Even in Kyoto

My attention span for subjects in cognitive psychology has traditionally been limited by impatience over heuristics. It's an arena where humans can't help being subjective, and it's easy to get tangled up in this subjectivity to a point where one becomes blind to alternative ideas and evidence and ways of thinking. Kahneman is continuing to do a sensitive job of covering important gaps in how humans think about, interpret, and respond to the world around us. I have a feeling that I will wind up pulling out some excerpts to savor further.

In the meantime, here are two things that popped up yesterday, both touching on how scientific thinking can be transformed over time. They highlighted one of the most important things that Kahneman has done, from a philosophical standpoing: when Kahneman has encountered resistance to his ideas and evidence, he has made a concerted effort to work with those who have an opposing viewpoint to figure out how to reconcile different perspectives.

In contrast, for years now I have been observing some Huge Arguments in sociobiology that have largely just exasperated me, over the evolution of eusociality. At one point, a couple of years into graduate school, a group of us got together as a small class to work through the relevant ideas and math for the sake of understanding group selection. It wasn't easy, but with the help of a couple key people, we reached a point where we all felt like we had a good sense of the mechanics, even if we hadn't reached the stage where we had ideas on how to structure and test hypotheses on the subject. That was sufficient for me; my main interests lie elsewhere.

But the evolution of eusociality is obviously a Big Question for sociobiologists, so of course some prominent figures in the field have had longstanding interest in being involved in answering the question. When Wilson and Nowak's paper appeared in the journal Nature in 2010, it created quite a stir, but as this blog post so aptly puts it, "Reading the protracted back and forth between the challengers and defenders of kin selection is like watching a tennis match in which the ball abruptly changes shape, size, colour, and direction every time it crosses over the net."

In this case, there may be hope in the long term, but the tennis match has left its mark on interpersonal relations in the field of sociobiology, which I think is something of a shame.

Yesterday I also encountered a piece about an emeritus faculty member from Berkeley, Marian Diamond, who is the subject of a new documentary because of her influential career spent studying the human brain. The brief video snippet in the article also provides commentary about how Diamond faced resistance to the ideas she was interested in pursuing. But it sounds like a worthwhile documentary project in that she was eventually able to convince people that longstanding notions about how the brain works were wrong. I also like her perspective on five things that promote brain health (diet, exercise, challenge, newness, love). To some extent, this all actually wraps back around to Kahneman, who in the most recent chapter of Thinking, Fast and Slow has pointed out that humans do a much better job of generalizing from anecdata than we do of applying general statistical information to specific cases. It will be easier to follow Diamond's story than it would be to follow a history of neuroscience.

Yesterday evening was splendid. It began with another game of Scrabble in the Bunker, trifold_flame's new office. Only this time, the Bunker's harsh edges were softened with the aid of a new rug, gentle lighting, and a hand-crocheted amoeba. E is truly amazing. As I said to D as we walked over to the Bunker, playing Scrabble in E's office somehow makes it feel like an erudite activity. I almost wanted to be wearing a sweater with elbow-patches, although it would have gotten a bit too warm after a while.

Scrabble wrapped up just in time for sblat and I to head over to listen to a lecture by Daniel Dennett...or so we thought. I had e-mailed to ask about tickets for the lecture, and was informed that there would be no tickets, so I mistakenly assumed that the size of the venue would accommodate the audience. Alas, we were directed to an unplanned and hastily assembled overflow room, where, several minutes into the talk, we were finally able to both see (sort of) and hear Dennett. [Eventually, you might be able to watch his lecture courtesy of the Beyond Center, here.]

Dennett's talk was entitled "Darwin's Strange Inversion of Reasoning," and thus focused on one of Dennett's favorite subjects, the theory of evolution by natural selection. [The "strange inversion," in this case, was Darwin's idea that higher levels of complexity could emerge from simple processes, which Dennett likened to Turing's reasoning about how computers could work]. I'm not sure that I learned much that was new, but I'm not sure I expected much that was new, for Dennett covers this subject extensively in Darwin's Dangerous Idea and related concepts in Consciousness Explained. So instead, I focused on observing the semantics of his lecturing style (his, I assume, intentional re-appropriation of the word "design," for example, to refer to the products of evolutionary processes).

In the lecture, he did a slightly better job of elaborating on his meaning of the word "truth," which was something that had been bothering me after reading Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He basically indicated that he believes in the arrival at scientific truth through a process of approximation, which is a more satisfactory explanation than what he had stated about science in BTS (where he simply referred to arrival at truth through science).* And yet at the same time, we hypothetico-deductive-ly trained biologists in the crowd cringed every time he used the word "prove."

At the end of the lecture, in response to a question from the audience, he also took a minute to talk about his academic mentor, who, he said, was a beautiful writer who wrote only sentences with impact.



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*Aside to Dad: I don't think Dennett's perspective on "truth" is mutually exclusive with the concept of "encompassing truth" outlined by Primack and Abrams, although it might be more short-sighted. Though one could argue that the short-sightedness itself is a critical issue. I've considered contacting Dennett to find out.