Languages Exist to Limit the Spread of Ideas

Much of this TED talk by Mark Pagel feels like a rehash of Mark Ridley's "When ideas have sex", or some other, similar exploration of memetics that avoids reference to memes:

The main departure is looking at how lanaguages actually stymie the flow of ideas. With a greater disversity of languages in more densely populated regions of the world, their number ringfence idea pools, preserving group's competitive advantage (or so he muses). These differences even reduce the flow of genetic information. This phenomena is an interesting counter reaction to the potentially homognising force of horizontal idea transfer.

Clearly, an situation like this can be thought to have evolved as much for it's widespread benefits, as for any short-term, local, competitive advantages. Just like the evolution of cellular life created myriad parallel laboratories for evolving better genes (through speciation), all these weakly connected cultural domains forster diversity. This is essential to avoid the entire population getting stuck down dead end paths, local optima that are impossible to back-track from. Diversity is the truly dominant evolutionary force (not refinement!), and it applies even more so to memetics, as with genetics.

The non-paradox of "The non-paradox of choice".

About this article: "More Is More: Why the Paradox of Choice Might Be a Myth" on The Atlantic.

I don't see the contradiction here between:

• Too many choices being bad - overwhelming customers.
• And too few choices being bad - choice always needs to be discernibly relative. 

Most of the time, those doing the 'choosing' are actually just searching for what they already had in mind: there's not time in the world to analyse the relative merits of each type of milk, butter, bread, jam, etc, for each range of items in your grocery shop, every time you shop (even if you could erase your memories and start from scratch each time). There seems to have been a pretty strong evolutionary bias against such strategies, hinting at the expense of this type of critical thinking.

Scheibehenne, et-al
2010

So there should be a bell curve, with an optimum number of product options peaking in the middle somewhere. Exactly where that sweet spot lies will depend on each individual: domain naive persons benefit from simplicity, while connoisseurs generally think at a finer level of specificity, dependant upon past explorations.

The meta-study (Scheibehenne, et-al - 2010), to which the article presumably refers, appears to have been rather dumb: simply averaging the outcomes of the ~60 studies done in this area, selected from the previous decade, so that the two separate effects cancel each other out. In fact, the spread of study results lean pretty equally in either direction (picture, right). So the Atlantic article misleads by pitting a single, famous (Jam) study against "...10 different experiments... finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems,..".

Of course I didn't read the whole study paper, and might well not appreciate the intricacies of statistical significance, even if I had. But then I've not read Barry Schwart's book either, so this is just the ignorant rumblings of some guy on the internet who's read an article and watched a snack-sized pop-lecture (quite a while ago):

Conclusion: there's probably no marketing research shortcut here; you need to understand your customer's motivations, and the demographics there-of, to provide the optimum dispersal of product options for their satisfaction, and your sales.

What's doesn't seem to have been studied is the cultural phenomenon of spawning entirely new product markets, by gradually expanding established ranges. I strongly suspect that new economic ecosystems will monopolise a greater percentage of customer's attention and therefore spending resources. Promoting choice inflation (via biased reporting, for example) could be seen as a kind of capitalist control conspiracy: keeping a populace busy working all hours to buy more s...stuff, they don't really need. But I'd lay the blame squarely at the door of humanities's slavery to memes.

Vince Cable produces fallacious mitigations for further science funding cuts

... is what the title of this BBC article should read. [1]

Waving a banner of necessary austerity to reduce public services and support for the lower paid majority of society is borderline morally corrupt, but cutting science funding is outright stupid. It's the equivalent of trying to buoy up a sinking hot air balloon by throwing fuel canisters overboard. But I can't say my dismay is a surprise, even when stimulated by the words of a prominent member of a political party I recently supported as our best hope.

Vince Cable and David Cameron in India (from the Dailymail.co.uk)

UK science is already under too much financial pressure, and has been for some time. Short term (2-4 year) projects are favoured too heavily over those that are more long term ('speculative'). Also, efforts I've heard of to commercialise the information products of university science have only left the universities out of pocket while lining those of layers and other middle men.

It is highly likely that the route to technological advancement is computationally irreducible, i.e. it is impossible to predict which research routes will yield important advances. Viewed from a great height scientific research is a process of memetic evolution. Evolution is not just (or rather rarely) about making gradual improvements to an organism, it mostly involves creating increasingly greater complexity by expanding into and creating as many new niches as possible, spreading tendrils out to every direction of phase space.

Adonna Khare -"Goldfish with Legs" (2008)

If mother nature were incarnate, and on a tight budget for biological evolution, would she have given the go ahead for fish with hydro-dynamically goofy protrusions, unable to know that these whimsical contrivances would eventually be used as the fist ever legs, spawning a vast new evolutionary tree of mammals. Please don't get caught up on my inadequate metaphor here, what I am trying to say is that limiting resources to the 'most promising' could create detriment well beyond a linear contraction in output.

In a previous post [2] I speculated that financial bubbles might be a boon for better businesses/technology, fostering evolutionary explosions after mass extinctions. But these austerity measures are non cyclical: a more gradual squeezing. What is more, the survival criterion are arbitrarily biased away from the most beneficial break throughs, towards short term money spinners and well entrenched "internationally excellent research".

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11225197
[2] http://lewyland.blogspot.com/2010/04/utility-of-green-energy-bubble.html

Last Month in New Scientist (The Best of August 2009)

For all the articles in the magazine that I've found interesting but not thought worthy of an entire blog entry devoted to them. I was aiming to mention about 4 articles per issue, with a paragraph each. Naturally, I've elaborate significantly in places (the Noel Sharkey interview became a full blown piece on it's own), and there were 5 magazine issues this month (opposed to the more usual 4). I'd say that it is, at the least, worth a scan through the article titles listed below, in case anything jumps out at you too.

I've not provided links to individual articles online, just the issue's index page, seeing as most people won't have full access to many of the articles anyway.

** 29 Aug:

+ "It's a small world - in a healthy brain" p14 -

The neuronal structures (in human cortices) display behaviour consistent with their connectivity being finely configured to a state of 'self organised criticality'. Basically that means cascades of activity are as unpredictable as earthquakes and the neurons form a structure more like human society (where one's only ever 6 degrees of separation from anyone else on the planet), rather than merely relying on neighbouring cells to pass signals on to their neighbours, etc. This comes as no surprise to anyone who's up to speed with the revolution of network theory from the beginning of this decade. And it doesn't elucidate much further as to how we think, let alone what makes us conscious/sentient.

The sited study looked at brains with Alzheimer's (which were seen to have long distance connections that were too random) and Frontal Temporal Lobe Dementia (which had too few long distance connections).

So I now wonder if something similar might be the cause of dyslexia (rather than macro-scale variations, like a particular brain region being smaller). For me dyslexia has meant: very slow reading speed in particular (even more prominently than blindness to certain spelling transliterations). What if my current condition also represents a structural deviation in my brain?; A decline in cognitive ability, particularly higher order (conscious) thought that, presumably, requires the most widespread cortical co-ordination, making it most susceptible to such faults.

Of course, even in an optimally order brain, each cell's activation threshold has to be carefully tuned, so that the network operates in a region of chaos, rather than epileptic fit or coma (too low threshold & too high threshold, respectively). Neuromodulation (by serotonin, melatonin, dopamine, adrenaline, etc) and variations in oxygen and glucose concentration can also be responsible for moving the brain away from it's optimal operating range.

+ "Air travellers get a robot chauffeur" p19 -

I (and some of my friends) have thought for a while that we could have entirely 'self driven' cars on the roads by now, from a technical stand point. The (good) reason why we actually have none, is that

Classic Lewy - Musical Composition on Evolution

On BBC2 last night - "Classic Goldie": The famous drum'n'bass populariser composes a piece for the 2009 Proms with full orchestra and choir. Themed on (his interpretation of) evolution; Starts with big bang, has tribal phases, spirituality heavy, etc. It's not that surprising that he manages to pull it off with some style, despite having no formal musical training and being initially unable to read notation; he has a professional composer as a personal assistant, an operator to solidify all the details onto computer and an entire orchestra of the most talented musical minds in the country to inspire and assist him.

[Above: compossition of 2 screen shots from the show, via iPlayer]

+ Anyway, I couldn't help thinking about how I would go about creating a piece embodying evolution, starting from the *very beginning*, especially having recently been thinking about genes, memes, and temes.

It would be:

- A musicalisation (audio equivalent to visualisation) of an exponentially scaled (allegorical) history of the universe.

- It would have to show patterns (refrains), like sections of genetic code, cropping up, being copied/repeated (to other instruments), being slightly modified (some fail = stop, some continue & expand in length/complexity). The layers build up on top of one another, being played simultaneously, like a food web/musical ecology.

- A fairly simple concept that would take a musical genius (not me!) to make sound good, as well as being informative. The important bit would be the evolution of tunes ('melod-emes' as i call them), the linear history of time structure could be stripped away if desired.

+ Structure wise it would go somewhat like this:

- Start with a very, very rapidly crescendoing roar of every instrument played evenly (no distinguishable stick impacts or anything).

{inflation}

- The homogeneous roar slowly diminuendos, abruptly cutting out (but not *quite* all at once), leaving part of the percussion department still going.

{first atoms form, universe becomes transparent}

- Distinct beats can be discerned, but in no pattern and very rapid. Low, quiet tone from across the whole orchestral slides very slowly (so at first is not noticed; it has been there since transparency), then increasingly rapid, as it gets higher pitched, culminating in a blowtorch noise {stars ignite}. Perhaps a series of sliding notes from different parts of the orchestra (getting closer together in time) each resulting in a new layer of blowtorch noise.

{gravity takes hold; formation of galaxies, stars ignite}

- Difficult... but most of the layers of blowtorch noise would stop with a crash, one at a time.

{heavier elements synthesised & supernovas}

- Cyclical rhythms emerge in percussion, the more wild/haphazard/syncopated ones end abruptly end (in very loud bangs), leaving one steady beat (no syncopation).

{planetary systems resolve to stable orbits}

- Percussive bangs (not as loud as the planetary collisions, but the tail end of them), frequent but tailing off. Blowtorch still quiet in background. During the bigger gaps between bangs, bits of tune start to emerge, then are temporarily silenced by a bang (or 2), before resuming (the same, timid, simple tune (on one instrument)).

{Cometary impacts}

Difficult to represent asteroids bringing water to the earth's surface unless imitating or using recordings of ocean (wave) sounds, and splashes; don't want the piece to turn into a clip-art esq collection of sound effects!

- Several fairly discordant melod-emes (i.e. tune ideas/memes) might be heard around one section of the orchestra (at random timings, on different instruments of e.g. the string section) then one catchy melodic tune appears and is repeated immediately across that section (so becoming louder, more distinguishable), then split octaves (for cello vs viola), harmonised too perhaps.

{organic chemistry leads to self replicating molecules & genes}

- The above process is repeated for each new section of instruments {species of animal}. In principle they should start with the same tune as the section before, then embellish and add to it. The effect should be a little like singing "London's Burning" in rounds, but much more complicated and with intermediate steps (which are free to clash a little with the existing notes for a while).

{building of ecosystems}

The first melod-eme could start on double-base (e.g. 3-4-3-1-2-4-repeat; bass riff notes), repeating every bar. Then cello (or whatever) joins in the same tune for a bar before adding additional notes in-between on the next repetition. (now i'm just thinking of a jazz number with each instrument coming in, in turn until the star trumpet/clarinet player really takes the tune away into ad-lib craziness. Not quite what i was aiming for, but a good alternative.)

Harmonies/chords on the same (set of) instrument(s) could represent {multicellular organisms}, but perhaps that's a bit of a stretch of interpretation.

- After the bunches of tunes have reached crescendo for a little while (and been dominated by low brass instruments {dinosaurs}), another cometary crash silences the more complicated (recently added) half of instruments/tunes. A new set of melod-emes emerges (more rapidly this

time) along a distinctly different feel of refrain.

{mass extinction > beginning of mammals}

- Need a particularly catchy tune (melod-eme) for humans, medium long, and perhaps on an instrument/played in a way that definitely hasn't been heard yet (in the piece).

{humans}

- Much of the detail of different/convoluted tunes across different instruments can be stripped away now, being replaced by/turning into harmonies of that fit with the dominant {human} tune.

{Agriculture/animal domestication, massive extinction}

- Choir would come in at this point, no words as such (obviously would spoil the music as an analogy, rather than dialogue), should give a ominous effect. Drops away a little as the next feature comes in fully.

{religion}

- Synth/electric instruments (perhaps traditional rock band set) kick in with their own (complimentary, but more jagged/cutting/staccato) tunes.

{technology memes}

This has now become distinctly rock music (with orchestral backing). 2 drum fills could be inserted for the world wars.

- Volume is now becoming unbearably loud, with lots of extra detail stemming from and fitted around the main human refrain (that has transferred dominance to the electric instruments (perhaps lead by lead-guitar)). Extra layers of guitar and funky beats joining in.

{20th century => Current => G.N.R. revolutions}

- Perhaps a very rapid electronic tuned synth whizzing around everywhere like at insanely fast auto (tone) dialler/modem.

{Internet through to AI}

All tunes/rhythms/patterns that have been heard throughout the piece join back in for a brief, orgasmic climax (fairly strong choir/religious sound permitted, but not dominant).

{Singularity}

- Ending is a paradox, because the Singularity (and evolution itself IMHO) is all about eternal progress, without end, in subjective time. I think, if the roar of orgasmic detail where to inverse rapid-fade (like a backwards explosion/cymbal crash) to deliberately mirror the very beginning (of the piece), that would be as good as could be done:

That way it shows the perspective from real time (if we have Tiplerian Singularity in a closed universe). It also rounds off the whole of existence; there is nothing external to the piece, no before or after movements; all of the meaning/purpose/detail is contained within. And the manically chaotic ending roar is shown to be the polar opposite of the homogeneous beginning roar (having experienced all the details being built up), despite it sounding indistinguishable on first impressions.

[Above: a little composition by me for this article]

+ In principle the music should build up in layers, each on top of the next; the blow torch of the suns, rhythm of the orbits, basic repetitive first tunes {of the micro-organisms}, should continue in the background behind the detail of everything that comes thereafter (like the foundations of an upside-down pyramid). In practice they will definitely need to be gradually faded down to allow the next layer to be properly heard, and probably faded out altogether (until the very end).

+ Writing the combined, interlocking ecosystem of tunes for the end of the piece will be almost all of the work. From there, one can work backwards, taking out notes and simplifying rhythms, making deviations for failed attempts {at species} and writing the alternative {dinosaurs} themed tuned section.

- An existing piece of music (with sufficient depth of layers) could be deconstructed in a similar manner, for this purpose.

- Fragments of Well known tunes could be incorporated into the piece for an ultimate mash-up. However, this would distract too much from the overall meaning of the piece (if that was what was considered important); listeners would start playing name the song.

- The deconstruction could be done automatically with an algorithm/AI. Or built up dynamically using genuine evolutionary algorithms, with a fitness function that rates the resulting listenability or the music (the difficult bit; getting an AI to appreciate music effectively).

+ It might be possible to get the bare bones of this idea done with just jazz band (or even rock band) instruments... That should certainly keep it from getting unhearably complex. In the mid section that would be desirable, but at the end that's the exact effect aimed for. Would have to increase the tempo instead to achieve the same effect.

+ I just realised that a visualisation made to fit with my hypothetical composition would be somewhat like a scientifically rigorous version of the "Big Bang Theory" introduction... They'd do well to replace their original (annoying as hell) theme tune with a (highly condensed) version of my composition!

[Above: another collage of mine - "Evolution of Musicianship?"]