Author Archives: Michael

To take the "communities behave like packs" idea a bit further…

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There are two special social standings within a wolf pack: alpha and omega. Alpha wolves determine the course that the pack takes and maintain their status primarily by psychological and physical intimidation (but rarely actual force). Omegas, by contrast, are the pawns: the lowest-ranking wolves in the pack. They receive a great deal of aggression from the other wolves. When resources are scarce, they have the lowest priority on feeding (this is significant because feeding is otherwise rather egalitarian within the pack). Sometimes they are shunned or even driven out of the pack.

Here’s where it becomes interesting, though: the omegas that are driven out of the pack may establish new packs of their own, establishing themselves as the new alphas – the pawns can be promoted.

As it is with wolves, so it is with humans. In communal settings, such as schools and workplaces, there is at least one individual who is singled out to be the “omega”. Some individuals are naturally popular and charismatic; these are the individuals at the opposite end of the spectrum. People may be uncomfortable around them, and may ostracize, shun, or behave aggressively towards them. Some omegas will learn to live in this station. Others, however, will detach themselves from the community entirely and begin to build a new one.

This is an integral and powerful component of disruptive leadership. The existing “alphas” are firmly entrenched in the existing social systems; those that they develop have a high probability of perpetuating only incremental improvements to it at best. Omegas, on the other hand, have garnered an active dislike of the system that has excluded them, and will design their systems on a new ideal, and very likely a highly original (individualistic) one.

"Seed Users"

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When growing a community on a social networking site such as Facebook, I’ve noticed that the majority of users perform little recruiting. There are, however, a small number of users who contribute greatly to the overall population of the group, and these users form the hubs around which the group eventually grows.

Machiavellian Teaching for Unmotivated Students

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In the absence of internal motivation, students will still study for exams, but will put little additional effort into a course.

So an absolutely brutal means of motivating these students is to give 10 exams and keep only the lowest 2 (or drop the lowest and keep the next two up).

They would study because every exam would count. They couldn’t afford to slip up.

It’s the sort of thing that I wish I didn’t even have to think about. In an ideal world, all students would be motivated…

Marketing to the Conventional

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Kohlberg’s stages of moral development indicate not only moral codes, but what people are primarily motivated by (an inseparable consequence of how one sees the world). This makes it useful for marketing.

The majority of individuals fall between stages 3 and 4 of this theory – the “conventional” stages: these people consider actions proper if they support social roles or a position of established authority (“following laws for their own sake” or “doing something because everyone else in my situation does”) or if they promote interpersonal accord (“this will help bring the community closer together”).

Particularly within the area of non-profit advertising, I am finding that this is how a message must be tuned – not “why is it good for its own sake?” but “how will this benefit the most people?”

Holding the position that there is no conflict between individual goals and those of society has made me eager to demonstrate it, however. Particularly when creating a new educational paradigm, this isn’t difficult.

The Will is Monist

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I’m reading about Schopenhauer’s concept of the will, and his position seems dualist: that will and consciousness are separable entities and that the will is a property independent of the mind.

But consider a hungry man at mealtime. His will (to live) compels him to eat. Now consider that same man but with a mild case of gastroenteritis. Only his body has changed – it would still be a rational objective response to eat, in order to acquire additional energy to fight off the illness and to remain hydrated. Any will existing outside of the body should take this into account.

And yet the man would lose his appetite. A change in the condition of his body has resulted in a change in his will. Thus the will must exist inside of the body.

Abstraction: Why *DO* we care about fiction?

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I’m currently reading an interesting book on the philosophy of the Legend of Zelda games (that sort of thing immediately jumps out at you when you see it in a bookstore). The first chapter is on why we care about what happens in the game world, knowing full well that it is fictional.

The author first criticizes the “suspension of disbelief” and “pretend” theories, as we are fully aware that the game situation is not real on a rational level yet are unable to fully control the emotional responses it evokes. The author then proposes a multilevel system of consciousness, under which we may locally consider the game world real yet may be globally aware that the world is still a game (performance anxiety is another example of this – some performers, myself included, become very stressed out prior to a performance, but are we in any mortal danger? No.

I think the author’s theory explains part of the scenario: just as we would pull away from the touch of a hot oven without thinking (a reflex arc), we apply the rules we’ve learned in the real world to the game world:

Fire -> Danger
Spikes -> Sharp pointy objects -> Danger
Monsters -> Deadly animals -> Danger

etc.

When under threat, it has been evolutionary advantageous for us to react quickly, with little to no intermediary processing. We apply our rules to the character, determine that we’re in danger, and respond as if the danger were real.

But there’s the rub: why do we care what happens to the protagonist? Link isn’t a real person. He can’t even speak. We don’t have any situations that can literally relate to his dungeon crawls (although it can be argued that Link’s adventures can be conveyed as metaphors for frightening scenarios in our own lives).

The answer lies in our capacity for empathy: we identify with Link’s motives, with the interactions he has with other characters, and in how his actions move the storyline forward. Because we are controlling Link, we often internalize his actions (“I just found the Master Sword” vs. “Link just found the Master Sword” are both plausible statements when playing the game), but we are just his guide. And because we are responsible for him and we have come to empathize with his motivations and struggle, we endeavor to protect him when threatened.

Programming by Intent via Automatic Search and Function Binding

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There’s a problem with Matlab. Even though it’s great for high-level programming, it just has too many functions, of which even the most seasoned developer is doomed to know only a small fraction. For example, the function pdist will return a matrix of pairwise distances, yet I’ve seen the same being done manually countless times.

Rather than cutting down the functionality provided by the language or forcing the user to “specialize” in studying certain Matlab functionality, I thought of an alternative approach:

The user knows what he wants to do. He wants to “compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”. At this moment, his best bet is issuing the command “lookfor pairwise” and sifting through the results.

But wouldn’t it be nice if he could type “I want to compute the pairwise distance between observations in matrix A”, and, based on the documentation and some tagging of the functions, Matlab would automatically fill in “pdist(A)”?

This can apply to any language, of course. Java seems another good candidate, given the number of standard classes in J2SE.