same event involving the player, then it is refused classification.  Some gamers say that the net result is that a lot of material that is not bad enough for a Refused Classification is released at M15+, the unintended consequences being that teenagers get access to what should be R18.


I think the interactivity question is actually secondary, because people consume so much of their media from the internet, which is always interactive.  We are all in some control of and choose the imagery we consume. 


Some psychological research into images of violence shows that we automatically identify with the dominant party in a violent act, so that it is almost impossible to show violence in story, moving image, without causing identification with the strong.  It is obviously an adaptive trait to admire and side with the powerful. The brain is always interacting, and the parts that take action are busily calculating what they would do, will do if called on. In watching violence, we see ourselves, and usually we see ourselves committing it.


I think what frightens people about these games is that otherwise healthy, normal people are powerfully engaged by them, and don't behave the way we might wish at other times. Games become interests that powerfully draw attention from people.  And attention = care = love.


Brains are built to be sensitive to some things - food, sex and violence most obviously in humans.  In nature, the vulnerability to stimuli is a vital survival trait - birds are addicted to feeding their young, and that's a good thing (this much is borne out by science) - but it's surely not unreasonable to think that most animals would be similar.  But it is possible to hack that addiction for benefit.  





This reed warbler (I think?) has what it thinks is the biggest, hungriest reed warbler chick in the world.  And long after the cuckoo chick's appetites have outstripped the hunger of a nest of young reed warblers, the parents will continue to work harder, exhausting themselves to the point that they are less likely to survive another winter. 


This is supernormal stimulus - it's when your brain has a monotonic valuation function for certain stimuli* - the more it goes up, the better your brain tells you it is, the more it absorbs your attention and overwhelms the other things you should consider.  Supernormal stimulus is too much of a good thing. Your anime girlfriend has eyes the size of her breasts and both are three times the size of her mouth and waist, better than any real girlfriend, or physically possible human. Even though she only interacts with you through your phone.  And of course, pornography.  And opera.


Is there a defence against supernormal stimulus?  I'm not sure. Controls of context are good, but the vulnerability itself can only be undone if you can stop the consciousness capture, stopping it being monotonic, by plumbing in all of life.  If the reed warbler could see the possibility of fledging next season's nestlings, this season's monster child would appear for what it is.


For further reading, you could maybe try Harvard psychologist Diedre Kemp's Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. 


Related subject - a guy called Arch Hart has some books advocating against sensation-seeking as a way of life - he wants to help people with exciting jobs, exciting hobbies, exciting lives who are exhausted and dejected take pleasure in a simple stroll through a place of their own. This is all very well, Arch, but can't we find a way to have our cake and eat it?


*By this, I mean it just keeps going up and up and up.

INTP Leadership

Mary McGuiness: "INTPs do not usually seek leadership roles. They don't like directing others and will not force people to do things. ... INTPs are more comfortable as leaders than as managers."

So how uncomfortable is that?

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

The Milgram Experiments

Back in the day, a very odd man called Stanley Milgram wanted to explore social psychology with a view to understanding human behavior and maybe helping get a handle on atrocities like the holocaust.  He set up an experiment where volunteers would come in and be told that they and another volunteer (really a confederate), after a coin toss, would take the roles of quizmaster and victim, and that the quizmaster would be required to shock the victim (confederate) with electricity if he gave a wrong answer.  The dial on the shock meter was marked in 45  volt increments and went to 450.  Somewhere around 200V was marked 'XXX', and the volunteer quizmaster would get a 45V shock (which is a fair kick) to see what it was like.  The subject of quizzing would not get many right, and the shocks would escalate with the confederate hamming it up - and the test was, when do people refuse to continue?  The result was that a great many people would proceed all the way, well into and beyond what they had reason to believe were lethal shocks - 70% was not unusual.  Factors that helped:

• encouragement from the supervisor, and specifically the words 'you have no choice, the experiment must continue.'
• the power of the encouragement was affected by the dress, proximity, loudness, attentiveness of the supervisor
• remoteness of the subject.  The more vivid and real the subject was, the more and earlier people refused. However, some people, when asked, where willing to hold the subjects hand to the electrified plate late in the experiment when the shocks were getting too large for the 'victim'.

So much, so interesting, and by now a pretty familiar experiment.  Certainly not the sort of thing you are allowed to do now, because once Milgram's approval was absent or withdrawn and people started to reflect on possibly shocking another person to death, many experienced profound guilt and self-disgust. We do well to remember that we're all just some very inexpensive theatre away from being talked into things that horrify us in other company.

The question I have is 'what about good?'  How much of this participation comes from the fact that we would all quite like to electrocute a stranger, given a chance?  A counterpart experiment that I would like to see is a condition where you have to share a cupcake or donate some time to the subject.  I'd like to see Stanley Milgram persuade a person into that!