Beyond Rivalry

RIP Randy Pausch (1960-2008)

2008-07-25T12:06:17-04:00

"Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose 'last lecture' about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47." He'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer almost two years ago. More at NYT and at Carnegie Mellon. This is his update page, which I've been following for about a year (servers at Carnegie Mellon must be overloaded; it's taking many tries to download today).

His Last Lecture is moving and inspiring, imo. Watch it.

Crime Novel Excerpts: In the Woods, by Tana French

2008-07-23T20:05:25-04:00

In the Woods (2007) was Tana French's debut novel, winner of the 2007 Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Set near Dublin, Ireland, it's narrated by Murder Squad detective Bob Ryan and moves between two possibly related crimes, both involving children, that take place 20 years apart in the same area. It's marketed as part police procedural and part psychological thriller, but I don't think it lives up to its thriller possibilities. The book was a pleasure to read but I was a bit disappointed with the ending.

What interested me most about it -- besides the well-paced exploration of a few characters and relationships, the intriguing plot, and the good writing (slightly too much 'had she but known" for me, and while in places the writing is beautifully poetic and whimsical, it's also a bit distracting because of that) -- were the Girardian possibilities in the various rivalries and mimetic doubles (two major sets), and the intimations and evidence of psychopathology.

French's second novel, The Likeness, featuring one of the main characters from the first, was published in the U.S. this week. The title plus the synopsis tells me there may be more mimetic doubling going on....

A couple of lines from In the Woods that particularly caught my attention:

"I don't tell people about the Knocknaree thing. I don't see why I should; it would only lead to endless salacious questioning about my nonexistent memories and inaccurate speculation about the state of my psyche, and I have no desire to deal with either." ... Replace "Knocknaree" with a variety of other things and Ryan's reasoning is mine for not talking much with most people about a good deal of my life, experiences, feelings, thoughts, etc.

"I'm not sure what exactly I did for those two years. A lot of the time, I think, nothing. I know this is one of the unthinkable taboos of our society, but I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood. I had a prism from an old chandelier hanging in my window, and I could spend entire afternoons lying on my bed and watching it flick tiny chips of rainbow around the room." ... (Similarly -- and that was a fairly industrious day in which Things Got Done.)

Deciding is Exhausting

2008-07-23T15:04:08-04:00

(Not surprising, really, since "to decide" literally means "to cut off" or "to kill" ... from Latin dēcīdere, to cut off: de- + caedere, to cut, hew, strike, kill. It's hard work.)

"Imagine, for a moment, that you are facing a very difficult decision about which of two job offers to accept. One position offers good pay and job security, but is pretty mundane, whereas the other job is really interesting and offers reasonable pay, but has questionable job security. Clearly you can go about resolving this dilemma in many ways. Few people, however, would say that your decision should be affected or influenced by whether or not you resisted the urge to eat cookies prior to contemplating the job offers. A decade of psychology research suggests otherwise."

Decision-making and prolonged focus both use the brain's "executive function," which "draws upon a single resource of limited capacity in the brain."

What makes choosing so tiring (it's hypothesised) are commitment and tradeoff resolution.

Commitment: "Committing to a given course requires switching from a state of deliberation to one of implementation. In other words, you have to make a transition from thinking about options to actually following through on a decision. This switch ... requires executive resources."

Tradeoff Resolution: "The mere act of resolving tradeoffs may be depleting. For example, in one study, the scientists show that people who had to rate the attractiveness of different options were much less depleted than those who had to actually make choices between the very same options." [This sounds exactly like commitment to me ...]

Implications:

When the brain's executive function is drained, we may make very different choices than when it's not. One study found that the choices made when the brain's executive resources were depleted followed a pattern: the decisions were "reliant on more a more simplistic, and often inferior, thought process." People made worse decisions.

We can "take this knowledge into account when making decisions. If we've just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we've just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn't try to make a major decision."

A number of examples of how decision-making suffers when the executive resource is over-taxed are in the article, "Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain" by On Amir in Scientific American (22 July 2008).

---

This research reminds me of the recent findings on distraction and impartiality. In that case, remember, when subjects' cognitions were constrained by having to memorize long strings of numbers (prolonged focus, taxing the executive resource ?), the subjects became impartial in their judgments, seemingly unable to construct arguments to justify acting with self-favouritism or partiality.

Perhaps the same mechanism described above is at work there, but with the result that making choices using a tired executive resource may be said to lead to better decisions (if you think impartiality is better) ?

What's Blooming Now

2008-07-23T17:48:18-04:00

My garden is foliage-focused -- lots of variegated and neon forms of perennial leaves -- but there are some flowering plants. Right now, here are the perennials that are blooming. Most of the photos of these blooms were taken yesterday; the tradescantia photos are from earlier because their flowers had already closed in the afternoon rain.

The raspberries, as I feared, are molding on the canes. I snipped a bunch of the moldy berries off yesterday to encourage new fruiting.

hosta (white and lavender)

hydrangea (green that turns to white that is turning now to blue)

geranium 'mourning widow' (purple)

tradescantia (blue and magenta)

bee balm (purple on one side of the house, red on the other)

meadow sage (light purple)

daylilies (orange and rich yellow)

black-eyed-Susan (volunteer, maybe left over from a wildflower planting a few years ago)

daisies (no decent shot)

various sedum (pink, white, yellow)

anise hyssop (purple spikes)

the last of the astilbes (faded pink)

the last of the filipendula (also faded pink)

What I'm Reading Lately: Death, Dog Poisoning, Novelty, Flawed Heroes, Psych Experiments, Limiting Generalisations

2008-07-24T09:48:07-04:00

A mish-mash of my recent online reading, pondering, etc.

>> Alpine murder mystery: Are sheepdogs being poisoned to save the grey wolf? (Independent, 18 July 2008):

So far this year, 17 sheepdogs (including Great Pyrenees) have been poisoned -- with slug poison placed inside pork meatballs -- in the high Maurienne mountains, just inside the French border with Italy. The killings seem to stem from an ongoing dispute between sheep-lovers (and shepherds) and wolf-lovers. "'The pork meat balls were left, some time during the night, most likely just before dawn, in a place where the dogs would be sure to find them. This is the work of a maniac – a madman. What if the meat had been found by a small child? There are tourists everywhere at this time of year, including many British tourists.'"

"The dogs have often died in great agony.... [The poison] causes instant and catastrophic diarrhoea and lung failure in small mammals like dogs. 'They finish up dying completely dehydrated but, before that, they drown in their own bronchial fluids.'"

There are about 100 wolves in France. There is a sheep-protection plan in place in the area, and there have been no wolf attacks on sheep in the Maurienne area for more than two years.

>> If you haven't read it yet, I recommend "Cancer & Creativity: One Chef’s True Story" (Food & Wine, July 2008):

"While undergoing treatment for tongue cancer, Grant Achatz temporarily lost his ability to taste. Paradoxically, it taught him brilliant new ways to create flavor."

>> Impossible Experiments (Psychology Today, 1 July 2008) is a small collection of research psychologists would like to do "if neither ethics nor practical reality stood in your way." What interests me is that almost all the comments (so far) are about one hypothesis, that how parents raise their kids doesn't influence them significantly. The experiment I would jump on is Tamler Sommers' "Another Man's Shoes." (The YouTube video at the end makes clear that the whole thing is a joke ... or is it?) Other never-done experiments.

>> "Our Infantile Search for Heroic Leaders" by Johann Hari (26 June 2008, Independent). Hari's thesis is two-fold: That there are no perfectly good leaders and that we can't expect leaders to solve our problems because "every civilising advance in history ... was won because ordinary people banded together and agitated for it." Not much new there, but what interested me about this article was Hari's critique of Mandela, Gandhi, and Churchill as flawed leaders. I never knew that Churchill, for instance, was "strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes." His portrayal of Gandhi as a murderer (of his wife) seems overdone, not because I don't believe it's possible but because even as Hari presents it, it sounds more like a matter of adhering to principles in one case (his wife's illness) and not in another (his own illness), a rather ordinary though insidious trait.

>> Reframing Questions by Dave Pollard at How To Save the World (16 July 2008) seeks to promote critical thinking, to help us think beyond our own "false myths and limiting generalizations." He gives some examples of some limiting myths and generalisations he encounters everyday in business, then reframes the questions, and then asks his readers: "What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?" Some day I may give some energy to it and respond to that challenge here.

>> "Why We Like New Stuff" (Mental Floss, 16 July 2008). Basically, "our brains are actually hard-wired to prefer novelty and adventure. ... In fact, research on the ventral striatum (the part of the brain associated with rewarding behavior) seems to indicate that sating our sense of adventure provides us the same sort of satisfaction we get from sex and food." Dopamine figures, too. Full study (7 pages, PDF).

>> "Italian Outrage Over Roma Drowning Photos" (21 July 2008, CNN) is confusing to me. "Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand."

I think I might be creeped out if dead people were lying on the beach -- I'm creeped out when a dead seal or horseshoe crab is lying on the beach -- but the sunbathers' critics aren't shocked that they're not repulsed enough, presumably; they're shocked that the sunbathers are indifferent to the bodies. Shocked that they can act as if they aren't there, that they can do what they would ordinarily do without creating a sacred space for the bodies, without making their deaths the focus. That doesn't seem so bad to me. In any important way, the girls are not there, so why regard the dead bodies as something sacred, something whose presence means we should act differently than we do ordinarily? I guess it's because death is seen as such a powerful force.

The Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe, said in his blog that "'To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur.'" I'd agree if the girls were injured or needed lifesaving efforts; then it would be cruel to be indifferent. But I don't see how the sunbathers' can really mind the dead girls' business now, or why they should.

I've been in the presence of someone in the moments of her death, and in the presence of her body, as it lay in her house, for a couple of hours after that. The moment of dying, yes, that felt like something happened, something a little unusual and yet not, like breathing in and out. But for the hours afterwards? My experience was that life went on in its ordinary way. If I hadn't felt that all along that morning, I would have when the mortuary folks came with their plastic garbage-like bag and heaved her body into it. It was about as sacred-seeming as bodies under beach towels on a sunny day.

(In a twisted way, it kinda reminds me of this ...)

In the Name of Science

2008-07-22T15:06:16-04:00

Chocolate 'cake' in a mug in a microwave. Don't forget to scroll down to see all the ... evidence.

One researcher's results:

"I mixed the ingredients exactly as ordered, and put it in the microwave. Over the course of five minutes the scents that came from my microwave were: Cooking chicken, old motor oil, cocoa, and burned coffee.

"It took me two tries to get a fork into my leaning monstrosity, and when I bit into it, it was crunchy. I threw it at a wall as hard as I could and it didn't break at all."

Another intrepid researcher substituted Nestle's Strawberry Quick for cocoa powder: "It tastes a little like strawberries, and a little like failure."

Not Many Dead - Volume II

2008-07-22T10:10:51-04:00

A magazine I read monthly has a reader write-in column titled "Not Many Dead: Important Stories You May Have Missed." The column is made up of headlines or snippets of 'news' stories that are hardly news. As part of an ongoing series (first one here), I offer these recent non-news stories:

"A study by an independent nonprofit research group, The National Sleep Foundation, found that more than 65 percent of moms drink caffeinated beverages to get through their day." [CNN, 24 June 2008]

Headline: "If Gordon is our Heathcliff, who or what is his Cathy?" First paragraph: "[British PM] Gordon Brown apparently thinks voters are right to compare him to Heathcliff, the brooding figure at the centre of Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Political Editor Tomos Livingstone wonders whether this is one question he should have laughed off instead, while, below right, Catherine Jones explores the true nature of the character the Prime Minister is comparing himself to." [11 July, Wales Online]

"Rapper 50 Cent is free to take a vacation with his son after passing a court-ordered drug test." [18 Jul, NYT]

"Plans for a large human trial of a promising government-developed H.I.V. vaccine in the United States were canceled Thursday because a top federal official said scientists realized that they did not know enough about how H.I.V. vaccines and the immune system interact." [18 July, NYT]

Noose Watch

2008-07-22T10:00:57-04:00

A surprising number of noose incidents in the southern New England and mid-Atlantic states ...

Click on map to learn details of each of the 78 incidents reported to authorities within the last year in the U.S.)

The Mechanism

2008-07-22T13:30:32-04:00

"In a nutshell: before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their rituals precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That's the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed." -- René Girard, in Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture

Quoted by Chronicles of Atlantis, with accompanying photo at that website.

This may not be what was intended, but reading Girard and learning about mimetic theory these last few years has led me to become extremely wary of all sacrifice (making sacred) -- which actually I think is intended -- and also sceptical and even perhaps cynical of self-sacrifice, in myself and others.

Sacrifice seems so often to go hand-in-hand with feelings of righteousness and resentment, and the act of scapegoating, and it offers an enormous payoff both for acknowledging the sacrifice as such and for denying all else. I see self-sacrifice now as mostly an acceptable way to make oneself sacred, a kind of self-divination that can be deeply satisfying and comforting to the sacrificer. (A short time ago I would have agreed that 'we are all sacred,' and yet now I think that such language amounts to a sort of trick, a means of identifying and attacking 'the profane,' that which we think is unworthy.)

I think we are called to compassion -- i.e., suffering with, abiding with, experiencing what the other experiences without clutching onto the experience -- which sometimes entails sacrifice of one's ego, one's desires, and at times one's life; and yet I can't be unaware of the ego-needs and the desires that are met in the act of sacrificing oneself in both mundane and extraordinary ways, in the stories we tell ourselves and others about the sacrifice -- before (if premeditated or foreseen), during and particularly after the fact -- and in the refuge taken in false modesty that seeks to lift up our own altruism and to deny our own selfishness. And contrariwise, even boasting of our selfish motives can itself become a show of ego self-sacrifice, a twisted pretense of appropriate humility that serves only to enhance the perception of oneself as a hero, a god, someone who isn't even aware of the good they've done. We are a tricky, tricky lot, it seems to me, capable often of hiding the complexity of our own motives from our own minds and hearts.

I can imagine self-sacrifice as a consequence of feeling in the flow of all life, as a heartfelt response to feeling loved, as an act intertwined with living an abundant life, though I have a more difficult time imagining that the story about the act could leave it at that without justification, fabrication, meaning-making, and so on.... What I can't imagine is self-sacrifice as a measurement on a moral scale without also thinking about the Pharisees and their sacrifices, abstinences, denials of pleasures, etc., for the sake of God, and how good they felt about their worthiness under God because of those sacrifices.

Self-sacrifice that comes from a sense of duty and a need to 'do the right thing,' and that carries with it a sense of having done right, done well, been worthy and pleasing, feels to me likely to slip unobserved into a self-congratulatory act, and perhaps to leak into resentment, bitterness, anger and eventually accusation when the act is unappreciated, unrecompensed, unacknowledged, unnoticed, and even unaccepted, and/or has an outcome considered bad by the sacrificer. (Or, alternately, the sacrificer may view the lack of appreciation and the bad outcome as yet another burden added to the sacrifice s/he is making, which just enhances the satisfaction s/he feels in making such a sacrifice.)

If such an act derives from wanting to measure up, wanting to do what's right and to be right, then it seems mined with explosive devices that will likely damage the sacrificer, as it did the Pharisees, without their noticing it. If, on the other hand, such a sacrifice derives from a feeling of being loved completely for who one is (and isn't), from a knowledge at the core -- or perhaps simply from a quick glimpse that's never been quite edited out -- that we are the recipients of a gift that our word 'life' doesn't even begin to describe -- Well, that kind of sacrifice could, it seems, be experienced not as giving up anything, not as an unequal exchange, not as suffering at all except in the sense of 'suffer' as 'allow' or 'undergo.' We might then undergo sacrifice as a bit of ash undergoes a lava flow or as a drop of rain undergoes a thunderstorm. What would that be like?

(I ordered Evolution and Conversion yesterday, and a few days ago received a copy of Girard's other book published this year, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, from which I may occasionally quote as I get into it. I'll probably skip around ... Writers whose works he explores include Stendhal, Voltaire, Valéry, Tocqueville, de Beauvoir, Proust, Racine, Sartre, Hugo, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare ... I haven't read most of the original texts, so it may be hard going. See TOC here.)

Taking A Life

2008-07-21T11:36:17-04:00

"When it became clear he wasn't going to move out of the way, I closed my eyes, covered my face and held my breath.

"By the time we were stationary, four of my eight cars were in the platform and I was on autopilot. I told the passengers there would be a delay in opening the doors due to an 'incident', and was calling the line controller for assistance when I heard a tap on my cab door. A smart man inquired, 'Do you know there's a person under your train?' I looked at the blood on the windscreen momentarily before assuring him that, yes, I was aware.

"He paused for a heartbeat, looked at his watch and said, 'So, how long before we get on the move again?'"

(from "Last Year I Killed a Man," by Vaughan Thomas, in the Guardian, 19 July 2008, via Scott)