John Searle, on constructing social reality:

If, for example, we give a big cocktail party, and invite everyone in Paris, and things get out of hand, and it turns out that the casualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz -- all the same, it is not a war; it is just one amazing cocktail party.

check out the gorgeous website of per se in new york, where i will dine at least once when i am not poor.

kinjal just got back from a one-week trip into the rainforests of costa rica, a remarkable act of daring considering that her qualifying exams are less than a month away. a week without e-mail or cell phone contact at any time of the year seems inconceivable to me now, but i'm always open to accomplishing the impossible. she looks so refreshed that i've almost convinced myself that it's something i need, what with exhaustion threatening to overcome me so much of the time.

i'm taking our required ethics class now, which has put me to thinking about priest-penitent privilege and its various ramifications. even in the old days, this was one of the things that always made me a little uncomfortable -- that priests are legally obliged to uphold the seal of the confessional no matter what the crime. in the united states, the clergy are the only people for whom this applies -- secrecy is mandated even in cases of reported child abuse or homicidal intention. for now this is only changing at the state level, but when, as will happen, the matter reaches the the supreme court, a decision either way is going to be serious business. one way, child abusers go free, the other, the church is forced to ante up its parishioners' souls. this sounds a bit like a false dilemma, but i think it's nearer the truth than you might suspect, and certainly something to think about if you're of a religious persuasion.

i've had a thing for walter moers for a while now, but i have to say that the city of dreaming books is probably his best novel to date. particularly because of the section on booklings and orming. booklings are cycoplean creatures who live deep in the catacombs under Bookholm, and devote their lives to memorizing the complete works of an author after which they're named. i don't know how this was accomplished in the german, but in the english translation (of the german translation from zamonian), the booklings' names are anagrams of the names of real-world authors. thus: Perla la Gadeon:

Hear the loud Bookholmian bells --
brazen bells
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
how they screamed out their affright
Too much horrified to speak,
they can only shriek, shriek...

and Bethelzia B. Binngrow (an albino bookling with a watery red eye), among many other delightfuls. this guy here has compiled a list of all of them -- i confess that there are a few which escape me, but i haven't given up yet.

things that made me unhappy this week

1. horrible undergraduates (now and forever)
2. 450 pages of reading
3. uncooperative custard (why didn't you set?)
4. wvu 73 duke 67

spring break's over. my aim for the next 6 weeks: have enough time to eat and sleep.

(st. paddy's day was fun, though. no green beer, but hookahs at byblos made up for that.)

ok, so you know this one, but i've never blogged it, and it speaks to my feelings quite well.

       The Stranger Within My Gate

The stranger within my gate.
He may be true or kind.
But he does not talk -
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well.
But they tell the lies I am wonted to,
They are used to the lies I tell.
We do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates.
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control -
what reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
May repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least they hear the things I hear
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf - And the grapes be all one vine
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

               Rudyard Kipling

wallet

i found a louis vuitton wallet outside the gym today.

(it irks me when things like that happen. if i ever lose my wallet, especially in west philly, i just know that it's going to be picked up my some schmoe who will proceed to spend the cash on crack and throw everything else away. i expect that, not because i'm a cynic, but because of statistics; there are just more schmoes than non-schmoes. it's the asymmetry that irritates me. if you're the kind of person who would not return a wallet you found on the street, then you're not going to be as annoyed when no one returns yours, because that's your worldview -- you would have done the same. on the other hand, if you're the kind of person who wouldn't think twice about turning in a wallet, you're unhappy even if you are aware of the odds, because others are not doing unto you as you would have done unto them. there's an inherent unfairness which doesn't get rectified, unless you believe in karma, in which case i have some tea leaves i'd like you to read.)

anyway, i searched the wallet to try and get the name and address of its owner, and found two things of interest: (1) a licence to carry firearms, and (2) a handwritten note from his girlfriend saying (among other things) that they had won a significant amount of money in the lottery, and that she was giving him the ticket so that he could go claim the winnings. ok. no lottery ticket in the wallet, though, which fortunately relieved me from a rather terrible moral quandry. (honestly, what would you do if you found a wallet with a ticket worth, say, half a million dollars in it? isn't that the kind of thing that only happens in movies? which reminds me, a simple plan is a pretty good film on just that subject.)

the next thought that crossed my mind was: this is a little suspicious. who writes notes like that? and where else would you keep a lottery ticket besides your wallet? the situation was beginning to resemble hornstein's famous experiment*, where they left wallets with letters in them (from a "previous finder") all around new york to see whether similarity between previous and current finder led to a greater likelihood of a wallet being returned. the wallet was right outside pottruck, the amount of money in it was about right, and it seemed like the perfect manipulation to make you less likely to return it (less cognitive dissonance because: "bah, he doesn't need the money anyway.") i was about two blocks away from the gym by the time this occurred to me, and i considered going back to look for an undergraduate surreptitiously taking notes across the street in an unmarked van, but by that time i was hungry and very near the curry shop and decided that i was being ridiculous.

over briyani, i considered this further. if i really did believe that the whole affair was a setup, should i keep the money? i've done lab experiments before that involve the dictator game, which i'll let wikipedia describe because i'm tired of typing.

In the dictator game, the first player, "the proposer," determines an allocation (split) of some endowment (such as a cash prize). The second player, the "responder," simply receives the remainder of the endowment not allocated by the proposer to himself. The responder's role is entirely passive (he has no strategic input into the outcome of the game). As a result, the dictator game is not formally a game at all (as the term is used in game theory). To be a game, every player's outcome must depend on the actions of at least some others. Since the proposer's outcome depends only on his own actions, this situation is one of decision theory and not game theory. Despite this formal point, the dictator game is used in the game theory literature as a degenerate game.

This "game" has been used to test the homo economicus model of individual behavior: if individuals were only concerned with their own economic well being, proposers (acting as dictators) would allocate the entire good to themselves and give nothing to the responder. Experimental results have indicated that individuals often allocate money to the responders, reducing the amount of money they receive. These results appear robust, Henrich, et al. discovered in a wide cross cultural study that proposers do allocate a non-zero share of the endowment to the responder.

i can tell you that the feeling of wanting to share the money is very compelling, but knowing the literature has completely hardened my heart, and on the two occasions i've had to play this (both times i was the proposer, luckily, enough), i kept everything (which is the normative thing to do). wouldn't this be an analogous case if i believed it were an experiment? i re-read the note, and looked through the rest of the wallet (business cards, check card, health insurance, supermarket discount card), and decided that if it were fake, it was nevertheless very convincing. ah, well. the powerball jackpot is at $275 million this weekend. maybe i'll get in on some of that action on my own.

* you need to have APA subscription to access the full article, unfortunately, but e-mail me if you want it.

insult

From U.S. News and World Report:

Overrated Career: Clinical Psychologist
By Marty Nemko
Posted December 19, 2007

The Appeal: You'll work one-on-one with clients in a private, peaceful setting, helping them conquer their inner demons.

The Reality: Research is revealing that many psychological problems have physiological roots, taking some of the luster off traditional psychotherapy. Some psychologists end up questioning their own value. Also, people are turning toward short-term cognitive therapists or personal coaches, who focus less on analyzing your childhood and more on developing pragmatic, step-by-step plans for solving problems, moving forward, and reaching goals.

You know, it's not that I even really consider my profession as clinical psychologist (to be), but I wish he had at least gotten his facts right. It's incredibly insulting to suggest that psychodynamic therapy is all that clinical psychologists know how to do -- it's probably one of the things I'm going to end up not knowing how to do. And who does he suppose provides CT? ExRP? Interoceptive exposure? Has he even heard of those things? Also, the students in our department probably know more about the physiology of mental disorders than some psychiatrists. So really, Mr. Nemko, you can take your opinions and stick them where the sun doesn't shine. That is all.

In the absence of anything interesting to say (it's spring break, and my mind has gone very soft), i'll leave you with 10 questions that you should consider so that you don't get caught off guard if you should one day have to answer them. In order of seriousness:

1) If you were given the option to be cryonically frozen after your death, but before the point of information-theoretic death (with the understanding that you'd be resuscitated once medicine could revive you), would you take it?

2) What about being a brain-in-a-jar (like in Roald Dahl's William and Mary?)

3) Uploaded onto a computer?

4) Memory enhancers that allow you to recover memories you thought were lost. Kosher?

5) If offered to you, would you take Ritalin?

6) Modafinil?

7) Undergo gene therapy to enhance your cognition?

8) Would you rather be paralyzed from the waist down, or lose all your autobiographical memories?

9) Would you agree to learn how to dissociate so as to create an alternate personality that was more assertive/congenial/diplomatic/aggressive/whatever character trait you're lacking in, with the understanding that you could switch back and forth between personalities at will (without any between-persona amnesia)?

10) If you were told, and believed, that we were indeed in The Matrix, would you take the red pill?

social psych went all the way till 7:30, by which time everyone decided that they had had it for the week. (that the undergrads were fleeing town en masse for spring break was also a contributing factor). we converged on lolita, a mexican BYOT, the T in question being tequila, of course, though not patrón as jokingly promised (boo!). there were people at the table who were not psych grad students, so the rule was instituted early that talking shop = take a shot, which led to people becoming very drunk very fast. weirdest penalty of the night given out for: "barry manilow t-shirt" (if you can tell me where that came from without googling it you get a prize the next time i see you). lolita has really good food, although in retrospect i would not have ordered the pechuga de pato (fried plantains, jicana-radish slaw), which was not really what i wanted. (steak would hve hit the spot.) the appetizers were superb: orange-ginger glazed carnitas with guacamole and pico de gallo, a soupy thing with chicken and huitlacoche (sort of like a stringy xue er), and warm, exceedingly fresh tortilla chips.

we went to a rather pathetic pyb after that, and i got the hiccups, and people starting dancing spastically. there was a live band, and they were alright until "don't stop believing", at which time i had decided that even $1 beer wasn't going to keep me there, and that i had better be reasonably sober to do my mri scans, which i discovered to my alarm were about 6 hours away. the housemate and rebecca and i escaped in a cab, and r. taught me the BEST TRICK EVER to get rid of hiccups, which is concentrate on getting your pinky fingers as close together as possible without letting them touch. and then it was 2, and then i had to get up, and i did my stupid experiment hung over, though fortunately no one noticed.

run #9

we discovered a big dark spot on the structural MRI of one of our subjects, about the fourth time this has happened to me since i started doing this kind of research. i've come to understand that these funny patches are nearly always benign, but having to go to a radiologist and wait for judgment to be passed is still a nerve-wracking experience. this time round: fatty deposits. net result: 2 hours of extra paperwork on a wednesday evening

a bunch of people weren't free to come to reading club, so we sat in elisabeth's house instead and ate homemade mapo tofu and leftover fried rice and had intelligent conversation. elisabeth is studying hebrew and arabic and other such lit-ty things, and is currently translating her way through the book of ezekiel with a small group of brave souls. they're also learning new (hebrew) vocabulary at the rate of 100 words/week, starting from the most common and working their way down. (me: "what is the most common word in the bible?" her: "and.")



following which we watched the first six episodes of the tick, which is so awesomely bad that it's good. ("you know, when a tomato grows out of your forehead, it gets you thinking. what do we know about anything? life is just a big, wild, crazy, tossed salad. but you don't eat it, no sir, you live it! isn't it great?")

dissertation tip #8

prospective weekend again (II)

we didn't host anyone this week, but there is someone new applying to our lab, which is very exciting. for one thing, i won't be the baby of the lab any more, but on top of that he does cognitive neuroscience research, which means that there'll be at least one person in the lab with whom conversations about work are not like me standing atop a very tall mountain sending semaphore messages with 5" x 3" flags. his name is jared, but since we already have a lab jared, he will be jared II and lab jared will be jared I*. jared I hosted jared II, which i hear led to such interesting e-mails as:

Dear Jared,

that sounds to great to me,

Regards,
Jared.

in any case, i interviewed jared II before lunch and he seems like a great kid, and without saying too much i hope he gets in because he deserves it and i don't want to be lonely in the office.

after lunch i tried to work and couldn't because writing reports about people who have 6 anxiety disorders all at once is really depressing. instead, i futzed around with my data and labeled all the variables, and made sure all my files were in alphabetical order with no repeats, and went into each folder and ARRANGE[d] ICONS so that they were perfectly aligned.

by 4, it was time for happy hour because it was friday and dr. sb had just turned in a grant and jared I had collected his very last dataset for this weird project he's doing**. i like happy hour. i had a vague feeling that it was going to be a bad idea to have happy hour starting at 4 right before the party for the prospective students, and i was right, but i would totally do it again.

new deck! RODPFBSE (leffe: my new beer of choice). syl told us about her trip to hong kong and macau and it was awesome in every way except for the fact that they only ate mcdonald's. i'm getting very good at submerging my disgust re: such disgraceful behavior. america has trained me well. we have another beer, and then a SoCo shot, and we all start getting wistful about the fog-covered future, which is a really bad sign, so adrian buys us another beer. norah arrives, and we drink to her internship placement at b____, and then suddenly we're exchanging puke stories, and i find myself telling everyone about the time in sec 3 gep camp when elwin (BONDED) had the bunk above mine and was sick in the middle of the night.

things kind of get fuzzy from this point on. i think having eaten only 2 chicken tenders and a handful of nachos did not help. jared I and i left for the prospective student dinner, where i talked to a lot of new people whose names i no longer remember, although the substance of our conversations was, in approximate order: "sleep/learning/memory consolidation is THE hot topic nowadays, and this IS the place to study that" (jared II), "have you done your cultural psychology homework?" (the housemate) "does the sensation of conscious will reside in afferent brain signals, efferent brain signals, or neither?" (christian), "should i have a reuben?" (thomas) "this reuben is delicious!" (andrea) "are we ever going to graduate from here?" (melissa p.) someone pressed a drink ticket into my hand, so i thought it would be an awful pity if i didn't have a glass of merlot.

then we were at the usual house for the party, and it was really loud, and i kept eating peanuts, and people were drinking flaming dr. peppers, which mysteriously do actually taste like dr. pepper. at some point, i got it into my head that i really wanted to go home and watch four weddings and a funeral, which i had just downloaded, and the thought blossomed into an obsession in the way that they do when you're not really thinking straight. and the housemate wanted to go home too, i think, so we did, and instead of watching four weddings and a funeral i went to bed and slept for a rather long time.


* incid., i'm not sure i've mentioned that lab jared has exactly the birthday as me. i'm slowly becoming convinced that the advisor does not in fact accept students based on merit, but because he's trying to win a bet by stringing together a succession of students who have particular things in common, like those games where you try to morph ANGEL into DEVIL in 5 steps.

** which involves showing people a saturday night live sketch about penis cream. don't ask. also: my blog is going to get 8,569 hits tomorrow.