excerpt from Bellow

from Saul Bellow, “What kind of day did you have?” in Him With His Foot in his Mouth and Other Stories (1984).

page cites are to the Penguin Books paperback edition (1985)

This is the part in which the great art critic Victor Wulpy (modeled after Bellow's University of Chicago colleague Harold Rosenberg) encounters an old acquaintance, Larry Wrangel, a Hollywood sci-fi film producer, while stuck in the airport in Buffalo ...

--oOo--

background, p.98:

Victor tells Katrina, his traveling companion ...

about a note he had received at the hotel from a fellow he had known years ago – a surprise that did not please him. “He takes the tone of an old chum. Wonderful to meet again after thirty years. He happens to be in town. And good old Greenwich Village – I hate the revival of these relationships that never were. Meantime, it's true, he's become quite a celebrity.”

“Would I know the name?”

“Larry Wrangel. He had a recent success with a film called The Kronos Factor. Same type as 2001 or Star Wars.”

“Of course,” said Katrina. “That's the Wrangel who was featured in People magazine. A late-in-life success, they called him. Ten years ago he was still making porno movies. Interesting.”

She spoke cautiously, having disgraced herself in San Francisco. Even now she couldn't be sure that Victor had forgiven her for dragging him to see M*A*S*H. Somewhere in his mental accounts there was a black mark still. Bad taste approaching criminality, he had once said. “He must be very rich. The piece in People said that his picture grossed four hundred million. Did he attend your lecture?”

“He wrote that he had an engagement, so he might be a bit late, and could we have a drink afterwards. He gave a number, but I didn't call.”

“You were what—tired? disgruntled?”

“In the old days he was bearable for about ten minutes at a time—just a character who longed to be taken seriously. The type that bores you most when he's most earnest. He came from the Midwest to study philosophy at NYU and he took up with the painters at the Cedar bar and the writers on Hudson Street. I remember him, all right—a little guy, quirky, shrewd, offbeat. I think he supported himself by writing continuity for the comic books—Buck Rogers, Batman, Flash Gordon. He carried a scribbler in his zipper jacket and jotted down plot ideas. I lost track of him, and I don't care to find the track again....”

--oOo--

p. 136:

They now saw Victor working his way back to the booth, and Wrangel signaled to the waitress to serve their lunch. The glazed orange duck looked downright dangerous. Circles of fat swam in the spiced gravy. Famished, Victor attacked his food. His whiskey glass was soon fingerprinted with grease. He tore up his rolls over the dish and spooned up the fatty sops. He was irritable.

Wrangel tried to make conversation, as a host should do. Victor gave him a gloomy if not sinister look – a glare, to be more accurate – when Wrangel began to point out connections between cartoons and abstract ideas. When people spoke of ideas as “clear,” didn't they mean reductive? Human beings, in reduction, represented as things. Acceptable enough when they were funny. But suppose the intention wasn't funny, as shorthand representations of the human often were, then you got an abstract condensation for the Modern theme. Take Picasso and Daumier as caricaturists (much deference in this to Victor, the expert). It might be fair to say that Daumier treated a social subject: the middle class, the courtroom. Picasso didn't. In Picasso you had the flavor of nihilism that went with increased abstraction. Wrangel in his rolls of fur and his chin supported by silk scarf and cotton bandanna was nervous, insecure of tone, twitching.

“What's this about reason?” said Victor. “First you tell me that ideas are trivial, they're dead, and then what do you do but discuss ideas with me?”

“There's no contradiction, is there, if I say that abstract ideas and caricature go together?”

“I have little interest in discussing this,” said Victor. “It'll keep until you get back to California, won't it?”

“I suppose it will.”

“Well, then, stow it. Skip it. Stuff it.”

“It's a pity that my success in sci-fi should be held against me. Actually I've had a better than average training in philosophy.”

“Well, I'm not in the mood for philosophy. And I don't want to discuss the nihilism that goes with reason. I figure you've done enough to f___ up the consciousness of millions of people with this mishmash of astrophysics and divinity that has made you so famous. Your trouble is that you'd like to sneak up on real seriousness. Well, you've already made your contribution. Your statement is on the record.”

“You yourself have written about ''divine sickness,” Victor. I would suppose that any creature, regardless of his worldly status, had one ticket good for a single admission if he has suffered – if he paid his price.”

But Victor wouldn't hear him out. He made a face so satirical, violent, so killing that Katrina would have turned away from it if it hadn't been so extraordinary – an aspect of Victor never manifested before. He drew his lips over his teeth to imitate bare gums. He gabbled in pantomime, not a sound coming out. He let out his tongue like a dog panting. He squeezed his eyes so tight that you couldn't see anything except the millipede brows and lashes. He put his thumbs to the sides of his head and waggled his fingers. Then he slid himself out of the booth, took up the duffel, and started for the door. Katrina, too, stood up. She held Vanessa's fiddle in her arms, saying, “I'd apologize for him if you didn't also know him. He's in very bad shape, Mr. Wrangel, you can see that for yourself. Last year we nearly lost him. And he's in pain every day. Try to remember that. I'm sorry about this. Don't let him get to you.”

“Well, this is a lesson. Of course it makes me very sad. Yes, I see he's in bad shape. Yes, it's a pity.”

It had cut him up, and Katrina's heart went out to Wrangel. “Thank you,” she said, drawing away, turning. She hoped she didn't look too clumsy from the rear.

Victor was waiting for her in the concourse and she spoke to him angrily. “That was bad behavior. I didn't like being a party to it.”

“When he started on me with Daumier and Picasso, I couldn't stand it, not a minute more of it.”

“You feel rotten and you took it out on him.”

He conceded this in silence.

. . .. ... .. . .

staging ...

Doofus Turing Test

(from 5.23.2007)

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's capability to demonstrate thought. Described by Professor Alan Turing in the 1950 paper "Computing machinery and intelligence," it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. [from Wikipedia]

In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently, IRC or instant messaging.

Thus, the Turing test takes as its objective measure the best-informed subjective impression of the human judge.

I propose an analogous test, which I will call the Doofus-Turing Test Notwithstanding the tradition of naming such proposals after their proponents (anticipating the doofus retort). The Doofus-Turing Test involves communication between a human judge and a human subject, not between a human and a machine. Like the Turing test, however, it takes as its objective measure the best-informed subjective impression of the human judge.

In other words: I am borrowing the notion from the AI field that it is useful to employ such a measure of intellect. Turing himself suggested several objections which could be made to his test, and I am not here arguing whether the Turing test holds up as a useful test or not against such arguments. I have observed, however, that computer scientists and AI researchers won't shut up about the Turing test, and neither shall I.

If a human judge's subjective impression is a useful construct in measuring machine intelligence, then perhaps it can also be employed to measure aspects of human intelligence. That is the extent of the analogy I draw.

So, what aspects of human intelligence do I imagine might be measured by the Doofus-Turing Test? I imagine that the human judge will rank the subject along a spectum of doofusheadedness. I shall call this measure the Doofus Quotient. I do not here propose the method of assigning an objective rank, nor the mathematical form of the index. That is to be worked out later, by actual smart people (once this proposal passes their Doofus-Turing Test).

The Doofus Quotient, or DQ, scores the depth and consistency of the subject's understanding. A subject who manifests a shallow, superficial or rote understanding of a topic under discussion would score higher, and especially if the topic is one on which the subject holds him or herself out as having specialized knowledge. Conversely, subjects who evince deep knowledge and whose remarks hold together logically would score lower (they would be less doofusheaded). High DQ scores for adherents (or spouters) of idea-sets lacking strong empirical and theoretical foundation; low DQ scores for practitioners of rigorous and intellectually honest analysis.

My premise is that a human judge with sufficient acuity in a given area can easily recognize others with a similar or greater depth of understanding; and conversely, the same human judge can readily sniff out spurious “experts.” The more data points, the better (as usual); but it does not take very many data points, I propose, to distill out a useful DQ. If the subject produces accurate, consistent responses to, say, five penetrating questions in a row, this tells the judge a lot. If the subject can only manage canned, superficial bullet-pointy soundbites in response to the same five questions, all the while maintaining the façade of specialized knowledge, the judge can also learn much about the subject. Even a subject who has a deep understanding in some areas may yet score high on the DQ scale, if the subject over-leverages this expertise by feigning expertise in other areas, for example. Indeed, such behavior may warrant a multiplier of some sort!

The Doofus-Turing Test looks for logical inconsistencies. If there are any pockets of irrationality in the subject's reasoning, it is a sign that there could be many similar pockets. The Doofus-Turing Test is attuned to the spouting of talking-point memes, divorced from factual or empirical basis. The Doofus-Turing Test exposes the deployment of rhetorical trickery tending to deflect attention from the merits of the subject at hand.

Someone who spends too much time writing a piece such as this one would score higher on the Doofus-Turing Test; someone who stops here and attends to other matters in life would tend to score lower.

___

[Update: someone who came back to edit this post likely just spiked his DQ.]

___

rw said...

On the subject of the DTT and the DQ, which results therefrom, I am puzzled by a population stratification bias. There are categories of people (let's select politicians as one subgroup) who clearly cluster around a high DQ. They are forced to speak to constituents, the debate floor, or their party often at times when they have nothing to say, or for that matter, they are rhetorically modifying a party line to overemphasize its strength. For instance, the republican party during the Lewinsky scandal continuously turned the debate on the floor, whatever the issue actually was at the time, to the notion of morality in this country. One might argue that the morality of an illicit affair and even the lying to cover said act up is dispicable. But, at what point does the act of a single man, even one so high in office as the President condemn the morality of an entire nation?

Herein lies the efficacy of artfully used dufusheadedness. By taking a single situation and extrapolating it to win political sway, we also have a form of high DQ. I view the DTT as having two sub categories. There is high DQ A, which is highly rhetorical debate with no substance or intellectual reference wherein the dufus is merely talking to pontificate. And, there is high DQ B where the dufus knows exactly how wrong and untruthful the use of rhetoric is but chooses to perpetuate it because rhetorical sound bites amplify his position. This is the most dangerous form of a dufus. The high DQ B dufus is the one who turns entire political platforms into a few sound bites (i.e. decline of family values, defeating terrorism, etc.). It is ironic that in many cases those dufuses have been caught violating their own "rhetorical moral code" when they are caught in a scandal (e.g. Mark Foley) or act to undermine their own rhetoric (Abu Graib, Walter Reed, and a lack of suitable armor on Hummers).

What is truly incredible is the ability of the high DQ B dufus to quickly spin a tale so as to marginalize the subject of a scandal and form a new rhetoric which draws attention away from it (i.e. new sound bites such as "the Democrats do not support our troops because they want to bring them home"). I submit that the high DQ A dufus is easy to find, and often easy to discredit, but the high DQ B dufus is much more careful about what, where, and who actually sends the message (case in point, who was hung out to dry in the Valerie Plame scandal, those who contemplated the leak or those who actually perpetrated it?) The high DQ A dufus is one who plagarizes a speech in his first run for the Presidency, manages to rebound to make another run more than a decade later, only to make another stupid comment about his competition (e.g. Joe Biden). This is someone who knows rhetoric works but does not know how to use it or even when he is using it.

I do not want to leave out low DQ A and B dufuses as well. You might suggest that if the DQ is low, then one is not a dufus. On the contrary, I would argue that a party who is up against another group of nearly pure high DQ dufuses and still cannot find a way to win sway must also be called to the carpet. This is the low DQ dufus A. That is someone who clearly references and understands the argument and can argue intelligently and with data against a high DQ dufus but often does not formulate a proper argument or is so lazy as to not realize they can powerfully use the tools of the high DQ dufus B against them. The only gem in this crowd is the low DQ dufus B, who are few in numbers. These are the class of people who gather data, cross reference it, form an opinion, and articulately display it in a form such as to totally discredit the opinion editorial nature of the high DQ dufus.

Alas, I search for this person in the political realm and find none. There are too many high DQ dufuses, particularly B's, who so quickly make the situation unenjoyable for the low DQ dufus B, so why would anyone worth the job actually ever choose to do it.

May 26, 2007 11:01 AM

truthboy said...

Low-D QB wondertwin powers activate! Form of a network; shape of a phase transition.

June 12, 2007 11:11 AM

. . .. ... ..... ........ oOo ........ ..... ... .. . .

& test of machiavellianism salon.com 9.13.1999

Human Memome Project

This title does not refer to tribe.net or anything else that pops when you search “human memome project” on Google. As it happens, the title turns out not to have much to do with this piece at all.

So why is it still the title?

cf. Wikinomics 85 et seq. re open-source.

Open Source Human Cognition, by which I mean: the Human Memome Project.

Memome?

Like genome, but for memes.

Got it. Proceed.

Pretending for a moment that there were such an open-source project (which I have to do, as I sit here unaware of the activities of any such extant open-source communities, conceived & conducting themselves explicitly on the open-source model, pursuing the memome project).

Go onnnnn..... [clockcycle, clockcycle, clockcycle ...] ☺

Well, the 'board' on which you array the information-product of the community ...

[I was here interrupted by a ½-hour business call to get my 'first-blush-quick-idea-check' on a business idea. The idea worked, from every angle I could think of. I battle tested it, shot it through, turned it round & round my hypersoccerball of {udap | k | reg | complex adaptive systems | etc...}.

It was a Σ [win₁-win₂-win₃-win₄ ... win_n] situation, by karate man lights. A real nonzero summer. Karate man knows 'em when he sees 'em.

But here's the key thing, the reason that I am bothering to write down this digression into my client call: I expressed this effectively to the client.

How?

¿Shall I go onnnnnnn?

☺¡Go onnnnnnnn!☻

Well, karate man doesn't hold back in telling you how much he dislikes the whole neighborhood some of your questions are coming from.

How many times hasn't karate man read you out some riot act down to the foundations of your understanding of the universe, when all you asked him was a question about credit card disclosures?

Karate man thinks it is important to balance that out and express to you how much he likes a construct that floats through all constraint-gauntlets untouched, in a nonzero sum kind of way, win-win-win ... (or, solve-solve-solve-solve, with all the solutions achieved at once by the same construct).

Why nonzero sum?

Solutions cost money. Solving two problems at the same time, expending only the effort and money it would take to solve either alone, is a net gain. Solving multiple problems at once multiplies the gains.

Each 'win' is a problem solved or avoided; win₁, win₂ ... win_n corresponds to a phase space of n mutually orthogonal dimensions, one for each problem to be solved. When a solution is hit upon that solves this rubik's hypersoccerball, the thing starts glowing in the dark. That's karate man's way of saying: it is apparent when this occurs.

It is also a very good thing all the way around. So, what a perfect opportunity for karate man to balance out his hypercritical truthstructionism.

May I ask, who is 'karate man'? Is that you? I didn't catch where karate man (km) came into the discussion.

Karate man is a voice. Voice as in, writer's voice, 'public voice'; but not as in 'hearing voices.' [you should pardon the digression, but it's very interesting – this hearing voices movement – another backlash against neurotypical psychiatry akin to Aspies for Freedom.]

It is based on the original Eddie Murphy karate man bit from Trading Places, with certain ironic differences. Murphy's character (km_em) is pretending, contrary to fact, to be a bigshot & infallible karate man. Whereas, the km voice I am employing (km_tb) has a basis for his utterances (as opposed to zero basis). km_tb is the real deal.

Now, km_tb is not perfect, which means that he will not have a perfect basis for his utterances, and he can therefore be wrong. To the extent that he is wrong, he risks being ridiculous like km_em. Of course, km_tb knows this quite well. To the extent he is wrong (and ridiculous), well, he's already playing a km character, which can easily switch over to km_em if necessary.

In other words, km_tb is a voice that allows the author to speak authoritatively and efficiently, but one that need not maintain a façade of intellectual infallibility. In other words, km_tb is allowed to say stuff that in an ordinary voice would be too pedantic (aspie) to hold the neurotypical conch for very long. So km_tb is, like km_em, doing a kind of rope-a-dope. In neurotypical society, being right is actually more dangerous than being ridiculous, because ridiculous people can be ignored more easily (or otherwise removed from the ring). Plus, ridiculous people can succeed quite well in conventional society, judging by the epidemic of doofuses we have been suffering.

So do you see the layers of irony in here? You've got km_tb prancing around the metaphorical jail cell, even though what he says is (mostly) not ridiculous. It's straight up, fact-based, logically consistent, pithy. His actions and utterances are perceived (or portrayed anyway) as ridiculous or otherwise not deserving of consideration on the merits. So km_tb has to dodge and weave and pull an escalating series of hyper-Marshall-McLuhans from behind the movie poster to keep his 'cellmates' on the run until he can make bail (i.e., transcend the 'jail cell' scene and no longer be vulnerable to the particular collection of neurotypical cellmates).

Can you give me an example?

No. I don't want to . Use your imagination.

Then I think you should stop writing now.

Well, I'll stop writing about who km_tb is.

Go.

Well, this was a digression to a digression anyway. Let me get back to the first level of digression: I was telling you about the business call that interrupted my big point I had to write down about memomes, etc. So, anyway, after the interaction described above, I told my client that that ½-hour session was an excellent example of how I can be efficiently leveraged. Not that I'm not good for anything else. But this kind of interaction adds more 'wins' to any win-win you already got going.

This increases the chance that the client will continue 'rolling up soccerballs,' by which I mean, collecting and connecting key information she regularly requires in her business. She will certainly appreciate this, not least because my bills will be a lot smaller; or rather, she can get more advice-utility per unit cost. I will appreciate it because I don't like to spin my wheels answering the same questions over and over, even at my high billing rate. I want to work with people who have a need for information, and who are in the practice of valuing it and understanding it and collecting it and applying it on their own. Then our interactions are always interesting. Questions come from perspectives of escalating expertise, so it becomes a richer dialog. Mutual learning ensues exponentially. Stuff gets easier; more can be accomplished with less effort.

Neurotypical nonexperts seem to expect that experts should be some kind of black box that spits out definitive answers that can be applied in all cases without the nonexpert having to do much critical thinking. There is no shortage of experts willing to provide services on this basis. Neurotypical nonexperts seem to prefer heavy consulting costs to moderate mental lifting.

In my view, an expert performs an iterative function – an expert is not someone who knows everything, but someone who knows a lot; and more importantly, knows how to learn and how to teach. How to find relevant information and collapse it into a concise, actionable understanding; and communicate that understanding; and nurture the emergent thought community whose job it is to implement that understanding.

So, my (digression) point is: I told the client this stuff, fairly explicitly (using different words, but same meaning). Why not say it explicitly, just in case my own elaborate thought process has not actually materialized whole inside her head yet. That is a kind of shortcut, heading off at the pass vast clouds of wheel spinning, for both of us.

Yes?

What starts rolling up to me are soccerballs that are 'rolled up' enough for me to start fitting them into “higher” orders of fractal rolled-up-edness.

Hunh?

Well, take the sierpinski triangle for example:

Let's say that represents a higher level of what I'm calling 'rolled upped-ness' than just a single triangle Δ, or pieces of a triangle like > or _. (I know, I'm mixing my metaphors.) What I get by way of an inquiry should ideally not be just a Δ or a > or an _ . What I start to get, from clients who are strong in the critical thinking department, is one of these:

which I can then much more easily fit into the higher order structure represented above. I don't have to start out each time explaining that they need an emergent thought community whose job it is to implement the understanding they have engaged me to convey.

Now, that's a toy example of what I'm talking about, but on-the-mark from a complex adaptive network dynamic mandelbrotian fractal synced scale-free emergent wikinomic econophysical perspective (pardon my redundancy).

So my role is not to administer neurotypical non-soccerball-roller-uppers (to be charitable; the worse issue is with those with no apparent normative understanding of the foundations of our society; or even worse, those with an understanding coupled with an indifference or antagonism).

No. My role is 'boundary spanner,' harmonizer of ideas and people. As Uncle Abe might say, “ass kicker.”

“You are going to have a big medical problem if you don't do X; you're going to need a major operation to get my boot out of your ass!”

Nice, Abe.

What if you use the community around you as an information processing apparatus ...

In the same sense that one might view a company, or a whole industry, or a group of industries, or a whole economy even, as a huge and complex adaptive iterating apparatus on which one's thought experiments can be run.

So, f'rinstance, you could query the system: “What if soccer-video-bloggers started self-exemplifying rolled-up nonzero soccerballness?” And then see what emerges by way of answers.

It's a way of lining up one's bundle of coordinated, rolled-up interests ... and the emergent product is “pulled” in by the audience (or not; but it is not pushed out). Plus, emergent phenomena can turn out to be extremely valuable in ways that are beyond present imagination.

Product?

Yes! For one thing, it's good to have a product. Otherwise, one risks not being productive (not to mention appearing unproductive). It's good for a product to be interesting to a somewhat broader audience than oneself

(ya think?)

It's even better if the product is interesting enough that the audience will 'pull' it at their convenience, with no (or very little) further effort or action by karate man.

But it gets better: the 'product' is a self-exemplifying unit, which can (and does!) both incent and equip others to emulate it. Who knows what nonzerosumness may emerge?

Anyway, that's the kind of system query I like to run, and I unabashedly have my thumb on the scale. I mean, I influence the system as it iterates by selective feedback. "The idea is to get the fire started; to kickstart the network so that it works on its own." [quoting Biz Stone, A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs, p. 183]

What network?

I am speaking of networks of ideas and tools and people and practices.

So, your scale is not thumb-free, eh?

Right, but my thumb is scale-free.

Uth. Can you get back to the human memome project?

Oh dear, sorry. Well, no. I mean, I don't want to anymore (please refrain from cheering).

Well, what about "the 'board' on which you array the information-product of the community ... " That sounded like a promising beginning. That's the only reason I read through all your digressions.

Oh, that. Well, I'm sure I was going to talk about the physical infrastructure of the information age, a hugely important gameboard for game theory that is new under the sun. You know, rant # 14-G.