Jaywalking

There is something deeply disturbing about societies and individuals people who refuse to cross the street on a read light, regardless of the presence of traffic. To me it somehow seems like an abdication of reasoning. I understand an ironclad crossing the street rule where small children are concerned but why do adults docily wait for the green man? I feel that the man or woman who waits for the green man in the absence of traffic is in some fundamental way diminshing their humanity. They are manifestly NOT interacting with the real world but ONLY with socially constructed norms and symbols. The abdication of common sense involved in the refusal to cross the road when it is obviously safe to do so makes me wonder in what other ways such individuals are prepared to abandon their capacity to think to social convention. Mindlessness really disturbs me. Of course I realise that we all need automatic conditioned responses to get through the day. But the danger arises in letting our mind go entirely to sleep. I feel that in my own life I struggle with conditioned behavior. Generally I am NOT good at the sort of tasks that dont involve explicit thought. Locking the door, remembering my glasses, kicking a soccerball are all difficult for me. I struggle to learn not only new motor skills but also intellectual skills and disciplines that require the internalisation of complex structures. It just doesnt stick. In short my autopilot simply doesnt work very well.
While this is regrettable I also think it sometimes helps me to see the idiocy automatic responses can produce. An inability or unwillingness to think lies at the root of an awful lot of evil in the world.

I wonder about how capable those who await the green man are of thinking independently about politics, education, morality, bringing up kids...

I have my ticket..

I finally have my ticket back to Tokyo. I will leave London on Monday night and arrive in Tokyo on Tuesday night..

Looking forward to it!

efficiency at the cost of common sense.

The daily Telegraph reparts that an idiotic examination board in Britain is considering the possibility of marking the answers to ESSAY questions by computer... The computer will award points for style and for the presence of keywords... I really dont have words to describe the idiocy of this project. It stuns me that they REALLY think they will get away with this. Amazing...

A snake in the Garden of Eden...

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html

Another VERY interesting article in todays NYT

A behavioral economist at Yale has performed experiments in which he introduced monkeys to the concept of money, by given them tokens which they can exchange for various kinds of food at different costs..
The monkeys spent their money in accordance to their preference and responded rationally to changes in price, buying more of one good when the price was lowered and less of another when the price rose. There were also instances of monkey theft and robbery and even cases of monkey prostitution..

Reading about these monkeys is both funny and somehow sinister. It reminded me of the opening scene in Kubricks 2001 when the ape discovers that a stick can be used a weapon after exposure to the monolith.

Persuasion

An interesting article in the New York Times ran today concenring the degree to which beliefs are entrenched.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/04/opinion/04miller_oped.html

The vast majority of people hold essentially closed opinions on many many subjects and changes of mind are almost impossible...

I believe it was either Kuhn or Popper who stated that scientific theories are not so much discarded as that their proponents die... In general we cling to our beliefs with incredible tenacity... Differing degrees of intelligence seem mainly to influence how sophisticated our defense of those ideas is rather than our ability to abandon them in the face of conflicting evidence. .

Loyalty to ideas seems unfortunately to be something that is hardwired into us...

(This is another subject Taleb discusses in his thought provoking book)

The huge psychological resistance to changing our mind seems unfortunately hardwired into us.

Idea, values, and beliefs become such an integral part of the self concept that refutation of them becomes a kind of challenge to the sense of "I"

Most people (including myself) instinctively distrust the opinion of individuals who frequently change their mind on issues. Flip flopping on issues is one of the worst sins a politician can commit in the public eye...

Why are changes in opinion accompanied with a loss of pride?

The degree of difficulty involved in changing your opinion seems proportional to the energy and time you have invested in thinking about it.

Inability to abandon existing ideas and beliefs is one of the most problematic of human traits and I would wager that it responsible for a large proportion of the evil and folly in the world

Jeromes Book Club Selection for June ;)

Reading a quite interesting book at the moment called "Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the markets"
Its written by a guy called Nassim Nicholas Taleb a deeply eccentric and highly intelligent Options Trader...
In it he discusses the fact that we judge traders (and people in general) almost exclusively by outcomes not on how intelligent their decisions were given the information they had available to them at the time. Essenitally its a treatise on the universilty of the monday morning quarterback problem. We dramtically downplay the element of chance... He argues that successful traders are often just lucky traders and what we assign to skill is primarily due to a random distribution of success and failure... "Of course this ground has been wellcovered in books like "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" BUT Taleb isnt arguing for efficiency of markets... He believes that markets are actually inefficient in key ways particularly in their response to unexpected events... This isnt a how to book designed to help you increase the size of your portfolio. Its more of a general survey of life as Taleb sees it. In it he touches on classical literature, neuroscience, behavioral psychology and a host of other areas, bringing in Homer, Karl Popper, Richard Feynman Georgre Soros and a host of of other characters. The whole thing is written in a rambling but elegant stream of consciosuness style that I found very enjoyable. What I find particularly amusing is the authors extreme arrogance about his own humility.
The book is a little bloated BUT I enjoyed the intelligent rambling and frequent autobiographical digressions

My Passport is back...

I finally collected my passport from the Japanese embassy today, with my new Japanese Working Holiday Visa. The photograph wihich I had done in an automatic machine is predictably awful, I look like a cross between a deranged computer hacker and an Al Quaeda operative.... Im very excited about having finally organised that.. Now all I have to do is find a job and a place to live in Tokyo.