Author: Mark Davis

Entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and author. Bent on worldwide understanding.

The Pregnant Machinery of Metaphor

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Sylvia Plath has some thoughts about pregnancy in “Metaphors”:

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

It seems, at first blush, that metaphors have some creative substitutive similarity to the concept they are replacing. We can imagine Plath laboring over this child in nine lines, fitting the pieces together, cutting out syllables like dangling umbilicals, finding each part in a bulging conception, until it was finally born, alive and kicking.

OK, sorry, I’ve gone too far, fallen over a cliff, tumbled down through a ravine, dropped into the foaming sea, where I now bob, like your uncle. Stop that!

Let’s assume that much human creativity occurs through a process of metaphor or analogy making. This certainly seems to be the case in aspects of physics when dealing with difficult to understand new realms of micro- and macroscopic phenomena, as I’ve noted here. Some creative fields claim a similar basis for their work, with poetry being explicit about the hidden or secret meaning of poems. Moreover, I will also suppose that a similar system operates in terms of creating networks of semantics by which we understand the meaning of words and their relationships to phenomena external to us, as well as our own ideas. In other words, semantics are a creative puzzle for us.

What do we know about this system and how can we create abstract machines that implement aspects of it?… Read the rest

Good Reads in the Season of Existential Dread

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Naked self-promotion warning!

I’ve recently updated reconquista.pub to an improved design. Check out Short Fiction for, well, some free distractions. Meanwhile, I’ve joined Goodreads as an author and have been gradually building out my author’s profile.

These changes are part of a new advertising campaign for ¡Reconquista! designed for this upcoming political season. Welcome to the farce in this time of existential dread!… Read the rest

Measuring Belief and Quackery

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While reviewing reporting on the RNC this afternoon, I found myself curious about the protocols at news organizations with respect to their editorial boards. For instance, does the Washington Post editorial board require that claimed facts within all opinion pieces are not clearly disputed? Does the New York Times? I suspect yes, which is what we see in the lawsuit filed by Sarah Palin against the New York Times concerning the suggestion that Palin’s campaign was relevant to the shooting of Gabby Giffords. There was at least a debate that rose to the level of the Opinion Editor, if not the board.

I was investigating this because I am curious how WaPo handles Trumpy columnists like Mark Thiessen and Hugh Hewitt, who are mostly cheerleaders without baggage for the current president, with only occasional whataboutisms and other distracting suggestions about Biden’s candidacy. They don’t defend lies and cons. They just cheer. Meanwhile, the board itself came down hard on the repeated falsehoods of Pamela Bondi and the ongoing slaughter of truth in the service of the Trump 2020 campaign.

The mainstream press represents Trump and cronies as conmen and women, manipulative, self-serving, corrupt, cruel, ignorant, ineffectual, morally questionable, and out-and-out liars. And the press uses facts to do so. Yet Trump maintains a remarkable following despite this evidence, with many quizzical onlookers at a loss as to the psychology of Trump’s followers.

In this modern example, there are many, many resources that can be used to fact check and form opinions. Yet people choose to rely on only a few and discount others as being biased.

I was recently reading some fairly detailed Bayesian analysis by philosophers concerning Hume’s argument against miracles.… Read the rest

Fiction in a Preeminent Reality

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Young Adult fiction almost always has a simple theme. The hero or heroine is slowly unveiled as a unique and salutary figure, special by birth or heritage, and ideally suited to save the world. Their coming of age is a progression of minor crises, often spread out over multiple volumes, and the reader identifies herself with the protagonist thus lifting her thoughts from the humdrum life of school and social expectations that crowd in from daily life. It is escapism in the most earnest sense, but it is also a form of narcissistic manipulation through fantasy and play. Think of Harry Potter, the Twilight books, the Lightning Thief, Katniss. There isn’t anything to learn as the characters pinball around and the onion’s layers are peeled back to reveal the primary conflict that is finally resolved with a grand confrontation. It’s anesthetizing in the grandiose fulfillment of teenage hopes for being desired and special. And it sells and sells, and with plenty of merch, too.

Literary adult fiction can have a similar anesthetic effect. In this case there is the solemn effort to draw out characterization until the reader identifies parts of themselves in the personas. Katy Waldman at The New Yorker takes on the du jour authors Naoise Dolan and Sally Rooney, both earnest young Irish writers claimed to represent the souls of millennials, in a recent review of Dolan’s Exciting Times. But the books come across as dull counterpoint to YA fiction in most ways. Where Harry Potter is on a journey to confront his familial nemesis, this literature has characters nodding to class struggle while “reflexively” (per Waldman) engaging in self-awareness about that struggle. There is no revolution going on because these bourgeois women and men are rebelling only cognitively to the Sturm und Drang of crusty Hong Kong life.… Read the rest

Innocents in Intellectual History

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In 1999, I lived in a modest, rented townhouse in Redmond, Washington with my wife and a year-old baby. I had just quit my academic R&D position in a fit of pique over issues of contracts and conscience, and had uprooted our lives to go to Microsoft to be a program manager while still harboring an academic’s independent streak. I had hair down to nearly my waist that I tied back in a ponytail after it dried a bit on my way to work. I had a coordinating goatee, too. On dark, overcast days I would sometimes reach back to reposition my hair tie and the cinched area would still be mildly damp into the afternoon.

In Seattle that year, the World Trade Organization came to meet and with it violent protests over, well, what was it over? Some of it had to do with the notion of globalization of the economy. Some of it had to do with a hope for labor empowerment. Some of the participants were just anarchists, it seemed. I had a run-in one morning with a door guard-type who thought I had tailgated her through a security door at Microsoft. We had been warned in a corporate-wide email about security concerns were the protests to come out to the suburbs. I dutifully backed out, pulled the door shut, and ran my access card to open the door. Curiously, even after that, she decided not to ride the elevator up with me, a look of uncertainty and fear in her eyes.

And then there were the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 that felt similar to those Seattle actions of more than a decade before.

Kurt Andersen, author of the memorable Fantasyland, has a new book and a new Atlantic essay, College-Educated Professionals Are Capitalism’s Useful Idiots, that continues his theme of capturing intellectual history as a series of consistent trends that are easily observable and digested.… Read the rest

See my setup in Cult of Mac!

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Just noticed that Cult of Mac used my compute and sound rigs in their Setups category.

Check it out, here!

A few added notes/corrections to CoM bit:

  1. Raspberry Pi (not Pie).
  2. Topping D90 MQA DAC, which adds hardware MQA decoding. MQA is largely considered a “snake oil” standard for high quality digital audio, but I of course had to try it.
  3. A DAC (digital-to-analog converter) does not “ultra-filter.” A DAC just converts digitally-encoded music information into analog for playback. At its best, a DAC makes no changes to the encoded signal. The Topping D90 MQA is at the high end of the best measuring DACs, meaning that it preserves the original signal extremely well. Eh, there is a roll-off filter that keeps stray high frequencies out, but that’s just standard stuff.
  4. Timing of my analytics platform sale was garbled.
  5. I don’t do Zoom, but do use the webcam for Skype, Slack, and FaceTime.
… Read the rest

Post Pale and Nerdy

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White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert Jones is making the interview and excerpt cycle, here and here. I’m on the fence whether to read it since I think I get the gist from the excerpts and interviews, though I do often read controversial social criticism, social science, and religious thinking (Charles Murray, Coming Apart; Ehrman, Heaven and Hell; etc.). I inevitably learn something new. Here, though, the meta question is how a major religion that makes truth and moral claims to its adherents can harbor and tolerate something as repugnant as slavery and racism. Now, it might be argued that slavery and racism were simply part of our shared human past where tribes and nations vied for resources and land, but this of course argues against the possibility that religious traditions reflect some kind of special truth insofar as we are wedded to the idea that slavery and racism are bad, always and everywhere. Yet, from the “curse of Ham” to the endless support for slavery in the Old and New Testaments, and even the skin color tribal curses in Book of Mormon, there was plenty of ammunition for recent religious communities in America to be supportive of white supremacy, much less slavery.

And this is where the pale and nerdy comes in. In his review of Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing (which I also own) in the New York Times, physicist and philosopher David Albert took Krauss to task for bothering with the whole effort of trying to seriously engage with religious arguments concerning the origins of the universe at all:

When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and something full of loathing and contempt for every­thing essentially human.

… Read the rest

Evolving Ought Beyond Is

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The is-ought barrier is a regularly visited topic since its initial formulation by Hume. It certainly seems unassailable in that a syllogism designed to claim that what ought to be done is predicated on what is (observable and natural) must always fail. The reason for this is that the ought framework (call it ethics) can be formulated in any particular way to ascribe the good and the bad. A serial killer might believe that killing certain people eliminates demons from the world and is therefore good, regardless of a general prohibition that killing others is bad. In this case, we might argue that the killer is simply mistaken in her beliefs and that a lack of accurate information is guiding her. But even the claim that there is an “is” in this case (killing people results in a worse society/people are entitled to be free from murder/etc.) doesn’t really stay on the factual side of the barrier. The is evaporates into an ought at the very outset.

There are efforts to enliven some type of naturalistic underpinnings of moral reasoning, like Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape that postulates an adaptive topology where the consequences of individual and group actions result in improvements or harm to humanity as a whole. The end result is a kind of abstract consequentialism beneath local observables that is enervated by some brain science. Here’s an example: (1) Better knowledge of the biological origins of disease can result in behavior that reduces disease harm; (2) It is therefore moral to improve education about biology; (3) Disease harm is reduced resulting in reduced suffering. This doesn’t quite make it across the barrier, though, because it presupposes an ought for humans that reduces the imperatives of the disease itself (what about its thriving?),… Read the rest

Critical Surveillance in the Showman State

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I’ve been watching the steady stream of citizen-captured videos of bad actors in our little democracy. From racist police murders, to super-Karens, to anti-Antifa gun toters exercising intimidation, the mobile phone capture is revealing—and the internet is amplifying—the angry and ugly aspects of society that were once just local phenomena. Traditional media could promote them, but only when the events fit the channel restrictions on content, time, relevance, and taste. Now the channels are constantly expanding and the nascent ugliness is too.

Positive effects of this newfound awareness include policy changes like the requirements of body cameras for police, though some have argued that such videos violate the privacy of the subjects of police enforcement as often as they mitigate illegal behavior on the part of the police. Still, there is no going back. I purchased Google Glass during the beta period and experimented with the unit. I still own it and it still boots up. When they first came out there were reports of violent actions by people who were unhappy being subject to potentially always-on video recording. Now we have “Hey Siri, I’m being pulled over” audio triggers that are designed to enhance one’s recourse in the event of police misbehavior. Meanwhile, drones and license plate scanners by private companies can be subscribed to by police to be able to locate cars anywhere in metro areas quickly and efficiently, while at the same time the legality of attached GPS transponders for tracking suspects is constantly under judicial scrutiny. And facial recognition systems are racially biased, resulting in false-positive arrests of racial minorities (and likely others, too).

There is an entire field of Continental Philosophy that derives from Marxist theory and that goes by the title “critical theory.”… Read the rest

Architects, Farmers, and Patterns

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The distinction between writing code and writing prose is not as great as some might imagine. I recently read an article that compared novelists’ metaphors concerning writing. The distinctions included the “architect” who meticulously plans out the structure of the novel. Plots, characters, sets, chapter structure—everything—are diagrammed and refined prior to beginning writing. All that remains is word choice, dialogue, and the gritty details of putting it all on a page. Compare this to the “farmer” approach where a seed is planted in the form of a key idea or plot development. The writer begins with that seed and nurtures it in a continuous process of development. When the tree grows lopsided, there is pruning. When a branch withers, there is watering and attention. The balanced whole builds organically and the architecture is an emergent property.

Coding is similar. We generally know the architecture in advance, though there are exceptions in the green fields. Full stack development involves decoupled database back ends, front end load balancers and servers, and middleware/coding of some stripe. Machine learning involves data acquisition, cleaning, training, and evaluation. User experience components then rely on “patterns” or mini-architectures like Model-View-Controller and similar ideas pop up in the depths of the model and controller, like “factory” patterns that produce objects, or flyweights, adaptors, iterators, and so forth. In the modern world of agile methodologies, the day-to-day development of code is driven by “stories” that are short descriptions of the goals and outcomes of the coding, drawing back to the analogy with prose development. The patterns are little different from choosing to use dialogue or epistolary approaches to convey parts of a tale.

I do all of the above when it comes to writing code or novels.… Read the rest