Personal Worth and Pursuing Wisdom

Before the impromptu tribute to The Doors in my last post, I had gone through the cathartic exercise of describing aspects of my life that I didn't find particularly agreeable. I intend for this post to be more positive and constructive, with a focus on solutions to those problems. Along the way, there will be opportunities aplenty for discussing big-picture concepts like wisdom and good lives.

I have a tendency to focus on knowing and learning, and am not as comfortable with bargaining and earning. I don't believe that a trade-off exists between these two activities – after all, many people learn to earn. Instead, I suspect that my discomfort stems from a difficulty to put a price tag on my skills. Neither do I want to undervalue myself and be taken advantage of, nor do I wish to exploit others by demanding more than what is fair. If there were a way for me to make a clear, objective self-evaluation, I would feel more at ease while negotiating a salary, setting a consultation fee, or engaging in similar business transactions that involve fuzzy, intangible services.

Even when there are established market rates for some of these services, the quality of work that different service providers offer can vary tremendously. There might be exceptions, where every service provider's output is worth the same. However, even a seemingly trivial task (like screwing caps onto tubes of toothpaste) can be performed with varying degrees of precision and diligence. Perhaps truly discrete, pass-or-fail activities don't exist at all, and if they do, there's a good chance that they're not worth enough to pay a human to perform.

While these sorts of conundrums probably don't faze the average businessperson or employee, I happen to be a student of philosophy. Questions of scruples have thoroughly trounced what little business sense I might have with astonishing regularity, or have at least crippled them by setting what André Kukla calls "mental traps". I don't have his book handy (it's sitting in a cardboard box in Toronto), I think he calls this particular trap "recursion". In essence, instead of continuing with the problem at hand ("How can I earn money from my expertise?"), I discover another problem nested inside it ("What constitutes a fair price?"), like a Russian matryoshka doll. I then find myself tackling the nested (though not necessarily "smaller") problem, at the expense of the first. What's worse is that the nested problem is usually far less practical, often offering no immediate return on the considerable intellectual investment that its solution requires. This problem becomes my own personal Zeno's paradox, preventing me from ever returning to the original matter, either because it's just too hard to reach an acceptably accurate answer, or because it begets nested problems of its own; onions within onions.

I bring up these bizarre mental gymnastics for reasons other than – okay... in addition to – comic self-deprecation. Firstly, my reluctance to assign specific value to myself or my actions provides a key insight into what motivates me to understand wisdom.

I'm not an economist, and I don't have a firm stance on whether capitalism is a boon or a menace to civilization. However, I do believe that despite the popular claim that there are some things you can't put a price tag on, the invention of currency has drastically reduced the number of things for which this is true. It appears that currency allows people to trade in their subjective evaluation of things in the world for an objective value, literally allowing them to compare apples to oranges. While this value is neither absolute nor accurate, it is irresistibly convenient, and this convenience has made monetary systems ubiquitous, if not entirely universal.

What of the things in life that don't readily lend themselves to monetization? Sometimes, a provisional, approximate value is assigned to them, as and when the need arises. These assigned values can have a major impact on a person's entire lifestyle ("Do I care for my child myself, or get a higher-paying, more demanding job and hire a babysitter?"), or might help resolve some urgent yet relatively unimportant matter ("How much extra am I willing to pay for the custom paint job?").

Other times, however, things that lack a tidy dollar amount seem to lose value, or at least perceived value. In the same way that easy to reach, highly visible items tend to be discussed, purchased or eaten more frequently then out-of-the-way, obscure ones, items that are more difficult to appraise are often more susceptible to floccinaucinihilipilification. There are, of course, several caveats and qualifications that apply – that different people (and even the same people at different points in time) make different value judgments is just one example.

Even so, not being able to assign a monetary value to engaging conversation versus smarmy salesmanship, or genuine camaraderie versus an opportunistic alliance might make at least some people think that the former pleasantries are merely sentimental and illusory, especially when compared to their latter, profit-yielding counterparts. Once again, not all people think this way, but I have a strong suspicion that attributing monetary value to an option will make it more salient than alternatives for which no such value has been set. When asked directly, people might very well claim to prefer an unpriced option, but I have little doubt that the priced option will be more successful in capturing people's unprovoked attention.

Let's turn back to wisdom. What, if anything, can be said of a person's worth, qua person? We regularly assign people normative labels like "good" and "bad" (or "evil", depending on the context), "successful" or "unsuccessful" and so on. However, as I mentioned above, subjective value judgments are fraught with problems, while a person's net worth is inescapably unambiguous. People have a much easier time agreeing upon whether someone is wealthy or poor than whether that he or she is "good at" being a person. Instead of wading into murky territory and debating whether a penniless saint is worth more than a misanthropic trillionaire, people are more likely to avoid the question entirely. Those of you familiar with the history of psychology might recognize this move as something akin to behaviorism; avoid the unquantifiable, and hope that it will one day be explained away as a naive "folk" concept. While most people avoid voicing such beliefs explicitly, some people might genuinely think that a person that hasn't succeeded financially has nothing of value to offer the world.

That's one of the big reasons that I'm interested in wisdom. If there were some indisputable set of criteria that could be used to determine a person's relative "worth", that would be astounding.

Before I say any more, though, I need to be absolutely clear that I do not wish to oppose the concept of inalienable human rights. It is important to find a way to avoid literally and unconditionally treating every person equally (for example, treating heroes or philanthropists the same way that we treat murderers or thieves), or advocating unequal treatment based on irrelevant criteria (race, gender, age, net worth, etc.).

Part of the solution to this particular issue might require a few shifts in thinking. To avoid "worthy" and "worthless" from becoming some horrible Orwellian method of "scientifically" segregating societies into haves and have-nots, like some kind of cognitive Gattaca, a person's worth must be inherently changeable, and not an inescapable, life-long constant. Furthermore, people's attitude towards this normative evaluation must be free of blame, both towards environmental factors as well as towards each other. Instead, it should be understood that becoming better at being a person is probably the one objective that a person has most complete control over. As discussed by Stoicism and other schools of thought, people might not always be able to change their surroundings or circumstances, they are always free to modify their own attitudes towards these external conditions.

In the relatively brief time that I've been alive, I have had the opportunity to interact with, I daresay, a fairly diverse sample of humanity, including people of varying social status, level of education, monetary worth, behavioral dispositions, ethnic backgrounds, physical and mental capacities, and so on. While this by no means makes me an expert on the human psyche, it has certainly led me to believe that far too many people are incorrectly appraised (either by others or by themselves) to be better or worse people than they actually are, and that these discrepancies almost always stem from the selection (by a society or an individual) of some irrelevant set of criteria for comparison.

While it is encouraging to note that inappropriate measures of personal worth, such as a person's heritage, gender, or wealth continue to lose credibility in many parts of the world, this trend will make it increasingly important to discover, synthesize, or otherwise agree upon more appropriate normative standards. It isn't immediately clear whether some infallible form of such standards could exist at all, but at least pursuing this line of inquiry appears to have merit.

That was the first reason for bringing up my internal debate about personal worth. The second reason, a more thorough discussion of which I'll have to leave for another day, relates to my more immediate problems and their attempted solutions.

See? I told you I'd be able to fit in some big-picture stuff.

A Punctuated Tribute

Awake!

Shake dreams from you hair, my Pretty Child, my Sweet One.

Choose the Day, and choose the sign of your day – the Day’s Divinity.

First thing you see: a vast, radiant beach, and cool, jeweled moon.

Couples, naked, race down by its quiet side, and we laugh like soft, mad children, smug in the wooly, cotton brains of infancy.

The Music and Voices are all around us.

“Choose –” they croon, the Ancient Ones, “the Time has come again.”

 “Choose now,” they croon, beneath the moon, beside an ancient lake.

“Enter again, the Sweet Forest.

Enter the Hot Dream.

Come with Us – everything is broken up, and dances.”

Indians, scattered on Dawn’s Highway, bleeding – ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile, eggshell mind.

We have assembled inside this ancient and insane theater to propagate our lust for life, and flee the swarming wisdom of the streets.

The barns are stormed, the windows kept, and only one of all the rest, to dance and save us from the Divine Mockery of words.

Music inflames temperament.

Oh, Great Creator of Being: grant us one more hour to perform our art, and perfect our lives.

We need great, golden copulations.

When the True King’s murderers are allowed to roam free, a thousand magicians arise in the land.

Where are the feasts we were promised?

Where is the wine… the new wine, dying on the vine?

- Jim Morrison

…But it’s a Long, Hard Road…

There are at least two important types of self-improvement that a person can engage in. The first involves addressing flaws, righting wrongs and curing maladies of one sort or another. These might be character flaws, undesirable environmental factors, or even actual physical or mental disorders. The second kind of self-improvement does not require a problem to be solved, but is instead characterized by developing positive traits or states of affairs that were previously absent. For example, learning a new language, learning to play a musical instrument, or learning how to speed-read are activities that a people engage in, and yet these personal projects are often undertaken without any sort of external compulsion or necessity. Sure, a person might be learning a language because it is required of him or her, perhaps to fulfill a job requirement, but people often improve themselves in these and many other ways simply because they want to.

The difference between these two modes of self-improvement is analogous to the difference between what has been called the “disease model” of psychology, which strives to treat mental illness, and positive psychology, which aims to further improve the abilities of healthy people.

I suppose it is possible to unify these two modes of self-improvement by claiming that the second, positive type of self-improvement does indeed rectify an undesirable state of affairs, namely, a growing sense of dissatisfaction arising from not possessing the attributes that the self-improvement activity cultivates. It’s as if a person spontaneously decides that not possessing attribute x is a problem, and then takes measures necessary to solve this problem. While recasting positive self-improvement as problem solving in this way doesn’t change much, it does allow all kinds of self-improvement to be treated as instances of problem solving, which simplifies understanding their relationship to wisdom.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ll be writing about my own attempts at self-improvement, the challenges that I face, and the progress that I’ve made. In addition to the journal-keeping therapeutic value that I hope to yield from this exercise, it will probably provide some opportunities for talking about wisdom itself. So, without further delay…

For the past two years, I’ve been living in Lahore, Pakistan. I moved here from Toronto to live with my family, mostly because I felt trapped. I had a part-time retail job, which I found after an unprecedented, recession-induced, fourteen-month dry spell. I was suffering from depression, and felt extremely tired and under-motivated most of the time. I didn’t have enough to pay my university tuition arrears, and so I wasn’t able finish my final year. In a bout of despair that people in the northern hemisphere probably only ever experience in February, I agreed to move to Lahore and help my sister improve her company’s IT infrastructure.

My sister was more concerned for my well-being than for her company’s computer systems, of course, and wanted to pull me out of the rut I was stuck in. The love and care of my family, the change of scenery, and an improved diet all helped me lift myself out of my miserable state of mind and after a very long time, let me shift back to a more positive perspective on life.

A year later, an old friend, whom I attended high school with before I moved back to Toronto in 1999, offered me a job at the multi-national tech consulting firm where he worked as a senior manager. For the past year, I’ve been writing articles, white papers, marketing collateral and technical documents, and I now earn enough to live comfortably (though certainly not lavishly).

While it might appear that I’m content with my situation, this is only marginally true. Yes, I’m not in a continual state of panic and anxiety, the way I was in the months leading up to my departure from Toronto. However, there are many issues that I have yet to resolve, and just as many annoyances that make living in Pakistan rather troublesome and undesirable.

Foremost amongst my troubles is my unfinished degree. I have less than a year of study left to go, and it would be a travesty to leave such an important life goal unattained. I have about three years left to resume my academic efforts – any longer, and I’d have to start over from scratch. While the possibility of not earning the degree that I’ve worked so long and hard for is in itself a horrible prospect, I also have a gargantuan student loan to pay off. While I might be able to find a source of income that allows me to fulfill this financial obligation that I have to the Government of Canada, even without a degree, I highly doubt that I’ll find it here in Pakistan. My current salary might appear rather respectable when set against the low cost of living in this country, but it is no match for foreign debt.

The most salient of the annoyances that come with living in Pakistan is putting up with “load-shedding” – rolling blackouts that have steadily worsened over the past two years. At present, the building that I live in, situated in an upscale neighborhood of the city, receives no more than an hour of electricity at a time. The gaps between these bright patches are usually an hour long, but have recently lengthened to two hours between midnight and morning. In other words, I get less than twelve hours of electricity at home each day. The UPS that I have powers a handful of lights and ceiling fans, but that’s about it. Food spoils more quickly, washing and ironing clothes requires beatific patience, and the benefits of air conditioning (which is already scandalously expensive) are tragically short-lived. What’s worse is that these service outages are entirely unscheduled, so they can’t be planned around.

As you can imagine, this power situation has a major impact on my life. The summers are extremely hot, and there’s only so much that a ceiling fan can do. Using computers and accessing the Internet is next to useless, and there’s little point in attempting any activity that takes more than an hour, like downloading large files, watching a movie in one sitting, or playing video games of the more involved variety. If it weren’t for this laptop that I bought just three weeks ago, I’d be cursing myself right now for not having saved my work, instead of continuing to type away in my now uncomfortably dark and warm room.

In addition to the obvious types of frustration that these power outages cause, there are several rather subtle ones. It leaves me feeling deeply insecure, not knowing when I might be interrupted. I often put off activities that a power outage might cut short, and even when I proceed to update my computer or watch a movie or begin a print job, I’m haunted by a dreadful sense of urgency. I find myself glancing at the time over and over again, hoping that I accomplish the task before I’m switched off. As if being interrupted isn’t bad enough, many electricity-dependent activities are all-or-nothing affairs, cannot be resumed, and have to be started over if disturbed.

Other difficulties and undesirable states of affairs that I associate with living in Pakistan include the scorching heat that bakes most of the country for around eight months every year, the risk of contracting Dengue fever or other exotic illnesses, excessive and ubiquitous filth and pollution, and the relatively poor infrastructure for roads, health care, and Internet access.

The unacceptably dangerous traffic conditions here make life especially difficult for me. For many different reasons, I have chosen not to drive, and bicycles are my preferred mode of transportation, and are also a hobby that I have a deep love for. The traffic in Pakistan, especially urban areas, is unimaginably aggressive and disorganized, with vehicles making as many “lanes” as they can by attempting to overtake each other, swerving into oncoming traffic or onto unpaved turf whenever they please, tailgating each other with reckless abandon, unabashedly disobeying traffic signals (when they happen to be functioning), and otherwise asserting some form of vicious primal dominance upon any species of vehicle smaller than themselves.

While some people (usually poor folk that can’t even afford the sub-$300, China-made motorcycles that dominate the roads here) do ride bicycles, this is a risk that I’m not willing to take. Despite over ten years of urban cycling experience in Toronto, I wouldn’t last a week biking around even the nicest neighborhoods in Lahore, even if I bought the nicest bike I could find (which are, by the way, rather low-end by North American and European standards). I would literally not survive. Because of these awful conditions, I stick to a rather strict home-to-work-to-home routine, and commute by (noisy, cramped, smog-infested and shockingly dangerous) auto-rickshaw.

However, there are some less tangible issues with living here that are much more severe, and might be thought to rival the country’s energy crisis in magnitude, at least for me. These have to do with people’s behavior. While there are all sorts of folks, good and bad, pleasant and unsavory, in every corner of the world, many people that I meet, witness around me or otherwise share space with throughout the day behave in ways that I often find grating, and sometimes find difficult to tolerate. There is a higher incidence (compared to Toronto and similar places) of people being unnecessarily loud, not respecting public space or public property, exhibiting blatant opportunism at the expense of everyone else (as well as the coherence of the system itself), subscribing to rather petty forms of materialism, displaying an astonishing degree of short-sightedness, being reckless or outright lawless for little or no reason, and failing to tolerate even the most benign opinions or actions of others that they disagree with. Even this list of specific observations fails to capture the wrongness that I sense when I’m in a public place.

Finally, living in Pakistan has left me in a social void. The combination of unstable channels of communication, dangerous and inconvenient modes of transportation, and largely incompatible psyches do not lend themselves to making many new friends. While I have a few acquaintances at work and meet with family members somewhat regularly, there aren’t many people here that think or act like me, resonate with me in any profound way, or that share my interests.

I’ve thought about my situation deeply, and strongly believe that I ought to live elsewhere, at least for a while.

Now that I’ve made it clear, both to you readers as well as myself, that there are significant problems that I need to solve, it becomes somewhat easier to discuss their respective solutions. That, however, will be the subject of a separate post, since I’ve already chattered on for a good long spell.

My next entry will be about specific attempts that I’ve made to inch myself closer to homeostasis. I expect that this discussion will include some tidbits from the psychology of problem solving, like problem formulation, problem finding, and Newell and Simon’s means-ends analysis.

Until then!

A Return to Egocentrism

I haven’t been actively pursuing theoretical research on wisdom for some time now, due mostly to other conflicting responsibilities. Even so, understanding wisdom is and will continue to be an endeavor that I hold dear and believe to be of critical importance.

While my current circumstances have made it difficult to devote enough time to studying wisdom with the intensity that the topic deserves, I have continued to itch for a meaningful expressive outlet. So if I don’t have many profound thoughts to share about contemporary wisdom research, what can I write about?

I’ve decided to use this blog to record my ongoing efforts towards personal growth, the challenges that I have been facing, and where applicable, discuss how these admittedly anecdotal thoughts might inform a general understanding of wisdom and flourishing. I feel that I’ve wasted too much time waiting for the inspiration required to produce long, detailed articles on wisdom, and would be better off writing shorter, more frequent snippets about life, and how one might succeed or fail to live better.

Hopefully, this shift from allocentrism to a more egocentric view of wisdom will make for more frequent blog entries, firmly grounded in the real world.

On Artificial Wisdom: For U of T's Cognitive Séance 45

It’s rather unfortunate that I couldn’t be there for the Mind Matters conference, and that I’m missing this wonderfully-themed Cognitive Séance as well. Even so, I’ll contribute by adding a few thoughts. I started typing this stuff out as a wall post, but my words have once again outgrown their container, so I’ve moved them to my blog. Well, here’s what I have:

A couple of useful approximations of wisdom that I’ve found useful are “problem solving ability in the absence of expertise”, and “meta-expertise”. Neither is perfect, but both are instructive. The first can be understood as being “execution-level”, while the second is “development-level”. The performance-competence distinction comes to mind.

Goals and problems are relevant to discussions of wisdom. Problem detection and goal selection are flip-sides of the same coin. The first indicates an external disruption of homeostasis, while the second suggests an internal redefinition of the same. The agitation or dissonance that this state of affairs produces is what moves the agent to act.

Action can be external or internal. External action, as Searle might say, attempts to fit the world to the agent’s preferences, while internal action attempts to fit the agent’s preferences to the world. So long as the world-mind difference is reduced sufficiently, the “problem” will have been solved satisfactorily.

To witness wisdom in action typically requires an unfamiliar state of affairs. One kind of foolishness is to mistake the unfamiliar-yet-irrelevant as a problem. If the unfamiliar scenario is genuinely unacceptable, though, a wiser agent (understood in some manner that is independent of this problem) will be more likely to find a solution than a less wise agent (assuming that neither have domain expertise).

Since expertise is out of the picture, wise agents appear to rely on heuristics. If two agents have identical repertoires of heuristics, the one that selects a subset for use in a more context-sensitive fashion is more likely to reach a solution. Having a larger repertoire of heuristics, I would imagine, might initially provide an advantage, but would eventually lead to inefficient heuristic selection.

These execution-level thoughts about wisdom apply “at runtime”, so to speak. On the other hand, wisdom also involves development-level components. To continue the analogy, they are “compile-time” factors. This is where “wisdom as meta-expertise” enters the discussion. For example, the heuristics an agent learns over time affects how well it can solve an unfamiliar problem. This means that some deviation from homeostasis encouraged the agent to revise its repertoire of heuristics. It (partially) solved its “sub-optimal heuristics” problem, and if it practises this skill enough, it might gain expertise in heuristics optimization. Similarly, acquiring expertise various specific domains might lead to “expertise” in expertise acquisition. The reason I’ve used scare-quotes is that “domain-general expertise” is an oxymoron, though I’m not sure whether “expert generalizer” is.

Now I’ll turn to Artificial Wisdom (AW). Some artificial expert systems that exist today have been spoon-fed their abilities, while others have become experts through practise. It’s this second type of artificial systems that are more likely to act as the forerunners to AW. One important tool that helps humans acquire expertise is generalizing across different instances of the same kind of problem. “The star-shaped peg fits in the star-shaped hole” and other blindly-discovered solutions to similar problems can lead an intelligent agent to heuristics like “look for a hole that’s the same shape as this peg”.

Notice how I’ve performed a bit of recursion above. Generalizing across instances of the “acquire expertise” problem, I’ve picked out the “generalize over problem instances” heuristic. Continuing this recursive trend might prove fruitful to AW research.

Wise agents probably excel in identifying accidental successes and developing them into reliable algorithms and heuristics, kind of how Jeff Hawkins describes the neuroscience of rehearsal in On Intelligence. Other essential mechanisms for developing AW include ways to evaluate similarity and relevance.

I hope all of you have a great Séance!

xkcd on the Extended Mind

On August 3, I was flipping through kxcd’s nerdiddlyumtious comic archive, and decided to share this one on my facebook wall. By the time I checked my account the next day, my wonderful CogSci friend from university and bona fide IT maven, Vladislav Sekulic, had responded with these praiseworthy posts:

Vladislav Sekulic So true! Brings up interesting issues. Compare Mike1979 chatting with his Wikipedia/Google-savvy friend to an actual car mechanic/expert. Suppose he gets the same advice and answers. Does his internet savvy friend know as much as the mechanic about car repair? 

To narrow down the situation here a bit. Let's say his friend could always have the internet handy and could find any declarative piece of information that is relevant regarding car repairs. Or if we're talking about the medical domain, suppose additionally that the person one way or another has free online access to any scientific journal they could care to search, and can obtain/borrow any textbook that is typically assigned to novices in the domain of interest. Assume the person has a modicum of scientific ability and critical thinking, can write well, etc.

Would this person be able to answer any question or present a good argument for a given position regarding these domains? I.e., aside from declarative knowledge, is there a component to expertise in a domain that is a superset and cannot be acquired except through actual practice of the domain? 

For control, let's further assume that procedural knowledge is not relevant, i.e., the person does not actually have to be able to repair an engine or perform a heart transplant, they just need to be able to give step-by-step instructions on how to do the same, or give advice about it, or argue why a certain procedure is not optimal in some way, etc.

One reason I've wondered about these issues relates to self-proclaimed "experts" who blog or otherwise put information online about an opinion they have on a subject, whether politics, climate change, health, or otherwise. They may present a cogent argument, and give good evidence, even going so far as to quote papers from reputable scientific journals. Nevertheless, they do not have formal training in that field. 

Some people who would read their opinion would not care about that, and only be impressed with the actual arguments -- though, to be fair, in many of these cases I'm sure there is some implicit confirmation bias that the person held before even reading the piece. But others would disregard the argument out of hand simply because they do not have the relevant credentials, regardless of the substance of their reasoning. Who would be right?

Sometimes such a self-proclaimed expert will be able to (seemingly) successfully spar with an actual expert in the field. This is perhaps most readily apparent on climate change denier blogs. To a lay person or amateur, it may seem that the blogger and the scientist are on equal footing. But perhaps this would not be the case with a third-party observer that is also an expert, say an actual climate scientist (I can't think of a real example, this is just hypothetical and may not actually happen, which is telling in itself). They may find it "obvious" that the blogger is way out of league. For example, they would never actually endorse their post to be published in an actual scientific journal -- *aside* from any considerations regarding the person's credentials, i.e., rejection on the basis of the writing alone. 

Again, our climate change denier blogger has all of the abilities I've attributed to them above (full online/journal/textbook access). And I know, I've switched from car repair to climate change, but they both relate to expertise and I hope can be addressed in the same way (or not?).

So, what is the difference between the lay person who sees the online climate change dispute as legitimate, and the expert who sees the climate change denier blogger as being "obviously wrong"? 

Is there something really silly about the situation as I've presented it?

Am I totally procrastinating right now??

August 4 at 8:34pm

Vladislav Sekulic I see it as a bit of an "information age" version of a Chinese Room, but am ultimately most interested in the nature of expertise and, importantly, credibility, which has obvious social implications.

August 4 at 8:37pm

Vladislav Sekulic To be fair, I should give a stab at this first. Prima facie, I would say that one difference is that although the super-blogger and expert can have access to the same factual information, the latter has had time to integrate this information in such a way that they can find connections that are not readily apparent, and can see the "big picture" that lets them reason in a way that is more veridical. Although, to be sure, even (and especially) amongst experts, there can be deep disagreements about the "big picture", so perhaps this consideration is not a good one.

August 4 at 8:46pm

Given the time and thought that Vlad had already invested in this conversation, I decided against standard facebook protocol (which typically involves a crass one-liner by way of reply) and bagan typing out a more suitable response. Before I knew it, my reply had swelled far beyond sensible facebook post length, even by our own outrageously verbose standards. With my own post nowhere near complete, Vlad and I were joined by the brilliant Tristan Nixon:

Tristan Nixon I think your last comment is the most telling. A person who searches online for a practical piece of advice, and then parrots the answer to a friend does not really "know" the answer to the query - they are simply acting as a proxy for the internet's "knowledge". A mechanic (one hopes), not only knows a lot of practical advice about cars, but also has a sophisticated and detailed mental model which unites and organizes that knowledge. They aren't just parroting facts from a big database in their heads, they can use the model to generate an indefinitely large set of different suggestions, advice, predictions, diagnoses, etc. about cars. Its a competence vs. performance distinction. A lay person may have a sufficient model of a car to be able to digest and understand a certain piece of information about spark plugs, but their ability use their limited model to adapt to novel and unforeseen issues is going to be much less.

August 5 at 6:51pm

Tristan Nixon As for climate change denier bloggers, I think there's a small handful of amateurs who actually have a fairly decent understanding of the science, and make a few good critical arguments. There's also a whole lot who know very little and who make overly simplified arguments that appeal to a lay audience precisely because they give the illusion that these issues are simpler and more straight forward than they really are.

August 5 at 7:12pm

After nearly a fortnight’s worth of typing, procrastination, thought, and delays, I finally posted my response as a facebook note.

Needless to say, I have yet to receive a response. :-)

Instead of having you click through to the old note, I’m copying the whole thing below. While facebook’s intellectual property issues provide enough justification for this redundancy, the main reason that I’m putting this up here is that I had accidentally switched “Mike1979” and “Me” in my note. This glaring error is corrected in the version below.

Mind over Meter

Singularly rustling

Peerless paradox

Cursed well's divination

Moored hyperbolous

Send me higher fluidly

Synchronominous

Bicamerally dualist

God in us we trust