Month: October 2023

we need to think of a name for him

I am reading Determined by Sapolsky. Here’s an interesting excerpt (translated into Russian) about cultural differences between Asians and Americans.

“… Americans usually use singular pronouns, define themselves through personal characteristics rather than relational ones (‘I am a lawyer’ instead of ‘I am a parent’), and structure their memory around events rather than social ties (‘This summer I learned to swim’ versus ‘This summer we became friends’). If asked to draw a sociogram—a diagram with circles symbolizing themselves and other important people in their lives—Americans typically place themselves inside the largest circle at the center. Meanwhile, an East Asian’s circle typically does not exceed the size of others’ circles and is not at the forefront. The goal for Americans is to stand out, to be better than others; the goal for East Asians is to maintain inconspicuousness. These differences generate variances in understandings of norm violations and in ways of responding to them.

Such differences reflect different brain and bodily operating mechanisms. On average, East Asians’ dopamine reward system (a neurotransmitter associated with the feeling of satisfaction) responds more actively to a calm facial expression as opposed to an excited one, while for Americans, it’s the opposite. That’s why the somewhat grim faces of Russians seem strange to Americans 🙂 When presented with a complex scene, East Asians usually perceive it as a whole, whereas Americans focus on the individual at the center. Forcing an American to talk about moments where they were influenced by others, they produce more glucocorticoids—’stress hormones’; contrary to that, an East Asian produces stress hormone when discussing influencing others.

Where do these differences come from? The conventional explanation for American individualism is

1) that America is a country of immigrants (as of 2017, about 37% are immigrants or their descendants). But not everyone decides to emigrate: immigration represents a selection process of people willing to leave their native world and culture for a long and complicated journey to a new country. Along the way to their destination, individuals face barriers that hinder their entry and work in the toughest jobs after obtaining permission;

2) that much of America’s history involved an expanding western frontier, settled by similarly resilient, individualistic pioneers. Meanwhile, the standard explanation for East Asian collectivism is the ecology dictating means of production—in China, for instance, ten thousand years of rice cultivation requiring massive amounts of collective labor to transform mountains into terraced rice fields, collective planting and harvesting each person’s turn, collective building and maintenance of massive and ancient irrigation systems. Collectivism has also been predominant among the Russian populace throughout many years of history.

An interesting exception to this rule are regions of northern China, where the ecosystem impedes rice farming, giving rise to millennia of individualistic wheat farming. Farmers from this region, and even their university student grandchildren, are as individualistic as Westerners.

According to one intriguing study, Chinese from rice regions navigate obstacles (in this case, by walking around two chairs experimentally placed to block a pathway into Starbucks), whereas people from wheat regions remove obstacles (i.e., by moving the chairs).

—

Forests teem with a multitude of species, which tends to create a perception of multiple gods. Moreover, monotheistic desert dwellers are more warlike and effective in conquests than polytheists from tropical forests. This explains why about 55 percent of people adhere to religions created by Near Eastern shepherds.

Herding raises another cultural difference. Traditionally, people earn their living as agrarians, hunter-gatherers, or shepherds. The latter live in deserts, steppes, or tundra with their herds of goats, camels, sheep, cows, llamas, yaks, or deer. Such shepherds are vulnerable in a different way than arable farmers, for whom the main enemy is nature. It is difficult to stealthily sneak in at night and steal someone’s rice field or tropical forest. But you can be a crafty pest and steal someone’s livestock, milk, and meat, on which they survive. This vulnerability gave rise to ‘cultures of honor’ with the following features:

(a) extreme, yet temporary hospitality to a passing stranger—after all, most shepherds are nomads with their animals at some point;

(b) strict adherence to codes of behavior, where norm violations are usually interpreted as an insult to someone;

(c) such insults require retaliatory violence—a world of feuding and revenge that lasts generations;

(d) the existence of warrior classes and values where valor in battle brings high status and a glorious afterlife.

Much is said about the hospitality, conservatism (in the sense of strict adherence to cultural norms), and violence of the traditional honor culture of the American South. The American South typically has the highest murder rates in the country, not robberies, but killings of someone who seriously dishonored your honor (by insulting you, failing to fulfill a duty, etc.), especially so in the rural South.

Where does this culture of honor in the American South come from? A widely accepted theory among historians suggests that while colonial New England in the north was populated by pilgrims and the mid-Atlantic by merchants such as Quakers, the South disproportionately housed shepherds from northern England, Scotland, and Ireland.

By the way, the hotter the climate in which a person grew up, the more reactive their amygdala in stressful situations.

Another cultural comparison between ‘tough’ cultures (with many and strict behavior norms) and ‘soft’ ones. What are the main features of a ‘tough’ society? A history of many cultural crises, droughts, famines, earthquakes, and a high incidence of infectious diseases. And I mean ‘history’—one study of 33 countries showed that toughness is most often found in cultures with high population density starting from 1500.

Five hundred years ago? How can that be? Because generation after generation the influence of ancestors shaped how often a mother physically contacted her children; whether children were subject to rituals such as scarification, life-threatening initiation rites; whether there were myths and songs about revenge or forgiveness, etc.

Reading Determined by Sapolsky. An interesting study is mentioned. Seems like obvious results, but still. Birth month (read zodiac sign) correlates with university success.

The first study examines the impact of birth month on admission results at Oxford. Those born in September score on average higher than those born in August.

The second study looks at the effect of relative age (RAE) on British Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and medicine. Because the academic year in Britain starts in September, there can be up to a year’s age difference among students in the same class. This can put younger students at a disadvantage compared to the older ones.

It was found that out of 62 British-born Nobel laureates, 41.3% were born between September and November. This is significantly higher than laureates from other countries. Such a birthdate distribution among British Nobel laureates was not uniform.

There are also a number of similar studies that support these findings

Hahaha

P.S. I managed for an hour and a half, then my brain exploded

yesterday on the way to the bar, I snapped a picture of the moon with my little phone

my 29th. How do you think, will Yuki appreciate his portrait?

my 29th work. Do you think he will like it? Does it look like him?

continuing to read Determined

by Sapolsky. Interesting (translated into Russian)

“…For millennia, sages have asserted that outer beauty reflects inner goodness. Although we no longer openly claim this, beauty still holds power in our subconscious; attractive people are considered more honest, intelligent, and competent; they are more frequently chosen or hired, and with a higher salary; they are less often culprits in crimes and receive shorter sentences. My god, can’t the brain distinguish beauty from kindness? It especially cannot. In three different studies, participants in brain scanners alternated between assessing the beauty of something (such as faces) or the kindness of some behavior. Both types of assessments activated the same area (the orbitofrontal cortex or OFC); the more beautiful or better, the more activation of the OFC (and less activation of the insula). As if trivial emotions about beauty interfere with brain reasoning about measures of fairness. What was shown in another study – moral judgements were no longer colored by aesthetics after the temporary suppression of a part of the PFC that directs information about emotions to the frontal cortex.”

And do you associate beautiful people with honesty, intelligence, and kindness?

Interestingly, the latest iPhone, even in terms of the location of production of most of its key components, is hardly Chinese anymore. Look, 29% of them, based on cost, are supplied from South Korea. LG Group provides parts for the camera, Samsung Group supplies the display.

The USA has provided the largest share of key components, 33%, with Qualcomm and Broadcom supplying communication chips. Japan’s share remains unchanged at 10%. Apple manufactures its own chips in Taiwan (TSMC). China’s share is 2.5%. A significant Chinese contribution is the titanium case.

I am currently reading Sapolsky, who describes an experiment showing that people who experienced disgust (for example, by holding their hand in a vomit simulation) tend to recommend harsher punishments for violations related to cleanliness.

This is explained by the fact that disgust is associated with activity in a part of the brain called the insula. This brain region is activated by repulsive smells or sensations. For the last hundred million years, this helped in survival by choosing what to put in one’s mouth and what not to. Later, when people encountered the need to assess acts and with moral judgment in general, evolution just added this role to the insula, as developing a specialized area of the brain simply takes more time and it’s a big question if it’s really necessary. Actually, the reverse pattern also works – a good smell and taste facilitate people being more agreeable and more often positively assessing artworks. Another study showed that hunger makes us less tolerant. Analyses of judges’ decisions were correlated with the times they had eaten.

Source: Implicit effects of sweet tastes: M.Schaefer et al. “Sweet Taste Experience Improves Prosocial Intentions and Attractive Ratings” Psychological Research 85 (2021): 1724. B.Meier et al., “Sweet Taste Preferences and Experiences Predict Prosocial Inferences, Personalities, and Behaviors,” Psychological Sciences 102 (2012): 163.

Do you now understand why it is good to keep small treats handy during negotiations?

I’ve just started reading “Determined” by Robert Sapolsky. I noticed that one of the chapters ahead (haven’t finished it yet) references Cellular automata. And I realized I forgot to share an interesting find—a book “A New Kind of Science” by Stephen Wolfram. I bought it earlier this year and have read about 60% of it.

“A New Kind of Science” is a voluminous tome of over a thousand pages that covers everything from physics to biology and neuroscience. Its author, Stephen Wolfram, a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences, is the creator and main developer of the scientific software Mathematica and also Wolfram Alpha. Having become incredibly wealthy, he dedicated his intellectual career to exploring what happens when simple rules are applied to cells on a plane or in space.

He discovered that even simple rules like “if the square to the right is black, be black; if it’s white, be white,” when repeated a million times, can generate surprisingly complex structures. To a human, this complexity does not fit well with the simplicity of the rules because everywhere in our world, it seems that simple rules generate simplicity, and complex rules generate complexity. Hence, his main idea is that often simple rules can generate very complex outcomes.

Essentially, this is how DNA works. After all, DNA is a program that receives a) the actual software code—a sequence of amino acids and b) the result of the previous execution (enzymes floating in the cell suppressing some fragments of the software code, as well as some initial state of enzymes floating in the mother’s egg cell). As a result, after 10 iterations, the same software code generates structures that simply did not exist before ten iterations. And at, say, the hundredth iteration, something else gets activated. And calculating what will activate if something initially goes slightly wrong—like if an enzyme isn’t present at a needed moment in the cell—is virtually impossible. This makes genetics a very complex field.

Wolfram has a whole system for such things. For example, for a simple algorithm – we choose the color of a cell in the next iteration based on the color of the cell in the current iteration and the colors of the immediate neighboring cells. Such rules are formulated as 8 transformations of three bits into one, which essentially gives a program that only needs 8 bits to fully describe its logic. These 8 bits define the program. For example, Rule 22, which can be formulated as: each cell in the next generation will be black if exactly one of its two neighboring cells or itself is black in the current generation. So, if you initiate this rule against some initial state, a random pattern of large and small triangles, which are simultaneously random and not, will form over millions and billions of generations. The most interesting part is that it’s unpredictable from the initial condition and by the rule—at least, science doesn’t know how, and observations can only be made by running simulations and examining the outcomes. For instance, it might be that somewhere at the billionth generation, the pattern begins to repeat. Or it doesn’t. Or an intricate trapezoid might appear in the pattern that hadn’t appeared before. Or after a certain step, everything might collapse into a completely white or black background.

But what’s interesting is that this complexity is determined from the very beginning. Essentially, the number (rule) + initial combination determines the infinite terabytes of the resulting pattern. Slightly change the rule or the initial combination, and everything changes to something else, but also determined.

By the way, almost 100% of Wolfram’s discoveries would have been understood even in ancient Greece, and nothing prevented them from being formulated and passed down to the next generations in ancient Greece. But for some reason, there hasn’t been a single attempt over thousands of years. Only in the 20th century did they gradually begin to dig into the topic. Well, try to think of any other branch of science that theoretically could have been invented in ancient Greece but was only conceived now.

In the book, he analyzes the biology of these resulting creatures, and even classifies them reasonably well. He identifies some common characteristics—the same triangles in the pattern, although neither he nor others can explain where they come from.

In general, the book is very entertaining.

Now about the oddities.

Wolfram claims that this is a new way of doing science: instead of mathematical modeling of physical processes, scientists can simply observe computer-generated patterns that accurately model phenomena. And that in many cases, this opens up new horizons. Well, that’s debatable. Well okay.

I’m also somewhat irritated by the speaking style “one of the most important discoveries that I made.” It’s practically in every chapter. It must be admitted that the topic Wolfram launched with this book around 2002 was already in circulation, but no one had systematized it quite like he has. And it must be admitted that since 2002, it has also not been particularly popular among scientists. Maybe there’s not much more to delve into than Wolfram did, or maybe they just don’t like him so much that no one wants to touch it 🙂

So, no doubt, this book must be incredibly irritating to industry practitioners who, reading it, seem to practically not exist compared to the self-proclaimed brilliant mind of Mr. Wolfram. Sometimes it almost crosses into parody. I remember from my school days programming Conway’s “Game of Life,” and I was amazed then, where the heck does the information to describe all this come from. But according to Mr. Wolfram, he was the first to think this way. That is, he of course refers to Conway, but unwillingly, cloaking all the references with self-praising statements. Possibly, Wolfram did indeed make many discoveries independently and helped revive the subject, but even if so, he needs to recognize the merits of others more in his texts and not boast about how smart he is.

The book, by the way, is available in public access—Wolfram has put it up on his website, well adapted for the web. In its printed version, it is also surprisingly affordable. So if you’re interested, I advise you to take a look and form your own opinion.