evolution

We often think about evolution as organisms surviving, mating, and giving birth to organisms which will hopefully survive, mate, and give birth. However, I think evolution has gone through some meta-evolution, creating new powerful evolutionary tools.

At first, we had the evolution of particles. This is closest to what creationists complain about when they say "how could random chance have created a living organism?" Somehow, it seems like particles really did randomly fit together into some sort of particle that could reproduce itself.

After some time, a meta-evolution occurs in the form of cells and DNA. Probably DNA came before cells, but I don't know how that works. Anyway, cells and DNA can evolve more efficiently than pure randomness by using restricted randomness. That is, when DNA is copied, it is usually copied exactly, but sometimes mistakes are made, and these mistakes -- mutations -- allow the exploration of different sorts of cells. But DNA is structured in such a way where random mutations typically don't screw everything up completely. DNA encodes information in a very inefficient manner, taking up lots of space where it could theoretically compress the information. In fact, lots of information in human DNA isn't even used. This inefficiency is good though. It is the feature that allows changes not to effect too many things. If DNA was encoded using zip compression, then any mutation at all would completely change the entire meaning of the DNA strand.

After some more time, another meta-evolution occurred, in the form of organism. Organism have two parents. This allows organism to explore an even more restricted space, by essentially taking the mid-point between good points in this space, as well as searching randomly a bit with mutations. Cells on the other hand only have one parent, so the only mechanism they have for exploring the space is mutation.

After even more time, another meta-evolution occurred, in the form of brains. Brains divide an organism into hardware and software, where the hardware evolves in a 2-parent organism way, but the software can evolve differently. Brains encode "behaviors", and if we think of behaviors as software-organisms, then they are organisms with potentially many parents. I'm not sure exactly how behaviors are transferred, but I imagine that a creature can observe behaviors of other organisms and adopt those behaviors without needing to mate and give birth to a new creature (at least humans seem to be capable of this with "mirror" neurons). This allows an even more refined way of searching behavior space, by essentially taking weighted mid-points of many parents.

After even more time, another meta-evolution occurred, in the form of imagination. Imagination is the ability of a brain to simulate reality in it's head, without actually doing anything. This allows a brain to test a behavior without suffering too negatively if it is a bad behavior. This increases the turn-around time for exploring behavior space.

Now behaviors, or "ideas", seem to be like organisms themselves, and they are evolving in the ecosystem of brains. That is, the life and lineage of an idea or behavior doesn't necessarily follow blood lines. Hence, we might expect there to be "meta-evolutions" of idea-organisms. And it's possible that there already has been. Some ideas may already have created a sort of "cell and DNA" structure (memes?) so that they can more reliably survice and reproduce, with a more refined mechanism for searching the space.

In fact, I feel like one survival strategy of ideas is to infect a brain, grow, and be born in the from of a human thinking "I just came up with an idea!", where really, the idea had already been come-up-with, and it's just a good strategy for ideas to make their "mothers" think they are original creations so that the mothers will love and care for them, e.g., tell other people about them, so they can survive and reproduce. But the mothers didn't really create them, any more than a human mother cobbled together the DNA of their child.

Hence, I think the idea of "idea ownership" is bunk -- even if it has been a good strategy for ideas to make us feel this way thus far. That is, by understanding better how ideas actually evolve, we may be able to create an even more efficient ecosystem for ideas, in the same way we can develop better agricultural methods by understanding better how plants grow.

oh github pages

I didn't realize it, but the little webpage http://dglittle.github.com/smiley-slider on github that shows the smiley-slider in action had been broken. Whenever people would go to dglittle.github.com/smiley-slider, they would be redirected to glittle.org/smiley-slider, which was nothing -- a 404.

This redirection happened as a result of me setting up my homepage glittle.org to be served from github, which involved having github redirect dglittle.github.com to glittle.org. Apparently this breaks all my project pages.

This behavior is apparently foretold in a tip at the bottom of this article. Paraphrasing, it says: project pages like dglittle.github.com/smiley-slider will be redirected to things like glittle.org/smiley-slider unless they have a file telling them to redirect somewhere else. Of course, the very next tip says that they won't actually be redirected anywhere if there is such a file.

Which is strange. But great. It means that maybe I can fix my problem by adding a file to the smiley-slider repo telling it to redirect to some bogus domain, like example.com (except specifically not example.com, since github knows that that domain is bogus), which would cause it not to redirect anywhere. In particular, causing it to not redirect to glittle.org/smiley-slider, which is nothing -- a 404.

This did work. Sortof. I thought the behavior would be that it wouldn't redirect dglittle.github.com/smiley-slider anywhere, but the actual behavior is that it does redirect dglittle.github.com/smiley-slider to glittle.org/smiley-slider just like before, except that miraculously, glittle.org/smiley-slider shows the content held in the smiley-slider repo. And I have no idea what it would show if the homepage repo happened to have a directory called smiley-slider.

Anyway, I'm confused, but it seems to work. However, this means I need to put a bogus file in all my projects telling github that they are being served on some domain that they are not being served on. I suppose one alternative is to have my homepage in a regular project, so it doesn't cause dglittle.github.com to redirect, but that would mean having my homepage it a github branch called gh-pages, rather than master, which seems confusing, but maybe less confusing.

[update: now I do have my homepage in a regular project so it doesn't cause dglittle.github.com to redirect]

reduction

When talking about computer sciency problems -- the sort of problems that people like to call NP-complete and such -- people often say things like "problem A can be reduced to problem B".

The word reduce is confusing to me.

This "reduction" makes it sound like a large problem called A is becoming smaller -- reducing in size -- so it can fit somehow in B.

But that's wrong. B is generally a bigger and harder problem than A.

For example, we might "reduce" the problem of finding the maximum number in a set of numbers to the problem of sorting the numbers. That is, we can sort the numbers, and then we'll get the maximum number for free by looking at the last number in the sorting. But sorting is harder than finding the max, so we didn't really reduce the size of the problem of finding the maximum number when we sorted the numbers -- we did more work than we needed to.

So, I propose that we stop saying "reduce", and saying something like "embed" or "express in terms of".

I can embed the problem of finding the maximum number into the problem of sorting numbers, or I can express the problem of finding the maximum number in terms of the problem of sorting numbers.

arguing

My uncles have lively discussions -- arguments one might call them. I have inherited the trait of enjoying arguing, and I can get pretty emotionally vested in them.

My philosophy of arguing changed a bit when I did debate in High School. Since I was forced to argue both sides of each topic, I grew to feel that both sides of every argument were "right". Of course, the topics tended to be chosen for having good points on both sides.

In any case, I'm not sure whether both sides of an argument are "right", but here's a made-up word-to-the-wise about arguing:

You can only truly win an argument if you can argue in favor of your opponent's side better than they can.

connection

Both Watchmen and Logicomix reference Alexander "untying" the Gordian Knot with a sword. The character in Watchmen interprets this "solution" as genuinely innovative. The character in Logicomix takes the solution as not really a solution. I lean in that direction myself. The goal of untying the Gordian Knot is not to unlock some box, in which case opening the box is the real goal, and cutting the knot is as good as untying it. However, in the case of the Gordian Knot, the goal is to untie the knot. The goal is not even to make the knot disappear or cease to exist. The goal is to untie it.

ethics

There is this philosophical question of how to "ground" ethics and morality, without God.

I think the answer is: ethics and morality are grounded in whatever a society happens to think about them, and they can vary from one society to the next. And societies are not always in complete agreement about what is good and evil, making some actions morally grey within that society.

Isn't this circular? I mean, it seems like a society could say "we think X is good because we think X is good, and ethics are grounded in what we happen to think", and how could anyone convince it otherwise?

The answer is: if a society really did think that X was good because it thought X was good, then it really would be good in that society, and it really would be hard to convince that society otherwise.

However, this does not mean that all societies will employ this logic in coming to decisions about what to consider good or evil. Most societies will probably employ logic like: X is good because it promotes well-being, and Y is bad because it causes suffering.

When trying to convince a society that something is good or bad, there is no "logical foundation" one can turn to. I think it's a messy matter of simply convincing lots of people using the techniques of convincing people of things.

So.. do I think people are necessarily evil if they do things that their society thinks are evil? No. I don't think people or actions are evil in and of themselves. Societies can think things are evil, and if they do, then those things are thought of as evil by those societies. So if someone does something that their society thinks is evil, then I think that person will be thought of as evil by their society.

Do I personally think they are evil? I might. If I did, I feel like all that would reveal is that I personally thought they were evil.

big words

Big words compress information. However, they are also more difficult to understand -- they are used more rarely, so they are more likely to be forgotten, or may take longer to recall. I feel like the tradeoff rarely favors using a big word if the goal is conveying information.

I feel like this same tradeoff comes up in math. After thinking about a problem for a while, the solution can be compressed into a short equation. However, presenting that equation alone presents a very challenging task to the reader to try to unravel the meaning of the equation (especially if it has lots of greek symbols, and the reader is not greek). I think it is often better to walk the reader through the key ideas that led to the equation.

Naturally there is a tradeoff. Sometimes big words and equations are good.

But I feel like they are often abused in order to make an author look smart, or even to hide a bad explanation by making it difficult for people to understand, and hoping that people won't ask questions for fear of feeling stupid for not understanding it.

I think explanations are like user interfaces. If the explanation fails, it is probably the fault of the person doing the explaining, NOT the person listening.

bad brain teasers

In listing brain teasers I like, I remembered that I've wanted to complain about some brain teasers that I hate. I hate brain teasers which claim to require "out-of-the-box" thinking, but.. well.. I feel like they cheat. I realize that brain teasers often have a "trick", and they often purposely lead the thinker down the wrong path, but they need to be careful. They need to make sure, in the way they are stated, that all the necessary assumptions are clear.

Here's an example of a bad brain teaser:

There's a room near you with a light in it. You're in a room with three light switches. One of those switches controls the light in the other room. You can do what you want in this room, and when you're done, you can walk into the room with the light. Then you need to say which switch controls the light.

The supposed answer is: leave one switch on for a while, then turn it off, and turn on one of the other switches, then walk into the room with the light. If the light is on, it must be the most recent switch you turned on. If it is off, feel the bulb. If the bulb is hot, it must be the first switch, otherwise it's the last switch.

However, this supposed answer assumes some things that were not clear from the problem statement. First, it assumes that the light in use is the sort that heats up. Second, it assumes that the light is within reach, and not attached to a high ceiling. These assumptions are not clearly stated, so someone thinking about the brain teaser can't assume they act in their favor.

Another example that bother's me a bit is the Candle Problem (my phrasing is taken from wikipedia):

How do you fix a candle on a wall (a cork board) in a way so the candle wax won't drip onto the table below using only the following (in addition to the candle): a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks.

The supposed solution is to empty the thumbtacks out of the box, put the candle inside it, tack the box to the wall, and then light it. However, I'm not convinced that it is clear to all participants that the box holding the thumbtacks is a legal item. It seems fair to think that the experimenter simply included the box so the thumbtacks wouldn't roll away. If it's fair to use this box, why isn't it fair to move the table away from the wall?

Mormon errata

...just thought I'd fix the Mormon religion real quick:

1. the devil

Mormon belief: My understanding is that the Devil and Christ had different plans for man. The Devil wanted people to be more-or-less forced to be righteous. Christ wanted people to choose righteousness for themselves. God went along with Christ and threw the Devil and his followers out of heaven.

fix: The Devil and Christ had different plans for man. The Devil wanted people to gain understanding without experiencing hardship. Christ didn't think this was possible. God also didn't think it was possible. The Devil and his followers were afraid to experience hardship, so they didn't enter mortal bodies, and they're waiting around until they overcome that fear.

2. atonement

Mormon belief: My understanding is that Christ came to earth to suffer for the sins of man, so that man can be saved, since sinning makes people impure, and people can only return to God if they are pure.

fix: Christ suffered all the sorts of things that people suffer so that he could understand people when they prayed, otherwise people might be like "you're a God, you don't understand what I'm going through." There's no such thing as being impure. God is infinitely understanding.

3. after-life

Mormon belief: My understanding is that there are three degrees of glory people can attain after they're are judged, and one degree of non-glory called "outer darkness." All of these are eternal, though I've heard people disagree about that.

fix: Spirits are learning all the time -- sometimes inside of mortal bodies -- and as they learn more, they get more power as a natural side-effect of their increased understanding about how things work. If you're like the Devil, saying "I don't want to suffer at all" then you're limited in how much you can learn, but you're not trapped forever. Spirits can always learn and progress.

4. faith

Mormon belief: My understanding is that when you read the Book of Mormon, and pray about it, you get a feeling of "this is correct", and you should trust that feeling. This is then the foundation of faith in God and the church.

fix: It's hard to be sure that any particular feeling came from God. Brains are tricky. Even after extremely powerful feelings, if people reflect on them honestly, they may doubt their supernatural origin. However, religion is not about faith, it is about hope. Faith is easy to put in the wrong place, acting as a trap where people get stuck believing something that isn't that great. Hope is free to explore, and discover how we truly wish the universe was, given the experiences we've already had. This exploration is the true quest for God. And I submit that it isn't easy. It is hard to come up with a good way for the universe to be that accounts for all the negative experiences people have had so far.

being wrong

I hypothesise that there's a meme going around that says: "It's bad to be wrong. Only say things that are right." I think this is bad.

A friend was mentioning a recent result which is a retraction of a slightly less recent result suggesting that neutrinos could travel faster than light. Apparently there was some call for the head of this experiment to resign, and he did.

What folly, I say. Not of this guy, but of his peers, and us, to shun him this way.

If we restrict ourselves to only publishing and talking about things that are 100% certain to be correct, first, we'll publish and talk about nothing. It kills me that the end of that article quotes this guy saying "Now we are 100% sure that the speed of light is the speed of neutrinos." Really? After all that, you're now 100% sure of something? I feel fine being pretty damned sure of something, but never 100% certain.

Second, if we restrict ourselves to only publishing and talking about things that we're so sure about that we're willing to bet our careers on them, then we'll publish and talk about practically nothing. And the things we do talk about will take us inch by inch, slower and slower, toward some local maximum that we're pretty close to already.

I feel like the path toward breakthroughs in science involves wrongness. Wrongness, conversation, refinement, more wrongness, and eventually astounding rightness of a superior kind to our current rightness -- and even that is worthy of being questioned, because it too is probably wrong.

input

It's Friday. I've eaten ice cream, which I do every Friday, but usually I eat it while watching something.

These days, I feel harder and harder pressed to find something good to watch. When I start a movie, I feel like I know what will happen. It's been hard to find good new music as well, though music lasts longer for me than movies, since I can re-listen to music, whereas I generally can't re-watch TV shows, or re-read books.

I guess this is just a rant. I'm sure I'm wrong. But I feel like people aren't willing to take risks. Media artists fall back to the monetary lure of mass appeal, or so it seems. Everything is smoothed out such that it appeals to everyone, but not very much to anyone.

There was a string of good indie games recently. I played Braid, World of Goo and Limbo.

I just don't know where to get good input these days. I feel starved.

random rant related to self-help

This is the age of minds. Of consciousness. Of controlling our own minds. Of self-help. Of taking self-help seriously. There is too much information, too much change, etc, for an ordinary human brain. It's not a matter of getting old, not just a matter.. I think my brain is as spry as ever, but the problems it faces now are getting larger. Soon they'll be too big. I need to figure out how to deal with that. I need to figure out where I fit in.

What are the right goals to have in this environment? What is the right way to stay sane? What does it mean to stay sane?

These are some tools I use:

- Writing thoughts. Like this. Just writing what's on my mind. Being very honest about what's on my mind. That is one thing that is so tragic about today's society, is that we're so private. There are meme's like "Too Much Information". People say things like "don't burden ME with that", and it sounds cool, like they're being cool, and it's the stupid person who's saying too much about what's no their mind. But I think we have got that turned around. We should all be "burdening" each other with what's on our minds, and trying to make sense of it. That's real information, not just social grooming.

- Writing "unsent" letters. I read this in a book somewhere, maybe Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. The idea is, if you're in a relationship with someone, having difficulty, you might have a lot of anger towards them. And you might like to tell them all of this. But, the idea is to instead write it in a letter AND NOT SEND IT. Hopefully just writing it all out is enough -- that's the idea anyway.

- Accepting everything. Accepting sounds like thinking everything is good, or everything is true. That's not what I mean. More like, acknowledging everything. Thinking that everything could be true, and being ok with it if it were true. Related to this are things like forgiveness, But also accepting that I hate someone, if I do hate someone. Accepting things seems to change them, and make bad things go away.

- Face what seems to be true, no matter how bleak. I fell from the Mormon church, away from having an afterlife, into a world of death possibly being the end of everything for me. And I had to accept that, but I believe I'm in a richer more meaningful world now, with even larger potential happiness. Though, it didn't always seem so. And, frankly, I could be wrong, or hiding from the truth. Still, I generally find that facing bleak fears reveals a rosy rainbow on the other side that is even better than the former reality would have been without the fear in the first place. Or something like that.

Things I've tried:

- Being positive. I get into little manic episodes of positivity and think, wow, if I could just remain positive, I could do anything. But, I fail to remain positive. I simply can't seem to sustain it. I'm not sure it's possible. I'm not even sure it's actually a good idea.

copyrights and patents = bad

I've told people that I think copyrights and patents are like control rods in the fission reaction of human intelligence, where the "explosion" being prevented is hopefully one of goodness, as opposed to destruction. Perhaps another analogy would be better.

In any case, one of my main problems with copyrights and patents is that I don't think human brains are good at knowing where ideas came from, and trying to keep track of that reduces the efficiency of thought and creativity. I feel like people would be better problem solvers if they didn't need to second guess all of their solutions to make sure that they didn't violate any patents or copyrights.

I think I've said this before, but whatever. I'm saying it again.

voting and democracy

Here are a couple standard answers to a couple standard questions that seem off to me:

What is your take on voting?

Well, both candidates are bad, so we should vote for the "lesser of two evils."

What is your take on democracy?

Well, it's bad, but to quote Winston Churchill: "..democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms.."

I feel like culturally, we're unwilling to consider innovation in this space. In fact, I feel like many people perceive it as dangerous, like revolutions are dangerous.

writing to size

Rant: one thing I hate about papers in academia is page minimums and maximums. This has been something I've hated all through school. For me, the problem was generally that I wanted to say something with fewer words than the teacher required, and I felt like I was adding bull shit to my paper to fill the remaining space.

"How long was your thesis?"  "Oh, 500 pages"  "Wow, you must have done a lot of work!"

"How long was your thesis?"  "Oh, 70 pages"  "Wow, you're adviser was fine with only 70 pages?"

As if page counts indicate the amount of work done.. As if the amount of work done indicates the amount of useful insight provided to the world..

I feel like people should write whatever's on their mind to say about their research, put it online, and expand it where and if people ask questions about it.