science v culture multiplied by infants

I often joke around about all the crazy psycho-social experiments I'm going to put my children through. I kid about how I'll make a conscious effort to fail to invert auxiliary verbs in the appropriate contexts, or that I'll only read adult science fiction for their bedtime stories, or that every weekend they'll be getting training on how to 'cheat' on IQ tests.

Today I stumbled across this story. The scientist with me is intrigued while the human in me is horrified. I'm fairly certain that both of those reactions are inappropriate.

Leave it to the swedes, I guess.

Work and Play

Susan Garnsey is a really awesome professor of Psychology at the U of I. When I was there I had the wonderful experience of being a lowly undergrad worker in her Language & Brain lab (I ran ERPs for a comparison study of Japanese and English on garden path sentences).

I remember one of those stereotype shattering moments in my early academic career when I was sitting on the couch next to Gary Dell and some graduate students at one of Susan's Parties. We were talking about some such crazy thing related to sentence processing when I looked over to Susan's CD collection and was struck by her musical tastes. I pulled out a copy of the Magnetic Fields' 69 love songs which spun the group's conversation into a totally different (and totally awesome) realm.

Suddenly, I was no longer in an intimidating professor's home in some nerve-wrecking conversation where, at any moment I was in danger of saying something stupid that was going to make evident how little my undergraduate brain knew about sentence processing. Instead, we were talking about the qualities of Stephin Merritt's voice and his multi-talented cast of friends, a conversation I may have been having with peers at some house party later that weekend.

I guess I should have probably taken advantage of my surroundings that day and maybe gained a little more insight on the wonderful world of psycholinguistics, but it was pretty cool talking about music with these people who spent a large part of their week lecturing to undergraduates like me and grading our homeworks, and doing cutting-edge research. In a very profound way, it made a carreer in acadamics actually seem within grasp. These people could be so well versed in the processing literature AND know about Stephin Merritt? They didn't have to spend all of their time with their nose in a journal?

Sometimes I feel like that's really not the case, that I was imagining that whole event, and that I'll spend the rest of my life in front of the computer, typing, committed to the reality that popular culture is going to escape further and further from my ability to know it, understand it. At times like these, I fire up my PS3 and play some video games, assuming netflix hasn't sent me my next movie yet.

Sex differences

I just read an article in the paper which describes a couple of cross-cultural studies (personality surveys actually) which show that the magnitude of personality differences between the sexes differs greatly from culture to culture.

Many people believe that gender differences are not a genetic/biological phenomena but a cultural one, and the findings of these cross-cultural surveys might support that. However, the survey also finds that in countries where the gender roles are much stricter (where, for example, women aren't allowed to work and men do very little child raising) the gender differences are much smaller than in countries where both the men and women seem to share the same kinds of work.

I always believed that gender differences arose from a combination of culture and biology (though, biology is the root of the difference since these differences appear in the natural world as well). But the findings that the cultural explanation is not that simple is really exciting.

song tips

I was just listening to my iTunes playlist, as I often do while working at the computer, and this song came on:

	Iron & Wine - The Trapeze Swinger
	Found at skreemr.com

I'm a big fan of Iron & Wine, but I haven't heard this particular song in a while. And as I was listening to it (all 9+ minutes of it) I thought to myself that this would be a fantastic song to run film credits to OR to play as a graduation song.

I've never really approved of any of the graduation songs that I've been subjected to. The problem is that no single person gets a say in what graduation song gets chosen, its done by democracy and so it's done by popularity which automatically makes all of these decisions completely unoriginal. I guess it's also possible that the most popular person chooses a song and everyone agrees because that's what you do in high school or elementary school.

So we used songs like that Sarah McLaughlan song about remembering each other (I actually like a lot of Sarah McLaughlan songs but that mirrorball album got overplayed). I also remember some lame song set to Pachelbel's Canon which came out around the time I graduated high school. That one seemed to be written specifically for high school graduations and it was terrible. And for some reason, I think we used Mariah Carey's 'Hero' for my 8th grade graduation.

Anyway, MUSICAL RESPECT goes to any class who uses Iron & Wine's "trapeze swinger" as a graduation song.

P.S. Iron & Wine will be opening for the Swell Season at a concert this october at SDSU. I highly recommend it. Here is a sample of the Swell Season:

	Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova - When Your Minds Made Up
	Found at skreemr.com

	Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová & The Frames - Falling Slowly
	Found at skreemr.com

Don't watch this at work!

I thought this video was really clever!
And it's got david byrne singing.

wow...

When I learn about traditions like this baby dropping ritual, presented in the video above, my first thought is "how did such a tradition come to begin? What sorts of social conditions had to be in place for human beings to start doing this and to then continue doing it generation after generation."

Ah... to be an anthropologist.

I'm surprised that this completely slipped my radar

Apparently, the big radio congloms put together a list of songs that were 'inappropriate' following the 9/11 attacks. Included on the list are "walk like an egyptian" by the bangles and "free falling" by tom petty.

This is one of those moments in life that can be accurately defined as funny and sad at the same time, at least for me.

UPDATE: I forgot to post the link from wikipedia

lies and ethics (and getting preachy about doctrine)

I highly recommend the radio show "radiolab".

One of the more recent episodes is about deception: What is a lie, how do people manage to lie, and what results from lies. In that respect, the claim of the final segment on the show is that to be deceived in a fundamental way (the kind of deception that is like learning that your wife of 2 years is actually a con artist with 3 other husbands in various parts of the country) causes a real deep scar in the fragile psyche of a human being. And this result might or might not be categorical. A big lie causes a big hurt, a medium lie causes a medium hurt, and a little lie causes a little hurt (on average). But that hurt, big or small, can be long lasting and can negatively affect the human interactions of the victim for the rest of her life.

I'd never given the matter much deep thought, but the radio program's topic led me down that path (as many of these radiolab episodes tend to do). I thought about what a society which finds lying acceptable would look like? Could such a society even exist? I posit that it couldn't, that if a group of people living together could not trust one another and thus depend on one another would soon cease to exist. This might sound like an obvious conclusion but it has pretty serious implications.

You see, I was reminded of lying's 9th place on the list of 10 commandments and this reminded me about the argument often made by many middle-of-the-road believers about the fundamental truths we receive from the holy books.

It goes like this (an argument I've actually heard my own ears being made on at least 2 occassions): There are folks who believe that a world free of religion would, much too quickly, descend into chaos because it is the Bible (qoran, torah, etc) which provides those critical lessons of morality. If we stop looking to the holy book for moral guidance, we could lose morality altogether as it is not a knowledge that can be acquired innately or through day to day experience.

I have always looked at a counter-argument from the basic perspective that morality can be achieved through non-religious means, but this train of thought about a society of liars made me think of a similar, but more effective counter-argument. If it is the case that morality is not innate and that it is actually interlinked with the inception of, just for one example, the ten commandments provided on mt Sinai to the Israelites, then we must assume that during the Israelites' wondering of the desert, post-exodus, none of them had a problem with lying to each other. Similarly, if one of them intentionally killed another, the rest of the tribe would not cast the murder away but would find that act simply morally ambiguous at worst (best?). But, lucky for them, once God provided the laws, order was established, that murderers and victims of lies suddenly knew who was right and who was wrong.

Even from a naive sociological perspective, we must admit that

• if lying is accepted within a society, then people would quickly cease to communicate in a meaningful way, that no critical information exchange would take place, and that the members of such a society could never depend on one another
• if intentional killing was acceptable within a society then all of the mild benevolent members would quickly die off leaving rage addicted psychopaths to slowly kill each other off.
  
• if adultery was acceptable this would quickly lead to a generation of illegitimate children for which no one, except for their mothers, could feel responsible. And that such a social problem would lead to the death of many of these children (or their mothers) from poverty.

A society like this would quickly collapse. Therefore we cannot assume that the Israelites (or the Egyptians, or any other group), pre-ten-commandments, were exactly such a culture. So we cannot assume that the 6th-10th commandments really told the Israelites anything that they didn't already know/believe about a moral way to behave.

Critical thinking alone should give one plenty of ideas about where, other than a holy book or religion, morality might come from. But until today, I haven't really thought about what the old testament would tell us about morality if we assume a priori that morality does come from God by way of two stone tablets or spoken word directions to the chosen people.

Of course, one can still argue that our innate sense of right and wrong is a divine gift, but if you are willing to accept that then you really couldn't attribute anyone's immoral behavior, as many people do, to not reading the appropriate biblical passage or attending the right church.

So, the question is, if we are innately moral (whether through divine intervention or as a result of living in a functional society) then what else do we have to learn from the qoran (or torah, or bible, etc) that we can't learn from each other?

PS. One of the problems with bible literalists is that they are easily persuaded to believe that homosexuality is a sin. There are a couple of passages in the bible that, pretty unambiguously say that man-on-man and woman-on-woman sexlove is not acceptable. But this can lead to a paradox involving the fifth commandment (about honoring mom and pop), from what I can tell. Because what happens when the gay man or woman is your mother or father? Has anyone ever asked these crazy protesters, who hold up signs that say "jesus hates fags" what he would do if he found out his father was gay?

Just like Europe

In my SD-Union/Tribune this morning I found the headline "FBI admits 4th year of privacy abuses" (it's an AP story so I'm sure you can find it online somewheres). I didn't finish the whole article but it got me to thinking about another article I read online somewhere where different EU specialists were arguing about which of the EU countries had the most spied-on populace.

Over the years I've come to realize how truly big Big Brother has become in many of the economically powerful EU nations. By comparison, here in America our privacy is much less invaded. And when the FBI has to 'admit' that "oops, we spied on you more than usual again last year.... our bad!" you know things are changing.

I haven't read this anywhere, and I'm sure that no one with authority would admit that it's true, but I have a feeling that our government agency, and the White House probably are looking to Europe as an example of how spying on your populace works, how the citizens of those countries haven't yet revolted and how it has led to more controlled borders, etc. So having evidence that it works, they feel it's time to implement it here at home.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. But I am afraid that having that kind of power consolidated, that is to control the information of a citizenry, could more easily fall into the hands of a bad leader elected by that apathetic citizenry. It's a scary thought and is not beyond the realm of possibility even for a country like the US. Maybe the benefits outweigh the potential risks, I'm willing to accept that possibility, but I'd like to see the data from those EU countries who've implemented state-wide RFID, or who've got face detecting cameras on every major street corner, etc.

But that's a digression. What I meant to write was: Why are government sectors looking to Europe for techniques to establish surveillance but ignoring the slew of other good ideas that we might borrow?

Early 90's memories

Do any of you remember this awesome gem? I was always pleased by Rambo's concluding appearance.

On staying positive

Overheard on the street yesterday:

Middle-aged man to younger man: "Well, it might look like it's bad for the economy, but hopefully [the weak dollar] will make those illegals think twice about coming here"


Yup... whatever we can do to keep the brown people at bay...

In the meantime, rich European women are flocking to boutiques in New York taking advantage of the situation, Australians are importing all of their electronic goods, and rap stars are flashing foreign currency in their music videos.

Global, human-induced climate change

Of course, the main problem with his argument is that we can choose column A, but we might already be too late, in which case we'll still get the horrible outcome of row2colB. But if we add column C, which is a contingency plan for when the earth turns to shit (such as building hydroponic food towers, elimination of all WMDs, cure for AIDS, increase to stem cell research funding) then we can get benefits either way while diminishing the negative outcomes of the worst case scenario.


Interesting Argument About Global Warming - Watch more free videos

Part 3 of the "cultural games I don't want to participate in" series

Intellectual Masturbation

I vaguely recall reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 when I was a high school lad. I vaguely remember one of the themes of the book was about government censorship. That's actually a lie. I remember government censorship being the CENTRAL THEME of the book. I don't know if I came up with that analysis or if it was implanted by whichever high school lit teacher was responsible with enlightening me.

The point is that the Author, one Mr. Bradbury, did not intend for that to be THE or even a theme of his book.

Should this matter? After all, the muse works in mysterious ways. Maybe his subconscious was speaking through his pen. Maybe critical analysts of literature are much more intelligent than the authors of the books they critique. Or, maybe, Cien años de soledad was really just about a family and their crazy adventures and not a socio-political allegory on the state of Latin America.

This sort of pseudo-intellectual bullshit is exactly what is supposed to shame me out of reading science fiction. I refuse to buy into it. If you're going to write a book that only a subset of the educated elite population is going to appreciate that's you're prerogative. But I loathe the industry that develops around this very notion that there are different kinds of Art, each belonging to a segregated social class.

We're living in a country where a trip to a MoMA (any of the dozens splayed across the country) is going to cost you $20+ and nobody, not the poor nor the rich, cares. How lucky we are that 3/4th of our population is functionally literate, it's just a shame that less than a fifth of us cares to use that skill.

I'm going to teach my children to read ASAP and then, when they're old enough, I'll give them a copy of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" and then ask them to teach me what it's about. They'll tell me, and then we'll go to an art museum together.

Graduate School is actually Work

It is the case that graduate school is actually a lot like an office job. It certainly has differences, but the similarities are really key.

Similarity: We have bosses, and we work for them in a somewhat organized way.
Difference: Our bosses often change periodically

Similarity: There is a hierarchical set of strata and at any one time we have bosses on each stratum.
Difference: We're not always fully aware on which stratum each boss currently lies

Similarity: deadlines, always with the deadlines
Difference: We are much more likely to take the work home and loose sleep working on it at all hours.

Similarity: Lots of office drama
Difference: none, it's the same kind of drama (although, generally, there's much less inter-office romance)

Similarity: We work 40+ hours per week (much closer to 50 or 60 I'd guess)
Difference: We can choose our own hours, but we get paid about 1/3 of what our time is worth (though our benefits are pretty darn good and we're kind of interns anyway)

Similarity: omipresent, endless meetings
Difference: most are not mandatory

Similarity: We needed to be hired for this position
Difference: We know we're gonna be fired/replaced in less than 7 years

Where's my paradigm shift!

I've recently become interested in the history involving the infamous kinsey reports. It's pretty interesting that a bug collector was able to spark a revolution.

Part 2 of the "cultural games I don't want to participate in" series

Small Talk

I can shoot the proverbial shit, I just don't like it. It's not the case that I don't want to talk to people, I actually enjoy it quite a lot. I just want conversations to be more meaningful.

I'm supposed to believe that when someone asks "How are you" the culturally appropriate response is "Fine, and you?". People don't want to know about my back problems or the stress resulting from my lack of sleep or missing my loved one. This is true in a lot of cultures. I guess in Korea the typical greeting is "where are you going?" and the socially appropriate response is "that way", where the demonstrative 'that' actually has no specified referent. After all, who wants to know that you're headed to the proctologist, except, maybe, the proctologist?

Certainly, I agree that there should be some kind of limit to the amount of information that is exchanged in short encounters. These limits should be set by the level of the relationship between the two participants. I just happen to be more permitting of this level with respect to complete strangers.

Let's just assume that these conversation are to remain as meaningless as possible. I'd like to propose, then, a completely new topic of small talk which should replace weather-talk, sports-talk, and traffic/public transport-talk.

Wikipedia articles.

Before starting out each day, hit the random article link on wikipedia's website. Read it in as much detail as time allows, and then begin all consequent small talk with the phrase "I read on wikipedia that X". Then the goal is to use up the small talk time by engaging the other person into the most bizarre yet topical conversation possible.

Part 1 of the "cultural games I don't want to participate in" series

Fashion

I'm a Fashion dullard. I'm not sure which stage of my life I was supposed to learn how to dress myself and look good, but if someone other than myself was responsible for teaching me the intricacies of style they didn't do a good job.

I guess I can have intuitions about other men or women's style. These intuitions will tell me when I think someone is wearing something that I think looks good on them. So I do have some kind of internal sensor which differentiates fashionable clothing and non-fashionable clothing. I don't know where this intuition came from. I suspect it has something to do with my experiences watching tv or going to events where people dress up. The problem is that this intuition is not really that well tuned with the rest of my fellow cultural participants'.

But I really think that what is fashionable is much too subjective to spend much time pondering about. For instance, the top notch fashion of the the 16th century is not acceptable in the 21st. I think doublets, jerkins, and codpieces look pretty cool and I would wear them if it was socially acceptable to do so (or if I found them on sale at Macy's). But that's not the case. In fact, we don't even have to go back 500 years to commit fashion faux pas. Wearing clothes from just a couple decades ago, for example, is only OK when the fashion elite deem it so.

So, I ask you, why should I invest even a minute of my day worrying about getting my style up to speed? As long as I'm not dressed in an obscene way (e.g. loin cloth, clown wig, and rain galoshes) I shouldn't be judged by my 6 pair of indistinguishable jeans, my dozens of plain t-shirts, and single pair of all-purpose shoes.