"The Fiction Bias"

From time to time, the folks over at Overcoming Bias like to speculate on or warn about what they call the "Fiction Bias" -- essentially, that fiction represents an inherently fallacious approach towards the world, and should therefore be avoided and rejected in the interests of objectivity. I've always been struck by confusion towards this stance -- after all, aren't most models used until the next best thing comes along, after which it's discarded as so much meat? Do scientists really approach their theories as essential truths? My own experiences with academic essays and blogs lead me to believe no, so the stance must surely have it's root in some other problem.

Overcoming Bias has always struck me as a very sound and useful advisory board for looking into personal biases dangerous to learning. It therefore strikes me as a little disappointing that people that should have an idea of what a wide variety of different mindframes can be brought to bear on a subject insist on positing the existence of a better/best style of the discussion of ideas. I suppose we all take certain things for granted -- I definitely accept a priori that "all models are wrong, but some are useful."

I could go on, but as I've already made clear most of my stance at my comment here, I'll put the stick down and leave the bush be.

Corrupt Hardware

Imagine yourself approaching a crossroads. On your way towards the crossroads, you begin framing your decision within your head. "Left," you decide. "I'm going to go left." Only when it comes time to turn, you go right. Why?

It's widespread knowledge now that there are different parts of the brain, all with separate yet interlinking faculties. It's only natural to reason that in the situation above, there are two different types of processes going on. The part of you urging "Left" seems to be the narrative part of your mind, the section that can tell a story or describe something. The part of you that finally convinces you to turn to the right, on the other hand, are your actual decision making faculties.

These separate classifications may seem obvious and a little bit unnecessary. After all, the decision was made for a reason, and it doesn't matter that a separate part of your mind details an action opposite of the one actually made. There's simply a higher order, maybe unconscious process going on by which one processes stimuli and decides the appropriate course of action.

This is all well and good, but to anybody that has knowingly made a wrong or possibly even self-destructive decision before, the above situation undoubtedly rings a bell, or smarts, or... Choose your metaphor. The differences here detailed are classic symptoms of self-deception, and it becomes incredibly important to understand why the decision-making process took the course of action that the narrative portion of the mind insisted was incorrect.

One reasoning would be that the decision-making process itself has a capacity to be faulty. Like using a computer with a bad operating system, instead of processing stimuli in such a way as to lead to "positive" outcomes, the process gravitates towards "negative" outcomes. The process needs not even classify outcomes as positive or negative -- It may be completely neutral, working only towards "optimization," and the data itself may be corrupted. A hedonist may realize his or her excesses are dangerous, but if the hardware is tuned towards certain conditions, he or she has little or no choice.

This line of thinking is intimately related to the descriptions relayed to addicts about their condition -- there is an addiction gene, your hardware is faulty, and the only way to avoid a system crash is to avoid inputing certain commands. The addict scenario, however, still provides for some amount of free will. A person is at the mercy of the stimuli if and only if they choose to put themselves in those situations. What I'm describing is an innate tendency towards self-destruction -- actions which are conventionally bad or negative viewed by the body as necessary or desirable.

A reasoning more in line with ideas of free will would be that the decision that occurred opposite the narrative occuring at the same time came simply because a person had not truly convinced themselves of the desirability of an outcome. This explanation is more mollifying to an individual's sensibilities of selfdom, but as a person who has frequently found himself indulging in situations or even substances that were tangentially opposed to his benefit, I'm tempted to believe that there's something beyond a mere reasoning capacity working here. This problem has been running through my mind all day, and I think the value of looking into the possibility of physically-determined actions is obvious. Is there a way to negate the pain? Or, as in the case of a shot, should we amplify the terror of the situation by imagining amplified pain, or simply roll with the situation? The pain is equal in either case, but in the latter, a person is able to accept the conditions and move on much more easily...

Personality qua Birth Order

"Another important factor in being the first-born is that the eldest sibling is more likely to undertake the unpaid role of private tutor to his or her younger siblings. Many psychologists believe that this opportunity to tutor younger children improves the oldest child's verbal and cognitive skills. They learn by teaching, and this pays them dividends in later life – making them into leaders rather than followers.

Frank Sulloway suggests that sibling tutoring is the key to explaining why older children eventually maintain their overall supremacy in terms of IQ." -- Are the family cliches true?

I'm going to plead ignorance on a large scale when it comes to this subject, and not take a stance either way. What I will say is that it prompted me to remember incidents in my childhood that I haven't thought about in years -- namely the organization of "class" where I would try to teach my younger brother arithmetic and grammar that I was learning in elementary school. I'm wary of falling prey to the kind of astrology-fallacy a section in the above article mentions, where one begins to believe hypotheses and horoscopes based on experiences and situations in one's own life, but childhood development is no joke, and the article definitely raises some things to consider. According to the article, the average difference between first- and second-born children amongst Norwegian conscripts is something like 2.3 IQ points, and while there are a plethora of variables that could contribute to such a difference, those points are something I'd seriously consider trading in a finger for.

T.S. Eliot

"What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." -- After Strange Gods

"I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren; and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it." -- Christianity and Culture

It's always disappointing to find how many poets, writers, and literary critics combine revolutionary methods and theoretical ideas with staunch conservatism and tendencies towards tradition. While avoiding the blatant dominion of the philosopher king (he felt that statist policies tended to be expressed in political passion rather than legitimate evaluation of political ideas), Eliot frequently demonstrated strong tendencies towards an autocracy of xenophobia and convention with striking similarity towards the puritanical anti-progress stances of Plato's Republic. Eliot's well-known quote "Humankind cannot bear very much reality" notwithstanding, New Criticism roots its very nature in objectivity, which connects very well with Eliot's rejection of the possibilities of fascist, communist, and egalitarian liberal societies in favor of that which is (or rather, was, circa- Post World War I, Pre World War II Britain) -- a society of Christian, hierarchy-based cultural conformity meant to preserve the intellectual history, goals, and mentality of the traditional Western world.

Remember that one of the few things to come out of Eliot's flirtations with Buddhism was the idea of the repression of personality. Religion was Eliot's cure for a Hollow Man's disease. The cult of personality in fascism, the agnosticism of communism, and the celebration of the individual in liberalism could only serve to detract from the healthy society.

I'll always consider it a great irony that the New Criticism I find one of the ultimate tools for the progress of ideas (expressed through objective analysis and increased ease in discussion of texts) was birthed by a literary proponent of society's stagnant homogeneity. May the tools of the Republic's guardians be ever used against them.

Game Literature

Not an in-length discussion of the idea, but something I need to get off my chest before I develop it more.

At this point, I'm not sure of the ideal way to interact with literature, because it has numerous different purposes, different ways of conceiving of it, and even though the people utilizing it may hold only one of these different conceptions, it does not necessarily negate the validity of any of the others. The models are useful rather than exclusively explanatory.

I've been thinking of ways to relate literature to game theory, and I think this holds true on the side of the authors. After all, rhetorical strategies are designed to attract a certain number of readers and adherents, whether an elite few or a general populace. The entire point of the study of rhetoric is that certain strategies have appeal, with returns that, while apparently indefinite, can be approximated given past returns for similar rhetoric.

The only problem so far is that, while authors are definitely rational, rhetoric is not their only concern. Furthermore, the actual formulae of game theory does not apply because of the definition of a game -- after all, just because rhetoric has led to adherence or the spread of one idea does not of a necessity rule out adherence to other ideas. There is no clear cut winner in the game of literature, only more influential or better-positioned literature.

This idea of literature has extensions for what occurs on the side of the reader. As more and more people are convinced of the legitimacy of ideas and rhetorical strategies, cooperative play ensues. Blocks of idea-adherents form in order to compete with their ideas against other teams of literary disciples. Rather than a mathematical treatment of literature, this conception holds more probable use in a memetical discussion, as literature becomes about the survivability of ideas through competition.

Correcting Inflation

Lately, inflation has been rampant on my server in World of Warcraft, which makes me wonder what we can learn from the models presented in the game's economic system.

For anybody unfamiliar with MMORPGs, or even World of Warcraft in general, there are some peculiarities about things that occur in order to keep the economy stabilized. There are, of course, your average video game occurrences - loot, such as cloth, money, quest items, weapons, etc, drop off of mobs that you kill. Everything in the game is vendorable, but there is a big distinction between resources that matter -- things like weapons that have excellent stats or capital (called mats) for your professions -- and vendor trash, which are lame armor and random drops such as "squished bug eyes" meant to get money into circulation.

There is a subsection of vendor trash which are weapons that bind on pickup, thus becoming "soul bound," which you cannot sell on an auction house, which has quite a bit to do with the economy, but that's a little bit beyond my focus at the moment. World of Warcraft is full of opportunity cost experiences, and there are many different ways to upgrade your character. There is gear that can be quested for or raided for, or even purchased through player vs. player arena points, but all of these are soul bound. There is also comparable gear that is craftable. Furthermore, there is decent gear that can be purchased for the lazy player, or else disenchanted for capital for different types of character upgrade.

I'd like to know how inflation has come into being on the server -- I suspect it occured at a time where professions necessary for the gaining of capital such as mining and disenchanting were not much of a focus for the server, and so the goods that were on the auction house were more scarce, and therefore became more expensive. Once prices were established for the server, people were unwilling to start undercutting the total, because it seems like there is an abundance of people willing to pay for capital to get their professions up as quickly as possible, especially since the introduction of the expansion, where gold is much more available after a certain level.

So, the situation stands that people with more money, seeking the quick and easy, are able to lay more out to get their professions upgraded as quickly as possible, reinforcing the inflated prices at the auction house, which is the primary barter system for the server. Lower level players, which I can associate with the lower class, are kept out of the market by the scarcity of opportunity to gain resources, since you either have to do a lot of hard, gold farming through killing monsters and looting them to gain money, or have a profession in order to have any sort of lead in the game. In the real world, you have to have money to make money, and this holds true here as well. Leveling your professions are expensive, and people won't buy things from you until a point where you've invested a lot of money to get your "profession points," or certifications up.

A friend of mine once made the quip that a way to make a lot of money off of the auction house would be to start out with a decent amount of money, buy out everything on the auction house of a certain good, and then put it all back at a higher price -- not necessarily a lot higher, but higher nonetheless. It seems like the reverse of that would have a chance of getting the realm back into stability -- a person starting out with a lot of money could buy inflated goods, then resell them for a loss on the auction house.

The only problem is that it would take a sizeable group of people to perform this action. One person's name showing up repeatedly for all the goods on the auction house at lower cuts only lets the people who originally sold them on the auction house know there is some goofball out in the world that is buying and selling at a loss, which gives him an opportunity to get rich off of you. Ineffective system. The best way would be to have a team of an unknown percentage involved in the program, each taking a small loss, so that eventually, the market becomes accustomed to buying at the more realistic, lower price, rather than the inflated, money grubbing price.

I'm still in the process of learning and reading about all of these things, so there are undoubtedly some economic theories already in hand that deal with these types of situation, both in the game model world I'm describing, and in the real-world parallels. It really does make me wonder what kind of watch dogs are sitting there, in the market, scrounging around for things going awry... In the meantime, I think I'm going to try to get a group together to perform an experiment on this virtual market.

Morning Ontology

It's always important in conceptual discussion to determine how each of the participants are viewing the language they're using. Are their words describing models of hard realities, in a way a person might say that a thing is purple or hard, or are they using words to describe abstractions drawn from their own mind? While generally a non-issue because of the close approximations between the two, I can conceive of situations where a debate can turn into a matter of talking past eachother, just because two different conceptions of basic metaphysics are taking place.

I'm struggling with which I tend to gravitate towards, but the difference between the two explains a lot about my attitude towards Plato's Theory of Forms and Ideas. When concepts become descriptions of things, it's not hard to believe that the perfect form of that thing exists and is a part of reality, while the abstraction-viewpoint would be content to use that perfection as a tool originating via reason and used for perceiving qualities of the abstraction on a day to day basis. When perfection exists on an observable level, it's easy to begin to see deviation from that norm as something to be avoided (given that the norm is something "good") which leads to all sorts of murky nonsense. At the same time, the whole discussion still makes me feel Plato was working off of innate bias rather than good faith, considering it's not too much of a leap to consider that there could be a perfect representation of something bad and undesirable.

Tantalusean Literature

Ambiguity is at the heart of language. This handy idea has been with us for centuries -- at least, from my knowledge, from the time of Aristotle. What I think is not what you think, and vice versa. What we deal with on a day to day basis are symbols and conventions used to arrive at approximations to eachother's thought process. Hard enough with something concrete like apple, where one might think 'fruit,' another 'sweet,' and still a third, 'sphere,' or perhaps 'red,' but when it comes to concepts like 'freedom,' 'love,' 'loyalty,' 'duty,' 'good,' semantics become agonizing. Given such problems of meaning in simple words, what happens to literature? How can we ever expect to arrive at objective themes with short stories and novels? Poems, of all things! What about poems!

The bad (and good) thing is, we can't expect to arrive at objective themes. At least, not completely objective. Every person will read a work in a different way, bearing on it different experiences, different understandings of the meanings of words, even different understandings of the definitions of words. Muddling the murk into an even muddier mess is the good faith we have to have that an author even understood the standard usage of the word he or she used.

The solution lies in approaching themes of a work of literature not as a variable to be solved, but as a truth to be approached, yet never reached. Or, better yet, approximated. Literature is a prism -- the author shines one beam of thought through it, and out comes droplets of light, there to be caught and collected and compared. In this sense, literature becomes more of a game, as an interpreter seeks to show their interpretation is closest to the original. The game then expands into a forum -- comparisons and contrasts of experience and interpretation can become debates and discussions, with questions on the reliability of the literary model that is presented, or the implications for the outside world that the themes of the model has presented.

At no point does this approach negate the necessities of New Criticism. In fact, New Criticism embraces the approach. When flawed perceivers seek to obtain perfect, objective understanding of a thing, conflict is inevitably introduced, and it is only through a conflict that the strength of an idea can be honed and tested. Ambiguity and objectivity are intertwined -- Ouroborean and inseperable.

At the same time, I have the feeling authors are playing a completely separate game.

Good Sirs,

I am writing to inquire as to how, after all these years, "War and Peace," by Mr. Tolstoy hovers in the New York Times bestseller list at the enviable position of number twenty. Previous to this point and time, I was under the impression that copies of the aforementioned novel were lovingly passed down from generation to generation, copies of the novel staying within the family as heirlooms, alongside of carefully written synopses, so that one day, eventually, the entirety of the novel will finally be read. Perhaps we are now falling within a time period where these ancient tomes, having been thrown against numerous walls as a result of numerous frustrations, are having to be replaced by the dutiful descendants of those who first undertook this onerous task?

I eagerly await your reply, as I sit here in a state of near-catatonic shock and befuddlement.

Yours,
Jake Voorhees.