Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

I’ve long maintained that free will is an illusion.  That the mind arises from the physicality of the brain and that there is no room for an active will separate from the physical processes of the brain.  That’s not to say that I’m a fatalist.  I don’t believe that thoughts are deterministic, let alone subject to perfect prediction.  My position boils down to the brain as a (gigantic) black box containing an uncountable number of states.  Input from the senses changes the state of the brain and occasionally results in actions.

Assuming (which I don’t) that the processes of the brain were completely deterministic, chaos theory tells us that they would not be predictable (what’s the solution to the three-body problem? [other than a king-sized bed]).  Moreover, the processes themselves are dependant on physicalities small enough that quantum effects are relevant and therefore the state changes contain a strong stochastic component.

Philosophically speaking, none of this affects the way we should live.  Education, punishment, personal interaction all affect the state of the brain and are therefore worthwhile [and inform my position that the real purpose of the criminal code should be rehabilitation and not warehousing, punishment or societal retribution… but that’s a post for another time].

Yesterday, I heard the coolest story on NPR.  In a nutshell, moral judgements are apparently influenced by the right temporoparietal junction so that a magnetic pulse disrupting that region of the brain affects those judgements.  In the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the researchers told one of four stories to the participants.  The stories addressed permutations of effect (neutral or negative) and intent (neutral or negative).  So, one story described an unintentional (neutral intent) poisoning resulting in death (negative effect), another described an intentional (negative intention) failed poisoning (neutral effect), etc.

When making moral judgements, adults generally consider intention.  So if you didn’t intend to poison someone and did, it’s understandable; whereas if you intended to poison and failed, you are still morally culpable.  This is exactly what the researchers found in their controls.  However, after disrupting the right temporoparietal junction, participants started making moral judgements based on the effect.  You intended to kill someone, but failed?  No problem, the person is still alive.  You didn’t mean to kill someone and did?  You bad person, someone died.  Apparently, this is common in children before they learn to make moral judgements based on intention.

So, in a nutshell, temporarily altering the physicality of the brain affects people’s thoughts with respect to moral judgements.  I’ll consider that support for my position that the mind arises from the physicality of brain and any belief you have in a free will separate from those physical processes is an illusion.

10256 It’s a good day for the Allman Brothers. Great southern rock without the confederate overtones and segregationist dog whistles in Lynard Skynyrd.

Dear Amazon.com:

After buying the collected works of Robert Johnson, blues guitarist from the 1930s, the man who was reputed to have sold his soul to the devil to become the greatest blues guitarist ever, I really don’t think I want albums by Robert Johnson the 70s power pop musician.  I know they have the same name, but trust me, they aren’t the same person.

kthxbai

Now that the Democratic Party has won congress, a result I am thrilled to see, there will be increasing cries for them to present “A Plan” for Iraq. Leaving aside the constitutional issues, i.e., the executive branch is responsible for military operations, while congress controls the purse strings and provides oversight, asking for a plan at this point is a complete exercise in futility. There were a number of plans presented or endorse by Democrats over the past four years and all of them were ignored. At this point, Republicans are basically saying, “we’ve ignored you for years, but now that it’s completely fubar’d what do you intend to do about it?”

Unfortunately, there is probably nothing that can be done about Iraq – or at least very little that is palatable. We’ll see what the Baker commission comes back with, but in the meantime let’s review the things that we could have done:

1) Most obvious, we could have avoided the whole war to begin with. As was known before and proved after the invasion, Saddam had no WMDs, was not a threat to us, was not involved in 9/11, and was cooperating with the IAEA. I remember the state of the union speech that Bush gave in the run-up to the war. I remember screaming at the television that the man was lying. Aluminum tubes? They were of insufficient strength to separate uranium. Uranium from Niger? Complete fabrication. I could go on and on about what was known before the SOTU address. The only question left in my mind is whether Bush was lying or completely ignorant.

2) Sufficient troops. General Eric Shinseki suggested that we needed several hundred thousand troops to pacify Iraq. For this, he had his authority ripped out from under him when a report was released that stated Rumsfeld had named Shinseki’s successor 14 months before his term expired. in any event, Shinseki’s estimate of several hundred thousand troops seems to have come straight out of the Army War Colleges journal, Parameters. As this article notes, necessary force ratios are proportional to population size and are affected by the level of violence. A peaceful country like the U.S. might maintain a police force with a force ratio of around 3 per thousand, but to pacify a country might take a force ratio between 10 and 20 per thousand. The article notes that the British had around 20 per thousand in Northern Ireland during the height of the unrest there. Right now, our force ratio in Iraq is in the neighborhood of 5 to 6 per thousand, and we’re in the midst of a civil war. Bringing order to Iraq could easily require 400-500,000 troops. As the 1995 article notes, “we must finally acknowledge that many countries are simply too big to be plausible candidates for stabilization by external forces.” At 26 million people, some 6 million in Baghdad alone, Iraq may be one of them.

3) Of course, at the outset, a lower force ratio could have worked and some of those troops could have been Iraqi. So, a third plan: maintain and don’t disband the army. Unfortunately, the administration through the CPA did disband the army, forming the nucleus of the insurgency. So, instead of having a stabilizing force, we gave a leg up to our enemies and gave them weapons with which to attack us.

4) Along the lines of disbanding the army, many of us opposed de-baathification. This policy essentially drove out of government anyone who had belonged to the Baath party, i.e., all of the people that actually knew how to work the government and to provide services. In order to have any position of responsibility in Iraq under Saddam, you had to belong to the Baath party. You didn’t have to kill people, you didn’t have to believe in it, you just had to officially sign up. A much smarter policy would have been to get rid of the killers and abusers and leave the engineers, military officers and teachers.

5) As the situation started to deteriorate, we needed to train up the Iraqis to get them in a position to stabilize their own country, i.e., get the overall, effective force ratio up around 20 per thousand. The problem is that the soldiers, police officers and recruits are a) afraid to leave their families; and b) getting killed before they can be trained to defend themselves – in many cases, killed before they join up. Addressing this problem, by either moving the recruits to another country for training or to a safer location within Iraq could have helped.

I’m sure I’m missing other “plans” from the past 4 years, these are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head.  At this point, there aren’t too many options left. Stabilizing the country will take a massive increase in troops – troops the U.S. doesn’t have. Most of our allies have either bailed out or are in the process of bailing. This leaves us with only a few other sources of troops, one could imagine that we would have to bribe provide incentives to the Egyptians or more distastefully to the Iranians and/or Syrians. None of these countries will willingly put forward the hundreds of thousands of troops needed and their price for doing so would be incredibly steep, but still cheaper than our participation in an ongoing civil war.

The moral is that preventing a problem is far easier than correcting it. The Republicans didn’t prevent the problem, but now they want someone else to take the responsibility for a lack of options for fixing it.

and if you haven’t seen this, you should – it’s very good.

Caveat lector – this is not a fully formed thought, I’m just trying to get some ideas down.

I worked with a guy (not a friend) who was obsessed by workplace culture. As near as I could tell, he came from an environment with an entirely different culture and didn’t care for the one we had. At one point, he and another person (a friend) gave a talk on culture. They described different aspects of culture, including appearance and behavior.

Workplace culture is important. Studies have shown that companies with a “positive” culture are more productive. What I don’t have a good sense of is whether the culture causes productivity, productivity causes positive culture or if the two are correlated but not causally determined.

I tend to think that workplace culture is an evolved group response to circumstances. Changing the external manifestations of culture, without changing the circumstances that the culture evolved in response to, is pointless. Cultures (workplace and other) seem to be “evolutionarily stable strategies” (ESS). In evolutionary biology, an ESS is a strategy that *if* adopted by all members of the population can not be beaten by adopting another strategy. Essentially, deviations from the norm are penalized, driving the population back to the norm.

I suspect that what makes cultures so difficult to change is that they are ESSs. Trying to change culture by changing specific behaviors or by bringing in a new employee exhibiting the desire behavior, is destined to fail, because success within the culture depends on behaving with the cultural norms. I think that the only way to change cultures is to identify the underlying issues that caused the culture to evolve and to address those issues.

For example, I know of people that would like to see their work environment be more innovative – like (they perceive) Apple’s or Google’s. To get there, they try to encourage people to be more creative in their jobs or they propose that we all dress in a cool, hip way, like the Apple “geniuses” (seriously, I’m not making this up). The problem is that if you perceive that the culture is not creative, it is likely the case that the work place does not reward creativity. For example, as I understand it, Google allows employees to spend up to one day a week working on a personally chosen, pie-in-the-sky project. But to do that, they’ve had to overstaff. If they didn’t overstaff, then people spending time on random projects would cause other things to break.

So, if you want your culture to be more like Google’s, then you may have to consider overstaffing in order to get there. You can’t just expect that encouraging people to change their behavior and to be innovative will work