Ken's Blog

Sally’s comment on yesterday’s post said:

“If it was a big birthday–like a MILESTONE birthday, you may have just witnessed someone’s personal freak out being performed.

Sounds strange. Was there cake? Was it good?”

Yes, it was indeed a milestone birthday. A very big one. And indeed there was cake, and it was extremely good, although nobody ate it. The absolute highlight of the evening, for me at least, was a performance piece by three of his friends. In “real time” they assembled a giant cake, formed it into the shape of an alligator, slathered on icing and otherwise decorated their masterpiece, then stuck in candles, while a recording was played of Cookie Monster and The Count happily singing “If I knew you were coming I’d have baked a cake.”

It’s hard to describe what it’s like to watch three grown people doing something so insane while that particular music is playing. But I can tell you it was a deliriously joyful thing to behold. And I can also tell you, from first hand experience, that when three of someone’s friends decide to help him to get through a milestone birthday by frantically assembling a giant alligator cake in front of more than a hundred astonished witnesses, all to the tune of a song from Sesame Street, there is a lot of love in the room.

I went to a birthday party last night. The man of the hour threw himself a huge bash and invited his many friends. He rented out a theatre and structured the evening as a variety show, with himself as Master of Ceremonies.

What was most fascinating to me about the occasion was how the birthday boy took to the stage and proceeded to perform, not as himself, but rather as a series of characters: First a late-night comedian, then a freakish quiz show host. He presented one sketch after another, each more outrageous than the one before.

And I found myself wondering whether I was witnessing some sort of cultural feedback loop, in which the emerging digital culture of personal invention is starting to redefine the world of flesh and blood.

Our culture is already moving beyond the make-believe “democracy” of American Idol. Media has become fragmented, decentralized. We are entering a time when the traditional content producers are losing control of the conversation, when each individual has become a potential point of broadcast. Consumers are becoming better at voting with their clicks, and the MySpace-driven rise to fame of a Lily Allen could become the rule rather than the exception.

The long tail is starting to wag the dog.

So I wonder, was I witnessing a glimmer of the future? In the age of YouTube, will more and more people assess their milestones, measure the worth of their lives, by an ability to create a persona, to transmit a virtual self?

Their talk was far-ranging, the rhythm was changing
And rhyme rearranging out there in the night

Their thoughts began drifting, for something was shifting
A curtain was lifting, a song taking flight

And so then she kissed him, and yes she did bind him
The wall was behind him and yes yes they said

This flower of the mountain, like the girls Andalusian
Perhaps an illusion, her lips were so red

Her arms were around him, her body imploring
The boy, now adoring, returned her caress

Say yes mountain flower and the wind somewhere blowing
Their hearts madly going and yes I will Yes.

I just saw August: Osage County, the brilliant southern gothic comedy/drama by Tracy Letts. It was in turns elegaic, hysterically funny, tragic, manic, thrilling. By the end you really got the sense that human fates are determined by events set into motion long before, sometimes many years before.

As I was watching it, I started to wonder to what extent our sense of free will is an illusion, in the sense that we are formed by events outside of us. Perhaps our very motivations and desires have been set into motion by forces outside our control, and to that extent the very idea of “self” as an independent entity may be an illusion. As Schopenhauer once said: “A man can do whatever he wants, but he cannot want whatever he wants”.

I wonder how you would even get a handle on a question like this. Could you step outside your own values and desires sufficiently to question them, examine them? Would you even want to?

Maybe that’s the thought for the day.

Wow! The comments on yesterday’s blog were so thoughtful and interesting that I’ve decided to continue this thread for another day. The question I’d like to focus on today is this: What would indeed be a scientifically valid test to distinguish sincere emotion from merely the artful simulation of it through acting?

The first commenter points out that Ekman’s micromovements are not something of which the observer would be explicitly aware. It is plausible, but not at all certain, that one difference between a merely good actor and a great actor is that the latter is actually incorporating these subliminal micromovements into the performance. Detection of micromovements, together with correlative measurement of how convinced people were by a particular actor’s performance, could – and should – be incorporated into the testing protocol.

A later commenter points out that we humans may have a native ability to suss out the fake when we are in the same room with someone, perhaps through smell, that we don’t have when we are looking at a video. So today I’m going to talk about how one would go about testing for the ability to detect sincerity when there is a constraint that everyone is in the same room. Then this ability could subsequently be testing against our sincerity-detection abilities when looking at a video, through the use of a 2×2 study.

By the way, this same commenter also points out that the strength of a democratic system rests largely on its ability to function despite the fact that people cannot truly trust politicians. Point well taken!

This commenter’s first point, about things needing to happen in person, suggests a double-blind study involving two kinds of participants: (i) a volunteer questioner; (ii) a respondent who is either a volunteer an actor. The questioner is the test subject.

The questioner asks a fixed series of questions, and is not informed as to whether the respondent is answering sincerely or merely acting. First the questions are asked by one questioner of a sincere respondent. Then an actor who has viewed a recording and transcription of the first session is charged with trying to duplicate the “performance” of the sincere respondent. For this session a different questioner is given the same questions to ask. After each session, the questioner is asked whether he/she believes that the respondent was actually an actor.

This process is repeated over a number of different sessions, using different participants as questioners and different respondents. The protocol would measure for a systematic ability on the part of a population of questioners to accurately assess the true nature of their respondent.

The United States has been gripped again by presidential election fever, and millions of Americans are earnestly trying to determine which candidate has the sincere interests of the nation at heart. But this question of “sincerity” is tricky. A lot of people voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and again in 2004 because he somehow seemed sincere.

But how did they know it wasn’t all just an act? How can you ever know whether a politician is sincere? Maybe a more general question is this: Do humans actually have a mechanism that can distinguish between true sincerity and the very artful fakery of it?

It wouldn’t be that difficult to scientifically determine the answer, but as far as I can tell, nobody has run the experiment. Here’s how one might go about it: Film a discussion between two people who are interacting in complete sincerity. It could be a boyfriend and girlfriend who’ve been asked to discuss their relationship, or a debate between two sports fans about who has the better team.

Then hire two good professional actors to replicate this scene. The actors’ goal is to convince you that they too are utterly sincere. And yet, of course they are not. The particular emotions, values, points of view that were deeply held and sincerely expressed by the original participants are utterly irrelevant to the actors. Emotionally they are invested only in creating a convincing external performance.

Now show films, under controlled conditions, of these two scenarios. Allow the observers to vote on which version is truly sincere and which is the artful fake. Let’s say that the outcome is that observers cannot tell the difference (or worse – that they are systematically more likely to believe the fake version to be real).

What significance might this have for politics? A key premise of Presidential politics in the U.S., as it is practiced today, is that you are voting for the individual. People do not primarily vote the resumé but rather the candidate, out of a sense that they have identified the person they can trust to lead the country.

Should the experiment show that true sincerity cannot be determined by a politician’s manner, arguably this would constitute proof that someone who runs on a platform of sincerity, such as George W. Bush, could just as easily be a completely cynical liar, a cold and calculating manipulator of his audience, up to some utterly self-serving end. Not only wouldn’t we know the difference, we couldn’t know the difference.

Maybe we should run the experiment and see.

When we use the word “language” we mean at least two different things. There are natural languages, such as English, French, Japanese and Greek, and then there are artificially designed languages, like programming languages such as C and Java. There is a big difference between the two.

For one thing, a natural language gets passed down (and evolved) by generations of people. It has to be “naturally learnable”, which means it has to be learnable by two year olds. Actually, little children have super powers: A kid will absorb language like a sponge, with no conscious effort – something most adults cannot do. But children can only perform this amazing feat with natural languages – a kid wouldn’t be able to pick up, say, Java programming in the same way.

Actually, children don’t just learn natural language. Linguist Ann Senghas and her colleagues have documented how a community of deaf children, in just a few generations, spontaneously evolved Nicaraguan Sign Language, a fully mature natural language, from disordered gesture fragments. By “fully mature” I mean that NSL, which has existed for only a few decades, is already as grammatically and linguistically mature and evolved as English, French, Japanese, Greek or any other natural language.

One reason I’m interested in this is that I’d like to explore the question of whether we could get children to build us a bridge between natural language and computer languages. Specifically, could we create an environment for a community of children in which their natural language creation abilities could be put to work to evolve a naturally learnable language that would also be understandable by a computer? Such a cross-over language might contain operations roughly equivalent to procedures, loops, variables and other elements of programming.

This is trickier than you might think. For one thing, programming languages are generally context free – every statement can be parsed in only one way, thereby making it possible for the computer to understand what we want it to do. In contrast, natural languages are context sensitive – even the very grammar of a sentence can be ambiguous and dependent on context. As Groucho Marx once said: “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.”

If we can create an on-line environment for kids to play together, maybe a place where they can develop fun games, which allows them to evolve a context free language (so the computer software has a chance of understanding what’s going on) will the kids embrace that as a way of communicating, and will their spontaneous language generation skills kick in? I suspect we’ll have to help by designing a graphic user interface that always shows the kids what the computer is able to understand.

What’s the long term goal of all this? Well, if we’re successful, then the sort of people who do not think of themselves as computer programmers – in other words, almost everybody – will be able to grow up being able to tell computers to do things in ways that are now available only to the programmer priesthood. Maybe you could just tell your computer something like:

“Find me a jewelry box for under $200 from some store in my neighborhood that matches the color of my niece’s wedding dress, and put a deposit on it.”

I suspect that the way we’ll say this to a computer will look neither like English nor like today’s programming languages. It will be something new. I do believe that by making use of the language generation capabilities of children, we might be able to evolve an effective way for anybody to possess the power of programming without even thinking about it. Once an ordinary person can casually tell a computer what he/she wants it to do, imagine how that might transform the ways we use future generations of search tools like Google, on-line markets like Ebay, and social networks like Facebook.

Today's agenda: Motionless and resting
At home enjoying life, eagerly nesting

Inert, unmoving, Sunday Times acquired
My anatomy reducedly attired

How exotic - lazy endless noodling
Indulging unconditional secludling

I stole one day, oh life is kind
Enjoy yourself: Only unwind

Today I went with a friend to see a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, adapted for the puppet theatre as Frankenstein (Mortal Toys) by Eric Ehn, in a production directed/designed by Janie Geiser and Susan Simpson.

Despite, or more likely because of, the rough quality of the production, which had an artful, wistfully rag-tag quality, we found ourselves drawn into the sweeping tragedy of Victor Frankenstein and his misbegotten monster. There was something about the way the creature would appear, at different times, in wildly different scales (something for which puppetry is particularly well suited), which made him seem less a thing of flesh than an external manifestation of Victor’s own misshapen soul, of the ugliness lurking within his selfish vision of glory.

I couldn’t help but compare this with Kenneth Branagh’s disastrous 1994 version, in which there is no way for the audience to separate the hubris of Victor’s character from the hubris of Branagh’s performance of the doomed scientist as a kind of early Romantic-era rock star. Rather than see the character, we see the actor, and we find ourselves saying “Oh Kenneth, just get over yourself.” Which is really not what you want to be thinking in the middle of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Victor as Mortal Toy		Victor as Boy Toy?

In 1811, seven years before Frankenstein was published, in an essay entitled On the Marionette Theatre, Heinrich von Kleist wrote:

“..where grace is concerned, it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet.” (translated from the original German by Idris Parry)

Scott McCloud very eloquently expressed a related thought in his marvelous book Understanding Comics when he conjectured why, as realism decreases, audience identification with a character may actually increase:

I think about this in my current work on interactive animated characters; it’s probably one of the main reasons I am constantly drawn to puppet theatre. Characters can gain a kind of power when they have been stripped of detail, simplified, made so universal that they become figures upon which we find ourselves projecting our own internal visions. This is true not just for comedy (what we usually think of when we think of comic books, animation, puppet shows), but for tragedy as well.

The girl was vivacious
And somewhat voracious
The liquor contagious
The boy felt outrageous
Their mood grew gregarious
Till, feeling hilarious,
They descended the palace
And took to the street


In this vast megalopolis
Our winter metropolis
What is our true purpose?
Do our moments usurp us?
For when things become amorous
Then our hearts, feeling glamorous,
May drink from the Chalice
And so be complete