The First Rule of Rock Climbing

1. Do not talk about climbing.
1. Just stand up.
1. Stop sucking.
1. Grip harder.
1. Be strong.
1. Don't be weak.
1. Don't be not strong.
1. Be taller.
1. Go up.
1. When in doubt, skip.
1. When in doubt, dyno.

Don't Shoot the Symptom

The usual disclaimers about not seeing outside my life experience apply.

This is my last rant on social issues. I find it amusing that I feel compelled to put the warning above, even though it's almost tautological.

I saw the latest James Bond film (Skyfall) several months back, and was afterwards surprised to find that there's some backlash on the blogosphere. Not because the film was badly made - most critics praised the cinematography - but because the women in the film were disposable Specifically (spoiler alert):

• Bond seduces the sex slave Severine, with full knowledge of her past
• Bond fails to save Severine due to bad shooting, despite a minute later overcoming his captors
• M (played by Judi Dench) is killed, and is replaced by a man
• Moneypenny is reduced from an active agent to a desk job

Now, these things (especially the first one) are certainly bad things to portray, but I wonder how out of the ordinary they are. That is, because the film is a work of fiction but set in a close-to-real world, these events in themselves may not be misogynistic, although the selection of their portrayal might be.

Let me try to make this idea more clear. The events in a work of fiction, which is set in the real world, could be representative while still being misogynistic. We could, for example, write a fictional book with the vilest, most sexist human trafficker as the protagonist, and have them get away scot-free at the end. The events and characters in such a novel would certainly be misogynistic, but they would also be realistic (as in, such people exist in the world). The question is, is the work as a whole misogynistic?

I think the underlying question - which applies not just to feminism, but also to heteronormativity, stereotypes, and so on - is the act of criticizing people for being realistic. Back to Skyfall, 27% of senior positions in six US intelligence agencies are held by women; 22 of the Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs. That is, if the writers of Skyfall had wanted to determine, at random, whether the new M should be male or female if the statistics of reality were followed, three out of four times the new M would still be male. The other portrayals are less defendable, although again there is a question of whether it was unrealistic.

Moving outside of fiction, complaining about realistic sentiments is actually quite common. I caught myself doing it for a couple weeks, when I noticed how infrequently the asexual perspective is brought up. I was started to get annoyed at this, until I remembered that asexuality represents maybe 1% of the population. Even if this is an underestimate, sexual people are still in the vast majority, and I should not expect to find the two be represented equally frequently.

This asexuality example is not particularly compelling one, but other, less politically-correct examples are everywhere. One such case is the struggle between meritocracy and equality in, for example higher education (this is also an issue for Silicon Valley). In the ideal world, universities would like to select their students purely on the basis of their academic achievements. The problem is that, since education opportunities are not equally given to everyone, those with the most "merit" tend to be Caucasian and, to a lesser extent, Asian. This means that if we attempt to continue with meritocracy, the student population at the most prestigious universities will no longer resemble the demographics of the country at large. Note that this is not due to the universities being actively discriminatory, but that as a result of societal/structure issues, the result is a discriminatory one. For universities, the solution is often to ignore pure meritocracy and instead accept students based on a mix of merit and equality. Silicon Valley, on the other hand, has no pressure to make this change, and as a result has increased the economic inequity in the Bay area.

Here's an even more contentious example. "In 2008, the [homicide] offending rate for blacks (24.7) offenders per 100,000) was 7 times higher than the rate for whites (3.4 per 100,000)." If we take this seriously, that means all else being equal, the black person you just walked pass is seven times more likely to be a murder than the white person you just walked pass. If we were to take precautions against murder based on the estimated likelihood of being the victim of an attempted murder, we should be more cautious when around a black stranger. But this is, of course, entirely inappropriate (and possibly unethical); as with the meritocracy case, the resulting action is discriminatory even if the logic that led to it, and the statistics that the logic is based on, are both sound.

I could continue to list examples, but instead I'll highlight the lesson. The point here is not that we should stop caring about these issues, but that we need to separate the realistic reaction to an undesirable circumstance, from the undesirable circumstance itself. Sometimes these are not separable - the reaction may itself further perpetuate the circumstance (think victim blaming and rape culture) - but often the reaction is merely a symptom of the underlying problem. This is especially important for people who want to fix the undesirable circumstance, as removing the reaction would not solve the problem. For everyone else, separating the symptom from the cause will maybe help quell your frustration.

On Vulnerability

I think a lot of times we use words without really understanding what they mean. I don't mean this in the "here's a new word let's use it" way, but that often the use of a word has more meaning than might be found in a dictionary. "Vulnerability" is one such word.

I started thinking about this word over the summer, when I was having a conversation with a friend. I was sharing a personally-meaningful quote with them, when they told me that I'm making them feel vulnerable. I didn't pursue it at the time, but afterwards I thought it was strange: since it was me who was saying something personally meaningful, how was it that they felt vulnerable?

The dictionary definition of (psychological) vulnerability is the feeling of likelihood of being hurt. While this seems correct on the surface, it is also insufficiently nuanced. We do not, for example, feel vulnerable while succumb to a disease, nor when facing a tiger. (Granted, not having experienced either, I can only speculate; but these scenarios doesn't evoke the description of vulnerability to me.) At least, it's not the disease or the tiger, in and of itself, that leads to the feeling of vulnerability.

I started thinking of instance where we might describe the feeling as vulnerable:

• discussing personal trauma
• giving a sincere compliment
• sharing a secret

Of these three, the second one about compliments needs elaboration. Imagine a friend who has gone through a rough period. You meet up with them after being out of contact for a couple years, and find that they have moved, with a new job and a circle of friends; they seem to have moved pass their previous difficulties. You want to them that you're glad that they're okay, and more than that, that you're proud that they've managed. The latter, in particular, seems to evoke feelings of vulnerability.

Weirdly enough, the breakthrough came for me from considering whether there were people who would never be vulnerable. Specifically, I was thinking those with impaired affect: the sociopaths, the schizoid, and so on. It was a hunch, but it seemed to me that the stereotypical emotionless sociopath wouldn't feel vulnerable, not because they don't feel things, but because they don't care about the reaction of others.

If my hunch is correct, it would mean that vulnerability is not so much about the fear of getting hurt, but about the fear of indifference to some strong emotion. This is what connects the three examples above: it's that the person feels strongly about the subject (trauma, compliments, or secrets), and they fear that this feeling might be dismissed as unimportant.

A more recent experience of mine seemed to confirm this explanation. I was meeting a friend for dinner, someone whom I used to have a crush on; she knew this, but I was rejected, and I eventually got over it. A couple days before, I suddenly learned that her boyfriend (who I also knew) was visiting, and would be joining us as well. Upon learning this, I was suddenly ambivalent about the whole thing, which puzzled me. It wasn't exactly romantic jealousy, since I no longer desired a relationship with her. Eventually, though, I realized I was feeling vulnerable about the dinner and, by the above definition, I figured out that I was afraid she would somehow downplay my previous feelings for her by, for example, openly making out with her boyfriend. Nothing of that sort happened, of course, but I felt better knowing the source of my feelings.

That, I think, is one of the best reasons for figuring out the true meaning of words: it lets you more quickly understand what is going on when you are tempted to describe yourself with it. I'm not sure if this is really a subfield of philosophy or linguistics - the study of semasiology or lexical semantics comes close. Regardless, I've been thinking a lot about what people mean when they use different words (also on the list: "true", as in this "expresses something true [about people]"), and I thought people would be interested in my thought process.

PS. I'm aware I never finished the story about my friend; this is deliberate, as the quote I shared reflects as much about them as it does about me. This makes it somebody else's secret, and not my story to tell.

A Rambling on Effortlessness

There's a quality that's been popping up in many places, and I want to take the time to, if not nail down what it is, at least feel its edges.

There are many guises to this thing. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it's called Quality. In The Timeless Way of Building, it's also called quality. Abraham Maslow calls it self-actualization. Both the Kingkiller Chronicles and the Sword of Truth series call it rare, or at least, that someone who has it is a rare person. In Finite and Infinite Games, that person would be called a player of infinite games. Buddhists and Taoists would probably call it mindfulness or presentness. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi might call it flow. For the lack of a better word, I will call it Effortlessness, because it's most recognizable in that form.

Think of your favorite athlete, or artist, or dancer. Imagine them doing their work: while they're focused, what they do always seems effortless. There's a simplicity and elegance in their movement, and they act as though what they're doing is the most natural thing in the world.

Except that effortlessness is not quite the word for it, in that it's not correct. Take the best climber, say, Adam Ondra. Here he is climbing one of the world's hardest routes. Except for the crux, he looks effortless - as exemplified by the need to have a disclaimer that "no adjustments have been made to the speed of the climbing". We all know that Ondra spent a lot of time and effort to get to this stage; Bill Ramsey calls it the box of pain, which is to say, you're choosing between the pain of failure or the pain of training.

There's an old joke about how, to be a great painter, all you have to do "make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally" (I stole this wording from Zen and the Art). Part of the joke is that being perfect is harder than being a great painter. To paint "effortlessly" is not, in fact, effortless; it may be effortless in the moment, but much effort is put in to make it look effortless.

That's the first hint about the nature of effortlessness. Effortlessness is never something that the participant feels in the moment; I doubt Ondra thought the route was effortless while climbing it. He might, however, think that it was easy afterwards. Psychologists call this the remembering self, as opposed to the experiencing self. I suspect it's the same reason I feel protected. I often know how much time I actually put into research, but afterwards it always seems like it's nothing. When I first realized this, I tweeted, "For someone with a pretty huge ego, I tend to trivialize my accomplishments."

We've all had moments where we're so focused on something we forget about time passing, and only afterwards can we look back and think, "that was awesome!" I had one such experience at Red Rocks last year, climbing this 5.6 crack. Usually, after I climb something, I can replay most of the moves; on that particular route, I just remember feeling awesome coming out, and have no recollection of what happened on it.

Here, the idea of effortlessness intersects with that of flow. I personally think that it's the same thing as presence - because all your energy is focused on what you're doing - but that seems contrary to what Buddhists call mindfulness, which instead brings to mind an inherent meta-level of conscienceless. I'm not trying to be mystical here; take this passage from Zen and the Art:

But the biggest clue seemed to be [the bad mechanics'] expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing - and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5pm or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing [my friends] were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.

Of course, Pirsig here was trying to get at what he called Quality. Somehow, the internal description of "caring", of attachment and presence, shows through to observers. Pirsig also raised the example of someone who does something for amusement - and to that person's surprise, other people notice these small things. There's a sense of playfulness to this, drawing in the idea of games. This is why, I think, you cannot teach someone to be effortless. You cannot tell someone to be playful - or as Karse would put it, "to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself", as opposed to seriousness, which is to "press for specified conclusion."

It's curious that Maslow has listed all of these ideas under what he calls the metaneeds of the self-actualized. By this definition, the self-actualized desire effortlessness and playfulness. Despite this connection, it's unclear to me how these attributes are all connected. There is a certain je ne sais quoi about them, in how they cannot be taught and cannot be described. I think the point of this post is just to mention all these related concepts, so I can find them again as I keep thinking about these ideas.

Two Ambigrams

Earlier this year I tweeted that I was excited about something that I couldn't reveal at the time. The something is actually an ambigram, which I design on occasion. I first learned of the idea from Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, in which ambigrams played a major role. Incidentally, the ambigrams in that book were designed by John Langdon, who commented on my previous post about ambigrams and psychology. I designed my first ambigram back in 2004, and have done several more since, mostly as gifts to people.

My best work up till the beginning of the year was a birthday gift I made for my friend Emily.

One interesting thing about this design is that there is no i. The m flows directly into the l; the i is an illusion created by the tittle above the last stroke of the m. I actually made a version with the i, but it isn't as elegant, and I stuck with this version.

The ambigram I made earlier this year was a going-away gift for my friend Laura, who moved to join her boyfriend Neale in Philly. Neale had moved there about a year ago, but I failed to make a gift for him then. The idea was therefore to make a gift for each of them. Having a complexity addiction, however, made me wonder whether I can make the two gifts interact somehow, to represent their relationship.

Long story short, here's the result:

It's actually very difficult to see what's going on; it's better to show each one separately:

Individually, each half-circle isn't anything special: it's just their names in some fancy typeface. Together, however, is where the magic happens. The more observant of you will have noticed that the letters in laura and neale are not independent. In fact, they share all but the middle letter: the ra in laura turns into the ne in neale, and the le in neale forms the la in laura. Here is the combined circle again, with some highlighting: laura in red, neale in blue, and the overlap in purple.

The r/n were easy to merge; the crux of the design was in the a/e. It had to look good enough as both for each name to be readable; this was mostly done by adjusting the length of the closing stroke and of the swash. neale presented an extra challenge: if the e's can be read as a's, then what should happen to the remaining a? I was lucky in that a has two variants. Having used the single-story variant for the merged glyph, in the end I created the double-story variant from scratch, making a Frankenstein glyph from various bits of different letters.

The final part of this is the presentation. As you saw, the combined circle is hard read, which meant that each half-circle would have to be independent. I hit on the solution of printing each on a transparency, then put in a cardboard frame for sturdiness. This way, each card would individually show a single name:

But when stacked and aligned, it shows the full ambigram:

Typographically, I still like my emily card more, but in terms of the final product, this surpasses the former by far (which I had simply printed on cardboard). This is not just because you can fiddle around with the cards until they align, but because the re-interpretation of the letters is so unconscious. None of the few people I tested the ambigram on realized that the a changed to an e (or vice versa) until I pointed it out to them, despite them moving the cards into position and reading back out the individual names. This goes to show how powerful our preconceptions are in interpreting what we see.

I do not have any future ambigrams planned, although I do have a different art project in mind. Maybe I will share that when I'm done.

Understanding Privilege: An Attempt

The usual disclaimers about not seeing outside my life experience apply.

Many of the blogs I follow, including those of my friends, often write about social issues. One concept that keeps coming up is privilege. The idea, according to Wikipedia, is to highlight not only the disadvantages that some people face, but also how the advantaged may not recognize that they are so. This concept is most commonly applied to gender and race, but people also talk about heterosexual privileges and able-bodied privilege.

Coming from a technical background as a straight (if asexual) Asian male, I have never quite understood the idea of privilege. To me, it seems like a mere reframing of the same issues around gender, race, sexuality, and disability discrimination. Maybe it makes the societal origins more visible, and how discrimination may be passive instead of active, but I don't think that's true of most discussions of privilege. As such, the idea of privilege seemed a little redundant.

The definition of privilege, however, is in some sense broader than discrimination. One of my problems with privilege is that it can be applied to a lot of things other than gender and race. An lo, I found articles about the literacy, food, and water privileges. These are not attributes that we commonly associate discrimination with, and it is difficult to imagine what it would mean to discriminate against those without water. (It should be noted that the lack of some other universal human rights do get discriminated against; this is the case for the lack of housing, or what might be called the shelter privilege.)

The article which originally introduced the idea of privilege is Peggy McIntosh's White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. In it, the author noted that when confronted with male privilege, men

[have an] unwillingness to grant that they are over-privileged, even though they may grant that women are disadvantaged. They may say they will work to improve women's status, in the society, the university, or the curriculum, but they can't or won't support the idea of lessening men's.

McIntosh goes on to note that there are different kinds of privilege, that "some... should be the norm in a just society[, while] others... distort humanity of the holders as well as the ignored groups." The implication is that, for the former type of privileges, it is sufficient to grant the same privileges to those currently without them, while for the latter types the current holders of those privileges must also give them up.

Which brings me to my last confusion about privilege: all this academic discussion is great, but what is the (now consciously) privileged supposed to do with this information? On the blogs I follow, privilege is mostly brought up as an argument for the privileged to be more sensitive (or, as this comment eloquently puts, "Shut the fuck up and listen"). More condemningly, privilege has been used to explain the prevalence of rape jokes on the internet. Michael Kimmel, in the foreword to Privilege: A Reader, suggests that the task (of privilege researchers and advocates) is "to make visible the privilege that accompanies and conceals that invisibility [of being white, straight, male, and middle class]." But then he continues:

While noble in intention, however, this posture of guilty self-negation cannot be our final destination as we come to understand how we are privileged by race, class, gender, and sexuality. Refusing to be men, white, or straight does neither the privileged nor the unprivileged much good. One can no more renounce privilege than one can stop breathing. It's in the air we breathe.

So what are we to do? Kimmel's analogy with breathing is apt, considering the discussions of food and water privileges. That his words are in a book is, itself, a sign of the literacy privilege that he holds. Everything we do is a product of privilege of some kind or another - here I am, typing this blog post about privilege (intellectual) on a personal laptop (wealth), in a text editor I learned to use (education), that I will publish on the web without fear of filter or governmental backlash (internet, or freedom of speech). There are potentially an infinite number of privileges to check, and it's unclear to me what results are desired. Deterrence of privileged speech does not apply equally to sexism and to the internet, and the idea of privilege doesn't contribute to distinguishing the two. While I appreciate new viewpoints as much as the next person, I'm not sure we need the idea of privilege simply to teach a lesson of respect.

I want to end with an example of privilege checking that made me further hesitate on the idea of privilege. A friend's blog (to which I will not link) quoted a blog post motivating people to leave their jobs and travel the world. In the middle is this passage:

You can say farewell to your family, your friends, and if they love you, they'll let you go, they'll know it's not forever. You'll make new friends on the road, people from near and far, from all walks of life, with one thing in mind: to travel. You might be surprised at the hospitality of strangers who will love you like family, usher you into their dwellings, give you a place to rest your blistered, wandering feet, and a plate of home-cooked food to eat.

My friend found that the whole post "reeks of privilege", and said specifically of the first sentence in the excerpt above that some people may "have family to support (not everyone can care only for their own needs)." The first part of this reaction I agree with: it's definitely true that many people have to support their families. (Although, I suppose this in itself is a privilege, considering the alternative of being orphans in a war-torn country.) What struck me was the second part, how people who "care only for their own needs" are privileged. Depending on your viewpoint, these people are variously described as "selfish" all the way to "sociopathic". Neither ends of this spectrum are attributes people find desirable, so calling them privileges seems at least odd. Certainly, not being close to your family gives you advantages - such as the freedom to travel - but if everything that gives you benefits is a privilege, then the idea is so dilute as to be meaningless.

Generalizing the Turing Test

Are people familiar with the Turing test? Named after Alan Turing, the WWII British mathematician and code-breaker, it was proposed as a way of testing whether computers are "intelligent". In addition to inventing this test and helping break the Enigma, Turing is also famous for the conception of a Turing machine, a mathematical construct that is useful for understanding computation in the abstract. Unfortunately for Turing, he was also homosexual, and was prosecuted by the state for it after the war; this eventually led to his suicide. In 2009 - 55 years after Turing's death - the British government formally apologized for its treatment of Turing, and only earlier this year, in 2013, was he officially pardoned for his crimes.

Turing is also the subject of an upcoming biopic, The Imitation Game, starring Sherlock Benedict Cumberbatch. The title of the film is, in fact, based on the Turing test (or rather, is famous because of the test). In the Turing Test, a computer and a person both try to convince a human judge that they are human. The judge can only communicate with both parties through text, but they can ask questions. A computer or a program is said to have passed to the Turing test if, over multiple conversations, the judge cannot reliably and correctly label which is the person and which is the computer. In some sense, the computer needs to be imitating a person, whence the name of the game.

(It can, of course, also go the other way, to have a reversed Turing test: the goal could be to convince the judge that both participants are computers. This doesn't make sense as a test of intelligence, but the idea is the same. You can also try to convince the judge that they're a computer...)

Setting the question of whether the Turing test is a good test for whether a computer is intelligent, the test is nonetheless elegant in its design. There are several crucial elements of the design, that the computer is not "the most intelligent" or "the most human like" compared to other computers, and that the judge is not simply deciding whether one conversant is a human or a computer; these features mean that the computer must match the human in performance. Further more, because the judge can ask the computer any question they want, the computer must be able to talk about any subject the judge could think of. Thus, even though no one has a good definition of "intelligence", the Turing test at least allows us to apply a "know it when I see it" criterion.

For the most part, familiarity of the Turing test has remained within the academic fields of computer science, psychology, and philosophy. I was recently surprised, however, that it came up in an economics article. In this article, it is suggested that liberal economists can successfully present conservative economic arguments, while the same cannot be said of the opposite, for a conservative economist to present liberal economic arguments. The author therefore proposes a variation of a Turing test: put him (a conservative) in a room with five liberals, and see if people can tell who's the fake; then put Paul Krugman (a liberal) in a room with five conservatives, and again see if people can tell who's the fake.

What, then, is the more general version of the Turing test? The Turing test is really a special case of a discrimination test. The key, however, is that the Turing test is being used as a criterion: if the computer cannot be distinguished from a human, then we shall consider it as intelligent. This means that, crucially, we do not need to define the exact attribute that we are judging by, only that it behaves indistinguishably from the real thing. While we do not have a perfect definition (or even a good one) of intelligence, the beauty of the Turing test is that we don't need one to decide that a computer is intelligent. This may be a very behavioral definition of intelligence - it doesn't address the Chinese room problem, for example - but it's better than endlessly debating the definition of intelligence.

Of course, the Turing test, clever as it is, is not the silver bullet for all indefinable attributes. In fact, there are strong restrictions on when the Turing test will be useful. For one, the judge must be familiar with the attribute that is being judged; for example, I would not be a good judge of liberal/conservative economists, since I myself cannot tell the difference. More generally, the more discerning the judge, the more "powerful" the Turing test becomes. Additionally, the attribute being judged must be different from how the attribute is generated. In the original Turing test, what we cared about was whether the computer is intelligent, not how it came to be that way (that is, whether it does so through neurons or silicon). This means that care must be taken to remove elements that may give the distinction away, which is why the original test uses text as the medium of communication, as opposed to a face-to-face conversation, which would detract from the task of judging intelligence.

It is curious to me that, despite spending some time on this post, I cannot think of a single application of the Turing test. The closest I've come is for driverless cars, and using the Turing test to see whether they drive safer than humans do. Such a test would involve putting human and computer in simulated drives, and having the judges simply watch a recording of the performance without knowing which is which. While such a test would show that self-driving cars are as safe - if not safer than - humans, it is also unnecessary: the metrics for safety seems sufficiently well-defined that we don't need a Turing test, and that any old comparison would suffice. This is nothing more than an argumentation from lack of imagination, it may seem that we are simply not trained to think of tests in this way. More often, when we think of an attribute we want to measure, we define the attribute such that it is measurable, or else we give up trying to get any accurate measurements. Maybe the Turing test is a good way to attack some of these measurements we've given up on.