This is a concept which I’m currently struggling to come up with a better name for but it’s about responses to an argument. A crucial part of argumentation is actually understanding the claims and assertions that the other person is making. In order to do this, one can either solve the easy problem or the hard problem.

The difference between the easy problem and the hard problem is one of recognition vs recall. When confronted by an argument, the easy problem is to scan through your list of pre-canned responses to arguments. It’s a matching between arguments and replies. Is reply 1 close enough to fit? No. Is reply 2 close enough to fit? Yes. Stop, you’re done, spit out response 2.

The easy problem is seductive because it’s well, easy. But it’s more than that as well, it’s gratifying to the ego. You come up with a substantive response and it’s clever so you feel like you’re doing real work. Moreover, you spend your time compiling a larger database of pre-compiled responses and the larger your database is, the closer and more encompassing your matches become so you feel like you’re making progress. But when you solve the easy problem, you stop at the FIRST match which is sufficiently close. If the difference between the actual question and what you perceive the question is suffciently close, then you completely ignore the difference.

Solving the hard problem is taking the opposite approach. Instead of figuring out what response matches the question, you instead look at the structure of the question and reason out a response free from any pre-concieved biases. You conciously don’t try and recognize the question and place it into a particular category. Solving the hard problem can be valuable because it occasionally leads to genuine surprise. Solving the easy problem will never tell you something you could not be convinced of but solving the hard problem occasionally leads you down a difficult path.

The hard problem is more intellectually pure, with less chances of making a mistake. But it’s well, hard, and quite often doesn’t seem neccesary. So many of the questions we are asked every day seem like the sort that can be answered with a pre-cached answer and so we feel comfortable solving them with the easy problem. The problem is, it’s impossible to tell whether a problem is indeed something solvable or not with the easy problem because once you’ve determined that, you’ve already solved the hard problem.

This is especially true of internet comments and conversations. Once you mention certain key words in a posting, people will come in and post based on what happened to match that filter. This makes it very hard to present an argument which is very similar to a common argument because most people will match for the common argument.

So how do you get around this? I think the only way is to gain the respect of a core group of readers and have them get to the point where they assume that you’re not stupid and that it’s worth trying to solve the hard problem when you present them with an idea.

My post yesterday on how to think about the existance of god seemed to generate a fair bit of commentary, both on the blog and on reddit. Many people popped up with alternative rebuttals to the claim “you can’t prove that god exists”, all of which I was aware of. But here’s the fundamental problem with all the conventional claims: They don’t work. Yes, they might be strictly, logically sound. Yes, they might require less of a leap of logic. But the problem is that concepts like burden of proof and occam’s razor sound totally convincing to people who have already accepted that it’s true but it’s hard to overestimate just how bizarrely counterintuitive, highly abstract and just plain wrong-sounding these concepts are. Atheists don’t have an argumentation problem, they have a communication problem.

Here’s what atheists seem to be missing when they encounter a Christian who disagrees with them: There are actually two legitimate reasons why a Christian would hold the position that Atheism is not merely wrong, but absurd on the face.

the philosophical argument

One is that they disagree from a fundamentally philosophical standpoint. It’s a perfectly legitimate model to posit that God only reveals himself to those who have made the leap of faith and, indeed, the power of religion lies in the difficulty in finding God. The evidence for God does not lie in naturalistic experiment, it lies in the human quest for meaning or the structure and order of life. It’s not a position I agree with but it’s definately one I respect as a internally coherent explaination of the world. In this case, of course atheists can’t find any evidence of God’s existance, they’re simply too stubborn and persist in looking in the wrong place despite huge and obvious signs of their ineptitude.

The urn example in this case lays down explicitly the areas of agreement and disagreement. You can move from there to the much more philosophically demanding areas of how occam’s razor and burden of proof affect each side’s claims.

the factual argument

The second reason is that they simply disagree with you on a factual level. To them, faith healing is real and demons have a manifest effect on the world. Miracles happen all the time and you would have to be stupid and blind to be an atheist. It’s so obvious that supernatural events are happening that it becomes impossible to consider that another person could view the world differently.

What the urn example demonstrates is that yes, atheists too would be convinced by supernatural events. A ball with the number 417 would convince an atheist the urn is red just as easily as a bona fide miracle would convince them of God’s existence. The point of contention is on an interpretation of evidence and this can be used as a starting point to segue into skepticism, levels of evidence, basic human psychology and burdens of proof. If you differ on a factual level, then Occam’s Razor is completely a non convincing argument. If miracles are happening on a daily basis, then the simplest explaination really is that god exists.

The fundamental problem that I’ve seen is that the average atheist argues with a Christian like they’re an atheist but stupider and believing in silly things. This is a wholly ineffective way to argue with anyone and it’s not going to change anyone’s mind.

I’m going to break my sequence of concepts to present an interesting analogy I just came up with to explain why this argument is subtly wrong:

“There’s no way to prove that god does not exist”

Say I have two urns:

• One is filled with numbered green balls, all of which lie in the range of 1 to 100.
• The other is filled with numbered red balls all of which lie in the range of 1 to 500.

I draw a sequence of balls from a single urn, announce the numbers and I then ask you what color you think the urn I picked was.

Obviously, if there is a single ball >= 101, then you can assert with 100% probability that the urn is red. However, there’s no possible sequence of balls that could definitively prove a green urn. But if I keep on drawing balls under 100, consistently and without a single ball over 100. The more balls are being drawn, the more sure you are that I picked the green urn.

I view this as analogous to the problem of the existence of god. The space of possible universes in which god does not exist is a strict subset of the space of possible universes in which god does exist. It’s therefore strictly impossible to prove that god does not exist.

Each observation is like drawing a ball out of the urn and each observation can be consistent with an atheistic or supernatural interpretation of the world. Say you observed stones independently arranging to form the words of the koran, the ten commandments written in fire across the sky and routine, repeatable, spontaneous limb regeneration after praying. If any one of these happened (and they were verified to be bona fide miracles and not just what seemed like miracles), it would be the equivilant of drawing ball 328: absolute proof that god exists. But we keep on picking balls and observing the world and they keep on being strictly naturalistic phenomena.

Sure, it’s still possible that god exists and we’re going to find evidence of him if we keep on looking harder. But to me, we’ve picked enough balls that it’s not where the smart money is anymore.

Quite a while ago, I was reading an article on secret tips of the trade that different professions have which had the following quote:

Actor

Every actor eventually is called upon to act drunk. Most do this by slurring their speech, stumbling around, and perhaps drooling a bit. This is what a freshman drama teacher calls “indicating.” A better way to appear drunk is to act very, very sober. Walk very carefully, and try not to let anyone see that you’re inebriated. This is much more subtle and will register on a level the audience won’t immediately recognize.

How do we spot people who are drunk? They’re the ones who are acting sober. Drunk people behave like how they think sober people behave. We understand this instinctually and subconciously and we’re incredibly attenuated to it although we often can’t articulate why we feel something is off.

This applies to other aspects of human behaviour. We can spot when rich people are pretending to be middle class because they act like what they think middle class people act. We can spot unintelligent people trying to sound intellectual. Because in all these cases, these people are acting sober.

The converse side of this is that you can only spot acting sober if you’ve actually been sober before. If you’re a rich person, you’ll totally be convinced by another rich person pretending to be middle class because that’s totally how you think middle class people act.

Understanding acting sober allows you to see the various masks that people put on and, more importantly, it’s an inner lens on how they internally represent the world. It can be a window onto someone else’s soul.

Of course, there’s acting acting sober (which is what professional actors do) and acting acting acting sober and so on ad infinitum as well.

Today marks the halfway point in my little experiment to 30 days of blogging and I thought I would share a bit about my experiences. Making an external commitment to do something has definitely spurred my motivation and it’s been a positive influence on me. It’s been a great feeling that every day, no matter what, I managed to accomplish *something* with my day and it’s also spurred me to be more disciplined and be more aware of the shape of the day. It also means I’ve been much more aware of ideas, constantly on the lookout for new things to blog about. Paradoxically, on some days, it’s meant that I’ve been blogging less as I might have 2 or 3 ideas I deem worthy of blogging about but I want to save the extra ideas in case of a rainy day.

That being said, blogging continuously in this sort of fashion sucks too. Given that I have to fit blogging around the rest of my schedule, I always end up cramming it into this corner or that. All of these blog posts have pretty much been a straight shot, stream of conciousness from start to end and the quality, IMO reflects that. If you study great writers, what sounds like a breezy, casual reflection is actually the result of massive amounts of rewriting, organization and editing to get it into it’s final form. Amateur writers who make the mistake of trying to emulate the greats try and emulate the result rather than the process and, as a result, end up coming up with something clunky.

I had my first ever hangover today and it wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Mind still a bit fuzzy, a more substantive blog post tomorrow…

I made a seemingly flippant comment the other day in response to some Republican glurge:

“If Republicans were convinced by facts, they would be Democrats”

For people who operate via reason and argumentation, it can sometimes be frustrating and immensely counterproductive to be arguing someone who is unreasonable. So much time and effort is spent arguing in the only way a reasonable person knows how: through dilligent research and arraying a formidable array of facts for one’s side. However, so few reasonable people seem to every ask why reason has been such a poor strategey historically in changing people’s minds.

Imagine that you had a friend who literally had a hypnotic voice. When he speaks to you, he could convince you that up was down or bats were bird or that bacon was not delicious. He’s your friend and you know that he cares for you and would never do anything actively to harm you but at the same time, wouldn’t the most prudent form of action be to block your ears every time he comes by and to listen to none of what he is saying?

For those who are adept at reason and believe they can hold their own in an argument, reason is a value free tool, neither good nor evil. But for a large bulk of society, reason is not a tool but a weapon. It’s the hypnotic ray that the privledged elite use to mind control an entire country. And what’s more, reason is outside of their grasp and they know it. If you were part of the disengfranchised majority, wouldn’t you decide that shutting your brain off is the only reasonable defense?

I gave a talk today to the iSchool Research Conversation class about my work on building better commenting systems for aminormalornot. Overall, the presentation went really well and there was some interesting conversation that came out of it but there was one segment of the discussion which verged into the surreal.

We were talking about communities and quality conversation and some people were trying to define an example of where awesome comments would not yield a high quality conversation and porn came up. For some reason, everyone seemed to get really attached to the porn thing and the debate over whether there was community around porn.

While I admit that I consume porn, I’m not especially interested in sharing my porn with others or getting into in depth discussion about my porn and I get the impression that not many people that I know are. As a result, I had a hard time imagining what a community around porn looked like and I was pretty sceptical that they existed to any great extent.

What was the really surreal part though, was that all the women in the room seemed adamant that porn communities exist while all the guys in the room just sat back and seemed like they clearly wanted to have no part in this conversation. Maybe women know something men don’t about porn but one woman seemed to speak with quite some experience about how there were connoisseurs of porn who cared deeply about the lighting and cinematography and passionate enough to share such thoughts with others.

I know it’s mean but after she said it, I couldn’t help imagining her stumbling upon her boyfriend surreptitiously watching a piece of graphic erotica and then accepting at face value, his explaination of “Honey, I’m just watching it for the lighting…”

I’ve been reading Why should the boss listen to you by James Lukaszewski and it’s one of those books which is so obviously right that it shouldn’t need to exist. One of the very obvious things that the book says is:

you should be helpful to your boss

Simple, trivial and easily accomplished right? It’s not as easy as you think.

The second most useless form of help

When I was writing my PhD and I met another academic, we would talk shop and I would explain my research. More often than not, they would suggest a paper to read, a new avenue to explore or a new perspective on the issue. Of course, they were just trying to be helpful but the majority of the time, these conversations were the second most useless form of help I could have gotten.

I am willing to wager that there has not been a PhD in history who thought he did not have enough papers to read or that their project was too tightly scoped. Working on a PhD program is like trying to empty the ocean with a tablespoon, the list of potential work would occupy several hundred lifetimes. Given that you only have 4 – 10 years to complete a PhD, you are forced to prioritize and intelligently ignore everything that is not within your immediate scope.

Every PhD student has an internal priority list of papers they could feasibly read, papers they would love to read and papers they know to be useful but they have no hope of every getting around to reading. So when you propose a new paper that is only tangentially related to their topic, they’re just going to smile politely, let you email it to them and it’s going to slide to the very bottom of their to-do list. This is the second most useless form of help.

The most useless form of help

The only useful forms of help

iPhone applications provide an unwitting peek at what companies believe is the real purpose of their product. Because of the limited form factor of the iPhone, developers are forced to release cut down versions of apps and what features they choose to include tells a lot about their priorities.

For example, the youtube iPhone app does not even suggest that comments exist wheras it devotes significant space to “similar videos”. Clearly, youtube believes their business success lies in encouraging people to browse through more videos. This is reflected in their benign neglect of the web based commenting system which I think has the potential to be one of the more interesting arenas on the web if it were handled well.

The facebook iPhone app features prominently the ability to take pictures and upload them directly to your profile as well as a well integrated commenting feature. Chat as well is featured heavily in the facebook app. Curiously enough, events are completely missing from the app (although not the web interface) which I regard as a major limitation. Also missing is the ability to forward messages or do anything other than a straight reply. Facebook mail has the potential to become the de facto email replacement but it seems relatively clear that this is an area that Facebook is not super interested in as there have only been a trickle of new functionality related to it’s messaging service.

Google maps allows you to plot a route via car but it doesn’t include the walking or public transit modes that it has on it’s website. Even more annoyingly, it doesn’t have the ability to dynamically change your route to a location as you move around which makes it effectively useless as a GPS navigation system.

Some of these insights would have been obvious without looking at the iPhone app version of websites but I think it does place these distinctions in starker contrast. It doesn’t just have to be the iPhone either, looking at any reduced functionality version of a site can give you a sense of what their developers regarded as essential and optional.