Curiouser and Curiouser! on psychology

Passed

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 14:29:36 +0000

I forgot to mention here: I have passed the first two modules in my Postgraduate Diploma in Psychology. I received a grade 'A' for Developmental Psychology I and 'B' for Personality and Social Psychology.

I was a little surprised that the results weren't the other way around as I felt that social psychology was my stronger subject. I guess I should find out what let me down there.

Nevertheless I'm very glad to have passed. I won't say I'm looking forward to the next set of exams, but maybe I'm feeling a little happier at the prospect ;-)

As if we needed the stress

Wed, 11 May 2005 22:09:20 +0100

Currently studying for Cognitive Psychology 1 exam which is scheduled for next Monday afternoon but may be postponed due to a strike by lecturers in the NATFE union. Of course you'd be hard pressed to learn about this from the Pravda like London Metropolitan University website. It's good news only there and any students who might be wondering whether their exams will go ahead can go hang.

Topics include:

History of, and major influences in, cognitive psychology
perception
attention
memory
decision making and reasoning

Note I have no argument with lecturers withdrawing their labour if they're in a dispute. I do have a problem with the University (to whom I am paying over a thousand pounds of my own money) keeping me in the dark about something like this.

The University makes quite a lot of money from us postgraduates. I'm sure that, aloong with the other problems we've had, this will be encouraging many (myself included) to consider where else we might spend our money next year.

You have my attention

Fri, 13 May 2005 10:08:32 +0100

For a flavour of the sort of thing I'm working on I have uploaded a concept map of attention which I am working on. Attention is one of the key topics I am studying for the Cognitive Psychology exam on Monday. I picked it because it is a compact topic with close links to Memory, another topic I am studying. I'm building concept maps from my notes because my reading in memory suggests that incidental learning through organisation is very effective.

Problem solving

Fri, 13 May 2005 18:10:36 +0100

Another concept map representing today's study.

The calm before the storm?

Sun, 15 May 2005 18:25:13 +0100

Tomorrow afternoon I take my Cognitive Psychology 1 exam. I'm feeling quite calm about the idea which I think has more to do with floatation tanks than it does to comprehensive preparation and deep knowledge of my subject.

One thing I will say is that I really didn't enjoy the course while I was doing it. I found it rather dull right up until the last lecture on reasoning and decision making. However, studying it since then, I've found the links between attention, memory, problem solving, and decision making have woven themselves into a very interesting pattern culminating, for me, in Anderson's Adaptive Control of Thought (ACT) theory. I've actually learned quite a lot especially from the problem solving research.

When the exams are over I would like to go back and recover that and write up some of the the thinking i've done.

Oh well, a couple of hurdles to get over first.

Not quite a disaster

Mon, 16 May 2005 20:07:30 +0100

The exam wasn't a total disaster although it didn't go to plan. I expect to pass (hell the passmark is only 40% I'd be embarassed if I didn't) but don't think I'll do as well as last time and certainly won't improve on it which is disappointing.

Oh well, best laid plans and all that. I'm still feeling pretty unruffled about it all although I do exhausted. Next exam is Biological Basis of Behaviour in 10 days.

Error #11 -- system overload

Sun, 29 May 2005 12:48:57 +0100

Some things about last week that I very much enjoyed (not the exam, although that went okay) were:

not having to keep up with my mailing lists
not having to check, or reply to, email
not checking bloglines
not having to think about what to post

For a few days I felt a pleasurable sense of disconnection. Now I am asking myself "Why?"

My current line of thinking is that thought itself may be the problem. I am wondering if I have reached some kind of attentional boundary for concurrent, on-going, tasks.

I have 3 major ones (as well as a raft of minor ones) which are:

personal study projects around information management, topics, and sense making frameworks. These have lead me, in the previous 8 months, to learn Ruby, a bunch of new mathematics, AI algorithms, and so on
a growing role in my company requiring me to develop new knowledge and skills and to be better at communicating and persuading
a psychology course which is stretching me and leading me in many new directions

Now I choose to take on all of these silver linings. All bring me pleasure and fulfillment of some kind. Yet, in the last few weeks, I have found myself at a point where my brain is giving me active resistance and making life difficult. Why?

In cognitive psychology I learned about some models of attention which represent how the brain handles concurrent task processing. A central assumption of all the cognitive models is that useful resources are in limited supply. Common sense suggests this is a good assumption. Somewhat unsatisfyingly for my purposes though these models that I have studied deal only with simultaneous competition for resources, e.g. "How well can someone write from dictation while simultaneously reading a novel?" The answer is "surprisingly well" but it doesn't address background processing very directly.

When I'm working on an identity fraud presentation I'm not directly trying to understand support vector machines or why humans don't reason with propositional logic. When I'm studying Baysian theory I'm not thinking about communicating technical proposals or how neurons communicate. Whilst learning Andersons ACT model of skill development I'm not thinking about data protection or clustering algorithms. And yet I feel that, somewhere in the background, I am doing all of these things. It seems to me that my mind is dealing, at some level, with more problems than the one which is my current focus of attention.

For my purposes I require a model of attention that attempts to explain both focused attention and background attention. I have learned attentional models that describe the brain as having a kind of central executive function, a shared facility which plans tasks and shares available, modal, resources between them. Although it wasn't part of the syllabus for this semester some of my reading suggests that more current theories involve multiple executives. I think that background processing must also involve (to some degree) reasoning and access to memory.

As an aside, I found it very unsatisfying in the cognitive psychology module I took that everything seemed disconnected. It wasn't until the very end, the last week before the exam really, that attention, memory, and reasoning all began to interweave for me. I think lesson #1 of a cognitive psychology course should eschew history (as much as I love William James) in favour of building the backbone which will support every other concept.

So I'm looking for an attention & thinking model which handles not only focused attention but the way in which background tasks are processed. Is there anyone out there who is current in this field?

Returning to my starting point I have recognized that I am facing some internal resistance, my stress levels have gradually risen, and I find it harder to concentrate. Floating has been a boon, it deals effectively with the stress, but it's a band-aid solution. In the three months I have off from my course I aim to manage my stress levels downwards and to try and come up with a better solution which allows me to continue my interests along more managable lines.

I'm certainly open to suggestions.

Feel the closeness

Sun, 03 Jul 2005 19:11:46 +0100

I don't know why but the scene towards the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the alien mothership is teaching the human computers a basic tonal language always provokes a strong emotional response in me.

And is the Pensicola Florida reference in Contact a homage to Close Encounters? It being the place that one of the humans who comes off the mothership went missing.

Second thoughts

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 12:55:03 +0100

I'm questioning (especially after speaking to Beth earlier) my response to todays bombings. I don't feel about it so much as I think about it. Given that it's now clear that there are at least 4 deaths and dozens of serious casualties, some of them at Aldgate East tube (which I use for college), I wonder if that betrays a lack of empathy on my part. I feel a sort of weary sense of dread. My thoughts are focused on how we identify with this event and how we respond to it. But now is not the time.

Going critical

Thu, 15 Sep 2005 21:24:04 +0100

This week has been a whole week of studying Research Methods in psychology. Much of it is basic statistics and I have vague memories from my degree. But the stats modules I did were over ten years ago, not well taught, and certainly of no interest to me then.

These days I am really interested in stats (god help me) and probability. It seems, more and more, that everything I am interested in is underpinned by fundamental uncertainties and only statistics and probability theory can rescue you and give you some hope of making headway.

My basal ganglia made me do it!

Sat, 22 Oct 2005 15:39:48 +0100

Fascinating piece of science from MIT which, if confirmed (and I believe it will be because my experience is that I give in when I come across familiar stimuli), goes some way to explaining the problem with bad habits. I've personal experience of thinking I have a habit beat only to find myself back in the grip of it seeming, almost in an instant, to have come full-cirlce. It's a very depressing experience.

Habitual activitysmoking, eating fatty foods, gamblingchanges neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain when habits are formed. These neural patterns created by habit can be changed or altered. But when a stimulus from the old days returns, the dormant pattern can reassert itself, according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, putting an individual in a neural state akin to being on autopilot. [Via World of Psychology]

I can't say I find this discovery very comforting. But it does confirm that you should do your best to avoid picking up habits because, as hard as that is, it is surely easier than quitting them. Again my experience is that my successes have involved consciously ridding my life of habit cues. Relapses usually occur around unexpectedly coming across such a cue. For this reason Supermarkets are a real problem.

Death Ratchet

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 08:55:51 +0000

Michael S. Rozeff, Louis M. Jacobs Professor of Finance at University at Buffalo, talks about the uncertainty and factors involved in the ever increasing expanse of state power. There is the big ratchet theory:

One explanation (among several) of our Brobdingnagian State is that growth of government sometimes occurs via a ratchet effect. A big event happens, like World War I. The State assumes powers it didn’t have before the war. Afterwards, the status quo ante is never fully restored, even though the emergency, real, contrived, or imagined, is over. The new status quo is one of increased State power, perhaps with some reversion back to the previous situation. This rise and partial reversion is the ratchet effect.

But this does not explain everything and we turn to psychology for an understanding of how dependency upon the state comes into play. Once people grow to depend upon the state they tend to look to it, and not themselves, for answers. How many times are we all guilty of hearing something on the news and saying "the government should do something about this!"?

It appears to me that the powers-that-be work the electorate’s psychology to make this happen. The details vary from case to case. The electorate is primed for acceptance by such elements as fear, desperation, and anxiety. A desperate and fearful people will be willing to adopt desperate solutions. People impatiently demand action and solutions. Sitting idly by while businesses liquidate excess inventories or labor moves to new locations takes time, and this will not do. People are suffering and something must be done! The enemy has struck and we must act!

And there are other effects from behavioural economics that affect how fuzzy personal preferences can be exploited:

Status quo bias is a cluster of decision-making behaviors that have been measured experimentally and observed in practice by researchers in behavioral economics and finance. For example, people randomly given coffee mugs are more reluctant to sell them than people randomly given money are to buy coffee mugs. The ownership of the mug itself changes their preferences in favor of the mug.
All a leader has to do is "endow" citizens with the war, instead of a mug. Once they take "ownership" of it, they will be reluctant to give it up. It’s that easy.

Lastly we have another well-known psychological factor: loss aversion. As a general population we are more risk averse than we think. If we have taken a £200 loss then it may take a £500 gain to put us back on track. We're like bad poker players who can't let go of money already in the pot. Our gains have to exceed our losses by a considerable factor leading to another supporting factor for status quo bias.

Rozeff's view is that the power of the state increases because the present incumbents of the state take opportunistic decisions relative to their powerbase and follow that up with attempts to validate these decisions and make them the norm. It's not a "secret cabal" conspiracy theory but a reflection of how natural human tendencies go awry when given unreasonable power. The more spheres in which a government can extend its influence the more likely people are to look to it for answers and be subject to government propaganda and biases.

I think that this supports my view that we need to find a way forward that allows us to dismantle the government apparatus. Unless we accept that the only way forward is the constant ratcheting up of self-serving government power until it reaches crisis point and revolution.

Read Rozeff's piece and see if you don't agree with me.

How much less do I exist?

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 11:13:10 +0000

It's depressing. For so long I had come to believe that a search for my name would give my weblog as the No.1 result. But, as I reported at the beginning of November my blog has disappeared from a bunch of search terms. But not all of them.

I tried contacting Google but no response. I can't see any logic to it. For 2 years or more my blog was me as far as Google is concerned. Now it's not and I can't seem to do anything about it.

Yeah it's depressing.

It doesn't take Freud

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 11:20:07 +0000

To work out that, yes, I am a complete egomaniac :-)

It's good to be in the middle

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 13:47:56 +0000

Here's an interesting research finding:

New research suggests observers tend to overestimate the performance of people located in the centre. “We have identified a biasing cue in objective judgments: the target’s position”, the researchers concluded. “These results have implications for selection interviews and performance assessment tasks such as grading, auditions or any evaluation of individuals competing in groups”.

[From the British Psychological Society Research Blog]

Why do we still believe in group brainstorming?

Sun, 12 Feb 2006 21:21:34 +0000

An interesting tidbit from the BPS research info feed.

So you need some fresh, innovative ideas. What do you do? Get a group of your best thinkers together to bounce ideas of each other…? No, wrong answer. Time and again research has shown that people think of more new ideas on their own than they do in a group. The false belief that people are more creative in groups has been dubbed by psychologists the ‘illusion of group of productivity”. But why does this illusion persist?

Bernard Nijstad and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam argue it’s because when we’re in a group, other people are talking, the pressure isn’t always on us and so we’re less aware of all the times that we fail to think of a new idea. By contrast, when we’re working alone and we can’t think of anything, there’s no avoiding the fact that we’re failing.

To test their theory, they recruited hundreds of students and asked them, either on their own, or in differently sized groups, to think of as many ways as possible to boost tourism to Utrecht. Afterwards the students in groups reported feeling more satisfied with their performance, and feeling that they had experienced fewer failures to come up with new ideas, than did the students who’d worked alone.

In a second study, Nijstad’s team found further support for their theory by showing that the illusion of group productivity could be undermined if different members of a group had to think of ideas for different projects. In this case, the students’ satisfaction with their performance and their sense of how much they had failed to think of new ideas, resembled the experience of students who worked alone.

The researchers said “We suggest that working in a group may lead to a sense of continuous activity. This may provide group members with the idea that they are productive, because they feel that the group as a whole is making progress, even if they themselves are not contributing”.

Other possible reasons for why people think they work better in groups include ‘memory confusion’, the idea that after working in groups people subsequently mistake other people’s ideas for the own, and ‘social comparison’, the idea that in groups people are able to see how difficult everyone else has found it to come up with ideas too.

Nijstad, B.A., Stroebe, W. & Lodewijkx, H.F.M. (2006). The illusion of group productivity: A reduction of failures explanation. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 31-48.

Abstract Author Related research report here (on page 3 of 4)

Hmm.... is it true that I am always more creative and have more ideas when I work alone? Frankly I find that a little hard to accept. When I think of times when I have been most creative I think of times working alongside Mike or Paolo. But perhaps two people isn't a group and maybe we weren't so much coming up with new ideas as riffing off each other.

I've got to say that I do think group brainstorming is still a valuable tool, it's just that you can't expect to throw any old group of people together and have it work out. From social psychology we know, for example, that conformity is a strong influence in groups and that in-group/out-group divisions form swiftly and uncounsciously. Designing a group activity is like designing an experiment. You have to understand and, where possible, control for the variables.

Comments last stand

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 19:32:40 +0000

Euan and I have just had a healthy disagreement over the value of comments.

I would summarize Euans point of view as being that of the enabler. He sees comments as an integral part of creating communication around his weblog and ideas:

I've written 1354 posts on my blog and had 2118 comments. Anything that makes that less likely is negative IMHO

I would summarize my own point of view as being not contrary to the aims, only the means. I don't get nearly as many comments as Euan (probably about 10%) so perhaps I am less convinced of their value. But I would like more people to comment on what I write. I often try to write provactively in the hope that it will spur some kind of conversation or debate. My curse, I guess, is that I am either preaching to the choir or seen as a blowhard.

Nevertheless my beef with comments boils down to:

the wrong ownership model. If I leave a comment on your blog you own the comment. It is in your space and appears (or disappears) at your discretion. At the same time this lack of ownership leads, I think, to a sense of disassociation between you as the writer and the comment (and it's impact)
the wrong attribution model. Even if I don't comment anonymously I can't really be sure that someone who leaves a comment as you, is you and nor can anyone else. If it's on your blog, I can be sure.
the wrong social model. If people know where to go to find out what you're saying then it's likely you will have that in mind when you say stuff. Being a consistent asshole will make you the billboard of your own buffoonery

In a sense I am contending that comments are like email. We often say things in email that we would never say face-to-face because we are detached from the meaning and the human being at the other end. By placing our comments in a self-context we may be subconsciously encouraged to think more deeply about what we are saying and it's likely impact.

Euan raised the concern that disabling comments necessarily means people with a blog will be left out. To this I would answer that the solution is most likely technical and here I think CoComment, whilst they may be addressing the right problem, are not being radical enough. Leaving a comment on most blogs these days is a sign-up type process. So why not have someone sign up with a comment-log service.

I envisage a comment-log as a blogging lite service which just acts as an aggregator for an individuals comments. A kind of "blog this" system where instead of leaving a comment I end up writing a post to my comment-log with it automatically formatting the response post and linking to the original post.

Devolving power can only bring good?

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 15:06:41 +0000

According to an ICM poll 40% of British muslims would like to see Sharia law implemented in predominantly muslim areas of the UK.

Okay some comments first: 40% are in favour, 41% were against. So we could just say "opinion is fairly divided." Additionally, as a commenter at reddit points out:

As a complete non-expert, I'm curious whether "Sharia law" means the same thing to all UK Muslims. The (currently disputed) Wikipedia article makes it seem Sharia can legitimately mean many things.

In fact, if I asked a typical citizen in my own country (US) what the advantages of Anglo-American common law vs. European civil law were... well I wouldn't even know if I were asking a meaningful question. ;)

So opinion is fairly divided on the matter and we're not even sure what either side thinks they are being asked about. I take comfort from the fact that only 1% felt that the July 7th bombers were "right".

But let's assume for a moment that there is a muslim community in the UK who are predominantly in favour of Sharia law and there is some formulation of Sharia law that they can agree upon. Is there some particularly good reason why, if it only applies to their community, they shouldn't have it?

It seems to me that many of todays problems are about arbitrary boundaries and the restriction of choice. I was born in the UK, it didn't take much effort for me to be here. If you are born in Iran and want to come to the UK you probably have a boundary problem. We don't want to let you in. By what right do we make this decision? I'm not sure.

Also our boundaries lead us to form groups. We form emotional attachments to places. We become "of" a place when, in reality, it's just a label we associate with ourselves. However this grouping leads to divisive in-group/out-group thought patterns and to irrational and unnecessary hostility between groups of people who really shouldn't have anything to fight about.

If we could make boundaries more about choice than chance then a lot of the tensions in our societies might be reduced. If a strong majority of people in one place want to live by a set of common principles then they should be free to do so and those who disagree are free to leave and have somewhere to go. I guess it's this last bit that's hardest. Where do you go?

Still quite a lot of thinking to be done here...

The Cubicle-Dweller effect

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 23:37:14 +0100

On the train in to London today I got thinking about psychological variables (for example there is Eysencks PEN model) and behaviour. It may be a non-sequiteur but as the train chugged slowly along I looked up at a big glass office building and saw what you might expect to see... lots of people in cubicles including a few who looked like they were asleep. It set me to thinking about why it is that I so like working in small companies (In PAOGA we are around 10 including part-timers) even though I like the social aspects of larger organisations.

The bystander effect is a well known result in psychology from the research of Latane & Darley. Its the reason why you are often better off with just one or two people around if something happens (e.g. you get attacked, there is a fire, you break down,...) than a big crowd. In a big crowd responsibility gets diffused and everyone looks to everyone else (who also isn't doing anything) for cues about what to do next.

PAOGA is a small company and I can quite clearly understand how what I do relates to furthering the goals of the company and delivering value for us. My lines of responsibility are pretty clear and I don't sit there thinking there is anyone around to pick up my slack.

In large organisations I think it is harder to trace your line of responsibility from what you do to the end result where the value lives. Also as the organisation grows the management structures grow (and perhaps not proportionately) and I believe that people fall into attributing disproportionately more value the higher up the tree you are.

In essence I think that in larger companies there is a bystander effect or perhaps we should call it a cubicle-dweller effect. The larger the company the larger the diffusion of responsibility for delivering on the companies promises and consequently the less motivation there is to try and make them happen. As motivation drops people don't work so well on what they're doing and, critically, don't ask

How can I do more?

This suggests to me a rationale for breaking large companies into smaller companies and organizing them into co-operative networks. In those smaller companies people will understand their value better (and not just bull-shit made up departmental goals that nobody really believes) and, with something real on the line, be motivated to do better.

If you look at Microsoft today and then think back to the opportunities they might have had if they had decided to split the company up. Sure it would have been disruptive but that might have been a good thing.

Smaller companies deliver!

If I were a rich man

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 10:00:02 +0100

I was talking to Graham recently about the future and I think he was a little surprised that I don't have any grand ambitions or plans for where I want to be in twenty years. I wonder if this is related to my poor visual imagination (which has been another interesting topic of conversation for us).

Do any other non-visualizers find themselves a little bit adrift? Maybe it's just a philosophical thing. I tend to be more concerned about the now than about the future (except in a slightly angsty sense).

In 2004 I started a Posgraduate Certificate in Psychology course and passed it. I had planned to go on and do the Diploma course last year but with money worries pressing and difficulties with focus I decided to postpone. I'm still considering completing the Diploma via the Open University although I may be leaving it late to do that this year.

So anyway I was thinking about what I like doing and one consistent answer is "learning new things" and, especially, branching into new territory and trying to mix it together with the old.

When I think about my strengths I consider myself a little of the jack of all trades, master of none. I am a programmer that does marketing. I'm not a great programmer and I'm not that great at marketing either but somewhere in the fusion of technology, strategy, and marketing I seem to have come up with something.

If were rich today I would follow my nose. That would lead me back to University to finish my psychology course and probably to a cognitive science/artificial intelligence M.Sc. I would also try to go to conferences on genetic programming, cognitive science, and social software & systems.

Where might all this lead me? I have next to no idea. But I think it would be a fascinating journey.

Finally, a goal for the future

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 18:23:32 +0100

I've been thinking a little bit about my goals for the future and that, just maybe, having a goal is a good idea. Ok so let's say for the sake of argument that it is and that it won't hurt me to have one anyway. So what do I want to do?

I've already said that I would like to go back and further my studies in general psychology and cognitive science. I'm also interested in AI and Genetic Programming. I think there is a good ten years worth of time spent there already.

But I think what I would like to go further than just studying and playing with new ideas and create an institute to do research in these areas. That is, the wealth that I create independently I would use to build a research organisation to work at the intersections of psychology, ai, and genetic programming.

I'm not sure what the history of such organisations are and how they ensure their long term future, I guess that's my next step in thinking this through.

But anyway, this is me starting to think of the future.

Turbulence

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:37:45 +0100

In the language of “chaos” theory, America – if not all of Western civilization – is in a state of turbulence of such intensity that efforts to restore order by recourse to traditional systems and policies will be to no avail. On the contrary, it is our insistence upon established practices that has led us to our plight; and only a fundamental, creative change in our thinking and behavior can extricate us from the destructive consequences of our prior assumptions. -- Via Butler Shafer

I started getting interested in complex systems by listening to David Snowden describe his work. The first time was almost 3 years ago to the day. I heard him again almost a year later and it reinforced his ideas and concepts.

Dave introduced me to the idea that some spaces are complex and in such spaces cause & effect is a retrospective coincidence so that the tools and techniques that used to yield results may cause unpredictable future effects. The challenge of complex spaces is that, when you're in them, they don't necessarily look any different to the knowable spaces we are comfortable with. (Dave also introduced me to the exploits of the incomparable Mulla Nasrudin for which I am very grateful).

From that point onwards I got very interested in sense-making and, given my background and my fascination for blogging, I became very interested in topics and topic maps as a tool for understanding and representing things of interest. In a sense my topic map defines my world, or at least the subset of my world I choose to make public. What has always tripped me up is how poor are the tools we have to work with. My own efforts in addressing this situation, small as they were, have stumbled and failed.

Originally my interest in these things was purely theoretical but over the last 3 years my interest in politics and the nature of the world around me has blossomed and my interests in complexity, systems, sense-making, and reasoning have seemed more practical. I have gone from being an unthinking socialist to a thinking... for want of a better word libertarian. I hesitate when I use the term because I still understand so little of the philosophical underpinnings that define it.

What I do know is that many people who hear me talk about politics and life these days appear to think I am, at best, misguided and, at worst, delusional. I'm treating that as a good sign. For people who believe they are in an ordered space where the old answers remain true then anyone who acts like they believe they are in a complex space may appear to be out-of-step or irrational. Of course I cannot utterly dismiss the possibility that I am misguided or delusional but I see no way to address that other than to keep asking questions.

Recently (although not so recently as I would like) I started studying psychology. I found it to be a fascinating subject both from the perspective of personal discovery but also as a source of tools for thinking about human problems. Social psychology has many interesting things to teach us. From a political perspective one need only consider GroupThink and then look around.

Lately I have been thinking about my future and what I would like to do, if finances and personal situation permit. I am a generalist and aspire to be a PolyMath. I believe that much of interest lies at the interstices of the sciences and arts. I have expressed an interest in doing research and am looking for the right opportunity.

In the meantime I continue to self-educate as best I can. Right now I am honing up my logical argument skills and beginning to read about the very interesting area of Systems Theory. Systems Theory seems to be the ultimate polymath science that seeks always to unify, it's exciting.

The goal of all this effort, like most of my goal, is not yet directed to any specific purpose (not even a political one) but to providing myself, and hopefully others, with better tools to master life. In Gregory Benfords fantastic novels about human future (e.g. Great Sky River) he describes how humans have an enhanced sensorium and access to the aspects of the wisdom of their dead.

I see the shearing forces that act on our society, like the evolution of technology outstripping the pace of social change, and the increasing uncertainty and turbulence we face and cannot but believe that we need new and better tools if we are to survive. Right now I believe that my lifes work is in researching, developing, and using such tools.

Phew... This post went somwhere other than I where I was expecting and, despite being something of a ramble, wanted to be written. I think that reflects my growing uncertainties about my present and my future: my own personal turbulence.

Philanthropy

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:56:05 +0100

Don Dodge writes that Warren Buffet is donating a considerable chunk of his $44bn fortune to Bill and Melinda gates foundation.

Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world, announced he is giving the vast majority of his $44 Billion dollar fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I said in an earlier post that "Bill Gates legacy will be humanitarian philanthropy". Microsoft was the result of his first 30 years of work. In his remaining years, Gates is just 50, philanthropy will be his main mission.

That's an amazing coupe for Gates and something that, well regardless of your stand on Microsoft, you can just like the man for it. Dodge also makes another interesting point:

Gates takes a business like approach to solving human problems. He is serious about producing real results with minimal overhead costs. Compare this to the way the US government or United Nations, or Red Cross, approach problems. The bureaucracy and overhead is ridiculous. They talk forever and get nothing done.

This is an idea close to my heart. I firmly believe that a pound spent by government is, often, a £0.95 wasted. But why is it only the first and second wealthiest men in the world that get to be philanthropists? What about the rest of us?

I think the problem for us is that we find so much of our wealth swallowed by taxes that are used to fund unpopular wars, ineffective programs, and to support chums of the ruling party. I think a lot of us see the foreign aid budget and, looking at our pocket books, think "I gave." And we did.

When charities come a calling what you choose to give on top of what the government liberates from you might hurt.

As an aside I think it is bluntly wrong of charities to use psychological tactics like gift-giving to pressure people into donating. No matter what your cause, unethical behaviour like manipulating people, cannot, in my book, be right. I also don't appreciate the aggressive doorstep tactics that many charity workers seem to have adopted.

I think the answer is to reduce taxation and allow people to decide how they want to be philanthropists. Government should not be about charity and giving away our money to the problem de jour in order to win favourable headlines for the ruling party is not ethical behaviour.

I'd rather give to the Gates Foundation.