Anarchy vs. Sovereign Structures

There's a curious relationship between forms of government that employ states vs. those that don't. I'll try and touch simplistically on it, and go over a few thoughts.

The main issue at hand is authority, with a corollary being power. Abstractly, systems of Anarchy claim that structures where no individual person, or node, has authority over any other, should perform better at least on average than structures with a command network, i.e. authority. In Anarchy, power is distributed equally across everyone. In other structures, different nodes have different amounts of power, with the most stable structure being one where there's a clear ordering to the power. That is, one node has the majority of the power, and the rest follow from there with no equivalent nodes of useful size. (In a Monarchy, the peasants may all be more or less equal, but the individual power amounts and the sum total of the power in the group is negligible compared to the absolute authority of the Crown.)

When people dismiss Anarchy, they are arguing that either a) authority-less networks perform worse on average and so aren't useful, or b) such a network is unstable (some say impossible) and authority will manifest itself naturally one way or another (typically through mob violence). a) is purely a technical argument that I won't get into here, though briefly I'd mention that while there may be some cases where having a command system definitely helps, such as running corporations or militaries, I think it could be shown that those do not represent the majority of interesting cases. b) is more interesting.

See Full Post and Comments

Inferential Distances Again

I briefly touched upon this previously, but some actual examples in the form of fake dialog would be more useful. Before I get to that though, let me try and frame the problem abstractly. When you master a body of knowledge with long argument chains, you'll find that trying to convince someone of your conclusions, especially the non-intuitive ones, without them going through a similarly long argument chain, is near impossible if they haven't even started on a similar road you took. In the process of trying to explain why you believe your conclusion, you inevitably have to move down to a further level on the inferential chain and create a link from that level to your conclusions. At science conferences, a presenter might do this by starting off with a general set of facts the layman wouldn't be expected to know, but most people in the presenter's field should, and create a link from that point to his presentation's conclusion. A single step such as that has an inferential distance of 1, and has two levels. Now if the same presenter is trying to explain it to a layman, there may be any number of levels below the first that he started with his colleagues, and he now has to go through those first.

But it gets even worse, because the inferential chain is really a graph. There may be some "hierarchy" to it, as in you need to accept certain ideas on the graph before you can move to a different area of the graph with its own network of ideas, so you can consider it a chain with each link being a graph, but that's only valid for strongly hierarchical models.

Now imagine the difficulty that presenter might have trying to explain his conclusions to a layman. Many ideas, or "nodes", in the graph need to be visited and agreed upon or at least understood before he can move up an inferential level. If he's uncertain where the layman's initial knowledge lies, he'll most likely start at a level too high. And so the layman asked him to explain X, suddenly the presenter is explaining Y, Z, W... None of which the layman really understands, and the presenter only realizes this once he gets to W which is reinforced by Y, so he drops down a level to start explaining A, B, C...repeat. This is understandably confusing for the layman, and if the layman is predisposed to not liking the general thrust the presenter is heading for already, he may start shutting out everything. Then he'll accuse the presenter of constantly changing the subject and being dishonest when the presenter is just trying to bring the layman up to a level where understanding X in reasonable terms is even possible.

See Full Post and Comments

Python: map or list comprehensions?

This question seems to come up a lot when doing functional programming in Python. Should you use the more classical map/filter functions, or the Pythonic and usually more readable list/generator comprehensions? Do you do:

map(lambda x: x*x, xrange(11))

or

[x*x for x in xrange(11)]

?

(Note that map in Python3 is lazy and you would use range(), if you want laziness with comprehensions use parentheses instead of brackets to use generators.)

See Full Post and Comments

Plagiarism in Code

Note I'm not talking about copyright infringement, which is criminal, but mere academic plagiarism, which is a civil matter whose probable worst-case outcome is expulsion and reputation damage. Nevertheless it falls inside the sphere of the often- (and ill-) used concept of intellectual property.

I've always had a problem with plagiarism as a concept as well as something to avoid. In English, here's some teacher asking me to analyze a literary work. Okay. The literary work is simple, so what I turn in is near-exact in terms of information as many other students' work, but with my own phrasing. If I happen to match the phrasing of another student in many instances, or now with modern tools anyone on the entire internet, then the teacher suspects plagiarism. How can I avoid something that could happen due to chance alone? (By lowering the chance but that has to pollute the production in some way. I might normally say "Candy tastes good." To avoid plagiarism accusations, I might say "The bumps on the muscle that resides in my head, in the mouth, normally called the 'tongue', detect the chemicals in this sugary substance about to enter my digestive system and tell my brain it's okay to continue." You can continue that line with asking "why?" to every statement, and adding a "because" for all of them (potentially adding on "because"s to each "because"). I could have gone into evolutionary biology with the above.)

My eventual conclusion on plagiarism is that it's not meant to catch uniqueness of thought, nor is it an effort to catch whether a student understands something, but is an attempt to determine whether work was done according to some specification. Even plagiarizers have to do some work, sometimes more work, depending on the circumstances, but it's not the kind of work desired. So plagiarism is very much an effort to regulate the way of doing something, even if the outcome is the same.

See Full Post and Comments

The Cumber Manifesto

I propose we stop calling imaginary and complex numbers imaginary and complex numbers. I propose we throw them all in the same bucket called "Cumbers". This has several advantages, which I shall briefly enumerate.

First is the instant association with a cucumber. Now I don't have kids, so I don't know if Cucumbers are the new Broccoli, but when I was a kid I loved cucumbers as much as I do today. (Though I loved broccoli too, so...) Cucumbers are cool and green and friendly. When written down, Cumbers can even resemble a long cucumber: (3 + 4*j).

Second is just avoiding the names which can lead to confusion in children and some teenagers. I'd like young children to learn algebra, but young children may not be able to fully grasp that one word can have completely different meanings. So when they hear "Imaginary" they think "This doesn't correspond to anything real", or when they hear "Complex" they think "Oh no this is hard." This is compounded by the more important, sad fact that even high school calculus teachers don't know what complex numbers are useful for. I had a great teacher, he didn't know. He said vaguely "electrical engineering." Now I know better, know more, but that's a different subject. Calling them "Cumbers" gets rid of this potentially emotionally distressing situation in the names.

See Full Post and Comments

Why vim? Or: Why a text editor, not an IDE?

People (mostly at my school) have gawked at me when I say I don't use Visual Studio, or I don't use Eclipse, or I don't use Dreamweaver, or I don't use Word and use OpenOffice less and less. Instead I use vim. And the fact that I only have one substitute for all those giant programs speaks volumes about vim.

Of course, it's not just vim. I obviously use compilers and such. But whenever text is involved, it's almost always vim I end up using. I don't particularly like emacs, but they more-or-less have the same practices as vim users if a different philosophy. (Kind of how Christian Monk/Nun practices match up with Buddhist practices even if the philosophies are quite different.)

So I've grown into the habit of saying "Linux is my IDE." I use vim when I need to edit text, and use a host of Linux programs to manipulate that text. I use ant for my Java projects, Makefiles for C/C++ projects, gdb for debugging, $$\LaTeX$$ for documents and homework, and a browser to parse the templates I handwrite that compile down to HTML.

See Full Post and Comments

Fall Semester Classes

(Update: They canceled my Combinatorics class and bait-and-switched the software engineering course, so I had to change a few things around.) Back to school this fall for the start of my Junior year. Where'd the past two years go?

20 credit hours is the norm at my school, it's actually pretty manageable. (And if you think about it, you spend at least 20 hours a week in high school. Not as much time on homework or projects but actual butt-in-seat time seems greater.) If I only had to take 10-13 credits as is common for "full time" students at other schools, I think I'd blow my brains out from boredom. At least with 20 credit hours chances are you'll like most of the classes and the crappy/boring ones are swept under the rug. If you're only taking three classes though, and two of them are crap, I don't think the other one can make you happy no matter how good it is.

Anyway, here's a list of my classes and their descriptions according to the school catalog along with some of my own thoughts.

See Full Post and Comments

Older Posts Newer Posts