Culturomics

Whizzes at Google & Harvard got together and Culturomics is the result. according to this scintillating Science article on the topic, 4% of the books that have ever been published are waiting to be analysed by you, right now. Here is an example of a search I ran to see how things got explained over the last century.

I searched for "psychological explanation" (red line), "sociological explanation" (blue line) and "evolutionary explanation" (green line). Nature appears to be in the ascendant, just overtaking nurture at the close of the century. Sociological explanations peaked in the 1970's, presumably just as the '68 generation came in from the streets and sat down at their desks. Interesting that psychological explanations took a dip around the 1930s. Anti-semitism, maybe?

What it means to be cynical

I am surprised to learn that the original Cynics set as their goal "a life lived in harmony with nature". According to Wikipedia, "the ideal Cynic would evangelise; as the watchdog of humanity, it was their job to hound people about the error of their ways. The example of the Cynic's life (and the use of the Cynic's biting satire) would dig-up and expose the pretensions which lay at the root of everyday conventions."

The references to hound and watchdog stem from the etymological similarity of cynic and Greek word for dog.

Rewards and uncritical learning

This experiment shows that a human child adopts a pointless procedure that an ape of the same age dismisses. The wrong conclusion to draw from this is that human babies are stupider than ape babies. The insight is that humans have adapted to pay attention to processes that yield rewards, especially when those processes are engaged in by superiors. Not all processes that are followed by rewards are worth repeating however. Undoubtedly we all pointlessly bang some boxes at some point in our everyday lives, simply because our parents banged those same boxes and it worked for them. Unless we test our theories we can waste a lot of time and energy.

"One of the things unique to the human brain is this need to explain why events occur"

This quote comes from Mike Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist who has been researching the processes of human cognition since the 1960's. Mike's work with split brain patients demonstrates this need to explain graphically. The experiment depicted from 5m30s onwards shows how a patient's left brain, which is ignorant of what caused a behaviour, concocts a story to explain that behaviour. It is striking how convinced the patient is by the explanation fabricated by his left brain.