Hey Science! What are you trying to prove?

There is a certain thing that comes up from time to time in my courses and elsewhere. It's one of those things that is always mentioned in passing, cropping up like ugly little weeds along the path of discussion: bothersome, but fleeting enough that on no individual occasion is it really warranted to interrupt the discussion at hand to address it.

In class this morning, however, I spent half an hour listening to a presentation in which the presenter informed us of what the authors of a paper had aimed to prove, described how they tried to prove it, summarized what their results ended up proving, and went on to discuss the potential implications of what had been proven.

And every time the student uttered that P-word, I cringed inside (or I hope it was only inside). I wanted to stop him and proclaim: "This is science, not math! No one is trying to prove anything!"

Science is about uncovering truths to the best of our capabilities, with the understanding that there is always more to be uncovered and our capabilities themselves may improve over time -- that what we accept as true today may well be replaced with a new truth tomorrow. Scientists seek to uncover truths by making educated guesses about the nature of the world as well as predictions about what would happen, under specified conditions, if their guesses are correct. If what happens under those conditions turns out to match their predictions well enough, we might accept their guess as the Best Guess So Far regarding the nature of that aspect of the world. If the match isn't good enough, we go "Hm, nice idea, but guess again!" Similarly, if someone's guess conflicts with an older, previously accepted guess, but the predictions following from it match reality more closely than those of the old one, we might say "Gee, looks like that old guess wasn't quite right after all."

Rinse and repeat, and hopefully our Best Guesses So Far get ever closer to accurately representing how things actually work, enabling us to manipulate the world in ever cooler ways using this growing understanding of it. (And to the extent that these guesses allow us to manipulate the world as we'd like to, that degree of accuracy is good enough for the time being.)

A mentality of "trying to prove" that your guess is correct conflicts with the very basis of science. It hampers proper, rigourous experimental design. It poisons critical, unbiased evaluation of data. It makes drawing grounded, realistic conclusions nearly impossible.

Sadly, the science publication industry itself seems to reward only those who most convincingly "prove" the shiniest things, in spite of the value that all well-tested guesses contribute to our collective understanding of how the world works. (So maybe I'm wrong; maybe people end up trying to prove things after all. Publish or perish, as they say.) This distortion of science, as the authors of that essay put it, certainly doesn't help to give students the right idea of what science is all about, let alone a clear sense of what may or may not constitute good science.

And so this morning I sat listening to a classroom of graduate students talking, not about how convincing the authors' evidence was, nor whether their conclusions seemed reasonable, but about what the authors had proven, followed by sharing other examples they could think of that agree with what was proved. And suddenly this seminar course seemed to differ from a typical undergraduate one by barely more than the fact that it's not a professor who stands at the front of the room, but a student.

This Is Your Brain on Music (Part I)

This is a book I bought years ago because of my interest in cognition, my love of music, and the fact that my curiosity about how we experience music and why was driving me crazy. For some reason (probably because I'd bought another half-dozen books at the same time), I started reading it then, but didn't get that far before I got distracted by shiny things and forgot about it.

Recently, in my theory development class, we've been talking about design and perception, and music (the way we perceive it, and our preferences relating to it) came up; it reminded me of this book. My music- and dance-related experiences over the last couple of years have made my fascination with this subject much greater than it was even when I bought the book, so I was eager to pick it up again and start reading it from the beginning. Here are a couple of passages from the introduction that resonated with me in a way they couldn't possibly have when I first read them years ago:

What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work. The work of artists and scientists is ultimately the pursuit of truth, but members of both camps understand that truth in its very nature is contextual and changeable, dependent on point of view, and that today's truths become tomorrow's disproven hypotheses or forgotten objets d'art.

After I finished undergrad, during my final years of which I focused on molecular genetics and spent most of my non-classtime waking hours working on my school's team for the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, I -- by no means deliberately -- gradually stepped back from the nitty gritty technical side of synthetic biology, and found myself spending more of my time focused on running and developing my team. Having receded from the land of the hardcore technical side of science, I came to realize that I am (would it be ironic to say "at heart"?) a scientist, in terms of the way I see and think about the world, the questions I'm given to asking, and the way I evaluate information on a day-to-day basis. Meanwhile, I'd become much more immersed in a world of art. Of music, and of dance, and of expression of whatever is alive inside us, trying to get out. And, feeling almost like two completely different people in each of them, I've all the while had a hard time reconciling these two worlds of Science and Art. I'm still not sure how I can do so in a practical sense (or whether I can), but reading that passage was strangely comforting; it made me feel more like a single person.

... I was going to include another excerpt here (actually, the one that I wanted to comment on in the first place), but I'll leave that for tomorrow.

Tough love

Often, when I've dug a really deep hole for myself, and I know I've screwed myself over to the point where I couldn't undo it if I tried, I'm more than a little ambivalent when things work out alright anyway. And, as happy and relieved as my immediate reaction might be, part of me is disappointed in -- maybe even a little resentful of -- the person who made an exception and cut me way more slack than I deserve, because they've robbed me of the hard lesson I should have learned from my own behaviour.

More on blues dancing... and (learning) dance of various sorts

I am currently super-hyped about the chance to blues dance again in the (very) near future, particularly after watching a bunch of great videos of blues dancing the other day.

This is the first example of blues dancing I ever saw, and I fell in love with it immediately.

The rest are videos I came across recently. The next couple videos are from the San Diego Fusion Exchange, so maybe they're not strictly blues (?)... but what I love about blues is that it totally doesn't matter. :]

Man, I love how this woman moves (same woman from the two videos above)...

Gah, 1:16 kills me! So awesome...

Love this one. This woman dances likes her limbs are weightless... beautiful. And the song... mm mm mm...

God, I love her lines at 1:28, and what they do afterwards at 1:34-ish. *_* Gorgeous dancing...

I really like these guys too; their style really appeals to me (and their choice of songs doesn't hurt :]):

Their style is pretty simple on the whole, but the overall feel is cool, and I love the little things they do with their feet (what the dude does at 1:25 *kills* me -- so awesome).

But now here's the interesting thing... Blues, this super free-form style, is making me want to learn technique like I've never wanted to before -- even moreso than when I was doing ballroom. In ballroom, it seems, technique is everything, and you really don't get the feel of the dance unless you're doing it properly. [I say this based solely on the eight-or-so months of ballroom I did, which was the first dancing I'd ever done, so I had nothing at all to compare to at that point. Maybe my impression would be different now... Not that I'm not still a Very Inexperienced Dancer, after only about 1.5 years total. Hehe.. So yeah: tablespoon of salt is warranted here, for sure. That is, don't be fooled into thinking that I know (or think I know) what I'm talking about at all. :P All of my dance-related ramblings are just my personal impressions/thoughts based on my own relatively meagre experience.]

So I was really into working on technique at that time. Once I stopped taking ballroom and was pretty much only dancing salsa socially, at first I really wanted to take salsa lessons to improve, but eventually (probably as my following improved over time, and I could at least squeak by dancing passably with most leads) that desire faded and I just wanted to have fun. Although... I suppose that was part of it, and the other part was that, when I hear salsa music, the way my body feels like moving is often at odds with how salsa styling seems to be commonly taught. (Or I just suck too much at consciously controlling my movements to find out, haha.) In any case, I didn't really feel like taking salsa lessons anymore (which was just as well, since I never did get around to taking any :|!), and since then I've been kind of just messing around on the dance floor, doing whatever the music is making me do (which can feel great, but, as I've written before, has actually become problematic).

But back to blues! So I learn about this whole "blues dancing" thing and fall in love with it instantly, since it's all about dancing the music and moving how you feel. Awesome! But seeing more examples of blues dancing, I see how much more can be expressed through it, and (unlike with salsa) I don't have anywhere close to the vocabulary of movement required to express the things I'm made to feel by the music I'd want to dance blues to. It's like being at a loss for words... like wanting to convey an idea to someone but not knowing how to put it, and watching these awesome videos is like reading something someone else has written that says exactly what you wanted to say, way better than you ever could have put it yourself. It makes me really want to improve my vocabulary and precision of movement, so I can say many more varied and nuanced things through dance.

... Too bad the reasons I never got around to taking salsa lessons when I wanted to still apply (and then some). :| Maybe in the spring I'll be able to squeeze in a lesson or workshop here and there...

Ideas Worth Spreading

One of the best websites on the internet (yes, the entire internet) is, in my opinion, TED.com. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), for those who aren't familiar, is an annual conference where some of the world's most extraordinary people -- scientists, artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, innovators -- convene to share their ideas in concise 20-minute talks that range from thought-provoking to inspiring to mind-blowing. To read more about TED itself, you can go here, but I want to share some of my favourite talks that I've watched recently. Talk descriptions are taken straight from the TED site, and below each video I've included some comments of my own.

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

I'm extremely interested in cognition and how people process information, so in addition to the treatments his groups has been doing, his research and its implications are very exciting.

Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

I actually think the description for this one is somewhat misleading. The studies Ariely describes aren't really about why "we think it's OK", so much as under what circumstances we tend to cheat (and, based on those findings, he suggests explanations for this). However, given that the factors involved in those explanations aren't (in all likelihood) consciously considered by people who are deciding whether to cheat or not, his findings are quite interesting. If we're predictably irrational, we certainly aren't intuitively so.

[As an aside, I recently read the paper of his about what the authors term "coherent arbitrariness", how even when the value people ascribe to something is arbitrary (e.g., the amount of money they would have to be paid to be willing to endure the pain of the vice-grip on their finger, as he mentions in this TED talk), they still make adjustments in "coherent" (predictable) ways (i.e., demanding more money for longer duration of pain). He has also authored a neat paper on how buyers and sellers can value the same good quite differently. If you're interested in either paper, let me know and I can send them to you.]

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.

This talk actually made me shed tears. I cannot explain why. Maybe it has something to do with how strongly I feel about education and the role it ought to have in tapping into the specific strengths that everyone has -- getting people to realize their potential, especially in spite of what "conventional wisdom", such as academic curricula, would indicate should be expected of them.

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

This talk I actually watched years ago. As someone who is given to spending obscene amounts of time deliberating over important (and not-so-important) decisions, often to the point where my indecision ends up making my decision for me, I found this talk Most Excellent. Even aside from never really being able to know which choice will be "best", there's the reality that, even if we could always choose the "best" options, it wouldn't necessarily make much difference to how happy we end up being: by and large, humans make themselves (relatively) happy with the reality they are faced with.

Hm. There are several more talks that I really want to share, but I'll save those for another post.

Bottled feelings

I feel like I understand art a little better today. I've rambled on before about how the things (energies? passions?) that are alive inside a person can force themselves out in the form of art... music, movement... or other activities, like working hard for some kind of cause. In a couple of ways I get this a little more now than I did before...

Expression through dance is something I can relate to since I feel it all the time: when I hear the right music (which could even just be music in my head :P), there's this need to let this thing out of me, which can only be released through movement.

The visual art thing, on the other hand, I didn't really get. As intrinsically enjoyable as the act of drawing is for me, I'm rarely compelled to do it in the first place. But for perhaps the first time ever, I recently had a taste of that compulsion: I went out to a lake one evening with a bunch of friends. The moon was a huge, orange crescent hanging low in the black sky. As we stood around by the lake, looking at the stars, we realized the moon was getting lower on the horizon. Soon enough it had reached the lake itself, and I stood there, captivated, unable to look away as this orange crescent moon sank into the water like a ship on fire. Something about this nearly moved me to tears, and it felt like the ship was drawing the breath out of me and taking it with it as it sank. I couldn't bring myself to move until long after the last point of light had vanished on the horizon, and I desperately wished that I could capture what I'd just experienced... preserve it somehow, in the form of a painting.

Of course, I am in no way a painter, and it would be terrible to destroy that experience as it exists in my memory by seeing whatever awful rendering I might produce on paper, so I wouldn't even attempt it. Even my written description just now, which I tried to gloss over as much as possible (while still getting the gist of it across) in order to avoid this very thing, has kind of sullied my memory of the event. :| In any case, even if my inability to express myself through these means stops me from actually doing it, I've now at least had a glimpse of what it's like to want to express myself through visual art.

In this case, the desire to capture a moment made me want to create art: to take my experience of that event and turn it into a physical object so I could have it later, maybe share it with others. In the past, I've been driven by various emotions to write things -- sometimes poetry, sometimes other things -- and it has mostly been because of a need to take whatever I was feeling at the time and get it out of me. To reach in and grab hold of it and pull it out and get rid of it, so I could stop experiencing whatever feeling of unrest was roiling inside me. And aside from looking at what I've just pulled out only long enough to see that it is indeed the thing, in its entirety, that I wanted to get rid of, that's generally the end of it, and I don't deal with the thing any further.

But today, for some reason, I read some things I'd written a while back, during a time when I felt quite different than I do these days. Even though I remember a lot of things from that time, even some events in plenty of detail, I generally can't recall the specific feelings I had. Perhaps it's akin to the way you might remember the face of someone you once knew long ago; you might have a rough picture, but it's hazy and doesn't capture the details -- the features that make that person distinct from others with the same sort of look. Yet if you actually see the person, they're immediately recognizable, even alongside other, similar-looking people. In the same way, though I could no longer remember my feelings from these past times, as I read these things that I'd once written, everything I'd been experiencing at the time came crashing over me again. Nuances of emotion that I still wouldn't know how to begin describing in plain words. Somehow I didn't expect that reading these things could put those feelings back into me, even in spite of how irrelevant they are to the present. That is, given how things are now, it doesn't even make sense that I should be able to feel these things from these other times.

It's as if, in writing each of those things, I distilled that immediate experience out of me and bottled it like a drug... and all it takes to once again experience everything I'd managed to draw out of myself back then is to sip from that little bottle.

I suppose, then, that if another person has had experiences similar enough to that from which a given drug was distilled, they too can be affected by it; this is perhaps what makes art resonate with certain people but not others. This would certainly explain why until a few years ago I had very little appreciation for the arts: I hadn't even begun to live yet.