Tag Archives: town hall

Arts & Entertainment, Literature, Music

For That Night, Town Hall Belonged To John Hodgman & Friends

I had never seen John Hodgman live before Monday night, so going into his reading at Town Hall, I didn’t really know what to expect. On one hand, a book reading is a book reading is a book reading, right? Ha! I may have been naive about a Hodgman reading, but my naivete was repaid with music, comedy, and finally: a reading.

John Hodgman is very fond of theatrics. (I know, I know, that’s like saying the sun is fond of Denver.) His opening gambit had Sean Nelson (formerly of Harvey Danger) playing the part of John Hodgman, with John Roderick (The Long Winters) on stage as well, guitar at the ready. Suddenly, from the audience: a ruckus! Some random audience member was hollering for Hodgman, the real Hodgman, to get out on stage, already.

So Hodgman appears, and it becomes clear that this is not a random audience member (you probably already knew that)–it’s They Might Be Giants’ John Flansburgh! At some point, Jonathan Coulton also appeared with a guitar. It was madness! (If you’re keeping track at home, that’s one (1) Sean, one (1) Jonathan, and three (3) Johns.) The bit ended with the audience feeling sorry for everyone except Hodgman, who proceeded to sit down, take off his shoes and socks, and do the rest of the show barefoot.

Even though he had antagonized his collaborators and tried to pull one over on us, we were all ready for anything, eager to laugh and participate and pick up on his obscure (or not so obscure) references (Leon Redbone, Dr. Who, Wilford Brimley, Chekhov, Michele Bachmann, etc.). Some of us were too eager to participate; with a consummate performer’s slight egotism, he reminded one man in the crowd of something Paul F. Tompkins said: “This is still a comedy show, and this is still a monologue.”

In other ways, though, participation was the theme that night. Perhaps it would be better to say collaboration; the men on stage were there to enhance the comedy, the reading, and the man himself. And without an audience who understood him, the show would’ve fallen flat. We were putty–I think a large percentage of the audience would’ve done anything he told us to. After hearing a random “whoo-hoo!” in response to the date, Hodgman made the noisemaker (a teenage boy) stand up and come forward, so we could all see this eager November 7, 2011, enthusiast. He called those who booed his recent 40th birthday “grim” for booing his mortality.

He finally got around to reading from his latest book, That Is All, which was the ostensible reason for the event. He read sections on Sports and Magic, which I would try to sum up for you, but really you should just buy the book. Or check it out of the library. Any summary I could give you would not do the book justice. (I can’t resist mentioning my favorite part, by far, which was when he started talking about elemental hockey. Ice hockey, air hockey, etc., and the Table of Elemental Hockies. [Also, his summation of soccer: they kick the thing in the thing until they’re so bored they fight.])

After comedy hour, we were treated to some music. First, Roderick and Coulton sang and played a song about mortal enemies, called “Nemesis.” Then John Flansburgh sang us a song, a capella, that he had seemingly just made up, about a night custodian. Sean Nelson sat down at the piano and gave us a medley of “Every Day is Like Sunday,” “Baba O’Riley,” and “We Will Become Silhouettes.”

After even more comedy and a reading of Hodgman’s first script for his reality TV show (where people are kidnapped and forced to compete in a competitive hoarding show), for which he pulled local celebrity Ken Jennings out of the audience, the whole crew (John, John, John, Jonathan and Sean) sang “Tonight, You Belong to Me” with Hodgman on ukelele. A fitting end for a show in which we did, indeed, belong to him.

News, Science

Daniel Kahneman on Intuition and the Limits of Self-Help

Daniel Kahneman

“I’m very pessimistic about self-help,” said Nobel-winning behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman to a questioner at Seattle’s Town Hall last week. He’d been delivering a talk on “fast and slow thinking,” which contrasted the non-conscious pattern recognition of intuition with the more laborious process of reasoning.

The questioner wanted some tips on how to circumvent flawed intuitive leaps, but Kahneman’s position was that, if he himself is any model, knowing about intuition’s shortcomings doesn’t grant you any special ability to turn it on and off. (I would add that depending on how intently you approach Buddhist practice, your mileage may vary, if not in precluding the intuitive leap, then at least in reflecting before acting upon it. But this requires you to work through several meditation cushions.)

Well, what is the problem with intuition, anyway? In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman lays out the ways in which intuition’s pattern recognition is immensely capable–at the talk he referenced a few “miraculous” cases where a non-conscious expertise, gained from repeated experience, allowed quick thinking to save the day.

A medical professional, for instance, see subtle signs of a heart-attack coming before it hits and calls for an ambulance. A firefighter’s hot feet tell him to clear the room before he can explain why he’s alarmed.

“I hope I have made it clear,” Kahneman added later, “that there is nothing magical about this.” (Magic, he added, is the pernicious belief that the universe is ultimately knowable, can be “clearly seen.”) It’s just that we perceive, and associatively link, much more than we’re ever aware of. Over time, repeated linkages gain in relevance, to use search terminology, still without our being cognizant of it. But our ability to form hunches that pay off becomes stronger and stronger.

The best question you can ask of your intuition about something is whether the environment is regular enough to have taught you this lesson–“Quite often it just isn’t.”

The classic case is your stock market hunch. The market’s behavior is incredibly complex, defeating supercomputer attempts to find regular behaviors over its recorded history, let alone you, with your lifespan-limited range of experiences. (Now, of course, the trading market is in its way self-aware, knowing within milliseconds of moves large and small, and displaying exactly the kind of frightening reactivity that we are prone to as well.)

Part of the urge to hack our intuition comes from how we conceptualize it. To allow an audience to grasp the dynamic easily, Kahneman laid out System 1 (intuition) and System 2 (reasoning). It’s a “psychodrama with two fictitious characters.” System 1 is always “whispering” hints to System 2, and System 2, being lazy, prefers simply to endorse System 1’s input most of the time, and generate some bullshit explanation after the fact, if pressed.

When Kahneman surprised everyone with a slide that said simply “banana vomit,” he pointed out that in addition to experiencing a measurable physiological reaction of disgust simply to seeing the word “vomit,” that we also likely made up a story about bad bananas on the spot to explain the two works appearing next to each other. (Fun fact: When you make people appear to smile by asking them to place a pencil between their teeth, they find cartoons funnier.)

One problem is that creating some patterns excludes other patterns, in the same way that you can’t see the vase and face simultaneously. System 1 suppresses what doesn’t fit the pattern it’s settled on, and so you’re never aware of that missing, conflicting data. Interestingly, not only is intuition on autopilot, but so seems to be our response to it; we respond to people with gut feelings. We glare in exasperation as Spock weighs pros and cons.

Intuition isn’t about accuracy so much as it is about taking action. Sure, we work from terribly small sample sizes, but on the other hand, we have only to see the tiger jump out of the bushes that one time to jump into the next county the next time we hear rustling there. To promote action, rather than lengthy debate, gut-based hunches come with a healthy heaping of self-confidence and a sense of impenetrable coherence.

It’s a little like William James‘s hypothesis that emotion is based on physiological response, rather than the reverse. The hair on the back of our neck goes up, and we describe a feeling of fear. Forming a judgment results in a feeling of confidence in it. We say we have “settled” on something, and in actual fact, we resist being moved off that position. Further details, especially if they don’t easily fit within our schema, are rejected so that we can continue to enjoy the way everything fits so neatly together.

When faced with a truly difficult problem, Kahneman said, intuition will try to answer an easier one instead. In the Israeli Army, he was tasked with testing candidates for officer training school, and had to report on whether candidates displayed leadership qualities in a stressful problem-solving situation. When the results were in, “our predictions were worthless,” he recounted. They were using one-time, situation-specific performance as a proxy for leadership skills, without having proven there was a strong correlation between the two.

(Equally, we are prone to making after-the-fact predictions. “I knew that was going to happen,” we will exclaim, when what we mean is that it was among the outcomes we had entertained. Thinking something will happen and seeing it happen is not a prediction; that’s chance. Even explaining why something has to happen, and watching that exact thing happen is a question of percentages, as Nassim Taleb will demonstrate for you.)

While intuition is flawed, there’s not much easily to be done about it. Remember that the “systems” are fictitious–in reality the same brain’s function generates both. Trying to “correct” intuition’s real-time performance could affect brain function in a way that would change the performance of System 2. Besides, intuition is very good at getting us through our day without having to reason our way past every bit of news we encounter.

Kahneman suggested that we really only need to revisit the most significant decisions, and check for evidence of systematic bias. Because we are the biased system, in most cases, self-help isn’t help at all. You get more mileage from asking other people, whom you haven’t screened to share your biases, what they think of your decision.

“Let other people correct you,” advised Kahneman, knowing that is exactly what many people are least fond of. But as proof of the soundness of his advice, he pointed out how much better he was at detecting when other people were making mistakes, than when he was.

For more on this subject, Kahneman suggests you read Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works, watch Moneyball on the confrontation between scouts and statistics, and, of course, read Thinking, Fast and Slow.

News, Science

Lisa Randall to Explain Higgs Quantum Thingie to Town Hall Audience

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Lisa Randall

Because this is Seattle, tomorrow night, Wednesday, October 12, hundreds and hundreds of people will crowd into the Great Hall at Town Hall to hear Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall talk about the Large Hadron Collider, dark matter and energy, and supersymmetry.

They’ll be paying $5 for what is essentially a stop on a book promotion tour–Randall’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door has just come out. But privately, I suspect, they’ll be hoping that, perhaps quantum mechanically, some of Randall’s smarts will leak out and up their IQ.

For those of you wondering what the Large Hadron Collider has been up to recently, this is can’t-miss stuff, and by that I mean both Randall’s talk and her new book. Knocking on Heaven’s Door is, at 417 pages of science narrative (excluding end notes and such), going to cover much more ground than Randall can in her talk. (Which should go something like this.) Also, Knocking on Heaven’s Door contains this XKCD comic on string theory. Very hip.

Part of the reason that KOHD is 417 pages is because Randall, quixotically, has decided to explain how science works for the benefit of anyone near the back. In her first chapter, she lays the groundwork with the question of scales (confusion arising from the misapplication of scale is at the heart of a lot of New Age woo regarding thinking quantum mechanically). Newton’s physics, for instance, aren’t wrong so much as limited in the scales at which it can be applied. But many other theories are wrong, in whatever scale you care to choose to test them in.

In Chapter Two, you get a lot of Galileo. Chapter Three concludes: “The religious part of your brain cannot act at the same time as the scientific one. They are simply incompatible.” Another three chapters whiz by as Randall dives deeper into the world of very, very tiny particles, and introduces you to the Higgs mechanism, which is the original How the Leopard Got His Spots tale, except in this case the Leopard is particles and the Spots are mass.

The idea–whatever we call it–is that a phase transition (perhaps like the phase transition of liquid water bubbling into gaseous steam) took place that actually changed the nature of the universe. Whereas early on, particles had no mass and zipped around at the speed of light, later on–after this phase transition involving the so-called Higgs field–particles had masses and traveled more slowly.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will no doubt produce a lot of evidence, but one thing in particular that theoretical types have predicted is the existence of a Higgs boson, which would follow from there being a Higgs field. It may also tell us why the masses particles do have are much less than is theoretically predicted by quantum mechanics.

Randall takes you inside the LHC, both literally and figuratively, discussing the political machinations behind its construction and giving a history of particle collision, and in the process explaining why the LHC is so powerful that some people (again, a little misunderstanding of scale) were under the impression that it might create a black hole that would swallow all life as we know it. In fact, it may well create a black hole, or a whole fleet of them, but they wouldn’t manage to swallow a gnat because they would be very, very tiny.

The thing to worry about with the LHC is that it uses enough electricity to power a small city and when things go wrong, it gets very expensive in short order.

Somewhere around page 250 the micro-particle going gets difficult to take seriously. A sample illustration caption reads, in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion: “The W boson can decay into a charged lepton and its associated neutrino, or into an up and down quark, or a charm and strange quark.” You’ll soon meet Murray Gell-Mann, and nothing will ever seem certain, or clear, again.

On page 285, deep in an explanation of the Higgs mechanism and boson, Randall writes, deadpan, “This was a difficult section with several abstract concepts,” and then she summarizes, briefly, all the stuff you didn’t grasp at length. When, a few pages later, she asks you to recall that “taus are the heaviest of the three types of charged leptons and are the heaviest particles aside from bottom quarks that a Higgs boson can decay into,” you may simply smile agreeably and hope it won’t be on the test.

Chapter Seventeen moves on from the LHC, to what’s next: supersymmetry, dark matter, and extra dimensions. Supersymmetry is an attempt to solve that discrepancy in the masses that particles have (observed vs. predicted), by inventing a whole new set of symmetrical particles. String theory, in contrast, suggests that open strings are “anchored to a brane.” If there are different branes “out there,” gravity could exist on another one, and this would help explain its relative weakness, compared to other forces.

And then there’s dark energy and dark matter. Google it. Randall’s concern here is to explain how we might be able to find evidence of these mysterious things, which ought to be there, but don’t seem to interact with other energy and matter in ways that we can so far detect. Interactions could be rare, or hard to see, or both.

For the layperson, paradoxically perhaps, Randall’s attempt to elucidate what exactly scientists are up to in particle physics and cosmology could have the effect of emphasizing the inscrutability of what the eggheads are up to in their dark caverns underground. KOHD feels much like the kind of book that people buy to display bona fides via bookshelf, with a subset actually cracking it open, and a subset of them actually finishing that Higgs bestiary.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

What’s Better Than Seven Cellos? Eight Cellos

If you’ve never before heard a host of cellos playing together, you’d be astonished at the thrill of the sound, so rich and reverberant, so exciting. Such was my first reaction to the sound of six cellos playing a movement from a Vivaldi concerto for two cellos with four others taking the roles of violins, viola, and accompanying cello.  Downstairs at Town Hall on Friday night, it was the opening work on a program for eight cellos and one soprano presented by Simple Measures.

This lively organization, the brainchild of cellist Rajan Krishnaswami and now in its seventh year, aims to make classical music accessible, unalarming, and fun for all sorts of people including children, whether they know much about the genre or not. He gathers small groups of excellent musicians, performs with them wearing casual dress in unusual music venues like Mt. Baker Community Club or Q Café, and talks with the audience, not lecturing but having a discussion about the music. Usually the first half is short pieces or single movements which may relate to each other, and the second half is a full-length work.

Friday’s cello grouping is uncommon. It may have been that which drew the biggest audience Simple Measures has ever had, judging by the show of hands of cello-lovers in the hall, or maybe the centrality and space of the venue and ease of parking, or maybe because of the program’s big draw, the Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 of Brazilian composer Villa-Lobos. Composed for eight cellos and a soprano, we rarely get a chance to hear this extraordinary work live, particularly with, as here, accomplished professional musicians and an equally accomplished singer.
It was the culminating highlight of a fun concert. The programming had been put together with a deft hand, and the musical points were mentioned lightly in introductions as chairs were rearranged.

The first half included a Gigue from one of the Bach Cello Suites, paired with a Toccata from a George Crumb sonata for solo cello, showing the three-century differences but also Crumb’s debt to Bach, plus a lively movement from a sonata for two cellos by the 18th century-cello virtuoso Boccherini, a delightful Bacchanalia supposedly by Chopin and arranged for three cellos, and a mystery work which was instantly recognizable to the audience who loved it, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” despite an overlong and somewhat dull performance.

The most arresting works came as the concert continued, with Golijov’s Lua Descolorida for soprano and string quartet played as written by four cellos, a fine arrangement of Faure’s Pavane for four instruments by cellist Chuck Jacot, and Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1, composed for a cello orchestra and here played with eight, preceding the final tour de force.

The Pavane made an excellent choice for arrangement, with cello sonorities blooming in this stately work, and Villa-Lobos created in his first Bachianas Brasileiras a work poetical, declamatory and fast. Best of all were the two works with soprano Terri Richter, a past Seattle Opera Young Artist whose voice has developed to a warm purity perfect for this kind of music.

The Golijov, described enigmatically by the composer as “a slow motion ride on a cosmic horse” opens with long melismatic phrases in the voice, with the vocal line then remaining separate from a slow, gently moving, harmonic accompaniment. It’s one of those works where exact pitch sense is crucial, and Richter achieved it effortlessly, her whole range to the highest notes easy and clear and almost without vibrato as is needed here.

Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 is deservedly famous for the beautiful antigenicantilena with which it starts over soft, plucked strings, and then for the fast rhythmic second half with its imitations of bird song, if you listen carefully.

It was a treat to hear this live in a well rehearsed, satisfying performance with the right type of voice. Kudos go not only to Richter, a perfect choice for this, but to the eight cellists: Krishnaswami himself, Theresa Benshoof, Roberta Hansen Downey, Virginia Dziekonski, Eric Gaenslen, Chuck Jacot, Page Smith, and Brian Wharton. By the looks of it, they were enjoying themselves as much as the audience.