If you like Myers-Briggs, I should warn you that we don’t (much). As gentlemen scientists, we’re not fond of any scheme that seeks to linearize a complex, non-linear system – especially when that scheme is then used as a guide for how to treat other people.

Calling someone (or yourself) an ENTP is fine as a game, but claiming it’s somehow scientific is wrong. It’s arbitrary and made up. And then using it to pre-judge people – well, that raises ethical questions.

ENTPs on the prowl

Personality testing and Myers Briggs in particular is very popular in certain circles (e.g. recruiting). The assumption that people have unified “personalities” and that these don’t change over time is common enough to have become a part of our language (she’s not my “type”). There’s something comforting about labelling other people and yourself.

Polash puts forward a plausible hypothesis about this – do we just label ourselves to be who we want to be?

[By the way, the soundtrack for today’s podcast is Paula Abdul’s Opposites Attract. Don’t ask us to explain – just go with us on this one.]

Update Monday 2/11: BTW Paula Abdul sends her love! (no, really)

Horoscopes and fortune telling are fun, but we don’t hire and fire based on them (although, see footnote about Raymond Domenach below). By putting people in boxes, we deny them the opportunity (the right!) to surprise us. Labelling people has a painful history – let’s just be careful.

Special note: we should really issue a (mild) bad language warning for this week

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This week we are joined by Dr Nic Woods, a doctor, health IT expert and fellow gentleman scientist. We’re all in our forties now (‘the decade that matters’ as on of our friends told us) and aging is on our minds. The Cumean Sibyl of legend wants to die as the price of immortality. In the modern world, we are encouraged to pretend to be young.

In our case, we’d just be happy to get a few more years

I look the same – right?

But medical science is already prolonging our lives, in the future maybe by decades or more. Forty is the new thirty, thirty is the new twenty etc. etc. But are we here for a long time or a good time? No one wants to cling on for years and years as a vegetable, but conversely it seems morally imperative that we pursue longer life if we can.

Nic gives us some excellent expert medical viewpoints to augment our usual gentlemanly ramblings, including a description of aging as an accumulation of errors. And with recent revelations about neuroplasticity in older age, there is hope for all of us.

The Hef, still going strong …

Entropy is entropy. Whatever else we might achieve, we’re unlikely to be able to cheat the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Even if we preserve our bodies, there is systemic physical decay, not the mention the psychological costs of aging and the decline of the mind. Change is the way of the world, and the old must make way for the new eventually.

There may be such a thing as living too long. There may be such a thing as the ‘right’ time to go.

Then again, bring on the nanobots!

More red blood cells! More!

Thank you for joining us again gentlemen and women – may you live long and prosper. Remember, you’re never too old to disco. But sometimes we lie about our age. As Auden says –‘Time will have his fancy/To-morrow or to-day.’

Special apologies for the poor audio quality in this discussion. Also check out our previous Discussion #15 – the Mindset of Aging

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Shourov’s great-grandparents – note the colourization of the photos done by hand

Scientists recognize kin selection as an evolutionary strategy – we care more about those genetically closer to us, all the better to persist our genes. This may operate across time too – our great-grandparents share our genes too, and thus trigger the same feelings of kinship. Brian makes the point that listening to your parents is good evolutionary strategy, but listening to the stories of your extended family in time (i.e. your ancestors) may be even more beneficial.

Everyone is you.

Can we hack kinship selection to make the world a better place? We all share a lot more ancestry than we think. Take any two random people from anywhere in Europe and they share hundreds of ancestors from only 1,000 years ago – similarly for everyone in the world. If we could bring this shared ancestry into our collective consciousness, could it create empathy and love between strangers? Could we make the Golden Rule – “love thy neighbour as yourself” – closer and closer to a tautology?

Dating your mother … ewww (screenshot from Back to the Future)

We finish with a segue and a controversial thought – were our ancestors happier because they expected less from life? What are the costs of social mobility and equality of opportunity? If we could meet one of our ancestors from centuries ago, what would he or she think of us? The further you go back in time, the less options people had. We assume that caused them pain, but maybe they adjusted to their lot and found contentment – no one told them that “you can be anything you want to be”.

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Life isn’t like chess. Shourov makes the point that in real life a player has infinitely more options than in the game itself. For example, if I am losing, I can overturn the board. In the stockmarket game, I can lie, cheat or misinform the market. In the business game, I can deceive my clients, steal from others or even murder a rival. We’re good at gaming systems, and any set of first order rules will be modified by the agents that are nominally bound by them. Everything feeds back signals into the system and structures never stay static over time.

The stockmarket game – do ‘meta-rules’ exist?

So we’re very suspicious of someone who thinks they’ve worked out a set of positive rules. We like meta-rules a little better (see this paper proposing that quantum mechanics is an emergent property of a deeper cellular automata). We like falsifications – negative rules seem to work. For example – “nothing ever stays the same”. Folk wisdom persists through time because it is usually that kind of second-order negative statement which holds true as the centuries pass by.

Games are easy. People are hard.

Games are easy. People are hard. We love life and we love people, but not absolutely everything has to be worked out and turned into a formula. Our ramblings this week turn philosophical and messy, like life itself. But we do know that the best games are those you play with your kids, because they don’t “know” enough not to break the rules. There’s Kasparov and then there’s my five-year old. Live in the meta- if you want to live well.

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Studies by Prof Ellen Langer have shown that to some extent we are only as young (or old) as we feel.  And given the chance, the human body can surprise us when the mind is encouraged to forget the true age of its body, and instead subtly prompted to remember what it was like to be younger.

Prof Ellen Langer, photgraph from rdigitallife.com

Prof Langer has done experiments where people are treated a lot younger than their real age, in a share-house situation, and studied the effects. She says that part of the key is to encourage mindfulness, or actively noticing new things.

In our conversation we speculate on whether this means there are benefits to focusing outside the self. And at the same time not giving up when things are bad, not dwelling on how bad things are, which can be a natural habit our minds return to if there is nothing else to do.  Don’t give up. When you give up, things go down hill.

We also discuss the power of the placebo effect, and conversely the nocebo effect, and also links between immune system and attitude.

Listen to the pod cast here:

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Every human society has music. It is a Cultural Universal which features in all cultures and tribes around the world. Music is thought to have been there at the start of human evolution, along with dance and laughter as some of the fundamental building blocks of the human psyche and human language.

Other animals such as birds also sing, for many reasons. But perhaps birds use music as their language, like we talk. And so too humans use music to communicate.

We discuss the book by Dr Daniel J Levitin, ‘This is Your Brain On Music.’

Music is certainly an important part of our lives. It is tied strongly to emotion. Some emotions are very difficult to express effectively with words but much easier to convey with music. Listening to certain songs a change our mood. Musicians express their emotions through music and it resonates with the rest of us. And that resonance stays with us through our lives.

For example, the bands that were there for us during our years of teen angst such as Roxette and Bananarama stay with us, even though the equivalent musicians and bands of today have much less traction with us old timers. But the newer bands obviously mean something to the current generation of angst-ridden teenagers.

Roxette, still going strong incidentally.

Listen to the pod cast here:

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Links to our own music:
Shourov and Declan are in The Bombay Royale.
Declan currently also appears in The Wikimen and Hoodoo Mayhem.

There are different types of project failure, where the project is: complete but costs too much; complete but too late; complete but with low quality; incomplete and doesn’t do what was originally envisaged; combinations of the four; and not done at all – scrapped by the stakeholders with nothing to show for it.

Software and IT projects, more than other types of projects such as construction or manufacturing, often suffer from the last case – scrapped. We discuss agile methodologies and whether they are the solution – or at least whether they reduce the probability of failure.

Sometimes there are too many chiefs and not enough engineers. And even if the business analysts identify the full scope of what needs to be done, sometimes the stakeholders don’t see the same vision or can’t afford the required budget.

As always, Scott Adams has an angle:

Listen to the pod cast here:

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Spreading the atheist gospel

The easy narrative here is that Professor Blackmore, an avowed atheist and rationalist, was trying to open the minds of her students and show them the irrationality of their beliefs – and that those students who were offended were displaying an inability to think for themselves and explore alternative viewpoints.

As gentlemen scientists, we don’t think things are quite so simple. We like Dawkins and Blackmore, but we think that they and their compatriots often lack humility. It’s easy to sneer to religious people, but which of our ‘secular’ behaviours and beliefs will be sneered at by the Dawkins of five hundred years from now?

(Brian points out that the modern act of shopping – buying material goods that we don’t need – would be deeply irrational and ridiculous to the members of a Papua New Guinean highland tribe.)

Deeply irrational “viruses of the mind”

We are all selective and biased in our processing of information. We distort reality at every step of the way, often in subconscious ways beyond our control. We are masters of self-deception. And the boundaries of our knowledge are completely opaque to us – we have no idea of what we don’t know.

All of which means that the only rational state of mind is one of humility, skepticism and open-mindedness. Not everything can be falsified now, but just because we can’t do it does not mean that it cannot be done. We know a lot, and vanishingly little at the same time. Not everything can be settled. Arguments rarely if ever change minds, but they can plant a seed. And everyone has an agenda, even the most ‘objective’ of scientists and even (perhaps especially) if they have convinced themselves that they do not.

Our ramblings then move into memetics itself and debate the core meme-gene analogy; religions as memeplexes and useful mutations thereof; proselytization and the power of faith; our responsibility to attempt empathy; how to build bridges; learning by doing, not talking; the good that religions do for individuals and communities.

We love the ideas behind complexity, adaptive systems and evolution and we would defend them anytime, but we don’t feel the need to proselytize. You’re free to listen to our ramblings and opinions, but we are not asking you to share them. As gentlemen scientists we never expect everyone to think exactly the same way that we do.

So we sympathize with Professor Blackmore. But if her objective is to introduce her ideas to new audiences, then insulting their way of life isn’t a great way to do it.

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In the spirit of (pseudo) scientific enquiry, we have given each scenario a “rating” – a combination of likelihood (how likely it is to happen in the near future) and risk (how catastrophic would it be for us).

Download or listen to the podcast below and scroll down to see a summary of our ratings.

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Nuclear War

Sure we have enough bombs to “kill us all”, but in any real conflict there would be many millions of survivors globally. And even under the severest of nuclear winters with its attendant disruption of the food chain, you could assume that some communities would persist and survive under the harshest of conditions (as some of them do today) to seed a new generation. 2/10

Eco-pocalypse

We rely on a healthy biosphere for optimal existence, but even a highly damaged biosphere is likely to be habitable by humans². In fact, the resilience of networks in the natural world and our own adaptability are part of the problem – we don’t appreciate how much damage we are doing because we always seem to ‘get by’. There are excellent ethical and practical reasons why we should limit our ecological footprint, but the claim that we are driving ourselves to extinction is a dubious one. 2/10

Reversal of the Earth’s Magnetic Field

Reversals and disruptions of the Earth’s magnetic field seem to happen quite regularly, every half a million years on average. If it happened again, we might expect global disruption – even catastrophe – but it’s unlikely to be the full-blown extinction event³. 1/10

Meteor strike

It’s thought that a meteor is what did for the dinosaurs – what would it do to us? A really large meteor would irreversibly change our climate and block the sun’s rays from much of the Earth for a long time. Nothing larger than a chicken survived the last big strike 65 million years ago, and the Gentlemen Scientists don’t like our chances with this one. 5/10

Black hole passes by the Solar System

Planets go flying in every direction, including ours. Sounds pretty bad, right? We’re not sure how likely this is, but it feels like it is unlikely. Undoubtedly a full-blown extinction for us if it does, though (unless we have time to prepare?). 1/10

Gamma Ray burst from space

Unimaginably powerful beams of energy travel through space on a regular basis – we can see them. If one of them hit us, it could burn off the ozone layer, expose us to high doses of radiation and destroy the food chain. Statistically very unlikely, but we’d never see it coming and we’d be screwed. 3/10

Extraterrestrial life wreaks havoc

Some people believe that life on Earth may have come from another planet, and it might happen again. It’s logically possible that lifeforms (microscopic life, viruses etc.) may be relayed to Earth, and that such a “pan-spermic” event could wreak havoc. However, if there is one thing about our biosphere it is highly competitive, and any “alien” life is unlikely to be adapted to our environment, let along superior in any important way (although it is possible – think of introduced species). A very unlikely scenario but risk difficult to assess. 1/10

Superbugs

A mass epidemic of an engineered ‘superbug’ would be super-scary, and they might not be too hard to make. But here is where the raw material of natural selection – the natural variability of our population – is our defense. In even the worst pandemic, some people survive, and the genes that lead to their lowered susceptibility are strengthened over time. Even a zombie virus couldn’t achieve a coverage of one hundred percent, and the survivors would carry the flag. 2/10

Grey Goo – Nanotechnology gone wild

The idea of grey goo seems fanciful – tiny little nano-robots that can replicate themselves take over the world, munching their way through everything. It’s possible in principle (we think) and some people take it semi-seriously, but we think any such self-replicating technology would end up mired in its own waste and would be too easy to stop. 1/10

Runaway Artificial Intelligence

Will we reach a moment of technological singularity, when we build a super-human intelligence – which might decide to (or inadvertently) eliminate us? Even a super-intelligent machine will need raw materials and energy, and none of them would be evolved for our biosphere the way we are (not to mention our co-evolution with the organisms that help us live). And is it even possible for us to build machines that can think to that level? Too many assumptions needed for this scenario. 1/10

Killer Meme Epidemic

Some Jains in eastern India starve themselves to death. Could a suicidal meme such as this ever spread through the population, causing us to override our most ancient biological instincts and exterminate ourselves? Sounds far-fetched, but scary and difficult to rule out exactly because we don’t really understand the principles of cultural transmission. Again, natural variation protects us – a killer meme might infect everyone but there might be some who are immune (eg. the mentally deficient or mentally ill). 3/10

Mass Infertility

Thought experiment – some kind of catastrophe instantaneously destroy every human egg in every female on Earth. That’d the end of the human race, since women don’t create eggs but are born with them. Sexual reproduction as a modus operandi might have a weak link somewhere, but we can’t think of how you could “break” it for every individual in our global population. 0/10

Life is all about making mistakes. As we age, interrogating our own personal histories for mistakes yields more and more useful lessons, for those who wish to go through the exercise (it’s painful to do so). Whether it is in a performance review at work, on stage, in sport or just a quiet reflective moment at home, there is nothing quite as fruitful as constructively inspecting your mistakes and learning from them.

Mistakes are information wrapped in pain. They seem to be very good at compressing a lot of information into a small package. If you think of adaptation and evolution as an information processing system, then mistakes (errors, evolutionary dead-ends) are the primary way to glean information about the environment for the system.

In tonight’s discussion, we start with personal anecdotes that show the same quality – mistakes we have made that have become touchpoints for our own lives. Mistakes which have become something much bigger and much more positive.

What would the world be like if no one ever made a mistake? What would a universe without error look like? Would evolutionary processes grind to a halt? Could we ever have got out of the primordial soup without our propensity to make errors?

But then again what is a mistake? If something was a good idea “at the time”, it only become a mistake later in time. This binary judgement (mistake/not a mistake) cannot be applied to the event, but only to the complete system in time and space (action + time + consequence). And even then, whether or not something was ‘wrong’ depends a lot on your frame of reference as an observer.

Our culture is schizophrenic about mistakes. We pay lip service to the ancient ideas of empiricism and learning by “trial and error”, but our world is theory driven and in love with optimization, which implies the removal of redundancy and error. Our default position is to design our lives in such a way as to minimize our opportunities for making mistakes.

But you have to do it wrong to do it right. To learn what not to do. A life/world without error is dead, boring and sterile.

As Gentlemen Scientists we have made more than their share of mistakes. But mistakes plus attention equal learning. Perhaps a good life is not making less mistakes but always making new mistakes. Plus being aware of your fallibility – having the courage to say “I was/could be wrong”.

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A recent article in Scientific American introduced us to the ideas of David Deutsch and his Constructor Theory. Constructor Theory seeks to formulate “meta-laws” which sit “above” the laws of physics and determine them. They would do this by describing what may and may not (i.e. is forbidden to) happen, rather than trying to explain what will happen. Deutsch proposes that such a “meta” framework may be the way to unify the quantum and classical models of physics.

Deutsch is known as a pioneer of Quantum Computation, but this theory of his is speculative and not well known. It has its detractors, such as a this particularly abusive young physicist from the Czech Republic. But Deutsch’s ideas got us thinking here at Gentlemen Scientists HQ and set us off on a rambling, semi-informed conversation.

The thing is, we love the “meta”. Meta laws are fascinating because they hold out the promise of deeper understanding and unification. Understanding and control at a meta-level is stable over time than first-level control and survives the unexpected. Meta cognition, for example – the ability to reflect on one’s own patterns of thinking and behaviour – leads to better strategies for living under conditions of uncertainty.

However, once you start up the “meta-” ladder, how do you stop? Are there meta-meta-laws, or meta-meta-meta-laws? And when you do stop, you’re still left with the question – who designed the meta^N law that you are left with? You’re still left looking at the “Face of God”.

The Face of God on Mars, as photographed by NASA (the Cydonia region on Mars)

So this approach is no magic bullet. In a way, the Constructor Theory is a deliberate lowering of our ambitions. Our tendency is to want to predict, and we judge our scientific models by their predictive power. But if we shift our focus from what will happen to simply trying to write down what will never happen, and then following such an exercise to its logical conclusion, we may be surprised to find just how much “drops out”(this seems to be what happened with Deutsch – he ended up with results that a remniscent of open problems in quantum mechanics).

If it makes us feel better, we can say that we are “deferring” the question of working out the “laws” while we explore the “meta-laws” first. Will it turn out that we never actually need to go to the “laws” in the end, because the “meta-” understanding will give us what we need? Counter-intuitively we might get a deeper understanding by trying to understand “less”.

Slight tangent: it got us thinking about our cognitive biases. When we look at network graphs, we concentrate on the nodes, not the edges. We put people as records into our databases, but not the relationships between people⁴. We see things, and we try to describe the things, but we don’t think as much about the things that make things or the things that connect things.

Crude analogy with a network graph. Usually we like to think about the nodes N of the graph, but for a connected graph we could work with the edges A only and ignore the nodes altogether without losing any clarity or completeness of our model. We could even derive second order measures B based on the edges, such as e.g. relative sizes of adjacent edges. The resulting set of “meta”-edges would no longer fully specify a single graph but a whole family (“universe”) of possible graphs.

Before we get too far into our own navels, however, we do end up with a couple of concrete lines of enquiry. Deutsch’s work may be crackpot, speculative or revolutionary – or anywhere in between – but we feel encouraged to follow the same process when thinking about people and memes. Centuries of efforts to codify laws about people and communication have met with limited success in our opinion (sorry, social scientists).

So is it time to take a meta view and develop some meta-laws about what people don’t do instead? For example, we could imagine that a simple biological imperative make it (almost) impossible for us to truly believe in the imminence of our own death. What happens if we represent some of these basic assumption and construct ‘laws” from them? Could we construct a better social science that way? We’re excited about that possibility and are thinking of some simple computer simulations to explore these ideas further.

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Like many of us, John has a keen and active interest in both science and religion. As the new century brings exciting cross-collaborative developments (such the scientific study of meditation), these also bring new opportunities for us to reconcile what has previously seemed incompatible. The Gentlemen Scientists believe that rambling conversations such as this week’s discussion are more and more the need of the hour.

Along the way we discuss why childhood traumas can so deeply affect adult life, how cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) works, issues of determinism and free will; Dawkin’s definition of the “meme”, the mechanisms of “cultural transmission” and why memetics hasn’t contributed serious results to science; how Buddhist adepts modify their brains to achieve detachment, social learning theory and speculations on why advertising works.

Image courtesy catholicvote.org

And we are not afraid of asking the big questions – we finish up by considering the idea of “moral progress” – are we morally and ethically better off as a human society than we used to be – or are we, as in The Lord of the Flies, just savages in slacks?

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