mod_security seems to not like it when i update a post in wp. tell me again why I left blosxom? oh, yeah, so i could offer a comments feed. ’cause i have so many folks making comments that it was, like, *really* important. grr.
Sunday 5k 29:17
And I thought yesterday sucked. Felt like crap, but no injuries, ended feeling good. Still focusing on two-strides per breath in, and think I’m going to stick with that until we leave for Greece. Lots of other stuff orients around that, and it seems a good regulator.
Friday 5k 27:53
As if testing my new resolve that anything under 28:00:00 is acceptable, this one pushed right up to the edge. Was 8:20ish on the first mile. Reversed the intervals, with all in breaths at 2 strides, alternating out breaths at one or three strides. I also distracted from the sense of effort for a few blocks by using my hands to model floppy foot and pulling the road. The feet do seem to try to follow the hands, as far as that goes, and it makes a kind of sense to use that part of the motor map which is more nuanced to develop patterns in less nuanced areas.
Saturday 5k 28:28
Not entirely pleased about the time. Focus: two-strides for each in breath. Also, walked a mile before and after. Walking was good, and this is part of the set up to move to 5m daily after we get back from Greece.
Sunday 5k 29:17
And I thought yesterday sucked. Felt like crap, but no injuries, ended feeling good. Still focusing on two-strides per breath in, and think I’m going to stick with that until we leave for Greece. Lots of other stuff orients around that, and it seems a good regulator.
Much better today. Yes, sometimes I stray too far toward the combative in me, but that’s only a matter of course correction. I likewise sometimes stray to far toward the cowardly. But, by and large, I think I strike the difference as well as the next guy, better than many, and the only real sense of lack in this arena comes from my own high standards. I want more and better for myself.
Now, in the context of a place like Cooperation Commons, the conflict comes from a general tendency to sit back, let others start the dialog/dialectic, and then throw in my two bits where I think appropriate. But in this particular venue I have taken on something of a moderator/stimulator role, and my old methods simply aren’t sufficient. I’m doing new things, and thus need to learn new tricks.
I feel like I learn more that way. Either my erroneous thinking gets exposed, or I am forced to better articulate my points, but either way, most of the time a good on line row makes me feel like I’m learning, better, faster, deeper.
But at what cost?
Lately I’m troubled by my unruliness, my aggressiveness, my need to pick fights on line. There are reasons for this personality trait, including the insecurity of a college drop out in a correspondence law school, and legitimate pleasure in dialectic as a means of fostering knowledge. But of late, influenced in no small part by the good examples of some specific others, and in the context of trying to kickstart more involvement at Cooperation Commons, I find myself thinking it’s time to tone down this particular trait.
And replace it with what?
Fights are interesting. They draw crowds. Every creative writing course I’ve seen tells us, "No conflict, no story". So if it’s stimulating conversation, if that’s the goal, then picking fights works.
But with whom, and to what end? That is, who are the members of the crowd circling around the combatants, and are they actually the people, or the kinds of people, one is trying to reach? If not, then maybe there needs be a different approach.
Maybe at 43 I should have worked all this out by now, but I haven’t. As the possibility of professional life draws nearer (I’m slated to take the California Bar Exam in 2009) I find myself increasingly bound to act in a manner that will actually move me toward the kind of life, and professionalism, I want for myself.
That’s not to say that I contemplate for a second the possibility of forever ridding myself of my rambunctious will to scrap. Nor even that I will free myself of my fuzzier and flakier moments of goofy experimental writing.
Most pointedly, this has all come to a head as I have started reading "Evolution of Cooperation" by Axelrod. It angers me, and I can’t sanely say why. But it seems wrong, intellectually unsound and even a touch dishonest. Question begging, question dodging. The Prisoners’ Dilemma, which Axelrod purports to study, has some unique qualities, and there are lessons to be learned from those qualities. But Axelrod dismisses those lessons and qualities. I can only assume that he starts with an assumption that "cooperation" is an inherent good, and then seeks a means of showing how it can be achieved in less inviting circumstances. It seems to me as if he travels 359 degrees to reach his point that some circumstances foster cooperation better than others.
About a year ago a professor (at a real law school) with whom I had the privilege to correspond, read a laundry list of my concerns about Axelrod’s handling of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. He reply was essentially, "So what?"
I fear that the progressive/liberal agenda is damaged by specious reasoning, which I see in Axelrod’s work. I feel the progressive/liberal agenda is already on the ropes, socio-politically, and that we simply can’t afford the luxury of building our arguments on sand. And I think that in ignoring the unique qualities of the Prisoners Dilemma, Axelrod has so built.
And I don’t have a single flipping forum where I can hash this out the only way I know how, adversarially. And I’m wondering if it isn’t about time I learned a new way.
Slowly working through this one. Counting on tags to help me pull it all together later.
Axlerod’s entire work seems premised on a need to refute Hobbe’s notion that a strong central government is needed to effect cooperation. The fact that Hobbe’s was a) speaking in a specific context, b) manifestly wrong as evidenced by simple observation (for every brute there’s an angel, by and by) seems to have escaped Axlerod.
However, one has to give Axlerod full credit for fighting the good fight, and that is probably the aspect of his work that draws so many people…and so little critical thought. We all want to avoid nuclear holocaust. We all want our nation to be wealthy while at the same time feeling our nation is “good” and “strong” and “honorable” and “plays fair”. But in the context of cooperation and competition between nations, Axlerod says, on the same page, that nations would be best served by free trade and that their best interests lie in protective tariffs. Now, neither of these positions is unarguable, but it is odd for one person to claim both in effectively the same breath.
A good example of the fundamental problem of cooperation is the case where two industrial nations have erected trade barriers to each other’s exports. Because of the mutual advantages of free trade, both countries would be better off if these barriers were eliminated. But if either country were to unilaterally eliminate its barriers, it would find itself facing terms of trade that hurt its own economy. In fact, whatever one country does, the other country is better off retaining its own trade barriers.(emphasis added)
I begin to think there is a personality type drawn to paradox. I am not of that type. When someone proffers me a paradox I begin searching for the falsifiable premises on which it is based, to probe for the mis-perceptions from which it rises. The solution to the paradox of the Spanish Barber is to go and look and see what he does.
Axlerod would seem to be of the first type.
—
Worse, however, than the above proclivity to get lost in paradox, is the hash Axlerod makes of The Prisoners’ Dilemma. He does, in a footnote, credit Flood and Drescher, the originators of the dilemma, and credits Tucker for formalizing and popularizing it. But Axlerod never gets around to actually describing the dilemma. Instead he substitutes in an entirely unrelated generic two-person, non-zero-sum game with a sucker’s payoff, and he labels the moves “cooperate” and “defect”.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, in the actual Prisoners’ Dilemma there are no such options. The game moves are confess or not-confess. There can be no cooperation, because there can be no communication and no coordination. There is one simple choice to make, after which one of two indeterminate results will obtain. There isn’t even the type of communication which “evolves” in Axlerod’s “Iterated Prisoners Dilemma” tournament, for there is only the one round to be played. Axlerod’s lack of sensitivity to such qualitative issues which separate the Prisoners’ Dilemma from generic, iterated two-person, non-zero-sum games is unfortunate, not in the least that it seems to have spawned a generation of cooperation studies and students who do not in fact have their eye on the ball. It is trivial to construct a game in which the payoffs clearly yield predictable behavior. The point of the Prisoners Dilemma is that some games aren’t so predictable. And analysis of the Prisoners Dilemma teaches us that we must distinguish between determinate and indeterminate results. Axlerod’s work, at least as far as page 8 (admittedly not far, but starting premises and principles often make or break an argument) simply fails to make his point. This is best established by the simple reversal of the completely arbitrary labels he has assigned the actions on his generic, non-zero-sum, two-person game: One could swap the words “defect” and “cooperate” and the nature of the choices, as determined by the payoffs, would remain the same.
That’s not well articulated. But the point is better made at my old online version of the game, here.
Sunday 080629 5k 28:28
10:00 low 80s F, mild breeze
Focus: visual engagement with road; Consequence: strong neck pain, right side of back of neck, exacerbated by tilting head back. This is probably from bending at the neck instead of generally tilting at the ankles.
Monday 080630 5k 29:40
18:00 high 80s F, mild breeze
Focus: pampering sore neck muscles; Consequence: generally more upright posture, slower speed (also slower due to time of day, heat, and general mood). Discovered that “running on water” and “moving the track” foci are complements for “visual engagement”. That is, it would be harder to hold those foci with the head tilted out of alignment.
Tuesday 5k 28:37
6:00 mid 60s F almost no breeze
Focus: Navel to spine. Consequence: was consistent with pampering neck. Generally seems to go with breathing focus, with exhale on foot fall triggering a mild contraction/activation of the abdominal and lower back muscles. It was mostly easier to maintain this focus in time with controlled breathing than to let the breathing vary out of rhythm with the feet. By the end of the run I was explicitly coordinating the coordination of the accented footfall with the pulling of the navel to the spine, and this seemed to create some of the “spring” and “strike the ground” effect called for in other foci.
Wednesday 5k 27:59
Still favoring the neck, still focusing on navel-to-spine, but today also added, from a chi-running vid on youtube, settling the shoulders down over the hips. I took this a step further and imagined tightening up all the connections, shoulders to hips, hips to knees, knees to ankle. I thought about the BTfR notion of compactness, and springiness, and this seemed consistent. And it was a little more of an “alpha-state” run, in that I managed to work through my memory pegs during it, without hurting my time. First mile was 9:20, which would put me over 28 for the 5k, but I managed to come in just under, despite going “alpha” after that first mile. No complaints.
Thursday 5k 27:16
Intervals. Odd numbered telephone poles, breathe one in, two out. Even numbered poles, breathe three in, two out. First mile was 8:33, which is better then 7mph, but lost time on the final mile, up and down a fairly steep hill. Still, it’s 6.8 mph, nothing to whine about.
Well, I finally got the right-click fix on the UbuntuBook, and this time it didn’t clobber the wifi drivers. Of course, now I’m wondering if that was ever the problem. Who knows.
Dare I try for the iSight tonight?
Howto on getting right apple key to sub for right-click not only fails, but seems to screw up wifi. Restricted wifi drivers show as enabled, but nothing I have tried makes them show as “in use”. Will have to put off fixing for at least another day, just too far behind on other matters.
Wed 080625 29:24
Thu 080626 28:57
Fri 080627 27:00:30!!! (6.88mph!!!)
Sat 080628 29:49 (midday, 4hrs sleep, mild head-wind)
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