Fixing the holes

I continue to fix the holes created by the move to wordpress. While doing that, I come across bits that I like and put them in the “My favorite bits” category. For instance, here is The Buddha’s Sermon on Economics. I find putting words in the Tathagata’s mouth a lot of fun. It is my way of paying reverence to the One Who Has Gone Before. All the Buddhists bits begin with “Thus have I heard …” because originally it was an oral tradition.

The other bit I fixed today was on the concept of opportunity cost. I call the piece “Casting Spells to Fix a Broken Car“.

Now back to our regularly scheduled boring stuff.

A Set of Useful Tools

Bertrand Russell considered the basic purpose of education to be the “formation, by means of instruction, of certain mental habits and a certain outlook on life and the world.”

I believe there is a small set of very powerful tools, or mental models, that can help us comprehend the dynamic world we live in. It is surprising that such a complex and complicated world is amenable to comprehension using only a small set of tools. But it is indeed true. The tools that I refer to are immensely powerful and flexible. That these tools exist is a powerful testimony to the ingenuity of humans. Seemingly innocuous and simple ideas have profound implications. Continue reading “A Set of Useful Tools”

IGT Education: Reader comment

A reader, “P”, wrote in response to my “intergenerational transfer model for education” and said:

I came across your blog and the intergenerational model. I thought it was brilliant. My only concern was to do with making graduates realize that they owe something back to the institution. I went to a REC, received a highly subsidized education but do not have immense feelings of loyalty toward it, at least not enough to give back to it. Continue reading “IGT Education: Reader comment”

It is a connected world

The magical thing about the world is that it is connected. Not just at the physical level, it is connected in the abstract level at which we comprehend the world. Physical connectivity of course is clearly evident. Above our heads, the weather system is global as is the hydrosphere which then connects all the continents. That is geograhical connectivity. Then there is biological connectivity. Every one of us shares common ancestors. We are all cousins, a few dozen times removed at most since we share common ancestors. It is sobering to realize that Sorenson of Norway is a cousin to Mugusha of Zaire although their family resemblence is not immediately apparent. But that relatedness between all humans is just the tip of the iceberg. Continue reading “It is a connected world”

Of Symbols and their Manipulation

My dear Abhishek,

You are a sentient human being who is capable of using symbols.

There is one fact that distinguishes us from the rest of creation: our ability to use language. Or to put it another way, our ability to do abstract symbol manipulation. That ability, more than anything else, allows us to call ourselves members of the species homo sapiens sapiens. All our best attributes flow from that unique faculty. How did our brains diverge from the brains of our pre-human ancestors? What were the evolutionary forces which molded our neocortex? These are questions that are fascinating to explore. Even the capacity to ask these questions and answer them in some fashion requires the ability to manipulate symbols. You will notice that there is a certain circularity involved in this process: we use the faculty to explore the same faculty.

We are part of that larger creation we call the Universe. We are also that part of the Universe which seeks to comprehend the Universe. So through us the Universe comprehends itself. Isn’t that the most astoundingly astonishing thing about creation? Through us, the Universe is self-aware. We make the Universe self-reflective. Our thinking about our ability to do symbol manipulation involves symbol manipulation and this is what makes the process recursive and ultimately makes it a recursive Universe. All recursive processes have a terminating condition. We are that terminating condition for the recursive Universe. We, through our ability to comprehend the Universe, bring the Universe into existence. That is what the ancients in India many millennia ago meant when they declared “Ahum Bramha” which means “I am the Creator of the Universe.” Lots of interesting implications arise from this realization. In modern day terminology, thinkers have called it “The Anthropic Principle” which basically states that the Universe exists because sentient beings exist within it which are aware of the existence of the Universe.

We will discuss more about the self-reflexive recursive Universe later in these letters. But for now, we will move on to the ability that allows us to comprehend the Universe: symbol manipulation. More specifically, we will concentrate on the symbols alone and leave the discussion on the manipulation of symbols for a later date. So what are symbols, you may ask. Well, the first answer is that they are abstractions. What is an abstraction? One way would be to call them “representations in the brain.” Another word for “abstractions represented within the brain” is “word.” See I have used the word “word” twice in this and the previous sentence. When you use words to discuss words, self-reference is unavoidable.

The word is primary. And all that the thinker does is to manipulate symbols — words. We are symbol manipulating entities. Through our senses we get impressions of the world outside our brains. These are stored as memory. Some of these inputs are mapped on to words and the higher functions of the brain manipulate these symbols. Without the words we will continue to sense the universe but we will not be able to do the symbolic manipulation which is thinking.

Here is my claim: that unless you know the word, you cannot think. Conversely, to think effectively, you have to have a very large collection of words. The collection of words that you “own” is your vocabulary. That last sentence illustrates an amazing concept — that of hierarchy. Words exist in an hierarchical structure and that is what gives them power.

Words, as we keep saying, are abstractions. They represent something but they themselves are not the thing. The word “cow” is not the thing that exists out there with four legs, gives us milk, and goes moo. Distinguishing the symbol and the thing is very important. When people fail to make that distinction, they confuse the symbol for the thing, and work themselves up into a rage and all sorts of nasty things happen. But I digress.

OK, so things exist out there in the world. Those things are what I call “atomic” things. A cow is an atomic object or thing that exists out there in the world outside our brain and we use the symbol “cow” in English to correspond to that. Atomic objects are not limited to material things. Without getting too academic about it, let’s recognize that the number “1” is also a thing and we label it and call the label the word “one.” Given our collection of atomic objects for which we have words, we then construct higher level abstractions of things that are not atomic but are what I call “compound”. So the word “cattle” stands for the abstract entity which is “the class to which cows belong”. In actuality, cows exist in the real world but cattle don’t. We just refer to the abstraction “collection of cows” as “cattle.” The word “cow” is an atomic word, and the word “cattle” is a compound word by my definition.

Now you see what I mean that words exist in a hierarchical structure? The words you own is represented by another word we call “vocabulary.” That is, “vocabulary” stands in for “the words that you own.” In a sense, the higher level word is more economical, or compact. The magical thing about words is that we can build higher and higher level words based on how we manipulate the words at the next lower level.

It is easy to see that even if the world out there has a limited number of atomic objects — which implies a limited number of atomic words — the compound words that we can form is unlimited. And as time has gone on, our collection of words have increased. Or we can say that our vocabulary has increased. The consequence of this increase? We can think more effectively. And after all this, I want to come to the advice that I would like to give you today. To learn how to think, you have to learn vocabulary. By that I don’t mean that you open up the dictionary and memorize it.

Learning vocabulary means to understand what the word means, not just its dictionary definition. When you understand a word, it means you know the connection between the word and what it represents and all that it implies and how it is connected with other words at the lower levels. All education is ultimately an attempt to acquire a vocabulary and the skill to manipulate the vocabulary to build higher level words. Think about that for a bit.

You may object and say that perhaps learning languages is about vocabulary but surely engineering or physics is not about vocabulary. But it is indeed all about vocabulary. A physicist knows physics vocabulary which he has patiently learnt over years. When he finally adds “quantum mechanics” to his vocabulary after years of studying all the component words that make up the compound word “quantum mechanics”, he can then use that word without having to think about all the bits that go into making that word. Note that he did not actually add the word “quantum mechanics” to his vocabulary the first time he heard it or read the word on the page. It became part of the vocabulary after a long time was spent in manipulating the lower level words which ultimately define quantum mechanics.

Here is one analogy that you may find useful. A compound word is like a theorem in mathematics. A theorem is a true statement in the system under study. Once a theorem is proved, then you can use the theorem to create more theorem. So also, when you collect (under certain rules) a number of words to create a higher level word, you then have the luxury of using the higher level words and it helps you to think more effectively.

So where am I going with all this? A large vocabulary is important if you want to be able to think effectively and clearly. As I noted before, education is about vocabulary (symbols) and thinking (manipulation of symbols.) The fact is that while thinking requires words as the objects upon which it operates, thinking itself creates more words. As more people think in the world, the collective vocabulary of the world goes up and this is what increases our ability to think more clearly.

So what is the point of all this thinking clearly, you may ask. I leave you with a thought that Blaise Pascal recorded: “Working hard to think clearly is the beginning of moral conduct.”

All evil in the world arises from faulty thinking. To become a truly moral person, we have to learn how to think correctly. To the ancients in India, ignorance was the root cause of misery and sorrow. We will go into that one of these days.

With a deep bow to the wordless wisdom in all sentient beings,

Atanu

Trading Freedom for Security

In connection with the London bombings, came across this at Phoenix Muses:

Jihad al-Khazen, an op-ed columnist for the London-based pan-Arab Al-Hayat newspaper, wrote: “Such criminal terror acts prove that no measure is enough to fight terrorism.

“Actions that governments take to fight terrorism are totally justified because protecting life is a lot more important than protecting civil liberties.”

Brings to mind what Benjamin Franklin said about trading civil liberties for security. “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”

Of course it is unfair to juxtapose Franklin’s viewpoint with Jihad al-Khazen’s.

All the taste but less filling

Some apparently wise statements reminds me of lite beer: all the taste and less filling. These statements sound nice but are not reality based. Consider this for a moment this:

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. — Native American Proverb

It is supposed to appeal to our sense of conservation, of course. Since it is our children’s possession, we have to take care of it. Rather flimsy reasoning. It is not our property, says the proverb, and implies that this realization would compell us to conserve and not trash the place.

Let’s look at the evidence. Which car do people drive more carefully: rental cars or their own cars? Tell the average human that he owns the stuff, and he will be more concerned about conservation than if he were told that it belongs to someone else.

Want to know why public monies are wasted? Because the money the public official is spending does not belong to him. You are on an expense account? Well, don’t bother checking the right hand side of the menu. Want a forest to be destroyed? Make it nobody’s forest. The tragedy of the commons will trash it soon enough. Earth does not belong to you? Well, let’s have a party and who cares if we trash the place — it’s not mine in any case.

Want people to really care about something? Make them own the thing and see how they care.

The Reign of Terror

Just a quick note prompted by the bombings in London.

A moment of silence for the dead.

Brought to mind the poem “Before I start this peom” by Emmanuel Ortiz which I had first come across in Suhail Kassim’s blog post. Here are the last lines of that poem, for the record.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.

Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the
second hand
In the space
between bodies in embrace,

Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all
Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin
at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

The whole poem is worth deep consideration.

The Reign of Terror

***

Let us mourn in silence with this simply awesome gut-wrenching rendition by an American, Emmanuel Ortiz …

“Before I start this poem“

Before I start this poem,
I’d like to ask you to join me in
a moment of silence
in honour of those who died
in the World Trade Centre
and the Pentagon
last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you
a moment of silence
for all of those who have been
harassed, imprisoned, disappeared,
tortured, raped, or killed
in retaliation for those strikes,
for the victims in both
Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing …
A full day of silence
for the tens of thousands of Palestinians
who have died at the hands of
U.S.-backed Israeli forces
over decades of occupation.

Six months of silence
for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation
as a result of an 11-year U.S. embargo
against the country.

Before I begin this poem:
two months of silence
for the Blacks under Apartheid
in South Africa,
where homeland security
made them aliens
in their own country.

Nine months of silence
for the dead in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, where death rained
down and peeled back
every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin
and the survivors went on as if alive.

A year of silence
for the millions of dead
in Vietnam — a people, not a war —
for those who know a thing or two
about the scent of burning fuel,
their relatives’ bones buried in it,
their babies born of it.

A year of silence
for the dead in Cambodia and Laos,
victims of a secret war … ssssshhhhh ….
Say nothing … we don’t want them to
learn that they are dead.

Two months of silence
for the decades of dead
in Colombia, whose names,
like the corpses they once represented,
have piled up and slipped off
our tongues.

Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence
for El Salvador …
An afternoon of silence
for Nicaragua …
Two days of silence
for the Guetmaltecos …
None of whom ever knew
a moment of peace
45 seconds of silence
for the 45 dead
at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence
for the hundred million Africans
who found their graves
far deeper in the ocean
than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing
or dental records
to identify their remains.
And for those who were
strung and swung
from the heights of
sycamore trees
in the south, the north,
the east, and the west …

100 years of silence …
For the hundreds of millions of
indigenous peoples
from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots
like Pine Ridge,
Wounded Knee,
Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers,
or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced
to innocuous magnetic poetry
on the refrigerator
of our consciousness …
So you want a moment of silence?

And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust
Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won’t be.
Not like it always has been

Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about
what causes poems like this
to be written

And if this is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem
for Chile, 1971
This is a September 12th poem
for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
This is a September 13th poem
for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem
for Somalia, 1992.

This is a poem
for every date that falls
to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories
that were never told
The 110 stories that history
chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC,
The New York Times,
and Newsweek ignored
This is a poem
for interrupting this program.
And still you want
a moment of silence
for your dead?
We could give you
lifetimes of empty:

The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces
of nameless children
Before I start this poem
We could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit

If you want a moment of silence,
put a brick through
the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses,
the jailhouses, the Penthouses
and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton’s 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt
fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.

Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the
second hand
In the space
between bodies in embrace,

Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all
Don’t cut in line.
Let your silence begin
at the beginning of crime.
But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.