MELIORA LATENT: Dios escondido

MELIORA LATENT: Dios escondido

Lifesaver

My efforts over recent years to improve my French have now paid dividends on the street, or rather the platform.

The scene: in the very early morning I am waiting for a train on a platform of the Cologne train station, smoking a cigarette, walking meditatively around in the smoking area and near it. At one point I was at the edge of the platform next to the rails, which are a few feet below the platform.

Suddenly a young woman seated a few feet away in the middle of the platform jumps up, runs at and kicks out at me as if to knock me down on the rails, and says something in French. I didn't understand exactly what she said, but aggressive as I am (especially when surprised), I reacted accordingly and she backed away.

Because she spoke in French, I figured quickly that I should reply in French. The first sentences that rushed out of me: Tu es folle ? Qu'est-ce que tu veux de moi ?. She answered (in translation, I can't remember the exact words): "You're walking up and down in front of me". I replied, thinking very fast ("Can you say conne ?"): Qu'est-ce que ca te regarde ? Sale conne, je te casse le nez ?

She was subdued now and shut up, so I moved away. A bit later she got up and vanished down the platform. I got to thinking: she may have been annoyed at my smoking just outside the smoking area. There was no smoke in her direction (I checked), so she was just playing citizen policeman. But what a way to do it ! My physical reaction was justified, but what a way for me to react verbally ! Where did all those disobliging phrases come from ??

Very satisfactory, all things told (marie-lucie will be scandalized, but that's only because she's a nice lady). My linguistic skills are moving into line with my moods. It's good that I watch French TV and read not only Sartre, but also less edifying authors. It's a lifesaver.

Changing your mind

To learn is to change your mind.

This is a paraphrase of a remark by Luhmann. It may seem paradoxical to those who think of learning as the accumulation of knowledge. On this line of thinking, each new piece of knowledge lines up more or less neatly next to the old pieces, as in a well-organized warehouse. Flashes of insight merely illuminate the goods from different angles. Learning in this sense requires no ability to take stock.

But learning can be looked at in another, additional way. By the definition of "new", when you run into something new it can't be an extension of what you already knew. To incorporate it into what you already know, you must change your mind about its being new, or change your mind about what you thought you knew. Learning in this sense requires an ability to take stock and reevaluate.

If these considerations are new to you, you may have learned something - depending on how you look at it.

Short story

Once upon a time they lived happily ever after.

A folly of praise

In a section called "Advice on gifted education" at the website of the mathematician Terry Tao, there is a link to a well-written, convincingly documented 2007 article "How not to talk to your kids" in the New York magazine. It shows that praising children for their intelligence, instead of for the efforts they make, tends to make them lazy and supercilious - at best.

I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts. 

As it happens, I had left America around the time that force-feeding of self-esteem came into fashion in education there:

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.

 The psychologist Carol Dweck was one of the first to shake up this complacent fawning:

When parents praise their children’s intelligence, they believe they are providing the solution to this problem. According to a survey conducted by Columbia University, 85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent. Everyone does it, habitually. The constant praise is meant to be an angel on the shoulder, ensuring that children do not sell their talents short. 

But a growing body of research—and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system—strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it. 

For the past ten years, psychologist Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia (she’s now at Stanford) studied the effect of praise on students in a dozen New York schools. Her seminal work—a series of experiments on 400 fifth-graders—paints the picture most clearly. 

Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.” 

Why just a single line of praise? “We wanted to see how sensitive children were,” Dweck explained. “We had a hunch that one line might be enough to see an effect.”

Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice, Dweck’s team explained, was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.

Party of one

For several years now tv commentators and bloggers have been using the expression "I celebrate" in an unusual way: "Tonight I celebrate the new book by Professor Suzy Q on the fight against FGM". All who use the word in this way, so far as I have heard it, are women who hold no ecclesiastic position. That may or may not be relevant to understanding the career of the locution.

The speakers are not having fun, at least not so's you notice. They are merely stating that they are doing something in the decorous, responsible way suggested by the simple present "I celebrate X", rather than the progressive form "I am celebrating X [, whoopee !]"

"Celebrate" has been a word for what you do at a party, or at high mass. Is "I celebrate" now like "I promise", a speech act in which the saying is already the doing ? Has someone celebrated who says "I celebrate", even though they are holding neither a drink nor a monstrance ?

It's a kind of stateliness scam, I think, more to do with priests than pretzels: "Tonight I will be treating an important topic with all due ritual". It is cheaper than the real thing, since you don't have to buy cases of vino, and you don't actually have to invite anyone nor even sweep out the pews. So whatever you've already got, you have it all for yourself.

Let's be fair

In Selbstversuch, Sloterdijk mentions the European religious wars of 400 years ago: "In the 16th and 17th centuries, all of Europe was a battlefield for confessional armies. In psychoanalytical terms: hysterics and obsessional neurotics, armed to the teeth, were beating each other over the head in an attempt to force their symptoms on their opponents." Somewhere Luhmann wonders why philosophers of ethics do not conclude that one cannot, in good conscience, allow all questions to be decided by a bad conscience - nor by a good conscience. He says that they never address these matters.

I before me, except after p

Self-referentiality is often confused with egotism. But egotism is self-preferentiality.

Chili powder or a history of Europe ?

I'm in the doghouse with the in-laws of a friend of mine, Ralf, because of their dope-crazed dog. Being pumped full of cortisone for an incurable skin disease, it rushes around like a mad thing, panting so fast you'd think it's about to hyperventilate, jumping up on things and down again, and generally making a nuisance of itself.

The in-laws brought it along to a barbecue dinner at Ralf's house. I was eating at a low table, fending off the dog who wanted to share the grilled goodies on my plate. I kept pushing it away with my foot, and several times asked the in-laws to restrain it. They refused because "it would make him unhappy". So I finally kicked the dog (not hard) away from my table. He got the message, but the in-laws didn't.

I recently gave Ralf a bag of chipotle powder (dried smoked jalapeños) to pass on as a gesture of appeasement to his stepfather-in-law, who comes from Rumania and appreciates chilis. The bag was from a precious consignment of Mexican chili powders that my sister sends me occasionally from Texas. She asked me yesterday by email what I needed, so I specified chipotle powder, telling her the dog story in explanation of my low stocks.

This was her reply:

What??!! Kicking dogs away from the table is a great tradition of millenia. The Romans, the Angles, the Saxons--I would venture to say all civilizations (and certainly man in pre-history)--have wisely participated. One can't pass on one's genes if one dies of starvation because the fucking dogs are getting all the best food. Better give the family a history of Europe than a bag of chili powder. It might do more good.

Visualization in philosophy

While spring-cleaning my archive of weblinks, I rediscovered Walter Whiteley on Visualization in Mathematics: Claims and Questions towards a Research Program. I'm merely going to quote a few passages from that paper, on the principle that a link to the wise does not sate, but only stimulates the appetite.

There is a connection here with my readings of Luhmann, Nassehi and other German sociologists/philosophers of the "radical constructivist" type. I find that their ideas are easy to understand when understood as schematic, visualizable scripts. But more on that mysterious remark in later posts. Whiteley's suggestions are straightforward enough:

Context:
I am a research mathematician, working in discrete applied geometry. My own practice of mathematics is deeply visual: the problems I pose; the methods I use; the ways I find solutions; the way I communicate my results. The visual is central to mathematics as I experience it. It is not central to mathematics as many teachers present it nor as students witness it. This contrast is striking.

I also work with future and in-service teachers of mathematics: elementary, secondary and post-secondary. They are surprised to learn that modern abstract and applied mathematics can be intensely visual, combining a very high level of reasoning with a solid grounding in the senses. They wonder how good visual work in elementary school connects to their own experiences with algebraic and formula centric (but visually meager) presentations of mathematics in courses. They wonder how any of these approaches connect to students’ future work that might use mathematics. They suspect that visual and hands-on work is not the ‘real math’ but is a crutch or bridge to be left behind as one matures. They are surprised at distinct and varied forms of visual reasoning within mathematics. They are surprised that what their students see is not what they see. We cannot just show a visual and say ‘behold’. Learning to effectively use visuals takes as much teaching and time as algebraic and symbolic reasoning [7,31]. The challenge is that visual representation and thinking skills can be as important to students’ futures as the symbolic and language based reasoning.

...

Claim 5:
We create what we see. Visual reasoning or ‘seeing to think’ is learned. It can also be taught and it is important to teach it.

Comments:
As cognitive science reports, we learn to see [13,21,23,24,26]. We learn what to notice and what to ignore, and how to interpret ambiguous cues. We work with images in the brain, as wholes and as parts, with symmetry, and with transformations at many levels [15]. In mathematics, what the expert sees and does with an image is not what the novice sees, even with the same diagrams. What the teacher sees is not what the students see. What one student sees is not what their neighbor sees. All of these differences impact our classroom work with diagrams and visuals. Since we create what we see, we can change what we see. Consciousness of alternative ways to see, and of the value of seeing differently, is one step. It takes ongoing guidance (cognitive apprenticeship), practice and evolving imaging (and imagination) to ‘learn to see like a mathematician’[7,31]. A well-known book on learning to draw says: “I will change how you see and the rest will be easy” [9]. Something analogous can be true for the learning of mathematics.

...

Claim 6:
Visual and diagrammatic reasoning is cognitively distinct from verbal reasoning.

Comments:
Brain imaging, neuroscience, and anecdotal evidence confirm this distinction, in the brain and in functional problem solving. Imaging suggests connections of mathematical reasoning with brain areas for eye-hand coordination, and an association of visual and kinesthetic reasoning. For example, we do proportional reasoning in this area of the brain, appearing to use a logarithmic number line associated with eye-hand coordination [1,5,16,17]. Studies of the brain during problem solving show distinct paths and forms for visual reasoning and verbal reasoning. Symbolic reasoning appears to be a distinct amalgam of these, with parallel paths dependent on parallel representations. To quote C.S. Pierce: "Diagrammatic reasoning is the only really fertile reasoning."

Peek-a-boo

Sig on Mars reports that certain passages quoted from a NY Times book review discussed in my last post here have been deleted from the newspaper's site.

I have on various occasions noticed that happening at newspaper sites, not just that of the NY Times. In the present case, I assume it was because a number of people wrote to the editors complaining that the passages made them "uncomfortable". So these were removed, allowing everyone to settle down in their couches and pull the blanket back up over their knees.

Intelligent life-forms are always torn between comfort and curiosity - it's part of the definition. Techniques have been found to meet these conflicting demands, but they are not equally fine-tunable. Since text as a medium is technically more primitive than film, it is not easy to prick a text into a teasing shape, concealing offensive passages in a way that still allows a prurient glimpse. You pretty much have to castrate it.

Of course the old practice of replacing letters by "*" is still available. However, due to the deterioration of reading skills in many of the formerly industrialized countries of the West, America in particular, to use "*" would make it difficult for readers to get that prurient glimpse. To reconstruct an outrageous original text from asterisks, you must know how to spell.

The film medium is more flexible - software can blur parts of the image, or overlay them with rectangular black areas just that little bit too small. The basic approach is that of the pastie, that 100% American juridical invention: it is legal to show female breasts in all their gory, on condition that form-fitting, light-reflecting pieces of paper have been pasted over the nipples.

The same peek-a-boo techniques are used in films, for body parts as well as for advertising. In a sequel of the American TV series "Jackass", which is currently being re-run here in Germany on one of the prole channels, I noticed that even naked male butts are overlaid with see-through blur boxes. So now buttilation is on the Index, in addition to titillation.

In MTV reports on famous whatevers, advertising slogans on the t-shirts worn by the whatevers are so blurred that you can't guess what is being flogged. I assume MTV would restore the focus if they could get the advertising revenue. Unfortunately there is no money to be made flogging male butts on TV, so you never get to see much. Male nipples may be shown without any restrictions, because the monitors of morals apparently do not know the naughty things that can be done with them.

Today's lesson was: cringe-making puns are more injurious to comfort than is curiosity.

Boredom, spuds and charity

In this post I will be discussing cats, concepts, Mr. Potato Head and "being difficult".

In an email discussion recently, the possible merits of a new book by Stephen Pinker were being weighed on the basis of a review entitled "Is Violence History ?". In discussing the book the reviewer, Peter Singer, employs notions such as reason, ethics, justice, repression, mind, morality, cognitive and emotional faculties, hunter-gatherers and so on. He comes to the conclusion that Pinker's book is "supremely important". I have quoted some passages at the end of this post.

My reaction to this review was very different from that of the other participants in the discussion. So different, in fact, that I thought I had better not say it straight out, but only remarked: "This is kaleidoscope thinking: round and round go the same old notions, flashing and rattling. Morality, reason, violence ... I got tired of reading such stuff decades ago." Having thought over all this later, including my decision to hold back, I identified boredom and charity as essential components.

1. Boredom

It was around the age of 15 or so that I first encountered books and articles about reason, ethics and so on. I was particularly taken by Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind. This led me to the British analytic school of moral philosophy and R.M. Hare, all of whose books I read that I could get my hands on in Texas (I see in the Wipe article that the reviewer, Peter Singer, studied under Hare). For a long time I read with particular interest the TLS reviews of books of philosophy.

Over the last forty years, however, I have lived in Germany, reading Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Plessner, Gadamer, Sloterdijk, Deleuze, Rheinberger, Rorty, Atlan, Morin, Bachelard ... As a result I seem to have lost my ability to make much sense of those TLS reviews (even the fretfully humorous ones by Fodor !) or the Singer review. This is where the trouble starts with my American and British acquaintances - where I find myself being charged with being difficult, cynical, insecure ...

The image that sprang immediately to mind when I read the Singer review was Mr. Potato Head. The words "reason", "ethics" etc. seemed to be bits of plastic being rearranged yet again to produce a striking result. Now whether or not an Anglophone person has read any of the German and French writers I mentioned above, surely - I feel - he/she must have tired of all those inconclusive but insistent Anglophone discussions over the years: reason is a component of morality (or not), violence is natured (or nurtured), mind is a neural epiphenomenon (or not), justice is positive (or natural), cognition and emotion are separate (or bound together in our hunter-gatherer natures) ...

The fact that I find all this worthless - does it imply cynicism, a belief that "there is no such thing as reason and justice" ? It does not. It implies that I believe (at the very least) that the words, the conceptual cut-lines, are worthless. Exercise: try to formulate what you want to say without using the words "reason", "justice" and the rest of 'em. Do you find it difficult to break that habit ? It is rather reminiscent of addiction, isn't it ? And that potato - is it not "the neutral subject" surveying the world of ideas without a clue as to how it constructs that world, and is constructed by it ?

I am not trying to create the impression that I know-it-all and that these are easy-peasy issues - far from it. What I am trying to do is bring attention to how difficult they are. Glibly, skillfully shuffling traditional words around won't hack it. Boredom, though, is the mother of invention, a state of mind conducive to finding different approaches.

2. Charity

Dogs easily learn to look in the direction a person points with his index finger. Cats never learn this, but always look at the finger. I myself will look in the direction pointed when there's something there worth looking at. Otherwise I tend to stare at the finger, trying to figure out the point of pointing at such a pointless thing.

At first glance, it seems that I am being rather uncharitable, to put it mildly, to dismiss a serious discussion of Singer's/Pinker's ideas as a game of Mr. Potato Head. I'm sure the participants would not thank me for suggesting in this way that they are wasting their time. But do I find it uncharitable to be dismissed as "cynical" ? No, I find it frustrating, since my interventions are equally serious.

Maybe the problem is the analogy with Mr. Potato Head. This image may seem offensive, but I found it apposite and funny. And this is, I think, the core of the problem: I tend to be serious and make jokes at the same time. Many people interpret that as cynical frivolity, whereas I expect it to be taken as a token of self-deprecation and open-mindedness.

It seems there is more seriousness in the world than I had expected, and charity is not going to fix it. Thank God for books and blogsites, where one can speak one's mind without immediate reprisals.

Quotes from the review:

When you heard that a gunman had slaughtered scores of Norwegian teenagers on a holiday island earlier this summer, did you think that here was another symptom of our sick and violent world? So did I, until I read Steven Pinker's brilliant, mind-altering book about the decline of violence.

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. As Pinker shows, it is both a long story and a relatively recent one. The first thing that had to happen was the move from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence (where your chances of meeting a violent end could be as high as 50:50) to settled communities. The trouble was that early governments showed themselves at least as capable of cruelty as anyone else: most of the truly horrific instruments of torture Pinker describes were designed and employed by servants of the state.

To readers familiar with the literature in evolutionary psychology and its tendency to denigrate the role reason plays in human behavior, the most striking aspect of Pinker’s account is that the last of his “better angels” is reason. Here he draws on a metaphor I used in my 1981 book “The Expanding Circle.” To indicate that reason can take us to places that we might not expect to reach, I wrote of an “escalator of reason” that can take us to a vantage point from which we see that our own interests are similar to, and from the point of view of the universe do not matter more than, the interests of others. Pinker quotes this passage, and then goes on to develop the argument much more thoroughly than I ever did. (Disclosure: Pinker wrote an endorsement for a recent reissue of “The Expanding Circle.”)
[The escalator of reason appears to be a cautious intellectual version of the Rapture]

More to the point

I have renamed this blog to "concertnotes" because it gives a better sense of the kind of posts I do. It used to be called "grumbleby", but grumbling is only an amusing sideline. My basic disposition is that of a spectator at concerts that do not seize his attention. As a result, I find myself examining the ceiling, riffling the program notes and in general not so much watching the show as considering the circumstances of its production.

This is what Luhmann calls "second-order observation". To be clear: engaging in this does not grant "objectivity", or privileged access to "the truth". It is merely a technique of attention to attentiveness - looking at the finger instead of what it's pointing to, studying the window display without buying anything (possibly for lack of money). The Little Match Girl was a second-order observer, and so was Wilde.

No more ugly makeup !

John Cowan has pointed out a "bookmark resource" for tarting down the websites I complained about in my last post. As he explains here:

The Readability bookmarklet helps a lot with pages like that. Go to this webpage and drag the "Read Now" button to your browser's bookmarks bar. Then click on it whenever you want to make a page more easily readable. It deals with bad colors, annoying formats, etc.

People should take a look at Readability's FAQ, which answers the questions "What is Readability?" and "What happened to the free version of Readability?".

In short: the bookmark resource is "still free", and this is what it's all about:

We’re turning Readability into a monthly subscription service with a unique twist: the great majority of your fees (70%) will go directly to the writers and publishers you enjoy. We’re tethering a small, passive transaction to the reading decisions you make through the platform. You can even publicly share the top domains you’re enjoying through Readability. It’s a new type of badge: “I support these writers & publishers.”

In other words, this is another scheme to keep track of where you go with your browser - but only when you actually use the bookmark. Clicking it merely takes you to another website (Readability), and there is not even a cookie involved. Exactly the same happens when you point to any link. You'll have to decide if you want to live with that. It seems reasonable enough to me.

The make-it-more-readable feature appears to work as follows (I've inspected the page sources, but am not a browser/javascript expert):

1. Let's say you are positioned on some web page "x.com" in your browser. That is, the "page frame" showing the contents of that page is in the foreground of your browser.

2. You click on the "Read now" bookmark. This is a "widget" containing javascript activated by your click.

3. The bookmark javascript is called with the "x.com" address as parameter, causing the browser to call another piece of javascript at blog.readability.com. This other javascript technically reads the HTML page at the parameter value "x.com" (the stuff which your browser had rendered in the original, hard-to-read form). It converts that original page into a "more readable" HTML page at blog.readability.com, which is then the final page that is actually rendered in your browser (no longer the one at "x.com").

Relatively speaking

Recently, a commenter on a blog post at another site complained bitterly that he could not read the yellow-mauve-and-white-on-black presentation of a web page to which the post had linked. I myself could make out the text, but reading it was hard on the eyes. There are a lot of websites in the internet that are tarted up in this way.

One could speculate about the motives of the authors of such websites, and whether they are at all aware that there are "accessibility" aspects to web design. But over time I have found it more efficient and productive to take unreadable things at face value, and simply not read them. Given the amount of text in the world that is clamoring for attention, I rejoice at every badly designed website I encounter, and every badly written book - in each case one less thing to deal with !

It is an extravagance to posit that there must be substance behind appearances. The principle I apply here is: if less is more, than nothing is most to be desired. In terms of biological evolution, rejection is just the flip side of selection, but it's algorithmically simpler. How to weigh the criteria for selection from a large set of alternatives is a difficult problem, and requires goal-directed intelligence. In contrast, all you need to reject something is a garbage can (in case you need it later on after all).

Disgusting but memorable

Watching the DVD of Deleuze interviews called L'Abécédaire, in the "C comme Culture" section I suddenly noticed a disgusting detail: Deleuze's fingernails are uncommonly long, wide, and misshapen - as if on a Mandarin manqué. They look too long for plucking guitar strings, but I may be wrong about that.

Anyway, since today is one of my be-nice practice days, I felt obliged to call myself on this one: "What do you mean, disgusting ? Deleuze will have had his reasons for keeping his fingernails like that. What do you care about Deleuze's fingernails ?" etc. etc.

With my eyes right up to the screen to check the fingernails, I replayed over and over a section where they can be seen. I heard this over and over:

Dès qu'on fait une chose, il s'agit d'en sortir. [pause] Il se faut aussi d'y rester dans le sortir. Alors, rester dans la philosophie, c'est aussi comme en sortir de la philosophie. Oui ... [pause] sortir de la philosophie, ca veut pas dire faire autre chose. C'est pour ça qu'il faut sortir en restant là-dedans. [pause] C'est pas faire autre chose, c'est pas en faire un rebond.

With this curious mantra in my ears, I sunk deep into program-notes mode* and arrived at the following considerations. I think I now understand better how structuralism and deconstructionism came into fashion - all that "death of the author" and il n'y a pas de hors-texte crap.

It happened when critics decided they should be ashamed of peering at the personalities and personal habits of authors. They wanted to become more objective by dealing only with the texts. But these critics were now devoting the same over-expectant attention to words as they previously had to ambience, substituting one fetish for another. They were still interpreting, associating, reading things in, and wondering "why this, why that ?".

Suddenly I got a good look at the fingernails, and dropped the program notes. It was now clear that no matter what engages your attention as a writer or speaker, it can pay off to pay attention to your performance as well. An amusing or disgusting detail, although initially distracting, may ultimately help the audience to remember what you said, or reconstruct it. I had figured out what Deleuze meant by Dès qu'on fait une chose, il s'agit d'en sortir. Il se faut aussi d'y rester dans le sortir.. Back in the sixties, we called it "keep on truckin'".

* When you're attending a concert, there are occasionally boring stretches. That's when you turn your attention to the program notes, in search of something more interesting.

Wanderer between worlds ?

Recently I ran across the familiar German expression Wanderer zwischen den Welten in several different contexts. I would go so far as to say that it's a rather hackneyed expression, used to attribute cross-cultural moxie to anybody and everybody who has owned a passport.

Be that as it may, where does it come from ? Is there a "wanderer between worlds" original ? The expression is now so trite that any internet sites that might identify its origin are swamped by the ones where it is merely used.

Babies sign up

On the German sternTV program just now I saw a remarkable documentary about children communicating with their hands, as in sign language for the deaf. But these children were not deaf.

Already at the age of 10 months, children are able to use simple structured gestures in interacting with their parents - for instance to "signal" recognition of situations in which the gestures were learned, as when they hear background music again in a store when they revisit it. It was said that an American working with deaf children had noticed that they learned to deploy signs at a much earlier age than hearing children usually learn to speak.

Mothers who had been trying this out with their children were in the studio with their kids, talking about it with the moderator Günther Jauch. One woman said that in the course of six weeks there had been so many opportunities to learn signs that her child had learned 60 of them. The film had shown a small girl with her parents in a zoo. The child was about 1.5 years old. She had learned simple signs for different animals on previous visits. On this visit, every time she came to an animal she knew she would make the special sign for it. I remember that she made the ones for bear, rabbit, and giraffe.

One explanation for the phenomenon was that gross motor skills are acquired in the hands much earlier than are the fine motor skills needed for speech. The film explicitly warned against imagining that this signing is a prefiguration of unusual intelligence, or that it might accelerate or hinder speech learning at a later age. I took this as intended to put a damper on the kind of parents who want to discover black gold in their kids, and are prepared to drill for it if necessary. The commentator also warned against trying to force this signing on children. Here is an American website I found about the subject.

Lord of the flies

The estival of flies is upon us again, and the number of the beasts is legion. Since occasions for effective swatting are intermittent, I have decided to observe their behavior more closely than usual. Leaving out of account the torpor caused by occasional cold weather, I have come to the preliminary conclusion that the survival of house flies in the presence of predators and temperate conditions is primarily a function of their unpredictable behavior. Their strategy is to have no strategy as to where they will land, how long they will rest, whither they go and when they come.

This is an interesting idea, whether or not it could be demonstrated by mathematical means that flies exhibit random behavior. It suggests that 1] what may seem to be an absence of goal-directed action can, by changing the frame of reference, be interpreted as serving a purpose, even without anything resembling a circumscribed goal or deliberation. Changing the frame again, we hit on the idea that 2] motives can be effectively concealed by erratic behavior.

I suppose that 1] is more or less the idea of biological evolution. But there is a supernatural fly in the ointment. Its buzz is audible in 2] and the words of P.T. Barnum. who supposedly described the secret of his success thus: "Keep'em guessing".

Conclusio: even though we free our minds from the notions of up-front determinism and progress, we are still at the mercy of crafty ephemera. Walk softly, and hedge your bets. The meek will inherit the earth because they play their cards close to their chests.

The birth of bossiness

Experts, experts everywhere, and not a moment's rest. They tell us to speak one language instead of another, eat these substances instead of those, act this way instead of that ... A disposition to urge other people to change their behavior could be an Anthropological Constant. If this turns out to be a momentous discovery, remember to mention my name when you pass it along.

What can we imagine to be the evolutionary advantages of this imperious meliorism ? Perhaps there aren't any. The only offhand explanation I can think of for the phenomenon itself is longevity overhang. By that I mean this. We may assume that fathers and mothers have always told their kids how to behave. Over many millenia, the average lifespan was only 35 or so. By the time parents were no longer able to tell their kids what do to - when the kids became adolescent and would no longer listen - the parents just died. But as life expectancy increased, there were more and more parents left with time and wisdom on their hands, since the captive audience had flown the coop. This was the birth of bossiness.

Of course this tendency expresses itself in different ways. Some old people get a pet, others get a license to practice psychological counselling, still others learn Esperanto.