Tuesday, December 13, 2005

The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey

The Splintered Mind by Douglas Cootey

Excellent blog centred on ADDA. Insights for me, and should be useful to the rest of us defects. List of recommended ADD-related books, too, which in previous times would have sent me straight to Amazon. Nowadays, armed with my new self-knowledge, I’m aware that my habit – of buying technical books then only glancing at them once – is not the result of unfortunate circumstances, but something I’m stuck with.

He’s actually remarkably disciplined – makes rules for himself and sticks to them. I find this admirable, but impossible to use for myself. If I started something like this, it would just become another project, and like all self-driven projects I’d lose interest in it the moment I’d done the interesting bits. And then I’d forget to use the mechanism when the time came.

I’ll have to keep looking for my own strategies.

Game Theory, and why Hobbes was wrong

Hobbes’ Thesis
The philosopher Hobbes has been shocking people for centuries with his beautifully-reasoned arguments that Man requires a Supreme Leader – to whom all one’s rights and individuality must be delegated.

Failure to do this will, says Hobbs, leave humans in the ‘State of Nature’ – acted upon only by instinctive forces. Such a life Hobbes famously describes as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. He equates it to a state of war, in which every man is essentially – prefiguring Darwin - in conflict with every other individual for resources like food, shelter, partners and other basic needs.

The solution to this, as proposed by Hobbes, is a King. Of course, monarchs were the natural solution in force at the time of writing, and at that time a ferocious and often bloody debate was raging over the relative supremacy of Parliament and Monarchy, and Hobbes believed that the latter was the proper way forward.

The King was an individual to whom the populace collectively surrendered all their rights and authority, and who then wielded that collective power on their behalf. In the process he acted to remove the conflict between individuals, resulting in a state of Peace – in contrast to the uncontrolled state of war that, thought Hobbes, Nature made inevitable.

It’s an extraordinary thesis, and hugely compelling. I’m extremely impressed by Hobbes’ ability to cut through sentiment and emotions and see society’s raw dynamics so clearly. I think he’s wrong, though. Humans in the natural state are not inevitably brutal to each other.

He couldn’t have known this, as the key information has only recently become clear.

Game Theory and Trust
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a classic piece of Game Theory. It’s a thought experiment that pits two hypothetical people against each other, both faced with a situation in which they actions of the other – which they can’t control – will affect their future.

They may each choose one of two possible avenues, but it’s the choice of the other that determines whether they have chosen correctly, and the outcome of that choice.

This scenario is normally presented thus:


Two suspects A, B are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and having separated both prisoners, visit each of them and offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution (defects) against the other and the other remains silent, the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence and the betrayer goes free. If both stay silent (cooperate), the police can only give both prisoners 1 year for a minor charge. If both betray each other (defect), they receive a 5-year sentence each.

This may seem at first both complicated and spurious, but in fact it represents in microcosm the sort of choices that we face every day. We constantly have to assess cost/risk/benefit in almost everything we do: each time we purchase a chocolate bar from a corner store we trust that the storekeeper is selling genuine merchandise and not ripping us off. The storekeeper in turn trusts that our money is not counterfeit.

In more complex transactions, especially high-value purchases, we routinely take greater risks: we trust that the car we buy will not fall apart once it leaves the showroom. The seller trusts that our ability to pay the large sums is genuine. We hand over money in the expectation of future goods. We hand over goods in the expectation of future payment. We constantly trust strangers not to rob, injure or cheat us, even when they could get away with it. Why do we take these risks?

The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma
A single Prisoner’s Dilemma ‘game’ is not particularly enlightening. It really only allows one to contemplate the problem of working with others, and the issue of trust. Things become more interesting when repeated games are played, and previous behaviour can be used to estimate the likely future actions of one’s partner in crime: if they have consistently defected in previous games, they’re likely to do it again.

With repeated iterations of the game, it becomes possible to develop a strategy for winning (i.e. minimising one’s jail time). A strategy is essentially an algorithm – a set of rules that provide responses to specific events.

An Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Algorithm (IPD) really has only one input – the actions of the other player over the previous games. The sequence of the other player’s actions can be analysed in various ways in order to decide the algorithm’s single output: whether to Defect (turn the player’s partner in) or Co-operate (remain silent).

Game theorists spent a long time developing and testing algorithms for IPD, and pitting them against others: simple ones that respond with the minimum of thinking; algorithms with complex statistical analyses of the accumulated data; heuristic algorithms using neural nets to learn from their mistakes and successes.

And after a great number of experiments, a clear winner emerged: a strategy that consistently outperformed all the others, no matter which opponent it was partnered with – from complex algorithms to random responders. And what was it that this spectacular world-beater did, that swept all before it?

In plain language, the algorithm – called ‘Tit-For-Tat’ by the developers - was ‘Do unto your partner whatever they last did to you’.

That’s it. No analysis, no heuristics, no statistics – just handing back whatever is dished out to you. And Tit-For-Tat beats everything else.

The implications of this to the real world are hard to be certain of. It appears to indicate that over-analysing is not all that wise, and that past performance is an unreliable guide for prediction, no matter how you cut it.

Changing the Context
Tit-For-Tat is the champion when pitted against any other algorithms. So what happens when everyone is playing TFT? Interesting things, as it turns out.

If the background environment consists entirely of Tit-For-Tat opponents/partners, another algorithm scores even better. Once again, it’s not one of the statistical analysts. This algorithm has the name ‘Forgive Once’. Its operation is very similar to TFT, with one exception: as its name suggests, it will forgive (by ignoring it) a single defection by its partner. Apart from this, it will feed back what’s done to it, just like TFT.

And the trend continues: in an environment consisting entirely of Forgive Once partners, a new algorithm called ‘Forgive Twice’ turns out to be the winner. Work out what that one does. And it doesn’t stop there.

What inferences can we draw from this?

  • Although the mechanisms involved in the Prisoner’s Dilemma are simple and numerical, they map well onto real-world situations.

  • People don’t usually make arithmetic calculations when assessing risk/benefit. They go with ‘what feels right’. But those feelings are the result of instinct and experience, and tend to conform accurately to the calculated optimum.

  • Iterated PD games themselves map well onto everyday real-world experiences, in which an individual must constantly engage in cost/risk/benefit transactions with others. So ubiquitous are these mini-transactions that we tend not to notice them.

  • Many such transactions don’t involve the transfer of material goods, and the interactions take place using non-vocal communication. Being highly verbal animals, we tend not to notice the rich non-verbal interchanges that we carry out continuously with others.

  • Some measure of how important such interchanges are can be gleaned from the difficulties that arise when the communication channels are interrupted or blocked: as in cars, where tempers often flare simply because the appropriate permission-seeking and -granting behaviour is not present.

If the IPD is accepted as a valid model for human behaviour, the fundamental first lesson is that cooperation has a survival advantage.

In the early days of humanity, punishment for infractions of any kind tended to be utterly disproportionate to the actual damage done: agonising death was routinely handed out as a penalty for minor crimes. This could be described as Massive Retaliation.

A breakthrough occurred in the legal Code of Hammurabi, which introduced lex talionis – the principle of retribution referred to as ‘an eye for an eye’, which states that a punishment should exact upon the perpetrator the same level of injury experienced by the victim. This principle is still in use today in some formal judicial processes, and in some less formal social interactions.

Lex Talionis bears a strong functional resemblance to Tit-For-Tat. As a more efficient system – more satisfying for punishee and neutral observer; less so emotionally for victim, but undeniably fairer – than Massive Retaliation, Lex Talionis became widely adopted.

As we have seen, though, in an environment where all participants are playing Tit-For-Tat, a still more efficient algorithm – and therefore modus vivendi – becomes possible.

The Old Testament of the Christian Bible is in part a narrative of the rise of Lex Talionis from the previous state of massive retaliation. This natural progression is at the core of Hobbes’ error: he was unaware of the natural processes that make fairer systems of justice arise, overtaking the bestial ‘State of Nature’ he envisaged.

The Biblical narrative continues in the New Testament. In many ways it was an idea whose time had come, but Christianity was - in the ancient middle eastern world at any rate - in the right place to put forward the idea, and has been unfairly credited with inventing it. The idea was the Forgive Once algorithm.

It was expressed as ‘turn the other cheek’, and it’s worth noting that, despite this USP, Christianity remained a small and relatively unsuccessful desert sect for centuries until Emperor Constantine and his mum, Helena Augusta, suddenly decided to renounce the far more interesting Roman pantheon. The rest is history.

It’s possible that the ‘Forgive Once’ aspect of the new religion may have appealed to a Constantine wearied by the excesses of war. At any rate, it came with the territory, and the fact that the new algorithm is more efficient made its success inevitable.

Our present-day society operates on a variety of ‘Forgive n’ algorithms. Formal transactions tend to be based on Tit-For-Tat (which can be considered to be ‘Forgive Zero’). More ad hoc transactions – especially between friends, and between regular transactors – will involve multiple ‘forgivenesses’. These may be offerings in the expectation of future profit – as in the case of presents to good customers; or effectively symmetrical, as in the case of a temporary loan. Regularly, acts of pure altruism take place, in which not only is there no benefit to the initiator, he must actually lose out: each time someone allows a car from a side-street into the queue, they perform a small sacrifice with no possibility of direct recompense. Why do they do it?

The short answer is that they do it because in the long run such behaviour carries survival benefits, and so selection pressure favours it. The overall trend toward increasing trust continues as each new level is reached: Forgive(1) is overtaken by Forgive(2) and so on, until the population is dominated by increasingly generous and trusting people.

(Note that this treads perilously close to Group Selection, but avoids the problem: TFT is immediately beneficial to the individual, and tends to spread. F(1) has benefits in the TFT environment that results, and so on.)

If the point hasn’t already been banged home enough – which it probably has: Hobbes’ Natural State turns out to be a lot less nasty and brutish than he anticipated. In the absence of an all-powerful monarch or other supreme authority, Man is nevertheless able to adopt a fair, trusting and mutually-beneficial modus vivendi for peaceful interaction with his fellows. This type of morality is neither God-given nor imposed – we get it for nothing because of its survival advantage, and the IPD shows how.

Flies in the Ointment
Of course, in such a fair and trust-based environment, the occasional rogue individual is able to make considerable headway at others’ expense. His rampage is usually limited, however: along with the tendency to trust, humans have an acute ability to detect cheating and falsehood, and good mechanisms for branding the Cheater. The society will tolerate a limited number of truly amoral people, especially the true psychopath with no moral scruples, willing to go to any length to disguise his true nature (in contrast, the average crook is often limited by his own guilty conscience).

A significant social problem is that, ironically, laws tend to be framed in the context of the normal, moral person, and may be weak in dealing with truly 'evil' people except when their transgressions are suitably profound – as in multiple murderers and so on. In this situation, the psychopath may be able to live comfortably within the law, despite causing great harm to others.

A mechanism for detecting such people, and removing them from society - even deleting them from it entirely - would benefit all of society, much more than punishment of those who merely break the letter of the law.

DRM Again

According to The Register, Gartner reckons "the music industry will abandon attempts to encumber CDs with DRM software and refocus its efforts on pushing legislation to require that DRM technology be integrated into PCs."

(Sigh) And so it goes on. Nowhere is the long-running and futile attempt to use technological locks to keep the world away from what they want so concentrated as in the matter of DRM. Having apparently realised the futility of building it into the media, they figure to put it into the base hardware.

This is as likely to work as the last such attempt: making DVD-ROM players region-specific via firmware. No doubt there are some people whose DVD-R players are actually locked to a specific region, but anyone who doesn't want this lockdown will find that a crack is a brief Google away at worst. If you can get in before the firmware locks itself, you can probably find a freeware defeat. After the lock comes in to force, you may have to pay for the crack, but you can certainly still defeat it. More recent DVD burners and their drivers appear to have stopped bothering about the issue altogether, so pointless has it become.

If future brand-name PCs appear with hardware-based DRM, they will simply provide more incentive to go for less mainstream motherboards without such features. The mainstream manufacturers will presumably not be unaware of this factor, and will resist their inclusion. Their best bet would be to make any locks they put in inherently crackable, and the online community will no doubt supply the goods in a while. Chances are there’ll be a ‘secret’ back-door defeat that will mysteriously leak to the public in short order after the kit hits the street.

If the mechanism is put into the O/S, the first cracks for it will probably appear while the stuff is in Beta.

It’s a senseless waste of energy, except for one factor: it’s clear that Apple’s success in getting the music industry buy-in to iTunes was strongly influenced by the ‘uncrackable’ MP4 DRM they included. This appears to have convinced the music publishers to allow their precious files out into the world.

It didn’t stay uncrackable for long. Prior to iTunes 6.0, Apple's DRM was comprehensively cracked, and translation of iTunes music files to straight MP3 became trivial. iTunes v6 introduced a new algorithm, which at the time of writing is still uncracked. It’s unlikely to remain so for long, though. I can only assume that the music moguls complained to Apple, or that Apple felt that they should maintain the façade of uncopyable music for a while longer, until they had more music houses on board. Eventually they’ll presumably give up, lest they force the community they’re frustrating to come up with a mechanism that’ll crack anything – it’s already quite feasible to read the sound synth’s data tables directly.

I guess this is a transition period. They’re always a drag.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

Sony DRM woes

Yet more news on the BBC about Sony’s ongoing DRM troubles. All around you can hear the sound of Sony execs weeping into their beers, the outraged howls of stung customers, and the sniggers of those of us who find the whole things hilarious.

Sony are, they assure us, repenting. Good. Is it possible that other organisations will look upon this mess, and learn from it? The lesson is simple:

You can’t use technology to keep the world away from something they want.

It just doesn’t work. There are too many of us out here, and some are cleverer at undoing locks than your guys are at locking things up. Just because your security system baffles you, it’s no guarantee that you’ll baffle every one of us. Statistically, it’s practically inevitable that somewhere out here in the real world will be someone with the patience, experience and intellect to discover what you’ve done, and how to get around it.

As someone said of the IRA: we only have to get lucky once, and we’re in; to keep us out, you have to get lucky every time. And luck, ultimately, is really the only factor.

(I once worked briefly in a flea market. In one corner of the giant cellar in which it was housed was a group of pinball machines. Every few weeks, the people managing these would come and take one away, and replace it with another, different one. As soon as they’d gone, the little tribe of resident teenage pinny-wizards would swarm over the thing, probing its secrets.

(Within an hour, you could go over to them and ask ‘What’s the trick with this one?’, and they’d say ‘You smack it there, and it gives you a free game’, or ‘Tilt it, and then hit it here’. If such simple tricks failed, they’d prise back the beading on the glass cover, feed a wire coat-hook in, and wiggle it on one of the bumpers until they’d run up a hundred free games. When the numbers got low, they’d ring up another hundred.

(These were pubescent kids, most of them truanting from school, where their academic records were doubtless unremarkable. In minutes they could work their way past the best protection Bally could dream up. Necessity is the mother of some pretty amazing inventions.)

The Security Industry – once a simple sop for the paranoid, but since 9-11 an overriding fact of life – responds to these things by cranking up the sensitivity of their systems. This just makes them more likely to go off spectacularly when spuriously triggered. So false positives become a daily occurrence: cash machines that won’t allow you to get at your own money; the lone car in the parking lot, its alarm wailing away, urgently reporting nothing to no-one; ‘license keys’ with enough bits to specify every particle in the universe. Sometimes it’s easier to go on the Web and get the hack than it is to hunt down the box to find the 24-digit key.

All security systems have this in common: they are a wretched inconvenience to those who have legitimate rights to whatever it is they’re protecting. In contrast, they usually pose little difficulty to the properly-equipped people they’re supposed to keep out.

In ‘80-‘81 I worked in one of the first computer shops. Some software was ‘protected’ and some wasn’t. The unprotected stuff we all messed with, and learned to use. Using the protected stuff would cost our little start-up the price of the package, which we couldn’t afford. So we learned the stuff we could work with, recommended it and sold it by the crate-load.

Later, with the help of early cracker programs and bit-copiers, we managed to make copies of stuff we were interested in for our own use, and we learned that too. And we recommended and sold it. Far from losing out because of what’s now dramatically called ‘software piracy’, the developers of the software benefited enormously in new sales.

This is still the situation today, except that many more types of information are available as digital data, able to be reproduced endlessly without degradation. Even in the analogue days - when the only sources were records and radio, and the only recording mechanism was analogue cassette – the music companies allowed themselves to be convinced that every taped song would otherwise represent a sale. They started the ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ campaign on the back of that notion, but it seems as though nobody paid attention except for an enterprising bunch who set up FACT and FAST, and now make money by propagating the idea that people are ‘stealing’ from the copyright owners. Who gets to see these messages? Why, those who buy or rent DVDs and videos, of course, and then have to sit through little scenes showing what corrupt swine pirate video sellers are, despite the fact that this audience – having bought or rented a genuine DVD – are presumably the last people who need to be told.

Ultimately, such inaccurate targeting is not the most erroneous aspect of this business, of course. The primary raison d’être takes care of that, suggesting that every taped song, film or program is a direct loss to the copyright holder. It isn’t: the overwhelming majority of copied media go to people who would otherwise never obtain a legitimate copy, because it’s too expensive, or because it’s not worth the cost to them – which is really the same thing.

A pirate copier supplies his own media. In the absence of manuals, he may buy 3rd-party books to learn to use the program – and there’s little doubt that pirate software is responsible for a large portion of the sales of such books. He’ll make no use of official tech support, and must fix his own problems. He costs nothing at all.

But those same pirates may well like their stolen property, and recommend it to others. If it’s software, and the need arises for their company to acquire a package, which one is he going to recommend? The same applies to music and film.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

How the Big Boys Buy Toys

Something I do a lot of at work is Bids. Most people are presumably unaware of the machinations that go on when a large company, government or military organisation buys itself a monster IT system, but they're complex, all right. And hard.

Here in Europe, it starts when the organisation publishes an ad in the European Journal, laying out the thing they want - a callcentre, a document management system, a system to help the police solve crimes etc. (Non-Europeans can substitute their own objects and establishments.) Next, interested supplier companies who think they can do the job write in, 'expressing an interest'. The Client then sends the suppliers a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ), which usually asks basic question about the Supplier's finances, ability to tackle the job, previous work references and so on.

If the Client thinks you have what it takes, they will then send the Supplier an Invitation to Tender (ITT), and this is where the going gets tough and expensive. An ITT is usually a thumping great document that the Client has built up over months - even years - and which details exactly what they (think they) need. The nasty bit is the client Statement of Requirements (SoR), which will specify everything from the number of system users to the response time for data accesses. Essentially, they put down every damn thing they can think of. Somewhere in the document, they'll usually break those SoR requirements out into a spreadsheet-style matrix, with each requirement numbered, supplementary information if any, and some sort of flag to say whether the requirement is Mandatory or just Desirable.

The Supplier then has to submit an actual Tender - another even bigger document (usually about the size of a large novel) that describes in even more detail exactly what they plan to do in order to satisfy the SoR. You have to satisfy all of the Mandatories, and unless the competition is pretty weak, you'd better satisfy all the Desirables too.

Consider the size of this task: you have to design a complete, large, complex IT system. It has to satisfy many tens, and sometimes hundreds, of tightly-framed user requirements, including performance times. You have to build the system out of existing commercial software packages as far as possible. Custom code is expensive: it costs a lot to develop; it breaks and costs even more to fix; operating system upgrades break it; upgrades to the other packages in the system break it; no-one else in the world is using it, and your company is the place where any future buck will stop.

The commercial packages in the system have problems of their own: they, too, break. Operating system upgrades do strange things to them. Their long-term interoperability with other packages can't be guaranteed forever. Sometimes a new version of a package will have some characteristic that makes it useless as part of the system. Sometimes the company that developed the package will take years to respond to an OS upgrade, holding the rest of the system back.

So you have to be careful, and that's even harder than it sounds. Chances are that at least some of the features in some of the packages you'll need to use are things you don't know well. Sometimes the whole damn component will be new to you. Under those circumstances you're pretty much forced to take the word of the package supplier on trust, and those guys are very keen to sell product.

You're following a Client specification that probably took them from six months to a couple of years to write. You, on the other hand, usually have less than a month from receiving the ITT to the day you hand the Tender in.

The ITT is written by people intimately involved with the context of what's missing from their lives - they know all about problem. Trouble is, they don't really know all that much about the solution, or they wouldn't be asking someone else to do it for them.

Note that the fact that you're designing this thing on paper, and don't actually have to build it on the spot, doesn't really give you much room for guesswork. If your creation is accepted, your company really will have to build it - at the cost you specified. We're talking millions of quid here. If you get it wrong, and the actual solution needed is bigger and more expensive, you can be sure that the extra money will be extracted from your gluteus with pliers. And then they'll fire you.

Not only do you have to design this system from scratch in a few weeks, your solution has to be cheap, too - at least cheaper than the competition's, and, of course, you don't know what they're going to be charging. The ITTs always have some burble about how they don't undertake to accept the cheapest quote, and that it's 'value for money' that they're after. The fact is, though, that any Supplier who is not the lowest bidder better have a damn good story to tell, because the Client's bean-counters will usually have the final say, and technical excellence and other considerations tend to be secondary.

(So serious a factor is this, that dark rumours abound of companies who virtually give their solution away at cost, and then squeeze money out of the client using every possible trick: £100 to make a phone call; £2000 for an on-site meeting and so on. Anything not written into the bid is charged for, at vampiric rates)

The result of this cost-cutting is not, as one might have hoped, a massive saving to the taxpayer. Instead, it means that over time the IT infrastructure of government, police and military is powered by systems that were probably at the end of their tethers from the day they were installed, and from which every conceivable unstipulated spare capacity has been shaved. The next time you hear about some gigantic, newly installed tax computer or hospital resource management system falling over a week after installation, reflect that some bloody accountant probably insisted they go for that one, even though the engineers knew that a much better system was on offer for a little more wonga.

Bids - horrible, stressful things, requiring blood, sweat, lousy hotels, grim food and late nights. I have to do them all the time.

Ailment Files 1

I have ADD, I reckon.

My company has this irritating habit of forcing mandatory 'training' on its employees, apparently believing this to be a panacea for its various weaknesses. The worst of this is when those in the uppermost levels of management become excited about some new marketing philosophy, or efficiency system.

So excited, in fact, that they decide everyone in the entire company would benefit from knowing about it. So they send forth a diktat that all employees - and there are many tens of thousands - shall complete a training course on whatever it is, with a pass mark of >80% by a given date. This has happened several times in my six years.

I find these courses horrible. I just can't focus on anything I'm not fundamentally interested in - and these are thoroughly uninteresting subjects. By the time I reach the end of the course, I've forgotten what happened at the start.

So I always make use of the mechanism employed - I assume - by most of the other tens of thousands of employees: I get the crib sheet. There's always one around by the time I get round to doing the course, and in fact by that time the said sheet is usually pretty sophisticated, with answers to all the multiple choices. This sheet allows everyone to achieve passes in the 90th percentile, and everyone's happy - except for those of us who don't like such subterfuge, but don't see any choice.

I can say with complete honesty that I can recall nothing whatsoever of any of these courses. I don't even remember the subjects, but I do know that none of this rubbish has ever had any benefit to my work. At all. Ever.

But the most recent one did provide me with a revelation. I was gazing glumly at a screenful of hypothetical situation intended to illustrate a point. I was part-way down the page, and had found, yet again, my concentration drifting off onto a totally unrelated subject. For the umpteenth time, I mentally slapped myself, and tried to focus back on the text.

And of course my concentration drifted again. Why is studying so difficult for me? Why can't I concentrate on this stuff? It's as though I have an inability to concentrate. As though my concentration is defective. As if I have a deficit in my attention. An attention deficit… heeeyy…

So I went looking. I found a WHO paper with an ADD assessment, did it, and got an A+. I read up on symptoms and experiences, and they fit. I signed up to an Adult ADD online support group, and found myself in a crowd of people whose lives were exactly like mine. School had been a disaster for them, as it had been for me. Though acknowledged to be at least as intelligent as their more successful classmates, their academic record had gone into free-fall in the first few years of school. Few of them made it to university.

Their work careers were similarly chaotic: dozens of jobs, many ending acrimoniously. Few advance far up the chain of promotion, most remaining in low-paid and blue-collar positions.

(Which makes me, at least at the moment, a long way off the curve. I'm in a senior position, dealing with complex technical projects, and being paid way above the national average. I have no debts or relationship problems. It wasn't always thus: 15 years ago I was penniless, single, lonely, squatting in a hovel in Whitechapel, and developing a dangerous heroin habit. But right now I'm much less of a typical ADD adult.)

And ADD produces other, less directly related issues. Inability to finish things, once the interesting part is done - leading to work, and life, littered with projects started and then abandoned or forgotten.

I learned that Adult ADD (aADD or ADDA) had taken some time to be recognised as a real disorder. In the US, it's now well-established, but here in the UK its very existence was ignored until very recently. ADD in children is a fully-recognised phenomenon across the world, but for some reason it was always assumed that the disorder somehow simply went away in adulthood. I suspect that the symptoms become less overt over time as the individual learns coping mechanisms, and also that adults' ability to concentrate is under less scrutiny than their younger counterparts.

What treatments were there for this condition? Sadly, not much. Here in the UK, even those are hard to get at. Only a few medics are able to prescribe them, because medications like Ritalin are not licensed for use on adults, so GPs can't do so until their use has been blessed by one of these few. Perhaps there's some sense in requiring a formal diagnosis before handing out the pills, but there must be many ADDA people out there going untreated because of these obstacles.

The more I read up on Ritalin, the less I liked what I heard. It's a stimulant, an upper, and I really don't like those. They tend to make me uncomfortable unless balanced by a suitable downer. As I understand it, the paradoxical reaction that occurs in ADHD kids is one of the diagnostics for the condition: this upper makes them sleepy. Been there, done that, but it's not a peaceful experience. It's tooth-grindingly edgy, and no fun at all. If the stuff is another one of these, then small wonder that the kids don't like to take them, and patient compliance is a problem.

Apart from these, nothing to speak of, apart from the usual pile of 'complementary' junk. There's some Behaviour Modification stuff, but it seems that these are likely to be coping mechanisms, and I reckon I can work out a few of my own.

I'm doing so. Armed with my new knowledge, I know in advance the likely outcome of some events.
  • I know that things I start will probably never be finished, so I don't start them unless I expect to enjoy the journey, and actually reaching the destination isn't that important.

  • I know that I can be distracted utterly by almost any diversion. In the middle of something important, the slightest attention-getting interruption will make me drop the original project and forget it entirely. I have to structure an environment that constantly forces me to be faced with the important work.

  • And I know that studying something that doesn't interest me is a useless exercise. I have to avoid it wherever possible, and if I'm forced to, I have to set my own and others' expectations of the result.

I've located a private clinic I can go to, to get a formal diagnosis and then be referred to one of the licensed docs for a prescription. But I rather think I'll try to work this out on my own for a while. I have some things in my favour. I'm reasonably clever, and it seems I can make out in whatever field I find myself in. I'm stuck with being a Generalist, because specialising would mean having to learn things about a single subject beyond the point where it really interests me. And generalists are useful, too.

Friday, November 25, 2005

Religion and Society

It's widely held - almost axiomatic - that regardless of its truth or falsity, religion has a good effect of society. It teaches, say its proponents, morality, good behaviour, respect for authority and various other useful rules for living that benefit both its adherents and the populace as a whole.

Oops! - no it doesn't. Have a look at this research, in the Journal of Religion and Society.

Having dispensed with that aspect, let's talk about what other reason there may be for religion's existence.

World's Nastiest Ex-Cop

Is Sheriff John Bunnell the most objectionable person in the world, or is it just something he puts on for the show?

I reckon the blustering, bellicose, sneering persona he projects comes straight from the heart. There was an early cop show some years back - before he became a TV personality - that showed him working as an actual cop, carrying out a bust of some sort. Even then, the characteristics that Stojanovich presumably regarded as Star Quality were clearly visible: his undisguised contempt for those he was hunting; his fanatical dedication to his cause, and his unshakeable faith in his own personal righteousness.

The show, of course, is a perfect amplifier for these qualities. I don't know who writes the purple prose, but Bunny delivers it with real feeling. It's formulaic, but he pours all of his bile into each line, no matter how often he repeats them.

Every time the cops do something dangerous or deranged, they're being 'brave'. Each time the Bad Guys do anything unusual, they're 'crazed'. When the cops get lucky, it's a clever plan. The Bad Guys never get away, it seems, unless the footage is so good they really can't bear not to use it - in which case their escape tends to be glossed over as another clever plan.

How dangerous is this stuff, really? It's pretty nasty propaganda, which apparently tries to convince the viewer that all the felons shown are barely human scum, for whom no cruelty is unjustified. The Good Guys, in contrast, are valiant, superhuman heroes whose power and authority is absolute, and demands total, cowering respect.

The intended audience for this rubbish will probably contain a fair number who will be young and gullible enough to be impressed by it. That can't be good for society. Then there's cops themselves, presumably another key audience sector. While it may be good for their morale to have this superhero image fed back to them, it can't be good for their sense of proportion.

I reckon most people in the UK are pretty horrified by the random violence and abuse of power routinely shown being dished out by US cops. How accurate this picture is I've no idea, never having had a brush with them on any of my trips - despite a variety of small illegalities. It seems, though, that innocence is pretty irrelevant in these encounters, and the police will treat anyone they choose as a serial child-killer until they're face down in the mud with cuffs on. Only then will they stop being thugs long enough to become inquisitors. If one received such a beating-up from anyone else, you'd be inclined to go to the police.

And they do this on camera! Heaven knows what happens when no-one's looking - though there's footage of that, too...

Initial misgivings

OK, two people have so far told me I should do a blog. So I will.

I'll probably forget about it before long.

Who'll read this thing? How will they find it? Presumably it's supposed to be organic: some stray berk stumbles on to it via a search engine, and natural selection takes over.

So if I want to tout for custom I should give this thing a high cross-section for search engines - say things that people search for. Like what? Sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, perhaps - yeah, I do all of that.

We'll see.