Being Human

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Today's Dilbert:

(Click on the image for a larger version.)

I'm not going to quibble about this one.

In 1989, shortly before I left the industrial research job that I had held for the previous 15 years, corporate headquarters appointed me to a committee to decide on a procedure for evaluating methodologies for prioritizing follow-up actions in the wake of a "technology portfolio fair" where researchers had explained new technologies to heads of product development in various branches of the company.

We weren't authorized to decide what to do, nor even to suggest priorities for alternative actions, nor yet to suggest a methodology for assigning priorities to alternative actions, nor for that matter to evaluate alternative methodologies for assigning priorities to alternative actions. Instead, we were tasked with designing a procedure for evaluating methodologies for assigning priorities to possible decisions.  From a certain perspective, the mere ability to conceive and communicate such a task was a triumph of the human intellect.

My level of admiration for this achievement was not unconnected to my decision to move to academia.  But my feelings of awe had no linguistic focus — it was the content, not its expression, that was awful.

I've just discovered that probably one of the best series ever produced on philosophy is available on Google Video. The BBC series Human All Too Human includes three fantastic programmes on Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger - a trio of controversial thinkers who massively influenced 20th century philosophy.

It's an interesting choice as all had fascinating and turbulent lives - Nietzsche ending his life in insanity, Heidegger a unrepentant Nazi defended by a Jewish ex-lover, and Sartre who walked the line between free love and womanising.

All had a huge influence on psychology at various stages, and you can clearly see how many struggled with concepts of mind and society.

The programmes tackle both the characters and their theories and are some of the most engaging and gripping programmes I've ever seen on philosophy, an essential subject that usually gets little more than satire or lip service from mainstream media.

They're an hour each and worth every minute. Put some time aside, find a comfy chair and enjoy.

Link to programme on Jean Paul Sartre.
Link to programme on Martin Heidegger.
Link to programme on Friedrich Nietzsche.

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'From Stroboscope to Dream Machine: A History of Flicker-Induced Hallucinations' is a wonderful article that has just appeared in medical journal European Neurology. It charts how an early finding in visual neuroscience was adopted by the Beat writer William Burroughs and became a fixture of the psychedelic sixties.

Flicker induced hallucinations have been noted throughout history and typically occur when a strong light flashes between 8 and 12hz, also known as the alpha rhythm. They most commonly trigger a type of hallucination called a form constant that comprises of geometric shapes and patterns.

Alpha rhythms have been heavily linked to the function of the occipital lobe and, as we suspect from recent research, 'inputting' alpha waves into the visual system via flickers seems to cause hallucinations by knocking a deep brain structure called the thalamus and the occipital lobe out of sync.

As both are part of the visual system, the effect is a bit like knocking a conversation out of sync - misperceptions occur.

Burroughs happened upon the phenomenon and set about creating a machine to produce these hallucinations:

The flicker phenomenon reminded Burroughs of a story he had recently been told by his soul mate Brion Gysin (1916-1986). At the time they both inhabited a cheap hotel in 9, rue Gît Le Coeur, a small alley in the middle of the Latin Quarter of Paris. The place has been known as the Beat Hotel ever since. Gysin was a man with many skills; he was a painter, a poet, a calligrapher, a musician and a cook, all in one lifetime.

On December 21, 1958, as his diary reports, he had been travelling on a bus in southern France. He had fallen asleep, leaning with his head against the window pane. On passing by a row of trees, sunlight came flickering through and Gysin started to hallucinate:

'an overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multi-dimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. The vision stopped abruptly when we left the trees. Was that a vision?'.

Gysin knew by experience what neurophysiologists like Walter were talking about. Burroughs was able to hand him the theoretical framework.

The next step was to manufacture a stroboscope for private use. Gysin persuaded one of his friends, Ian Sommerville (1940-1976), to make one. Sommerville, who was originally a mathematician, came up with a simple but effective design

This was later developed into the commercially produced dreammachine, essentially a light with a rotating slotted lampshade designed to produced flickers in the alpha range. It became popular as both a way of inducing hallucinations on its own and as an aide to hallucinogenic drug trips.

There are plans online from a company who still make the machines to order.

The hallucinations don't occur in everyone (in fact, I've probably spent a few hours of my life in front of a frequency controlled strobe trying to trigger the effect with no luck) and in people with photosensitive epilepsy the flickers can trigger seizures.

The effect is almost unknown in the psychedelic circles circles in which it was once popular, but has now been adopted by neuroscientists wanting a lab-based method to research hallucinations.

If you're interested in reading more about the whole fascinating story, I can't recommend the short but fascinating book Chapel of Extreme Experience enough.

Link to full-text of article on flicker hallucinations.
Link to DOI entry for same.

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Not, that is, unless you think that typical contemporary exponents of this linguistic register are Dick Cavett, Glamour Magazine, and Michael Bérubé.

I noted this morning that Scott Adams is far from the only one to suggest that "at the end of the day" (in the meaning "when all is said and done" or "in the final analysis") is typical of "the vacuous way managers speak".  This phrase is often cited as  "over-used" as well as "irritating", and  I did a little lunch-time experiment™ earlier today suggesting that over the past 30 years or so,  it's indeed been taking over its rhetorico-ecological niche from competing cliches.

However, an unsystematic scan of my searches seemed inconsistent with the hypothesis that it's especially likely to be used by "managers", however we define that much-maligned class.  I speculated that this might be another example of the common process of stereotype-formation, where some behavior perceived as annoying comes to be associated with a class of people who are also perceived as annoying, and the association is then repeatedly strengthened by confirmation bias. (See "The social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming", 2/27/2007, for some discussion.)

Several commenters were not persuaded to abandon their prejudices, and so I decided to do a slightly more systematic check across sources, by comparing the frequency of "at the end of the day" to the frequency of "in the final analysis" in texts on the sites of 13 business, finance or management magazines, and 21 other diverse kinds of magazines and weblogs.

Here are the results, sorted by the ratio of "at the end of the day" to "in the final analysis":

SOURCE "end of day" "final analysis" RATIO 0 Dick Cavett (blog) 112 0 INF 1 Glamour Magazine 1160 1 1160.000 2 Michael Berube (blog) 1240 2 620.000 3 US magazine 242 4 60.500 4 Freakonomics (blog) 233 4 58.250 5 Management Today 284 8 35.500 6 People 324 10 32.400 7 Vanity Fair 96 3 32.000 8 The Valve (blog) 54 2 27.000 9 Black Enterprise 107 5 21.400 10 CIO Magazine 171 8 21.375 11 Andrew Sullivan (blog) 57 3 19.000 12 Columbia Journalism Review 110 7 15.714 13 Sporting News 1490 103 14.466 14 The New Yorker 99 7 14.143 15 Volokh Conspiracy (blog) 617 75 8.227 16 The Atlantic 122 15 8.133 17 Harpers 21 3 7.000 18 Fast Company 620 92 6.739 19 Business Week 2070 355 5.831 20 Business Finance 46 9 5.111 21 Red Herring 450 99 4.545 22 Forbes 1060 239 4.435 23 Psychology Today 143 40 3.575 24 HBS Working Knowledge 126 45 2.800 25 Government Executive 192 70 2.743 26 Foreign Policy 268 110 2.436 27 Inc 250 105 2.381 28 Workforce Management 263 130 2.023 29 Talking Points Memo 754 471 1.601 30 Crooked Timber (blog) 147 96 1.531 31 Chief Executive 321 260 1.235 32 Oprah.com 692 1860 0.372 33 Stanley Fish (blog) 75 421 0.178

Note that the top 10 end-of-the-day-users include just two likely outlets of management-speak (Management Today and Black Enterprise), whereas the bottom ten include five (Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Government Executive magazine, Inc magazine, Workforce Management magazine, and Chief Executive magazine.

I'm not going to claim that "managers" and other coporate types are actually less likely to use the expression "at the end of the day" than (say) liberal intellectuals and fashion- or gossip-magazine writers are — but this tabulation certainly gives no comfort to those who hold the opposite view.

[Caveat — these numbers were gotten from Google searches using the "site:" feature, and may be subject to some of the notorious numerical inaccuracies of that company's search results.]

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Following on the critiques of the faulty metadata in Google Books that I offered here and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Jacso of the University of Hawaii writes in the Library Journal that Google Scholar is laced with millions of metadata errors of its own. These include wildly inflated publication and citation counts (which Jacso compares to Bernie Madoff's profit reports), numerous missing author names, and phantom authors assigned by the parser that Google elected to use to extract metadata, rather than using the metadata offered them by scholarly publishers and indexing/abstracting services:

In its stupor, the parser fancies as author names (parts of) section titles, article titles, journal names, company names, and addresses, such as Methods (42,700 records), Evaluation (43,900), Population (23,300), Contents (25,200), Technique(s) (30,000), Results (17,900), Background (10,500), or—in a whopping number of records— Limited (234,000) and Ltd (452,000). 

What makes this a serious problem is that many people regard the Google Scholar metadata as a reliable index of scholarly influence and reputation, particularly now that there are tools like the Google Scholar Citation Count gadget by Jan Feyereisl and the Publish or Perish software produced by Tarma Software, both of which take Google Scholar's metadata at face value. True, the data provided by traditional abstracting and indexing services are far from perfect, but their errors are dwarfed by those of Google Scholar, Jacso says.

Of course you could argue that Google's responsibilities with Google Scholar aren't quite analogous to those with Google Book, where the settlement has to pass federal scrutiny and where Google has obligations to the research libraries that provided the scans. Still, you have to feel sorry for any academic whose tenure or promotion case rests in part on the accuracy of one of Google's algorithms.

Following up on this morning's post about phrases that some people find irritating, I thought that I'd take a look at the recent history of one of them, "At the end of the day", which was the Plain English Campaign's 2004 "most irritating phrase in the language". Geoff Pullum ("Irritating cliches? Get a life", 3/25/2004) took this phrase to "have a meaning somewhere in the same region as after all, all in all, the bottom line is, and when the chips are down", and he observes that it "may shock people by its complete bleaching away of temporal meaning", resulting in things like "at the end of the day, you've got to get up in the morning".

A Google News Archive search for "at the end of the day" shows a rapid recent rise in hits from around 1985 onward.  But so do some similar phrases, like  "when all is said and done", which doesn't seem to have incurred the ire of peevers to nearly the same extent. So I thought I'd look at the relative frequency of four phrases with similar meanings: "in the last analysis", "in the final analysis", "when all is said and done", and "at the end of the day".  I queried the Google News archive in 5-year increments from 1951 to 2009.

The raw counts are here, and a plot of proportions shows a striking increase, from about 1975 on, in the frequency of "at the end of the day" relative to the other alternatives:

it's nice to see that peevers like the PEC are responding, even if irrationally, to a genuine change in their linguistic environment, rather than amplifying purely internal psychic noise.

[Update — The OED has an entry for the "hackneyed phrase" glossed as "eventually; when all's said and done", with citations only from 1974:

1974 H. MCKEATING God & Future vi. 96 Eschatological language is useful because it is a convenient way of indicating..what at the end of the day we set most store by. 1976 South Notts. Echo 16 Dec. 1/4 ‘At the end of the day,’ he stated, ‘this verifies what I have been saying against the cuts in public expenditure.’ 1978 Jrnl. R. Soc. Arts CXXVI. 213/2, I want to make a number of points to you, which we believe invalidate..the recommendations they make at the end of the day. 1982 B. BEAUMONT Thanks to Rugby iii. 39 But, at the end of the day, it is an amateur sport and everyone is free to put as much or as little into the game as he chooses. 1986 Independent 17 Nov. 4 At the end of the day businessmen can talk to the city in a way chief executives cannot.

1974 is way late for the first "hackneyed" usage — was this phrase born hackneyed?

It's easy enough to antedate it — W.H. Auden wrote in Passenger Shanty (from Poems 1936-39):

8 The passengers are rather triste ,
9 There's many a fool, and many a beast,
10 Who ought to go west, but is bound for the East.

11 Mr. Jackson buys rubber and sells it again,
12 He paints in oils and he drinks champagne,
13 Says: 'I should have been born in Elizabeth's reign.'

14 His wife learns astrology out of a book,
15 Says: 'Your horoscope's queer and I don't like its look.
16 With the Moon against Virgo you might be a crook.'

17 The planter tells us: 'In Malay
18 We play rugger in March and cricket in May
19 But feel starved for sex at the end of the day.'

20 The journalist Capa plays dicing games,
21 He photographed Teruel Town in flames,
22 He pinches the bottoms of all the dames.

23 The Dominican monks get up with the sun,
24 They're as fond of their dinner as anyone,
25 And they have their own mysterious fun.

Though perhaps Auden's planter meant that literally, I'm not sure.

Another, even earlier, ambiguous antedating — a poem by William Canton with the title "At the end of the day", 1902:

1   Two on a moor befogged I found. One sat,
2      Hunched on a stone, beside a burnt-out fire.
3   One posed with drabbled peacock-feathered hat.
4      And both were old, starved, squalid in attire.

5   "You seem," said I to him upon the stone,
6      "Old friends new met in unexpected woe."
7   "Yes," sighed the man; "my name is Had-I-known ."
8      "And his?" "Oh, his!" he laughed—" I-told-you-so ."

Completely unambiguous is Ella Wheeler Wilcox's 1916 The Things That Count:

1   Now , dear, it isn't the bold things,
2   Great deeds of valour and might,
3   That count the most in the summing up of life at the end of the day.
4   But it is the doing of old things,
5   Small acts that are just and right;
6   And doing them over and over again, no matter what others say;
7   In smiling at fate, when you want to cry, and in keeping at work when you want to play—
8   Dear, those are the things that count.

Maybe this phrase was "born hackneyed" after all?

Even earlier is Benjamin Disraeli's 1847 Tancred:

As for Keferinis, although he was very conversable, the companions observed that he always made it a rule to dilate upon subjects and countries with which he had no acquaintance, and he expressed himself in so affected a manner, and with such an amplification of useless phraseology, that, though he was always talking, they seemed at the end of the day to be little more acquainted with the Ansarey and their sovereign than when Baroni first opened the subject of their visit to Darkush at Damascus.

]

Today's Dilbert:

This strip's first panel displays a number of stock items from the inventory of peevology, fixed-expression department.  For example, "at the end of the day" was at the top of the Plain English Campaign's 2004 list of the "most irritating phrases" in the language.

The usual complaint is that these phrases violate Orwell's injunction  to "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print". But the complainers, in the very text of their complaints, generally use their own collection of common "metaphors, similes, or other figures of speech", which typically occur in print even more often than the phrases that they're complaining about.

In this Dilbert strip, Scott Adams suggests two different reasons for irritation. One is that the offending phrases are stereotypically associated with a despised minority, in this case "managers". That's clearly a central part of the picture ("The social psychology of linguistic naming and shaming", 2/27/2007) — but as we'll see below, it's not clear that these stereotypes are fair ones.

The second charge is that the offending phrases are part of a broader pattern of linguistic crime, here "the vacuous way that managers speak". And again, the validity of this charge is not clear.

In the first place, each of the peeve-provoking phrases has apparently inoffensive counterparts, which are more or less equally frequent, and neither more nor less vacuous: "From now on, we'll skim the cream when all is said and done". This isn't stereotypical manager-speak, but it's not much of a contribution to corporate strategizing either.

But also, if we look at how the constituent clichés are used in real life,  we don't see a preponderance of  managers — at least not corporate ones — and we do see reasonable contributions to non-vacuity.

Moving forward: As an adverbial meaning "from now on; in the future as distinct from the past", going forward seems somewhat commoner than moving forward. And on 1/2/2009, Toni Monkovic identified "going foward" as her "pick for cliche of 2009″ in football, using the criteria that is has to be "essentially meaningless, exhaustively overused, and I have to really really hate it", thus validating Scott Adams' ear for irritants. There are certainly plenty of examples in the world of football, like Kellen Clemens' comment on the Jets' decision to start Mark Sanchez ("Going forward it is Mark’s job and I’ll support him"), or Roger Goodell's statement on Michael Vick's reinstatement (“I’m a believer personally that if somebody recognizes either mistakes in judgment or things, they can do better going forward, that the general public will recognize that and give people an opportunity to prove themselves").

But going|moving forward seems to be more commonly used by politicians and journalists than by corporate types or sports figures.

Barack Obama and his administration seem to be especially fond of it: "Going forward, we cannot tolerate the same old boom and bust economy of the past"; "Going forward, we will not blindly stay the course"; "Going forward, we can make a difference on several fronts"; "And going forward, we can build a lasting relationship founded upon mutual interests and mutual respect as Iraq takes its rightful place in the community of nations"; "Going forward, my administration will continue to consult closely with Congress and with our allies as we deploy this system"; "The biggest concern that I have moving forward is that the toll that job losses take on individual families and communities can be self-reinforcing"; …

But the Republican National Committee is almost as committed: "…concerned about the current negotiations and feel that it is necessary to restate our strong position on several issues and provisions going forward"; "This is a subject that needs to be focused on going forward"; "But from that point going forward, I felt it was best to stand on principle"; …

The Freakonomics blog is also a fan of this phrase: "Going forward, we’ll be cross-posting Robin’s Freakonomics-relevant blog entries here on the blog"; "I do not think this has a negative impact on lending going forward because everyone knows the rules of how things work in bankruptcy reorganizations, especially these days when lots of folks who made secured loans to pretty iffy organizations will have to take haircuts"; "If anything, we anticipate them taking a larger and more direct role going forward"; "And the questioner explained that her friends were thinking that going forward, these foreign locales were likely to be much more economically successful than the West"; …

And so is Thomas Friedman: "But going forward, if peace talks get under way, there are a few style points Mr. Obama should keep in mind"; "But the message going forward to every car buyer and carmaker would be this: The price of gasoline is never going back down"; "The big question I have going forward in Iraq is this"; "And the question I have going forward is whether that will be the case with President Bush"; "Tell the American people how you would deal with Iraq going forward"; "But going forward, this will be less and less true"; …

Low-hanging fruit: There were only 29 instances of this phrase in the NYT's archive for the past year. Of these, seven were about business and finance (mostly about the recent financial crisis), five were about energy use and climate change, four were about public health, and two were about sports. None seemed especially vacuous: "A variety of experts […] have long recognized that, compared with other tacks like building solar farms and extracting oil from algae, improving efficiency across all sectors, from transportation to housing, is low-hanging fruit"; "the Obama administration cannot overlook the low-hanging fruit — the gains to be had from making existing technologies more efficient"; "reducing black carbon is one of a number of relatively quick and simple climate fixes using existing technologies — often called "low hanging fruit' — that scientists say should be plucked immediately to avert the worst projected consequences of global warming"; …

At the end of the day: There were 408 instances of this phrase in the NYT over the past year. Of the 46 in the past 30 days (some of which were used literally, rather than in the metaphorical sense of "in the final analysis" or "when all is said and done"), sports (10) and politics (9) were commoner contexts (for the metaphorical examples) than business (7). And again, the uses didn't seem especially vacuous: "Again, at the end of the day, it's about how we can get the last six or nine outs"; "“You can try to work walks. But at the end of the day, if you can hit home runs, you want to hit home runs"; …

But even if these phrases are usually non-vacuous and non-managerial, they've certainly become more common. Thus "at the end of the day" has 14,452 hits on Google News this morning, compared to 539 for "in the final analysis", 28 for "in the last analysis", and 1,376 for "when all is said and done". The ratio of  "at the end of the day" to its common alternatives seems to have become quite a bit greater in recent decades — this morning's ratio is 14452/(539+28+1376) = 7.44, compared to the ratio for the Google News archive from 1950 to 1960 of 1750/(2750+1660+304) = 0.371.

This order-of-magnitude increase in relative frequency is no doubt the real source of the irritation, with vacuity and source statistics being secondary (or entirely imaginary) factors.

[Update: more here and here.]

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Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Is the Internet melting our brains? asks Slate of author Dennis Baron who says no, it's just another cycle in the human history of technology distrust.

Neurophilosophy discusses recent research on how patients in the coma-like persistent vegetative state can show conditioned learning and that those that day are more likely to show recovery.

Psychoanalyst Susie Orbach discusses the psychology and politics of the body on ABC Radio National's Saturday Extra.

TED Blog has an interesting interview with Oliver Sacks relating to his recent talk on hallucinations.

Thank you Developing Intelligence for being of the few places not to fall for the 'fMRI of dead fish is an example of a voodoo correlation' red herring. They're different effects and the DevIntel post discusses the difference.

Neuroanthropology has an excellent and somewhat philosophical post on mind body duality in the treatment of combat-related PTSD.

Free will is not an illusion after all, much to the surprise of New Scientist who report on new research suggesting an alternative interpretation to Libet's famous brain activation before conscious intention to move study.

The BPS Research Digest covers research on how your personality type affects the situations you place yourself in. One of many excellent post from the BPSRD this week.

ABC Radio National's Ockham's Razor discusses the many illness of dictionary creator Dr Samuel Johnson. You may be interested to know that another major contributor was William Chester Minor who wrote many definitions as a patient in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.

PsyBlog has an excellent post on how long it takes to form a habit.

A photograph of your loved one can reduced pain intensity according to a study covered by Neuronarrative.

New Scientist ">covers research on how different alleles of the COMT gene are associated with exam performance. Ignore the 'gene for x' nonsense and it's actually quite an interesting article.

Welcome to the rehab center from the future via a humorous photo gallery from Wired.

Neuroskeptic covers a fascinating case study of a man with a missing limbic system.

Another interesting advance in the still limited field of 'brain scan mind reading' is covered by Wired.

Cognition and Culture has a short piece on how to think, say, or do precisely the worst thing for any occasion.

The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the shocking news that treating your employees well increases their productivity.

When does consciousness emerge? The Splintered Mind has a brilliantly thought-provoking post on the emergence of the conscious mind in individuals and species.

The Neurocritic has a piece on a recent but necessarily speculative paper on the neuroscience of torture and the negative effects on accurate memory recall.

The comments on my post "The inherent ambiguity of WTF" drifted to other possible expansions of WTF, like the World Taekwando Federation. That reminded me of something I saw back in July on the blog Your Logo Makes Me Barf, mocking the abbreviatory logo of the Wisconsin Tourism Federation. The ridicule got some attention from local Wisconsin media, such as Kathy Flanigan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Folks at the Wisconsin Tourism Federation couldn't possibly have seen how the Internet would change the lingo when it was established in 1979.
But now that it's been pointed out, the lobbying coalition might want to rethink using an acronym in the logo. To anyone online, WTF has a different meaning these days. And it's not the kind of thing you want visitors thinking about when they think Wisconsin.

I decided to check out the tourism board's website, and lo and behold, they've bowed to pressure and changed their name to the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin. The old logo lives on, however, at the Internet Archive. Compare:

      

The transition isn't quite complete yet. The URL is still witourismfederation.org, and "WTF" survives in the menu directly below the logo on the home page!

      

There is a cliché in media stories where figures for a disease or condition are quoted followed by a statement that "the true figures may be higher". Sampling errors mean that initial figures are equally as likely to be under-estimates as over-estimates but we only ever seem to be told that the condition is under-detected.

For example, this is from a recent (actually pretty good) New Scientist article about gender identity disorder (GID) in children, a condition where children who are biologically male feel female and vice versa:

It is unclear how common GID is among children, but many transsexual adults say they felt they were "in the wrong body" from an early age. The incidence of adult transsexualism has been estimated at about 1 in 12,000 for male-to-females, and around in 1 in 30,000 for female-to-males, although transsexual lobby groups say the true figures may be far higher.

These estimates are usually drawn from prevalence studies where a maybe a few hundred or thousand people are tested. The researchers extrapolate from the number of cases to make an estimate of how many people in the population as a whole will have the condition.

These estimates are made with statistical tests which give a margin of error, meaning that within a certain range, typically described by confidence intervals, the real figure is likely to be between a range which equally includes both higher and lower values than the quoted amount.

For any individual study you can validly say that you think the estimate is too low, or indeed, too high, and give reasons for that. For instance, you might say that your sample was mainly young people who tend to be healthier than the general public, or maybe that the diagnostic tools are known to miss some true cases.

But when we look at reporting as a whole, it almost always says the condition is likely to be much more common than the estimate.

For example, have a look at the results of this Google search:

"the true number may be higher" 20,300 hits

"the true number may be lower" 3 hits

You can try variations on the phrasing and see the same sort of pattern emerges. I'm curious as to why this bias occurs, or whether there's another explanation for it.

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