a selection of quotes
Jun. 16th, 2010 07:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutFirst a big thank you to byrdie, for the lovely birthday presents. I'm about to complain about the book, but that doesn't mean in any way I'm not extremely pleased with receiving it as a gift. And I'm tremendously excited about listening to the Costello album.
Here's the quote on p 31 of _The Adaptive Unconscious_ that pushed me to post: "In many hackneyed works of science fiction"
I'll take a breather here to note that, much like commentary about romance novels with hunky guys on the cover, a sentence that starts like this isn't going to go anywhere good, and will be shockingly inaccurate about both the science fiction and whatever the analogy is to.
"human emotions are treated as excess baggage that get [sic: http://nativeenglishteacher.blogspot.com/2007/07/singular-vs-plural.html, unless "get" refers to emotions, which is a problem of antecedence] in the way of efficient decisionmaking [sic]. Invariably [that's a fancy word for always, isn't it? And aren't sentences that start with "Always" usually suspicious?] there is an android that is a much better thinker and decisionmaker [sic] than its human counterparts, because it has no emotions to muck up things. By the end of the story, we come to realize [what you didn't start there? Oh, wait, you did.] that we would never trade our lives for the android's. Even though emotions cause us to act irrationally and to make bad decisions [are we _reading_ the same sf? Or even watching the same sf?], we are willing to sacrifice precision and accuracy for the richness of love, passion, and art. Who would want to live the stark, emotionless life of an android?"
To be fair to Wilson, he goes on to note that unconscious/emotional/non-rational/wtf decision making (that compound noun is just giving me the heebies. This is English. Not German. Come on.) does a high-quality job. That's not my issue. My issue has several parts to it. First, there's the invariably. The vast majority of science fiction, hackneyed or otherwise, _does not_ include some robot/android/alien lacking in emotions and teaching us to appreciate our emotions. If he's thinking along the lines of Data and Spock, and thinks that is the lesson of Data and Spock, he's been seriously suckered by an ironic surface interpretation concealing a whole wealth of complexity and ambiguity: Spock and Data are _not_ lacking in emotions, and display a host of ways of managing non-standard emotional reactions in a social context (and given the number of women who respond by wanting to have sex with them, I seriously doubt there's a lesson being taught here about not trading our lives for theirs).
Second, there's the grammar thing that I pointed out. He's committed similar grammar weirdness earlier and it is starting to get on my nerves.
Third, and overwhelmingly most importantly, he's produced an analogy inaccurate in all important components that distracts from his point. He's not arguing that emotions help us love and wtf; he's arguing that without the adaptive unconscious, we wouldn't be able to stand up, make sense of speech or otherwise get through the day. And if he'd contemplated what his point was versus the content of his analogy, he'd have recognized the severity of the problem he'd introduced into his exposition.
But then, if he'd recognized it here, he would have recognized it sooner. Like when he said:
p 16 ""Making the unconscious conscious" may be no easier than viewing and understanding the assembly language controlling our word-processing computer program."
Or when he said on p 19 regarding proprioception, "We are completely unaware of this critical sensory system..."It is only the loss of the hidden proprioceptive system...that demonstrates how important it is." Having spent a number of years explicitly learning about mine, how to train it, and what its limitations are in the context of martial arts, I don't feel particularly unaware of mine, nor did I have to lose it to understand its importance.
Finally, on p 26: "Children do not spend hours studying vocabulary lists"
Not sure what universe Wilson lives in, but it sure isn't mine.
ETA: p 32
"It is now clear that feelings are functional, not excess baggage that impedes decisionmaking."
He's not even consistent. I blame the publisher. In fact, I'm going to haul out a couple HUP books that I've had for a while (_Red Hot and Righteous_ and _Righteous Discontent_) and not yet read and see if they have as many problems as Wilson and Gabaccio (sp?) do.
Here's the quote on p 31 of _The Adaptive Unconscious_ that pushed me to post: "In many hackneyed works of science fiction"
I'll take a breather here to note that, much like commentary about romance novels with hunky guys on the cover, a sentence that starts like this isn't going to go anywhere good, and will be shockingly inaccurate about both the science fiction and whatever the analogy is to.
"human emotions are treated as excess baggage that get [sic: http://nativeenglishteacher.blogspot.com/2007/07/singular-vs-plural.html, unless "get" refers to emotions, which is a problem of antecedence] in the way of efficient decisionmaking [sic]. Invariably [that's a fancy word for always, isn't it? And aren't sentences that start with "Always" usually suspicious?] there is an android that is a much better thinker and decisionmaker [sic] than its human counterparts, because it has no emotions to muck up things. By the end of the story, we come to realize [what you didn't start there? Oh, wait, you did.] that we would never trade our lives for the android's. Even though emotions cause us to act irrationally and to make bad decisions [are we _reading_ the same sf? Or even watching the same sf?], we are willing to sacrifice precision and accuracy for the richness of love, passion, and art. Who would want to live the stark, emotionless life of an android?"
To be fair to Wilson, he goes on to note that unconscious/emotional/non-rational/wtf decision making (that compound noun is just giving me the heebies. This is English. Not German. Come on.) does a high-quality job. That's not my issue. My issue has several parts to it. First, there's the invariably. The vast majority of science fiction, hackneyed or otherwise, _does not_ include some robot/android/alien lacking in emotions and teaching us to appreciate our emotions. If he's thinking along the lines of Data and Spock, and thinks that is the lesson of Data and Spock, he's been seriously suckered by an ironic surface interpretation concealing a whole wealth of complexity and ambiguity: Spock and Data are _not_ lacking in emotions, and display a host of ways of managing non-standard emotional reactions in a social context (and given the number of women who respond by wanting to have sex with them, I seriously doubt there's a lesson being taught here about not trading our lives for theirs).
Second, there's the grammar thing that I pointed out. He's committed similar grammar weirdness earlier and it is starting to get on my nerves.
Third, and overwhelmingly most importantly, he's produced an analogy inaccurate in all important components that distracts from his point. He's not arguing that emotions help us love and wtf; he's arguing that without the adaptive unconscious, we wouldn't be able to stand up, make sense of speech or otherwise get through the day. And if he'd contemplated what his point was versus the content of his analogy, he'd have recognized the severity of the problem he'd introduced into his exposition.
But then, if he'd recognized it here, he would have recognized it sooner. Like when he said:
p 16 ""Making the unconscious conscious" may be no easier than viewing and understanding the assembly language controlling our word-processing computer program."
Or when he said on p 19 regarding proprioception, "We are completely unaware of this critical sensory system..."It is only the loss of the hidden proprioceptive system...that demonstrates how important it is." Having spent a number of years explicitly learning about mine, how to train it, and what its limitations are in the context of martial arts, I don't feel particularly unaware of mine, nor did I have to lose it to understand its importance.
Finally, on p 26: "Children do not spend hours studying vocabulary lists"
Not sure what universe Wilson lives in, but it sure isn't mine.
ETA: p 32
"It is now clear that feelings are functional, not excess baggage that impedes decisionmaking."
He's not even consistent. I blame the publisher. In fact, I'm going to haul out a couple HUP books that I've had for a while (_Red Hot and Righteous_ and _Righteous Discontent_) and not yet read and see if they have as many problems as Wilson and Gabaccio (sp?) do.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 01:16 am (UTC)What was the context of the "children"? School-age children, or toddlers and preschoolers? If he's talking about basic language acquisition, I can't see where he's wrong.
Most of the androids I remember reading about have been if anything far too sentimentalized. Quite a few worry a lot.
children
Date: 2010-06-17 01:57 am (UTC)In any event, here's a bit more from page 26: "Implicit learning is defined as learning without effort or awareness of exactly what has been learned. Perhaps the best example is a child's ability to master her native language. Children do not spend hours studying vocabulary lists and attending classes on grammar and syntax. They would be hard pressed to explain what participles are, despite their ability to use them fluently. Humans learn to speak with no effort or intention; it just happens."
I recognize that my process for learning language differs from what books describe as "typical" language acquisition. However, I also recognize that when I watch very small children (babies) learning language, I see body language that indicates it is _quite_ effortful. I know what the preschool here in town does for their regular curriculum, and it involves vocabulary lists (albeit for teachers and parents explicitly to use to create a topically specific language dense environment for the children). I know that social scientists who study children from various economic backgrounds find that some parents do a lot of explicit language teaching from a very young (< 3 years of age) age (hey, those flash cards are being used! also, the books), and the children of parents who don't do a lot of explicit language teaching from a very young age have a very different sized vocabulary. And there's loose talk that vocabulary size in the US is predictive of all kinds of educational and economic outcomes later in life.
And then there's my son. He is finally talking enough that other people notice a difference and a larger fraction of the non-familial, non-school, no-experience-with-special-needs-kids adults around us understand him. A lot of the process involved in getting there involved an ungodly number of hours pointing at pictures of stuff and saying what it was called.
A better definition of "implicit learning" would be: learning _to do_, as opposed to learning _about_. A lot of education is learning _about_ something: learning the symbols, the approved operations, learning how to apply the operations to the symbols. Writing a thesis. Writing a supporting paragraph. Writing an essay. Writing a conclusion. Writing a hypothesis. Describing an experiment. Writing a proof. (That's a lot of writing. Hmmm.) Adding. Subtracting. Using a calculator. If I were going to explain "implicit" learning, I'd use as an example driving a car. There are a lot of elements to learning to drive a car: just being able to answer the questions on the driving exam does not get it done. Conversely, just being able to get the car in drive (or reverse) and press the accelerator is not going to get it done. It is easy, when thinking about thinking, to treat the getting-the-car-in-drive-and-pressing-the-accelerator part as unimportant, but just a little bit of extra thought reminds us all that yeah, there was a lot of learning involved in that aspect of driving, and it required some effort, but now driving a car is not effortful, unless we are driving in an unfamiliar car or in an unfamiliar environment (a Bostonian in New York, say).
Bringing up children and language supports the (wrong) idea that "implicit" means "without effort". But "implicit" learning isn't about "without effort", and it isn't even precisely about "without awareness". "Implicit" learning is the kind of learning that we tend to forget we learned. We remember our history classes; we don't tend to think of the life we live as teaching us history, even if after a few decades, the kiddies in school are learning _as history_ things that we remember having opinions about when we saw them on the news or marched in protest against them ourselves.
And I still say he's wrong about the kids and language anyway. There are huge numbers of "bilingual" people out there who understand a language they cannot themselves speak in, or who can speak and understand a very limited vocabulary of that language (the words used in and around the house and market, say), but can't use it generally as an adult. Using language acquisition as an illustration of _anything_ being without effort is, well, not well thought out.
Re: children
Date: 2010-06-17 02:09 am (UTC)