people less sickly than 100 years ago

via MR, in the vein of "things just get better", this NYTimes article suggests that no longer industrialized people getting bigger, but they have also been living longer and healthier.

self-control: philosophical questions

I've been thinking a lot about self-control. What is the self? Where is consciousness?

I'm asking these questions partly because I've been planning to read an ACT-R paper reading titled "The Minimal Control Principle". But really, it's just one of those nagging questions that never go away.

People obviously have a folk theory of what they do and don't have control over, and also of what *others* do and don't have control over. In fact, *every* moral judgement we make of our own or others' actions is justified by this basic assumption that the person is an agent who is able to make choices, and to control him/herself at that level.

What is a little bit puzzling about this is that this ability to control oneself is a modal notion. How can one prove that one could have acted otherwise? We may be able to beat some predictability tests, but how many levels of determinism can you refute before the laws of physics (or neuroscience!) make you predictable?

This interesting paper (via MR) about willpower sugests that, like patience, willpower is a depletable resource. Does this mean that, after enough temptation, people cannot be expected to control themselves?

This ties back to video game design: what level of control should you give to the player? If the goal is to make the played feel immersed as seamlessly as possible, we should try to minimize the size of the (inevitable) cut between real and virtual world (min-cut <=> max-flow!). A game like Spore is interesting because you different levels of description, but it would be more interesting still (but maybe very annoying) if the game automated away parts of gameplay *just* as the user demonstrated that they reached expertise: that way, you'd always be growing to higher and higher levels (being an expert doesn't make an activity completely effortless).

Much of what we do in life and work is automatic. This means that our control is restricted to the higher-level. We can only be accountable for our automatic actions insofar as managers are accountable for the behavior of their employees.

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ACT-R folks, when does conscious control correspond to the contents of the buffers? Should we define consciousness as being a meta-level of attention, i.e. attention to one's own cognition?

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Interesting talk on determinism:
David Steinsaltz - Essay on chance and determinism

The philosopher Daniel Dennett has
compared the free decision-making self in psychology to the
center-of-gravity in physics. Both are fictions, but they are useful
fictions, because they tell you where to apply force to achieve desired
effects. Recognizing that they are fictions does not force us to abandon
them, but it does suggest to us that we may need to put them aside when
the problem at hand depends on the fine structure.

MediaWiki linking

MediaWiki is behaving oddly. I've been trying to make the articles accessible through short URLs.

As soon as I changed $wgArticlePath to skip the "/index.php" part, my links went to "/wiki/Article" in every page I visited. This was good.

But since I didn't yet manage to make my domain redirect to the right URL, these links were broken. So I decided to turn back and make the URLs like "/wiki/index.php/Article" again. This, however, didn't take effect immediately. I reloaded the pages and nothing: the links stay broken. In fact, I am having to **edit** all those articles before they link to the correct places.

Strange!

UPDATE: The wiki is fine on IE! Firefox was still loading from some hidden cache!

The Mathematical Theory of Information

The Mathematical Theory of Information (which is based on the "Law of Diminishing Information", a.k.a. "the GIGO principle"), on "semantic information theory", seems like an interesting book.

It smells a bit crackpottish though: the concepts seem overly general (such fields, e.g. "systems theory", tend to attract crackpots). Furthermore, the author hasn't published anything outside of Wolfram's conference, and the only reviewers I recognize are Chaitin and Calude.