Disqus - Latest Comments for ecmendenhall

Re: Clean Clojure: Meaningful names - Connor Mendenhall

ECM — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 14:38:54 -0000

I agree! I'm not totally satisfied with this example, either. The threading macro is definitely cleaner, especially if each step is extracted into its own function.

But I think good names are especially important inside `->`. `(map add-wombat)` is pretty simple, but forms that do much more work inside are the first whiffs of a bad smell. `->` is second nature now, but I had a difficult time visualizing the way data flowed through the forms at first. Function names defined in terms of the data coming in make it much clearer that it means "start with this data structure and do these things to it in succession."

Re: Clean Clojure: Meaningful names - Connor Mendenhall

ECM — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 12:00:02 -0000

Thanks! I was actually just reading this—I'll add a link. Projectile and Prelude are awesome, by the way.

Re: Clojure, Leiningen 2 and Heroku: AOT Compilation Gotchas

ECM — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 05:17:20 -0000

You've saved at least one person a lot of time and effort! I was pulling my hair out this afternoon over null pointers from a database connection just like this. Thanks for writing this up.

Re: Learning to crawl (again)

ECM — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:33:22 -0000

Hi, Priyanka! According to the blog, I spent 11 days on the project, including the weekend. Total time, including writing up these posts and reading documentation and banging my head on the desk learning GAE was probably around a full work week. Of course, this was also the culmination of a month-long Python course.

Re: Thought Experiment

ECM — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 20:56:54 -0000

You're right. This isn't very well specified. Let's assume doing nothing also increases P by some amount N.

Re: Aporia. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. Objectivity and Art.

ECM — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:47:49 -0000

There is a lot of insight in this analogy and it has already helped clarify my own (very inchoate) thoughts. I agreed more strongly with each aim of art, up until the last:

"Art that is about art is as science about science: useful for practitioners but insufficiently universal in scope. Art that is about artists is as science about scientists: likely to be worthless where it cannot be generalized, and where it can it is hardly about individuals anyway."

Science about science might not be universal, and is usually pretty boring, but hasn't it generated much better science over time? (Whether philosophy of science counts as science about science is another question. Is it not commentary on what science is? Was Duchamp ultimately just a bad "philosopher of art?")

I was reminded of Las Meninas right away (the "art about art" example I crammed for the AP Art History test years ago). This is much better art than a mustached Mona Lisa on just about all the criteria you describe. But is it not art about art? Is it really art about the experience of percieving art or art about perception and reality? How can we make this demarcation when it comes to bad art?

I opened Wikipedia to take another look at the painting and saw that some have called the theme of Las Meninas the "theology of painting" and the "philosophy of art." Maybe these terms hint at a better approach to art about art.

Re: 45-foot paper airplane flies

ECM — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 08:33:13 -0000

From the article: "It was still able to glide at speeds of close to 100 mph for 7 to 10 seconds before stress on the tail caused it to hurdle [sic] to the ground."

I think this means the plane glided horizontally for 7-10 seconds before dropping for an unspecified number of seconds, not that there is extra gravity in Arizona or that the Pima Air & fnord Space Museum is trying to trick you.

Re: http://blog.millsbaker.net/post/18798414836

ECM — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:10:14 -0000

Somewhere in the far reaches of the multiverse, a contented man is applying a pee-on Calvin decal to a beat up camper shell. Under the stream, it reads "historicism."

Re: http://blog.millsbaker.net/post/18507616783

ECM — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 07:13:01 -0000

Awe and wonder are two feelings I hold dear. But constant wonder, the way a child sees the world, seems like a different and less desirable thing than the theory-laden awe I have now. The world may be too strange and terrible to comprehend, but even our feeble minds go pretty far.

Does the "miraculousness of creation" exist in the world itself, or in our knowledge of it? Simplifying the world in order to explain it is one way we create knowledge. (Can you tell I've been reading Deutsch? Explanations are my new jam.) Popper and Deutsch both prefer simpler theories that explain more and fail better over complicated, easily altered ones. And I think they'd agree that all explanations must simplify something—there can be no meaningful theory of everything all at once. But leave it to a child to try! I can think of no more eager explainer than a curious child, who goes from wondering at to wondering why in an instant. (Unless an animal instinct like fear gets in the way). Our minds filter, limit, reduce, repress, and partialize the world, and yet they can still explain.

Becker chose his language carefully here: We have the capacity to relate to the umwelt of a tick (David Eagleman wrote a little essay on this), to contemplate the way a bat sees the world, but we can't experience or know the perceptions of other minds, animal or human. We can only explain them, and that's where the wonder really is.

You might think that repression and partialization are a different sort of simplification than conscious focus and careful theorizing, but I'm not sure. And none of this is to say that these shortcuts don't cause us problems at the same time that they enable explanation. Some defective part of my mind constantly generates bad explanations about myself. Left unchallenged, they will become seriously distorted beliefs. I think this is one reason cognitive behavioral therapy has been so effective for me and many others: it has helped me root out bad explanations and come to terms with the way my mind tries to pass them off as facts.

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. Design & Compromise.

ECM — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 18:08:35 -0000

I think the open society does help make policies less wrong, by enabling some forms of error correction. But our understanding of the complex systems in which questions of policy are embedded—things like the economy and processes of cultural evolution—seems to me still so primitive that the theories we make about policy are unscientific. Physicists have it easy: their experiments are carefully controlled and isomorphic to mathematical models. Evidence in economics is probabilistic at best, and models are only brought to life with a wave of the wand and the magic spell "ceteris paribus." (I wear my wizard hat when I do economics).

Just like ancient beliefs about atoms, we have strong and seemingly logical intuitions that might someday be falsifiable, but I don't think we're there yet. It doesn't mean thinking about economics or policy isn't useful, but I guess this is all to say that compromises are just one subset of defective policy.

As an aside, I was once way into "futarchy" (link), the idea that we should choose the things we want by voting for them and decide how to get them with markets, which aggregate information and maybe preferences better than voting. I still think it's an interesting idea, in the same way one might read a crazy science fiction story and think "my, that's an interesting idea."

I'm going to go read this David Deutsch book now.

Re: http://blog.millsbaker.net/post/9810195937

ECM — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:53:12 -0000

"Nostalgia" is such a beautiful word, the rare clinical term that became something more human. My dictionary says it was first used as a translation of "heimweh," transforming "homesickness" in German into "the pain of returning home" in Greek. Translation often reveals a new facet of this feeling: "saudades" in Portuguese adds melancholy and longing, and "hüzün" in Turkish adds a kind of stoic fatalism that is close to my heart.

But I like "pain of returning home" most of all: the idea that the experiences our minds grasp for a few moments are flowing back to their home in the unknown.

Re: Meta is Murder. Writing and lesser things by Mills Baker. [We have forgotten] leisure as “non-activity” —an....

ECM — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:49:45 -0000

I'm sure you grok my own patterns of flight and return; I hope you'll forgive a barrage of comments as I catch up on some of your posts. (Isn't it strange and telling that I feel compelled to ask forgiveness for reading words that are no longer new and guilt for leaving the internet for a while?)

I am ever more convinced that the answer to "fraught thoughtlessness" and reclaiming non-activity is mindfulness in its many forms. Do you remember the passage in "Gödel, Escher, Bach" on Indra's Net? It's an excellent metaphor for some ideas about our minds:

"The endless connections which all things have to each other is only hinted at here, yet the hint is enough. The Buddhist allegory of 'Indra's Net' tells of an endless net of threads throughout the universe, the horizontal threads running through space, the vertical ones through time. At every crossing of threads is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. The great light of 'Absolute Being' illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead; moreover, every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net, but also every reflection of every reflection throughout the universe."

Discovering this passage (and the chapter on anthills and brains that follows) is one of the only moments in my life that I might grudgingly describe as transcendent or spiritual, at least in the sense of grasping the existence of mind-like patterns bigger than my own brain. Plucked out of context, it reads a bit like dippy mysticism, but of course it's just one thread in the braid. In fact, it was the a paragraph about anthills that really triggered the realization—this was just the groundwork.

Hofstadter's detours into Zen led me to a little book called "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," which has become one of my dearest handbooks for living. It's a collection of lectures by Shunryu Suzuki, who started the San Francisco Zen Center.

Zen Buddhism as I understand it (I don't!) is compatible with an atheist, materialist, mostly Deutschian view of the universe. I hesitate to call myself a Buddhist, since I'm such a dilettante about it, but I do meditate, which is one way to recapture some stillness.

When I sit, the self does start to emerge from distraction: at first, I can actually listen to my thoughts and see myself clearly. But what's more wonderful is "immersion in the real," which comes by clearing away those thoughts. One begins to recede, not back into distraction, but into what Suzuki calls "big mind." During these moments of calm and empty mind, I have come closest to seeing the world as I imagine Bible Scholar does. I may still reject this view for lack of evidence, but it is a wonderful exercise in empathy and humility.

Suzuki writes: "That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind. To experience this is to have religious feeling." The first part strikes me as a very Deutschian idea. The second is something I am still contemplating.

Re: http://missmala.tumblr.com/post/16200460771

ECM — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:47:55 -0000

Yes! I've been waiting for sunglasses forever! This is a fantastic protip…if only they shipped to Turkey.

Re: http://blog.millsbaker.net/post/15801320552

ECM — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:03:28 -0000

This is great! I read it at least ten times before writing a comment that turned into a post of my own, and I enjoy it very much when that happens. Here's a link, lest it get lost in the avalanche of notes from the Teeming Mills-ions.

Re: http://mills.tumblr.com/post/634690716

ECM — Mon, 31 May 2010 04:36:45 -0000

True. But the passphrase (and perhaps whatever is locked behind it) changes with every hack. There is no telos, and looking for one is meaningless, unfalsifiable and extraneous. All the more wondrous, then, that we are mirrors, as dirty and fragile as we are!

Re: http://mills.tumblr.com/post/640966837

ECM — Mon, 31 May 2010 03:35:44 -0000

A social psychologist friend of mine researches "mortality salience" and "terror management", theories inspired by Becker that try to explain the "curtain of fantasy" we create to avoid the "terrible reality" of death. It's fascinating stuff.

The more I learn about the limits of knowledge, the bugs in human cognition, and the wondrous complexity of the world around us, the more I feel that mind is a mediator, simplifying a frightening chaos of sensory inputs for a brain too feeble to grasp them all at once. Psychology, then, repairs and enables necessary and often healthy illusions. The picture of reality is too great and terrible to glimpse.

Emphasis on "feel." I'm no scientist, and I am not sure research supports my hasty conclusion.

Re: http://mills.tumblr.com/post/569422808

ECM — Fri, 07 May 2010 06:57:46 -0000

Ivan's God is long dead. But the god of biomechanics is alive and undergirds a complex moral order (no matter what the replicants try to tell you). We must take seriously the idea that our moral sense evolved, and that the intuitions behind much moral reasoning have deep Darwinian roots.

Sagan has it right: what we call moral "progress" is an extension of our basic moral sentiments to larger and more impersonal groups—the evolution of rules and mechanisms that overcome cooperative dilemmas and reward treating ever more distant others as we would ourselves or our closest kin.

I am drawn to the evolutionary account in part because it incorporates some of our intuitions about morality. The "natural moral order" that so many of us feel is out there is the heritage of generations of biological and cultural evolution. The feeling of "progress" is a product of the mechanics of cultural evolution, which tend to choose better rules over time.

The arc of our biological history has bent toward complexity. The arc of our moral history seems to have done the same. We have plausibly had a sense of fairness and reciprocity since before we were human. We have had basic moral imperatives for thousands of years in the form of codes and commandments and pillars. Only now are we are beginning to consider the complex stuff. To answer Jabberblog, material prosperity does seem to make us more "highly moral creatures," inasmuch as it encourages greater complexity.

But the term "progress" is a tricky one. Ree refers to moral change as "a process of learning." I like that. Accounts of cultural and moral evolution differ from biological evolution in that mutations are not random. Because we learn, culture is subject to "guided variation," in which new rules are biased towards enhancing our fitness. This, I think, gives us at least a feeling of "progress." Our moral rules do tend toward improvement in most cases.

But as Mills observes, our current knowledge of morality and the mechanisms of the evolutionary process "gives us in the present no special insight into its particular development in the future." Evolutionary systems are complex, path-dependent, and sensitive to environmental conditions. The selection dynamics of an altered environment can outweigh the "progressive" tendency of guided variation. We cannot predict the future path of our moral evolution, and attempts to reach into the future and apply some more advanced set of principles to the present are likely to get those principles wrong in the first place.

This answers your potential paradoxical problem, too. An arc towards justice (or complexity, or adaptive fitness) is an emergent order. It is a population-level phenomenon, independent of your individual impatience, which requires only that our moral rules are passed down.

A tendency towards improvement is one characteristic of moral evolution. But that doesn't imply a fixed teleology. As irredenta put it, the moral order is "most precarious"—like other complex systems, it can take off in unexpected and unforeseen directions in response to environmental change. This is not to say that the "moral index" hasn't been rising since the Pleistocene. So have the prosperity index and the complexity index, and I suspect this is no coincidence. There is reason to believe that things will keep getting better, but try as we might, we cannot imagine exactly how.

Re: http://jeffmiller.tumblr.com/post/500662951

ECM — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:50:53 -0000

What is seen, and what is not seen. I've always accepted, without much reflection, that libertarian ideas suffer from the narrative bias. It's easy to tell an empathetic story about deprived renters, and difficult to tell a story about the abstract effects of rent control. But your last point is a good one: there are plenty of good stories to be told.

Re: http://mills.tumblr.com/post/523484935

ECM — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 01:38:52 -0000

I read most of Pale Fire in the company of the best adviser in the world. Nice to know Nabokov would have approved. Great prospects for an unorthodox book club.

Re: http://squashed.tumblr.com/post/511659829

ECM — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 03:30:14 -0000

Here are many, many more charts that will make people think the Internet is dumb. This one just might take the Kaiser Fung Award for Achievement in Inept Visualization.

Re: Students have spoken – will Shelton listen?

ECM — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:07:44 -0000

Thanks for watching! We're still getting the hang of this live streaming thing and we didn't configure the stream to save after the broadcast. It's too bad, because we can't find an archived recording of the meeting anywhere on the web. We'll definitely let you know if we manage to find one.
I've never followed these public hearings very closely, assuming they were more or less procedural formalities without much bearing on the Regents' actual decisions. I suspect your prediction is right—it's the same blame-the-legislature-and-grudgingly-accept kabuki every year. But this time, there was a great student turnout—and many of them weren't even sent there by academic departments or organizations pleading for funds and fees. Whether the Regents noticed it over their webcams (and whether they'll ever manage to make a cognitive distinction between "student opinion" and "opinion of the student body president") is a different story.

Re: Terror and Torture

ECM — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:51:32 -0000

Of course human anguish weighs--and ought to weigh--in moral reasoning. Of course human choice is relevant. But none of these considerations outweigh the truth that torture is wrong and foul. Others have expressed this here better than I.

It is also true that as painful and personal the suffering to victims, and as gleefully brutal the acts of the guilty, terrorist acts are a threat to humanity equal in magnitude to venomous snakes and deep-sea fishing. Choosing to treat terrorism as an existential threat is a greater moral tragedy than choosing to torture.

Re: ‘We, amnesiacs all…’

ECM — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:57:44 -0000

Mine, too! The museum is fascinating, and I only had an hour and a half to take it all in. In fact, I didn't start wrapping my head around it until a couple days later--at the time it just seemed like a curiosity.

If you're ever in L.A., seek it out.

Re: mills baker - Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him...

ECM — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:38:43 -0000

Apologies to ragbag, but Tom Wolfe in

is crucial to any hangover quote anthology:

The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

Re: Oh So Mala...- Alla's Tumblr - redboothclassic:boredorborder:audreyhepburncomplex:...

ECM — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 17:23:47 -0000

Happy birthday! Let me know if I've missed some avenue of communication!