Overdoing it

OK, so recently I've been looking for a job (God hel^W^W Allah sav^W^W somebody stop me!). This has been scary - it'll be my first job since graduating.

One company I've applied to is an actuarial-type firm, although they seem a bit less straight-laced than most. In particular, they obviously like to feel they're giving their applicants a challenge, an attitude that resulted in me getting this request in my inbox:

In order to progress to the next stage we need to be impressed. In ANY medium of your choice, using no more than 100 words, please convince us why you should be selected for the {company name} Graduate scheme? (Please note that no further guidance will be provided).

This is not a request you make of Lifewish if you value your sanity. I am the master of overkill.

First, the 100 words. Any medium, hmm? How about Haiku? Ten stanzas of haiku, to be precise, detailing all the excellent qualities I have to offer.

Of course, it'll be a few minutes before they figure out it's in Haiku. I locked it with a challenge. The job application process should be as much about the company as the applicant.

And for the challenge? Well, what could be a better continuation of the Japanese theme than a Sudoku problem? Which I generated using code I wrote from scratch. It's got the company initials picked out in numbers in it.

Of course, I couldn't have people peeking at the answer, so I encrypted my 100 words with a Vigenere-style cipher, using the Sudoku board as its key. That'll teach 'em to ask for experience of VBA and Excel.

Some people claim I overreact to challenges. I don't see it, myself.
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The Task Ahead

And the Protein Challenge is underway! But of course, before I can start delving into the literature there's some stuff we need to get out of the way first. Namely: what are we actually trying to test?

Why so uptight?

The reason I think it's important to scope this challenge out in detail beforehand can be expressed in two words: goalpost shifting. Now, Paul is very good on this front compared to the vast majority of online debaters, but even he has his moments, and I'm sure I do too. Scoping everything out in advance means that neither of us can get confused (accidentally or otherwise) about what we were setting out to demonstrate. As I know from long hours of arguing with my sister, this can save much acrimony in later life.

The proof of the pudding

What is it we're setting out to achieve? The goal of this challenge is to answer the concerns Paul expressed in the following comment:

"When a protein emerges ... it will tend to improve its performance towards its local maximum." I am happy with this in some contexts - where there is strong selection. But I would like to see this at least demonstrated in representative computer models before I would accept that this works in nature.

This challenge (there may be others) is therefore specifically addressed at seeing whether evolutionary processes can efficiently optimise the functionality of a protein. This is not going to be easy - the production of proteins from DNA sequences is not terribly easy to compute, and the effect of those proteins even less so. As such, we'll need to break the problem down a bit (see later).

The groundrules

1) This challenge will only be considering the protein-space of one protein task. This could be, for example, the ability to catalyse a given reaction. Selection of the task will be contingent on the ability to find both a number of different proteins in the task's protein-space and a means of determining success at the task. This challenge will not consider:
a) the ability of organisms' genomes to find the protein-space in the first place
b) the origins of the genome itself
c) [more negatives will be added here as necessary]

2) This challenge will proceed using only biologically-realistic information:
a) All minor properties of the GA will be accompanied with journal or textbook references supporting their acceptability
b) The model used for determining the efficacy of proteins will be tested for accuracy before use. If it's not accurate, I'll go back to the drawing board and pick a more accurate but harder option.

3) On completion, the resulting GA will be initialised with a population of proteins that are distinctly suboptimal at their task

4) The party whose conclusions were not supported by the program's results will (if they so wish) have two weeks to pinpoint any unrealistic components, citing academic papers where appropriate. If any are found, the GA will be changed as necessary and rerun. The loser this time round will have only one week to point to inaccuracies.

The breakdown

I've already discussed the primary division between setting up the fitness function and incorporating it into a GA. The hard part here is the first bit, which I see as breaking down into three essential components:

1) Figuring out what a given protein's physical properties (shape, configuration, charge distribution) are

2) Figuring out how they'll perform with respect to the protein-space's assigned task

3) Figuring out what effect that'll have on the whole organism

That effect (fitness) can then be used to determine each organism's survival chances, as is necessary for the GA to function.

Once I've done that I'll go into more detail on the creation of the GA.

Isn't this overkill?

Yes, and quite horribly so given that all Paul wanted was a demonstration that this stuff was possible. The reason I'm going so overboard on this is because I have every intention of using the code I produce here for other stuff in future (there will be other challenges to answer other questions, such as the ease with which the various protein-spaces can be located). I'd also like the demonstration to be as conclusive as possible, of course.
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The Protein Challenge

Index of posts relating to this challenge, and list of tasks necessary for its completion.

Background material

Introduction

Open Mouth, Insert Money #2

Challenge Specs

The Task Ahead

Fitness evaluation

Genotype->phenotype

Phenotype->efficacy

Efficacy->fitness

Genetic algorithm

Realistic behaviour

Results

Conclusions
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Open mouth, insert money #2

I've been cutting back my online debating recently in favour of doing some actual learning wrt computational biology. However, one culture-wars blog I have kept visiting is Exile From Groggs, which is the most sane ID blog I've found to date.

In particular, it's occasionally possible to convince Paul (the blog owner) of something, given sufficient effort. This makes him practically unique in the world of blogging, let alone the ID community's segment thereof. And it's on this note I wish to speak.

I recently spent some effort trying to figure out exactly which parts of evolutionary theory it was that Paul had a problem with. One of the issues that came up was that, whilst he was broadly convinced that genetic algorithms such as real-world evolution could optimise very simple systems, he wasn't sure how they'd handle something as complicated as proteins, where the search spaces can be Bad And Wrong. The challenge was laid down and accepted: demonstrate that evolutionary algorithms could work in the context of proteins.

This challenge actually has two major components. Firstly, I need to determine a sequence->fitness mapping for a given selection of proteins. Secondly, I need to implement an algorithm using both this and biologically-realistic reproduction&mutation to simulate the real-world evolutionary optimisation of the protein within a given protein-space*. The first part is by far the more difficult.

I threw out a bunch of suggestions as to how this could be computationally modelled (rather than having to produce every single possible protein variant in the lab), and the option that seems to have been settled on is:

I work backwards by looking at an existing protein family, comparing the efficacy of the various proteins, and assuming that everything similar to one of these is also effective. I use some kind of sequence-based active-site-detecting process to fine-tune our guesstimate of the effectiveness of the similar proteins

In bioinformatics, this sort of thing can be worked through quite easily, but it's all too simple to produce hideously wrong answers. In particular, in this case it'll be fairly easy to determine which proteins will work well - the challenge will be avoiding false negatives.

More after the break.

* Syntactic note: we've been referring to the space of protein sequences that perform acceptably at a given task as the protein-space of that task. If we talk about the protein-space of a protein, we're talking about all the proteins that accomplish one of the same tasks as that protein in roughly the same fashion as that protein. This does not include wildly different proteins that happen to perform the same task; we're concerned primarily with families of similar proteins.
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ID's hard evidence

(AKA: Stoner Logic 101)

In response to this article in the York Daily Record, and to this thread on a blog I frequent, I feel I've finally gotten to grips with the evidence behind ID. I feel it can best be summarised by the following dialogue:

"Wow, dude, look at this flagellum thingy. That is soooo cool, man"

"Dude, what if... like... what if all these cool things were made by some Big Reefer in the sky? Cos, y'know, if I was a Big Reefer, that's the sort of thing I'd make..."

"Woah, duuuuude!"

There we have it, the conclusive disproof of evolutionary theory. I expect to win Nobel prizes for this day's work.

Needless to say, however, I have some doubts about the Quality of this argument.
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Poor quality in action: Let's have a festival!

There's currently a very loud festival going on in the field that's two streets over from me. Incredibly noisy drum music, lots of whistles and stuff. I remember that last year, when I was living in a room looking out onto the festival, the thumping made dust come down my chimney in spurts.

Which would all be well and good, and I'd be out there partying with the rest of them, if they hadn't scheduled it all right in the middle of exam season. It's two days til my exams start and there's no way I'll be able to focus. I'll be lucky if I get any sleep tonight - they play til late iirc. The short conclusion is that their timing lacks quality.

The long conclusion is unprintable.

Update: I originally thought that the drum noise was being amplified by concert-sized speakers. Turns out that they have about 40 drums and people are parading around banging them.
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Woah, dude!

The attentive reader may have noted that, when I was muttering about the reality-based community, I dropped some fairly heavy hints that membership of the RBC was not the only, or even necessarily the best, way to run one's life. That ties in with the rather incoherent post about just getting on with it.

I think I've actually managed to figure out how to turn the get-up-and-go attitude on and off at will. It's really weird - I get roughly the same sensation as when I'm riding the tail end of an all-night work session. Imagination stops. Distractions cease to distract. I no longer have a strong urge to read, blog or laze about.

What's slightly worrying me is that this attitude doesn't feel particularly contrived - I'm not acting it out, I'm just changing into a pre-existing gear. That opens up the rather worrying possibility that, if I get too used to this new mode, I'll get stuck like that. Which would rather suck.

I always laugh when I see cartoons about people smoking weed and going into obscure speculation about the nature of mind. I guess I just find it strange that some people need drugs for that...
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Faith vs. Reality

When I was younger, I spent about 7 years attending a weekly Christian youth club. They were wonderful people, and I spent many happy hours discussing theology with them. One thing that I never really got, though, was their reliance on faith.

Faith (heretofore defined as belief in the absence of evidence) is a very odd thing. When applied to many situations, most people would agree that it is synonymous with stupidity - for example, having faith that you can jump off a skyscraper and survive is not terribly sensible. And yet a vast number of people use it to justify strongly-held beliefs. Where's the borderline between situations where faith is and isn't acceptable, and how is that borderline justified?

My belief is that no such borderline is justified. I have never seen any situation where faith has resulted in a more accurate understanding of reality. Holy books do not generally tell us any confirmable facts about the universe that we didn't already know. They don't make any testable predictions that we couldn't already propose. Faith, when applied to understanding the universe, is completely useless.

So why do people have so much respect for faith? One way or another, I think it's an intellectual cop-out. In its simplest form, it acts as an excuse for not thinking much about the universe. It allows an individual to opt out of the reality-based community with a clear conscience. It means they don't have to waste time that could be better used advancing their position in life. The reality-based community is seriously under-represented amongst the CEOs of major corporations, and I strongly suspect that this is why.

A slightly more complex variant arises from intuitive perceptions of the universe. For example, in this article in the Observer, Richard Harries argues that:

However, religious belief is a matter of considered judgment. It involves our aesthetic sense, our moral judgment, our imagination and our intuition. In this respect, it is not totally different from making a judgment, for example, that Beckett is a great playwright, the war against Iraq was wrong or the sheer existence of the universe is awesome.

It's possible for an idea to Just Feel Right to someone. They can't justify it, but they "know" it's true - so they call upon faith to spring the trap of rationality they find themselves caught in. Faith allows them to treat objective questions ("does God exist?") as if they were subjective questions ("was Beckett a great playwright?"). Faith claims that their intuitive feelings constitute a valid argument. The problem with this, of course, is that intuitive beliefs about the universe have a regrettable tendency to be horribly inaccurate, to the point that overcoming these intuitions is an essential part of joining the reality-based community. As a rule, "self-evident truths" generally aren't.

Of course, faith of this sort has trouble surviving in a critical environment. Any scientist claiming to hold to a scientifically-testable belief on the basis of faith can and will be laughed at. There's a definite social component to faith, and I suspect that it is often provided by those whom faith does benefit - the hucksters and frauds. Religion will never die out whilst there's good money to be made exploiting those who adhere to it. The demagogues, the televangelists, the politicians who are miraculously born again just when their popularity needs a boost - all these, and the honest people they dupe, contribute to an atmosphere where criticism of faith is considered unacceptable. The same goes for other snake-oil salesmen - the psychics, the Qabbalists, the sellers of "alternative therapies".

As many of the crazier religious folk would claim, there is indeed something of an underground war going on. In the red corner, we have the scientists, the skeptics, the folk who insist on hard evidence before they'll believe. In the blue corner, we have the fundamentalists, the quacks, the preachers and the innocent folks who believe them. The former group has by far the best credibility; the latter group has by far the most convincing rhetoric. Who will win? That remains to be seen.

[Reality Check Disclaimer: This post is a rather speculative rhetorical piece, and as such may not be accurate. If you feel that any of the arguments or conclusions presented are incorrect or insufficiently justified, please call me on it]
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Putting my money where my mouth is

In the last post, I waxed eloquently about the value of a reality-based approach to the world. As I mentioned, a key part of this is testing one's understanding against the facts and the alternative hypotheses to the greatest extent possible. That's where this thread comes in.

If you have seen me make any statement that you disagree with, and you think your position is better backed up by facts and logic than mine, this is the thread for you. Tear down my views and/or build up your own, and show no mercy. If I feel you have a more watertight case than me, I'll publically concede. If you manage to overturn one of my more fundamental precepts, for example my atheism, I'll send you a bottle of Scotch (P&P charges permitting).

Additionally, feel free to insist that I provide support for any position that you feel I haven't fully justified. Be as inquisitorial as you like!

All this can be considered to be a standing offer - it's in no way limited to this thread - but having as much of the discussion in one place as possible can't hurt.
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The reality-based community

There is an ideal. It claims that a vital prerequisite of a high-Quality life is an accurate understanding of how the universe works. Recently I've taken to referring to this ideal's adherents as the reality-based community.

This is not the same as the scientific community - it's possible to be a member of the RBC without being a scientist, and it's possible for a scientist to have non-reality-based beliefs. Nor is it the same as atheism - atheists can be dogmatic too - although at the present time I'd say that atheism is a necessary condition for membership (but I'm an atheist myself so I would say that...). It's not quite the same as scepticism - unjustified scepticism is not reality-based. However, it can reasonably be considered to be the motivation for all of these behaviours.

The heart of this ideal is a willingness to admit when you're wrong coupled with an active drive to make sure that your inaccuracies get exposed as quickly as possible. It's about seeking out alternative hypotheses and analysing them on their own merits. It's about not rejecting ideas just because they conflict with your understanding of the world. It's also about ditching ideas the moment you find yourself unable to support them, in an appropriately public manner, no matter how attracted to them you are. It's about truth, often at the expense of beauty.

As the origins of the phrase suggest, this viewpoint has its weaknesses. Members of the reality-based community, dedicated as they are to building an accurate understanding of the universe, may have comparatively less drive to achieve. They will generally have made conscious efforts to avoid being ruled by their feelings and instincts, so may actually be slightly handicapped in situations where intuitive responses are more appropriate (in particular, members of the RBC are unlikely to be good at rhetoric).

However, if you want an answer to a factual question about the universe, ask someone who follows this ideal. Their answer may be wrong (and in fact they'll often caution you against assuming that it's 100% right), but it definitely won't be crazy.

No-one's perfect. There's not a single person in this world who is fully a member of the reality-based community. We all have our dogmas, and it's painful to let them go - and, until we do, we can't consider ourselves part of this select yet self-selecting group. In my opinion, however, it's an ideal worth aiming for.
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Debate: Can science justify the statement "God does not exist"?

There's one of those perennial debates brewing over at PandasThumb.org between those who (broadly speaking) think it is scientifically valid to say "God doesn't exist" and those who think it'll always be a philosophical position (including yours truly). I'm hoping to move it over here so as to avoid horribly derailing the PT thread.

Since I'm creating this thread, I get to go first! Yay!

In accordance with the rules of formal debate, I'll first define a few terms:

• Logic = inductive reasoning from premises to infallible conclusions
• Science = the scientific method = hypothesis testing and peer review. Includes both inductive and deductive reasoning.
• Philosophy = the study of scientifically-intractable problems (technically science is a branch of philosophy, but let's not go there)
  

My position is that approaches like science and logic are merely a means to an end. They are models that we apply to the universe where appropriate in order to generate accurate predictions about what will happen next. We use them because they have turned out to be very very good at this.

I personally do my best to use them all the time, but that is a philosophical position distinct from science or logic. It is based on my (unsupportable and possibly inaccurate) belief that, in the long run, a strongly predictive model of how the universe works will enable me to be happier, and on my philosophical belief that scientific and logical methods are the best way to achieve this.

If someone felt that this was not the case, or decided that happiness was not their goal in life, then IMO they would be philosophically justified in not applying scientific or logical methods. For example, if a man was suspicious that his wife's baby was not his own, he might legitimately decide that parenthood testing was not in anyone's best interest.

I don't deny that rational approaches are consistently better than all others at determining how the universe works. I do deny that the acceptance of rational approaches follows directly from this statement. Setting rationality aside isn't necessarily a daft decision, and it's something that I feel people have the right to do - as long as they don't inflict their irrationality on me.
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Cliché Invasion #1

Every so often, someone comes out with a comment that Just Works. It's a cliché in the making, a meme waiting to spread. It encapsulates some concept so beautifully that you just know you're still going to be using it in fifty years time (to the great annoyance of those around you).

On the off-chance I come up with bon mots of this sort, I'll stick 'em here. First entry (in response to this comment):

I think the problem is more that the faithful have all their eggs in one basket, and are thus made happier by evidence that it’s a well-woven basket than evidence that the handle’s about to break. As such, they tend to convince themselves that the former is correct and the latter is merely misguided anti-basket sentiment.

The result? They end up as complete basket cases.
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My claim to fame

As of tonight, I have an interesting claim to fame. I'm the only person I'm aware of who's been fobbed off by Daniel Dennett.

The scene: a packed lecture hall. Prof. Dennett is here to give a talk on his latest book, "Breaking the spell", which advocates for more detailed study of religion. This isn't something that many people (even those who, like me, believe it to be a worth cause) are willing to explicitly stand up for, due to the copious claims of blasphemy that tend to result, so he gets serious respect.

One of the things he mentions near the end is a way to push forward the study of religion, in a way that even the seriously religious would have trouble taking offence at. He suggests making study of world religions a mandatory part of education. In the UK we already have this, but apparently in the US this suggestion results in some serious shock on the part of his audiences. His stated reason for wanting this is that any religion that could survive the inevitable comparisons would have to be beneficial - that the selective pressure would result in only the nicest religions surviving.

I agree with the conclusion, but I disagree with the argument. It seems logical to me that this selective pressure would instead result in only the most virulent religions - those that make it very very hard to escape - surviving. These would be the ones that managed to completely stall people's rational thinking on the subject - for example, Roman Catholicism, with its threats of eternal damnation for anyone who even for a moment doubts the power of the Holy Spirit, or Islam, with its death threats against apostates, or pretty much any other form of fundamentalism.

The rest would tend to swirl down the plughole towards a sort of creedless humanism, which would sweep the field clear for these extremist religions. In short, we would be strongly selecting religions for increased "cultishness" rather than for increased benevolence.

I called Dennett on this (if anyone else was present: the tall guy in the bottom-right was me!) and his answer was interesting. He could obviously see the point of my question, but he spent his response completely sidestepping the issue and reiterating how not even fundamentalists would really have grounds to complain. That wasn't the point.

I think that teaching of world religions is a wonderful idea, for the slightly less pure reason that it knocks one of the major struts out from under religious beliefs. It's hard to believe that, for example, Christianity is in any way special when you see how much of it appears to have been ripped wholesale from Hinduism. I consider this de-strutting a good thing because it means that, for example, people might actually have to sit and think up a good reason for being anti-gay rather than just parroting Leviticus. From there, they might even be able to find their way through to joining the reality-based community*.

However, I don't think that it would necessarily achieve Dennett's stated goal of benevolent religion. And I think it's interested that Dennett so blatantly evaded the question - he seemed rather uncomfortable at having his pet idea challenged. Is it possible that the master of memes has himself become mildly infected?

(Reality Check Disclaimer: it's entirely possible that I completely misinterpreted his comments, or that he merely didn't have time to go into depth or something)

* More on this phrase later
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Quality of Mind: Get Up And Go

(A one-off post)

Reading list: "The Luck Factor" by Prof. Richard Wiseman

A couple of days ago I was going through a period of being extremely motivated and getting lots of good stuff done. For the first time that I can recall, I was able to sit down and think through the patterns of thought that lead my mind to be this productive. I came to the conclusion that it's part of a running philosophical theme that I've completely failed to notice up til now.

That theme: When in doubt, just keep moving.

It sounds like a daft truism but, on closer reflection, it seems to encapsulate an attitude that distinguishes the successful from the unsuccessful, and the lazy (such as myself) from the motivated.

The reason why I'm blogging about it out of sequence (the rest of the personal philosophy stuff will come after the discussion of science) is because, by its very nature, it's a hard philosophy to sit down and write about. The only thing that's keeping me from following my own damn advice at the moment is a massive hangover, and that's wearing off so I'll keep this brief.

If you're just staring at the screen, browsing random websites, marking time til the next task comes along, this post is for you. Get off your butt, turn off the monitor and move. Find something to do, somewhere to go, someone to talk to, whatever. Just keep moving.

...

...

And if you've read down to this line then obviously you're not paying attention. I said MOVE!
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Quality of mind: Science

There are several components to quality of thought, but they all basically boil down to understanding how the world works and acting on that understanding.

Now, as previously mentioned, understanding the world can be a good deal trickier than one might think. Apart from anything else, a decent chunk of such understanding is always going to be very very subjective, especially where other people are involved. However, for a given subset of the world - which I'll hitherto refer to as "consensual reality" - the scientific approach has demonstrated itself to be extremely effective.

The scientific approach consists of three main components:

1) Ways to ensure that your data and conclusions are accurate
2) Ways to ensure that someone else's data and conclusions are accurate
3) Ways to ensure that a community's data and conclusions are accurate

Some aspects of the scientific approach don't fit nicely into any of these categories, but I'll do my best to sort them out over the next few posts and explain why they give rise to such a powerful method of understanding the world.
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Objective analysis

Note: this isn't strictly speaking a Quality-related post, but it lays some groundwork for what I'm going to talk about next.

Reading list:
"The Globe: Science of Discworld #2" - Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen

One interesting thing about this life is it's never easy to get a straight answer. People by and large think in curves, and any answer they give you is likely to be a hyperbolic (apologies for pun) attempt to get you to do the same. Figuring out what is actually true based on the deeply biased information sources around you is about as easy as figuring which way is "up" when you've just been knocked off your surfboard and under the water by a 6ft wave.

This is why it's vitally important to figure out, as early as possible, what motivates the people around you. And nowhere is this more important than when figuring out what you should do.

For starters, any information that you get on morality from those around you is, in my experience, likely to be complete crap, the reason being that there's actually no such thing. It's a social construct and, like all social constructs, it attempts to imprint itself in the minds of those in the vicinity of its hosts.

How, then, to figure out what parts of the information you've been forcefed from an early age are remotely useful? How many of even the useful bits are any more than lies-to-children - approximations to the truth that are an effective way to keep you on the straight and narrow but that bear no resemblance to underlying reality?

Basically, there's no way. You're stuffed. By the point that you're able to actually read what I'm saying here (age 10 or so), you'll have been completely ruined as far as truly objective thought is concerned. The message of morality will have been beaten into you so strongly that you'll almost certainly be able to pass it on to the next generation with a straight face. Therefore the only way to build a better view of the world is to construct it logically and then hope like hell you can live according to it, regardless of how it clashes with your preconceived notions.

In my next post I'll start talking about the importance of critical thinking in building a truly high-Quality understanding of the world. It's quite a big topic so deserves its own post.

But wait, I hear you cry. If Lifewish is biased (which he almost certainly is) why should we trust him any more than we trust anyone else?

That's where the bit about bias comes in. Firstly, I'm writing this almost entirely for my own benefit - strike one against any deliberate bias. Secondly, I'm explicitly dealing with the issue of bias in my own thoughts, and when bias is dragged into the light it tends to die* - strike two. Thirdly, to the extent that I'm writing this blog for everyone else, my motives are very basic and thus easy to compensate for. Basically I find it a major ego-boost to think of you lot sitting down and actually stopping to think about my words. A motive that's pure as the driven yellow snow (to quote Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Strike three and out.

* This is the point of the scientific community. But that's another post.
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Excellence from top to bottom

The basis of the philosophy of areté is the idea that, if you "improve" yourself enough, the world's your oyster. The interesting thing about this philosophy is that, as you read it, you're probably muttering to yourself "well that's bloody obvious, isn't it". But how many of you actually believe it? How many of you act as if it were true? I know at least one person who's convinced that "networking" is far more important than true quality will ever be, despite the fact that in the Quality schema of life networking is a comparatively small part. So is it really that obvious to you? Or have you just been told that Quality is a good thing long enough that you've started parroting it back? Think about that.

On to detail. The way I view my interactions with the world is as a sort of network stack (if you're not geeky enough to know what I'm talking about, see here, and if you still don't understand give me a yell). The application of areté here is to work on improving each level, attempting to improve each in turn. In the coming posts, I'll be talking about the work I've been doing on each level of the Quality stack. If there's anything you'd particularly like me to talk about, do mention it - it might conceivably be something I hadn't thought to work on.

A basic overview of the Quality stack would look something like:

• Body
• Mind
• Social interactions

(If you're religious it would probably be valid to substitute "spirit" for the last one).

The reason that they're arranged in that order is that each is a small, yet abnormally important, subset of the one above. Mind is dependent on brain, but despite the fact that it's effectively just a chunk of the body it demands special effort. Social behaviour is probably the single most important element of the mind*, and demands an entirely new paradigm to handle it fully. Each acts to some extent as a driving force for the previous one.

I'll be covering these areas in absolutely no particular order. Maybe after I've done a complete braindump of all my thoughts I'll be able to go back over them and figure out how the pieces fit together.

* In fact there's an hypothesis that the reason we evolved big brains is so we could lie more effectively to each other. Go figure.
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So what's with this "excellence" thing?

Book list for today:
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - Robert M Pirsig
"Gates of Fire" - Steven Pressfield
"The Socratic Dialogues" - Plato

As a mathematics obsessive, I've always had a very analytical view of the world. I'm extremely good at breaking it up into chunks and finding out how it works. I'm very good at debating, at science, at figuring out what lies behind the curtain. All useful skills, but lately I've come to see that there's something missing.

That something is the "should" that drives life. A lot of people, particularly religious folk, get this handed to them on a platter. But I've never felt like I had a strong driving force, and to some extent that's resulted in a life of drifting. Fairly successful drifting, but drifting all the same.

I know how things work, but I don't know what I should be making them do next. I can see the various ways that my life could go in the future, but I barely have the motivation to choose. And that's having damaging effects, not least being the need to unburden myself and think stuff through on a blog :P

There is, however, a philosophy of life that provides the "should". It fits in very well with my current view of the world. Even if it turns out to be inaccurate, it will ensure that the time I spend following it isn't wasted. That philosophy is called areté, and it originates, as most of philosophy seems to, with the ancient Greeks.

My knowledge of philosophical history is extremely dodgy, so I'll skip the detail and just say that Socrates had some cool ideas. One of his key ones was a concept of Quality as being fundamental to an effective life. Quality is intrinsically a bugger to define cos it's goal-oriented. Quality is, at some level, "what you like". It's an attribute of one's interaction with surroundings that indicates that things are going well.

Slightly surprisingly, this can in fact be expanded into a full philosophy of life that's not in the slightest bit hedonistic (what a shame :P). The expanded version basically states that you should work at increasing this quality of interaction with the world around you. Attempting to structure my worldview around this idea has had some... interesting consequences.
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New day, new ideas, new blog

So over the past couple of years I've been playing around with a philosophical concept - areté, the ancient greek word for "excellence". Areté seems to be the key to a lot of life, so I'm planning to turn this otherwise-useless blog into a discussion of my views on it.

I probably won't be posting terribly regularly due to the limitations of work. I also plan to keep this blog fairly anonymous. This may prove problematic since, due to minor idiocy on my part, I've managed to link it to my real identity. If you have seen me in enough forums to be aware of this link then you're probably entitled to know about it, but I'd ask that people not go actively hunting for it and in fact do their best to take this blog at face value without reference to Real Life [tm].
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The lowdown

OK, I confess, I'm only signed onto this system cos someone has a bloggers-only blog that I'd like to comment on.

Bonus is that I get to create a new online identity - you can never have too many of those. Anyway, metasyntactic is a cool word - almost worth creating the blog for in and of itself.
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