Alex Pang's Contemplative Computing articlefesto, take 1

Alex Pang, the researcher at MSR Cambridge whose work I've previously sweated just a bit, has recently (okay a month ago) published the first draft of a big article about what exactly he means by "Contemplative Computing." I want to call it a manifesto but he hasn't used the m-word so I won't either.

I quite like the article! I am glad that he is/was employed by Microsoft; I think he's got an approach towards creating technology that will help us improve our minds, and being at MSR means some of this could actually happen.

Some good quotes (and I'll attempt to weave them into a summary if you don't want to read the whole 60+-page article):

Intro, and what's wrong
"... we need to understand how tools initially built for the scientific laboratory or office may be ill-suited to the home or family; how the objectives of efficiency and optimization may not work in environments characterized by irreducible uncertainty and ambiguity."

"We need to develop personal tools to better control information technologies, and to see how technologies that often are described as irresistible and inevitable are really shaped by human decisions and choices (or the failure to make such decisions)."

"The Web is not frustrating because it does nothing but destroy your capacity to think; the problem is that it brings the promised land within view, but keeps it out of reach." It makes some kinds of knowledge work easy- like searching for the answer to a simple question- then makes you think "oh so all my work should be so easy." You reduce the time it takes to look up the year that Star Wars came out to literally 3 seconds (from at least 3 minutes in an encyclopedia) and feel like you should get a 60x speedup in everything else too. When writing your paper or app doesn't get 60x faster, you feel like you're losing out, and start surfing the web in hope of making up for lost time.

What is contemplation?
"Here, I define contemplation to be a form of detached, calm engagement." This is important. It's not just calm. It's that wonderful state of oneness with the machine (or with the musical instrument, or pen, or tennis racket).

And "detached" is important too: it's not (necessarily) video-game sucked-in-ness. You have the ability to monitor your senses and reactions, to be as aware of your own mind as you are of the guys around the corner with rocket launchers. "Detachment of one's emotions or ego doesn't prevent immersion in the moment; it's a precondition for it."

Anyway, is "contemplation" another word for Csikszentmihaly's "flow"? It's been a while since I read that book, but it feels the same.

Careful!
"While Csikszentmihaly wanted to understand how optimal experiences make for more complex and satisfying lives, readers of Flow in the Web and game worlds have tended not to ask questions like "How can we design computers in ways that let users experience flow throughout their lives" but rather "How can we use flow to make e-commerce sites stickier?""
Amen, sir! We must be careful if we seek to use these powers for any ends other than to better our lives! It's like martial arts: while you learn karate, you get a lot of powers. But as Mr. Miyagi knows, you don't learn karate to kick someone's ass.

Possible solutions
Pang then posits a few hypothetical pieces of software that could achieve this goal of contemplation.
- Proust is a writing software (or mode in MS Word) that removes distractions. I'd try it, but I don't just sit and write often enough to know if this would be useful. And when I do, it's often right here in Blogger and I have to find a bunch of links anyway.
- Quixote is a search tool that ... does a lot of things. "It's more like a space in which you search for and organize information..." Because, as I mentioned before, most questions are more complicated than "what year did star wars come out?" Imagine a mode to Google where you could search for N things and mind-map them out in a useful way.
- Sensei aims to bring together all the data from various lifelogging sources to help understand what causes contemplation.
- Xuanzang, though, was the most interesting: it's a tool to promote mindful wandering. You seed it ahead of time with high-quality things that you'd like to read/see/watch/hear while taking a break from concentrating on work. Cue it up, start going through these things (mindfully of course), and then after a few minutes, it asks you if you're refreshed enough to start working. This one had the highest product of awesomeness * doability.
To me, Sensei and Quixote sound wonderful, and at least a decade in the future. I'd be thrilled if someone were to start on either now.

Man, there's even more I could write, but this post is getting long and I'm super tired. Read the article if you're interested, it's only 60 pages.

Sleep ideas from Quantified Self Boston

are here. In general, it's all cool. In specific:

- Eric Smith tried wearing a Zeo while awake. It basically gave him nonsense data (said he was asleep a lot). This makes sense; it's trained on sleeping people. Still, too bad we can't just give people a Zeo and use that to test their wakefulness.

- Sanjiv Shah got a big result from wearing yellow glasses at night. Kind of like f.lux for the whole world. Interesting, especially given the fact that our circadian rhythms are generally 24.18 hours but electric lights stretch them to 25.

- "[Sleep doctor Matt Bianchi's] talk brought up a discussion around the relative value of exploring small effects. The thought is that we should look for simple changes that have big results, i.e., the low hanging fruit. A heuristic suggested was if, after 5-10 days, you’re not seeing a result, then move on to something else."
Fair enough. Especially when real-world things will give you big margins of error anyway. Say that there was a chemical in bananas that made me sleep 1% longer. There's no way I'll do an experiment that has enough power to find that effect in a way that I know it's not just chance; I'd have to collect data for years. Nor is it really that important.

(the weird part is: how did they pick 5-10 days? I've settled on 2 weeks as a pretty good test period for most life changes, but why 2 weeks then? It's like collecting data: getting "about 10 people" for simple experiments seems to be "pretty good." I guess you have to start somewhere.)

EDIT: while I'm on "cool things", here's an idea about dreams from Scientific American: dreams feel more profound to us than they do to other people because serotonin release is inhibited during dreams. (similarly, you get less serotonin while you're on LSD.)

I had another neat idea about dreams the other day (and now we've moved on to straight-up-guesses). So dreams might be caused by random firings in your brain. It's one of the hypotheses out there. If so, it might explain why dreams make so little sense: they're incompressible. If you generate a random string of characters, and pick a random compression scheme, odds are that you can't compress it much at all. So if you take a series of regular daily firings (say, a bunch of yellow lights in a circle) you might say "that's the sun" and compose a bunch of visual inputs into one quick phrase. But if you take random dream firings, it's really tough to compress them (and therefore remember them) at all.

What is enlightenment?

So obviously this blog will alternate real world work with wild speculating. As they say, "Keep my feet on the ground / Keep my head in the clouds."

And speaking of wild speculating, how about we go with "what is enlightenment?" because kind of like "happy" and "good", it's sort of a vague term that we all want.

Okay, so an enlightened guy is some monk who is entirely cool with everything. Fine. He's a guy with a sharply tuned mind who is expertly adept at dealing with the world as it is. How does he get that way?

I propose (and this is not by any means an original proposition) that there are 3 parts: concentration, mindfulness, and compassion. I propose this because in reading about "these sorts of topics", these 3 words keep coming up. (you could also include "attention" and "empathy"; I feel like they're pretty close to, although not the same as, "concentration" and "compassion.") Also, I've heard of people meditating for those 3 things, and I haven't heard of people meditating for anything else.

At any rate, it seems as good a place to start as any. If you are awesome at concentration, mindfulness, and compassion, you're probably pretty enlightened, or (not to put a binary distinction on these things unnecessarily) you probably have a good life. And increasing any one of these factors, even, is a big help.

Well, that cuts down the problem by a factor of about three. I'd say my work's done for the day.

Continuing to be that violent force of light / guaranteed to turn it out bad as dolemite,
Dan

Idea: Only needs and habits cause long-term behavior

Here's an idea I'm kicking around.

What makes you do things every day? (as opposed to one-time things)
- Needs: if something is not right in your life, you will have an incentive to change things.
- Habits: it's what you always do.
- Nothing else.

Habits are obvious. I don't have citations handy, but I'm pretty sure we live most of our lives habitually.

Needs are sort of rare and have to be pretty severe. If I practiced two languages, drawing, working-memory, strength/coordination training, and another bit of meditation for 10 minutes each day, I'd probably be a superhero, for only the cost of an hour each day. But I don't, because there's no need. I've only been able to start doing a couple things, really, and meditation is the biggest, and it took a relatively large crisis of "what is my mind and what am I doing with my life."

Tim Ferriss (and Malcolm Gladwell?) talks about this as "the Harajuku moment" (he knew a guy who, while sitting in fashionable Harajuku, Tokyo, realized "no matter what clothes I buy, I'll always look like hell", and then immediately started to get into shape intensely and successfully). BJ Fogg's behavior model talks about motivation, ability, and triggers. We're talking about things you have the ability to do (sleep more, eat this and not that) so motivation is the biggest issue. But I think I'm disagreeing with him on the types of motivation: I think senses and social issues aren't part of it.

Maybe this is going in circles. I'm pretty sure it's not saying something new; needs more polish. But the point is, I think there are not many reasons to make a behavior change.

TypeRacer for your brain, or, EEGs are not just input devices

I've been psyched about the Emotiv EPOC and the NeuroSky MindSet for a while, even though I've never seen them in action.  Now I have: Tan Le gives a demo at TED.  She shows how you can easily use your brain to make a cube move around the screen.

Cool, sure.  But I feel like she, along with a majority of the Brain-Computer Interfaces world, is missing the point by saying "you can use your brain to control the computer."  You can also use the computer to read your brain!

Beer van Geer gets this.  His program, Dagaz, is a game that you win by concentrating.  Naturally, you'll get better at concentrating as you get better at the game.  It's like flipping the input/output around: you can use a keyboard to enter data to your computer, or you can play TypeRacer on your computer to get better at typing.  The difference is that getting better at typing only helps you while you're typing, but getting better at focusing your brain helps you all the time!

Someone in the audience pointed out "could you use this to help you have better (more productive, happier) work days?"  Yes!  Yes, you could!  And that's only the beginning!

Emotions and Attention: two different things

A lot of things I want to study- mindfulness, attention, left prefrontal cortex activation, being-one-with-the-universe, enlightenment, happiness- are all kinda the same thing.  If you're very mindful, if you're skillful at directing your attention, if your left prefrontal cortex is operating at full capacity, you'll be enlightened/happy.  More or less.

So I feel like whenever I have to answer the question "what do you want to study?" I want to say "you know, everything good in the universe."

I kind of like emotions too.  And I think those are pretty different.  Having good command of your emotions seems like one part of being a happy superman, but only one part.  It's popular nowadays, and for good reason: we've been neglecting it for a while.  (sort of like spatial intelligence, and physical intelligence, and pretty much all the intelligences besides "the mathy one" and maybe "the writing one.")

But I think, given a choice, I'm more interested in The Big Kahuna.  Mindfulness.  Enlightenment.  Whatever it is that Siddharta Gautama had and I do not yet.  It will be interesting to see if this is as rich a research field as emotions.

Interesting unrelated note about emotions: so I was in the Slice Cafe at Google HQ in California (the best place to get breakfast after 9:30AM, and one of the best places on campus, although now that Nourish is open I'm not so sure; seriously, Googlers, go to Nourish if you're in MTV, it's awesome) and Jens Lekman's "Pocketful of Money" (of all songs!) came on, and I got overcome by nostalgia and sadness and also depth and the sense that my life is a really grand movie adventure, and I realized I had this mixed up ball of emotions that really wanted to get out!  I mean, I just wanted to find someone else listening to this song and be like "aaah it's the saddest" and for him/her to be like "I know!", okay I sound like I'm 14 years old, shut up.

The point is, why do we have this compulsion to share emotions?  Particularly the more extreme they are.  It's as if the emotion has a life of its own, like it's a bucket of water, and you want to dump it on other people; but it's not enough to just dump it on them, you want them to soak it in like towels, not just let it run off.  Curious!

A nice metaphor hit me on the way home from work today.

"I want System Monitor/top/Task Manager for the brain."
(If it could End a Process, all the better.)

Incidentally, I heard about iRhythm recently.  A heart monitor that looks like a band-aid, that you wear on your heart.  Unfortunately, looking at their site, it looks like it's a prescription device.  So I searched for "apple heart rate monitor" and came up with this article about a patent application?  Interesting.  Oh, looks like someone already made it.  That whole Nike+ shebang.  Hmm... I wonder if that can be worn (and can collect data) for long periods of time.  Anyone tried it?

And about that last post

In rereading it, I feel like I'm computerizing humans.  I don't want to do that.  The ultimate goal of my research is to make us humans the happiest, not to make us the best at computing.  And it's a tricky trap to fall into, because you start thinking "well, if I always make the best decisions, I'll be the happiest", which is not necessarily true.

That's all for now.

Emotions as quick mental computing

Here's a neat idea, and I'll jot it down even though it's not very polished.  (I think I'll start doing that more here; seems a good place for it.)

Emotions offer quick and sloppy reactions.  You see something that looks like a snake, you run away; only later do you realize it's just a hose.  You could sit down and concentrate and take in all the details of the scene and mentally label everything and say "that is a hose", but that takes too much time.  Emotions are quick at the cost of being precisely correct.

Similar things are going on in the computing world.  You hear about how SQL is getting used less and new sweet techniques (BigTable here at Google, for example) are taking its place.  They're not always 100% correct, for some value of correct; for example, when you search for something, it doesn't tell you the exact number of pages in the Internet that contain that word.  It gives an approximation, which is fine, because the number is about 12 billion anyway.

When I'm playing Dominion, there are 16 cards, and I don't want to exhaustively research every possibility every turn; that'd take forever.  So I pick a card that "feels" good.  Even more when I'm playing a long match of rock-paper-scissors, I have to just go based on gut feeling.  It's not 100% right, and sometimes I make mistakes (playing rock against someone who always plays paper, for example), but it is quick.

So what if we could train our emotions better?  You'd get the kind of tradeoff you get between trying to use SQL for everything and using new better storage solutions.  It's like the difference between Google search and, well, some slower search engine.  Fractions of a second?  Totally worth it.  Instead of trying to put them aside and compute exactly, take advantage of them and learn to make better quick calculations.

I think I've distilled my research goals to one sentence:

"How can we use wearable and ubiquitous computers to help people better understand and improve their own minds?"

So the affective computing is obviously a big part of this.  The cognitive level of computing has been studied a lot (learning research, for example), but that's less interesting to me, because it's just logic.  But what's happening at the emotional level, how can we detect that, and if we can't actually tell what's happening*, how can we at least work with that and use it to help you?

*because it's really just a lot of neurons firing; what do you mean by "what's happening"?

The persuasive technology is a big part too.  I see it as the more applied end of the spectrum.  We don't really know how you decide to eat a burger or a salad, but we can apply little tweaks that will actually work.  And because we don't really know the whole process of how your mind makes decisions, we can't really do big overhauls.  But we can apply little nudges here and there, and this technology could (and does) ship today.

There's more than this; lots of psychology and neuroscience, which I haven't delved too deeply into yet.

And the "how" is often really interesting.  The wearable computers, new input/output methods, that are in the state of "really cool but not used in practice yet"... it would be great to put them to good use!  Brain-computer interfaces are on my radar, but I'm not as excited about them because they're not as far along yet.  As I understand it, it'd be really tough to fit an EEG into your everyday life right now.  (but it would be great if you could!)

These goals will keep evolving, I'm sure.  But I'm finding lots of good stuff that people are doing in these areas, so it looks very promising.

On a side note, I'm psyched about a new series that Cal Newport is starting up.  "The Romantic Scholar."  His blog has been a big influence on how I think about what I want to do with my life for the last year or so.