Thoughts following General Colin Powell's address

I am so glad I didn't skip this event. It's rare that one gets to be in the audience of really great public speakers, let alone speakers with such entertaining, intelligent speeches. Sure, he is not right all the time, but you get the sense listening to him and watching him that he's a truly wise person. And, he's a great stand-up comedian when he chooses to be.

The speech put heavy emphasis on globalization, and America within a world context of a global community, so it was amusing to me, on a different note, that on my way out, the people in front of me were speaking Arabic, a man about General Powell's age and his adult son. The people being me were speaking Russian, a bunch of foreign students joking (in Russian) about that they should have cheered "Russia, Russia" whenever the General mentioned Russia in his speech. I just wish I knew a bit of Arabic so I could have understood that conversation, too.

Annotated To Do List

1. Swing-dancing.- I said last term I was planning to try to go swing dancing this term, and there is a place here that has swing nights every week, yet I haven't made it there yet. I even somewhat have a potential dancing partner, though I'd have to be pretty crazy to assume he really ever planned to actually go dancing with me just from agreeing to "maybe go sometime." Still, it's better than "no", and in any case, I can't dance with anyone unless I actually leave the house to go dancing.

2. Get a bike and a helmet. Ride around Fort Collins trails a while to get used to being on a bike again. - It's been almost two decades since I last rode a bike, and when I was riding back then it was just in my own neighborhood, on sidewalks and in schoolyards, so it'll take a bit of riding to get to where I am as comfortable biking as I am walking.

3. Get a sewing machine. - Oh the things I could make! Actually, I'd love to be able to hem shortened pants and sleeves faster, and find a good pattern for tailored vests and jackets. I'll never find suits that fit my torso, with pants that fit and a well-proportioned skirt, AND a jacket whose sleeves are short enough, but I could make such an ensemble.

4. Assemble a short-list of PhD programs in political theory, rural studies, environmental science and ecology. - Realistically I ought to be hunting a school where I can combine landscape ecology and political theory if I wish, and in a place with good public transit. I still really like Aberystwyth, but I have to be able to bring the Cat.

5. Try climbing.- Every time this makes it onto my list, I think that maybe it will result in my actually climbing something. So far I have looked at climbing gear at a store, with a nice, attractive young man explaining to me the merits of different climbing shoes, and way back in 1999 I made it to the foot of what my friend Jackie thought was to be my first climb. However, something that would be fairly easy for a 5' tall person in general is much more difficult for me, with my much shorter arms and less functional hands. On a climbing wall, connected to a safety rope, and staying fairly low, I think I'd make better progress. I still have to be cautious on this one; My spine is irregular, missing a bit of bone in the vertebra in my neck, so the kind of jerk that could result from being caught from a fall by a rope might snap my neck with less force than would otherwise be required.

6. Urban ecology research.- All one needs in order to do urban ecology is an inquiring mind, knowledge of statistical analysis and ecology, and some data, which can be collected by observation or all sorts of other ways. I still have my square, with which to do plot census counts, too.

7. Walk to Horsetooth Reservoir and back- this is roughly a 4+ mile walk/hike each way from my place, so definitely a day-hike, and best done earlier in the summer when it's not as hot.

8. Make art.- I have a set of wood chisels, still, and a stack of linoleum for linocuts, so I've no real excuse not to do more printmaking. And if I need more chisels, the Harbor Freight Tools store where mine came from is just down the street.

9. Find someplace less reclusive to hang out.- It's nice and quiet at my place, but that's not always so great. I don't live close to the bars, and don't really want to, but being away from those parts of town I also don't have a natural hang-out location at my place. I'll probably never find a place quite like Whizzers, but life would be better with a hangout like that. Alternatively, I suppose having people over more would help.

Positive and Negative Motivational Fantasy

Though I have not yet had this conversation with a fellow grad student, and maybe they would not admit to it anyway, I would be surprised if other students didn't have similar fantasy storylines running through their heads. It's always more common when I am working on grand new multidisciplinary ideas (some of which I find in print ten years or so later from someone else, as grand new ideas, so perhaps I ought to start submitting some of those for publication somewhere), but even more mundane papers and projects can lead to these great daydreams. In these stories, I finish my paper/project, turn it in, get a really good grade (of course), and then am drawn into some world crisis or conference, or offered an opportunity of a lifetime, because of my paper/project and its/my obvious brilliance. It would be silly to really expect many of these to ever really happen, yet for anyone trying to generate new knowledge it may be healthier to believe these stories than to dismiss them.

Lots of students I've talked with lately are going through a lot of self-doubt, brought on by the stress of upcoming finals, term paper deadlines and all the rest. There are often a lot more students dealing with anxiety and depression symptoms around this time, and most large campuses have stress clinics to mitigate this. One thing they don't seem to mention much, if at all, is these larger-than-life fantasies. I would bet that for the students experiencing depression or self-doubt, these stories have been displaced by other stories, about failure and its worst consequences.

Early in a semester, my images of myself in my fantasies are triumphant and happy; I may be a well-respected professor at Oxford, or the behind-the-scenes mastermind for the leadership that unites the world in a great global system not unlike the Star Trek or Babylon-5 systems of Earth governance. If I have a guy I am inclined to weave into my fantasies, one I know or someone off a film, he is also very successful, accomplishing equally great if not greater things, and there is always a happy ending.

At this point in a semester, the stories have changed. The paper/project that was to save the world is now awful, and causes me to fail the whole class, something much easier to imagine, unfortunately, in grad school, where a C is essentially a failing grade. This is never the end though; it gets better. In the slow boring versions, I simply drop out, losing my job in the process of course, lose my apartment, and wind up living under a bridge somewhere, trying to feed my cat as best I can. Alternatively I might wind up living in my mom's unfinished basement, with all the spiders and sand scorpions, and I live out the rest of my days there. At least so long as I am not actually going through a depression at the same time, this is where the stories leave off, though both of these have their preferred suicidal endings too. The most exciting was one where I lived under a bridge along a creek or river, and was swept away to my death by a sudden flood from a dam-breach upstream, an ending I dreamed a few years ago.

The guys who featured in the earlier stories are not necessarily absent, but when they also play different roles. A common plot-line some years is that that the guy in question might have been interested in me, but my awful paper/project has shown me to be just a puffed up fool, and in no way desirable. The really soap-operatic version of this starts out disarmingly pleasant, so the guy and I have a few days or weeks of a nice relationship, out of which when everything falls apart I am not only under a bridge or in Mom's basement, but pregnant as well. (Those who have known me for a while may imagine how truly horrific I might find such a fantasy.) There's a woman in Atlas Shrugged, out in the village near the motor factory where Dagny and Hank find Galt's motor, who looks haggard and old, and turns out to be just a bit older than Dagny- that's the mental image that I turn into in this particular flavor of fantasy.

These contrasting fantasy types, triumphant and miserable, are a carrot and stick of motivation. The bad fantasies, while very effective at keeping my head out of the clouds, provide nothing to strive for. So long as I am struggling to write papers just to keep from failing, or avoiding getting too close to people out of the expectation of future rejection, there is little chance I will ever stray very far from the verge of failure.

The good fantasies, to the extent that I can believe them to be possible, are a shining future, a goal that justifies whatever effort is required to attain it. Far from being arrogant, these are fantasies of self-efficacy, images of oneself as capable and worthwhile, and with this sort of self-image, any set-backs are just temporary and can be overcome. Will I ever actually attain a future life like what I imagine in these stories? Maybe not the power behind a global throne, and perhaps my name won't be as well remembered as that of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, but a professorship and a good academic reputation is well within what my own professors seem to envision for me.

So, for the rest of this semester, at least, here's the overall future I am expecting for myself. I'm a well-known professor and intellectual figure, widely read across most of the social sciences and physical sciences. My academic work is proving quite useful within quite a few fields of study, and my books for the non-specialist public are instant favorites. I live in my favorite fantasy straw-bale walled house, custom built with art gallery, greenhouse and courtyard spaces, and surrounded by a very successful 250 acre land reclamation botanic garden, with my amazing partner, our cats and other animals(otterhound, ?), and an ever changing array of family and friends who come to visit, or to live with us between jobs and other adventures.

Will it all actually happen? The problem with trying to predict life is that anything might happen. I may be struck by lightning walking home tonight, or aliens might invade next week (Exterminieren! Exterminieren!), but so long as I am alive, I'd better believe that this or something better is my future.

People-mapping

Another distraction from writing my papers.

I was amused this evening by a friend recommendation for one Eric Binkley. This suggestion makes sense from Facebook's perspective, since I was at summer camp working with a Chris Binkley, who I think still has one of my books, though I can't recall anymore which one I lent him and failed to get back at the end of that summer. I was reading Tom Robbins a lot that summer, so .... Anyway, I have never met Eric, but out of curiosity I pulled up his profile, just to see if he looks like Chris at all(He does.), and it turns out he and I have not 1, but 3 friends in common. Alex Hughes, I was also not surprised about. Chris, Alex and I were all camp folks who studied at CU, so it makes sense that Eric might know Alex. The third, though, no surprise to him, as e knows that he knows Eric, is Paul Kemp, who I know was at CU, and at the same time as Chris and myself, but who I only met this past fall. Not exactly a big deal or anything, just the sort of coincidence that puts that "It's a Small World" song in your head for a few hours. But it got me thinking.

People group together because they find certain commonalities between themselves, but in any really big group of people, like a big university or a city, they can only aggregate to the extent that the have access to one another. This means that those people with whom one has a lot of similarities, but who somehow don't become or remain friends, develop networks of people parallel to one's own. [I want to hunt down literature now on social networks,social circles, and boundary setting in social groups.]

The group I was in during my first degree was for the most part the younger part of Geoffrey Brinker's group, combined with my own physics friends and Whizzers groupies. I never really crossed the road socially between the hard science half of the CU-Boulder campus and the rest. Even Muenzinger, where psychology is located, is the easternmost building before the sports complex, so while it is technically across the road, it's still on the science end. There were a few camp people who had science classes, and at least one who was in engineering, but most of the people I knew from camp were on the "other" side of campus, and did not hang out at Whizzers. So, any commonality I shared with those camp people was in itself insufficient for us to maintain active friendships away from camp. I think, too, that since Forrest and I had such a cohesive group of friends already, we were less likely to draw together any sort of new group out of our camp connections. Anyway, within our group we often met people individually who had multiple ties with others in the group, [read to background instrumental of the "small world song"]. Some of these people linked back to camp, too, through their older friendships, with Geoffrey as the key person to this whole network.

At camp, the older generation, loosely associated with Forrest and Geoffrey, and the guys from Geoffrey's cohort, was ageing out, being replaced by a new generation centered around Alex and his cohort. Anyone who wants to see Kuhn's paradigm shift in fast forward can simply volunteer as a commissioner at a Boy Scouts summer camp that is transitioning between generations. It seems that there is consistently a lot of unrest and eroding standards at these boundaries, which alarms the older set, and since the younger set is still figuring things out, and is changing stuff, they are blamed, somewhat reflexively, for the dropping standards and growing chaos. As the new generation becomes established, things smooth out again. The removal of the old generation, not any individuals' changed ideas, is what changes the overall camp culture, and once the new set is firmly in place they figure out limits for themselves within the context of their own programs. (With a gradual decrease in the stories of overenthusiastic scouts knifing people. I seem to recall a similar story about Kevin or someone in his staff being attacked by scouts when he was playing the masked bandit, so this overzealousness issue is not new, just really funny to hear about afterwords.)

I've been amused by some of the trivial details Paul has in common with others I did know in Boulder(really, I wouldn't be surprised if he and I crossed paths in a computer lab, for that matter- maybe I kicked him out of a computer lab or something). Now I am wondering if maybe he and the Binkleys demarcate a parallel social network to the one I lived in. Different coffee-shop(s), different artsy circles and outdoorsey circles, and perhaps not quite so international, since my group centered for a while on Reed Hall and engineering, but stylistically/aesthetically very very similar. We had backpacking, camping and scouts, but not climbing, and we didn't drink alcohol at all in our gatherings, but these are not what define a culture. Forrest and I did studio art, so we were involved with the studio arts scene, but we didn't have ties into local music. I had a few theater friends, but not within the context of any group; perhaps if I knew were to look I could trace several parallel networks to mine. HMMM. It would be really hard for a sociologist to map such patterns without having familiarity with the people involved, and equally challenging to study such networks if they are made up of people with whom the researcher is friends. Still, perhaps there are a few brash/brave researchers who've looked at such patterns.

Network complexity theory of intellectual ageing

This one I actually have not been thinking about constantly since it came up, but it's a nice psychology theory drawn from a model in policy theory. I am not sure if my professor, with whom I had the source conversation for this, was thinking exactly on these lines, but he probably was. Also there is probably a multidisciplinary networks literature that looks at large scale networks and limits to functionality with increased complexity, whether it has been explicitly linked back to human psychology or not.

A model that seems to have pretty good explanatory power for cognition is the neural net. My old cognitive psychology textbook is a bit disparaging of this theory, but as at least an abstract model it seems pretty decent. The idea is that your brain stores each component of experience separately, so for my cat I'd have separate neurons or groups of neurons for fuzzy, orange, white feet, cat, pet ownership, purring, .... My brain links these together, plus all the visual and auditory patterns that are all reinforced together when I think of Roland, or see him. If I am considering another cat, for instance my friend's orange cat Fluffy, some of these same neuronal components link together with new ones that together create a mental conception of his cat.

This same pattern of linkages and networks exists in human groups, which can form policy networks. The same person can be involved in campaigning against uranium mining in Colorado, volunteer with the Red Cross blood bank, and work in a bank dealing with corporate financing options, for instance, just as the same neuron, "orange fur" could be linked to my concept networks for Roland, Fluffy, and my old guinea pigs Gus and Max.

The conversation today with my professor was about that experience of sitting down to write a paper on one topic, and having a whole bunch of other ideas pop up in your head to distract you from the one you are actually writing. We postulated that perhaps this is due to the fact that one's network of ideas gets overly complex and expansive after a while. As students gather more information in their heads, and make lots of connections between concepts, they reach a sort of maximal utility for outputting these connections easily in prose, sometime before their late 30's or 40's. After this, there are so many connections and so many concepts that it becomes harder to put together coherent, straightforward, linear prose expositions of your ideas. This, we suggested, is why in just about all intellectual fields people tend to do their best work in their first few decades, in their 20's and 30's. Given the nice parallel between neural nets and policy networks conceptually, I'm thinking that there may be some useful insights to be gleaned from the policy networks literature to get a different perspective on why people's concept networks might inhibit productivity in academia.

Interpersonal Intellectual Rent

I am going to be distracted for the rest of the night if I don't finish this one, it seems.

I was stumped as of bedtime last night as to how one could have a marginal rent theory for interpersonal intellectual rents, and was still trying to work out exactly what is being invested, and what the gain really is. So, after continuation of yesterday's conversation, here's the solution to the rent problem I was amused by in my last post. I am still a bit fuzzy on some of the details getting from this to something which really uses marginal theory concepts well, but maybe that will be tomorrow night's post.


When people talk things out aloud, either to stuffed animals, or to their cat, or to someone who isn't really being responsive, they often find that in just saying their ideas out loud they gain additional insight or clarification of their ideas. For the sake of my model, I am sticking to the idea of threads of thought here, that one gains new or improved threads of ideas or equivalently of understanding. This initial case yields no rent, just a profit on one's own mental efforts through the work of ordering and examining one's ideas.

Conversing with a person who occasionally asks a fruitful question by accident or in ignorance may yield a slightly gain than the previous case, not by virtue only of one's labor, but by way of otherwise non-productive characteristics of the conversation partner. This extra gain is a small rent.

Conversation with an intellectual equal with respect to the topic being discussed will yield a much higher gain for the same amount of time and effort. This gain is more complicated, but ultimately the ideas in my head from such a conversation, if they are assimilated into my own collection of intellectual threads, represent my own work, even if they originated within the partner's brain. I still had to think through them and evaluate them to assimilate them. These new threads and modifications of my old threads represent shortcuts, saving me time and effort I would have had to expend to reach these same ideas on my own, just as the occasional accidental questions would, only to a much greater extent. Thus, from interacting with this partner, I've gained a higher amount in rent, plus the gain from my own work which is still my profit.

Rent can then be expressed in terms of the time saved, from not having to think through the longer route to the gained understanding/'threads'. This time can then be converted to some sort of labor-value equivalent to allow one to measure such gains against other goods. Thus I could perhaps work out an equation to approximate just how much I owe Paul, for instance, for his economist reference by which I gained rent in the conversation that started all this, and for his inputs towards the model I've laid out here tonight. Of course, he has since gained some understanding of marginalist economics from my inputs into our conversations, so perhaps some of that rent has been exchanged in kind, at least for today's conversation.

A sort of balance of trade model of interpersonal interactions, using this idea of rents, might help in modeling the dynamics of friendship, collaborations and marital conflicts, by allowing dynamics of such relationships to be abstracted, to yield more general patterns that can guide interpretation of particular relationship dynamics. This rent idea could capture at least an important aspect of what is commonly referred to as 'quality time,' too, since one could probably substitute other gains, like interest, esteem, or emotional support, and derive similar rent patterns. A spouse complaining of an imbalance in their marital relationship may very well be responding to an intuitive summation of rents that don't balance, perhaps.

(And now, it really is time that I go back to political theory land again and finish the essay this line of thought was interposing itself into.)

Progress and punctuated equilibrium

Almost done with my first year in graduate school, as strange and unlikely as that seems. In the scale of my life's successes so far I have probably never made so much progress in such a short time. A year ago at this time I had just quit Dillard's and was moving into my apartment here, with no job, and no clue what I would do next. I knew that if I was still working at Dillard's by the time I reached my 2010 birthday, my life-expectancy would be considerably shortened, and that there were really no better opportunities for me if I stayed in Longmont, so I leaped blindly off the metaphorical cliff, all the way towards unemployment in Fort Collins. Actually that seems to be a pretty common thread for me, leaping blindly towards something better, from high school in Pueblo to a first undergrad at CU, from physics to psychology, from post-graduation unemployment to my second degree program, and just about all the major decisions I have made since then. It's an exciting way to live, for sure- spend a few months considering all your options and thinking a lot, and then immediately implement whatever radical changes have resulted from all that deliberation. It drives everyone around you crazy, for sure, and can make for a lonely life sometimes, since without incremental changes or at least a lot of discussion and planning, few people from any one stage of your progression keep up with you very well. Even those who might really like to tend to lose track of where you are and what exactly you are up to after a while.
A model or framework from recent political science classes, which comes from other sciences originally describing evolution, is that of punctuated equilibrium. No doubt it is not a perfect model for describing the personal evolution of individuals, but it does apply rather nicely to lifestyles like mine. Of course, there are also other approaches to change, for instance incremental change, adjusting in small doses to changing environments, without the huge dramatic shifts I am so fond of. There is also the possibility of a sort of negotiated planned change, where if one has lots of people in one's life, one might develop changes in concert with those other people. These could be radical or incremental changes, but by being coordinated with other people, they produce little or no upheaval among surrounding people. I suppose this would be equivalent to states developing their own policies, but within the context of negotiated plans and goals. There may be isolated cases where the original biological evolution idea might allow for this dynamic too, but I doubt it. People plan, and can choose the direction of their own evolution somewhat, as well as the direction of evolution of their states, but evolution is not directed.