TL81.net

This is neat. Enter a bit of a simple bit of code and a placeholder image appears to order. Like this:

Or this:

It’s a kind of image lorem ipsum placeholder thing. One of the beautiful things about blogging is that you can describe things like this and then find them again using The Google later. Hey, where’s that link to the image lorem ipsum placeholder thing? Paving the Vannevar Bush trails.

As I understand it, Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s argument runs something like this:

• We’ve always been vulnerable to shocks. Shocks – the Black Swans – are unavoidable.
• The size of a shock is partly a function of the size of the system it affects. Globalisation means shocks can be very large indeed.
• The internet and digital abundance are other factors. Because they’re not rooted in the physical world, they can produce changes that are unintuitive and, erm, shocking.
• Complex financial instruments are a feature of the internet and digital abundance. We’re not capable of understanding them from our human perspective.
• We’re not, as a species, capable of thinking about ‘debt’ in a rational manner. It simply isn’t real to us. Empirical evidence demonstrates this clearly.

Therefore, a combination of a massively hyper-connected system, digital goods and complex financial instruments are cognitive kryptonite.

We only have two rational responses to this:

1. End globalisation
2. Convert debt (which we’re not capable of thinking about) to equity (which we are, relatively, because we own a stake)

This summary comes from what Nassim Taleb says on this radio show.

Here’s a piece from ft.com in which he and Mark Spitznagel lay it out, slightly differently to my mind:

Our analysis is as follows. First, debt and leverage cause fragility; they leave less room for errors as the economic system loses its ability to withstand extreme variations in the prices of securities and goods. Equity, by contrast, is robust: the collapse of the technology bubble in 2000 did not have significant consequences because internet companies, while able to raise large amounts of equity, had no access to credit markets.

Second, the complexity created by globalisation and the internet causes economic and business values (such as company revenues, commodity prices or unemployment) to experience more extreme variations than ever before. Add to that the proliferation of systems that run more smoothly than before, but experience rare, but violent blow-ups.

I’ve probably got this wrong. If you read it and spot how, I’d appreciate a heads-up.

Ta!

Not really capable of adding much detail to this, so I won’t. But it’s part of an ongoing investigation into my longitudinal but mild obsession on how much we’re dependent on language as a tool for encoding information.

There’s loads of internet-is-eating-my-brain stuff out there, which, frankly, I’m not that interested in. What I am interested in is just how little fiction I’m reading and what effect this is having on me. But that’s for another post. (Hence the ‘I’ in the title.)

Ed Yong’s blog:

The idea that language affects thought isn’t new. It’s encapsulated by the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, which suggests that differences in the languages we speak affect the way we think and behave. Typically, scientists test this link between language and thought by either comparing people who speak different languages, or by watching children as they, and their linguistic skills, develop. But both approaches have problems. Speakers of different languages also vary in many other ways that can affect the way they think, while growing children are also developing in many other aspects of their mental skills, which could confuse any effect of language alone.

But NSL [Nicaraguan Sign Language] cuts through both of these problems. Here is a language that was learned by successive waves of children whose mental skills were relatively mature, who all came from the same culture, and who all learned the language at the same age. . .

Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these [spatial awareness] tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.” She added, “[They] did not have a consistent linguistic means to encode ‘left of’.”

This is a fascinating result, especially since the first group of adults were older and had been signing for a longer time. It’s clear evidence that our spatial reasoning skills depend, to an extent, on consistent spatial language. If we lack the right words, our mental abilities are limited in a way that extra life experience can’t fully compensate for. Even 30 years of navigating through the world won’t do the trick. . .

This is a subtly different idea than the one espoused by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which suggests that different languages influence how speakers think about their world. By contrast, Pyers’ results focus “on those aspects of human cognition that are dependent on acquiring a language, any language”. She says that the room tasks tap into a set of mental skills that “crucially depends on language and that this relationship between language and spatial cognition should hold true for speakers of all languages”. . .

The grand idea behind all of these singular observations is that as human language evolved, our mental abilities became increasingly entwined with linguistic devices. Those devices are part and parcel of modern language, and thus modern thought. NSL, being a new language, is the exception that proves the rule – as it developed, so did the abilities of those who learned it, from their skills at visualising objects in space to their capacity for understanding the minds of their peers.

If you get a chance, I heartily recommend Oliver Sacks’ Seeing Voices, which made me cry. A voice is a terrible thing to be deprived of.

Update!

Language Log cover the story in some detail, adding helpfully:

. . . let’s not get carried away about the positive impact of “useful words”, the negative impact of “vacuous/fallacious words”, or any of the other common pop misintrerpretations of Sapir-Whorf.  The relationship between language and thought, here and in general, is more subtle and complex than that.

From the about page of The Mind is a Metaphor:

The Mind is a Metaphor, is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century. While the database does include metaphors from classical sources, from Shakespeare and Milton, from the King James Bible, and from more recent texts, it does not pretend to any depth or density of coverage in literature other than that of the British eighteenth century.

I could imagine happily working away on this as a way of life. And, I suspect, so could many others.

Which makes it odd that there aren’t more resources like it. Sometimes, it feels like there’s literally endless amounts of information on the web. So much so that people like Howard Rheingold have posted guides to crap detection to deal with this information overload. Given this overload, it seems fairly logical that a searchable metaphor database would be a useful tool in the toolkit. Being able to analyse the polemic and prose of persuaders via a comparative lens would be amazingly useful, I think. Are there patterns to metaphorical use, for example? I suspect there are (although you can find patterns in anything if you look hard enough).

I wondered if there were other metaphor banks on the web. There aren’t – not really. Though there are (some fairly sketchy) resources.

1. There’s this kind of thing (though I’m not sure how legal this is):

Metaphors-Dictionary

(It’s not got the faceted search of The Mind is a Metaphor, either. It’s just a book on the web.)

2. Knowgramming has lots of stuff on metaphor, but it’s a usability nightmare. I did like this test of metaphor strength, though I’m not sure why.

Metaphor Reversibility: The stronger the metaphor, the more reversible it becomes.

I also enjoyed these Top Ten lists:

• The Top Ten Metaphors of 2005
• The Top Ten Metaphors of 2006
• The Top Ten Metaphors of 2007
• The Top Ten Metaphors of 2008

3. Metaphor Sky is a searchable database. It doesn’t seem to have much to search.

4. Here’s some conceptual stuff from Lakoff.

5. This one’s ugly, and has the patterns pre-discovered. Which I suppose is a feature not a bug.

6. And that’s about it, that I could find. How would you go about cloning The Mind is a Metaphor’s back end and building your own not limited to eighteenth century British literature?

Dan Zarrella says adjectives and adverbs don’t perform well on Facebook:

Strong words

As he points out, this is exactly the advice that Strunk and White gave us in The Elements of Style:

Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.

But even before Strunk and White we had the words of Humpty Dumpty to guide us:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again.
“They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”