(subtitle for post: why some archangels get to be the voice of god and some don’t.)
I subscribe to Powell’s Books Daily Review email, which I usually ignore– I’ve been trying to have a more balanced information diet lately, which generally means that I take a small nibble of lots of pieces of news instead of diving in deeply to any single thing. Today’s review was on Phillip Zimbardo’s new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
This is one of those books that has a stupid name but describes something really cool (other relevant example: “goldendoodle” to describe the cross of a golden retriever and a poodle.) My high school psychology teacher had a thing for Zimbardo, he showed up all over the place in our curriculum, and since I had a little bit of a thing for her, Zimbardo has stuck around in my mind. He’s most famous for conducting the Stanford Prison Experiment, where ordinary people were divided up into the roles of guards and prisoners and who took to those roles in a way that became downright frightening. For more information on the Stanford Prison Experiment, you should employ one of the following information-gathering techniques:
- Google “Stanford Prison Experiment“. Look at that, I provided the link for you. All you have to do is click on it. This blog is all about making you feel like you’re saving time as it encourages you to waste even more.
- Read The Lucifer Effect. Probably a good idea to take the jacket cover off and replace it with a cover with a cooler title, like “The DaVinci Code”.
- Watch the My Big Fat Greek Rush Week episode of Veronica Mars.
There are two conflicting ideas of what makes people evil– situationalism (anyone can do anything given the right circumstance) and dispositionism (some people are just evil, dammit.) The Stanford Prison Experiment seems to indicate that situationalism is largely correct, but the book (review) indicates that it’s not that simple (it never is)– even amongst the guards, there were certain guards who were more sadistic than others. It seems like the real cause is a combination of some sort of internal threshold for sadism combined with the situation at hand– there are some heroic people out there who would never torture another human being, but they are few and far between.
The book seems relevant to me in a way that it doesn’t seem to touch on explicitly– the current debate over torturing detainees in guantanamo, particularly amongst the republican presidential candidates. It’s like we get to see the large-scale distribution of people’s internal thresholds for sadism in an intense and yet distant sort of situation. One of the key themes of the book is that people aren’t good at figuring out that an authority figure has made a mistake or lost the moral compass, and so tend to follow directions from them anyway, and I wonder if that’s what we’re seeing here. All it takes is one respected figure with a low sadism threshold, and he can get the vast majority of other people to fall in line behind him.
I think a large part of the problem is that we, as a people, don’t have enough skin in the game when it comes to questions about torture and the death penalty. It’s all too easy to dehumanize someone by labeling them as ‘evil’ and then doing whatever you want to them. So I think it’s time we changed the stakes. I think every citizen should be randomly assigned to a prisoner held in guantanamo or to a convict in the prison system, and in the event that the ‘enemy combatant’ or prisoner is proven to be innocent of whatever he was charged with, everything that happened to him during his confinement is revisited on his assigned citizen. I don’t think we really do justice to these people when we, as a society, say “hey, my bad” and just let them out the door, sometimes with a little bit of money as an apology. I’d like us to make the apology much more personal. And I’d like to believe that if we knew that we or someone we loved could be sent to prison at any time, we would do a much better job of treating prisoners fairly and humanely.
Of course that’s idealistic of me– the practical effect of such a system would be to ensure that no prisoner ever had a chance of being shown to be innocent after the fact, or of ever releasing anyone from guantanamo.
(p.s.- I hope you enjoy the use of capital letters in this post, part of my newfound effort to stop torturing your eyes.)
Labels: philosophy, book reviews
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ed felten is giving away 128-bit integers/circumvention devices. get yours before they’re all gone.
Labels: uncategorizable
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i met lane becker at sxsw– here’s a picture of us on stage at the heather gold show:
lane is in green, i (characteristically) am wearing the gray sandals. (note: this picture was taken by micki krimmel, who said i had the best quote of the show. i walked around on a cloud for the rest of the day after i read that.)
i met lane right before the show, i saw him in the audience and went up to him because he had asked an interesting question at one of the panels i was at that day and i wanted to discuss it further. i had no idea he was one of the guys behind adaptive path, which is probably a good thing, for if i had known it’s unlikely i would have had the courage to talk to him about my ideas. he could not have been nicer to me, and so i’ve been a big fan ever since.
his new company, satisfaction, had a great post today on the digg user revolt. i have been fascinated by this story (not quite as fascinated as techmeme has been, but still.) ever since i wrote my first constitution at the age of nine (it was for my third grade class, and was designed to put a check on the unbridled power of the girls), i’ve loved thinking about and designing systems that allow people to interact in order to achieve a common goal.
the general theme i’ve seen in the revolt posts is that this is the ‘end of digg’. i’ve been thinking just the opposite– i think digg will become stronger as a result of the revolt. the revolt was a clear illustration that there are checks and balances in the digg system: while digg-the-company has the ability to change particular policies or aspects of the voting algorithm, digg-the-community has a very clear veto-power that they can use to reject decisions that they don’t like. i think this is hugely significant– users in editorial-driven systems like slashdot or the daily kos can write journals or diaries and complain all they like about site policies they don’t like, they don’t have any actual power to effect change. the end result of this is that users eventually get frustrated and leave and the site stagnates. the digg community has a much more powerful outlet for venting their frustration, and the net result of this is that digg-the-company is forced to change to match the ideals of digg-the-community. regardless of what you think of the decision the community made, this is what democracy is all about.
Labels: uncategorizable
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when i came across this entry in my feed reader:
i immediately thought of mono and grails, and wondered what these competing application frameworks would be doing together at emo’s. fortunately, the google search for ‘mono’ provided a number of helpful links to treatment options, so i should be getting the help i need very soon.
Labels: uncategorizable
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i had an especially good teacher for intro to philosophy– tom polger, who was a graduate student at the time. i’m tempted to pick up his book, natural minds– even though i’m not sympathetic to identity theory, i’d like to give tom yet another chance to change my mind.
at the time, i was starting to wrap my head around ideas like non-euclidean geometry and the axiom of choice, and i was curious about how far people had gone in terms of exploring the limits of logic and language. figuring that no one takes things father than philosophers, i asked tom if anyone had ever tried to ‘axiomatize the world’, and he took me to his office and showed me his copy of wittgenstein’s tractatus logicio-philosophicus. the title is as long as the book is short– there are seven primary propositions, most of which have numbered subpropositions that are commentary on the primary propositions (this map shows the tree structure of the book).
i was thinking about the tractatus the other day– not so much as philosophy, but as a piece of literature. google searches for various combinations of “deconstruction”, “tractatus”, and “wittgenstein” didn’t turn up anything, which may just indicate that i don’t really get what deconstruction is all about. the brevity of the tractatus makes reading it feel like going through an advanced math proof, where enormous amounts of complex context and background information is referenced in passing. and yet, one of the primary arguments of the book is that philosophy is not like science or math, but rather that philosophical problems and questions are simple misuses of language, such that after you finish the book and understand it, you should throw it away because everything it says is nonsense. it seems like such an odd way to write a philosophy text that argues that philosophy is just a silly misunderstanding– i suppose the idea is that if you’re going to spew nonsense, it’s best to spew as little as possible.
i’ve been toying with the idea of doing a cover of some piece of writing using the literary style of the tractatus. sean suggested “there’s a monster at the end of this book”. right now, i’m thinking “animal farm” would make a good candidate. i’d also like to write up a qad rails app that would facilitate the reading and writing of tractatus-esque pieces of literature. right now, this is all brain crack. it would help if the next time we talk, you ask me about how this little project is going, and then berate me when i say that i haven’t really started it yet. and don’t let me off the hook when i try to claim that i’m busy with finals, that’s total bs.
Labels: math, literature, philosophy
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over the last few months, i have played quite a bit of wii tennis. sadly, i am now at a point where the game no longer provides a challenge. i have achieved the mythical 2301 rating and regularly beat sara and elisa 40-0, 40-0, 40-0. i can take a new character to ‘pro’ status in a mere 5 games.
i’ve started to have this daydream where i’m playing wii tennis against cary elwes, and the match is very competitive. the power serves are coming fast and furious and our respective frontcourt miis are volleying back and forth in the blink of an eye. i dive and miss a cross-court shot, and he wins the first game coming out of deuce.
– ‘you are amazing,’ i say.
– ‘thank you…but why are you smiling?’ he replies.
– ‘because i know something you do not…i am not left handed!’
needless to say, i need to find a new game to obsess over. has anyone played this new GT racing game? It comes with a steering wheel that you insert the remote into and looks very cool.
Labels: uncategorizable
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there’s no way scoble’s second mix07 prediction is serious, right?
the idea is that you’re going to take something that’s slow and put it on top of something else that’s slow and somehow that will magically make twitter scale?
Labels: tech, web2.0
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i feel like my tone has been a little dour of late, so here are a few things that made me happy today:
- this blog now is the #9 result for the google search “random graphs”. this kicks ass because all of the other first page results are about the mathematical concept of a ‘random graph’, and this blog does not talk about those random graphs at all, aside from the obscure pun in the subtitle. i would like this blog to become a quiet resting place for weary graph theorists.
- i had lunch at tam’s deli and cafe today– roasted chicken sandwich with the house tea and a cream puff for dessert. one of the most satisfying meals i have had in a long time.
- i registered dumbandpoor.com, the future home of my social network devoted to those people who, for whatever reason, opted to pass on the chance to work at google before the IPO, or turned down the opportunity to be employee #6 at microsoft.
Labels: uncategorizable
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i was working on my online profile for one of the social networks i belong to the other day. like many social networks, this one asks its users for a short block of text that summarizes their essence. i had no clue how to do this (i don’t think it’s possible to summarize things that you don’t understand), so I read other people’s profiles in order to get a feel for what sort of things i should be saying about myself.
a number of the profiles i read indicated that the person writing the profile hated/didn’t care for writing the ‘about me’ portion. no one seemed to complain about listing their favorite music or books or movies, so it seems like this distaste for talking about yourself is limited to context-free, blank-piece-of-paper situations.
i think there are two dimensions to this discomfort– internal and external. internally, we feel like we’re far too complicated and interesting to be summed up in a few sentences. externally, we obsess over what other people think of us, and desperately try to figure out how to express ourselves in such a way that the people we care about will like us and think of us in the way we wish to be thought of.
as i read, it occured to me that there were a few different broad patterns people used when writing their profiles, and better yet, they could be easily mapped to several of the major post-renaissance art movements.
- baroque/mannerist: highly stylized, offers a vision of the writer as a perfect combination of the attributes that they value most highly.
- realist: a portrayal of a person as they really are, usually with more emphasis on their warts than is necessary. often written by someone with a fascinating lack of self-consciousness.
- impressionist: vague but pleasing. when done effectively, allows the reader to fill in what they want to see.
- cubist: a sequence of short snippets or references to likes, dislikes, interests, thoughts, or emotions, the thinking being that we get a better feel for who people are by seeing a number of different dimensions in rapid succession.
i suppose it makes sense, when you think about it– as a species, we’ve only figured out a handful of ways to react when confronted with a blank space that we’re supposed to fill in with some piece of ourselves.
Labels: uncategorizable
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