My review of "Evolving Your Brain: The Science of Changing Your Mind", (author Joe Dispenza).
Interesting neuroscience, inspiring message, and some old philosophy in new clothes
Overall I enjoyed reading this book, although I did find it somewhat misleading regarding the scientific "paradigm" it offers and the minority philosophical points underlying it, and I was disappointed that there was not more practical applications of the author's interesting model.
My take on this book was almost the opposite of many of the other reviewers here who were either so impressed by the fact that someone would try to sue use science to support "free will" or so dismayed by the amount neuroscience in this book. Neither of those things seems that impressive to me. There *is* a lot of neuroscience here, and much of it is better than average (for a popular non-technical book anyway), but there is also some crude and I think poorly thought out philosophy as well. And the ironic thing for me was that the principles the author espouses for change are pretty mundane and don't really require either the neuroscience or the "consciousness precedes matter" philosophy.
The reasonable principles include such straightforward suggestions as envisioning your end point to organize action, using deliberate shifts of attention to change direction, using rehearsal to change habits, identifying destructive habits of thought, take responsibility for change, and make well-being a priority. Great ideas, but they don't really need the intro to neurosci or quantum physics in my opinion.
Brain science would have been more appropriate if the author had gone into more details about how we make decisions, showing how to influence the thinking process (e.g. see The Owner's Manual for the Brain: Everyday Applications from Mind-Brain Research 3rd Edition, (Howard)), but he avoids *that* sort of research, probably because it would dilute the philosophical message of "free will" that the author seems very concerned with promoting. If there are causal influences on thought, then it doesn't seem so free afterall, the opposite of the rhetorical message of this book.
The author does a pretty good job most of the time selecting and deriving pertinent lessons from neuroscience data and he gives some optimistic and realistic applications for how we can and do change ourselves sometimes. Where there is practical advice given, most of it seems very good to me, which is why I like this book overall and gave it a fairly good rating as inspirational self-help that tries hard to be scientific. As such it may for many people turn out to be a nice corrective to the scientific pessimism they find from many old school medical and psychological experts who are overly deterministic in their prognoses. I guess that's why so many reviewers seem so taken with this book, it does have an element of hope in it dressed in science, and we are more used to getting skepticism or pessimism in scientific treatments.
The author and I both seem to agree that we *can* change ourselves and influence our healing processes deliberately to some degree by rewiring our own nervous system in places, and we both also respect and commit ourselves to scientific causal models. We also both seem to be "compatibilists," people who beleive that our sense of free will and scientific determinism can be adequately reconciled. That far, I liked this book. We may disagree on the limits of self-change in practice in some specific spots, but I think the basic concept of self-healing and self-change is sound and welcome.
However the author also seems to have struggled with the philosophical problem of "top-down causation" at some point and I don't agree with or like the resolution he came up with. The whole concept from the start begins with the idea that thoughts trigger all sorts of physical things that have lasting effects. The author spends a lot of time in the book giving detailed examples of this. I have no problem with that, although it should be mentioned that this is not something new, it has been pretty well documented for decades by other authors, e.g. The Healer Within: The New Medicine of Mind and Body (Locke) and Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing: New Concepts of Therapeutic Hypnosis (Rossi).
The problem with this particular book that I didn't have with those others is: where did the thought itself come from and what is its manifestation in the brain? That's where the author mostly just hand waves the brain mechanisms and defers to the ancient archaic version of "free will" as something that floats free of physical reality through some obscure unspecified quantum mechanical rationale. Why does he need this stretch to point out that we can change ourselves? I don't think he does.
The way thoughts themselves arise is one of the most important and interesting aspects of brain science, and still largely a mystery. The author's good but selective review of neuroscience mentions "free will" a lot but never all the wonderful data that has been accumulated regarding how we make decisions or where our perceptions and misperceptions of "free will" come from. Free will, in the sense that it actually exists and is worth seeking, is not something that escapes the brain and then reprograms it as the author claims, it is a result of that same remarkable brain, even if not entirely understood. At least that is a more interesting and promising line scientifically than hand waving about quantum weirdness and how "thoughts" as disembodied entities cause things to happen in the body. From my perspective, the illusion that makes us feel as if thought has to be non-physical is addressed well in: The Illusion of Conscious Will (Wegner) and Freedom Evolves (Dennett).
This "new paradigm" of the author is actually more philosophy and pop science speculation than hard science I think. It isn't terrible by any means, or impossible, and he isn't alone in considering it, but it is not really a new scientific model at all in any interesting experimental sense. It has been around for a while and has had a small, marginal, but dedicated following outside of mainstream science (and more broadly in popular media).
The author applies the problematic "consciousness is prior to matter" philosophical stance and then at the end of the book he throws in the traditional idiosyncratic interpretation of quantum physics to make the point more "scientific." To be fair, this view is reasonable philosophically and more to the point, I suppose may help non-scientists better appreciate human potential for change, which seems to be the author's primary overriding goal. But personally I think it is a technically completely unneccessary and misleading way to resolve the issue raised by top-down causation. For details on the philsophical issues, Jaegwon Kim's books are particularly helpful, such as: Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation (Kim).
"Top-down causation," is the problem of how the mind, as a product of the brain, can then turn around and influence the body. I would say that this is a problem of how some aspects of brain function can influence others. The author instead joins those modern day Cartesians who evade the scientific problem with philosophy by making "thought" something outside of the physical world that causes things to happen in the physical world. Yes, I agree with the author that whatever a thought is in the brain does cause other things to happen in the body, but I disagree with him that it requires a weird non-physicalist take on consciousness and quantum mechanics to achieve this in principle. I particularly don't like that he claims this is some sort of new scientific paradigm. It is an old philosophical idea. There's a nice account of the difference between this intuitive view and the scientific worldview in: The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them (Flanagan).
This idea is certainly considered seriously by some philosophers, especially those who feel it is impossible to solve "hard problems" like qualia with physical explanations. But there is very little science here that applies to these ideas unless you really stretch and squint an awful lot at a few marginal experiments that could just as well be interpreted in other ways.
More importantly, the book doesn't really have as much in the way of practical ideas as I would have liked. The "science of changing your mind" should actually have a lot in it about changing your mind, rather than just explaining why it should be possible to change your mind.
So I don't think this was pioneering science because of its unneccessary odd digressions of philosophy and quantum physics, and I don't think it is a good how-to book, but I think the author makes a good case from neuroscience for the possibility of changing ourselves. I did find some value in the author's general model of how we change, but that would have made a better article than a book.
If the author had taken his model of change and neuroscience references and applied them to many practical examples rather than using them to promote an idiosyncratic underlying theory, this would have been a superb book in my opinion.
As it is, it is a better than average "alternative science" book. A worthwhile spiritual and also practical message combined with a mixture of real scientific and also very idiosyncratic models.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Volumetrics: Practical application of the obesity research
The top of the diet book list: More Taste, More Filling, Less Calories
My review of "The Volumetrics Weight Control Plan" by Barbara Rolls, PH.D. and Robert A. Barnett, HarperCollins, 2000.
There are thousands of diet books out there promoting approaches with varying combinations of common sense, science, experience, and novelty in their approach to weight control. They each have their advocates. I think Volumetrics is at the very top of the list of approaches for a number of reasons.
First is credibility. Barbara Rolls is not a personal trainer or a celebrity or "nutritionist" in the generic sense or someone who read a handful of studies and observed a handful of clients to derive her conclusions, she is a leading nutrition and health researcher. She knows the trends and patterns in the research, she knows which approaches have been reliable and which have not in the long run and with the widest base of people. Her foundation in the science of weight control is as solid as anyone writing about nutrition, and much better than 99.9% of the authors.
Second is flexibility. Volumetrics is not a concept based on sensory-specific boredom or food restriction, common and very popular approaches which generally are self-defeating. Volumetrics is instead based on understanding our own feelings of satisfaction with food so that we can feel satisfied while meeting our health goals rather than depriving ourselves. There are a number of effective tactics in Volumetrics for eating in a way that is satisfying and does not restrict food yet does restrict calories and therefore control weight. These tactics are not all or nothing, you can apply the ones you need to the degree that you need without following rigid rules and dietary restrictions. The tactics are organized in modular fashion. You can apply these principles when you go out to eat or order take-out or prepare your own favorites or you can make your own Volumetric meals from scratch, or any combination of these. Most of the time you are not avoiding foods at all, you are actually adding new ones in to help satisfy hunger so you don't need as much of the ones you crave in order to feel satisfied.
Third is variety. Unlike most programs, Volumetrics takes advantage of our natural inclination to eat a variety of foods in order to get the wide variety of nutrients that we need for optimal health. Most programs recognize that variety triggers us to eat more, so they discourage it and encourage boredom but we eventually get bored of nutritional boredom. Volumetrics instead encourages variety but provides a variety of choices that help rather than hurt weight control goals.
The central concepts are probably not going to be new to anyone who reads diet books. The presentation of their scientific basis and the reason why they work in terms of modern obesity research models is the strength of this book, and having this rationale is what allows the principles to be applied more flexibly. If you understand the *why* of the food choices, you can improvise flexibly in your own application of the program, and that's what Volumetrics gives you.
The key principle is satiety. Research indicates that in the long run we tend to eat until we are satisfied and we know we are satisfied in two ways. First, a complex collection of physiological signals from various parts of the body combine to produce the experience of satiety itself. Then we also learn what behaviors and foods lead to the experience of satiety for us. The Volumetrics approach centers around learning how to effectively produce the experience of satiety with what we eat and how to retrain our expectations for what we need to eat to be satisfied. That's it, the rest is details.
The main detail is the concept of energy density. Another important consistent research result is that people tend to eat the same amount by weight because of how we've learned to satisfy our hunger. The key result that makes the Volumetrics approach workable is that we can trigger the same signals that a particular weight of food produces with an equal volume of more satisfying, less energy-dense food. By deliberately creating the right sensory experience and fullness with foods that have less caloric energy, we learn to satisfy our hunger with less calories and so lose weight while eating more healthy and less calories.
The important point is that this is not about just eating salads and soups all the time, it is about strategically getting good nutrition by knowing the relative energy density of foods and eating more of the low energy density foods we really enjoy, and then more strictly portion control the higher energy density ones we have been craving and have been obstacles to our health goals. The emphasis on satiety in low-density foods controls the cravings for the high-density ones, making this possible.
This probably sounds a lot like common sense, and I think much of it is. However the details and their scientific rationale are what really make the program in this book stand out and make it workable and flexible. Volumetrics explains the specific problems with various other approaches like high protein/low carb and presents a broadly workable and scientifically based alternative that give you good lifelong nutritional habits rather than a tricky way to lose weight for a few weeks. I've been gradually incorporating these principles into my own life for several years and have been very happy with both their sustainability and their effectiveness. I think this program is going to be they key to weight control for a lot of people.
Given that the treatment of weight control in this book is so good, let's look at the few limitations.
First, since it is written from the perspective of health, there is really no treatment of performance or athletic nutrition, so athletes interested in weight control may be able to use these principles but they will not be able to rely on this book for their complete nutritional program.
Second, a related limitation is that the treatment regarding exercise is rather weak compared to the treatment of nutrition. Guidelines for walking and moderate activity are emphasized particularly for weight maintenance where they are most effective, rather than weight loss. The Volumetric approach is consistent with the trainer's dictum "you can't out-train a bad diet." Only a competitive endurance athlete and few extremes of that sort can hope to move so much that they burn off an energy-dense diet. So the principles of weight loss emphasize calorie restriction and satiety rather than exercise. As Volumetrics explains, exercise becomes important in three ways for weight *maintenance* (rather than loss) however: (1) strength training builds lean mass which raises resting metabolism, so we don't need to restrict calories as much, and (2) activity itself is more successful at maintaining weight than losing it, once we have eating patterns that maintain a nearly stable weight, and (3) a good exercise program is extremely effective at increasing our sense of self-efficacy, which leads to compliance and success in other habits as well. The limitation is that the book offers no help in what makes a good exercise program effective in these ways. It is not a book about exercise. High intensity exercise is mentioned as possibly even more useful for people who can tolerate it. I think this aspect is very important and should have been discussed a bit more. However it is a large book with a lot of details on its core principles, and exercise is really just a secondary concern to the authors.
Third, there is really very little discussion of popular principles that just aren't effective or those that possibly might be useful. The authors explain that most diets succeed in the short term because of various kinds of boredom and appetite suppression rather than because they are sound eating patterns. And they explain why adequate protein is important but more than that is not particularly helpful in the long run for weight control. But all of the rest of the tactics are left pretty much untouched. It would have been useful for some of the more intriguing ones to have been addressed, such as intermittent fasting.
Fourth, the thoroughness of the book will also be its downfall for some less patient readers used to reading web pages rather than books. This is a real book, not a pamphlet. It doesn't give you a condensed program in abstract form in the first few pages, you have to read the book and digest its lessons in order to get its full education and apply them effectively and flexibly. That's the whole point of the program, at least from my perspective, that deeper knowledge of the principles will help you with lifelong better eating.
All in all, I'd say this is the best single book on general principles of lifelong nutrition for weight control, it is detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative, and the program is practical, flexible, and sustainable. I'd venture so far as to say that other programs probably succeed or fail largely on how well they apply the sound principles behind Volumetrics.
My review of "The Volumetrics Weight Control Plan" by Barbara Rolls, PH.D. and Robert A. Barnett, HarperCollins, 2000.
There are thousands of diet books out there promoting approaches with varying combinations of common sense, science, experience, and novelty in their approach to weight control. They each have their advocates. I think Volumetrics is at the very top of the list of approaches for a number of reasons.
First is credibility. Barbara Rolls is not a personal trainer or a celebrity or "nutritionist" in the generic sense or someone who read a handful of studies and observed a handful of clients to derive her conclusions, she is a leading nutrition and health researcher. She knows the trends and patterns in the research, she knows which approaches have been reliable and which have not in the long run and with the widest base of people. Her foundation in the science of weight control is as solid as anyone writing about nutrition, and much better than 99.9% of the authors.
Second is flexibility. Volumetrics is not a concept based on sensory-specific boredom or food restriction, common and very popular approaches which generally are self-defeating. Volumetrics is instead based on understanding our own feelings of satisfaction with food so that we can feel satisfied while meeting our health goals rather than depriving ourselves. There are a number of effective tactics in Volumetrics for eating in a way that is satisfying and does not restrict food yet does restrict calories and therefore control weight. These tactics are not all or nothing, you can apply the ones you need to the degree that you need without following rigid rules and dietary restrictions. The tactics are organized in modular fashion. You can apply these principles when you go out to eat or order take-out or prepare your own favorites or you can make your own Volumetric meals from scratch, or any combination of these. Most of the time you are not avoiding foods at all, you are actually adding new ones in to help satisfy hunger so you don't need as much of the ones you crave in order to feel satisfied.
Third is variety. Unlike most programs, Volumetrics takes advantage of our natural inclination to eat a variety of foods in order to get the wide variety of nutrients that we need for optimal health. Most programs recognize that variety triggers us to eat more, so they discourage it and encourage boredom but we eventually get bored of nutritional boredom. Volumetrics instead encourages variety but provides a variety of choices that help rather than hurt weight control goals.
The central concepts are probably not going to be new to anyone who reads diet books. The presentation of their scientific basis and the reason why they work in terms of modern obesity research models is the strength of this book, and having this rationale is what allows the principles to be applied more flexibly. If you understand the *why* of the food choices, you can improvise flexibly in your own application of the program, and that's what Volumetrics gives you.
The key principle is satiety. Research indicates that in the long run we tend to eat until we are satisfied and we know we are satisfied in two ways. First, a complex collection of physiological signals from various parts of the body combine to produce the experience of satiety itself. Then we also learn what behaviors and foods lead to the experience of satiety for us. The Volumetrics approach centers around learning how to effectively produce the experience of satiety with what we eat and how to retrain our expectations for what we need to eat to be satisfied. That's it, the rest is details.
The main detail is the concept of energy density. Another important consistent research result is that people tend to eat the same amount by weight because of how we've learned to satisfy our hunger. The key result that makes the Volumetrics approach workable is that we can trigger the same signals that a particular weight of food produces with an equal volume of more satisfying, less energy-dense food. By deliberately creating the right sensory experience and fullness with foods that have less caloric energy, we learn to satisfy our hunger with less calories and so lose weight while eating more healthy and less calories.
The important point is that this is not about just eating salads and soups all the time, it is about strategically getting good nutrition by knowing the relative energy density of foods and eating more of the low energy density foods we really enjoy, and then more strictly portion control the higher energy density ones we have been craving and have been obstacles to our health goals. The emphasis on satiety in low-density foods controls the cravings for the high-density ones, making this possible.
This probably sounds a lot like common sense, and I think much of it is. However the details and their scientific rationale are what really make the program in this book stand out and make it workable and flexible. Volumetrics explains the specific problems with various other approaches like high protein/low carb and presents a broadly workable and scientifically based alternative that give you good lifelong nutritional habits rather than a tricky way to lose weight for a few weeks. I've been gradually incorporating these principles into my own life for several years and have been very happy with both their sustainability and their effectiveness. I think this program is going to be they key to weight control for a lot of people.
Given that the treatment of weight control in this book is so good, let's look at the few limitations.
First, since it is written from the perspective of health, there is really no treatment of performance or athletic nutrition, so athletes interested in weight control may be able to use these principles but they will not be able to rely on this book for their complete nutritional program.
Second, a related limitation is that the treatment regarding exercise is rather weak compared to the treatment of nutrition. Guidelines for walking and moderate activity are emphasized particularly for weight maintenance where they are most effective, rather than weight loss. The Volumetric approach is consistent with the trainer's dictum "you can't out-train a bad diet." Only a competitive endurance athlete and few extremes of that sort can hope to move so much that they burn off an energy-dense diet. So the principles of weight loss emphasize calorie restriction and satiety rather than exercise. As Volumetrics explains, exercise becomes important in three ways for weight *maintenance* (rather than loss) however: (1) strength training builds lean mass which raises resting metabolism, so we don't need to restrict calories as much, and (2) activity itself is more successful at maintaining weight than losing it, once we have eating patterns that maintain a nearly stable weight, and (3) a good exercise program is extremely effective at increasing our sense of self-efficacy, which leads to compliance and success in other habits as well. The limitation is that the book offers no help in what makes a good exercise program effective in these ways. It is not a book about exercise. High intensity exercise is mentioned as possibly even more useful for people who can tolerate it. I think this aspect is very important and should have been discussed a bit more. However it is a large book with a lot of details on its core principles, and exercise is really just a secondary concern to the authors.
Third, there is really very little discussion of popular principles that just aren't effective or those that possibly might be useful. The authors explain that most diets succeed in the short term because of various kinds of boredom and appetite suppression rather than because they are sound eating patterns. And they explain why adequate protein is important but more than that is not particularly helpful in the long run for weight control. But all of the rest of the tactics are left pretty much untouched. It would have been useful for some of the more intriguing ones to have been addressed, such as intermittent fasting.
Fourth, the thoroughness of the book will also be its downfall for some less patient readers used to reading web pages rather than books. This is a real book, not a pamphlet. It doesn't give you a condensed program in abstract form in the first few pages, you have to read the book and digest its lessons in order to get its full education and apply them effectively and flexibly. That's the whole point of the program, at least from my perspective, that deeper knowledge of the principles will help you with lifelong better eating.
All in all, I'd say this is the best single book on general principles of lifelong nutrition for weight control, it is detailed, comprehensive, and authoritative, and the program is practical, flexible, and sustainable. I'd venture so far as to say that other programs probably succeed or fail largely on how well they apply the sound principles behind Volumetrics.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Hypnosis and Synesthesia
Hypnosis and Synesthesia
New Scientist ran a recent review article by David Robson that might be of interest to those exploring the nature of hypnosis. It is on the experimental investigation of synesthesia effects using hypnosis. Feb 14-20 2009 issue. Research is reviewed narrowing down the genetic origin of synesthesia, but then research is also reviewed showing that similar sensory cross-over effects can be reproduced with suggestion. The percentage of people who showed a particular cross-over effect under the hypnosis condition was roughly the same as that of people diagnosed with synesthesia, and significantly different from non-hypnosis controls.
This is interesting but not neccessarily something all that new. It doesn't say as much about the nature of hypnosis as a different state of consciousness as Robson's article seems to assume because it is also suspected that synesthesia effects are actually fairly common, and that the diagnostic criteria reveal a matter of degree more than kind. So as in T.X. Barber's famous line of "non-trance" experiments, suggestion rather than hypnosis per se could well be what brings out the cross-over effects. Missing from the hypnosis synesthesia experiment seems to be a non-trance task-motivated or expectancy control, their controls were simply "asked to imagine." The difference between being "asked to imagine" and being motivated or expectant to see results is very different, and this was one of Barber's central contributions to hypnosis research.
On the incidence of synesthesia effects, also see Alison Motluk's article from New Scientist last year: "Do we all have some synaesthetic ability?"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14841-do-we-all-have-some-syn...
Synesthesia and suggestion both turn out to be fascinating windows into the mind!
New Scientist ran a recent review article by David Robson that might be of interest to those exploring the nature of hypnosis. It is on the experimental investigation of synesthesia effects using hypnosis. Feb 14-20 2009 issue. Research is reviewed narrowing down the genetic origin of synesthesia, but then research is also reviewed showing that similar sensory cross-over effects can be reproduced with suggestion. The percentage of people who showed a particular cross-over effect under the hypnosis condition was roughly the same as that of people diagnosed with synesthesia, and significantly different from non-hypnosis controls.
This is interesting but not neccessarily something all that new. It doesn't say as much about the nature of hypnosis as a different state of consciousness as Robson's article seems to assume because it is also suspected that synesthesia effects are actually fairly common, and that the diagnostic criteria reveal a matter of degree more than kind. So as in T.X. Barber's famous line of "non-trance" experiments, suggestion rather than hypnosis per se could well be what brings out the cross-over effects. Missing from the hypnosis synesthesia experiment seems to be a non-trance task-motivated or expectancy control, their controls were simply "asked to imagine." The difference between being "asked to imagine" and being motivated or expectant to see results is very different, and this was one of Barber's central contributions to hypnosis research.
On the incidence of synesthesia effects, also see Alison Motluk's article from New Scientist last year: "Do we all have some synaesthetic ability?"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14841-do-we-all-have-some-syn...
Synesthesia and suggestion both turn out to be fascinating windows into the mind!
Saturday, February 14, 2009
The Story Behind the Landmarks in the History of Life
The Story Behind the Landmarks in the History of Life
A review of Sean Carroll's book "Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species" 2009, Houghton Mifflin.
This is one of those “stories behind the science” books that gives you a sense of the sort of explorations that lay behind the famous discoveries that shaped modern biology. The primary focus is on the paleontologists who made various critical fossil finds and whose scientific obsessions led the efforts to uncover the history of life. Other books have covered the stories behind the genetics and the development of evolutionary theory itself better, but this one is particularly strong on the stories of key fossil hunters and their unique fascination with deep history and what it tells us.
The thing that makes this book worthwhile is that it is not just a travelogue of fossil discoveries, it makes a good and often successful effort to tie the work of each of the paleontologists into its implications for the history of life as well as making each find an interesting discovery for the reader.
It’s a very different experience learning the principles of biology in a classroom and reading the story of biology from the eyes of the naturalists discovering it firsthand.
On the other hand, the author doesn’t always tie specific finds back to their specific implications for biology. There is story and there is explanation, and the two are hard to balance. Story sometimes gets the better of explanation in this book. Although he is often careful to give simple explanations of concepts when introducing them, in a book of this type the author can’t help implicitly assuming a fair amount of knowledge that some lay readers might not have. I’m not sure I’d recommend this book as a primer on evolutionary biology, but then it wasn’t intended to be anything of the sort and that’s part of its charm.
What better way to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial this year than to learn about how his ideas helped inspire generations of scientist-detectives to learn about the fascinating history of living things on our planet. The story is intriguing throughout, but by the time Carroll gets to the story of discoveries close to our own species, it has become a story you just can’t put down and which is really just beginning to be told.
A review of Sean Carroll's book "Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species" 2009, Houghton Mifflin.
This is one of those “stories behind the science” books that gives you a sense of the sort of explorations that lay behind the famous discoveries that shaped modern biology. The primary focus is on the paleontologists who made various critical fossil finds and whose scientific obsessions led the efforts to uncover the history of life. Other books have covered the stories behind the genetics and the development of evolutionary theory itself better, but this one is particularly strong on the stories of key fossil hunters and their unique fascination with deep history and what it tells us.
The thing that makes this book worthwhile is that it is not just a travelogue of fossil discoveries, it makes a good and often successful effort to tie the work of each of the paleontologists into its implications for the history of life as well as making each find an interesting discovery for the reader.
It’s a very different experience learning the principles of biology in a classroom and reading the story of biology from the eyes of the naturalists discovering it firsthand.
On the other hand, the author doesn’t always tie specific finds back to their specific implications for biology. There is story and there is explanation, and the two are hard to balance. Story sometimes gets the better of explanation in this book. Although he is often careful to give simple explanations of concepts when introducing them, in a book of this type the author can’t help implicitly assuming a fair amount of knowledge that some lay readers might not have. I’m not sure I’d recommend this book as a primer on evolutionary biology, but then it wasn’t intended to be anything of the sort and that’s part of its charm.
What better way to celebrate Darwin’s bicentennial this year than to learn about how his ideas helped inspire generations of scientist-detectives to learn about the fascinating history of living things on our planet. The story is intriguing throughout, but by the time Carroll gets to the story of discoveries close to our own species, it has become a story you just can’t put down and which is really just beginning to be told.
The Sexual Selection Theory of Art: A Review of Dennis Dutton's "The Art Instinct"
The Sexual Selection Theory of Art: A Review of Dennis Dutton's "The Art Instinct"
Why have human beings always enjoyed making and experiencing art throughout history and in all areas of the world? This book is a bold claim about the nature of human beings. The claim is that the things we enjoy doing and the things we appreciate about each other were shaped largely by our history as a species rather than by what we learn from each other during our own life time.
This may not seem too bold to those unfamiliar with the academic climate of modern social sciences and humanities. In academia, particularly in social sciences and humanities, it is virtually heretical to claim any significant role at all for "nature" in human behavior. Although biologists in general agree that human nature is the result of an interaction of the expression of genes and their environment, the philosophy underlying the arts and social sciences heavily emphasizes the role of learning and enculturation in shaping us.
Still, even among biologists, Dutton's version of the claim is somewhat controversial. Dutton doesn't just say that human beings are the result of an evolutionary history. He doesn't just say that our brain and other organs are shaped by that history. Those claims are uncontroversial in biology. Dutton's particular boldness is that he claims that our nervous system specifically was shaped during the Pleistocene period of our history to favor certain qualities in potential mates, and that this shaping is the reason we have art.
The reason this claim is controversial even within biology has to do with two kinds of problem. The claim is rooted in a relatively recent subfield of biology known as evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary biologists are split about the potential of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior. Some, proponents of evolutionary psychology, believe that the only way we can fully trace the workings of the human mind is to find what specific sorts of problems it evolved to solve.
Others are skeptical on principle. Some just think the whole endeavor is wrongheaded. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that the human mind was more like a collection of byproducts of adaptations than adaptations. The philosopher Jerry Fodor argues that while modularity of the sort assumed by Dutton's chosen form of evolutionary psychology is clearly the rule in lower level neural processes like perception, it is unlikely in principle to play a role in higher mental processes.
Still others agree with the principles behind evolutionary psychology but don't think we can do it practically because the evidence we would need is too elusive and too easily obscured . They often cite the unfortunate tendency to explain everything glibly in terms of hypothetical Pleistocene adaptations. This tendency has been noted about evolutionary biology in general, but in other areas of evolutionary biology the methodological issues are more readily addressed. When we try to explain the roots of human behaviors, the issues become more complex.
Teasing out the evolutionary history of adaptations can be surprisingly tricky even for things with seemingly straightforward functions like feathers and eyes. When we look at mind and complex behaviors, the issues get extremely thorny.
Perhaps the best review of the empirical issues around evolutionary psychology are found in David Buller's book "Adapting Minds." [[ASIN:0262524600 Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books)]] Buller summarizes the core arguments: (1) EP requires a specific stable environment that we adapted to over time, and the evidence for this is based entirely on time span, rather than having found such an environment, (2) a primary tool of adaptation analysis, the comparison of species which share a common ancestor, is rendered problematic by our lack of knowledge other hominid species any closer than chimps, (3) rapid evolutionary change since the Pleistocene is potentially relevant, and points out the difficulties distinguishing adaptations of the Pleistocene from those far more ancient, and (4) most of the EP experimental programs are open to interpretation regarding how their data relates back to evidence for adaptations.
Dutton's argument is well made but not compelling because it is by nature very speculative. However he does do a good job addressing the major objections in a way that lets you see the potential for his theory. The argument is particularly difficult, and Dutton's efforts particularly admirable, because he not only has to address the scientific issues regarding evolutionary psychology, but also the climate of opinion in the arts and social sciences that opposes the whole notion of explaining human preferences and experience in biological rather than cultural terms. Against this background of broad skepticism, Denis Dutton is particularly well suited to make the case for the bold use of evolutionary psychology because he is more familiar than most people with humanities as well as having a good understanding of biology.
Dutton has to jump through several rather big hoops. Since he is arguing specifically about our universal appreciation of art as something to be explained, he has to first establish that art is indeed a distinct universal domain that can be studied. This is a challenge already because the modernist philosophy underlying art does not view it as a single domain that is universal to human beings. Dutton addresses this in two parts: first arguing that art can be defined usefully in terms of a dozen or so related cluster criteria, and then arguing that these are more likely the result of natural selection than they are byproducts. Next he has to establish that art is not only universal to humankind but also that something universal to our species actually requires an evolutionary explanation.
In the most generally interesting parts of the book, Dutton raises common controversies about art in order to show how he would address them. In the most technically interesting parts of the book, Dutton compares and contrasts the competing theories: (1) it is purely cultural with no relation to natural selection, (2) it helps bind people into groups for collective action, (3) it is the result of byproducts of evolutionary adaptation, (4) it is the result of sexual selection.
Ultimately Dutton settles on a sexual selection explanation, similar to Geoffrey Miller's treatment in "The Mating Mind," [[ASIN:038549517X The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature]] but more focused on art in particular. In this theory, we came to appreciate certain abilities in each other as a way to find better mates, and these various abilities cluster around certain common themes like skill, novelty, specific focus, expressive individuality, intellectual challenge, emotional saturation, and imaginative experience.
If you appreciate Dutton's intriguing cluster criteria for art and you accept at least in principle the concept that we may have evolved preferences shaped through sexual selection, it is easy to find Dutton's argument exciting in spite of its speculative status. This is very good popular science writing: a bold theory, a well made argument, and a lot of interesting examples.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of such a bold theory, but at least one good reason to consider it: it is wonderfully elegant.
Why have human beings always enjoyed making and experiencing art throughout history and in all areas of the world? This book is a bold claim about the nature of human beings. The claim is that the things we enjoy doing and the things we appreciate about each other were shaped largely by our history as a species rather than by what we learn from each other during our own life time.
This may not seem too bold to those unfamiliar with the academic climate of modern social sciences and humanities. In academia, particularly in social sciences and humanities, it is virtually heretical to claim any significant role at all for "nature" in human behavior. Although biologists in general agree that human nature is the result of an interaction of the expression of genes and their environment, the philosophy underlying the arts and social sciences heavily emphasizes the role of learning and enculturation in shaping us.
Still, even among biologists, Dutton's version of the claim is somewhat controversial. Dutton doesn't just say that human beings are the result of an evolutionary history. He doesn't just say that our brain and other organs are shaped by that history. Those claims are uncontroversial in biology. Dutton's particular boldness is that he claims that our nervous system specifically was shaped during the Pleistocene period of our history to favor certain qualities in potential mates, and that this shaping is the reason we have art.
The reason this claim is controversial even within biology has to do with two kinds of problem. The claim is rooted in a relatively recent subfield of biology known as evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary biologists are split about the potential of evolutionary psychology to explain human behavior. Some, proponents of evolutionary psychology, believe that the only way we can fully trace the workings of the human mind is to find what specific sorts of problems it evolved to solve.
Others are skeptical on principle. Some just think the whole endeavor is wrongheaded. The late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that the human mind was more like a collection of byproducts of adaptations than adaptations. The philosopher Jerry Fodor argues that while modularity of the sort assumed by Dutton's chosen form of evolutionary psychology is clearly the rule in lower level neural processes like perception, it is unlikely in principle to play a role in higher mental processes.
Still others agree with the principles behind evolutionary psychology but don't think we can do it practically because the evidence we would need is too elusive and too easily obscured . They often cite the unfortunate tendency to explain everything glibly in terms of hypothetical Pleistocene adaptations. This tendency has been noted about evolutionary biology in general, but in other areas of evolutionary biology the methodological issues are more readily addressed. When we try to explain the roots of human behaviors, the issues become more complex.
Teasing out the evolutionary history of adaptations can be surprisingly tricky even for things with seemingly straightforward functions like feathers and eyes. When we look at mind and complex behaviors, the issues get extremely thorny.
Perhaps the best review of the empirical issues around evolutionary psychology are found in David Buller's book "Adapting Minds." [[ASIN:0262524600 Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Bradford Books)]] Buller summarizes the core arguments: (1) EP requires a specific stable environment that we adapted to over time, and the evidence for this is based entirely on time span, rather than having found such an environment, (2) a primary tool of adaptation analysis, the comparison of species which share a common ancestor, is rendered problematic by our lack of knowledge other hominid species any closer than chimps, (3) rapid evolutionary change since the Pleistocene is potentially relevant, and points out the difficulties distinguishing adaptations of the Pleistocene from those far more ancient, and (4) most of the EP experimental programs are open to interpretation regarding how their data relates back to evidence for adaptations.
Dutton's argument is well made but not compelling because it is by nature very speculative. However he does do a good job addressing the major objections in a way that lets you see the potential for his theory. The argument is particularly difficult, and Dutton's efforts particularly admirable, because he not only has to address the scientific issues regarding evolutionary psychology, but also the climate of opinion in the arts and social sciences that opposes the whole notion of explaining human preferences and experience in biological rather than cultural terms. Against this background of broad skepticism, Denis Dutton is particularly well suited to make the case for the bold use of evolutionary psychology because he is more familiar than most people with humanities as well as having a good understanding of biology.
Dutton has to jump through several rather big hoops. Since he is arguing specifically about our universal appreciation of art as something to be explained, he has to first establish that art is indeed a distinct universal domain that can be studied. This is a challenge already because the modernist philosophy underlying art does not view it as a single domain that is universal to human beings. Dutton addresses this in two parts: first arguing that art can be defined usefully in terms of a dozen or so related cluster criteria, and then arguing that these are more likely the result of natural selection than they are byproducts. Next he has to establish that art is not only universal to humankind but also that something universal to our species actually requires an evolutionary explanation.
In the most generally interesting parts of the book, Dutton raises common controversies about art in order to show how he would address them. In the most technically interesting parts of the book, Dutton compares and contrasts the competing theories: (1) it is purely cultural with no relation to natural selection, (2) it helps bind people into groups for collective action, (3) it is the result of byproducts of evolutionary adaptation, (4) it is the result of sexual selection.
Ultimately Dutton settles on a sexual selection explanation, similar to Geoffrey Miller's treatment in "The Mating Mind," [[ASIN:038549517X The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature]] but more focused on art in particular. In this theory, we came to appreciate certain abilities in each other as a way to find better mates, and these various abilities cluster around certain common themes like skill, novelty, specific focus, expressive individuality, intellectual challenge, emotional saturation, and imaginative experience.
If you appreciate Dutton's intriguing cluster criteria for art and you accept at least in principle the concept that we may have evolved preferences shaped through sexual selection, it is easy to find Dutton's argument exciting in spite of its speculative status. This is very good popular science writing: a bold theory, a well made argument, and a lot of interesting examples.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of such a bold theory, but at least one good reason to consider it: it is wonderfully elegant.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
The "Peek-A-Boo" Tactic in Modern Martial Arts
The Peek-A-Boo Tactic in Modern Martial Arts
It is notable in that the best known Asian traditions mostly use tactics where you stand upright, hands down or outstretched, grabbing or trapping limbs and striking while moving into close range. In Western boxing, the hands are usually held in front of the chin and beside the jaw.
The "peek-a-boo" tactic differs in that the fighter places both hands on his head (or sometimes at brow level), blocking with his forearms and elbows, and then in some variations may use this defense as part of a guarded rush to force the opponent back and engage them at close range. The position may appear momentarily in some form in boxing and Asian martial arts while covering up, but it becomes a distinct "Peek-A-Boo Tactic" when it is heavily relied on for its own unique characteristics.
A number of styles seem to treat this tactic as if they originated it, but it is likely that it was developed in parallel because relies on some of our gross defensive instincts, such as hunching over and pulling our body away from attack and raising our shoulders and arms to cover our face. That's probably why it is so highly favored in "reality-based" martial arts training, it requires little formal training and little fine motor skill to use effectively under a wide range of conditions.
The Peek-A-Boo in Boxing
The first place I know of that this tactic was used with dramatic effectiveness was in boxing. The legendary Cus D'Amato trained two world champion boxers in it: Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. Both used it to great effect at times. Wikipedia has a useful description of the Peek-A-Boo tactic as used in boxing:
"Peek a boo boxing utilizes relaxed hands with the forearms in front of the face and the fist at nose-eye level, as opposed to the orthodox style where the hands are at chin level with the left hand slightly in front of the chin and the right hand next to the chin. Other unique features includes side to side head movements, bobbing, weaving and blind siding your opponent. The number system e.g. 3-2-3-Body-head-body or 3-3-2 Body-Body-head is drilled with the stationary dummy and on the bag until the fighter is able to punch by rapid combinations with what Cus calls "bad intentions". The style allows swift neck movements as well quick duckings and the bad returning damage, usually by rising uppercuts or even rising hooks."
The Peek-A-Boo in Martial Arts
The use of the tactic in martial arts follows this pattern as well, but expands on it. The hands are kept high (often actually being placed on the top of the head when defending), moving from side to side continually but also moving the hands continually to faciliate quick blocking reactions. Martial artists are concerned with attacks from a wider range of angles than boxers and allows a wider range of counter-attacks, so the Peek-A-Boo in martial arts has to make more use of active blocking to cut off the angles and counter-attack.
"Jailhouse Rock"
You find this tactic featured in some martial arts of African origin and it is featured prominently in "Jailhouse Rock," an art of recent origin which a number of sources have testified to finding in modern prisons. The link to Jailhouse Rock is probably not coincidental. One version of the story of Floyd Patterson says that it was Patterson's use of the tactic he learned in Coxsacki prison that led to Cus D'Amato developing it for boxing. This story can only be partially true at best, however, since D'Amato had already taught a similar kind of defense to fighters before working with Patterson. In any case, whether boxing learned the tactic from prison, or prison from boxing, the tactic appears in similar forms in boxing and in penal fighting. There are many ways that the two could influence each other back and forth because of the unfortunate fact that many professional boxers have done prison time.
In this scan from John S. Soet's book Martial Arts Around the World, the aggressive use of elbows from a loose Peek-A-Boo defense is shown as an illustration of Jailhouse Rock.
Other Appearances
The tactic is found in a number of other modern systems as well. Defensive Tactics instructor Steve Tarani teaches a stationary version of the tactic for fast emergency defense and calls it the QuickShield (a name he trademarked). It is found in informal versions in self-defense arts such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where it is used very briefly as a temporary defense and as a way to get into close range more safely rather than as a formal defensive system. I don't know if they use it in the Israeli arts, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't appear there somewhere. The heavily Indonesian flavored Jeet Kune Do of Dan Inosanto makes good use of this tactic and similar ones. The tactic has recently been featured in the fighting scenes of several movies. There is an interesting variation sometimes seen where one hand takes on the Peek-A-Boo posture on the head and the other hand braces against that elbow.
More formally, the tactic is featured very prominently in several fighting systems as well. It is particularly apparent in the "Crazy Monkey Defense," and the Keysi Fighting Method. In the Keysi system, a particularly versatile form of the Peek-A-Boo is called the Pensador or "Thinking Man" and is used in a very aggressive way very similar to the boxing application.
Update Dec 2, 2011: Lee Morrison at Urban Combatives recently expanded on the idea of the Peek-A-Boo as a distinct tactic by combining it with some other more or less instinctive positions commonly used by well known instructors such as Tony Blauer's "SPEAR" and calling the positions collectively "default positions." Interesting idea and worth reading I think. I was leading up to something like this in the article here but never got around to following up, but I think Lee did a better job than the one I would have done.
The Peek-A-Boo as a Distinct Tactic
It is notable in that the best known Asian traditions mostly use tactics where you stand upright, hands down or outstretched, grabbing or trapping limbs and striking while moving into close range. In Western boxing, the hands are usually held in front of the chin and beside the jaw.
The "peek-a-boo" tactic differs in that the fighter places both hands on his head (or sometimes at brow level), blocking with his forearms and elbows, and then in some variations may use this defense as part of a guarded rush to force the opponent back and engage them at close range. The position may appear momentarily in some form in boxing and Asian martial arts while covering up, but it becomes a distinct "Peek-A-Boo Tactic" when it is heavily relied on for its own unique characteristics.
A number of styles seem to treat this tactic as if they originated it, but it is likely that it was developed in parallel because relies on some of our gross defensive instincts, such as hunching over and pulling our body away from attack and raising our shoulders and arms to cover our face. That's probably why it is so highly favored in "reality-based" martial arts training, it requires little formal training and little fine motor skill to use effectively under a wide range of conditions.
The Peek-A-Boo in Boxing
The first place I know of that this tactic was used with dramatic effectiveness was in boxing. The legendary Cus D'Amato trained two world champion boxers in it: Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. Both used it to great effect at times. Wikipedia has a useful description of the Peek-A-Boo tactic as used in boxing:
"Peek a boo boxing utilizes relaxed hands with the forearms in front of the face and the fist at nose-eye level, as opposed to the orthodox style where the hands are at chin level with the left hand slightly in front of the chin and the right hand next to the chin. Other unique features includes side to side head movements, bobbing, weaving and blind siding your opponent. The number system e.g. 3-2-3-Body-head-body or 3-3-2 Body-Body-head is drilled with the stationary dummy and on the bag until the fighter is able to punch by rapid combinations with what Cus calls "bad intentions". The style allows swift neck movements as well quick duckings and the bad returning damage, usually by rising uppercuts or even rising hooks."
The Peek-A-Boo in Martial Arts
The use of the tactic in martial arts follows this pattern as well, but expands on it. The hands are kept high (often actually being placed on the top of the head when defending), moving from side to side continually but also moving the hands continually to faciliate quick blocking reactions. Martial artists are concerned with attacks from a wider range of angles than boxers and allows a wider range of counter-attacks, so the Peek-A-Boo in martial arts has to make more use of active blocking to cut off the angles and counter-attack.
"Jailhouse Rock"
You find this tactic featured in some martial arts of African origin and it is featured prominently in "Jailhouse Rock," an art of recent origin which a number of sources have testified to finding in modern prisons. The link to Jailhouse Rock is probably not coincidental. One version of the story of Floyd Patterson says that it was Patterson's use of the tactic he learned in Coxsacki prison that led to Cus D'Amato developing it for boxing. This story can only be partially true at best, however, since D'Amato had already taught a similar kind of defense to fighters before working with Patterson. In any case, whether boxing learned the tactic from prison, or prison from boxing, the tactic appears in similar forms in boxing and in penal fighting. There are many ways that the two could influence each other back and forth because of the unfortunate fact that many professional boxers have done prison time.
In this scan from John S. Soet's book Martial Arts Around the World, the aggressive use of elbows from a loose Peek-A-Boo defense is shown as an illustration of Jailhouse Rock.
Other Appearances
The tactic is found in a number of other modern systems as well. Defensive Tactics instructor Steve Tarani teaches a stationary version of the tactic for fast emergency defense and calls it the QuickShield (a name he trademarked). It is found in informal versions in self-defense arts such as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where it is used very briefly as a temporary defense and as a way to get into close range more safely rather than as a formal defensive system. I don't know if they use it in the Israeli arts, but I'd be very surprised if it didn't appear there somewhere. The heavily Indonesian flavored Jeet Kune Do of Dan Inosanto makes good use of this tactic and similar ones. The tactic has recently been featured in the fighting scenes of several movies. There is an interesting variation sometimes seen where one hand takes on the Peek-A-Boo posture on the head and the other hand braces against that elbow.
Mel Gibson is shown below doing a variation of the Peek-A-Boo.
More formally, the tactic is featured very prominently in several fighting systems as well. It is particularly apparent in the "Crazy Monkey Defense," and the Keysi Fighting Method. In the Keysi system, a particularly versatile form of the Peek-A-Boo is called the Pensador or "Thinking Man" and is used in a very aggressive way very similar to the boxing application.
Crazy Monkey
The folks at Crazy Monkey Defense (Rodney King and friends) say that they invented the Peek-A-Boo tactic from watching monkeys while on safari. They use in primarily in a defensive boxing context, by keeping hands constantly in motion so as to use forearms for rapid blocking without giving up the defensive shield. Their use of Peek-A-Boo differs slightly from D'Amato's mainly in that they are initially teaching it purely as a defensive system and use blocking motions with the arms (as shown in the jab defense example below) rather than bobbing and weaving. This probably makes the defensive shield easier for beginners to utilize effectively, while at least temporarily giving up on the potentially aggressive use of the tactic.
Keysi Fighting Method
The Keysi Fighting Method was created by Justo Dieguez and Andy Norman in the 1950's and they say it originated in the "Spanish Gypsy streets." It heavily emphasizes a form of the Peek-A-Boo as a unique sort of aggressive defense in order to get into close range and set up close range strikes. In the Keysi system, the shield position is maintained continually and used to set up strikes and guarded rushes at close range. The Keysi method demonstrates the unique versatility of the Peek-A-Boo for both offense and defense when used in a more general martial arts application. The founders of the art also train in Jeet Kune Do with Dan Inosanto, which probably helps explain why it shares a lot of similarity in places with Kali, Silat, and other Indonesian martial arts. The Keysi method has received a lot of attention due to being featured in several popular Hollywood films such as Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and MI-3.
The central concept in the Keysi method is the Pendador ("Thinking Man") which is the name they give the mobile, aggressive use of their particular version of the Peek-A-Boo position, with hands overlapping on the head. Many other concepts involve the use of that position to set up close range attacks.
Trinity Block: T.J. Kennedy's Hybrid Fighting Method
Raw Combat Sweden: Using arm attacks
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Sunday, January 04, 2009
"Blind" faith vs. faith
Attacking intellectual blindness rather than faith
This cartoon posted by Cameron Reilly in his blog is on the classic theme of faith vs. science.
I appreciate jokes of this sort, although I also think they sort of miss the point. They are funny more because they play on our fear of religious fanatacism and our stereotypes of faith than because they really hit home.
I think it’s more the “blind” in blind faith that we find problematic … rather than the “faith”part. Great things as well as terrible ones are accomplished by monomaniacs with a mission driven by faith. If someone shares your own faith, you find it admirable. If they don't, it is scary, and often for good reason. We use "faith" to good effect in all areas of life. It also aligns us and sometimes kills people massively when leveraged for politics.
Attacking “faith” as such sometimes makes us sound as if we lack hope, optimism, and belief in anything in general, and for many of us who admire science, the rest of those things aren’t true.
Origin of Species is still considered a classic of science writing and theorizing because it drew observations from broad patterns of data in many fields to support its conclusions, fairly considered conflicting evidence, and suggested implications of the ideas and ways to test them. Its role in the cultural shifting of “faith” was a secondary result.
The works of "scientific" creationism are still equally great examples of quite the opposite process, selectively picking data to support its conclusions, selectively quoting authorities, and creating explanations that while they explain a lot in some sense can’t ever be tested.
We all have a tendency to see things in terms of what we already believe. We all make good use of “faith” in at least some form.
The important difference, I think, is that the ideals of inquiry teach us to make mistakes and learn from them, while a tolerance for uncertainty allows us to see our ideas as theories.
When we say that people are going overboard with “blind faith” I think what we intend to mean is that they completely reject the ideals of inquiry, which is what makes it blind. It’s the blind part and not the faith part that makes the cartoon hit home. If “design” or “creation” were really a hypothesis rather than a mythic story, it would at least potentially have a scientific form. To the degree that it has such a form, it has accumulated an enormous amount of disconfirming evidence.
That’s not an attack on faith, it’s an attack on blindness.
If we attack faith as such, it should be for its political and social abuses rather than because we ignore the value of "faith" in some form in daily life.
This cartoon posted by Cameron Reilly in his blog is on the classic theme of faith vs. science.
I appreciate jokes of this sort, although I also think they sort of miss the point. They are funny more because they play on our fear of religious fanatacism and our stereotypes of faith than because they really hit home.
I think it’s more the “blind” in blind faith that we find problematic … rather than the “faith”part. Great things as well as terrible ones are accomplished by monomaniacs with a mission driven by faith. If someone shares your own faith, you find it admirable. If they don't, it is scary, and often for good reason. We use "faith" to good effect in all areas of life. It also aligns us and sometimes kills people massively when leveraged for politics.
Attacking “faith” as such sometimes makes us sound as if we lack hope, optimism, and belief in anything in general, and for many of us who admire science, the rest of those things aren’t true.
Origin of Species is still considered a classic of science writing and theorizing because it drew observations from broad patterns of data in many fields to support its conclusions, fairly considered conflicting evidence, and suggested implications of the ideas and ways to test them. Its role in the cultural shifting of “faith” was a secondary result.
The works of "scientific" creationism are still equally great examples of quite the opposite process, selectively picking data to support its conclusions, selectively quoting authorities, and creating explanations that while they explain a lot in some sense can’t ever be tested.
We all have a tendency to see things in terms of what we already believe. We all make good use of “faith” in at least some form.
The important difference, I think, is that the ideals of inquiry teach us to make mistakes and learn from them, while a tolerance for uncertainty allows us to see our ideas as theories.
When we say that people are going overboard with “blind faith” I think what we intend to mean is that they completely reject the ideals of inquiry, which is what makes it blind. It’s the blind part and not the faith part that makes the cartoon hit home. If “design” or “creation” were really a hypothesis rather than a mythic story, it would at least potentially have a scientific form. To the degree that it has such a form, it has accumulated an enormous amount of disconfirming evidence.
That’s not an attack on faith, it’s an attack on blindness.
If we attack faith as such, it should be for its political and social abuses rather than because we ignore the value of "faith" in some form in daily life.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Preventing Injuries: Biological Robustness
Preventing Injuries: Biological Robustness
I'm a risk averse type, who happens to enjoy some slighly risky activities, so I've always had an interest in injury prevention. In the past decade I've gotten more systematic about preventing injuries. A minor pull that would have taken a few days to heal in my teens will now at 50 sideline me for weeks or even months. And after a few weeks off, I'm pretty much starting over on some aspects of my training. Rather than challenge my motivation to keep starting over and over, I've learned to greatly reduce my injury rate with a judicious little bit of extra training. If you just want to cut to the chase, you can skip down to the last couple of sections. If you want to know the background of the robustness approach , which I think is pretty interesting, then read on.
The biological robustness approach to injury prevention
The concept behind injury prevention that I've adopted is called biological robustness. Biological robustness is based on a adaptive systems approach to human movement. The essential idea is that biological systems preserve their integrity and their core functions in spite of both internal and external perturbation, and we can make use of that fact to understand how things go wrong and make ourselves more resistant tp injury.
Homeostasis has a notable pedigree in physiology, going back to the man often considered the father of modern physiology in the mid 19th century, Claude Bernard. Bernard coined the term "mileu interior" for the internal environment of living things. He wrote that "La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d'une vie libre et indépendante" which means:
The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life.
The modern slant on Selye's idea that makes it much more useful for injury prevention is that we have extended the mileu interior to a systems model of how the body operates in general, not just how the body regulates some of its interior processes. Biological robustness means the ability of the body to maintain its core functions in spite of unexpected events.
Note how much more general this is than Canon's homeostasis. The unexpected events might be inside our own body or things happening to us from the outside and they may be in many different kinds of systems. In a wide variety of cases our body strives to maintain function by adapting . Bernard's and Canon's careful observations about specific physiological processes turned out to be applicable to more systems than they first noticed.
This striving to adapt is important for a number of reasons. For example, it can mean that we will change our movement form (often without realizing it) to compensate for a stiffness or weakness in one muscle group by using other muscle groups differently. The fact that our body centrally coordinates movement as well as internal homeostasis means that problems in one place can end up being referred someplace else, a well known principle in modern physiotherapy.
It may seem obvious that when your left foot is hurt, you limp on it and change your gait to adapt, but the concept has some much more subtle implications. A tight iliopsoas muscle in the front of the hip can have an effect on how you use your gluteus muscles, which in turn helps cause an injury somewhere else. And this is a relatively simple and straightforward example.
What this all means to us for preventing injury is that we can't understand the mechanics of our activities just by studying human activity and trying to figure out where the direct physical stresses on us might be. We have to understand the patterns by which our body coordinates movement and strives to adapt to unexpected stresses.
How specifically does this translate to injury prevention? Expecting the Unexpected
Physical training for performance is mostly about identifying specific requirements and training in a way customized for those specific requirements. The better we know the demands of the activity, the better we can tailor the activities and schedules to meet them. Training is specific.
The way that biological robustness affects training is that we also have to take into consideration unexpected stressors as well as expected and well known ones. The principle of robustness training is "expect the unexpected." How the heck do you do that? It's not as crazy an idea as it first sounds. Although we obviously can't prepare for anything that might happen to us, there are a range of potential unexpected stresses that are found in any given kind of activity. For example, a runner can expect to sometimes hit broken ground and turn their foot over, a wrestler can expect to sometimes have body parts pulled forcefully to the limits of movement in various directions, and so on.
So knowing these potental unexpected stresses, how do you protect yourself?
Performance training and robustness have a critical tradeoff. The more you work to prepare yourself for specific expected demands, the more vulnerable you become to unexpected ones. It isn't obvious why this should be so. What seems to happen is that all this complex adaptation your body is doing to specific training demands leaves imbalances and vulnerabilities in other areas. As you become able to push more weight in one exercise, you may be developing a weakness somewhere else that is compensating for some minor internal or external factor that you don't even know about. Over time, even relatively minor unexpected stresses can hit one of these vulnerabilities, and all of a sudden we are injured and we don't know why. We assume we just worked to hard perhaps. But in some cases it was a long developing adaptation process.
How do we minimize the risk of this happening to us?
For each specific training goal, there is a related robustness goal.
When you train for strength, you are working to improve the work capacity of specific muscles and muscle groups. When you train for strength robustness, you look to increase modularity. This means looking at the chain of movements involved and enhancing the ability to withstand stress in each part of the chain. Rather than trying to increase the amount of weight you can push or pull, when you do strength robustness work you try to expose yourself to a wider variety of stresses on the various segments of the movement. You do simple assessment tests to find basic movement weaknesses and you address those. These often reveal problems that you never knew you had because your body found ways to compensate very effectively. But that compensation had an effect elsewhere over time and made you more fragile to injury from some unexpected small stressor.
When you train for general conditioning, you are trying to increase the capacity and efficiency of your cells and tissues to utilize oxygen and utilize various energy systems for movement. When you are trying to improve conditioning robustness you are instead trying to reduce fragility by preparing for a wider range of lesser unexpected challenges rather than a greater amount of an expected challenge. You subject yourself to a wider variety of moderate stresses, particularly varying resistance levels, range of movement around joints, and multidirectional patterns of movement. You want to constantly vary the stresses from session to session and from week to week to expose you to a wider variety of stresses than you would normally get in your activity, but which you still could potentially experience.
When you train for coordination in your activity, you learn movement skills for specific kinds of responses. When you are trying to improve coordination robustness you are looking to train your nervous system to adapt to unexpected variations in movement in your activity. This is done by focusing more deliberately on the skills involved in your training while you vary it. Rather than always turning your thoughts off and running on automatic in your conditioning sessions, you focus more on the skills you are using and vary the sessions, so you can teach yourself to perform the movements in different ways with skill. If you're a runner for example, you might deliberately extend or shorten your gait for a while, concentrating on otherwise maintaining good form. You don't want to do too much of this. You aren't trying to change your gait, you're trying to teach yourself to adapt to unexpected variations in movement. In general you might try varying the speed, direction, range, or rhythm of various movements in your activity.
Finally, consider the psychological dimension of stress. Deliberately focus on small easily neglected aspects of your training to look for problems and help recognize areas where you are frustrated or not in control. Use drills to help develop a greater sense of control over your performance. If you identify specific situations that cause you problems, expose yourself to them in a controlled way in practice to help desensitize yourself to it. Simulate problem situations and rehearse the coping skills you will need in realistic simulations.
Conclusion
Beginners often get too excited and simply overreach themselves. Aside from that, most injuries result not from doing too much or training with too high an intensity level, but from increasing difficulty too quickly without preparing properly or without realizing that there is a basic movement problem being compensated for. Using a conservative progression scheme and incorporating basic assessment tests goes a long way to preventing injuries.
If you want to do even more, then find subtle variations of your training methods that impose a wider variety of moderate stresses on your body, both slight variations in functional movements and in the individual segments of movement chains, and teach your body deliberately to adapt to
variations of stresses. Don't overdo this, it isn't meant to change your basic training program or interfere with it, it is meant to expand it at the boundaries to make you better prepared for the unexpected stressors that you will eventually meet.
Much thanks to Matt Lancaster for the ideas in his article Taking a robust approach to running from P2P Publishing (2008) from which a lot of the specific ideas in the last half of this post were taken. The Peak Performance web site offers a number of good articles and books that are well researched, authoritative, and practical.
I'm a risk averse type, who happens to enjoy some slighly risky activities, so I've always had an interest in injury prevention. In the past decade I've gotten more systematic about preventing injuries. A minor pull that would have taken a few days to heal in my teens will now at 50 sideline me for weeks or even months. And after a few weeks off, I'm pretty much starting over on some aspects of my training. Rather than challenge my motivation to keep starting over and over, I've learned to greatly reduce my injury rate with a judicious little bit of extra training. If you just want to cut to the chase, you can skip down to the last couple of sections. If you want to know the background of the robustness approach , which I think is pretty interesting, then read on.
The biological robustness approach to injury prevention
The concept behind injury prevention that I've adopted is called biological robustness. Biological robustness is based on a adaptive systems approach to human movement. The essential idea is that biological systems preserve their integrity and their core functions in spite of both internal and external perturbation, and we can make use of that fact to understand how things go wrong and make ourselves more resistant tp injury.
How the Body Responds to Stresses: Claude Bernard and the Inner Steady State
The central theme of biological robustness originated in the concept of homeostasis.Homeostasis has a notable pedigree in physiology, going back to the man often considered the father of modern physiology in the mid 19th century, Claude Bernard. Bernard coined the term "mileu interior" for the internal environment of living things. He wrote that "La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition d'une vie libre et indépendante" which means:
The constancy of the internal environment is the condition for a free and independent life.
Maintaining the Internal Steady State: Extended to a General Principle
This idea was later developed by physiologist Walter Cannon in the early 20th century into the concept of homeostasis. Canon published his ideas in 1932 in The Wisdom of the Body.
Most important for our purposes, Cannon reasoned that homeostasis does not occur by chance, but is the result of organized self-government. This is a very significant observation and modern biology has recently begun to build on it increasingly to see the body in terms of more tightly interconnected systems rather than a collections of loosely coordinated individual parts.
This probably seemed to a lot of mechanically minded physiologists at the time as a rather unlikely or even an unscientific notion. Fortunately our increasing understanding of how complex systems work in general has made Canon's ideas increasingly plausible and important over time rather than relegating them to the science museum with phlogiston and luminiferous ether.
Biological Stress Challenges Our Integrity
Canon's homeostasis, derived from Bernard's mileu interior, became the foundation for the familiar notion of stress, first discussed in this context by endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930's. Canon was the one who first coined the popular expression "fight or flight response" in 1915 and it later figured importantly in Selye's concept of stress, along with the idea of homeostasis.
Biological stress is when our capacity to maintain our internal steady state environment is exceeded, whether it is because of real external threats or even perceived ones (which is why there are psychological components to stress as well as physical components).
In the process of preparing for and responding to threat, organisms bring all sorts of emergency mechanisms into play. Selye theorized that when stresses were extended too long, these emergency responses would eventually become exhausted, leading to illness and injury. Other theorists since then have proposed the alternate theory that stress-related illness results not so much from the exhaustion of the emergency mechanisms as from their effect itself on our tissues and organs over time.
In either case, the significance to us is the same: extended stressors without relief lead to breakdown. That becomes the model for how chronic injury occurs. It is also potentially an important factor even in acute injuries, which often occur when we are fatigued or distracted, both of which are sometimes related to the effect of stressors.
Homeostasis Expands To Biological RobustnessThe modern slant on Selye's idea that makes it much more useful for injury prevention is that we have extended the mileu interior to a systems model of how the body operates in general, not just how the body regulates some of its interior processes. Biological robustness means the ability of the body to maintain its core functions in spite of unexpected events.
Note how much more general this is than Canon's homeostasis. The unexpected events might be inside our own body or things happening to us from the outside and they may be in many different kinds of systems. In a wide variety of cases our body strives to maintain function by adapting . Bernard's and Canon's careful observations about specific physiological processes turned out to be applicable to more systems than they first noticed.
This striving to adapt is important for a number of reasons. For example, it can mean that we will change our movement form (often without realizing it) to compensate for a stiffness or weakness in one muscle group by using other muscle groups differently. The fact that our body centrally coordinates movement as well as internal homeostasis means that problems in one place can end up being referred someplace else, a well known principle in modern physiotherapy.
It may seem obvious that when your left foot is hurt, you limp on it and change your gait to adapt, but the concept has some much more subtle implications. A tight iliopsoas muscle in the front of the hip can have an effect on how you use your gluteus muscles, which in turn helps cause an injury somewhere else. And this is a relatively simple and straightforward example.
What this all means to us for preventing injury is that we can't understand the mechanics of our activities just by studying human activity and trying to figure out where the direct physical stresses on us might be. We have to understand the patterns by which our body coordinates movement and strives to adapt to unexpected stresses.
How specifically does this translate to injury prevention? Expecting the Unexpected
Physical training for performance is mostly about identifying specific requirements and training in a way customized for those specific requirements. The better we know the demands of the activity, the better we can tailor the activities and schedules to meet them. Training is specific.
The way that biological robustness affects training is that we also have to take into consideration unexpected stressors as well as expected and well known ones. The principle of robustness training is "expect the unexpected." How the heck do you do that? It's not as crazy an idea as it first sounds. Although we obviously can't prepare for anything that might happen to us, there are a range of potential unexpected stresses that are found in any given kind of activity. For example, a runner can expect to sometimes hit broken ground and turn their foot over, a wrestler can expect to sometimes have body parts pulled forcefully to the limits of movement in various directions, and so on.
So knowing these potental unexpected stresses, how do you protect yourself?
Performance training and robustness have a critical tradeoff. The more you work to prepare yourself for specific expected demands, the more vulnerable you become to unexpected ones. It isn't obvious why this should be so. What seems to happen is that all this complex adaptation your body is doing to specific training demands leaves imbalances and vulnerabilities in other areas. As you become able to push more weight in one exercise, you may be developing a weakness somewhere else that is compensating for some minor internal or external factor that you don't even know about. Over time, even relatively minor unexpected stresses can hit one of these vulnerabilities, and all of a sudden we are injured and we don't know why. We assume we just worked to hard perhaps. But in some cases it was a long developing adaptation process.
How do we minimize the risk of this happening to us?
For each specific training goal, there is a related robustness goal.
When you train for strength, you are working to improve the work capacity of specific muscles and muscle groups. When you train for strength robustness, you look to increase modularity. This means looking at the chain of movements involved and enhancing the ability to withstand stress in each part of the chain. Rather than trying to increase the amount of weight you can push or pull, when you do strength robustness work you try to expose yourself to a wider variety of stresses on the various segments of the movement. You do simple assessment tests to find basic movement weaknesses and you address those. These often reveal problems that you never knew you had because your body found ways to compensate very effectively. But that compensation had an effect elsewhere over time and made you more fragile to injury from some unexpected small stressor.
When you train for general conditioning, you are trying to increase the capacity and efficiency of your cells and tissues to utilize oxygen and utilize various energy systems for movement. When you are trying to improve conditioning robustness you are instead trying to reduce fragility by preparing for a wider range of lesser unexpected challenges rather than a greater amount of an expected challenge. You subject yourself to a wider variety of moderate stresses, particularly varying resistance levels, range of movement around joints, and multidirectional patterns of movement. You want to constantly vary the stresses from session to session and from week to week to expose you to a wider variety of stresses than you would normally get in your activity, but which you still could potentially experience.
When you train for coordination in your activity, you learn movement skills for specific kinds of responses. When you are trying to improve coordination robustness you are looking to train your nervous system to adapt to unexpected variations in movement in your activity. This is done by focusing more deliberately on the skills involved in your training while you vary it. Rather than always turning your thoughts off and running on automatic in your conditioning sessions, you focus more on the skills you are using and vary the sessions, so you can teach yourself to perform the movements in different ways with skill. If you're a runner for example, you might deliberately extend or shorten your gait for a while, concentrating on otherwise maintaining good form. You don't want to do too much of this. You aren't trying to change your gait, you're trying to teach yourself to adapt to unexpected variations in movement. In general you might try varying the speed, direction, range, or rhythm of various movements in your activity.
Finally, consider the psychological dimension of stress. Deliberately focus on small easily neglected aspects of your training to look for problems and help recognize areas where you are frustrated or not in control. Use drills to help develop a greater sense of control over your performance. If you identify specific situations that cause you problems, expose yourself to them in a controlled way in practice to help desensitize yourself to it. Simulate problem situations and rehearse the coping skills you will need in realistic simulations.
Conclusion
Beginners often get too excited and simply overreach themselves. Aside from that, most injuries result not from doing too much or training with too high an intensity level, but from increasing difficulty too quickly without preparing properly or without realizing that there is a basic movement problem being compensated for. Using a conservative progression scheme and incorporating basic assessment tests goes a long way to preventing injuries.
If you want to do even more, then find subtle variations of your training methods that impose a wider variety of moderate stresses on your body, both slight variations in functional movements and in the individual segments of movement chains, and teach your body deliberately to adapt to
variations of stresses. Don't overdo this, it isn't meant to change your basic training program or interfere with it, it is meant to expand it at the boundaries to make you better prepared for the unexpected stressors that you will eventually meet.
Much thanks to Matt Lancaster for the ideas in his article Taking a robust approach to running from P2P Publishing (2008) from which a lot of the specific ideas in the last half of this post were taken. The Peak Performance web site offers a number of good articles and books that are well researched, authoritative, and practical.
Minimalist Fitness: Wherever you go, there you are, working out!
Minimalist Fitness: Wherever you go, there you are, working out!
I just read this excellent post on the Zen Habits blog which reflects a lot of my own philosophy of minimalist conditioning as well.
Part of self-directed training is doing a little research to figure out how to get started, then getting out of analysis mode and DOING IT. It helps in making that transition to DOING IT to have someone do some of the planning for you to get started. I list several programs that I've used personally and found very helpful and very motivating. There are many others that look good as well based on similar sound principles. Remember, I'm not suggesting these in particular for veterans or elite athletes, I'm emphasizing the ones that will help a relative newbie get started fast in a solid minimalist program which they can build on themselves later.
Turbulence Training
http://www.turbulencetraining.com/
Does all of the planning for you with predetermined minimalist sessions and vaariety and progression built in. Support forums, contests, ongoing workouts available.
"Never Gymless" Workout
http://www.rosstraining.com/nevergymless.html
High-end intensity minimalist principles and program ideas, you have to do a little planning work to use this well and most of it is not really for absolute beginners but it provides superb conditioning principles.
RMAX
http://www.rmaxinternational.com/home/
This is a whole culture of programs around various aspects of fitness with a strong minimalist slant and often an interestingly unusual twist.
TorqueBlade
http://www.torqueblade.com/
A very cool approach based on swinging heavy blades around to emphasize functional movement. I mention this one mostly because it is fun, especially when you get bored with burpees and pushup varations.
As I said, I’m omitting a lot of good ones, but these I’ve actually used so far and found fun, effective, and minimalist.
I just read this excellent post on the Zen Habits blog which reflects a lot of my own philosophy of minimalist conditioning as well.
Part of self-directed training is doing a little research to figure out how to get started, then getting out of analysis mode and DOING IT. It helps in making that transition to DOING IT to have someone do some of the planning for you to get started. I list several programs that I've used personally and found very helpful and very motivating. There are many others that look good as well based on similar sound principles. Remember, I'm not suggesting these in particular for veterans or elite athletes, I'm emphasizing the ones that will help a relative newbie get started fast in a solid minimalist program which they can build on themselves later.
Turbulence Training
http://www.turbulencetraining.com/
Does all of the planning for you with predetermined minimalist sessions and vaariety and progression built in. Support forums, contests, ongoing workouts available.
"Never Gymless" Workout
http://www.rosstraining.com/nevergymless.html
High-end intensity minimalist principles and program ideas, you have to do a little planning work to use this well and most of it is not really for absolute beginners but it provides superb conditioning principles.
RMAX
http://www.rmaxinternational.com/home/
This is a whole culture of programs around various aspects of fitness with a strong minimalist slant and often an interestingly unusual twist.
TorqueBlade
http://www.torqueblade.com/
A very cool approach based on swinging heavy blades around to emphasize functional movement. I mention this one mostly because it is fun, especially when you get bored with burpees and pushup varations.
As I said, I’m omitting a lot of good ones, but these I’ve actually used so far and found fun, effective, and minimalist.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Being fair to sociologists: is it worth the effort?
Being fair to sociologists: is it worth the effort?
In his blog Stranger Fruit, John Lynch makes the latest of his attacks on Steve Fuller, who has recently chosen to associate himself supportively with intelligent design proponents. I don't agree with Fuller in general, but I also think I understand in part why he finds his critics to be responding stupidly in many cases.
My comments:
1. Sociologists of science traditionally distinguish themselves as "objective" in part by showing their cynicism to mainstream science, illustrating that they can stand apart from it in some sense and observe it critically. I know that's a difficult idea to make consistent, since the critical examination generally itself makes use of scientific concepts. I don't agree with it, I just make an observation.
2. Controversy tends to drive people to the extremes (I suspect because it fosters the conditions for "hot" or "motivated" cognition), and people get caught up in those extremes to varying degrees.
So in being well intentioned sociologists of science, often involved in controversies, people like Fuller sometimes slide down toward the opposite pole from the people whose work they are trying to understand.
Thus polarized, it is so much work for people to understand each other that they generally don't consider it worth the effort. So Fuller is pretty much doomed to be misunderstood for the most part, and to find his critics to be rather dense.
Some of my favorite examples of the possible breaching of this polarization are found in "The One Culture" edited by Labinger and Collins. There, scientists and sociologists of science go back and forth and make sincere attempts to understand each other as if the other side actually has something worthwhile to say.
Conclusion: Sometimes in the end it is worth the effort to try to understand each other, sometimes not. We don't always know which is true from our initial appraisal, and that's the point.
In his blog Stranger Fruit, John Lynch makes the latest of his attacks on Steve Fuller, who has recently chosen to associate himself supportively with intelligent design proponents. I don't agree with Fuller in general, but I also think I understand in part why he finds his critics to be responding stupidly in many cases.
My comments:
1. Sociologists of science traditionally distinguish themselves as "objective" in part by showing their cynicism to mainstream science, illustrating that they can stand apart from it in some sense and observe it critically. I know that's a difficult idea to make consistent, since the critical examination generally itself makes use of scientific concepts. I don't agree with it, I just make an observation.
2. Controversy tends to drive people to the extremes (I suspect because it fosters the conditions for "hot" or "motivated" cognition), and people get caught up in those extremes to varying degrees.
So in being well intentioned sociologists of science, often involved in controversies, people like Fuller sometimes slide down toward the opposite pole from the people whose work they are trying to understand.
Thus polarized, it is so much work for people to understand each other that they generally don't consider it worth the effort. So Fuller is pretty much doomed to be misunderstood for the most part, and to find his critics to be rather dense.
Some of my favorite examples of the possible breaching of this polarization are found in "The One Culture" edited by Labinger and Collins. There, scientists and sociologists of science go back and forth and make sincere attempts to understand each other as if the other side actually has something worthwhile to say.
Conclusion: Sometimes in the end it is worth the effort to try to understand each other, sometimes not. We don't always know which is true from our initial appraisal, and that's the point.
The concept of motivated cognition: its uses and abuses and its application to rationalism
Two Kinds of Scientific Rationalists: The Influence of Motivated Cognition
The concept of motivated cognition: its uses and abuses
There is a growing body of evidence that human abstract cognition is motivated, something that has been studied recently and somewhat infamously with regard to politics. The scientific concept has also been abused for political purposes, so for good context on the technical side check out this great article on the Mixing Memory cognitive science blog, which describes the basic concept and also its limitations:
Theories of motivated cognition have recently emphasized its apparent link with what is often called "hot cognition," which for example means that we particularly tend to use this mode of thinking in situations such as where:
Motivated cognition and science
The point I've been preparing for here is that philosophical discussions over human reason aren't all that different, from the standpoint of cognitive science, from political opinions. The fact that we are starting with the assumption that humans are rational doesn't mean we aren't typically affected by the conditions that lead to hot cognition.
The classic difference is of course that in the philosophical tradition of modern science, we are supposed to consider all ideas tentative, assume that our own ideas may be biased or wrong, and then are strongly encouraged seek out disconfirming evidence and to consider it when it is found. So in principle, at least, we should already be aware of something like the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, be aware that it affects ourselves as well as others, and actively work to compensate for it. The tradition emphasizes the uncertainty of knowledge at a given time in history, and so encourages an important attitude of active open-mindedness in its conception of scientific inquiry. This is notoriously taken too far at times to encourage premature and unwarranted "paradigm shifts", but the basic underlying principle continues to be sound and consistent with current cognitive science.
When scientific rationalists write about how great science is and how religion is largely silly superstition, I think they often seem largely unaware that they are not representing a single body of opinion but are themselves split by the effects of motivated cognition.
Motivated cognition and rationalism
In the opening of his wonderful book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins discusses two temptations he feels are worth avoiding, but which he he is compelled to flirt with for the purpose of narration: (a) our appetite to find patterns in history even when they aren't there and (b) the vanity of the present, seeing the past as if it were aimed at our own time.
Discussions over what is rational for human beings to believe based on science are in general forced to flirt with these temptations as well. The concept of what is rational has a history and we want to see patterns in it. At the same time, we also want to see the current worldview as being the end result that all of history has led up to.
I see people who consider themselves scientific rationalists (steadfast followers of the ideals of reason and the process of scientific inquiry) as falling mostly toward the extremes on a spectrum with the following poles which I think are the result of motivated cognition and reflect different approaches to addressing the two temptations:
1. those scientific rationalists who are motivated by a desire and need for a sense of certainty leading to a great faith in logic and current best knowledge and believe that we can know the outcomes of our actions with great confidence because science is self-correcting over time and has led up to the present day knowledge in a persistently cumulative way,
2. those scientific rationalists who are more motivated to embrace the unknown and to think of current best knowledge as more transient and have less confidence that we can know the outcomes of our actions because they see the history as contingent, they recognize that knowledge accumulates, but are also more motivated to think of any given theory as tentative at a given time
Similarly to the philosophers foxes and hedgehogs or the lumpers and splitters, these stereotyped views of scientific rationalism are just a tool for helping to understand how our motivations influence the worldviews we adopt and support.
The varieties of scientific rationalism
So I finally come to my point, the different sub-species of scientific rationalists. By the way, like those of us who are diametrically opposed on political ideology, the different scientific rationalists at the extremes don't really see those at the other extreme as scientific rationalists at all.
To make the point more concrete, at one extreme for example we have the people who are committted to preserving science and preventing irrationality and superstition from corrupting the body of accumulated well-tested knowledge. These are the "skeptics" and for historical reasons they are closely related to the almost ironically titled "freethinkers." I don't say this in a demeaning way, because these are really my intellectual mentors and inspire me. I say it is almost ironic because I truly think the motivation for this form of "skepticism" and "freethought" is at its root more about preserving something valuable than inquiring freely. It just happens to be the scientific tradition that they are preserving rather than the traditions of the Crown and Church altar.
At the other extreme we have the people who are committed to questioning and addressing the frontiers of knowedge more aggressively, who want to test the more wacky and more unpopular ideas, who are most motivated to feel that we don't really know how our actions will turn out but we have to act anyway. They are the people motivated to truly embrace the unknown rather than minimize it to help solidify our current knowledge.
The first extreme considers the second one to be irrationalists because they are so quick to dive into things that we have only clues about and not a stable research platform. Their motivation to aggressive "demarcation" of science and superstition leads them to consider ideas that have not yet been validated and well tested to be not only of low confidence but superstitious in principle as well. People who emphasize the contingent nature of history seem to this first extreme to be deliberately ignoring the important patterns and how much we have already accomplished.
The second extreme considers the first one to be irrationalists because they are so loathe to walk on the wild side and don't seem to them to embody much at all of the spirit of active open-mindedness that allows science to revise its mistakes over time. People who emphasize the cumulativeness of scientific knowledge seem to this second extreme to be deliberately ignoring the role of accidents and how much is still unknown, or what might be overturned.
I think the philosopher/logician Susan Haack captured this distinction very well in her book Defending Science Within Reason. She refers to the first category as deferentialists, and the second as cynics. I think that captures the spirit of the distinction very well overall. I strongly empathize with her efforts to steer between them.
The Mixing Memory blog has another fascinating post where a similar kindof distinction is applied to atheism, something commonly associated with scientific rationalism. The author (someone who identifies themself only as "Chris") cleverly divides atheists into skeptical atheists and suspicious atheists. Skeptical atheists are said to adhere strongly to rationalism, while suspicious atheists are more skeptics in the classical sense and question even the scientists' version of reason as well as religious faith.
This is similar to the tradition that considers Haack's cynics and my second category of rationalists to actually be irrationalists, which I tend to disagree with. True, they do put less emphasis on achieving closure through systematic logic, but in many notable cases they are just as opposed to superstition and irrationalism in spirit as the deferentialists.
The cynics are less confident that we really know what we think we know, they don't embrace superstition or revelation or acts of faith.
So I'd put a slightly different slant on that, and say that the cynics really are scientific rationalists of a kind, who have a different slant on reason, emphasizing its limitations while recognizing that it remains our best tool and that we still need to act on it.
To illustrate this important point, my best current example of someone I currently consider a scientfic rationalist cynic is Stuart Kauffman. His conception of how biological phenomena are epistemologically emergent in nature for example truly questions the classical physicalist picture, but it is consistently scientific and rationalist. His consideration of the issues is sophisticated enough that in their online article on emergent properties, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that (referring to kauffman's Home in the Universe):
The concept of motivated cognition: its uses and abuses
There is a growing body of evidence that human abstract cognition is motivated, something that has been studied recently and somewhat infamously with regard to politics. The scientific concept has also been abused for political purposes, so for good context on the technical side check out this great article on the Mixing Memory cognitive science blog, which describes the basic concept and also its limitations:
In motivated reasoning, memory searches, interpretations of incoming
information, evaluations of arguments, and even perception, are biased in such a
way that we will be more likely to arrive at a desired conclusion ...
...biasing the information available for supporting or evaluating
conclusions and arguments, as well as interpreting incoming information...
...as long as we can, we'll only deal with that information that is
consistent with our conclusion... continually confronted with information that conflicts with that conclusion, we will be forced to deal with it
Theories of motivated cognition have recently emphasized its apparent link with what is often called "hot cognition," which for example means that we particularly tend to use this mode of thinking in situations such as where:
- our attitudes are challenged
- an emotional judgment is called for
- there are relatively small consequences for being wrong
- the judgmental task is complex
- "Objective" information is not readily available or the evidence is ambiguous
- disconfirming evidence is not highlighted
- counter-arguments come easily to mind
- we are distracted or under time pressure
Motivated cognition and science
The point I've been preparing for here is that philosophical discussions over human reason aren't all that different, from the standpoint of cognitive science, from political opinions. The fact that we are starting with the assumption that humans are rational doesn't mean we aren't typically affected by the conditions that lead to hot cognition.
The classic difference is of course that in the philosophical tradition of modern science, we are supposed to consider all ideas tentative, assume that our own ideas may be biased or wrong, and then are strongly encouraged seek out disconfirming evidence and to consider it when it is found. So in principle, at least, we should already be aware of something like the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, be aware that it affects ourselves as well as others, and actively work to compensate for it. The tradition emphasizes the uncertainty of knowledge at a given time in history, and so encourages an important attitude of active open-mindedness in its conception of scientific inquiry. This is notoriously taken too far at times to encourage premature and unwarranted "paradigm shifts", but the basic underlying principle continues to be sound and consistent with current cognitive science.
When scientific rationalists write about how great science is and how religion is largely silly superstition, I think they often seem largely unaware that they are not representing a single body of opinion but are themselves split by the effects of motivated cognition.
Motivated cognition and rationalism
In the opening of his wonderful book, The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins discusses two temptations he feels are worth avoiding, but which he he is compelled to flirt with for the purpose of narration: (a) our appetite to find patterns in history even when they aren't there and (b) the vanity of the present, seeing the past as if it were aimed at our own time.
Discussions over what is rational for human beings to believe based on science are in general forced to flirt with these temptations as well. The concept of what is rational has a history and we want to see patterns in it. At the same time, we also want to see the current worldview as being the end result that all of history has led up to.
I see people who consider themselves scientific rationalists (steadfast followers of the ideals of reason and the process of scientific inquiry) as falling mostly toward the extremes on a spectrum with the following poles which I think are the result of motivated cognition and reflect different approaches to addressing the two temptations:
1. those scientific rationalists who are motivated by a desire and need for a sense of certainty leading to a great faith in logic and current best knowledge and believe that we can know the outcomes of our actions with great confidence because science is self-correcting over time and has led up to the present day knowledge in a persistently cumulative way,
2. those scientific rationalists who are more motivated to embrace the unknown and to think of current best knowledge as more transient and have less confidence that we can know the outcomes of our actions because they see the history as contingent, they recognize that knowledge accumulates, but are also more motivated to think of any given theory as tentative at a given time
Similarly to the philosophers foxes and hedgehogs or the lumpers and splitters, these stereotyped views of scientific rationalism are just a tool for helping to understand how our motivations influence the worldviews we adopt and support.
The varieties of scientific rationalism
So I finally come to my point, the different sub-species of scientific rationalists. By the way, like those of us who are diametrically opposed on political ideology, the different scientific rationalists at the extremes don't really see those at the other extreme as scientific rationalists at all.
To make the point more concrete, at one extreme for example we have the people who are committted to preserving science and preventing irrationality and superstition from corrupting the body of accumulated well-tested knowledge. These are the "skeptics" and for historical reasons they are closely related to the almost ironically titled "freethinkers." I don't say this in a demeaning way, because these are really my intellectual mentors and inspire me. I say it is almost ironic because I truly think the motivation for this form of "skepticism" and "freethought" is at its root more about preserving something valuable than inquiring freely. It just happens to be the scientific tradition that they are preserving rather than the traditions of the Crown and Church altar.
At the other extreme we have the people who are committed to questioning and addressing the frontiers of knowedge more aggressively, who want to test the more wacky and more unpopular ideas, who are most motivated to feel that we don't really know how our actions will turn out but we have to act anyway. They are the people motivated to truly embrace the unknown rather than minimize it to help solidify our current knowledge.
The first extreme considers the second one to be irrationalists because they are so quick to dive into things that we have only clues about and not a stable research platform. Their motivation to aggressive "demarcation" of science and superstition leads them to consider ideas that have not yet been validated and well tested to be not only of low confidence but superstitious in principle as well. People who emphasize the contingent nature of history seem to this first extreme to be deliberately ignoring the important patterns and how much we have already accomplished.
The second extreme considers the first one to be irrationalists because they are so loathe to walk on the wild side and don't seem to them to embody much at all of the spirit of active open-mindedness that allows science to revise its mistakes over time. People who emphasize the cumulativeness of scientific knowledge seem to this second extreme to be deliberately ignoring the role of accidents and how much is still unknown, or what might be overturned.
I think the philosopher/logician Susan Haack captured this distinction very well in her book Defending Science Within Reason. She refers to the first category as deferentialists, and the second as cynics. I think that captures the spirit of the distinction very well overall. I strongly empathize with her efforts to steer between them.
The Mixing Memory blog has another fascinating post where a similar kindof distinction is applied to atheism, something commonly associated with scientific rationalism. The author (someone who identifies themself only as "Chris") cleverly divides atheists into skeptical atheists and suspicious atheists. Skeptical atheists are said to adhere strongly to rationalism, while suspicious atheists are more skeptics in the classical sense and question even the scientists' version of reason as well as religious faith.
This is similar to the tradition that considers Haack's cynics and my second category of rationalists to actually be irrationalists, which I tend to disagree with. True, they do put less emphasis on achieving closure through systematic logic, but in many notable cases they are just as opposed to superstition and irrationalism in spirit as the deferentialists.
The cynics are less confident that we really know what we think we know, they don't embrace superstition or revelation or acts of faith.
So I'd put a slightly different slant on that, and say that the cynics really are scientific rationalists of a kind, who have a different slant on reason, emphasizing its limitations while recognizing that it remains our best tool and that we still need to act on it.
To illustrate this important point, my best current example of someone I currently consider a scientfic rationalist cynic is Stuart Kauffman. His conception of how biological phenomena are epistemologically emergent in nature for example truly questions the classical physicalist picture, but it is consistently scientific and rationalist. His consideration of the issues is sophisticated enough that in their online article on emergent properties, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that (referring to kauffman's Home in the Universe):
Kauffman (1993b) is an important and influential assessment of current
scientific theories lending themselves to epistemological emergentist
ideas.
Since I consider philosophy to be for the most part a reason-motivated endeavor and the SEP to be relatively authoritative, I think their mention in this context lends support to my contention that Kauffman provides a data point for scientific rationalist cynics.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Todd the Fervent Public Audodidact
My sub-species has finally been identified: fervent public autodidact
I was honestly very touched by this comment from Alexander Iwanow on my FaceBook page. I just had to save it here so I can look back on it on those days when I wonder whether anyone reads those reviews that I sometimes put so much into.
"Mr. Stark, I've been an admirer of your fervent public autodidactism for years now. You've turned me on to many great books (and off of many bad ones). You are among the most vibrant, reliable, and judicious voices to gift himself on a public website. (Jeff Bezos should give you a plaque for helping him to sell so many books!) I mean hell, man, you even got me to look into YOGA...!!! Thank you for responding warmly to my somewhat rude and impulsive kamikaze invite, and I look forward to whatever twists, turns, and elegant refinements your consciousness opts to undertake."
I was honestly very touched by this comment from Alexander Iwanow on my FaceBook page. I just had to save it here so I can look back on it on those days when I wonder whether anyone reads those reviews that I sometimes put so much into.
"Mr. Stark, I've been an admirer of your fervent public autodidactism for years now. You've turned me on to many great books (and off of many bad ones). You are among the most vibrant, reliable, and judicious voices to gift himself on a public website. (Jeff Bezos should give you a plaque for helping him to sell so many books!) I mean hell, man, you even got me to look into YOGA...!!! Thank you for responding warmly to my somewhat rude and impulsive kamikaze invite, and I look forward to whatever twists, turns, and elegant refinements your consciousness opts to undertake."
Functional Training and Corrective Exercise
Functional Training and Corrective Exercise
In his T-Nation article, trainer Mike Robertson addresses the concept of functional training in terms of the popular trend toward using devices like BOSU balls, wobble boards, etc., that are said to help develop better stability and prevent injuries. Mike discusses why the current trend to using instability devices isn't always productive and how it actually gets away from the concept of functional training. I highly recommend Mike's article, and I want to give some additional context for it here.
The idea of "functional training" was originally to move away from isolation exercises like leg extensions and curls and instead have people do things that were more like the specific challenges they expect to face, forcing them to support, move, and stabilize themselves in controlled ways to prepare to handle real physical challenges better without injury, and in the process, correct more basic weaknesses.
Trainers began to notice that people don't use their bodies in the way that an isolation mentality would predict; the parts are interdependent in important ways when we move. Various neural and connective tissue mechanisms linkn our body parts together to stabilize them as they move through space and exert force against resistance. This led to increasing use of exercises emphasizing multi-joint movements that more closely mimicked real sports movements and real life movements, and led to a growing distinction between training specifically to lift heavy weights in particular ways, training to build big muscles, and training to perform better and avoid injury in other activities. "Corrective" and "functional" training came to increasingly mean doing exercises on unstable surfaces or training the abs, and this starts to drift away from the original concept.
Why is this a drift away from true functional training? ...
Two very important concepts underlie this trend: the "core" and the "kinetic chain."
When someone gets hurt, especially repeated patterns of injury that don't have another obvious cause, it is currently "best practice" to try to track this down to a problem somewhere stabilizing the body properly during movement. Particularly when someone experiences a range of different injuries on the same side of the body, trainers will tend to suspect a problem with the "core." This refers to the central trunk stabilizing muscles and structures.
The "core" obviously doesn't do all of the work of movement. You can think of it as like a platform that we push off in order to move. Actual movement occurs when muscles contract in a precisely timed sequences, where movement at one joint decelerates followed by acceleration at the next joint in the sequence. Thus a "kinetic chain" or simply chain of movements.
The motor cortex in the brain appears to be organized to coordinate muscles in terms of these sequences rather than to fire individual muscles, so this is considered a very fundamental idea. The constant alternation and interplay between producing force at one joint and reducing force at another is coordinated by complex neural mechanisms that are considered an important aspect of proprioception, a general term for our inner body sense.
A synopsis of this topic would be remiss if I didn't mention the first widely read book on the topic, and the one that first fascinated me with it: Total Body Training by Richard Dominguez and Bob Gajda. Many of the concepts that are now widely taken for granted in functional training originated in that very book which is now somewhat hard to find. In fact, this book appears to be the first place where the now ubiquitous late-night infomercial term "core" was used seriously to mean the stabilizing platform for movement. Dominguez is a sports medicine orthopedist and Gajda did his Ph.D thesis in biomechanics. Total Body Training was the result of that work. It is also worth noting that Gajda was a very successful bodybuilder before his work in functional training, having once beaten Arnold for the Mr. Universe title.
The trend toward using wobble boards and such to improve performance and prevent injury begins with Gajda and Dominguez's ideas and is based on improving proprioception skills. The idea is that weaknesses in "core" strength are transmitted by means of the "kinetic chain" to become problems that don't bear any obvious relationship back to the "core."
It's a little like the medical notion of referred pain. Problems in stabilizing the trunk get "referred" to injuries in more remote places in the body. When people try to correct for problems with their gait, their posture, and their basic movements, they compensate by using other muscles and end up with patterns that induce strain and eventually injury.
So one of the ideas is to improve proprioception by exercising on unstable surfaces, forcing us to develop better stabilization skills rather than overcompensating with the wrong muscles. Especially if we lack adequate balance, which isn't uncommon.
The problem is that while stabilization by learning balance skills is important, it is only part of the problem and not neccessarily the best focus for remediation. One of the most common "core" problems appears to be when certain tight core muscles inhibit other muscles through a neural mechanism called reciprocal inhibition. This causes a deep inefficiency that is transmitted to other areas of the body. One common example is when a tight muscle on the front of the hip diminishes hip extension and inhibits the use of the glutes. This imbalance is transmitted through the movement chain to cause problems with other parts of the leg during activity.
The point is that you won't neccessarily best fix this kind of problem by wobbling on a board or a ball. You have to assess the problem and come up with movements that help address the imbalance. Assessment isn't black magic, there are some basic tests that are widely used by therapists and trainers. It does take a little experience to watch a movement and recognize problems with it, but the assessment tests are designed to amplify the basic problems so you can see them better. If you don't have a trainer handy and want to know more about assessment, Gray Cook's book The Athletic Body in Balance is a good start. His "functional movement screen" is a good example of a simple assessment tool.
There's nothing wrong with doing work for proprioception skills and limb stabilizing strength, but it shouldn't be your primary focus since injuries are more likely to be the result of underlying deeper stabilizing muscle imbalances, somewhat obscured by the actions of the kinetic chain.
If you remember that movement starts from a platform, and operates through a chain, it makes sense to assess the integrity of the platform first rather than trying to adjust the wobbling at the end of the chain.
That's why I think Mike's approach to training with functional corrective exercise is so helpful.
In his T-Nation article, trainer Mike Robertson addresses the concept of functional training in terms of the popular trend toward using devices like BOSU balls, wobble boards, etc., that are said to help develop better stability and prevent injuries. Mike discusses why the current trend to using instability devices isn't always productive and how it actually gets away from the concept of functional training. I highly recommend Mike's article, and I want to give some additional context for it here.
The idea of "functional training" was originally to move away from isolation exercises like leg extensions and curls and instead have people do things that were more like the specific challenges they expect to face, forcing them to support, move, and stabilize themselves in controlled ways to prepare to handle real physical challenges better without injury, and in the process, correct more basic weaknesses.
Trainers began to notice that people don't use their bodies in the way that an isolation mentality would predict; the parts are interdependent in important ways when we move. Various neural and connective tissue mechanisms linkn our body parts together to stabilize them as they move through space and exert force against resistance. This led to increasing use of exercises emphasizing multi-joint movements that more closely mimicked real sports movements and real life movements, and led to a growing distinction between training specifically to lift heavy weights in particular ways, training to build big muscles, and training to perform better and avoid injury in other activities. "Corrective" and "functional" training came to increasingly mean doing exercises on unstable surfaces or training the abs, and this starts to drift away from the original concept.
Why is this a drift away from true functional training? ...
Two very important concepts underlie this trend: the "core" and the "kinetic chain."
When someone gets hurt, especially repeated patterns of injury that don't have another obvious cause, it is currently "best practice" to try to track this down to a problem somewhere stabilizing the body properly during movement. Particularly when someone experiences a range of different injuries on the same side of the body, trainers will tend to suspect a problem with the "core." This refers to the central trunk stabilizing muscles and structures.
The "core" obviously doesn't do all of the work of movement. You can think of it as like a platform that we push off in order to move. Actual movement occurs when muscles contract in a precisely timed sequences, where movement at one joint decelerates followed by acceleration at the next joint in the sequence. Thus a "kinetic chain" or simply chain of movements.
The motor cortex in the brain appears to be organized to coordinate muscles in terms of these sequences rather than to fire individual muscles, so this is considered a very fundamental idea. The constant alternation and interplay between producing force at one joint and reducing force at another is coordinated by complex neural mechanisms that are considered an important aspect of proprioception, a general term for our inner body sense.
A synopsis of this topic would be remiss if I didn't mention the first widely read book on the topic, and the one that first fascinated me with it: Total Body Training by Richard Dominguez and Bob Gajda. Many of the concepts that are now widely taken for granted in functional training originated in that very book which is now somewhat hard to find. In fact, this book appears to be the first place where the now ubiquitous late-night infomercial term "core" was used seriously to mean the stabilizing platform for movement. Dominguez is a sports medicine orthopedist and Gajda did his Ph.D thesis in biomechanics. Total Body Training was the result of that work. It is also worth noting that Gajda was a very successful bodybuilder before his work in functional training, having once beaten Arnold for the Mr. Universe title.
The trend toward using wobble boards and such to improve performance and prevent injury begins with Gajda and Dominguez's ideas and is based on improving proprioception skills. The idea is that weaknesses in "core" strength are transmitted by means of the "kinetic chain" to become problems that don't bear any obvious relationship back to the "core."
It's a little like the medical notion of referred pain. Problems in stabilizing the trunk get "referred" to injuries in more remote places in the body. When people try to correct for problems with their gait, their posture, and their basic movements, they compensate by using other muscles and end up with patterns that induce strain and eventually injury.
So one of the ideas is to improve proprioception by exercising on unstable surfaces, forcing us to develop better stabilization skills rather than overcompensating with the wrong muscles. Especially if we lack adequate balance, which isn't uncommon.
The problem is that while stabilization by learning balance skills is important, it is only part of the problem and not neccessarily the best focus for remediation. One of the most common "core" problems appears to be when certain tight core muscles inhibit other muscles through a neural mechanism called reciprocal inhibition. This causes a deep inefficiency that is transmitted to other areas of the body. One common example is when a tight muscle on the front of the hip diminishes hip extension and inhibits the use of the glutes. This imbalance is transmitted through the movement chain to cause problems with other parts of the leg during activity.
The point is that you won't neccessarily best fix this kind of problem by wobbling on a board or a ball. You have to assess the problem and come up with movements that help address the imbalance. Assessment isn't black magic, there are some basic tests that are widely used by therapists and trainers. It does take a little experience to watch a movement and recognize problems with it, but the assessment tests are designed to amplify the basic problems so you can see them better. If you don't have a trainer handy and want to know more about assessment, Gray Cook's book The Athletic Body in Balance is a good start. His "functional movement screen" is a good example of a simple assessment tool.
There's nothing wrong with doing work for proprioception skills and limb stabilizing strength, but it shouldn't be your primary focus since injuries are more likely to be the result of underlying deeper stabilizing muscle imbalances, somewhat obscured by the actions of the kinetic chain.
If you remember that movement starts from a platform, and operates through a chain, it makes sense to assess the integrity of the platform first rather than trying to adjust the wobbling at the end of the chain.
That's why I think Mike's approach to training with functional corrective exercise is so helpful.
Flowchart for responding to negative blogs
The Air Force (their Public Affairs Agency) has this simple but useful flowchart for responding to negative press online. I found this reading web marketing author David Meerman Scott's WebInk blog. It's largely commonsense, but as the saying goes, such isn't always so common.
The Air Force (their Public Affairs Agency) has this simple but useful flowchart for responding to negative press online. I found this reading web marketing author David Meerman Scott's WebInk blog. It's largely commonsense, but as the saying goes, such isn't always so common.
Which is Better: Conscious or Unconscious Decision Making?
Which is Better: Conscious or Unconscious Decision Making ?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081224215542.htm
The snippet above from Science Daily reports on the superiority of unconscious decision making in the case of estimating likelihoods.
My thoughts ...
There's a fairly sizable literature on decision making, and typically the headlines hide the facts in this field. I'd estimate that about 70% of the recent experiments went the way of this article with their conclusion (and of course one of Malcolm Gladwell's popular books) and about 30% went the opposite way, saying that the work 'proves' that complex decisions should not be left to unconscious proceses. It's like the nature/nurture question, we feel compelled to slide toward the extremes.
My impression is that what the literature (collectively) has shown so far is:
1. There are perceptual tracking mechanisms and very powerful computational mechanisms that operate completely outside of awareness for the most part, yet are important in decision making (rapid cognition, etc., the "human intuition is so amazing" school)
2. Our conscious reasoning processes are built very recently (phylogenetically) on a substrate of other things, and so they have a lot of biases and blind spots and rely heavily on our limited and easily distrated working memory capacity (Kahnemann, Tversky, etc., the "human reasoning is so fallible" school)
3. The unconscious mechanisms don't work by magic, i.e. with the exception of some basic category templates for recognizing and sorting things, they still rely on an acquired store of experience built onto those templates (Kant plus Darwin)
4. Good decision making for complex problems is good largely because because it tends to use the unconscious processes effectively, and does this by focusing attention on the relevant aspects of the problem (knowing what is relevant and what is not is sometimes the meat of the problem, and sometimes a given)
5. Focusing attention on the relevant aspects of a complex problem generally requires us to draw from the skills that rely on working memory and are generally conscious and build on structural rules, sequencing, and explicit algorithms (the virtual von Neumann machine that many of us we believe we possess in our head)
So while the above is a very simplistic account of a big topic, I think it helps illustrate that "conscious" vs. "unconscious" is not really the important issue in decision making, although it is certainly useful to distinguish automatic processes. The more compelling issue is how to structure problems so we can use the powerful resources of the mind, and how to learn the skills for making best use of those abilities, and the skills for recognizing our own biases and blind spots when we structure problems.
Many natural mechanisms work best on imperfect information but fail when compared to systematic reasoning with good information. However most real and meaningful human problems in nature require responses with limited resources, limited time, and very limited information, so a lot of the research actually demonstrates that while we can do better than intuition in theory, we can't do better than intuition in practice.
That is, unless we have some way of "cheating" by having unusually good information or knowing the answer ahead of time. Our species dependence on social imitation probably reflects exactly that, a way of "cheating" the limitations of individual problem solving by copying what other people are doing. For every problem we find that legitimately shows that people screwed up by trusting systematic reasoning too far, we can find one where someone trusted an intuition that had catastrophic consequences. In my opinion, the key skill set is in learning clues for recognizing when to trust each tool. That is, rather than espousing either blind trust or mistrust in powerful automatic processes.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081224215542.htm
The snippet above from Science Daily reports on the superiority of unconscious decision making in the case of estimating likelihoods.
My thoughts ...
There's a fairly sizable literature on decision making, and typically the headlines hide the facts in this field. I'd estimate that about 70% of the recent experiments went the way of this article with their conclusion (and of course one of Malcolm Gladwell's popular books) and about 30% went the opposite way, saying that the work 'proves' that complex decisions should not be left to unconscious proceses. It's like the nature/nurture question, we feel compelled to slide toward the extremes.
My impression is that what the literature (collectively) has shown so far is:
1. There are perceptual tracking mechanisms and very powerful computational mechanisms that operate completely outside of awareness for the most part, yet are important in decision making (rapid cognition, etc., the "human intuition is so amazing" school)
2. Our conscious reasoning processes are built very recently (phylogenetically) on a substrate of other things, and so they have a lot of biases and blind spots and rely heavily on our limited and easily distrated working memory capacity (Kahnemann, Tversky, etc., the "human reasoning is so fallible" school)
3. The unconscious mechanisms don't work by magic, i.e. with the exception of some basic category templates for recognizing and sorting things, they still rely on an acquired store of experience built onto those templates (Kant plus Darwin)
4. Good decision making for complex problems is good largely because because it tends to use the unconscious processes effectively, and does this by focusing attention on the relevant aspects of the problem (knowing what is relevant and what is not is sometimes the meat of the problem, and sometimes a given)
5. Focusing attention on the relevant aspects of a complex problem generally requires us to draw from the skills that rely on working memory and are generally conscious and build on structural rules, sequencing, and explicit algorithms (the virtual von Neumann machine that many of us we believe we possess in our head)
So while the above is a very simplistic account of a big topic, I think it helps illustrate that "conscious" vs. "unconscious" is not really the important issue in decision making, although it is certainly useful to distinguish automatic processes. The more compelling issue is how to structure problems so we can use the powerful resources of the mind, and how to learn the skills for making best use of those abilities, and the skills for recognizing our own biases and blind spots when we structure problems.
Many natural mechanisms work best on imperfect information but fail when compared to systematic reasoning with good information. However most real and meaningful human problems in nature require responses with limited resources, limited time, and very limited information, so a lot of the research actually demonstrates that while we can do better than intuition in theory, we can't do better than intuition in practice.
That is, unless we have some way of "cheating" by having unusually good information or knowing the answer ahead of time. Our species dependence on social imitation probably reflects exactly that, a way of "cheating" the limitations of individual problem solving by copying what other people are doing. For every problem we find that legitimately shows that people screwed up by trusting systematic reasoning too far, we can find one where someone trusted an intuition that had catastrophic consequences. In my opinion, the key skill set is in learning clues for recognizing when to trust each tool. That is, rather than espousing either blind trust or mistrust in powerful automatic processes.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Hack: using parity to burn more reliable disks
If you like to burn data disks and are concerned about their longevity, check out this great idea posted on LifeHacker. The example here uses a Windows freeware tool called QuickPar, and for recovery you will need another tool (such as ISOBUSTER) to read surviving data from bad disks so you can use this method.
Burn More Reliable Discs with QuickPar http://tinyurl.com/9j7hyb
The tip is about using that lump of extra space you usually end up with on your data disks to hold parity files for your data. Parity files have extra information that lets you recover your files if they are later found to be corrupted. I've had a number of cases where old disks started to have a few corrupted files before the entire disk became unreadable, and this tip would have saved a lot of anguish. Of course if you want to protect everything on the disk, you'll need to leave more space on your disks for the parity files.
This takes just a touch of tech savvy, but it's a beginner tip as "hacks" go. Anyone comfortable with using disk burners and disk reading tools like ISOBUSTER will find this an easy thing to use to make the most precious data on their CDs and DVDs much more reliable.
So why don't they build this functionality into all disk burning tools?
Todd
Burn More Reliable Discs with QuickPar http://tinyurl.com/9j7hyb
The tip is about using that lump of extra space you usually end up with on your data disks to hold parity files for your data. Parity files have extra information that lets you recover your files if they are later found to be corrupted. I've had a number of cases where old disks started to have a few corrupted files before the entire disk became unreadable, and this tip would have saved a lot of anguish. Of course if you want to protect everything on the disk, you'll need to leave more space on your disks for the parity files.
This takes just a touch of tech savvy, but it's a beginner tip as "hacks" go. Anyone comfortable with using disk burners and disk reading tools like ISOBUSTER will find this an easy thing to use to make the most precious data on their CDs and DVDs much more reliable.
So why don't they build this functionality into all disk burning tools?
Todd
Thoughts on Twitter (so far)
I just started using Twitter this week and have been wondering whether it would be of any use in the long run. It seems to leverage our instinct for gossip, effectively a giant ongoing chat room. But that doesn’t mean it can’t become a powerful tool.
First, so far, I think it's pretty clear that it is not the right medium for intelligent discussion and encourages a soundbite mentality that is already too common and too tempting. We can’t structure a thoughtful argument and provide context for an original thought in 140 chars, unless we have been involved in a dialog for a while or have common source of context, neither of which is encouraged by the Twitter format. It is possible but extremely inconvenient for that purpose. You can only give clues to your thinking, or give the impression of saying something useful, which hopefully will trigger thinking in other people.
However, that said, it also seems to me that Twitter seems particularly powerful when used as a source of quick pointers to potentially interesting things … a spur to creativity or looking in new directions. The more people think of it as a way to trigger ideas in others, the more selective they will be about giving ideas rather than statuses, and the more feeds we can read that trigger useful ideas. So long as the mundane “I am going out to the store for some bread and milk now” stuff doesn’t overwhelm the channel.
I think that (as with non-virtual relations), it works best if you surround yourself with people that have good ideas and diverse thoughts about similar interests to yours (and maybe a couple of offbeat friends). I can't see how people following 5,000 Twitter contacts can use it for anything more than random inspiration?
(This is an edit of a comment to Cameron Reilly's blog post about how he uses Twitter).
I just started using Twitter this week and have been wondering whether it would be of any use in the long run. It seems to leverage our instinct for gossip, effectively a giant ongoing chat room. But that doesn’t mean it can’t become a powerful tool.
First, so far, I think it's pretty clear that it is not the right medium for intelligent discussion and encourages a soundbite mentality that is already too common and too tempting. We can’t structure a thoughtful argument and provide context for an original thought in 140 chars, unless we have been involved in a dialog for a while or have common source of context, neither of which is encouraged by the Twitter format. It is possible but extremely inconvenient for that purpose. You can only give clues to your thinking, or give the impression of saying something useful, which hopefully will trigger thinking in other people.
However, that said, it also seems to me that Twitter seems particularly powerful when used as a source of quick pointers to potentially interesting things … a spur to creativity or looking in new directions. The more people think of it as a way to trigger ideas in others, the more selective they will be about giving ideas rather than statuses, and the more feeds we can read that trigger useful ideas. So long as the mundane “I am going out to the store for some bread and milk now” stuff doesn’t overwhelm the channel.
I think that (as with non-virtual relations), it works best if you surround yourself with people that have good ideas and diverse thoughts about similar interests to yours (and maybe a couple of offbeat friends). I can't see how people following 5,000 Twitter contacts can use it for anything more than random inspiration?
(This is an edit of a comment to Cameron Reilly's blog post about how he uses Twitter).
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Being "scientific" about exercise and weight control
I was looking for references to research on the relationship of appetite and exercise and I came across an interesting blog post that inspired some thoughts. I see a lot of people trying to interpret research results, which in general I like to see. But people also seem to commonly try to draw advice for themselves from selectively chosen studies, and that's the part that I wanted to comment on.
If you want to know how exercise effects your body, and you have confidence in science, try doing it and measure the effects. Make yourself the study population rather than trying to identify (or not) with the population in the latest study. Or, if instead you want to understand the research, get the background for the program and read the literature directly.
People tend to treat journalist's reports of research it as if it were "scientific advice" and then when it is nothing of the kind (which is generally the case), the researchers are accused of being hopelessly obscure, getting paid for results, or being contradictory about their advice. What a bum rap. That's not the point of research at all.
Research is most *interesting* when it contains contradictions and gets *boring* when the results become consistent. Sure, you want to prove your new hypothesis is right, but if it were easy to demonstrate someone would already have demonstrated it. You expect things to be fuzzy in a new area of research where there are interesting new hypotheses to test.You can almost never generallize "laws" (or advice) from a single study, nor should you expect to.
Conclusions vary even in very similar studies either because of the way the question was asked or because they didn't identify the right variables in the right way yet to address the question. That's assuming they're even studying something that can be characterized in a law-like way, which isn't always the case.
Sometimes individual differences outweigh generalized laws, even when there *are* underlying laws (this is a common finding in social psychology research). More to the point, this seems to be the case somewhat with nutrition as well. Conflicting results are a symptom of a fertile research topic.
IMO, if you want to draw good advice from research, stop jumping on every new study that comes out just because it seems to say something you'd like to hear, and learn to follow the *trends* in the research programs. That means reading technical books and journals rather than sound bites and blogs, and looking for commonalities rather than just reports that stand out because they are novel. But that's more work than you probably need to do.
There are a lot of people that have been spending decades researching obesity and there are some very useful conclusions. But you still have to do the work to see what works best for you.
I think there are many, many fat people out there exercising like crazy and not reaching their goals because they keep looking for magic bullets or excuses instead of starting with sound principles and then experimenting carefully to see what is working for them and what isn't.
I've noticed that there are also a number of chubby runners out there who stay chubby because they take in more than they put out, which I suspect is due to the putative appetite effect. It could well be that they would benefit by changing their training to briefer, higher intensity work, so that the appetite effect would lessen and the metabolic increase last longer. But that's speculation at this point and represents very hard work and many people would give up on such a regimen if they're used to jogging and elliptical machines and such. So they have to experiment to see what's right for them.
Well, anyway, personal experimentation (and brief high intensity training) is an approach that has always worked very well for me. Just remember, people tend to distort their own perception of what they take in and what they put out (*that's* a pretty well validated research result across many studies). So when you measure your compliance and your results, be sure to be specific and use accurate measurements and don't rely on memory and estimation.
I was looking for references to research on the relationship of appetite and exercise and I came across an interesting blog post that inspired some thoughts. I see a lot of people trying to interpret research results, which in general I like to see. But people also seem to commonly try to draw advice for themselves from selectively chosen studies, and that's the part that I wanted to comment on.
If you want to know how exercise effects your body, and you have confidence in science, try doing it and measure the effects. Make yourself the study population rather than trying to identify (or not) with the population in the latest study. Or, if instead you want to understand the research, get the background for the program and read the literature directly.
People tend to treat journalist's reports of research it as if it were "scientific advice" and then when it is nothing of the kind (which is generally the case), the researchers are accused of being hopelessly obscure, getting paid for results, or being contradictory about their advice. What a bum rap. That's not the point of research at all.
Research is most *interesting* when it contains contradictions and gets *boring* when the results become consistent. Sure, you want to prove your new hypothesis is right, but if it were easy to demonstrate someone would already have demonstrated it. You expect things to be fuzzy in a new area of research where there are interesting new hypotheses to test.You can almost never generallize "laws" (or advice) from a single study, nor should you expect to.
Conclusions vary even in very similar studies either because of the way the question was asked or because they didn't identify the right variables in the right way yet to address the question. That's assuming they're even studying something that can be characterized in a law-like way, which isn't always the case.
Sometimes individual differences outweigh generalized laws, even when there *are* underlying laws (this is a common finding in social psychology research). More to the point, this seems to be the case somewhat with nutrition as well. Conflicting results are a symptom of a fertile research topic.
IMO, if you want to draw good advice from research, stop jumping on every new study that comes out just because it seems to say something you'd like to hear, and learn to follow the *trends* in the research programs. That means reading technical books and journals rather than sound bites and blogs, and looking for commonalities rather than just reports that stand out because they are novel. But that's more work than you probably need to do.
There are a lot of people that have been spending decades researching obesity and there are some very useful conclusions. But you still have to do the work to see what works best for you.
I think there are many, many fat people out there exercising like crazy and not reaching their goals because they keep looking for magic bullets or excuses instead of starting with sound principles and then experimenting carefully to see what is working for them and what isn't.
I've noticed that there are also a number of chubby runners out there who stay chubby because they take in more than they put out, which I suspect is due to the putative appetite effect. It could well be that they would benefit by changing their training to briefer, higher intensity work, so that the appetite effect would lessen and the metabolic increase last longer. But that's speculation at this point and represents very hard work and many people would give up on such a regimen if they're used to jogging and elliptical machines and such. So they have to experiment to see what's right for them.
Well, anyway, personal experimentation (and brief high intensity training) is an approach that has always worked very well for me. Just remember, people tend to distort their own perception of what they take in and what they put out (*that's* a pretty well validated research result across many studies). So when you measure your compliance and your results, be sure to be specific and use accurate measurements and don't rely on memory and estimation.
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