For some reason, I’m becoming very good at thinking up the same ideas that Google does. A few of them I gave at interviews or SoC proposals well before they were established products, so it is possible that Google used those ideas, but I anticipated others, such as Knol, very shortly before they were launched.
I should somehow use this to my advantage – but I’m not sure how 🙂
To summarize the practical aspect of Panidealism (rather than the theoretical duality):
“You don’t know everything; stop acting like you do.”
That’s it – it simply states that we will never have the complete set of knowledge required to judge the ultimate consequences of ideas, and we should stop limiting ideas on such judgments in our ignorance.
Quoth the New York Times on both perfectly valid research being ignored and how a field becomes “hot”.
The usual pattern is taking place here: first, someone comes up with new results which the scientific community either ignores or rushes to discredit because they’ve somehow got the idea that skepticism (essentially making themselves unreceptive to ideas that don’t fit with their dogma) is the best way to evaluate scientific discoveries:
“But when those tools emerged in the early 1990s, Dr. Dick found stem cells in acute myelogenous leukemia, a blood cancer. He reported that such cells made up just 1 percent of the leukemia cells and that those were the only ones that could form tumors in mice.
Yet Dr. Dick’s research, Dr. Wicha said, “was pretty much ignored.” Cancer researchers, he said, were not persuaded — and even if they had accepted the research — doubted that the results would hold for solid tumors, like those of the breast, colon, prostate or brain.”
Potential avenue that opens up all sorts of treatment possibilities presented, but they “weren’t persuaded”. Nice.
Now, wait for it…
“That changed in 1994, when Dr. Wicha and a colleague, Dr. Michael Clarke, who is now at Stanford, reported finding cancerous stem cells in breast cancer patients.
“The paper hit me like a bombshell,” said Robert Weinberg, a professor of biology at M.I.T. and a leader in cancer research. “To my mind, that is conceptually the most important paper in cancer over the past decade.””
Ah, so you “weren’t persuaded” when one person found it in AML, but if it’s in breasts, well, that’s a whole different story! Now it’s the most important paper in the past decade! After all, even if stem cells may not form in solid tumors, there must be no value in treating what is probably the most virulent form of leukemia, right? (I had described this exact sociological phenomenon of violent swings in opinion with new presentations just yesterday on a Slashdot discussion thread – also, why the disporportional emphasis on breast cancer? There are other cancers that kill many more people, have much higher fatality rates, and strike both sexes equally).
Now we see an idea becoming “hot”:
“Dr. Weinberg and others began pursuing the stem-cell hypothesis, and researchers now say they have found cancerous stem cells in cancers of the colon, head and neck, lung, prostate, brain, and pancreas.
Symposiums were held. Leading journals published paper after paper.”
Etc.
It’s a good thing they’re taking this theory seriously. It’s a bad thing that they ignored it for as long as they did because they were too convinced that they already knew everything to take a valuable hypothesis seriously. Sure, demand proof if you’d like. But don’t take absence of it or a perceived lack of quality as evidence that the hypothesis is wrong. Science is not law; the burden of proof can be taken up by others if they are not satisfied with the evidence because ultimately, we are all in this together.
Here’s another interesting tidbit from a linked article, which in my mind supports my theory that one tumor could supplant another if injected into the same site:
“They then injected laboratory-grown cancer cells into the benign tumors, which spread swiftly throughout the teratoma clusters. The result, they believe, is an ideal test bed for anticancer agents.”
This in turn supports my idea that it is possible to alter the characteristics of a tumor by harvesting and injecting particular cells. Selecting the weak in this manner can possibly make tumors more sensitive to treatment.
Still waiting on the equipment and training – or collaboration with someone who has such equipment and training – to actually test that one 🙂
People seem to always think a person will be the “last” polymath… until the next invariably comes along.
Positive thoughts to combat the usually-negative tone of the past few years and to set an upbeat plan of action for the next few:
I think my “dark year” may be over. I’m beginning to realize now that there is only one person who can suppress me: me. Perhaps my failure to obtain good training has made my ordeal more difficult, but even at Temple, my ideas are beginning to blossom… and I’m finally being given a chance to pursue them. As for the difficulty of obtaining the training I wanted, I am not responsible for others, and I am not going to be held responsible for the poor decisions others have made. My training is what it is. I am doing what I can. Let society gain returns only to the extent it has invested; I will no longer overwork to compensate for my lack of knowledge. If I live long enough, I have too much talent and too many ideas to be suppressed forever; that is sufficient.
My classwork is finished. I obtained an A- in my last required traditional class, which is sufficient to exempt me from the qualifier altogether. This means all I need to do is pass the preliminary exams (on my research, which I can do now, much less in six months) and defend my dissertation. I’m going to continue on with my dissertation while I wait for feedback, since waiting indefinitely for feedback while doing nothing is a bad idea for making progress.
My idea for extending semidefinite embedding is implemented and working. I haven’t compared the speed or memory requirements, but I imagine it will consume significantly less memory than traditional SDE. After doing the experiments, I’ll put a paper together and it will go off to KDD. It’s completely novel, so if it is rejected, that is their problem; I will no longer assume responsibility for the outcome of others’ decisions. Let it be on their heads; I publish to spread my ideas, not for the fame! Manifold learning is quite an interesting field of research, since, as I mentioned before, it models the cognitive process of abstraction very well. I’m also learning that many things in data mining are guess-and-checks (they like to call it “optimization”, but that’s really what it is – guess, check, move, repeat) on MSE, which is, to put it bluntly, stupid. Gradient descent is probably the optimal stepwise procedure, since the gradient vector points in the direction of maximum ascent by definition, but it’s not optimal in the sense of total convergence: we can converge much faster if we can extrapolate parts of the global MSE curve from local information, which we most certainly can do, especially in the case of polynomials (we know EXACTLY how many roots it will have, we know whether the function is odd or even, and yet we don’t use this information!) We might be wrong, but the error should obey probabilistic bounds, and convergence should still be easy to achieve. I guess I’ll need to figure the error bounds out, even though I hate doing that sort of work.
Anyway, this is a whole class of things to pursue.
The Softee Variations are complete – all seven and a half minutes of them. The theme is something most people would consider trivial, but it really is an excellent theme to write variations to – as evidenced by the fact that I derived a second theme from it, set it at counterpoint with the first (I still have no counterpoint training, but I’ve learned to let my intuition guide me), and still added a third voice in without a problem – and worked with both of these themes for over 7 minutes, making this my longest piece yet. The second theme is simple and translates well into a minor key, after which I overlay a third theme, again loosely based on the first. My musical style is rapidly evolving in the direction I wish it to go – I’m blending the classical theory I’ve learned, the theory I’ve acknowledged I will never learn and thus intuit, and my melodic and fairly modern style. The result is something completely unique. I continue to experiment with orchestration in “Water” and “Painting a Sunrise”, and I am also finding myself establishing my own unique orchestral arrangement, not for the sake of changing things, but because I desire a precise and unique sound from my music. My music will initially be overlooked, because it’s a niche and music is an art, but my scientific work will eventually drive people to examine my artistic work as well if it’s good enough. Since I write music for the sake of the music itself (it compels me to write it down before it is lost forever), I’ll be ready when this happens.
Lower on the list is “Cap”, the capability-oriented programming language. I know how the language syntax will look, but I haven’t figured out how I’m going to compile it yet. I’ve never had the opportunity to take a class in compilers or programming language theory, so I may need to do some reading first. Maybe no one will use it. That’s fine – it models my cognitive processes well and is much more versatile than OO, so these people will simply be left in the dust. I started programming very early and by now I’m very good at it, but I still work in a paradigm that does not model my own cognitive paradigm, which is inhibitory. Once thought and expression are meshed, I’m going to fly.
Following these things (that is, once I have my Ph. D.), I intend to devote myself to my Polymath idea. The job offers continue to stream in, freeing me from the worries of an uncertain financial future and ensuring that I will indeed have the time and resources to devote to such an undertaking. Three students and one faculty member have already praised the idea and given helpful comments where applicable, but I should attempt to organize a larger community around it. It shouldn’t be hard to do so – you’ll be surprised at how many people the current educational system shortchanges simply because they’re capable of handling much, much more than what schools give them. They want to learn in multiple fields – they want to become polymaths. But they can’t. Think of all of the interdisciplinary challenges – we could solve these much more efficiently if we trained individual polymaths instead of devoting teams of specialized experts to them! For example, if I could gain access to laboratory equipment and some better biological training, my knowledge of computational modeling and machine learning would make me excellent at, say, devising cancer treatments (those following the blog have probably noted that I’ve already devised a few, but lack resources to test or refine them). Of course, once given the prerequisite knowledge, insight is universal.
Mathematically, I’m becoming very powerful. Restlessly so, in fact – like having a lot of bottled up energy screaming for release. I need to prove something with all of the new mathematical knowledge I have acquired, so I’m thinking of resuming my divisor function research. Legendre’s conjecture also looks like an interesting question to pursue. The partial failure of my previous approach (what I presented in my divisor function research was actually an intermediate result, not what I set out to prove) was due to a reluctance to use higher, more abstract levels of mathematics. I know better now.
I’ve acknowledged I will never be a particularly excellent pianist. I can perhaps do anything that requires mental effort, but this restriction is physical. I simply cannot compel my hands to move quickly or accurately enough to become an excellent pianist, nor am I sure all of the practice time I would spend attempting would be put to good use. I’ll continue practicing about one hour a day just to steadily increase my proficiency and to maintain my position ahead of everyone else at the recitals.
This is the end of my Dark Year. It’s the beginning of the Second Ascent.
The sorts of people for whom the best punishment is to simply watch the consequences of their actions unfold tend to be the type that forget what their actions were by the time the consequences roll around, I’ve noticed. If they can’t even remember important actions from day to day, how can they even claim a hold on consciousness?
One highly likely reason for neuroplasticity is to compensate for damage. However, the adaptation of the cortex in primates to accommodate new “limbs” connected via a brain-computer interface is also very interesting, and leads me to believe that tool-using behaviors require a certain amount of such plasticity. After all, there’s no good evolutionary reason for the cortex to adapt to new limbs after a certain age… animals don’t grow new limbs. I suppose one important question that this raises is: “does the same degree of neuroplasticity occur in animals that are less prone to tool use?” Hominids, anyway, are pretty good at it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if primates are too. A handful of other animals, such as finches, ravens, and dolphins might also qualify. But that leaves a large number of animals who aren’t known to be prone to tool use. Would they exhibit the same response?
I’m taking a well-deserved break from all of the research I’ve been doing recently and finally putting the theme to my water suite on paper. I originally composed it for the piano, but something that… ambient… needs an orchestral treatment to do it justice. I notice that I’m developing a preference for ensembles of strings, harp, and flute, but this one also has a French horn carrying the melody to give it somewhat of a stronger, nobler quality than “Painting a Sunrise”, the other piece I’m currently working on with this orchestral arrangement.
But enough of that; onto the main subject of this post: the viola, as an instrument, is overlooked. Most of the solo string repertoire is created for either violin or cello, and some performers and composers can’t even read viola parts because they’re written on the tenor clef (I’ve written enough string work to be able to read fairly well on the tenor clef myself). Even in an orchestral setting, the viola mostly plays inner harmonizations, which means it’s usually playing second fiddle (pun intended) to the violin. The (first) violin is usually playing the melody, so it is heard, the cello is usually playing the bass, so it is heard, but the poor viola is almost always sandwiched right between the two. It adds something, but people just tend to group the sound into “strings”; it isn’t meant to be picked out.
But while deciding which instrument to harmonize the horn part in my piece to, I noticed that the upper registers of the cello, while nice, had a sort of “hollow” timbre, while the violin was too “stringy” to mesh well with the horn. The viola, however, yields a full, rich sort of sound that fits the horn part perfectly without that sort of “stringy” feel (the string quakes in a way that the horn does not, and for this passage, I wanted a sort of noble but tranquil feel). Though I spent a while tinkering with the ensemble and the dynamics, the final result sounds excellent. This leads me to believe that the viola is overlooked, probably because of the propensity in classical music to follow a traditional ensemble. I guess a single string doesn’t usually play with the horns.
As for the rest of the piece, I’ve also noticed that the harp carries an arpeggiated bassline excellently (I guess that’s why they call it “harp-like!”), even when overlaid with almost any solo instrument. I find myself orchestrating a lot of ascending 6/8 arpeggios in this manner. It works well with the horn (not really the trumpet, though), the flue, the oboe, the violin, the clarinet, and perhaps even the piano. I suppose harp + flute is my favorite combination, though it isn’t suitable to every piece.
Ah, to have the chance to do this more often… and to be able to write a minute of music without having to spend an hour ruminating over what would sound best 🙂
Knol is that Google Wikipedia spinoff that I had foreseen about a day before it went public.
Because the site is designed essentially as a “Wikipedia with attribution”, what is going to end up happening in all likelihood is that the people who are credited with the page’s content will actually end up writing fairly little of it. It will fall to others – those working for the expert, if not the general public – to maintain these pages. If Knol becomes sufficiently popular, maintaining a Knol page will become a sort of resume-worthy badge of honor. Because this will help people’s careers, it will become another sort of paper-mill.
Of course, this is precisely the sort of result I’d expect, given the homogeneity I thought existed in Google when I visited. What we’re seeing here is likely the product of a bunch of academics attempting to apply existing concepts in scientific publishing to an online encyclopedia, probably in their 20% time. Unfortunately, as I’ve repetitively stressed, there are many significant problems in the way scientific publishing is conducted, not the least that attribution and work put into the project are often unlinked.
It’s a good idea in theory, but an awful one in practice, not to mention that fragmenting the world’s knowledge is not a good thing. Better to concentrate the efforts of an encyclopedia in one place.
A lot of stuff is going on this week, including a conference deadline for two papers, and because it’s still being reviewed, I don’t think I should continue working on my dissertation this week. Once it’s reviewed, I will resume.
I might still write 2 or 3 pages today if I find some free time, though.