New Book of short fiction is being released

It's been quite a week to look woebegone: no new SH podcasts. But at least we're closer to removing the National Boil!

In the absence of any new SH work, here's a shameless plug for my newest book:

A Thousand Ways to Fail, & Other Stories
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B081XHKGNC

#174: Life & Mind, with Richard Dawkins

This was a nice, juicy one and a great introduction to a Sam Harris conversation for any Sam-curious folk.

I don't have an over-arching theme to extract from the conversation, but here are a few tidbits that struck me as interesting:

Dawkins points out that we are mostly descended from young ancestors, which is why the species doesn’t live very long. In general, what promotes a species' ability to reproduce at an early age is usually antithetical to living to an old age. The classic example is a brightly colored songbird--the great colors in sure his appeal to the opposite sex, but also his visibility the predators

Dawkins invented the word "meme" to be some concept or artifact adopted by a human population. (I don't think other species can have memes...?) 

Dawkins introduces an elaboration, the "meme complex" such as buildings or religion. He is careful to explain these are not the same as "extended phenotypes." The latter are dictated by genes. So a cave dwelling might be an extended phenotype if every human, naked and unprotected and looking for shelter, would move in an stay there. But a castle or apartment building, whose design has to be learned through the surrounding culture, is a meme complex.

Here's a fun little throwaway most of the way through the conversation: "the only remaining problems in genetics are the origin of life, sex, and consciousness." Oh, is that all?

They moved into religion and mysticism later on, and Sam monologued for quite a while on the paradox that those enlarged spirits in history had to interpret their epiphanies through some iron-age mysticism. But he says that in this modern age we should be able to reach an profound understanding of reality through isotropic drugs or meditation. You don't need some primitive superstition, but instead an understanding of the plasticity of consciousness.

This invokes one of my objections to Sam’s belief in meditation as a way to free one’s ego from illusion. He thinks that because you cannot identify where a thought comes from, and that means it doesn’t come from you. But it seems to me that not being able to identify where you are located, where your seat of consciousness exists, in no ways means that it doesn’t exist. It just means that you can’t see the other side of a mirror. For Godel, it made sense that you couldn't measure the span of a mathematical system from within the system.

In his closing statements at the end of the interview, Sam talks about gives reasons to the skeptic for trying meditation. I felt that this really spoke to me, as I have become less and less enamored with his meditation app, the further I get into it. I have begun to suspect that people who meditate are in search of some sort of mystical non-reality, an escape from their day-to-day mind. Perhaps some out-of-body experience? Proof that our existence is more than mere software inside a meat computer? Why spend an hour upon hour trying for some elusive goal of non-experience? 

Sam suggests that the doubting novitiate might consider himself an explorer or a scientist embarking on the study of his own mind. What if he is more like a fisherman sitting by the bank of an empty lake, waiting for nothing to bite?

#172: Among the Deplorables, with Andrew Marantz

Another intellectual from the not-terribly-left-of-center who finds himself butting heads with Sam over subtleties that Sam seems genetically unable to perceive!

As expected, the Reddit chatter seems to favor Sam over Marantz early on. Yet I was encouraged by the growing group of people who understood what Marantz had to say, didn't dismiss him out of hand, and shared some of the feeling I have that Sam has a rather noticeable blindspot where it comes to "wokeness." Kind of ironic for the author of the Waking Up podcast.

I won't weigh in on the conversation any further than to post this for your entertainment pleasure, the title poem from my recently released collection:

Confession to the Cockroaches

Apparently, you’ve learned to read

and come upon this volume. Know, then:

it lead to your rise.

You might scoff: “These poems didn’t

lead the humans toward their final war!"

But dig a little deeper.

The missiles haven’t launched yet,

but the masses have begun their spiral.

Their vitriol grows daily.

Okay, it wasn’t just this author. It was

the readers, too. All of us who, unmindful,

worshiped the idol of Merit:

“of course the elite should get the best,”

we declared, anointing ourselves

with all rights and privileges. With crowns.

We stacked the deck, blinded by our

narrative of just rewards.

We hogged the wealth. Off-shored it.

As the masses lost livelihoods,

we only shrugged: “Their fault!

They should go to college. Get retrained.”

As though honest work shouldn’t pay.

As though college was for everyone.

As though we deserved our good fortune.

Already I hear the distant drumbeat.

Dumpster fires warm the whole globe.

Cheering, at the precipice.

#169: Omens of a race war

It was amusing to listen to Sam so unwilling to distinguish between white nationalists and white supremacists. He really didn't have much energy for Kathleen Belew's thesis that "white supremacy" is not a useful identifier because it describes most of the world: she thinks the entire structure of western civilization is built around the oppression and exploitation of the non-white races. And one gets the sense that she is not exactly an extremist compared to the rest of academia, where she works.

I have to acknowledge that as a white person it may be too easy for me to dismiss that point. And maybe Sam is just as unwoke as I am. But it may also be that I'm taking a more woke and not less woke position: I say that western civilization is structured around the oppression and exploitation of all races, whites included. I think the one-percenters--those doing all the oppressing and exploiting--really don't give a fig what your race is, so long as they can milk you of your cash and your labor.

Sam and I share another blind spot: we were both uneducated about the role that the white nationalist movement played in Timothy McVeigh's terrorist attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City. But Kathleen does make a compelling case for the circumstantial evidence that adds weight to that role, even if McVeigh never explicitly admitted to it.

One other eye-opening aspect of this conversation was the lackadaisical history of the FBI in investigating and prosecuting white-power terrorist groups. One only wonders if the growing antipathy between the FBI and the kooks who are being taught to fear the "deep state" will ultimately lead the FBI to take a more serious interest in these kinds of movements.

#168 Mind and Motion

#168 Mind, Space & Motion With Barbara Tversky

This was one of the more interesting podcasts I've heard in a while. Maybe because she sounds like someone's wise old aunt from Massachusetts. Maybe because I didn’t know much of this stuff before listening. 

The starting point was how our understanding of spatial relationships is more fundamental than abstract thought or language, which turns out to be Law Number Six in the "Nine Laws of Cognition" that she proposes.

Here are a few random factoids which came out of the conversation:

Blind children use their hands to describe directions. The gesturing helps complete the thought. 

Children’s drawings naturally tend to exaggerate those parts of the body (head, hands) that have a lot of neuron connections. 

People recognize videos of their own body motion better than they do strangers or even friends. It’s like trying on a piece of clothing to see if it fits—"and here it’s trying on a pattern of motion."

Moving in space can be better for old people to preserve cognitive alacrity than doing crossword puzzles. 

And here are Barbara’s Nine Laws of Cognition. I'm not sure about calling these laws--I'd be more inclined to downgrade them to the 9 Observations of Cognition. Because they seem to be more heuristic than theoretical: 

1st law: There are no benefits without costs. 

E.g. being creative is the antithesis of learning. 

2nd law: Action moulds perception.

E.g. our perceptual learning is done by moving in the world. 

3rd law: Feeling comes first

E.g. you know you like something before you recognize it. 

4th law: the mind can override perception

E.g. there was a study in a mental hospital where fake patients quit faking it after a while and began to act "normal," but those psychologists continued to interpret their actions as symptomatic of psychoses. 

5th law: Cognition mirrors perception 

E.g. within mentally imposed categories, differences are ignored, while between categories differences are exaggerated. 

6th law: Spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought

I.e. we learn how to manipulate abstract ideas by imagining prepositional relationships between them--over, under, above, within &c. 

7th law: The mind fills in missing information

E.g. If you see a guy sitting behind a desk, you guess he has legs, even if you can’t see them.

8th law: When thought overflows the mind, the mind puts it in the world

E.g. cavemen blurted out their thoughts into carved bones, indigenous people into hieroglyphs, and modern people into tweets.

9th law: We organize stuff in the world the way we organize stuff in our minds

E.g. we keep food in the kitchen, tools in the garage, children in school, and art in museums.

Shameless plug for my novel

This post is only distantly related to anything to do with Sam Harris. To wit:

Imagine a dystopian future world. Now imagine that world through the eyes of one of your fellow Sam Harris audience members. Maybe it would look like my novel, The Unsettler.

The second installment of my novel The Unsettler has come out, and here's what my publisher has to say this time: 

In this coming issue of SERIAL Magazine, the theme is SURVIVAL. We’ve got 5 short stories and two novel installments all about surviving whatever life may throw at you....

SERIAL MAGAZINE, Issue 11[In] the second installment of The Unsettler by Charles Joseph Albert..., Javier would like nothing more than to stay in the resource-deprived City he crew up in. You either run or adapt to survive and Javier has adapted quite well to the only life he’s ever known. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a choice about whether he stays or not. In ISSUE TEN, Javier was kidnapped by a childsnatcher and dumped in the wilderness. In ISSUE ELEVEN, we see him meet an unlikely companion who guides him to a “better life.”

#165 Journey Into Wokeness with Caitlin Flanagan

This podcast begins with a sample Waking Up episode, which takes the place of this episode’s housekeeping. 

(I’m going to editorialize a tiny bit here; you can take this ignorant opinion or leave it at your pleasure.) About two months ago, Sam had some British guy on--I think he's a writer--who pushed back on the notion that meditation has any real impact on the meditator. He found it boring and decided--whether through a knee-jerk reaction or through really trying it--that it was a big fat waste of time. It wasn't going to lower his blood pressure or cause him to reconcile with his ex or any other claims stretching credulity. But I say, as long as if it’s fun and it distracts you from your mortality for ten minutes, then it's all well and good. And yet I have to agree with that guest--thinking that you're going to learn how to recognize the important from the inconsequential, as Sam promises in this sampler, just because you meditate—well, that's just silly.

CF is an interesting left-leaning but not-really-feminist feminist, who skewers hypocrites right and left. Since she’s the mother of two sons, she isn’t so quick to vent about toxic masculinity.

She wrote an expose of the nanny industry pointing out that many privileged white upper class Harvard graduates who make it to the top of their New York investment banks end up hiring a illegal aliens as nannies. And somehow, Biffy doesn't pay Consuela's social security on the proposition that she's a “member of the family.” 

And yet, CF reports, Consuela is always mysteriously fired within five years.

Here's another droll CF comment: men say women are hysterical. But if women are more hysterical, it’s probably because of all the sexual assaults they’re repressing.

One last thought: CF makes a fascinating point that Harvard is making use of minority students to bolster their image, but it is not being straightforward with them about what will be needed for them to succeed in highly competitive fields like STEM. This means Harvard is condemning their minority students--even those who are superlative students--to compete in an unfair field against Palo Alto kids with three years of AP physics, kids who have done unbelievable experiments already in their high-school labs. Harvard owes it to their social-engineering admissions to prepare them in some way, offer them the remedial or even advanced prep classes that they might not have been given, and yet instead of doing that, the kids are callously left to sink or swim at their peril, never mind the psychological damage that might be inflicted on them.

I knew a couple of kids in that category from when I was in school, kids who were dumped in the deep end without adequate preparation. Hell, when it comes down to it, I was one of those kids myself. Admitted to Berkeley from a mostly minority high school and left to flounder without the least concern of how badly of my depth I was. So I can attest--CF knows what she's talking about here. This stuff is real.

Review of #162 - Medical Intelligence, with Eric Topol

I wasn't surprised by the reddit/blogger controversies stirred up by Sam. He spent so much of the podcast bemoaning the violence of Antifa protesters! I was thrown off, though, when he complained about how wacky the left is. Because I thought he was saying that "the left" = "Antifa".

It took me a while, but I figured out that he was really complaining about "the mainstream media" coverage of the event. How those lefties did not take to task the violent thuggishness of Antifa. The fact that NPR, CNN and NYT refuse to condemn the violence makes them--he says--look biased and cowardly. And I agree--look on the Internet for coverage of the Antifa thugs, and the only critical coverage you'll find are from screwball right-wingers. The left is, as Sam points out, suffering from severe whataboutism.

As for the main podcast itself, it really was good, but didn't teach me anything new. I'm sure we'd all rather have an AI looking at our radiology than a human, I don’t think this is controversial. I don't remember anything interesting coming out of the conversation that I hadn't already heard with the possible exception of this one horrible irony:

Medicine in the US is remarkable--unique, maybe--for its pernicious overtreatment to the point of harm done to the wealthy... an evil exceeded only by its callous undertreatment of the poor.

#159: Conscious (with Annaka Harris)

One of the immediate attractions of this podcast, to anyone who has listened to more than one or two of them, is the unedited goofy beginning of this where Sam and his wife Annaka figure out how to get into the dynamic of interviewer/interviewee instead of husband and wife. A lot of awkward moments, a lot of laughs, and a thoroughly enjoyable glimpse into the man behind the rigorous, austere veneer that must be the face of every public figure.

Once you get past that, there may not be much of interest to the hard-core neuroscientist or political observer or AI researcher. But if you come at these with a more general interest level, which probably describes most of us, then you might derive something from it. I for one was expecting to hear Sam extract from Annaka that the hard problem was going to be solved in ten years and soon we'd be making computers that were just as conscious as we are.

Instead, she voiced a scruple that I share: what if consciousness isn't an either/or proposition (humans have it but dogs don't, for example) but more of a phenomenon that can occur in degrees. Humans are more complexly conscious than rats, who are more conscious than complexly worms, who are more complexly conscious than bacteria, who are--who knows?--more complexly conscious than atoms.

I did my PhD dissertation in relativistic quantum mechanics, and I still don't understand how an electron knows when to emit a proton that is off-shell, and when to emit one that is on-shell. Or why the energy that makes up an electron decided to coalesce into the clunky and sluggish existence of matter at all! Why not remain pure, massless, and immune to entropy?

So I say, maybe there is some level of complexity within even the reductionless point particle we call an electron. And maybe that complexity is a building block of consciousness, though we only recognize it when it has been added to in sufficient number.  And it was pretty cool to hear these two skirt this idea. To hear Sam say, "what is it like to be an electron?"

#58 - The Putin Question

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Garry Kasparov about the problem of waning American power, the rise of Putin, the coming presidency of Donald Trump, computer chess, the future of artificial intelligence, and other topics.

Coming back to this episode months later, I don't remember anything about Trump, computer chess, AI, or other topics. The only thing I remember can be summed up in my handy-dandy little meme I just generated instead of working:

Review of Making Sense #157: What Does the Mueller Report Really Say? With Benjamin Wittes

Oh, boy! This was a juicy one. Starting with good disclaimers about how Benjamin is not a lawyer but a legal reporter, and also that he despises Trump and wants him out of office. So if you take him at his word, you won't view the rest of the interview as yet another Trump lackey running a screen for him. And really, unless you're blinded by your own political bents, you will find yourself unable to disagree with pretty much everything Benjamin says.

He makes clear that in Volume 1 of the report, Mueller found no criminal activity on Trump’s part prior to the 2016 election:

• Gross incompetence kept him from accomplishing the conspiracy he intended 
• So did a halo of interceding aides 
• Merely applauding and being the beneficiary of Russian hacking does not mean Trump conspired.

So, though there are terrible lapses of judgment recorded, there's nothing criminal there.

Volume 2 is a different story, though. That one is about the Trump response to the investigation. Benjamin notes that Mueller was legally not allowed to say that anything indicted Trump, only whether he is exonerated or not. But he says there are three clearly criminal and impeachable classes of offenses outlined in Volume 2:

• Criminal offense #1: serial abusive attempts to influence the investigation by firings etc.
• Criminal offense #2: serial attempts to abuse his power and launch FBI attacks on Hillary Clinton and other political enemies 
• Criminal offense #3: commanding and encouraging witnesses to not cooperate with the investigation.

Benjamin ends by recognizing the danger of proceeding with impeachment proceedings, which may only energize Trump's base for a 2020 election. And he very rightly counters that with the danger of turning a blind eye to such criminal and reprehensible behavior.

Sam does a good job of staying out of the way and only asking intelligent and appropriate questions. At the end, he asks the question which is on my mind a lot these days: "what do you say to the die-hard partisan Trump supporter who keeps insisting that there is no 'there' there?" 

Benjamin's answer is one we've probably all heard before: "Tell them to substitute 'Biden' or 'Hillary' (or whatever) in the report everywhere you see Trump's name, and see if you can't understand how terrifying this is to people on the other side who are concerned about the fate of our democracy.'

Sound advice. But I bet many committed Trump supporters would be willing to ride a nuke into--well, not Moscow, anymore, but how about San Francisco?--if Trump told them to. So I don't think they'd give a fig about the fate of our country's democracy.

Making Sense #154: What does Sam Harris really want?

#154 What do Jihadists Really Want

This is one of the topics that most appeals to the whacko right-of-center segment of Sam's base. But it's important not to judge the strength of an argument by the whackos it attracts.

My primary objection to the overall content of this particular podcast is that Sam's bias seems to be preventing him from seeing clearly the traps he so nimbly detects in his opponents' views. Anyone who has listened to him learns very quickly that he hates it—HATES IT—when people try to second guess what he says.

And indeed one of the very first things Sam tells us is that we should believe what people say about themselves and stop trying to second-guess their motives. Jihadists want to kill all of us infidels because the Koran tells them to. Choosing not to believe them would be as foolish as choosing not to believe a medical student who tells us that he's studying to be a doctor because he wants to help people.

Oh—except that Sam allows that the medical student may also be in it for the money. Or the prestige. Or scientific curiosity.

But getting back to jihadists—they all want to kill us because their religion is inferior. Sure, he says, there may be some "local" jihadists who are only beheading US Marines because their leaders told them to. But that's beside the point for Sam. And he even says it would be crazy to think that there aren't some Muslims who want to kill us because of the horrors of colonialism. But don't let that distract you.They really want to kill us because they hate our freedoms. George W was right!

If you don't agree with Sam, you are a "Muslim apologist." Or even worse, you are a self-described "woke" liberal, meaning your weak mind has been befuddled by—what? I don't know, too much empathy, perhaps.

Now, I love laughing at foolishness as much as the next self-righteous science nerd. I love skewering the befuddled, mocking the wrong-headed, and kicking the bottom tiles of the Jenga stack that is the average American mind. I love it almost as much as Sam does.

Which is why I'm going to hoist you by your own petard, Sam. Let's take a swipe at your Jenga stack, for you seem to be blind to the fallacies of your own argument:

1    1)      You acknowledge that your own example of medical students may have multiple and complex reasons for choosing their path

2    2)      you acknowledge that it would be absurd to ignore the effects of colonialism, and then do so

3    3)      you acknowledge that the power of cult leadership may also play a role

4    4)      It requires a disturbing level of intellectual hubris to think you're smarter than everyone else and that you're the only one who sees this clearly.

Sam's premise is that jihadists exist mostly because Islam is a religion with "more than its share of bad ideas." But it is entirely possible that he's wrong. That the whackos in the Muslim community who think infidels should be killed may not speak for a significant portion of the "Muslim community." If that is even a thing.  

Were I to (gasp) try to second-guess Sam's motivations, I'd say it's pretty clear that he planted a big, fat, flamboyant flag in the whole end-of-faith, four-horsemen camp, and that's why he is blind to the above problems.

Let me repeat that I mostly agree with Sam. In fact I think he's the closest thing I've ever heard to The Voice Of Reason. Indeed, I don't dispute that Islam has more than its share of bad ideas. Further, I buy into Sam's notion that Episcopalians, Jews, etc. have benefited from several hundred extra years of civilizing effects and are now more likely than Muslims to frown on beheading infidels.

But I also note that Zionists were the first modern terrorists when they were being globally persecuted and in search of a safe place, in the early to mid 1900s. Nobody who has half a brain would now say that proves their religion is uncivilized or murderous. They would instead correctly acknowledge the dramatic and pernicious effect of global persecution on a population.

And I think Sam needs to do the same for Muslims. Even if it alienates the whackos in his base.

Making Sense #152: with Roger McNamee

This episode is about data privacy and the commodification of personal data. 

I'm going to be frank in that, for me, it doesn't carry a lot of interesting information. There were a few quote-worthy remarks to come out of the interview, but I'm not sure I'm 100% behind every one of this guy's worries. 

The best thing about the episode is that Roger doesn't paint himself as an expert and he isn't trying to convince anyone the sky is falling. It's really just a high-octane conversation between two very smart people, which makes it a thousand times more interesting than the next best thing out there right now (in April 2019, that would be Captain Marvel). 

One of the best quotes to come out of the episode is something along the lines of, "we need to ask how is it okay for Google to sell data they collect on minors."

Pretty much sums up all you need to know about the episode.

If you want a few more high points, I'd go with:

-"We’re not the customer and we're not even the product. We’re the fuel.”

-“I don’t believe that Facebook and Twitter will be as profitable than they have to clean up the toxic digital spills that they create.”

-"The Google Maps app is collecting meta data to process and sell. The Apple maps app doesn't do that."

Here are a few disagreements I have with this conversation:

Roger thinks Google is training their artificial Driving programs with our "Captcha" answers about which pictures have stoplights in them. That we're training their computers how to recognize stoplights. But that doesn't make any sense. If Captcha is going to know how or whether our responses are correct, then it already knows which pictures have stoplights in them.

Roger seems to think he doesn’t have any business relationship with Equifax and so they shouldn't have access to his data. But unless I'm mistaken, you sign a release when you accept a credit card. And the fine print on the release is the bank will share your data with their partners.

I'm also not convinced that the free giving away of all of this data is something to worry about. He does cite one conceivably nefarious example where Google figures out that your jerky mouse movements mean you have some disease, and sells that data to your insurance company so they can drop you. Which is pretty far-fetched. And would be rendered obsolete if this country ever gives up its obsession with jingoist yahooism and adopts universal health care.

Not a review--this posting is original content inspired by the Making Sense podcast

Summa Contra Theologica is a 32-page hyperlink text which I have created that in some ways is an answer to the stark atheism espoused by Sam and Making Sense.

I still consider it a work in progress, and any feedback, corrections, contributions or condemnations you care to make will be of great interest to me.

Thanks!

My review of Making Sense #146, Digital Capitalism with Douglas Rushkoff

I'm getting back to write this review a few weeks after listening to the podcast. Twice.

Why did it take so long? Because, although I am very appreciative of Rushkoff's points of view, I just didn't find myself terribly persuaded by him. It's great that he's biased toward humans over machines, and I imagine that there might be one or two people here in Silicon Valley where that opinion is controversial.

But I don't think that Facebook or Google tracking our data and marketing stuff to us is really a problem. The usual rules about false information should and are being enforced, but really, we're only protecting morons and hyper-partisans with those rules. The rest of us are presumably smart enough to know that Sandy Hook really happened, or that there is no child-sex ring being operated out of the basement of a DC pizza parlor, or that Donald Trump is an execrable human being with nothing but flyover-state resentment to keep him from immediate impeachment.

As an aside, I'll point out that Sam's and Rushkoff's comments about how bad the Information Age has become for writers only applies to that tiny minority of writers who were getting published. The rest of us were getting nothing but rejection letters from a closed-loop network of good old boys.

Now things have changed, and I'm free to submit my work to an explosion of free online venues and have finally become published. If not successful. This blog is an amusingly typical example: I have a 100% acceptance rate for new work here (why not--it's MY blog) and yet it has a readership of zero.

But the main reason I haven't published this review until now is that I just didn't find the episode very interesting. There were no conflicts of opinion, no startling revelations, and no real there, there.