Capitalism and Psychopathy

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Ha. Ha. Ha.

The ultimate behavioral economics dissertation topic: Capitalism and Psychopathy
     Chapter 1: Motivation
     Chapter 2: History and philosophy of capitalism
     Chapter 3: Psychopathy in history
     Chapter 4: Evolutionary origins and the neuroscience of psychopathy 
     Chapter 5: Psychopathy and (the rampant) capitalism (that is contemporary America)
     Chapter 6: Where to go from here?

In a culture that idolizes Steve Jobs but not Bill Gates, anyone who dares publish that thesis will never get a job in the United Freaking States and therefore must move to Canada or Scandinavia.

Brain Pickings is the most intriguing and illuminating website I've visited in a while

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io9.com is a close second. Together this makes for my shortest blog entry with the most number of tags.

I particularly should check out these collections of books... on the left panel on the main page. I already read a few of them and heard about a few more, but hmm... haven't read real books in a while. Too many things are happening lately...

Bakemonogatari - 2 of ??

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[[My previous blog entry about this anime]] 

This series has such high re-watch value for me... because it encourages endless pondering and rumination about nuances and intentions and the like. It's interesting to entertain the connection between the seemingly random scene insertions and the plot elements, e.g. the characters' dialogues, actions, and thoughts.

The insertions are often highly geometric constructs of street scenes, i.e. residential areas inside a city. Examples include generic apartment windows, playground swings, light rail tracks, power line towers, etc.


I feel like these inserts help set the mood and stimulate the viewers' train of thoughts in various Brownian directions... just as the black and red screens that flash for only a fraction of a second and read "Black (or Red) scene: animation number 'none'"... I have not yet figured out what they mean...

Actually, I think it could be either (1) animators got lazy (2) they're trolling the audience (3) simulating the old flickering film reels (4) black scenes for -_- or @_@ or =_= or ._. moments, and red scenes for O_O or intense bloody moments...

Please Understand Me by Keirsey & Bates

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There was a revisit of the Jungian temperament types, and derivatives thereof, but this time with an emphasized intention of understanding others... and just maybe develop some kind of unifying theory. I know people don't fall neatly into these bins, but instead behave more like weighted sliders along various scales. I may have one "dominant" type but also have significant characteristics of another type.

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1817241&show=html

However, it is helpful to learn more about the personality archetypes as corner data points, so to speak. Makes interpolation somewhat easier, but not really. It's like predicting chemical reactions with complicated materials...

http://selenadelesie.com/2009/12/16/signs-of-frustration-communication-series-part-2/

... because these intrinsic types could be affected by environmental factors in all sorts of ways.

The references to Greek mythology are interesting, i.e. Dionysus (Artemis), Apollo (Persephone), Prometheus (Athena) & Epimetheus (Hestia). Perhaps I shall initiate a comprehensive (or selectively highlighted) study of mythologies from different cultures at some point...

As I was reading the book, I tried to pay attention to the various dynamics as different types interact. The description better illuminated certain aspects of my life, as I took the extrospective approach rather than my usual introspection. And perhaps it will help me to relate to other people better. My SO said that I've been improving, so there is hope haha.

Gin no Saji (銀の匙, Silver Spoon, a manga series by Arakawa Hiromu, with reference to Dan Pink's Drive)

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It certainly feels refreshing to see a manga series that doesn't have the usual medley of gratuitous violence, complicated and/or explicit romantic entanglements, and/or (psychotic/delusional) characters either with or without magical powers. On some level, I identify with Hachiken, the main lead of Gin no Saji, who is from the city and therefore an outsider at an agricultural trade high school. He's also somewhat adrift on the sea of life without a landmark of destination in sight.

All of Hachiken's classmates seem pretty set in life. They have decided to follow a specific trade in some type of farming or animal husbandry, often take over the family farm. A subset of them dream of playing professional sports in order to make more money and support the family business. On the one hand, these youngsters are following a tradition in what they are born into, what they are familiar with. On the other hand, these trades demand a lot of physical and mental stamina, as well as a strong intrinsic motivation. Like Hachiken before he enrolls at the school, I really have no idea what it actually takes to wake up before dawn and clean the stables and milk the cows and harvest the eggs and... butcher the animals.

Hachiken gets asked many times that all-encompassing inevitable question, "What do you want to be? What is your dream?" To which he would reply, "I... don't really... have one..." He very likely has followed a prescribed path that supposedly leads to a contrived and canned definition of success. Like a perverse version of E.T. following a trail of Hershey's.

Ahh, the artificial construct of being number-one. When people are conditioned in an environment filled with numerical differentiators and zero-sum games, their intrinsic motivation soon withers and dies. (Read Dan Pink's Drive for more elaboration on this idea.)

Over the course of the seasons, Hachiken's experience at the agricultural school has opened his eyes in ways that a regular city high school would not. Perhaps he will eventually find some kind of purpose in life.

Speaking for myself, a perversely conventional definition of an educational "success" story. Is it a success story if I don't feel much like one?






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Ship of Fool by William Trowbridge

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Wonder what drew me to pick up this little anthology from the myriad of lineups on the library bookshelves. Was it the white-on-black text on the book's spine? The petite size? The ohh-so-shiny gloss suggestive of a published year coincident with the current calendar year? I'd go with all three. After all, the mind draws from a lifetime of associations when making split-second choices. Like what books to read over the next few weeks... The intriguing intro on the back cover merely confirmed my intuition that this would be a good read by my dictionary. 

(The title is not to be confused with the ship of fools, which is an allegory of civilization. Although the concepts are loosely related.)

This is a collection of poems about the fool archetype. Imagine a combination of Yiddish comic characters "schlemiel" and "schlimazel", where the former is "a bungler who's always accidentally breaking and spilling things on people", while the latter is "a sad sack who's always getting his stuff broken and spilled on him". Trowbridge's Fool is both.

Reminds me of comic characters whom Robin Williams and Jim Carrey played in movies. Or Forrest Gump. And perhaps the Fool is not so foolish after all.

After all, Cupid's fool of a peon calls himself "a flyboy from the infantry of love".

I mean, everyone has been a fool at some point. Perhaps the Fool speaks to that primal curiosity, the (blind?) courage to believe that the world is still beautiful, or the (naïve?) earnestness to try and make it so.

Despite being (seen as) perpetually awkward. Nevertheless, he deserves some applause for trying. To help. To live. To love.

To be.






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The zen of simulacrums

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me: I'm compulsively surfing blogs today
I also went comment happy
must be a rebound from the powerpoint making marathon this week
 
friend: haha write a few wiki articles while you are at it then
 
me: Hmm, I'm not big on writing wiki articles
My writing is mostly fiction nowadays
even my research
jk

friend: fiction is simulation =)

me: Thanks har har

friend: the reverse may not be true

me: mmm that actually sounds deeply philosphical

friend: isn't it?






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Copenhagen (play)

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The title aptly plays on the locale and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics. This play is about intentions and their interpretations thereof. And the difficulty that arises when things are left unsaid.

Niels Bohr had treated Werner Heisenberg as more than a colleague, closer to a star protégé or a son. And Heisenberg was the prodigal upstart of the physics world who corrected Bohr's math error at a conference when he was a 21-year-old grad student. Thus began ~20 years of collaboration that revolutionized quantum physics until they had a falling-out when Heisenberg insisted on meeting Bohr in WWII-raging 1941... while they were on the opposite sides of the war.

In a way, they are both like experimenters trying to characterize an elusive particle, trying to understand why one wants to meet the other while the potential barrier is overwhelming. (Oh punny puns...) In the attempt to gauge what the other is thinking, they ask questions (make a measurement), all the while tiptoeing around political landmines (stringent experimental conditions).

I would like to think that Heisenberg wanted to warn Bohr about the destructive force of atomic fission and thereby dissuading the governments (on both sides) to develop weapons from it. Or he could have been trying to fish out information from Bohr. Or he missed his mentor after being out of touch for many years. Or some combination thereof. So many eigenstates... whose wavefunctions collapsed into a broken friendship.

All the while, Niels' wife Margarethe stays mostly in the background as an observer, albeit not a neutral one. Like a meta-overseer whose presence keeps the particles from bouncing off into Neverland, i.e. talking in math equations and throwing nerdy references around.

My favorite scene is where Heisenberg likens Margarethe to an atomic nucleus, Niels to an electron who is "here, there, everywhere and nowhere", and himself to a photon trying to find the electron. Upon meeting, both particles are deflected, i.e. affected forever. It captures their dynamic rather well...

As an aside, all the actors are fantastic in this. Daniel Craig (Heisenberg) is probably the most famous of the three in the U.S. at least, and it was fun watching him play a brilliant, troubled, earnest character.






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On some action movies (Tron: Legacy - Iron Man 2 - I, Robot - Matrix - Firefly, etc.)

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CG effects galore! Too much flashing eye-candies can result in a hyperglycemic attention span.

I get bored watching most action films that simply showcase CG effects. What engage me are the philosophical references and/or soundtracks. Tron: Legacy and I, Robot fit the bill. I liked the machine vs. human theme, manifested in the form of zen symbolism and Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, respectively. Their soundtracks kick ass too.

Iron Man 2, by comparison, was a disappointment after Iron Man 1. Tony Stark is a rather one-dimensional character. I'm not so sure whether he gives The Institvte a good name or not...

I can sort of see why Olivia Wilde took a break from House to star in Tron: Legacy. The zen references make the movie more interesting than it otherwise would be. I wonder if her character's name, Quorra, alludes to zen koans (quorra - query - riddle - koan) That would be a clever trick. She portrays these mysterious characters rather well, while giving them a certain approachability and hence more sympathetic to the audience, i.e. Thirteen from House.

On the other hand, Summer Glau is good at playing the really "exotic" types of characters, i.e. River Tam from Firefly, a child prodigy who becomes the subject of human experimentation. She's like the female equivalent of Keanu Reeves, at least re: their movie roles :-P






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Do not try and bend the spoon [Actually this could have been taken straight from 道德經 and we'd be none the wiser]

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... instead, only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon.

Why yes, only that the observer sees a spoon and thinks there is a spoon. And the mere act of observation is never isolated from the grand scheme...

The Matrix. With Zen koans. I have known about these for a long time, just not by this label. Aren't they delicious? The vast interconnection of the universe and how the physical reality is but one aspect, one possible manifestation out of an infinite combinatorial soup.

The Tao of Physics. I know most of the concepts already, but I'd just like to see if I could uncover any new insights. The pioneering quantum physicists sure sounded remarkably like the ancient Eastern philosophers in their quintessence.

I love that splash page where the quantum physics equations are next to a selection of a classical Hindi text. For the vast majority of people on this planet, they all look like inscrutable gibberish. But they do have something in common. They both attempt to describe the ultimate truth. Which of course, is not really describable.

Goes to say that I can't describe the state I am currently in right now. It is indeterminate. If I change a variable, the outcome would be vastly different. Everything would change. It is so tempting. I can't quite understand, because it is a tautological contradiction for the brain to try to understand itself... unless I go beyond the brain...






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Hooked on an IV drip of House episodes

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Garwddang that show is addictive. House is too much of a jerk, but a self-aware and unrepentant and entertaining one. I love the foil action with Wilson. Their conversations almost always have philosophical and moral undertones, presenting two contrasting points of view on how to deal with thorny ethical quandaries like to what end should doctors go to save their patients and/or protect their friends and family... Or just how to treat people and behave in society in general.

Except when they are playing stupid pranks on each other involving guitars or chickens. Or should that be... even when?






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Mirror into the depth of psyche

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(1) So apparently if you're trying to impress someone in a teleconference setting, make your 3D avatar vaguely and subconsciously resemble that person. Hmmm! That should work for the vast majority of people who're not prone to self-hatred. While I'm not really endorsing self-hatred, America does need more people with even a modicum of such tendencies. Case in point: Donald Trump. [gag]

(2) In "The Finder", a recent episode of the TV series Bones that introduced the curious trio of Walter, Ike and Leo, Walter berates a waitress for bringing him decaf that he doesn't think it decaf and why does decaf cost the same even though it takes more processing to extract the caffeine out. Ike explained that people don't like to pay more for something less. Granted, Walter has a rather paranoid and suspicious nature, but this raises an interesting point. Humans are designed to be primarily sensory creatures, so a straightforward correspondence between size and cost (i.e. food) makes sense. Few people would ponder what processing took place behind the packaging, e.g. chemicals used, amount of water used, etc. That reminds me, I should start reading Buyology. Because economics is hardly about mere numerical models, however elegant they might be. Much of economics is behavior psychology, which is fascinating but rather messy...

(3) Ever since I could remember, I've always felt like something was lacking in those "happily-after endings". In fact, one of my favorite pastimes was mocking Disney fairy tales back in the '90s with some co-conspirators around my age. Morally ambiguous characters intrigue me, e.g. Dr. Gregory House, Dr. Remy Hadley (Thirteen), Dexter Morgan, Jack Bauer (and his reincarnated assassin in The Confession)... come to think of it, morally ambiguous female characters in TV are rather rare. Sonia from Crime and Punishment seems to be one. Hmm... Akemi Homura from Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica could be one... at least in the beginning of the series :-P

"Music between nature and architecture"

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Being the pan-aesthetics enthusiast that I am, I went to this talk (blog title) by Leon Botstein. I can see why he gets to be the president of a preeminent liberal arts college... I can almost imagine him in a Count Dracula cape, working semantic and symbolic abstraction magic with his dramatic intonations and lexicons. He would have made a terrific orator in the Greek tradition. :-P

This is his ongoing project, and not so surprisingly, he started with mostly German composers and architects, stemming from his German-Hungarian (Jewish) background. Here are the main associations he made -

(1) Architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel :||: Composer Felix Mendelssohn, based on their style that is evocative of 19th Century pastoral Romanticism. Schinkel did paint some rather magical Gothic cathedrals nestled in beautiful forests (below), and Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture is demonstrative of the spirit of nature (I played this with an orchestra and also happen to really like this piece).

(2) Architects Otto Wagner & Joseph Maria Olbrich :||: Composer Gustav Mahler... Initially ornate, Baroque, rectilinear and true to traditional form, later on more subtle and philosophical. I'm not as familiar with Mahler's music (will listen to his symphonies at some point). The Vienna Secession movement seems interesting to look into...

(3) Architect Eero Saarinen :||: Composer Jean Sibelius ... The connection is fairly obvious here because these two were good friends, and their styles influenced each other -- with organic, iteratively evolving themes. I could hear this in Sibelius's violin concerto. I like Saarinen's buildings, especially the staircase. I am drawn to staircase designs...

(4) Architects Le Corbusier & Frank Lloyd Wright :||: Composers Edgard Varèse & Igor Stravinsky ... Neo-Classical, functionally aesthetic/ aesthetically functional :-P Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was definitely a neo-shock at the time. And Varèse wrote this wicked difficult piece "Density 21.5"... One of Le Corbusier's buildings reminded me of Simmons Hall and another of the Green Building, huh. I didn't know he also designed the Carpenter Arts Center @ Harvard, which Botstein said was "hard to find an angle that actually looked attractive".

The Q&A session was illuminating as well. It gives a window that glimpses into Botstein's persona (at least in public...) which I find to be cogent, eloquent, uncompromising, territorial, and domineering. :-P

The first question was how did Botstein made the associations he did, i.e. what basis, and whether other scholars in the field would make the same associations. Botstein replied that these connections are not arbitrary as he approached these from a historical point of view, based on actual contacts between the architects and the composers. Since they were contemporaries, they were therefore subjected to similar social influences and Zeitgeist of the time. (Thank you, GRE vocab list...)

The second question was from another musical scholar, who asked about the influences of the French Revolution on the arts/architecture, i.e. pre-revolution being more formulaic and post-revolution being less so... Botstein said that he didn't quite agree with this, although I don't recall the details of what he said after that...

The third question was from an architect, who wondered about how to reconcile the improvisatory nature of some music with architecture, which is very planned. Botstein answered that these architects were also very much painters and sculptors, so their creative process involved lots of sketching in the beginning. The editing part was what he drew parallels to.

He also commented on concert halls and how their design influence the sound, which reminds me of David Byrne's TED about music and the architecture of concert halls. Botstein quipped that it's much harder to build a concert hall in a rural area, e.g. Bard College than in an urban area... hence Carnegie Hall is "unremarkable" and Lincoln Center is "an abomination"... har har har...

Well, it was a great talk for sure. I look forward to see how he'll continue this project.

Contemplations

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On a good day, at least 30 ideas (+/- 10) emerge in my head. For fleeting moments, I would be improving the environment, creating artworks, composing songs, writing stories, making (self-proclaimed astute) social commentaries, forming connections, or generally toying with abstractions. Unfortunately, these ideas rarely cross my brain-hand barrier.

Is it laziness? Fear of rejection? A combination thereof?

Is "too busy with research" just a lame excuse?

Or is there something else, something more sinister lurking below the noise threshold of my consciousness?

If I continue reading The Zen of Creativity, will I find my answers?

Conversational

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Met a friend I haven't seen in a while. As good grad students, we chatted about research. I talked about my quantum physics simulations and he talked about MOS cap parameter extraction and modeling...

And then I managed to turn a conversation about the new football-themed decor at a campus dining place into a dialogue about philosophy, religion, and science :-P

"So many football pictures here... people are obsessed!"

"Yeah, the whole sports fan concept is like a religion... hardcore fans almost worship their favorite teams and/or players..."

"Are you Christian?"

"No, you?"

"I'm Buddhist."

"Buddhism is more like a philosophy... Christianity is more similar to sports team worshipping :-P"

"So do you believe in anything?"

"This may sound a little strange... I believe in the laws of Nature."

"Like Newton's Laws and such?"

"Yes, although they're only a subset of Nature's laws because they only work part of the time... And we won't ever discover all the laws because of our limited perception..."

(Then we talked about scientific discoveries and technological advancement... and decided that anything could happen in the next thousand years.)

Iris Zero, Arago

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Came across a curious manga series about high schoolers who are born with individualized special power called "Irises". And Toru, who apparently has no such power, is known as "Iris Zero".

Since he has no special powers, he is constantly bullied and thus adopts a "minimal exposure" philosophy to life. Although after a popular girl singles him out by confessing to him and hanging around him everyday, this situation turns complicated rather quickly...

As Buddy from The Incredibles says, "When everyone is super, no one is." That only applies if everyone's super along the same dimensions. It is interesting to note that because Toru has no "Iris", he compensates for it by developing a razor sharp intuition about people's intents and motivations. I must say this is a pretty special power that I'd like to have too...

Watching this story unfold is rather entertaining and adorable. This and Arago have been my good finds of the day...

Arago feels like Black Cat + Master Keaton + Dresden Files. Take an impetuous rookie police detective, a father-figure/mentor chief inspector, a childhood friend who becomes a weapons specialist in the same department, and lots of Anglo-Celtic-Gothic supernatural legends against the contemporary Scotland Yard & London backdrop. This one is a fun read too.

Revisiting Bleach

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[Spoiler alert! Arrancar arc]

I was curious about a pairing I've seen a few times between Orihime and Ulquiorra, which I suspected to be a case of Stockholm Syndrome, so I read all the Bleach chapters since Soul Society arc... and I realize the appeal.

Ulquiorra represents Nihilism, which initially struck me as a psychic deadness with dark circles around his eyes and marking that resembles tear-streaked eyeliner :-P And he has minimal facial expressions and minimal emotions. However, he's extremely perceptive and logical, kind of like L from Death Note... Serious resemblance :-P

There's always a tension between Ulquiorra's interaction with Orihime when she is kept captive at Aizen's palace. He never does more than what's necessary (e.g. gratuitous violence), and is generally civil. He does not understand why Core Crew (her school buddies) are coming to save her, although he seems genuinely curious about how this motivation arises. A bit like the Bicentennial Man robot. I can see how the Stockholm Syndrome (and a bit of Lima) comes about... especially as he turns to ash after battle w/ hollow Ichigo.

Oh and the Shinigami training academy is like Hogwarts + Quantico. =P

More quizzes...

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My Political Views
I am a left social moderate
Left: 5.02, Authoritarian: 0

Political Spectrum Quiz

My Foreign Policy Views
Score: -4.2

Political Spectrum Quiz

My Culture War Stance
Score: -6.03

Political Spectrum Quiz

Some random thoughts in the past week or so

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(1) Stereotypes reduce the spectral richness of the world from continuous Lorentzians to discrete Dirac deltas.

(2) Every snippet I read in Ann Lauterbach's The Night Sky projects a multidimensional array of imagery and ramifications. Meanings morph with space and time. At a particular moment, she could not have quoted Richard Feynman better...

(3) Doctors of Philosophy nowadays usually don't get very philosophical in the traditional sense. But the name stuck somehow.

(4) I don't think having many separate online identities represents a disjoint self. In fact, quite the opposite...

(5) My new rig will be composed of an all-star cast with a first-time director/ system integrator.

(6) I like dragonflies. I associate them with a freedom of a sort of carefree youth. Seeing them hovering above the RNB lawn makes me happy.

Electric keyboard music synthesizer... and random kindness from strangers

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Went a few stops on the train (extra stop on weekends, which I didn't realize...) to get my synth today. It was not an impulse purchase, but the act of actually going out and getting it had been... somewhat impulsive. I was stupid and got off one stop early, which I promptly realized after I got off the rather crowded (sardine/farmed salmon/or any farmed animal) train... Dodger's game, apparently.

I then proceeded to walk to the next station, which I gave up after about 20 minutes of walking approximately north, because I had no map and the roads were unfamiliar and too confusing. I did pass through a rather nice residential neighborhood just around that station... front gates, large (expensive) houses, expansive yards, sequoia trees... right outside the town limits though was a ghetto-like area, which I decided not to venture into and therefore turned back and waited for the next train.

When I got off (at the right stop this time), I found the main road pretty quickly. However, I had a fake memory that the street number started with a 3 and has four digits... so I walked in one direction and realized the numbers were decreasing... and turned and walked in the other direction... for ~15 minutes... before realizing that I must have remembered the wrong street number. So I turned back... and sure enough, my original path was in fact correct... as the music store was pretty close to the train stop.

The actual process of buying the synth was a lot faster than I expected... because I got the only model that was around my price range ~$300. There were many models that were 3 to 7 times that... seriously professional :-P.

I asked around the AC adapter and the foot pedal, and the store staff recommended the "survivor's kit" that included the adapter, foot pedal, cheap headphones, 2 CD-ROM guides, and 2-year warranty "for free"... the kit was originally about $40, but since I was getting that synth plus the stand (~$20), the store staff essentially gave me a "rebate" of sorts. And I mentioned that I'm a semi-local student, haha.

He asked another store staff to cart everything to the train station. (That was unexpected.) I asked them to tape all the boxes together before that :-P They were quite nice. I think I'm going back there again... if only because in my excitement I forgot to tip the guy for carting my synth...

Shortly before the train came, a random dude asked me if I needed help carrying *that big box* hahah... he looked like a late-undergrad or early-grad student. And yes, he was very familiar with the whole geek-kid-trying-to-relearn-piano deal. That help offer was also unexpected, but very welcomed since after moving it myself... I could definitely use some help... So he and I carried the box on the train and off the train. He had to get back on the train because he was going to a later stop than I was.

After getting off my stop, I carried it by myself for about five minutes and... met another person who offered to help me! Turned out she was also a student at the Farm, and was just going grocery shopping so "had plenty of time to spare" :-P She majored in a science during undergrad (that *other* school), and did some lab work for a few years, and then... decided to major in history/philosophy of science/technology for grad school. Fascinating huh. We had a great convo, and I think I might drop by her research group's office because for some reason she's not in the email system. I do know her full name though. Maybe she goes by a different name... oh well...

Hahaha, quite an adventure for this one today. And it's been a very long time since I was this excited... months? :-P wow that sounds sad, ooops.