XKCD pointed out that for everyday tasks it might be rational to spend a few hours to shave off a minute each day: over the next 5 years the time will be saved. Of course, to some people dressing is a delight that should not be unduly shortened. But many of my friends find it a chore: they might recognize the importance of being decently dressed, yet find it hard to do. Hence they agonize over it, and do not find it a very worthwhile activity.

In the following I will show that it pays off to learn to dress better, but maybe not so much being an overly critical dresser.

Suppose you have probability p of selecting something that looks good, and probability q of noticing when you have a bad combination. So after the first try you have a nice combination with probability p, leave with something ugly with probability (1-p)(1-q), and do a new try with probability (1-p)q. Then the total probability of ending up with something nice will be P = p + (1-p)q( p + (1-p)q ( p + ... )))). The series S=1+x(1+x(1+...)))) must fulfil S=1+x(S), or S=1/(1-x) (it is a geometric series after all), so P = p/(1-q(1-p)).

For example, if p=0.5 and q=0.25, P=0.5/(1-.125)=0.57. If you have a sharper eye, q=0.5, and now P=0.66. Being good at selecting clothes (p) obviously helps, but noticing clashes (q) can compensate for bad selection ability - it just takes time.

How long does it take? The number of steps is distributed as a geometric random variable with parameter (1-p)q. So you should expect to do 1/(1-(1-p)q) trials before you finish. In the above p=q=0.5 case you would hence on average try 1.33 times. Just being critical will not slow you down if you are good at selecting, but if you are bad at selecting yet critical it will take a while.

What is the most efficient level of critical scrutiny? We could model the utility as the probability of dressing nicely divided by the number of steps it takes:
U= [p/(1-(1-p)q)] / [1/(1-(1-p)q)] = p. So by this measure critical scrutiny doesn't matter, only your basic skill in selecting clothes.

Another utility model says that nice appearance has value N and sloppy appearance has zero value, and lost time has value -t per step. In that case the total utility will be
U=N(p/(1-q(1-p))) - t/(1-q(1-p)) = (Np - t)/(1-q(1-p))
So the utility goes up for higher q if N>t/p. If the value of looking neat across the day is better than losing a few minutes in the morning you should hence be a critical dresser. If if the value isn't high, just throw on anything that fits and is clean enough.

In fact, most of us likely value avoiding embarrassment more than losing a bit of time. So if we add a -N value penalty term for looking bad, we get U= (N(2p-1) - t)/(1-q(1-p)). This function varies much more with p than q, suggesting that if embarrassment is a major factor in your thinking besides efficiency you should aim at becoming better at selecting clothes in the first place - being highly critical might actually not help a lot.

Conclusions: By thinking through these considerations now, you can optimize your dressing for the foreseeable future. You can save a lot of time by increasing p, especially if it is really low (it is both likely easy to increase, and it reduces the time spent iterating - I recommend "Dress for Success" by John T. Molloy as a classic intro, relevant even if you are not a businessman). Being overly critical is of much less use than it seems: yes, sometimes you will spot a stupid mistake, but becoming better at p helps more than boosting q.

In situations where variation doesn't matter, it might be best to use memoization: just spend enough time to find a really perfect combination (or a set of combinations) and store them for later. That way dressing can be solved in O(1) time for everyday use.

(This post was originally a reply on the Extropians mailing list, now extended and corrected)

On the FHI YouTubechannel some of the videos from the Winter Intelligence conference are now up. Here is my talk on ethics of brain emulation:

I'll post a link to the preprint of the paper when it is finished.

There is an interesting twist to the privacy issue: is privacy even relevant in a hive mind? Of course, the situation is different if we just use the term to denote a highly connected society. But a complete hive mind would be a single being. Why should there be any need for privacy?

There are two reasons. The first looks as privacy as compartmentalization. Compartmentalization is important in our own bodies and brains. Everything is *not* connected to everything, but usually in fairly specific ways. Our different mental modules do not completely talk to each other. Looking at brain connectivity matrices show that they are fairly sparse, and indeed seem to have a nonrandom structure. There are no doubt some cross-connections (and synesthetes), but there is not much reason to link the primary visual cortex straight to a motor planning.

Keeping systems separate makes it easier for them to learn what to actually respond to - a neural network trying to learn a mapping of inputs to a desired output will do it much better if there are no irrelevant input channels. Even the existing cross-connections seem to sometime impair our thinking, like the weird effect where immobilizing one arm makes the other more dexterous or where using TMS to inhibit some cortical areas improve performance. So a unified hive mind might actually not want every unit to be in contact with every other: beside the quadratic bandwidth requirement, most information would be irrelevant and distracting. Modularity and abstraction barriers are great for software and organisations, and no doubt good engineering principles for hive minds.

Second, privacy is about our desire to control who have access to our information and what they do with it. The problem is that once information is "out there" we lack control. Leaks can happen because somebody breaches trust, but also because apparently innocuous information is inferentially promiscuous and allow others to deduce unintended things, stored information may become accessible in the unknown future, or we do not realize the range of what can be done with it. This has plenty to do with how the actions influence us or our goals, and little with the information itself. So one could argue that in a true hive mind this account of privacy as information control and trust is not needed since all units have aligned interests.

But that seems to be a big assumption. The "interests" of many parts of our bodies and minds do not seem to be perfectly aligned, yet they participate in the organism. There are selfish genes and genetic components, contradictory drives and plans, and so on. I have a desire to stay healthy in order to achieve various higher order life goals, but my hypothalamus makes me desire fattening food. And if the hive mind comes about due to the gradual merging of previously independent people, it is plausible that many forms of local and group selfishness may be grandfathered in. It is not even clear that it would be better to have perfectly aligned interests: competition is a good method of generating diverse new solutions. The fact that we have multiple goals and shift between them seems to prevent the kind of universalist ruthlessness it is easy to deduce from utility-based AI programs. A hive mind might hence benefit from not having subsystems with goals identical to itself, especially if the top level goals are so complex they are hard to represent by the subsystems.

So privacy might not be exactly dead even in a hive mind world.

I have been longing for knotted vortices for years. It all began when I got The Inventions of Daedalus by David Jones. In one of the essays he suggests how to make knotted magnetic fields: sheath a flexible solenoid in superconductor tubing (so field lines cannot cross it). Make a knot on it. Turn on the power: now you have a normal magnetic field between the ends. Now untie the knot. Since the field lines will not intersect and cannot escape the superconductor tube the knot must end up on the magnetic field: between the poles of the solenoid there is now a knotted field.

This was mainly done in jest, of course. But I found it hard to see why it would not work (vector potentials don't have to be conservative). When I brought it up to Göran Grimvall he briefly handwaved it (probably because I, as a student, didn't explain it very clearly). However, it turns out that there are indeed real papers on magnetic knots. And, unsurprisingly, they are not really stable.

Getting a knotted vortex is in a sense the dual to the knotted magnetic field: if you have a knotted wire carrying a current it ought to produce a magnetic field that circulates like the fluid.

There is a surprisingly common assumption that people will eventually act out disturbing fantasies they have. If that were true, the murder and rape rate would be astronomical. Part of it is due to evidence bias: serial rapists and killers certainly often have deviant fantasies and it comes to our notice during the court hearings, but a large fraction of normal, law-abiding nice people also have them.

Another idea is that people easily mix up reality and imagination. If that were true we should expect lots of murderous Macbeth actors. Perhaps the form of reality mixing that actually does matter is that hours per week of television viewing correlates with the fear of being a victim of crimes: the bias of media to show newsworthy stories give people availability heuristic bias to think that there is a lot of crime.

In general, we have a very simplified imaginary model of what a criminal is like, fortunately not built on real experience but on fiction. Similarly we tend to overestimate how predictable people are, especially when they are very unlike us. So we tend to overestimate the validity of profiling and underestimate the need of solid non-fantasy evidence.

D. Huylebrouck sent me a great article: Belgian town of De Panne blunders with artwork: Unfortunate miscalculation

Basically, the big golden ratio/Fibonacci artwork has an addition error making the numbers wrong. As noted in the article, it is not the only one. I was reminded of the famous sculpture Kryptos outside the CIA that also contains a typo making decryption hard.

The obvious conclusion is that artists don't double-check their artworks.

Normally this is not needed, since all the content exists on some readily accessible surface/physical layer and the implied deeper layers of meaning emerge from that layer using robust human inference. When we see Michelangelo's David we see the marble form, interpret it in terms of human appearance and mythology, and then extrapolate deeper levels based on context. But while the artwork in De Panne can be interpreted this way (golden ratio concrete block, spiral, numbers as a first level, leading to layers of mathematical and art history meaning) the erroneous symbols create an accidental, nearly parasitical meaning: rather than showing the regularity and infinite perfection of mathematics, it now leads the viewer to consider error, confusion and mistakes. Kryptos is even worse: here much of the meaning resides in the existence of a hidden but in principle decipherable layer, and the typo destroys some of the content in that layer.

It is even more obvious in case of informative artworks like commemorative sculptures or memorials: here there is some information layer linked to the real world the sculpture is intended to reveal and perhaps put into a deeper context, but of course that link can be erroneous. These kinds of artwork are fragile in an informational sense: a single letter or number can destroy their symbolism.

Recognizing whether you are working in a fragile domain (a single error can change meaning strongly) or a robust domain (errors merely nudge the final result) is important, whether in science or art.

Also, http://www.anthropic-principle.com/, Nick's site about the anthropic principle and related to biases, has also been updated.

The fact that we accept this form of shoddy decisionmaking is troubling. The best way to combat it is likely to make it vivid: next time you see a finance minister or CEO holding a press conference after a late night meeting, envision him standing there drunk with a bottle. Then call them out on making important decisions while impaired.

Katie Mcdonough at Salon immediately misunderstood us, Take ecstasy, save your relationship It is quite amusing, since that happened the last time our research was widely mentioned. We had to write an explanation: Should you take ecstasy to improve your marriage? Not so fast …

Edit: the post has been corrected (and quickly at that - Kudos, Katie!). It is now Should we medicate parents to prevent divorce? A bit less exciting, but more correct.

Here are the findings of my research.

Infamous cakes proper

The Atomic Cake Controversy of 1946

In November 1946 the Joint Army-Navy Task Force Number One was celebrating the successful operation crossroads nuclear test at the Bikini atoll. With a mushroom-cloud shaped cake.

The photo, showing Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy (commander of the task force), his wife and Rear Admiral Frank J. Lowry, was published in Washington Post. A minister, Arthur Powell Davies, delivered a blistering sermon around the picture, giving voice to the nascent disquiet with nuclear weapons.

Conelrad Adjacent has a good essay about the whole affair and its (ahem) fallout, far more detailed and interesting than anything I could write.

Anne Marie Helmenstine even has a recipe, although she notes that the original was based on angelfood puffs. Possibly another reason for Davies to be upset.

Cakegate 2012

The Swedish artist Makode Linde managed to set off a firestorm in April 2012 with a cake during the opening of a exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. The cake was shaped like a black Venus from Willhelmsdorf, with his face made up like a golliwog. As it was cut up, he could be heard crying. That the first cutter was the very blond, smiling Swedish minister of culture, behaving like at any other cake-cutting ceremony, made things even better.

Of course, the exhibition was about female genital mutilation. And the artist is black. And has been using golliwog faces and blackface characters to poke at racism for quite some time. But context is easily lost on the Internet, and the rest of the world pounced on those racist Swedes (helped by the local easily offended people).

I think Johan Palme expressed it best when he pointed out that the whole event is the artwork, and a pretty subtle one.

Sandra Lee's cakes

While Makode Linde had to work for it, others achieve what Anthony Bourdain called "an edible hate crime" with much less effort. In this case it was Sandra Lee's Kwanzaa cake recipe. Besides being apparently pretty inedible, one can make a reasoned argument it is indeed disrespectful. Which of course helped the video go viral, to the degree that some people actually make the cake as an ironic gesture. She also managed another disrespectful cake, a Star of David cake for Chanukah that was made with marshmallows, which are not Koscher. Oops.

However, the real creator of the cakes was Denise Vivaldo, who has a hilarious confession of how the disasters came about. Although a confession is probably not supposed to blame the other gal so much.

The Sachertorte struggle 1954-1965

The cake managed to become controversial after his death too (n.b. the Congress factoid, it is everywhere):

"Sachertorte. A famous Viennese gateau, created at the Congress of Vienna (1814-5) by Franz Sacher, Metternich's chief pastrycook. Sachertorte (literally, Sacher's cake')...For years, Vienna was divided into two camps by the sachertorte controversy. The supporters of the sachertorte as it was served at the Sacher Hotel--two layers separated by jam, the top being iced--were led by the descendants of Franz Sacher, who regarded their version as the only authentic one. On the other side were the customers of the famous Demel patissiere, who based their claim on the rights acquired by Eduard Demel from Sacher's grandson, who authorized the so-called "true" recipe (the cake is simply spread with jam, then covered with icing), as published in Die Wiener Konditore by Hans Skrach. The Sacher Hotel finally won the court case that fascinated Vienna for six years. Demel replied by claiming that his was the Ur Sachertorte (the original cake)." ---Larousse Gastronomique, Completely revised and updated [Clarkson Potter:New York] 2001 (p. 1010)

Little-endians vs. big-endians, or in this case cake separatists and unifiers. And a real Sacher-tort.

(The exact dates of the suit seem murky: Wikipedia mentions a start in 1954, and an end in 1961, while several other sites claim 1965 and that the struggle had lasted 25 years. Most likely another case of how the cake accumulates myths.)

Lazy cakes

But using standard ingredients is of course too limiting. So why not add melatonin, the natural diurnal rhythm hormone to cakes in order to make them extra relaxing. Lazy Cakes were brownies with about 8 milligrams melatonin per cake, branding themselves as dietary supplements (since melatonin is not an approved food ingredient). Unsurprisingly, this proved controversial, especially since children could presumably eat them and the melatonin might interact with drugs or driving. Apparently the response was rebranding.

Personally I suspect the biggest problem is that the melatonin may reset your diurnal rhythm a bit too much if you take it early in the evening or even the afternoon: of course, maybe becoming an early bird next day is desirable if you want to have a lazy day.

Of course, once you open the ingredient list to the full pharmacopoeia the sky is the limit. I have heard stories about Viagra ice cream, and Viagra cakes certainly seems doable. Spanish fly has no doubt been put in cakes, not just pastilles (the Matrix movie doesn't count). Being a cognitive enhancement guy, I have occasionally pondered whether it is possible to include modafinil in some dish without a too awful taste. The problems are many: dosage matters when you want pharmacologically effective desserts, and regulating it when dealing with tasty creations will be tough. While toxic desserts certainly have a decadent charm (must see what Gray and Lucan suggests in The Decadent Cookbook), ideally they should be safe and consensual.

The Bergianska Cannabis Cake of 2004

The use of cannabis in baked goods is of course nothing new. Perhaps the most classical recipe is the one for Hashish Fudge in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (which the author claimed was given to her by Brion Gysin, perhaps as a deadline filler). That particular recipe got cultural traction in the 60s, even leading to the title of the 1968 Peter Sellers film "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas". That is another way of gaining perennial cultural relevance.

Cake attacks

The practice has a fair amount of history. It is interesting to note that in English this is known as pieing, while in Swedish this is known as tårtning - literally cakeing. The reason for the difference may be that in Anglo-Saxon countries pies are somewhat more common as desserts than in Sweden. Since the dish is more of a statement than an exercise in cooking the simplest kind available will do, which makes whipped cream or custard acceptable (but in my opinion does show a bit of lack of dedication). The real test of character is of course how the victim handles the attack - quite often they come across as far more dignified than the typical activist during the subsequent events.

An attack on Canadian minister Gail Shea got MP Gerry Byrne to suggest that pie-throwing should be reviewed under the legal definition of terrorism. “When someone actually coaches or conducts criminal behaviour to impose a political agenda on each and every other citizen of Canada, that does seem to me to meet the test of a terrorist organization” he said. However, the standard definition of terrorism typically is based on the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims, aiming the terror or violence effect at the general public. Pieing aims at particular prominent people and does not aim to do physical harm (the reputation or psychological harm might truly hurt, however). The risk of public pieing hangs over the head of just some people, not all. So calling it terrorism would stretch the already overstretched word far beyond the breaking point. Pieing is not morally neutral and certainly criminal, but it is not terrorism.

In terms of impact (heh...) I guess the attempt on Rupert Murdoch during the 2011 phone hacking hearings (still, it was just shaving foam, and his wife clocked the assailant) and the hit on finance minister Bosse Ringholm during his 2001 budget walk (traditionally the minister walks from his department to the parliament building with the budget proposal, surrounded by journalists and pundits) come to my mind. The 1977 comeback of anti-gay rights activist Anita Bryant, "at least it is a fruit pie", is also classic.

Here is another list of five other notable pie-tossing incidents.

Infamous non-cakes

The cake of Marie Antoinette

This is yet another one of those classic factoids where practically nothing is true or verifiable (are we seeing a pattern here?) It was attributed to a "great princess", not Queen Marie Antoinette, and was first mentioned in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, which was written when she was nine years old (the Wikipedia entry notes: "he may have invented the anecdote, as Confessions was, on the whole, a very unreliable autobiography."). There doesn't even seem to be any evidence it was attributed to her during the French Revolution. And brioche is more of a bread than a cake, although one could combine it with fruit, chocolate and topping to make a dessert.

The semla of Adolf Frederick 1771

It can of course be debated whether semla should be regarded as a cake proper, or just a dessert. It is close to the border: it is a sweet bread and it has both filling (marzipan) and a cream layer. But serving it with hot milk clearly moves into dessert territory in my opinion, since cakes are at most served with some cream or sauce at the side, not swimming in it. In any case, I prefer mine dry.

Whatever the answer is to Fermi's question, it is going to make the world a stranger place.