tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick) (05/18/86)
More on Barry Kort's "Problem of the right-hand tail" (ie social persecution of those with high intelligence). Here is the way I look at the problem. In order to function in society, it is necessary for most individuals to operate in a more or less routine manner, performing certain acts in a repetitive manner. I have been trying to work backwards from models of computation, abstracting certain principles and results in order to obtain models with a wider application, including social behavior. This is somewhat the reverse direction from that taken by those working in Artificial Intelligence, who study intelligent behavior in order to find better ways for machines to function. I am studying how machines function in order to find better ways for humans to function. Anyway, most people in society functioning more or less automatically, they handle input in such a way that only information relevant to their particular problems is assimilated. Input is interpreted according to the pre-existing patterns in their minds. It is as if it was formatted input in fortran, anything that doesn't conform to certain patterns is interpreted nonsensically. The people in the "right-hand tail", IQ distribution-wise, are there primarily due to greater capacity for independent thought, abstract thought, capacity to reason for themselves (or so I claim). Thus these individuals are more likely to have original ideas which don't conform to the pre-existing patterns in the minds of the more average individuals. The average individual will become disturbed when presented with information which he cannot fit into his particular format. And with good reason, since his role is to function as an automaton, more or less, he would be less efficient if he spent time processing information unrelated to his tasks. So by presenting original information to the average individuals in society, the "rightie" is likely to be attacked for disturbing the status quo. To use the machine analogy, the "righties" are more like programmers, who alter the existing software, where the "non-righties" are like machines which execute the instructions they already have in storage. The analogy can be pushed in various ways. We can think of each individual as being both programmer and machine, the faculty of independent judgement and the self being the programmer or system analyst, while the brain is the computing agent to be programmed. The individual is constantly debugging and rewriting the code for his brain, by the choices he makes which become habits, and so on. Also, in interactive protocols where various individuals exchange information, each is tampering with the software of the other. I currently have been working out a strategy for dealing with those I live with who talk too much. It is like having a machine which keeps spewing out garbage every time you give it some input. My current strategy is to carry a little card saying "I am observing silence. I will answer questions in writing." This seems to work very well, it is as if this form of input goes through another channel which does not stimulate so much garbage in response. Or its like saying "the network is down today, so sorry." One last tangent. Note that in studying models of computation one of the primary costs is the cost of memory. We can turn this observation to good use in studying human behavior. For example, suppose your wife asks you to pick up some milk at the store after work. This seems a reasonable enough request, on the surface. But if you think of the cost in terms of memory, suppose short term memory is extremely limited and you have to keep the above request stored in short term memory all day. In effect you are reducing your efficiency in all the tasks you perform all day long, since you have less free space in your short term memory. Thus we see again how women have a brilliant gift for asking seemingly innocent favors which are really enormously costly. The subtle nature of the problem makes it difficult to pin down the real poison in their approach. You can use various strategies in order to deal with this problem. One is to use some external form of storage (like writing it down in a datebook), and having a daemon which periodically wakes up and tells you to look in your external storage to see if anything important is there. Of course this also has its costs. By virtue of the relative newness of computer science, I think there will be opportunities for applying the lessons we have learned about machine behavior to other fields for some time to come. (Since it is only recently that the need for rigorous treatment of models of computation has induced us to really make some progress in understanding these things.)