If the world were a cabbage, this is what it would look like

Executive Suite [Media Notes 61]

Michael Liss brought this film clip to my attention:

It’s from a film called Executive Suite. I’ve not seen it but according to the Wikipedia write-up it’s about board-room wheeling and dealing. The very skilled and highly respected president of the Tredway Corporation suddenly drops dead on the street. A board member tries to take advantage of the situation by purchasing shares with the intention to sell them short. He’s aided in this scheme by the company controller, Loren Shaw, who wants to be the next president. But Don Walling, the VP for Design and Development, isn’t buying it.

In this scene he delivers a jeremiad decrying Shaw’s short-sighted by milking the company for quarterly gains by putting out cheap products at the expense of long-term growth by developing innovative and high-quality products. His speech wins the day. Quality wins out over bean-counting.

That strikes me as rather prescient for a movie that came out in 1964. Though the business press has never been at the center or my attention, I’ve been checking in every now at then for the last forty years or so. I don't know exactly when, but somewhere near the beginning of that period that issue – quarterly profits vs. long-term growth – became a standard issue.

It would be interesting to place this film in two contexts: 1) the evolution of business practices from, say, mid-century to the present, and 2) Hollywood depictions of business. I’m in no position to do either, but some films to look at:

• Citizen Kane (1941): Perhaps the best-known film about business, though it’s not so much about business as it is about a charismatic businessman.
• Wall Street (1987): Michael Douglas plays Gorden Gekko, a Wall Street player, who divers the famous “greed is good” speech.
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005): This is a documentary about betting on oil markets.
• The Wolf of Wall Street (2013): Leonardo DiCaprio gets rich running a “pump and dump” shop and eventually gets caught.
• The Big Short (2015): I’ve not seen this one, but Wikipedia says its based on the financial crisis of 2008.

Two jazz versions of "Chim Chim Cheree" – Trane and Pops

John Coltrane, 1965 

The tune is from a movie, Mary Poppins, which I didn't see, though I certainly heard the tune often enough. Julie Andrews was in the title role and she sang the tune. But it's John Coltrane's version that's burned into my brain. It's on the album, The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, and boy does it ever. This is the "classic" quartet, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrett on bass, Elvin Jones on drums, and Trane on saxes. He plays soprano sax on this tune.

Sydney Bechet played soprano sax earlier in the century, but it then disappeared from view until Coltrane brought it back in the early 1960s. By this time Trane had for the most part dropped changes-based tunes in favor of modal jazz. A year or two later he dropped even that in favor of wide-open unstructured wailing. 

Thrilling times.

Louis Armstrong, 1968 

This is the first time I heard Louis Armstrong perform the tune. He both sings and plays the trumpet, which he'd been doing for the last three decades or so. Stylistically it's worlds apart from Trane's version. Stylistically, it could have been recorded in the 1930s. And yet without Pops, there'd have been no Trane. They're separated by two, maybe three, musical revolutions – depending on how you parse the history.

Time flies when you're having fun.

Four hours a day, tops, for maximum creativity

Oliver Burkeman, The three-of-four-hours rule for getting creative work done:

There aren't many hard-and-fast rules of time management that apply to everyone, always, regardless of situation or personality (which is why I tend to emphasise general principles instead). But I think there might be one: you almost certainly can't consistently do the kind of work that demands serious mental focus for more than about three or four hours a day.

As I've written before, it's positively spooky how frequently this three-to-four hour range crops up in accounts of the habits of the famously creative. Charles Darwin, at work on the theory of evolution in his study at Down House, toiled for two 90-minute periods and one one-hour period per day; the mathematical genius Henri Poincaré worked for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. Thomas Jefferson, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Ingmar Bergman and many more all basically followed suit, as Alex Pang explains in his book Rest (where he also discusses research supporting the idea: this isn't just a matter of cherry-picking examples to prove a point). [...]

The real lesson – or one of them – is that it pays to use whatever freedom you do have over your schedule not to "maximise your time" or "optimise your day", in some vague way, but specifically to ringfence three or four hours of undisturbed focus (ideally when your energy levels are highest). Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos.

This feels about right to me. It’s not unusual for me to work 8 to 10 hours (occasionally more) in a day. But the really tough work, whatever it is for that day, is done in 3 or 4 hours. The rest of the time is spent on lesser tasks. Moreover, if I’ve done tough work for three or four days in a row, sometimes I have to take a day off and just putter through the day.

But there’s another side to this. I usually need to have those three or four hours in a single block of time. I can’t break it up in two shorter blocks. It takes time to get into a working “head.” Once I’m there I need to stay there until the energy’s gone. Working into things twice in one day takes up too much time just getting into the right frame of mind.

File this under behavioral mode.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

On the path

Ramble at the beginning of August 2021: We’re lost, looking for meaning, alas inequality [the Tractatus]

The inequality that sends billionaires into space is not an independent and isolated feature of the contemporary world. But let’s not start there. Let’s start with something ‘easy,’ Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, then we can think about the meaning of life, and then we can take a look at inequality – kith and kin to those billionaires. I end with a somewhat whimsical suggestion for a Twitter tax for the rich.

This is something of a grab bag and a parking lot. I’ve been thinking of these things and put them here so I know where they are. In time I’ll attempt to make sense of them. Maybe.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

I recently read a post by Rohit (The Architecture of Knowledge) that reminded me of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I asked him about it and he replied that, yes, he was familiar with it and that it was “an inspiration forever in its scope and ambition.”

I understand where he’s coming from. I read it early in my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins and it had a strong effect on me. Yes, for its logical structure, but also for its last proposition: “7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” I’d almost say its appeal was evenly split by that proposition and by the rest of it.

Looking back, it is a peculiar work. I went on to study computational semantics in my graduate years at SUNY Buffalo where I studied computational semantics with David Hays (while working on a degree in English literature). There I certainly was interested in something one might as well call “the architecture of knowledge,” that is, the structure of human knowledge. For the most part we – members of Hays’s research group – were interested in general principle, on the one hand, and small scale structures on the other. Yet my first major piece of work, an analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, certainly implied large scale structure, as did my dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory” (1978). That work certainly looks very different from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.

Wittgenstein was much taken with symbolic logic, which was relatively new at the time. He took its propositions to represent, that is, to be capable of representing, facts about the world. The world itself? Is that what he was chasing? Or did he think of those propositions as representing what Noam Chomsky came to call mentalese, the conceptual language of the human mind? Perhaps he did, but if so, he later came to rather different views on such subjects. In any event it certainly doesn’t look the work I did with David Hays or, for that, matter any of the roughly similar work others were doing at the time (see, e.g., John Sowa’s comprehensive website on knowledge representation).

Of course representing how we think about the world is very different from representing the world as it really is. That’s something fraught with metaphysical difficulties. And yet that’s something I’ve given some attention to in recent years, I’m thinking particularly about my work on pluralism, but also my more recent work, What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world. This work, however, is quite different from, has a very different texture than, the earlier work on conceptual structures.

That there is a clear difference between these two bodies of work suggests that we’ve learned something in the decades that have passed since Wittgenstein wrote his Tractatus. That work, it seems to me in retrospect, is neither about the world nor about our representations of the world. Or it is indifferently about both. It is an undifferentiated metaphysical ether.

To live a meaningful life

Meanwhile, our visions of the future are vapid, a theme I’ve been exploring in a recent series of posts on billionaires-in-space and in a post on our visions of the future. I think this is linked to various posts I’ve made about living a meaningful life:

• Scott Sumner, Meaning in Life,
  
• Our Rage for Order and Coherence,
  
• Personality, understanding, and anxiety as the driver of cultural evolution [Tech Evol],
  
• Fear of death as a driving force in human (cultural) life

Our visions of the future are not coupled with, do not emerge from, a belief in living a meaningful life. Absent such a belief, billionaires going into space collapses into self-regarding joy-riding. These seem to be people unconnected with the world, holding themselves above and outside the world. They are hollow men.

But how does the human mind, the human spirit, find itself at home in the world? For that’s what’s at stake. In a post about Mark Moffett’s The Human Swarm I made some observations about identity that are relevant to the question of meaning:

The argument that needs to be made is that our nervous system affords us open-ended awareness of the world. I suspect that’s a joint product of the active nature of the nervous system and the emergence of language. On that active nature, the nervous system doesn’t passively take the world in, but rather actively probes the world through continuously projecting expectations – think, for example, of the model William Powers developed almost a half century ago in Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973). Thus perception is a process of verifying those projections (or, to use a more current language, updating Baysian priors).

The emergence of language leads to an endless curiosity about everything: What’s that? How does it work? Where’d it come from? Living becomes thus becomes a dialog with the world. And the question, Where did WE come from? will arise in that process. The answer initially takes the form of myth, of stories about origins. And those stories, in effect, establish the link between a society and world. That too is a matter of identity.

Those same myths and stories direct our search for meaning in life. Where do stories of billionaires joy-riding in space direct that search for meaning?

Inequality, executive pay, and stagnation

Back in 2019 Tyler Cowen published a short article in Time, Why CEOs Actually Deserve Their Gazillion-Dollar Salaries, which was excerpted from his recent book, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. After acknowledging that that top CEOs make 300 times as much as the average worker, Cowen argues:

While individual cases of overpayment definitely exist, in general, the determinants of CEO pay are not so mysterious and not so mired in corruption. In fact, overall CEO compensation for the top companies rises pretty much in lockstep with the value of those companies on the stock market.

The best model for understanding the growth of CEO pay, though, is that of limited CEO talent in a world where business opportunities for the top firms are growing rapidly. The efforts of America’s highest-earning 1% have been one of the more dynamic elements of the global economy. It’s not popular to say, but one reason their pay has gone up so much is that CEOs really have upped their game relative to many other workers in the U.S. economy.

Today’s CEO, at least for major American firms, must have many more skills than simply being able to “run the company.” CEOs must have a good sense of financial markets and maybe even how the company should trade in them. They also need better public relations skills than their predecessors, as the costs of even a minor slipup can be significant.

And so forth and so on, “yada yada,” to quote various characters from Seinfeld. I’m willing to grant that these highly compensated executives get their jobs through honest labor, rather than some form of corruption, and that, on the whole, they are more competent than the next lower tier of executive talent.

What I question is that ratio between CEO pay and the pay of the average worker, 300-to-1. Is that necessary? Wouldn’t a 30-to-1 compensation ratio leave plenty of room for these (mostly) guys to play “mine is bigger than yours”? Where did that ratio come from?

We know roughly when it arose, after the 1960s. In August of 2020 the Economic Policy Institute reported:

In 2019, a CEO at one of the top 350 firms in the U.S. was paid $21.3 million on average (using a “realized” measure of CEO pay that counts stock awards when vested and stock options when cashed in rather than when granted). This 14% increase from 2018 occurred because of rapid growth in vested stock awards and exercised stock options tied to stock market growth. Using a different “granted” measure of CEO pay, average top CEO compensation was $14.5 million in 2019. In 2019, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 320-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 293-to-1 in 2018 and a big increase from 21-to-1 in 1965 and 61-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more—about six times as much—as other very high earners (wage earners in the top 0.1%). From 1978 to 2019, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,167%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (741%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 337% between 1978 and 2018, the latest data year available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 13.7% from 1978 to 2019.

Cowen has also written about something he calls The Great Stagnation (2011), when America’s productivity started slumping. As I recall he sees stagnation as beginning in the 1970s. So CEO pay starting galloping upward at roughly the same time economic productivity started slowing down. Is there a connection there?

I’m not suggesting that one caused the other, though I must admit the correlation is tempting. However, the CEO compensation system is not a system that is isolated from and thus independent of the overall economy. They are two aspects of the same economic system.

The Danes were in India in the early 17th century [my homies!]

The answer may surprise you (it certainly surprised me). It's the Danes! pic.twitter.com/M1TloJiRJk

— Dr Anton Howes (@antonhowes) August 3, 2021

Is this the kind of thing that inspired Plato's allegory of the cave?

Innocence! 💓
pic.twitter.com/zFRDu8DsV7

— Figen.. (@TheFigen) August 3, 2021

South Korea's transformation

South Korea scores in the top 10% of liberal democracies

Bucking a global trend, it's become more democratic

This is the only country to go from male-biased sex ratios to daughter preference.

And perhaps the most successful feminist movement in East Asia. pic.twitter.com/c5taCJiSkV

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) August 3, 2021

South Korea has increased public spending on childcare over the past 3 decades.

Centre-left governments increased parental leave, deregulated childcare provision, & provided a child-care allowance.

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) August 3, 2021

However...

Women's economic marginalisation and dependence on male breadwinners makes it difficult to resist, yet

We see unpredictably high levels of association in South Korea

340 women’s organisations, labour unions and NGOs launched ‘Citizens’ Action with MeToo & campaigned ‘With You’. pic.twitter.com/MFAz1Uf09e

— Alice Evans (@_alice_evans) August 3, 2021

The whole thread is worthwhile. Check it out on Twitter.

AI in Covid, vaccine design, and protein folding

The set of people RTing that is pretty completely disjoint from the set of people RTing #AlphaFold, or this article from last September about the (apparently large) role ML plays now in vaccine design. + https://t.co/1yIwPuHt1c

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) August 2, 2021

observing that there seems to be a space open for a discourse that would aim to summarize and integrate the social consequences of ML across a range of domains, neither "hyping" nor "de-hyping" but describing them.

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) August 2, 2021

Light play

Some varieties of improvisation, from New Orleans, through bebop, to Cage, and to K-Pop

Nahre Sol recently posted a video about improvisation, a subject she’s been posting about for several years: Why is Improvisation SO DIFFICULT for Classical Musicians?

Independently of what she said, there are two obvious answers to her question: 1) it isn’t part of their training and so is utterly foreign, and 2) it is to some extent surrounded by a mystique that magnifies the difficulties imposed by lack of training. It’s as though improvisation is this special thing where you have to learn the secret handshake and go through the initiation ritual before you’re allowed to even begin doing it.

I don’t know where the mystique came from – it was there when I was young in the 1960s – but I suspect it may be a reflex of the process whereby improvisation disappeared from the classical tradition. For, as Sol points out, improvisation was important in the Baroque era and into the 19th century. Thus Mozart was renowned for his improvisation and I recall reading somewhere that someone had even suggested that some of Beethoven’s piano sonatas are derived from improvisations. But by the late 19th century improvisation had all but disappeared – though as Sol notes, it continues among organists (many of whom have to improvise interludes and such for church services).

Why did it disappear? I’m not sure we really know. One thing, as Sol points out, is that it is pretty hard to imagine how one could create a piece of music where all the musicians in a symphony orchestra (60 to a 100 or more musicians) are busy making stuff up. How do they coordinate what they’re going so that the resulting performance is a coherent musical experience?

Roles in an ensemble

But the problem exists for small ensembles as well. A classical string quartet is very different from a small jazz group, quartet, quintet, or more or two more, or, for that matter, a rock group or a bluegrass group. In a jazz group there is a clear distinction between the rhythm section – generally piano (or sometimes guitar), bass, and drums – and the front line – generally one or two horns, trumpet and/or saxophone, and/or trombone. The rhythm section is responsible for maintaining the basic form of the piece, harmonic structure and rhythmic pulse, while the front line musicians are free to improvise melodic lines. The rhythm section players are thus more constrained than the front line soloists.

This distinction between front line and rhythm section doesn’t exist for a string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello) or for other chamber ensembles. While the players will take different roles in the course of a piece, sometimes more foreground, sometimes more background, there is no one player who can outline and anchor the harmonic structure the way a pianist in a jazz group can. While strings can play double and even triple and quadruple stops, I suspect you’d have some very annoyed cellists if they were forced to play triple and quadruple stops all the way through a piece, nor would it sound very good. Triple stops and even quadruple stops can be used here and there, but employing them on a continuous basis is something reserved to Paganini-style stunt pieces. Consequently all the players in a string quartet must play a role in maintaining the harmonic structure of the piece. And while one player will be assigned the melodic line (often, but not always the first violin), that is quite different from the relatively free improvisation of a horn soloist in a small group jazz.

Returning to jazz, we need to recognize that the scope of improvisation itself has changed from one style to the next. In the earliest form, New Orleans style traditional jazz (later revived as Dixieland), you didn’t have solos. While the group did recognize the distinction between front line (typically clarinet, trumpet, and trombone) and rhythm section (generally tuba rather than string bass, banjo and/or piano, and drums), the front line musicians did not play solos. One instrument, often the trumpet, would play the melody at the beginning and end while the other two instruments would play stylized counter melodies. Between the beginning and the end the front liners engaged in group improvisation (with the rhythm section), highly stylized and constrained counterpoint lines in relation to one another. The solo developed from something called a ‘break’: the rhythm section would stop playing for a short time, say four bars, and one of the front liners would improvise a line to fill the space. By extending the break and bringing the rhythm section in for background you have a solo. Sidney Bechet and Louis Armstrong appear to have been the prime movers here.

Starting in the mid-to late 1920s, traditional jazz gave way to the big bands of the swing era. These bands consisted of a rhythm section (piano, and sometimes guitar, bass, and drums) and trumpet, saxophone, and trombone sections, each with three to four members. The big band was a composer’s and arranger’s medium. Star soloists would be given a chorus, maybe two, in arrangements, but they weren’t expected to carry a performance. Nor is it clear to me just how much improvisation they did, as opposed to un-notated composition – something I’ll take up in the next section.

It really isn’t until we come to the bebop era, starting the early to mid 1940s, that the improvised solo comes to dominate jazz. Bebop was a small group form, typically quartets and quintets. The arrangements were simple:

1. a brief introduction from the rhythm section,
2. the front line plays the head (i.e. melody), often in unison, but sometimes in harmony,
3. solos from the front line, often the pianist would take a solo, sometimes the bassist, and often the solo section would end with the front-line trading four and eight-bar phrases with the drummer, and finally,
4. repeat the head.

The soloists would each have the same number of choruses, though the slow tempo of ballads often required different arrangements, and each was free to do as they pleased within the general constraints of the form. Later soloists were not required to use material provided by an earlier soloist, nor was there any requirement to somehow create a form that somehow went beyond the theme-and-variations format.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s various musicians experimented with freer formats, either simplifying to simple modal forms or loosening harmonic constraints. In time avant-garde groups would all but eliminate the difference between front line and the rhythm section. At that point any player was free to take any role in the evolving performance.

Let’s move on.

Un-notated composition

Back in 2018 Ethan Iverson interviewed Carla Bley, the (stone cold genius) jazz composer. She talked of having met Louis Armstrong:

I actually met Louis Armstrong! That was really amazing. It was in the subway and he was with his wife, they were going home to Queens. I just practically fell over. I couldn’t believe it. I thought that he lived on a cloud somewhere, in a palace, not in Queens. He was a very nice person, nice to me, anyway. I, of course, revere him for the same reason as I revere Count Basie. Everything is perfect. Every note, all the phrasing, is perfect. He worked on it. He told me he didn’t have that ethic that the rest of the musicians have, always coming up with something new, never repeating themselves. He just worked on a solo until he had it, and that was really freeing for a person like me, used to writing everything down. I couldn’t really enjoy improvising. When it turns out great, I am thrilled. But on the way to sounding even good, I’m in a terror. I just cannot relax.

Let’s be clear about that. When you listen to a Louis Armstrong solo, whether on a sound recording or a YouTube clip, most likely you are not hearing something he improvised on the spot. Rather, you are hearing something he’d worked over until he was satisfied. He then played that on all further occasions. What you are hearing is a composition which has not been notated. It will vary in minor ways from performance to performance, but it is always recognizably the same melodic line.

Consider this 1928 recording of “West End Blues,” in particular, listen to the opening cadenza:

Here’s a live performance from 1955 (with a helpful transcription):

After almost three decades he’s still playing the same cadenza, and his solo chorus at the end is the same as well.

Was he improvising or not? It depends. I’d be very surprised if he’d lost the ability to make up interesting melodies on the spot. He just was not interested in doing that once he’d arrived at an approach he liked. A saxophonist I worked with in a rhythm and blues band some years ago was the same way. Once he’d arrived at a solo he liked, he stuck with it.

In Armstrong’s case that solo has become part of the jazz canon, and, as such, part of the apparatus of jazz education that has been build up over the last five or six decades. Thus, last year something called the “West End Blues Challenge” swept through jazz trumpet circles on YouTube. Trumpeter after trumpeter played that cadenza. I don’t know how many versions there are; I’ve only listened to a half-dozen or so. All of them are technically competent, and musical as well. And they’re different in small ways. How could they not be? They’re different musicians, no?

Device for detecting brains synchronized through talking drums

Talking Drums [another channel though which language can be conveyed]

Cecilia Durojaye,Kristina L. Knowles, Jakob Patten, Mordecai J. Garcia3 and Michael K. McBeath, When Music Speaks: An Acoustic Study of the Speech Surrogacy of the Nigerian Dùndún Talking Drum, Front. Commun., 27 July 2021, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.652690

Abstract: Yorùbá dùndún drumming is an oral tradition which allows for manipulation of gliding pitch contours in ways that correspond to the differentiation of the Yorùbá linguistic tone levels. This feature enables the drum to be employed as both a musical instrument and a speech surrogate. In this study, we examined four modes of the dùndún talking drum, compared them to vocal singing and talking in the Yorùbá language, and analyzed the extent of microstructural overlap between these categories, making this study one of the first to examine the vocal surrogacy of the drum in song. We compared the fundamental frequency, timing pattern, and intensity contour of syllables from the same sample phrase recorded in the various communicative forms and we correlated each vocalization style with each of the corresponding drumming modes. We analyzed 30 spoken and sung verbal utterances and their corresponding drum and song excerpts collected from three native Yorùbá speakers and three professional dùndún drummers in Nigeria. The findings confirm that the dùndún can very accurately mimic microstructural acoustic temporal, fundamental frequency, and intensity characteristics of Yorùbá vocalization when doing so directly, and that this acoustic match systematically decreases for the drumming modes in which more musical context is specified. Our findings acoustically verify the distinction between four drumming mode categories and confirm their acoustical match to corresponding verbal modes. Understanding how musical and speech aspects interconnect in the dùndún talking drum clarifies acoustical properties that overlap between vocal utterances (speech and song) and corresponding imitations on the drum and verifies the potential functionality of speech surrogacy communications systems.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

Synchronized brains = extended consciousness(?)

Ana Lucía Valencia, Tom Froese, What binds us? Inter-brain neural synchronization and its implications for theories of human consciousness, Neuroscience of Consciousness, Volume 2020, Issue 1, 2020, niaa010, https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaa010

Abstract: The association between neural oscillations and functional integration is widely recognized in the study of human cognition. Large-scale synchronization of neural activity has also been proposed as the neural basis of consciousness. Intriguingly, a growing number of studies in social cognitive neuroscience reveal that phase synchronization similarly appears across brains during meaningful social interaction. Moreover, this inter-brain synchronization has been associated with subjective reports of social connectedness, engagement, and cooperativeness, as well as experiences of social cohesion and ‘self-other merging’. These findings challenge the standard view of human consciousness as essentially first-person singular and private. We therefore revisit the recent controversy over the possibility of extended consciousness and argue that evidence of inter-brain synchronization in the fastest frequency bands overcomes the hitherto most convincing sceptical position. If this proposal is on the right track, our understanding of human consciousness would be profoundly transformed, and we propose a method to test this proposal experimentally.

H/t Tyler Cowen.