Symbolic Statements

Posted on February 5, 2010 Written by 3 Comments
license_20100205124602_92445

We live in an age where information is too available. We have more facts than we can assimilate or use, and very little context.

One of the ways we manage to transmit all of this information comes from research done in “packing” of information. How much can we compress data, then “unpack” it later without appreciable loss?

I won’t go into that as a deep dive now, don’t worry. But it is something to consider, especially when “packing” of data means that individual pieces now mean multiple things depending upon what is around them.

The other day, I saw a license plate. Maybe it’s indicative that I spend too much time playing with letters and numbers and glyphs in my brain, but almost immediately I saw how close this was to spelling out a word (and a word that I wouldn’t want either of my kids repeating.)

Do you see it? Because the thought that came to mind for me was feeling sorry for the person two places ahead in line. They likely got this plate:

There.

Does that make it easier to see?

Do I have to spell it out now?

What happens is our brains decode the curves and lines based on context. When we expect to see letters, we see letters. When we expect to see numbers, we see numbers.

And when we’re accustomed to looking at words, the quickest glance will force our brains attempt to fit those shapes into the anticipated context.

Here, try this one.

See it now?

I feel sorry for that person.

One of the ironies here is that if you tried to go and get that specific combination as a vanity plate, you would be suspiciously grilled as to your motive. They would want to know exactly what it means.

Yet, through the power of spontaneous decoding, the state of Alabama has inadvertently called an innocent motorist a “sphincter.”

Who knows? Maybe they’re right.

Or maybe ugliness lies in the eye of the beholder.

Filed Under: Language Tagged: , , ,

Failure by the Numbers

Posted on January 24, 2010 Written by 7 Comments
sudoku cover

Sudoku.

It’s a logic puzzle that involves placing numbers or letters in a grid such that you get no repeating characters within a given row, column, or highlighted grid.

I got a book of puzzles for Christmas, and things finally slowed down enough I could check it out.

You’d think a publication so prestigious to be designated as the “OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE INTERNATIONAL SUDOKU AUTHORITY” would only promote and publish puzzles of the highest quality and rigor.

That there would be a painstaking process of editorial control, whereby the selected puzzles would represent the very essence of Sudoku as originally intended — and that the puzzles therein would go through a vetting round to earn their stripes as “Easy,” “Middle,” “Hard” or the pinnacle: “Devious.”

You might also assume that the publishers of “SUdOkU Fever” would choose to properly market their product with a sample puzzle right there on the cover. A puzzle that was chosen to establish the first pillar of Customer Satisfaction – that all-important initiative to properly establish and manage expectations.

A Sudoku book with a crossword or a word-find on the front, for example, would be a colossal failure, because not only would it not engage those seeking Sudoku, it would be mistakenly purchased by one seeking a letter-based, verbal puzzle.

In fact – since so many of my readers here have a more decided verbal orientation, maybe a little primer in creating a Sudoku might be in order.

You create a nine-by-nine grid where there are no repeating numbers in columns, rows or the smaller 3×3 grids. Then you turn most of the numbers into blanks. But for the sake of all that is holy, you start with a working grid. You don’t begin with a broken grid and expect it to suddenly blossom into a working puzzle.

And if you do have a broken puzzle, well, I suppose it’s okay if it winds up on the cover, just as long as that error isn’t too obvious — like having two of the same number so obviously in the same frame.

Filed Under: Personal Tagged: , , ,

The Hidden Gem

Posted on April 1, 2009 Written by 2 Comments

Can you answer the riddle embedded on this page? (Not just this single entry, but the site as a whole.)  

Comment below with your answer! (Are the categories part of the clue?)

Filed Under: Language Tagged: , , ,

Pie Anxiety

Posted on February 22, 2009 Written by 2 Comments
pies

The following appeared in today’s Parade Magazine column from Marilyn vos Savant:

Investors recently lost a large amount of money. But if others were not enriched by the same amount, where did the money go? —O. Slavinsky, Kansas City, Mo.

savant2Marilyn did a fine job addressing the notion of how gains on paper aren’t necessarily attached to real value, and how market capitalization numbers are often skewed. Her answer was lacking, however, in denying a fundamental premise to the question: That people only get rich by making others poor.

In this case, the questioner from Kansas City phrases the supposition in the reverse case: one can only lose money if another gets rich. We already know this is not the case, because there is no one celebrating when a house fire wipes out a family’s value and wealth.

It is commonly misunderstood – and to great societal detriment – that rich people get wealthy by making others poor. Wealth is created when people trade.

Let’s say you have a rock that is worth $10 to you, but it is worth $20 to me. I give you $15 for the rock. According to your balance sheet, you just made $5. According to my balance sheet, I just made $5. Wealth is created through trade.

Why is this so?

People in a freely trading society are empowered to do the things they are truly good at, and not waste their time trying to duplicate the efforts of others who are better at that activity. This is how the baker can make biscuits all day long and make a better living than if he tried building his own walls, and the mason can build walls all day and not worry about teaching his son to read, and why the teacher can touch books all day and not worry about starving. 

When each of us produces goods and services wanted by others, we can be richer than if we divided the “chores” up evenly. Society has more bread, more bricks, and more brains when people specialize.

piesWealth is measured by the increasing value accrued every time we freely trade, buy, barter or purchase. Since both parties are in agreement, they are each getting more value from the trade than before, and society benefits. The Wealth of the State increases. The pie gets bigger. You can have a smaller slice of a bigger pie, and have more than you can eat. Wealth and money are not “zero-sum.”

“Getting rich” does not, by definition, come at the expense of making someone else poor.

Marliyn – you would do us all a greater service if you helped others understand why such fallacies and worldviews are dangerous. Class envy is a tool employed by professional politicians to fuel dreams that “we can all get our fair share,” if we only gang up on the rich. When class envy is invoked, the only people who gain are politicians.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged: ,

Rhode Island Zombies

Posted on August 31, 2008 Written by 7 Comments
rhode-island-zombie

Some undead guy in Rhode Island wants to kill me.

He just tried leaving the following comment on a previous post:

WHEN U R READING THIS DONT STOP ORSOMETHING BAD WILL HAPPEN! MY NAME ISSUMMER I AM 15 YEARS OLD i have BLONDEHAIR ,MANY SCARS no NOSE OR EARS.. IAM DEAD. IF U DONT COPY THIS JUST LIKEFROM THE RING, COPY N POST THIS ON 5MORE SITES.. OR.. I WILL APPEAR ONEDARK QUIET NIGHT WHEN UR NOT ExPECTINGIT BY YOUR BED WITH A KNIFE AND KILLU. THIS IS NO JOKE SOMETHING GOOD WILLHAPPEN TO U IF YOU POST THIS ON 5 MOREPAGES.

Doesn’t he realize I don’t do memes? Doesn’t he also realize I track visits?

This seems to be as good a time as any to discuss Pascal’s Wager: If God doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t matter whether you are saved. If God does exist, then the paltry time you spend in compliance and getting saved is more than worth it.

If I believe in Pascal’s Wager, then I have little to lose in posting the deadly threats of an undead teenage psychopath from Rhode Island. If I don’t believe in Pascal’s Wager, then I blow it off.

Now, Summer… do I have to manually post this elsewhere? Or do I get credit for republication due to blog scrapers that steal my content?

(to Jacob, Luke, Jason, and the rest of my Kung Fu family: Time to activate our Zombie Plan?)

Filed Under: Philosophy Tagged: , , , , , ,

Statistics and Context

Posted on August 18, 2008 Written by 11 Comments

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.  Well, what about damned statistics that are meant to mislead people into incorrect conclusions?

I happened upon a passage in this weekend’s Parade Magazine that made me nearly foam at the mouth.  The piece was challenging the notion that the United States was the “World’s Richest Nation,” as though everyone really believed it was anyway.  There are countries with a higher median household income, and even a higher per-capita GDP!  (Gasp.  Let’s all give up and eat cheese.)

This is the paragraph that got me boiling:

Income inequality also is greater in the U.S. than in other developed nations, and some economists believe that makes us more vulnerable to hitting the skids than the rest of the world. “Low-wealth children are unlikely to become high-wealth adults, while high-wealth children are very likely to become high-wealth adults,” says Dalton Conley of the Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank. “That should sound alarms for policymakers.”

Alarms?  I’ll tell you what alarms me…

  1. Why is it assumed that income inequality is a bad thing?  Incomes are equal in undeveloped socialist states.  “The trees were all kept equal with hatchet, axe and saw.”  Income inequality can be a sign that varying levels of input (sweat and brains) will give you varying levels of results.
  2. “Some” economists.  Really?  Who?  Let’s get more stringent with that attribution.  I’ll bet there are “some” economists who think the earth is flat, or who think we faked the moon landing.
  3. Poverty is relative.  A child born into a family on the U.S. poverty line has a standard of living (nutrition, air conditioning, square footage of abode, etc.) that is equal to the average European.
  4. “Low-wealth children are unlikely to become high-wealth adults.”  This, on its face is true.  Nowhere on the planet are low-wealth children likely to become high-wealth adults.  That is not unique to the United States, nor to capitalist democracies.
  5. The Center for American Progress is a think tank – and “think tanks” are usually in the tank for whichever ideology is footing the bill.

#4 is the piece that really turned me red.  As it happens, a child born “poor” in the U.S. has a greater chance of moving into the top income levels than in any other country.  Conversely, a child born “rich” in the U.S. has a better chance of dropping down in status – not because of risk, but because if you just sit on your money and don’t work, others will take advantage of opportunities to surpass you.

It’s like saying that a baseball player “is unlikely to reach base on the next attempt.”  Well, duh.  If you consistently hit .300, you can be an All-Star.  If we had a bet where every time Albert Pujols had a base hit I gave you a dollar, and every time he made an out you gave me a dollar, I’d win!  The issue here isn’t raw outcome, it’s comparative. And compared to the rest of the world, there is more fluidity in our wealth.  Our rich are more likely to get poor than Luxembourg’s rich, and our poor are more likely to get rich than Denmark’s poor.

Content without context is a spinmeister’s best friend.  We’d be better served if more people were trained in critical thinking – the internal alarms that go off when information is offered with big gaping holes.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Economics, income, Parade, spin[/tags]

Filed Under: Communication Tagged: ,

Evil Greedy Stupid Sheep: 4 Modern Ways to Win An Argument

Posted on November 14, 2007 Written by 34 Comments
Dr. Evil

The great thing about internet communities and forums is that they give us a whole world full of disagreeable people we can disagree with. And since we rarely see these people in person, it is easy to completely depersonalize them through powerful debating tactics. The strategies I outline below deserve a special place in any list of informal logic fallacies, but that does not diminish their effectiveness online.

There’s an old story about a young lawyer getting sage advice from a senior partner. “When the law is on your side, pound the law. When the facts are on your side, pound the facts.”

“What if neither are on your side?” asked the newbie.

“Pound the table.” And as it turns out, these four techniques are right there on the table for the pounding:

  1. Dr. EvilEvil
    We’re all reasonable people, in our own minds. So it stands to reason that anyone who does not come to the same conclusions that you have must have a diametrically-opposed set of values. Therefore, they are evil. Those who disagree with us must be intent on raining down brimstone and weeping and gnashing of teeth. Why else would they advocate for the Apocayplse, unless they were Evil? And since they are Evil, we are justified in using any means necessary to remove their flawed influence. (my opponent is Evil because I am Good; see circular reasoning.)
  2. GreedyGreedy
    Next down on the list is the belief that your opponents – lacking visible horns, pitchforks, and pentagrams – must be on the take. It’s not that they spew evil with every exhaled breath, they are merely weak servants who have prostitued themselves to the highest bidder. Anyone (say a scientist who pursues a line of research) can be dismissed as a paid flack if we can properly assail the source of the funding as Evil. (my opponent is Greedy, and nothing they say can be truthful because they are associated with Evil; see ad hominem, association fallacy.)
  3. StupidStupid
    Lacking any hooks to hang the Evil and Greedy tags, you may want to insult your opponent’s intelligence directly. Look for any inconsistencies, no matter how far removed in time, place, or subject matter. All you need to do is confuse things long enough to render your opponent non-credible. It’s not that they have different values, nor are they so weak as to sell them. It’s just a simple simpleton who can’t logically connect A to B to C. (see circular reasoning)
  4. SheepSheep
    Sheep are blind followers. They might or might not be stupid, but they are through some circumstance surrounded by those who would lead them astray.Maybe they are tainted by the magazines or websites they read, or maybe by the people they communicate with. Our classifying them as “sheep” is not a deep insult, but rather an announcement that if only they spent more time with enlightened people like us they’d snap to their senses. Or better yet, become our sheep. (see Package Deal fallacy)

Just remember to keep your opponents in one of those four categories, and you’ll never knowingly lose an argument.

Filed Under: Communication Tagged: , , , ,
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