This is the my LJ entry that I asked people to refer further responses to me about my ideas about science, magic, and what I call Natural Philosophy to, in order to take further discussion off the this thread in the MUtales board. Over here you can only annoy me, not Lexy. :^)

With all the "defense" of science, I am surprised that no one noticed that I made a mistake. Or, at least, no jumped on me for it.

If the phenomena you describe do not follow the Law of Large Numbers, then they are not random by the strict mathematical definition

That definition is based on the properties of our universe; it is tied in to the concept of entropy, which is a physical property of our universe.

I know that a few people may have the knowledge to come up with objections that last paragraph; believe me, I have answers for the most obvious objections, but I will not discuss them here because any of this science talk seems to catalyze problems here. Come to my livejournal and comment on the entry created for this very purpose [self-reference]. I will not reply to further comments objecting to the ideas in my comments of either this comment or the current comment [this phrase refers to the original context of the quoted text] here. [This phrase refers to the original context of the quoted text] I am requesting that further discussion of; at least, my; contemplation of the meaning Lexy's MUniverse's structural behaviors, be taken over here [self-reference].

If you do follow this discussion over there [self-reference], keep in mind that I use the disclaimer that I shamelessly copied from stormcaller3801; "... people here might actually think I know what I'm talking about. I'll have to try and disabuse them of that notion ..."; applies to anything I might say about the MUniverse.

I apologize, Lexy, if I had realized what effects my initial comment would catalyze, I would not have made that initial comment here. In referring people to my livejournal [self-reference], I am trying to at least avoid contributing further the the mess I was responsible for here.

WARNING: Rant Immediately Impending (You Have Been Warned)[Skip to Next Entry to Avoid]

I had a discussion in the last week with an NT who is basically sympathetic to me, and the problems even in that discussion show me quite clearly how my only option remains to become so technically adept that both I am do situation-dependent partial isolation of myself and the remaining problems that other people still do have with me are not serious enough to justify losing the benefits my technical adeptness brings -- The Einstein solution, one might call it. I hadn't even thought about until this point that moggymania has, in that respect, particularly, a much harder time of things than I do, despite a level of intelligence that is probably even a little higher than my own. In my specialization, physics / computer science / engineering, even the most mediocre of my colleagues can't argue with the actual data; my method produces better performance (or a better match between the theoretical results and actual measurements) by an objective standard that virtually of our colleagues fully agree upon. In a more liberal arts field, one can clearly (at least to anyone trying to take an intellectually honest look at one's work) have a great many good new insights and have one's colleagues simply deny that fact because they don't like one's manner of expression. Posthumous recognition doesn't put food on one's table or a roof over one's head.

(This paragraph is in answer two possible minor objections, feel free to skip it. One possible objection is to question whether the standard truly is completely, absolutely objective and subject to no interpretation at all; I and some of the best of my colleagues can consider the question, particularly at a merely theoretical level, but in practice my colleagues either believe that the standards in question are completely, absolutely objective or at least for the purposes of evaluating a colleague's work treat them as such. The other objection would be supported by pointing to ideas in quantum mechanics such as the Many-Worlds Hypothesis and hidden variable theories (which do indeed more resemble philosophical disagreements than actual science); to which I would reply that these are small parts of the whole field of study and that I can easily relegate these issues to the sidelines of my main work.)

My problem in the discussion was in explaining the problems I have as an AC in a way that ey could understand it and believe it. One of the big issues was the idea of indirect cues from facial expressions and posture; I had to refer em to the fact that I had actually taken (what I believe to have been a subset of the full test) a facial expression recognition test that was either published on the Internet or in a popular magazine article relating to autism and found that while I did quite well on simple "large" states; eg, happy, sad, enraged; I did little better than guessing as the states became more nuanced; eg, interested, annoyed. The disturbing thing is that 10 years ago, there would have been now test that ey would have regarded as objective for me to have taken, and that even in spite of my reporting of actual results, ey still seemed to believe that I could learn to do better than I am currently doing. Of course, ey would have no difficulty understanding that more practice is not going to increase a protanomalous person's color discrimination beyond a certain point that is determined by the physical aspects of that person's sensory system, yet this understanding is complicated by the fact that even I, who tests well within the normal range for color discrimination, know from experience that practice has in the past increased my performance, but I also know that beyond some point, only external hardware, such as a spectrometer will do.

However since the issue at hand deals with mental capacity, (for the ensuing discussion) I honestly don't believe that ey believes that I am working at anything close to capacity because of my demonstrated genius-level intelligence when it comes to mathematics, physics, engineering, and computer science. (Unfortunately, I'm not yet fully enough educated in those fields to turn my talent in to a salable skill; figuring out how to finish my education is quite a high priority.) Ey doesn't actually believe that following eir suggestion of waiting until I could be certain from the indirect cues that I was not boring (or other negative effect) people would result in me being quite thoroughly socially isolated. And people can always say that they aren't particularly interested in the subject I am speaking on, I don't get offended; I figure that I can go off and do something else besides talk to this specific person about the subject and they should be happier if I not boring them anymore; but I guess based on other empirical results, I shouldn't be surprised. The social isolation problem would be a result considering one false positive (deciding that they are interested when, in fact, they are not) worse than twenty or a hundred false negatives (deciding they are not interested and breaking off when, in fact, they really are).

But virtually all I can do is change the trade-off between the false negatives and false positives; I can't improve my detection. Maybe a thousand years from now the hardware I have attached to my brain for other reasons, which could give thousands of digits of pi in any base I want in less time than it takes me to add two 10-digit numbers today, could also analyze the sensory input of my eyes and use advanced algorithms to assign probabilities of emotion states for the faces involved and do this accurately enough in real-time that I could actually mimic the "sensitivity" of an NT, but it's not a presently available choice. Actually, I think given access to the same conclusions as an NT, I probably do better because I know the difference between 95% or even 99% and 100%, and I'm convinced than many NTs do read other NTs and even some ACs well, but shamelessly use that knowledge for their own ends, rather than trying to follow the dictum of "first, do no harm", counting on a version of plausible deniablity to save their own reputations.

The Stanley Milgram experiments prove that conservatively that approximately 65% of NTs would rather murder a virtual stranger than risk a "rude" confrontation with another virtual stranger, and yet the extremes to which NTs will go to obliterate even mildly annoying or even completely harmless, but strange AC traits is well-known in the AC community. (I, personally, have been quite fortunate in having an over-protective father when I was too young to protect myself, and now being able to make a good showing when I believe that it is truly necessary to NT judges and psychiatrists, and in living in a society that has set the official standards for invoking involuntary treatment quite high.) The response I wish I could make to the (extreme) aggressiveness of some NTs in attempting to eradicate any autistic traits in ACs when they have the power would reference a quote from the Bible (Matthew 7:3-5, Luke 6:41-42): {After referring the results of the experiments mentioned below} I think that the plank in your eyes should be of much greater concern to you than the specks in our eyes.

The results of the Stanley Milgram, Solomon Asch, and that of the "guards" in the Stanford prison experiment and that of the one I will describe next could be interpreted as people "looking out for number one"; ie, untempered self-interest; perhaps with the influence of a "bad apple" in the Zimbardo experiment. The experiment was done where the interview was to be done by intercom; the true experiment is that shortly after the experiment starts there is the sound of a heavy object falling and then agonized complaints from the interviewer about not being able to get her foot free. (Yes, "her" -- I guess the researchers thought that a female was more likely to induce a protective response, though I've seen no explanation.) When the subjects were led to believe that they were the only ones listening to her "circuit", the response was quick. When they were led to believe that even as few as three or four people were listening to her circuit and she was calling for responses one at a time from the subjects, most people would wait many minutes before responding, if responding within the 10 minutes allotted, at all. (Note, though she never explicitly asked for help in what was actually a recording, but individual subjects had no problem responding when they believed they were the only ones aware of the possible problem.) The idea: "Let someone else risk being the first to respond, I'm not going to subject myself to even the minuscule possibility of making a fool of myself"? Since none of the other (supposed) listeners responds either, the subject should be able to say when questioned about a lack of response, well they didn't either -- A diffusion of guilt you might say, without a corresponding diffusion of appearance of foolishness if they are the only one to respond to a false alarm.

This kind of almost aggressive intensity of self-interest is not something I find desirable to let go unchallenged by society at large, but is at least explicable. However, the explanation that NTs are a bunch of Machiavellian assholes; while, in fact, fairly close to my own interpretation of the previously mentioned experiments and others of a similar nature involving the effects of being one of many capable of helping another; turns out to be at the very least an over-simplification of the truth. This experiment involves another cover story; the written "personality test" is a cover. The true experiment involves a hidden smoke generator in a vent near the center of the room. When seated at a desk and chair at the corner of the room, most subjects who were alone responded within a minute of the smoke starting to emerge from the vent, only one took more than 3 minutes to respond, and no one remained in the room at the end of the 6 minutes allotted for the true experiment. Now, the experimental group consisted of groups of four individuals each placed at one corner of the room. Even when mild irritants were added to what already became thick block smoke if one waited too long, slightly less than half the groups had even one member that left the room even at the end of 6 minutes. When I finally read of this experiment, I realized that a major component of the problem is that most NTs won't even save their own asses against the mildest inferred social pressure.

When observed (I am unclear on whether this was done with "one-way" mirrors or hidden cameras), the situation of the people in groups was seen to be as follows: one person sees the smoke, no one else seems disturbed (because ey is the first to notice); ey goes back to work; a second person notices, no one, including the first person, seems disturbed; ey goes back to work; etc. In one sense, we are fortunate that the groups consist of actual subjects; we can actually see the process of how this failure can happen in real life. In another sense, we are unfortunate that 3 of the group members were not actually "shills" hired by the experimenter who were told of the experiment and told to act unconcerned because the individual failure rate of the individuals in groups must be inferred from the group failure rate.

Don't you mean 1 in 8? Well, the first problem is that multiple individuals who will respond independently will almost certainly be assigned to a least one group. So taking 1 in 6 as the chance of a individual responding independently when ey is in a group of 4, the odds look like this:

The decimals and percents do not add up to exact unity because of rounding, though, in fact, if the value for 4 is rounded to the same number of places as the rest, in this case, one does get unity. This table is based on standard statistical models of picking individuals who have a rate of a particular characteristic of 1 in 6 from a sufficiently large population and randomly placing them in groups of 4. Indeed, a set of four fair dice (or even one but you have to manually record four rolls in a row) and a lot of patience should sufficiently show the validity of this table. Before you start, choose a number -- it doesn't matter which -- and call it a responder. It will take several hundreds of sets to be sure of converging on at least a marginally correct long-term value for the zero row, and much longer to for convergence on the value of the last row and that one may be more sensitive to even slight biases in the dice.

However, not only does 1 in 6 result in slight less than half of the groups failing, where the real result was actually slightly more than half; which means that even from that analysis alone 1 in 6 is a slight over-estimate. (How much of one I can not actually determine since I do not remember the exact value of the failure rate, just being shocked that it actually even slightly exceeded one half.) The other complication is that one does not know if everyone who responded, actually responded independently. Perhaps in one group B actually was encouraged to respond by the fact that A was clearly fretfully nervous, where neither A nor B would have responded had they been in groups where everyone else acted unperturbed; any influence of this nature means that any calculation of the nature I have done would still result in an over-estimate of actual independent responders.

So apparently the at least slightly over five-sixths majority answer to the stereotypical mother's lament "If all your friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you do it too?" is "Yes, absolutely!" It's too easy to laugh at this, at times when one isn't crying in frustration at this. However, I will suggest is the strongest possible terms that NT organizations work on figuring out how to most effectively remove this plank from their own eyes; as I suspect that this work will occupy you for several centuries; perhaps we ACs won't have to worry so much about your aggressive attempts to remove a few specks from our eyes when we have repeatedly explicitly told you to let us deal with it in our own ways, and the few that do ask for your help; we can advise them against it, but I find that my libertarian ethics prevent me from suggesting that other ACs forcibly prevent them from seeking your help.

Is it any wonder that sometimes that I am misanthropic enough to wonder if combining the near-total social isolation idea mentioned above with seeking out AC individuals is not actually a bad idea.

One effect is that I am consciously trying to moderate a significant dose of; if not abuse-caused, abuse-amplified; shyness.

Another, that is quite significant right now, is the help I'm getting from mild to moderate hypomania. Even with severe hypomania, I prefer to have to deal with steering, and sometimes outright suppressing, the excess energy than trying to force action though major depression.

Though, I like some pointers to the problems with neuroleptics referred to here. The problem is that the last time I searched for information, I found references to them being misused to suppress protest from autistics. However even some of the OTC drugs I have taken without significant sedating effects usually do cause enough sedation at significantly higher doses than I would have even considered using that they could also be misused in similar ways. On the other hand, I have also seen references to neuroleptic malignant syndrome in the same sources that refer to the misuse mentioned above, but it was never actually claimed that autistics were more likely than the general population to experience it.

Since, apparently, the most common treatment for bipolar disorder is antidepressants and neuroleptics, I'd like to know the actual risks of the neuroleptics. What to look for or have my friends, doctors, etc look for. I have little personal fear of the misuse described above because even in my depressive and one near-manic state, I could still advocate for myself well enough to get a different treatment instituted.

Which is not to say that those who are calling attention to the misuse and trying to get something are not doing important work -- they are --, but my current personal concern has little to do with that.

Given my extended discussion in the previous entry. I thought that I should make a few comments about the "Theory of Mind" conjecture directly and the Sally and Ann Test.

However, as others have noted, if Ann has pulled off this stunt consistently too many times, Sally might decide to start by looking in Ann's box for her marble. Others have noted the possibility of Sally's forgetfulness, or hidden cameras, or even some undisclosed ability to detect the marble though the box. (If Sally sees into the infrared region of the spectrum and the boxes are made of certain types of plastic, she would see the marble as easily as I would though red transparent cellophane. In actual fact, if Sally suffers from a rare form of color-blindness, red cellophane would be as completely opaque to her as a black garbage bag is to me, even though one common demonstration of infrared cameras is seeing though a black garbage bag). Brain-damage could allow for some very interesting possible reactions; eg, hallucinating the marble floating 10 cm from her own face.

But let us suppose that the tested makes the hidden assumptions that one is supposed to make and the tester will actually accept a statement that the guess is probabilistic in nature. As best I can tell, the test requires one to correctly state that a person who reasons much as oneself will incorrectly give the location of the marble because one witnessed events that the other person did not, and that had one also not witnessed those events one would also give that very same incorrect answer.

In order to do that, one does have to understand that others have internal mind states that are not always immediately manifest. (Actually as a philosophical materialist I firmly believe that the mind states do have an actual physical manifestation, but I believe that the detection and interpretation of most changes are well beyond current technology, so the net effect is the same: the mind states can only be estimated by inference.) In order to make this cognitive leap one has to understand that others have mind states; so that not conceiving of others as having internal mental states would be sufficient to fail the test (or so I think), however it is clearly not necessary to fail the test. Knowing that others have internal mind states but being unable to predict the those mental states to a reasonable degree of accuracy, could also very easily cause the tested to fail the test.

First, if the "Theory of Mind" conjecture really is that ACs do not naturally not conceive of others as having internal mental states in the same way as NTs, then it did not apply to me; it was the accuracy of predicting those mental states that was the problem. (In fact, I applied what has been called the availability heuristic (though there is a fallacy of the same name which is not the same): the only mind I have direct experience of is my own, other people appear to react similarly enough that it is very probable that they have also have complex internal minds, therefore the best way to predict the reaction of other people is to imagine how I would react to the same situation having the same knowledge. This assumption caused me to ridiculously over-estimate the significance of logic to the average person.) One of the problems is that the "Theory of Mind" proponents often do not seem to be able or willing to unambiguously state their conjectures, which makes it difficult to evaluate their claims.

Secondly, a question I have is that is my analysis (boxed, if your browser supports CSS) supposed to be fundamentally different from a typical NT's. A highly-trained NT philosopher could if asked (perhaps by a questioner using or expected to use Socratic irony) could generate the logical structure I have above, but does it have any resemblance to eir actual reasoning. I can hardly imagine how it can not, but then again I find it almost inconceivable that none of the over 400 people tested by Stanley Milgram threatened him with with bodily harm if he did not permit them to go and release the "learner". (Remember, though not reported here, the learner was strapped to the chair to "prevent excessive movement" which might dislodge the electrodes.)

I've never seen anyone make this comment on the use of The Tale of Becky and the Plant Sprayer in support of the hypothesis (though, conjecture might be a more accurate description) of Theory of Mind; although, that may be simply because I haven't looked in the right place.

This story is used as evidence for the idea that ACs do not naturally conceive of others as having internal mental states, however Becky's own statement in and of itself stands in direct contradiction to that idea: "I thought [that] you thought [that] I was a plant!!" I have inserted (in brackets) the almost-universally elided (in speech) subordinating conjunctions for precision. If one who understands English grammar and vocabulary reads this statement, one realizes that Becky is describing a hypothesis she made (at the time of the events in question) about Carol's internal mental state.

Becky's particular hypothesis seems laughable to most of us; it would have even seemed so to me even as young as 8 years of age, but the problem is not that Becky did not conceive of others as having internal mental states, but rather her difficulty in determining those mental states to a reasonable degree of accuracy.

On the other had there that logic question I posed at the front, that most non-mathematically-trained people answer incorrectly.

Answer B is a subset of answer A; therefore A cannot be more likely than B. Logic alone cannot tell one that B is a proper subset of A rather than a potentially identical subset; It takes real-world knowledge to exclude or virtually exclude the second possibility, which would mean that all bank tellers meeting the introductory description are feminists without a single exception -- highly unlikely, though logically possible. But even in that remote case, B is not more likely that A, just equally likely, rather than less likely.

Therefore, the correct answer is A, rather than B. However, the majority of people will answer B. Only when one uses highly-mathematically-trained people as subjects will one find the majority of people answering correctly, and even then there is what I regard as still an unacceptably high rate of failure. And further testing showed that among non-mathematically-trained subjects, that a significant minority of them could not be convinced by a slight simplification [dropping mention of the possibility of identical subsets] of the logic I just used that B was incorrect.

Had someone asked me when I was 8 years of age, why adults of normal intelligence usually failed this test, the only answer I would have come up with is carelessness (possibly due to wanting to finish the series of test questions as quickly as possible). I still find it difficult to understand how someone of normal intelligence paying attention to what they were doing could fail to notice that one answer was a subset of the other.

#ifdef SARCASM

I guess that why my HFA is considered brain-damage rather than a variant which has advantages and disadvantages.

#endif /*SARCASM*/

EDITED:

I want to clarify the point of the extended discussion of the logic problem is that in spite of my better understanding of others than Becky, I still did not understand other people's mental capacities very well.

This entry of 2007 Jan 15, but not necessarily the responding comments attached is released under a Creative Commons: Attribution-NoDerivs license with the additional provision that this work becomes public domain at the start of 2032 or upon my death or cryonic suspension, whichever comes first.

While clauses to that effect included in the full version of the license, I explicitly permit the creation and distribution of either flat-ASCII version or versions using markup languages other HTML, but not translations of the English text.

EDITED:

Feel free to post this in relevant autism forums, but I request that you put a link to discussion by commenting here, if the forum is publicaly accessible or if public archives of the discussion exist.

eBay: Your One-Stop Shop for all Your Terrorist Supplies

While I know how this [eBay: Your One-Stop Shop for all Your Terrorist Supplies] happened, I still can't help wondering if the Department of "Homeland Security" would waste millions of dollars investigating eBay.

This quiz and its result was too cute to pass up.

I've known for some time that I didn't really think of myself as being fundamentally male or female.

You scored as Either. You brain is neither specifically male nor female dominated in the way you perceive things and as bad as this sounds it can easily mean that you are capable of combining both limiting gender aspects to your advantage. Rather than being genderless you are possibly able think freely. This does not nec. mean that you are bisexual or androgynous or indecisive, though it might. </td> Either 64% Neither 61% Male 46% Female 32% Should you be MALE or FEMALE?* created with QuizFarm.com

Given recent events and the fact that I am HFA, I'm finding this cartoon and Aeire's comment on it particularly appropriate. It's too bad that most NTs can't handle this level of directness very well in general.

I'm in my second semester of this attempt at college. I'm still only going part-time, though I'm near full-time this time. Last semester, I really only took one class; the other was a 1 hour "orientation" class that all students had to take at some time. I got A's in both classes. This time I took 3 classes, and I'm noticing some ADD-like scheduling issues. I'm hoping that my attempt to create a scheduling book will help. I'm not sure whether what I am experiencing is really ADD (I was diagnosed as "hyperactive" when I was quite young, though no one would have considered me such during the last 12 years; depression really drops energy.) or if I'm just having trouble because I've not been in college since spring of 1998. I've not worked for most of that time, either.

Last semester my greatest trouble was turning in the term paper 3 weeks late, actually the day before the grades were due to be turned in. The big problem in this case was a moderate case of writer's block. In fact, I got the paper done in about 12 hours the night before the last class of the semester. Oddly enough, I was told that it was a well-written paper and would have gotten an A on it, but late work in that class was downmarked 10 points or 1 letter grade. Ever since then (about 10 days before Christmas), I have been writing I lot of material that I have been thinking on for a long time. I suppose that that is a small part of my problem; my tendency to perseverate on the ideas that are filling my personal writing projects.

Another aspect is that I now don't believe that I have been free of depression for at least 7 years now; it had slackened, and I thought at the time that it was coming to an end, but now I finally feel like I did some many years ago. This upswing started after I started college again last (2005) fall, but the real jump occurred at the end of this semester, I don't doubt that the fact of success was a significant factor in the timing. Having a paper that was essentially at the first draft stage called a well-written paper made quite an impact; it certainly helped kill the writer's block that I had been experiencing, in varying degrees, for at least 9 years. I've described my feelings/ behavior as "almost manic", but I don't really believe that description; it just been so long since I have been non-depressed and energetic that the contrast is so striking to me that it feels slightly abnormal. If I can learn how to steer the energy a bit better, I should be fine.

By the way despite my borrowed icon, I'm not a flapper, but I am spinner. And I have been spinning quite a bit lately.

If you want my email address, you can ask for it here. Include a email address you want it sent to.Though I may not give it to you for any number of reasons. One reason, I will give is that I won't give it to you if I don't recognize you.

If there is someone on your friends list who makes your world a better place just because they exist and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

I'll probably be a poor vector of this meme, because I don't know if even the person I got it from reads my journal; she has lots of people in her friends list.

I am hoping to move quite a ways from my current location, but California is not my top choice of places to move; though if I did decide to move to California, there is a good chance that I would have ended up in the San Francisco area even without knowledge of Moggy, though how likely it is that we would have meet even if I had ended up near there in the alternate timeline without the internet.

I was going to call the Telephone Time-of-Day Service, and record the leap second. I was all set up, too, even testing my setup a couple of hours early to make sure that the recording was loud enough and sufficiently clear. Well, when I tried to call just before the leap second I got a busy signal, and each time I tried I got one. I didn't get through until several minutes after the leap second.

However I did notice some interesting things. One was the change in the DUT1/ UT1 correction as encoded by the double ticks; it went from -0.6s to +0.3s! Normally, at a leap second the DUT1 increases by 1.0s. But IERS also occasionally issues change notifications that change the DUT by 0.1s. Since I have confirmed that the numbers are correct, they must have decided to make that 0.1s correction at the same time as the leap second.

Also, I noticed that my WWVB radio-controlled clock did not include a 18:59:60 time, and was off by one second after the leap second. I proved the second by hitting the recalibrate button, and when it recalibrated it changed the time by one second.

So, I can be at least somewhat happy that I was able to observe some indirect evidence of this leap second.

Who knows when I'll have another chance at this? They used to come fairly often, but the last one was 7 years ago (1998), and it may never occur again.

I chose "phoenix" as a login name a number of years ago. Given that my life was going badly at that time, I liked the symbolism that one writer described as "the new being reborn out of the ashes of the old".

Unfortunately on many larger systems, I found that "phoenix" was already taken. I am also an on-again, off-again Lojbanist -- mostly off-again lately. In Lojban "fagri" means fire and "cipni" means bird. So "fagri cipni" is a tanru meaning "fire-bird". Since spaces are generally unnecessary in Lojban and many systems don't like spaces in login names "fagricipni" became the logical choice.

Pronunciation

For English-speakers, the pronunciation would best be "FAH-gree SHEEP-nee". Though the space would often be converted to another syllable break. Yes, the sounds of some of the letters in Lojban are not the same as in English.

EDIT: Edit of 2006 Feb 10 primarily adds non-visible HTML markup, but there is one spelling correction.