Foundations

Build a house on mud, and no matter the breadth and majesty of your architectural imagination, the whole thing will quickly sink and collapse in the goo. Foundations are the unchallenged principles that allow you to freely build castles on the land and conceptual castles in the sky. For architects, your great tower will become a leaning tower in no time if you don't pay attention to the fundamentals of the ground you build upon. The same thing applies to any other contraption that is built without consulting the foundational laws of physics.

Funny thing though, when you are dealing with conceptual neverlands, the concept of a building built on sand can defy gravity forever if we just all sat around a circle and consistently calculate that mud is after all like concrete. Of course, testing your theory against the reality of dirt is what makes your calculations not only right but true. But sometimes we just don't want to get out hands, well, dirtied. So by not questioning foundational issues, whatever we build may have, to say the least, a certain tilt about it.

This is currently a raging problem in of all places, the quite foundational discipline of physics. In his recent book, The Trouble with Physics, the distinguished physicist Lee Smolin argues that Newtonian physics is good enough for macro, quantum physics is good enough for micro, but both rest on a common foundation that is another matter entirely. Thus, good enough is not good enough is you want an integrated theory of everything. The problem is assuming that something is foundational when it is not. Thus a final theory ain't so final.

Former foundation for the building housing

the Center for Evolutionary Psychology

For the psychology of motivation, the foundation is simple, namely a biologically informed and testable theory of how experience changes behavior. This is called a theory of learning. Unfortunately, a biological learning theory constrains how you can interpret observations about behavior. So when you ignore learning theory, you can't build psychological castles in the sky because there is no 'under' under. Thus, social, evolutionary, humanistic psychologies do without a neural foundation (in spite of their lip service to its importance) and equate approximate solutions with exact ones, which end up in a metaphorical sense, leaning. But that's OK if you tilt your head, and your reasoning within it, just so. But as this writer confesses, it is a common skill that I have never learned.

15 minutes of fame

The pop artist Andy Warhol predicted that with the technological advance of the media, soon everyone will be famous, but only for 15 minutes. A columnist in the Wall Street Journal recently turned this prediction on its head, and noted that as the media fractures as it advances, everyone will be famous all the time, in the eyes of 15 people that is. Thus, given advances in mass communication led by the internet, you will always find at least 15 people who raptly attend to your every musing, even if your claim to fame is a mere knowledge of the natural history of the dung beatle.

And this of course is a good thing, for if we can readily find 15 people who will give us an 'atta-boy' for our every murmur and burp on any topic that interests us, we will be more motivated to develop and perpetuate that interest. That's a wonderful change from pre-internet times, when the only 15 people who cared about us were more concerned with how we made our bed, fixed dinner, or paid the bills. We were famous of course, but not for the things that we felt truly mattered. Indeed, accomplishment and genius is only nurtured in environments where there are small groups of people to provide the 'atta-boy' for the simple act of trying. Indeed, where would Mozart, Galileo, and Einstein be without family and friends who gave them encouragement?

Of course, popular psychology, epitomized recently by Rhonda Byrne's best seller 'The Secret', gives short shrift to this simple truism. Motivation is just a matter of optimism, not a product of day to day encouragement, and your weightiest goals will move to you as a function of a sort of psychic gravity, or law of attraction if you will. So to get what you expect, you just have to learn how to expect, and keep expecting good things.

But this is nonsense, because as modern neuro-science demonstrates, motivation is not just a logical but an affective thing, and without the daily pleasantries of an unexpected compliment or word of encouragement, motivation is extinguished like a candle. To love what you're doing, you have to have other people love you because you're doing it. There is no other option. Motivation is not found in the logical constructions of optimism, but in our affective reaction to the opinions of other people.

To illustrate this truism, consider this global mind experiment, which can be performed by everyone who has ever posted to the internet. Consider a world without the internet. This would snuff out more than daily stock quotes and news blurbs on celebrities, but the individual inspirations of millions. Indeed, who would blog unto silence, or keep their aspirations bright when no one can hear them speak? Expectations would never be matched, because there would be no motivation to reach them. Indeed, that is the true 'Secret' of motivation, not the reflection of a cosmic law, but of a very human one. Motivation, like happiness, is not found in the facile and nonsensical laws of pop-psychologists, it is found in the 15 people who care about what we do.

The Flight of the Dodo

In Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland, Alice and her friends had just survived a stormy day at sea, and the wise dodo has just the answer to their rather damp plight.

What I was going to say,' said the Dodo, `was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.'

`What IS a Caucus-race?' said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

`Why,' said the Dodo, `the best way to explain it is to do it.' (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (`the exact shape doesn't matter,' it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no `One, two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out `The race is over!' and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, `But who has won?'

This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, `EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.'

Moral of the story: If you start out all wet, you just might end up all wet.

As a psychologist who thinks that most psychologists are all wet, this story has a particular resonance and illustration. In my last post, I noted that Rhonda Byrne's self help best seller 'The Secret' harbored a dirty little secret, namely that her 'secret' (and this is being extremely charitable) was unproven, that nobody cared to attempt to prove it, and that to follow the counsel of mere product endorsement (which is all the thing has) is to follow the counsel of a con man or a fool.

Of course Byrne's 'Secret' (i.e. think and you shall have) is merely the latest, although most eccentric variant of the oft phrased nostrum voiced from Dear Abby to Dr. Phil that that if you just think positively, challenge un-constructive thoughts, or mentally rearrange the cognitive deck chairs in one's noggin, then all would be well. The problem is, nobody has ever shown that any of this is more helpful than getting the wise counsel of your aunt, who will normally tell you the same thing. This was the conclusion of Robyn Dawes, who in his book 'House of Cards' , argued that psychotherapy is not a fraud, but that it ain't nothing special either. This was good news for family therapists (if it's a member of your family that is), but bad news for the psychotherapy industry. Of course, Dawes' conclusion caused a collective whine among therapists everywhere, who pointed to their own studies which conclusively proved that they had won the race and were the smartest and most effective of them all. But the problem is, and continues to be, that all therapists make that claim, irrespective of how they ran their race. In other words, as in Lewis Carroll's story, they all deserve prizes! This was the observation of John Horgan, who in his book 'The Undiscovered Mind' noted that awarding 1st prizes to all contestants is the same as awarding none. In other words, because therapists of all stripes claim to be equally special, they demonstrate that they aren't nothing special.

Of course, as Horgan notes, the race ain't over yet, but if prizes are given as easily as lollipops, then it never will be over, and that's a tragedy not just for psychology but for all of us.

The Secret

Passed down by ancient wise men from generation to generation, and known by cognoscenti such as Aristotle, Plato, and DaVinci, was a code that revealed the secret of the universe! Endorsed by king and cleric alike, there was no denying the power of consensus. Thus it had to be true. Written in a cryptic script that has only been fully revealed to this day, the Ptolemaic Code presented a shocking wisdom that when revealed anew will overturn the settled and complacent wisdom of today!

Stay tuned for more the Oprah show, and for the movie version directed by Opie. So what is this earthshaking wisdom? Namely, that the earth is the center of the universe, the planets revolve around it, and the stars are fixed on the surface of a rotating crystal sphere. Hokum? You bet, but only because by using telescopes we can see the reality of the night sky. Certainly in the 15th century it wasn't, and Claudius Ptolemy's (ca 150 ad) crack brained theory of the universe was catapulted to truth because it got a lot of important endorsements, and because the public, then as now, was gullible and stupid.

The Secret

Move forward a few centuries, and we endure another sort of hokum in another ancient cosmic 'law', again conveniently revealed after all these centuries. In Rhonda Byrnes' multi-media epic 'The Secret' , this #1 best selling/Oprah approved piece of BS reveals a profound and ancient 'Secret' (which is mainly a variant of positive thinking: a cosmic law of attraction, or believe and you will receive) that was also the secret of success for great scientists and entrepreneurs such as Galileo, Einstein, and Ford. Well, a can do attitude or positive way of looking at the world is no secret, but it wasn't their secret for success. Attitude can not make for accomplishment, but testability does, and the ability to scientifically demonstrate that your idea/contraption actually does work is the stuff that may not make for genius, but it sure validates it. So if your model T Ford couldn't get up a hill, or if experiment didn't bear out Einstein's claims of the relativity of time and space, then such genius evaporates, and becomes merely the oddball rantings of a fool.

And this is the problem for this oddball book. Product endorsements from Oprah, pop-psychologists, and grade D celebrities are as much related to science and the scientific method as an the pronouncements of an infallible pope. If you were to pronounce that tap dancing while whistling 'Dixie' cures cancer, you can only validate your genius if you can test your great idea, not because you get a lot of product endorsements. But evidently, this doesn't apply to Byrne's grand thesis. Thus, because there are a lot of product endorsements for this book, it means, like Ptolemy's theory, it must be true. In a pigs eye that is.

So 'the secret' is crap because it poses as sciences without embracing the self criticism of science. Better to read John Horgan's book 'the Undiscovered Mind' for those more inclined for a bit more sobriety in their thinking.

And for those of you (like me) who just have a terminal case of cynicism about the stupidity of popular psychological 'science', read this 'Sham'!

OR...you can read the Onion's Take on the Secret.

Socrates Hypo-Critias

A few lines from Plato's lost dialog: Hypo-Critias

Grecian Guy: Is it true Socrates, that the nature of the good is knowledge, and that with knowledge brings wisdom?

Socrates: I'd really like to answer, but I'm just snowed right now. You know, Peloponnesian War, lecture trail, that sort of thing. I'll just have to get back to you.

Grecian Guy: But Socrates, if virtue is reason, then why would it not be virtuous to reasonably act against the common wheal?

Socrates: You know, I wrote a book on just that topic, in which I of course reinvented the wheal. You can get it from Amazon, in fact there's one of them over there.

Of course, Socrates was not like this at all, which is why the wisdom of Socrates has come down to us over the millenia. But unfortunately the mind set of his antagonists exemplified in this exchange has come down to us, and it is embodied today by lawyers, politicians, and (of all people) social and physical scientists.

To demonstrate this, here's a practical experiment. Make up a question, and email some psychologist type who has plastered his accomplishments on a web site. He or she will geneally ignore you, charge you, or refer you to his latest book or lecture tape.

This is what was called in Ancient Greece sophistry. The sophists were proto academics who got paid for their wisdom and clever turn of phrase. Useful stuff when you had a dispute over property rights, or saw the potential profit in interpreting goat entrails or justify some act of cupidity or stupidity. Socrates hated those guys. For Socrates, wisdom was something you pursued because you loved it, not because it got you grant money, tenure, or lecture fees. Indeed, money is the root or should we say motivation of all evil, and that includes a heck of a lot of not just bad social science, but bad physical science too.

The problem is uniquely illustrated in an article by the distinguished physicist Frank Tipler, who noted that if you wrote on physics in the early 20th century, you did it because of love, not money, and invariably what you wrote about was not sullied by vulgar interests that compromised the love of truth. Nowadays, you write because you have to earn a living, and thus truth is denoted by the tonnage of your verbiage, not its quality. So science has turned into a gigantic muddle, with researchers bursting at the seams with conclusions full of sound, fury, and statistical significance, but meaning nothing. This also means that if you have a sound idea that can clear out some of this academic clutter, think again. A paper or article that challenges the pocket book values underscoring academic opinion likely won't get a fair hearing, or any hearing for that matter.

So if you want to be a philosopher, do it because you love it, and don't expect anyone to write you back on your insights. I am sure that in this day and age, Socrates would have traded in his real audience for a virtual one, and have blogged on about virtue and truth, unknown to all except those who loved the truth.