Ken's Blog

Evolution is not an absolute – survival is always relative to an ecosystem. Which means that almost any idea you come up with can fail when dropped into an incompatible ecosystem – even if the same idea has been a wild success in a different ecosystem.

The idea I described yesterday for finding the best young minds and nurturing them along to success – an idea that is being used successfully in India right now – might simply not work in the U.S. There are so many differences between the two cultures.

For example, I noticed the last time I was in India (I’m actually flying over there again tomorrow, which is probably why I’m thinking about this) that people over there have a much more intense and idealistic view of democracy than we do here in the U.S. It’s not that there isn’t corruption – there is lots of corruption. It’s more that even local elections in India are approached with an air of fierce pride. From what I saw when I was there, they take the right to vote very seriously. I think many people in India would be astounded by the fact that so many people in the U.S. have the right to vote yet don’t bother going to the polls.

That’s just one example, among many, of a difference in the way the two cultures think about things. I wouldn’t be surprised at all, given those many differences, to find that the idea I described yesterday simply wouldn’t work over here.

Darwin pointed out that every genotype requires a viable phenotype. In plain english, that just means that every generation along an evolutionary path needs to survive – not just most generations. A mutation that kills off its population at some point is a dead end, no matter how wonderful would be its final outcome three generations later.

And in the case of creating and maintaining an incentive program to find and support the top one percent of kids, there may simply be no viable phenotype – no path for growth without a fatal weakness – along the many steps that would be required for such a program to take root and flourish.

I’m not saying that this is true. But I am saying that if you did want to create such a program here, it would be a good idea to think about ways of providing it with an immune system of some sort, some way – at each stage of its development – to defend itself from its enemies.

A colleague of mine, a university professor here in the U.S. who is originally from India, told me recently about a program he is involved with back in his native state in India. Throughout the state, which has a population of about 50 million, in every town and village the top one percent of kids are identified by academic achievement. These kids become eligible for a program in which the state government pays for their college education.

One thing you might note right away about this plan is that there will be a huge disparity between the top one percent in a major town and the top one percent in a poor rural village. In the latter, even the best and the brightest may be practically illiterate. If you were simply to put all the kids in the same classroom, the ones from the richer areas would vastly outperform their counterparts from the impoverished countryside.

And so the plan contains the following provisions: If you fail your first year of college under the plan, you get to take it over, and the government will continue to pay. If it takes you seven years to finish college under the plan, the government will still pay. Also, after you graduate, the government will reimburse itself by automatically deducting a certain percentage from whatever job you take, for a certain number of years. But here’s the kicker: If you don’t get a job after you graduate – for whatever reason – there is no penalty. None whatsoever. The government simply swallows the loss.

My colleague reports that the plan is quite successful. Not only are the top one percent of students thriving in the program, but a number of top students selected from impoverished and relatively illiterate regions are making it through college as well, gradually gaining the skills they need as they go – albeit more slowly than the students from more well-off backgrounds. And the great majority of the students who graduate go on to well paying jobs.

It’s clear what the state is doing here. This program is not being done as some sort of favor for these kids. This is an act of pure self-interest on the part of the state. Find the students with the best natural ability, structure things so that the debilitating effects of even the most enormous economic disparity can be overcome over time, and do it all in such a way that there is no risk to the student – ie: no reason not to enroll in the program.

What you end up with is a sieve to discover your very best natural talents, and to make sure that as many as possible of those talents will be directed toward improving the state’s economy. If you end up with a few bad eggs along the way, that’s an acceptable level of loss, given the return on investment to the state’s economy coming from those students who thrive under the program and become financially successful.

What struck me when I heard about this plan was that (1) it’s brilliant, and that (2) it would never be tolerated in the U.S. Why is that? Because it would make people uncomfortable – the idea that somebody might be getting something for nothing. The idea that you might pay for a student’s education on the basis of pure potential, and then not punish that student in any way if they do not succeed, would be anathema in our society.

And the irony is that the real beneficiary of such a program is not the student, but rather the state – ie: everybody else. A program such as this is an engine for success precisely because it aligns with the state’s own enlightened self-interest. Find potential engines of the economy, nurture them and help them to reach their full potential. Your state will become richer and more competitive within the global marketplace.

Many people seem to have a sort of love/hate relationship with poetry. People will recite even the most obscure song lyrics with an easy familiarity and almost a pride of ownership – as though those words were their own personal anthem, and the song’s authorship by somebody else merely a quirk of fate.

But if you quote from Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or Byron’s “Don Juan”, many people will just grow pale. Rather than an act of cultural inclusion, quoting poetry is often seen as a form of cultural exclusion.

I’m not sure I understand why this is. Is poetry really so fundamentally changed when you add a melody to it? Does verse set to music become magically transform from “high culture” to “low culture” – and only then become valid as a medium of emotional exchange and comfort between ordinary folk?

By common consensus all song writers belong to the people, but few poets can claim that distinction. Perhaps Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings and one or two others. There is a mysterious wall of perception between “song lyric” and “poetry”. And something there is that doesn’t love a wall… Can anybody shed any light here?

Isn’t it astonishing that our minds are capable of exploring an endless variety of hypothetical realities? Just as those alternate realities are not limited by the bounds of physics, neither are they limited by the bounds of any other constraint of plausibility, whether psychological, cultural or ethical.

Every time you pick up a novel, you are entering in a world that was created entirely within the mind of a fellow human being. That world can be vast – filled with nooks and crannies, minute details and cataclysmic events, never seen upon this or any other world.

When I was a teenager I read Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast” series. On the level of discovered worlds, I found it far more compelling than Tolkien. Not only was Peake’s fantastical world insanely detailed, but those details differed from our own in telling ways. There were physical differences yes, but – more important – were the psychological differences.

The driving forces within the people of “Gormenghast” bear only a tangential relationship to those within the people we know. They are recognizable by analogy, but only in the way that, say, an American might recognize a dinner of boiled cricket to be food.

Tolkien, in contrast, is far more conventional – and therefore less exciting in my book. His hobbits and elves think very much the way we do. They may look different, but they are essentially us, in thinly veiled guise of chestnut brown and kelly green. Only Tom Bombadil is fundamentally different (unless you count Sauron as a character). Tellingly, Bombadil never made it into the film.

Not that this is a fair comparison. Tolkien was far more concerned with mythology than with psychology. Exploring uncharted regions in mythology can a lot less disturbing than uncharted regions in psychology. Which is probably why Middle Earth is a much more popular place than the Castle Gormenghast.

As it happens, I just saw the film “Milk” this afternoon. So when Sean Penn won the Academy Award and gave that lovely and inspirational acceptance speech, I was not at all surprised.

The friend I saw the film with knows Mickey Rourke, and says that Mickey had said that he would be happy were his friend Sean to win, and he knew that the feeling was recipricated. So it came as no surprise at all to me when Sean Penn paid special tribute to his friend and fellow actor.

I thought the this year’s show did a much better job than usual in helping the TV audience to understand what all those various awards are actually for – and what is actually done by the many kinds of people who help make a film possible.

As somebody who has long worked in computer graphics, I was heartened to see that Ed Catmull has finally been foiled in his decades-long campaign to render himself utterly invisible while being by far the most important force behind the emergence of computer generated films. No honor was ever greater deserved.

And I was very happy to see that the writers had the best lines. Tina Fey and Steve Martin, in their few minutes on-stage, practically stole the show (I particularly liked Martin’s beautifully subtle dig at Anne Heche). Although Philippe Petit’s wonderful antics topped even them, reminding us all – in case we ever needed reminding – that movies are very much a visual medium.

I read a review today in The New York Times on a new book by David Denby – the film critic of the New Yorker – decrying snarky humor. In honor of that book, I humbly submit the following blog post. Please don’t hate me.

***

On a whim, today I did a Google search of “Obama is the Antichrist”. Because this is America, I knew something juicy would show up. Sure enough, this double-quoted phrase returns 37,600 hits. That’s very respectible in anybody’s book. Many people would kill to get 37,600 hits for their name. And I think there is no doubt that the act of killing someone would increase anyone’s hit rate – an incentive for cold-blooded homicide if I’ve ever heard one.

When you follow the links, you find the expected assortment of nut-cases, most linking the ascendence of this particular Democratic candidate to the end of the Universe. The very idea of an “antichrist” presupposes that the Universe actually cares about our little planet and the strange two-legged creatures buzzing around on its surface. We are so full of ourselves, aren’t we?

Just to be fair, I then did a Google search on “McCain is the Antichrist”. Disappointingly, I got only 3200 hits. So it would seem that John McCain (assuming that is the McCain being referred to) is less than 1/10 as diabolical as Barack Obama. Imagine how disappointed McCain and his advisors must be, after all of the time and effort they put in last autumn to pierce the public consciousness.

And then I did one more search. OK, this is not fair, and I apologize in advance. I just had to do it. I mean, wouldn’t you? For completeness, I did a Google search on “Palen is the Antichrist.” Three lousy hits. And every one of them actually said “McCain/Palen is the Antichrist.”

That is just so unfair. She must be very disappointed.

Last night we went to a concert of breathtaking intensity. Every moment was a revelation, and these successive revelations piled one atop the other, in seemingly endless cascades. At some point I looked around at the faces of others in the audience. There was rapture everywhere. I saw smiles of recognition and delight, and some tears that I believe were tears of joy. Some listened with heads bowed, others moved unconsciously to the music, lost in old memories rediscovered.

And I realized at that moment that many of these people were coming to this concert with their entire life in tow. Some were hearing songs that they had adopted as personal anthems more than forty years ago. You could see the resonance of lives telescoping in the faces of listeners, of past and present fusing and coming majestically together.

And in this moment of intensity I understood a strange thing about human existence. We are all so unique, so particular, so very much ourselves – each unlike any other. My feeling of seeing the entire world from my head, of being the narrator of an unfolding universe, is your feeling as well – only in your case you are the narrator.

And so all of human reality is experienced from the point of view of these separate hard, shiny points of light, each one compact and tensely coiled. Identity is not at all spread out or diffused among us. There is no “half-way identity” between you and me. Everything is all or nothing – seen either through my pair of eyes or through yours.

Together we work to create a consensual illusion of a common vantage point – that is part of the process of socialization. But it is an illusion. In our essence we are like the tiny nuclei of atoms or the stars in the heavens. The core of each essential self is concentrated within a tiny speck of locality, whilst the distance separating us is inconceivably large – a vast empty liminal space between incandescent points of living light.

The reason we value our greatest poets, like the one who brought so much comfort to so many last night, is for the way they help us to create the illusion that there is something other than empty space within the vastness between us. We listen to their voices, and we do not feel alone.

They were lost in conversation, the two of them
On the street as though it were just another day
I had not even seen her for five years
She looked the same, in that brief moment
Before I made myself look away

They might have seen me, or maybe not
It might make no difference at all
Or all the difference in the world
Five years of accumulated pain, and wondering
All resolved in a moment

I was happy for them – am happy for them –
For me the betrayal was always in the mystery
Why such anger? Why friendship so rejected?
Questions I have asked myself every single day
Because there was nobody else to ask

But today was the day of revelation
The first day when I know for certain
That the cobwebs that have covered my heart
Can at last be cleared away, to make room
For whatever may come next

Many people go to movies to see visions of the future. There is that gee-whiz moment when you see some fantasy version of future technology, and a little voice in your brain says “I want one of those!”

Just to list a few of many examples – the “Star Trek” transporter, “Star Wars” holovideo (well ok, that one is really a rip-off from “Forbidden Planet”), the “Minority Report” gesture wall, or flying cars from countless films like “Blade Runner”, “Back to the Future” and “The Fifth Element”.

One odd thing about all of these things is that their gee-whiz factor stems partly from their very unreality. We know in our gut that these are visions not from our real future, but from the future as it might exist in some alternate universe. Each of them breaks one law or another that we sort of already know about, even if we’ve never really thought about it before.

The transporter violates so many laws of physics, from the laws of thermodynamics to laws of computational complexity, that it fairly screams “Not really possible!” Similarly, the coolness of the holovideo lies precisely in the fact that it seems to defy fundamental laws of optics – “projected” light is bending and scattering in mid-air, without bouncing off of anything. (Full disclosure: We actually worked on something like this in our lab a while back, but we cheated. Our “holodust” system bounced light off the dust in the air).

The “Minority Report” wall seems vaguely plausible until you start to think how it would feel to hold your arms up in the air all day, just to use your computer. It wouldn’t be very pleasant. But that’s precisely the point. We are being told, on a subliminal level, that this is not really our future, but a fantasy of our future.

Flying cars actually exist, but they are noisy, they consume alarming quantities of fuel, and their powerful ducted fans tend to create very unpleasant effects upon anyone unfortunate enough to be standing underneath one. This one is really a fantasy not about flying cars per se, but about effortless anti-gravity. In other words, a leap from real physics to fantasy physics.

Ironically, many of the innovations that have turned out to have the greatest impact on our lives are the least visible. We never notice the air conditioner (until it stops working). Yet it has completely transformed our nation’s landscape. For example, without A.C. there could be no office buildings or other high rises in places like Atlanta Georgia – still be fairly rural agrarian communities.

Similarly, the washing machine was a revelation when it first arrived on the scene. Hard as it is to imagine now (society has evolved quite a bit), many women were once virtually slaves to laundry – needing to spend large numbers of hours each day hand-washing clothes for a family.

There are many inventions like this. Completely unglamorous – we don’t even notice them – but they have transformed our lives, in some cases vastly for the better.

Perhaps the real importance of an invention can be measured as roughly inverse to its gee-whiz factor. Certainly not always, but often enough that it might be a useful yardstick (aha, another really useful, if unglamorous, invention…).

I have been watching the furor over the public release of information that baseball star Alex Rodriguez used an unapproved steroid around 2003. What I don’t understand is why he is being made into the villain of the piece.

So many people have expressed public rage toward him. Clearly taking enhancement drugs was not heroic, but neither was it all that out of the norm for that time. The voluntary testing in 2003 (with guaranteed privacy) was initiated precisely because organized baseball was aware that the taking of enhancement drugs – which was not yet clearly regulated in 2003 – was likely pervasive, and deeply embedded in player culture. The goal was to change that culture by initiating regulations – which was done the following year.

The worst you can say about A-Rod was that he claimed in interviews that he’d never taken performance-enhancing drugs. Lying in interviews is certainly not heroic behavior, but neither is it illegal. The fact that people are so upset by that speaks mainly to our crazy collective fantasy that sports figures are supposed to be something other than what they are – highly talented professional entertainers. It’s a little like saying that because Amy Winehouse is a great singer, she also needs to be an exemplary human being. Who are we fooling here?

But I’m not here today to talk about A-Rod. He’s not the villain of the piece. The villain is whoever took the fateful step, along what was apparently quite a long chain of steps – to make this privileged information public.

We might start with the federal subpeona of the test results during the 2003 BALCO investigation, but it’s clear that these federal investigators were operating with every expectation that the information they had seized would not become public, so they are almost certainly not our villains.

I understand that the leak was provided by four different anonymous sources – which is what gave Sports Illustrated the confidence to print the info. I would argue that the true villainy here is shared, in various amounts, by those four sources and the decision-making managing editor of S.I.. Compared with these folks, A-Rod is as innocent as a lamb.

Why do I say this? Because what these people did is attack you personally – you who are reading this. You put confidential medical information down in a lease or a contract, you provide confidential information about your child’s behavior problem to his teacher – under written guarantees of privacy. You type your private phone number into a Web form that explains it will never release that info, or look for informatoin using a search engine after reading the policy that clearly states your query terms will not be shared with anybody. You talk to your doctor about your wife’s bouts with depression, and her fears that her condition might become publicly known.

You do many things in the course of a day or week or month that involve a clear and explicitly stated contract of privacy. What these villains have done is take that away from you. Your rights, your privacy, the ability to shut your door and have a private conversation. Apparently none of it is real – your silly little illusion that you are entitled to the simple dignity of having people honor their word to you.

This is what has been taken from you by the villains of the piece. And you will not get these things back that you have lost unless the law recognizes that a crime has been committed – against all of us.

So the next time you rail against A-Rod, please keep in mind that you, or even your child, could be next.