Grothendieck-Winnicott update

One good feature of meeting Adam Phillips was that I got to ask him about Grothendieck’s use of the phrase “the capacity to be alone,” generally associated with the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.  Winnicott was Phillips’s analyst’s analyst, and Phillips has written extensively on him, so I thought I’d run the quote by him.  Phillips told me:

• Grothendieck’s conception of the capacity to be alone as “a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth” is certainly not that of Winnicott, who was talking about a capacity that’s acquired later via the developing relationship between infant and mother.
• Familiarity with psychoanalytic terminology was fairly common in France at the time, and doesn’t necessarily mean Grothendieck was psychoanalyzed or had any particular interest in analytic theory; in particular, the French analyst Francoise Dolto had a radio show in the 1970s which helped popularize Winnicott’s ideas in France.

Me and Adam Phillips, Friday 29 Sep, 11:30am

I have often been told I needed to sit down and have a conversation with a psychoanalyst, and now I’m doing it — in public!  Adam Phillips and I will be at Hillel Friday morning to talk about the challenges of writing about technical material for a general audience.  Feel free to suggest questions for Phillips in the comments.

 

John Doyle on handwaving and universal laws

John Doyle gave this year’s J. Barkley Rosser Lecture at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery; his talk was dedicated to the proposition that tradeoffs between flexibility and robustness in control systems with significant delays are in the end going to be bound by universal laws, just as the operation of a classical Turing machine is bound by laws coming from information theory and complexity theory.  (A simple such one:  a machine that has the potential to produce N different outputs is going to have a worst-case run time of at least log N steps.)

Doyle believes the robustness-flexibility tradeoff should be fundamental to our way of thinking of both biological and technological devices.  He gave the following very illustrative example, which is so simple that you can play along as you read my blog.

Hold your hand in front of your face and wave your hand vigorously back and forth.  It looks blurry, right?

Now hold your hand still and shake your head equally vigorously.  No blurring!

Which is strange, because the optical problem is in some sense exactly the same.  But the mechanism is different, and so the delay time is different.  When your hand moves, you’re using the same general-function apparatus you use to track moving objects more generally.  It’s a pretty good apparatus!  But because it’s so flexible, working well for all kinds of optical challenges, it is slow, and like any system with a long delay, input that oscillates pretty fast — like your waving hand — can cross it up.

When your head moves, it’s a different story:  we have a vestibulo-ocular reflex which moves our eyes in sync with our head to fix the images on our retina in place.  This doesn’t pass through cognition at all — it’s a direct neural connection from the vestibular sensors in the inner ear to the muscles that control eye movement.  This system isn’t flexible or adaptable at all.  It does just one thing — but it does it fast.

(All this material derived from my notes on Doyle’s talk, which went pretty fast:  all mistakes are mine.)

Here are the slides from Doyle’s talk.  (TooManySlides.pdf is the best filename ever!)

Here’s a paper from Science that Doyle said would be especially useful for mathematicians who want to see how the tradeoffs in question can be precisely formalize.  (Authors:  Chandra, Buzi, Doyle.)

The map of adjectives

I am the child of two statisticians, and as a result my childhood reading included the great sourcebook Statistics: A Guide To The Unknown, a collection of essays by some of the great statisticians of the century.  The thing that made a lasting impression on me was the map of adjectives from Joseph Kruskal’s article, “The Meaning of Words.”  Psychologists gathered survey data about pairs of adjectives describing personality traits, asking  to what extent the traits were similar or different, until they had enough responses to estimate a “dissimilarity measure” for each pair.  Then they used multidimensional scaling (pretty new in 1968, I think) to map the adjectives onto the plane in such a way that the distances between adjectives matched the measured dissimilarities as well as possible.  That such a thing was possible was a relevation to me — I guess I knew on some level that arithmetic could be translated into geometry, but I didn’t know that meaning could be translated into geometry.

Here’s the map, from Rosenberg, Nelson, and Vivekananthan’s original paper:

Lev Grossman — they asked him anything

Friend of the blog Lev Grossman did an AMA on reddit tonight about his novels The Magicians and The Magician King.  (I wrote about The Magicians here.)  Lots of good material but I especially liked this from Lev on Narnia:

You know how you — by which I mean me — love your parents, but you’re also kind of permanently angry at them, all the time? That’s how I feel about the Narnia books. I really do love them. I’ve tried to make my daughter read them about 100 times. But I feel so bitter about them too — about what they did and didn’t prepare me for in life.

A story about Giorgio Benda

from Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius:

It is said that, after his wife had died in his arms, he rushed to the piano to express his grief; but soon, becoming interested in the airs he was originating, he forgot both his grief and the cause of it so completely, that, when his servant interrupted him to ask about communicating the recent event to the neighbors, Giorgio jumped up in a puzzle, and went to his wife’s room to consult her.

John Lackey stands up for himself

From today’s Shaughnessy:

Is he willing to acknowledge that mistakes were made? “I guess. Sure. They’re being made in every clubhouse in the big leagues, then. If we’d have made the playoffs, we’d have been a bunch of fun guys.’’

He’s right!  We think we’re judging people’s behavior, but when we judge in retrospect, we approve and disapprove of the same behaviors, depending on the outcome.  See Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect for the same phenomenon described at book length.  A firm’s behavior will invariably be described as “daring” and “bold” when the company is doing well.  When the company’s fortunes turn sour, the same set of decisions are retrospectively reclassified as “reckless” and “foolhardy.”

Movies I cried at in 2011

• Bridesmaids
• The Muppets

What has become of me?  It has something to do with having kids, I think.  Some people say “I became a totally different person when my children are born” but for me it’s been almost the opposite.  In this one way, though, I’ve changed.  Before children I used to be impervious to sentimental scenes.  Now I choke up because one puppet misses another.  Mysterious.

 

Reader survey: do you know your credit card number by heart?

I don’t know mine.  I have to look at my card whenever I purchase something online.  Why?  It seems to me that I type or say my credit card number as much as I type or say my phone number, and I would consider it totally weird not to have my own phone number committed to memory.

On the other hand, my youth was spent in an environment where you had to recall your own phone number all the time, because it wasn’t programmed into your phone and you had to dial it every time you wanted to use it.  So the followup question for those readers who grew up in the cellphone era is:  do you know your own phone number by heart?

 

David Foster Wallace was not famously depressive

The LA Review of Books, reviewing Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly’s All Things Shining:

It may seem strange for a book about the good life to make such an extended example of Wallace, given that he was famously depressive and hanged himself.

No!  David Foster Wallace was not famously depressive.   Lots of people who read him very, very thoroughly, including me, didn’t know he suffered from depression until after his death.  His depression is only intermittently present in his writing and never governs it.  To read his books as a warm-up to his suicide is to waste them.