Daniel Soar: IARPA interested in the use of George Lakoff’s metaphor theory

It’s here, hat tip to Andrew Sullivan. Money quote:

Then – the real test, in phase two of the project – the government will issue the teams with three separate ‘case studies’: tough questions that intelligence analysts might want the answers to. What sorts of question these are going to be is barely hinted at in the briefing documents, but the implication is that the metaphor repository may provide the clue to understanding the hidden aims of different factions where some dispute is involved. What would it tell us if it turned out that encoded in the very language of the Iranian people is the concept that LIFE IS A BLAST?

The fallacy of decision makers

As far as policy, President Obama is a decision maker. So are some other heads of state. Otherwise, not even the Queen of England is one, much less the rest of us plebes. While we make real decisions in the tactical context of our jobs or personal lives, it’s a rare individual who actually gets to decide one way or the other about a policy without implicit and explicit influence from many others.

If we are to think about decision making from the standpoint of policies, it’s probably time to stop thinking about single human agency and shift the frame of reference to professional and social networks ( in the pre-Facebook sense of those words). In truth, most of us who fancy ourselves as decision-makers, are simply implementers, glorified functionaries. Our consequential policy decisions only emerge out of committees gradually, where degrees of freedom are systematically removed.

Why then, do most professionals, and especially academics value the thing they call “autonomy”? Is there a neural circuit in highly intelligent individuals that somehow links reward to a sense of controlling a decision? For that matter, is such a circuit ubiquitous in all humans? I’m not at all sure. Certainly in American culture, the thing we call autonomy is deeply connected up to the characteristic we call “individualism”.

And when we are truly autonomous, at least here in the United States, as its connected up to policy, about the only place I can really see it is in the privacy of the voting booth. But the problem of course is that the choices in the booth may not be very real, as far as policy is concerned. And even when we elect someone who has promised us a really concrete set of coherent policies, the reality of governing may dilute promised policy change to what is actually more of the same.

When can a blog entry make it into your CV?

From this post on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s site. As a journal editor, I’m worried about the details of how you would get peer review into the process. The notion of using an upward filtration process doesn’t satisfy. You need expert peers to make the initial decision. What’s being proposed here is something more akin to a popularity contest.

On the other hand, I’m convinced that some of the intellectual content posted on some blogs is worthy of publication in peer reviewed journals. We just haven’t figured out how to get there. In the meantime, there’s always Arts and Letters Daily.

Psychopathology–Paul Bloom’s Review in the NYT

It’s here. Here’s the teaser:

Do psychopaths enjoy reading books about psychopaths? In his engagingly irreverent new best seller, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (Riverhead, $25.95), the journalist Jon Ronson notes that only about one in 100 people are psychopaths (there is a higher proportion in prisons and corporate boardrooms), but he wonders if this population will be overrepresented among readers of his book.

Regeneration as a biological phenomenon

I’m busy co-editing a virtual symposium issue of our journal, The Biological Bulletin on regeneration with my MBL colleague Joel Smith. For loyal readers unfamiliar with regeneration in the biological context, we are referring to the phenomenon whereby certain animals regenerate tissue (limbs and sometimes even brains) either in the natural course of their life cycle or in response to injury.

Regeneration was one of the main concentration areas of Bernie Agranoff’s laboratory at Michigan at the time when I was doing my thesis work under him. The lab model was the goldfish optic nerve, which in response to injury, can completely repair itself.

But that was a long time ago. What has been wonderful about the present virtual symposium as been re-familiarizing myself with a field, that is, if anything, more exciting and relevant today, that it was in the last century, when it was part of my daily science diet.

In particular, I’ve been enjoying reading the work of HHMI scientist Alejandro Alvarado. His work in the area is seminal and he has brought the full power of molecular and cellular biology to the question.