You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'kludge' tag.
From Not Exactly Rocket Science:
In the Old English of Beowulf, seven different rules competed for governance of English verbs, and only about 75% followed the “-ed” rule. As the centuries ticked by, the irregular verbs became fewer and far between. With new additions to the lexicon taking on the standard regular form (‘googled’ and ‘emailed’), the irregulars face massive pressure to regularise and conform.
Today, less than 3% of verbs are irregular but they wield a disproportionate power. The ten most commonly used English verbs – be, have, do, go say, can, will, see, take and get – are all irregular. Lieberman found that this is because irregular verbs are weeded out much more slowly if they are commonly used.
To get by, speakers have to use common verbs correctly. More obscure irregular verbs, however, are less readily learned and more easily forgotten, and their misuse is less frequently corrected. That creates a situation where ‘mutant’ versions that obey the regular “-ed” rule can creep in and start taking over.
That seems to be the thesis of this paper by neurobiologist Jerome Siegel:
Sleep can be seen as an adaptive state that benefits animals by increasing the efficiency of their activity. It does this by suppressing activity at times that have maximal predator risk and minimal opportunity for efficiently meeting vital needs, and by permitting activity at times of maximal food and prey availability and minimal predator risk.
I read this as arguing that if an animal is not sleeping it will do things that are not in its interest. So sleep stops it from doing those things. Of course natural selection could instead have simply taught the animal not to do what’s against its self interest but instead, under this theory, sleep acts like a commitment device to blunt a self-control problem.
Via neuroskeptic.
Mindhacks has the scoop:
…in summary it seems that the brain simulates of the outcomes of actions based on your intentions to move because the actual sensory information from the body takes so long to arrive that we’d be dangerously slow if we relied only on this.This slower information is used for periodic updates to keep everything grounded in reality, but it looks like most of our action is run off the simulation.
We can also use the simulation to distinguish between movements we cause ourselves and movements caused by other things, on the basis that if we are causing the movement, the prediction is going to be much more accurate.
If the prediction is accurate, the brain reduces the intensity of the sensations arising from the movement – for good safety reasons, perhaps – we want to be more aware of contact from other things than touches from ourselves.
Via BoingBoing, here is a lovely list of kludges under the heading of “worst evolutionary designs.” My favorite
6 Shark-fetus teeth. A few shark species have live births (instead of laying eggs). The Jaws juniors grow teeth in the womb. The first sibling or two to mature sometimes eat their siblings in utero. Mmm … siblings.
I mention viviparous sharks in my paper “Kludged” becuase most sharks lay eggs and requires a large and coordinated mutation to switch to live birth without producing a fatal misfit. This example shows that whatever doesn’t kill it only makes it more kludgey.
I collect kludges. Its an especially welcome addition to the collection when it involves a tasty snack:
DunceCap Doff: There I Fixed It.
Psyblog has a rundown of 18 failures of the brain’s system of attention. My favorite:
9. Ironic processes of control
In fact sometimes attention is a real bear. What about when you really want to get something right, like putt the ball, hit a beautiful serve right in the corner or reverse the car into a narrow space? Naturally you concentrate even harder than normal, really focus. Unfortunately that just seems to make things worse: you miss the putt by a mile, frame the ball 50ft in the air and ding the car. What gives? These are what Wegner et al. (1998) call ‘ironic processes of control’. Sometimes too much attention is just as detrimental as too little.
I normaly strive to pay as little attention as possible.
Start your QJE clocks! I just submitted my paper Kludged (rhymes with Qjed) to the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The QJE has a reputation for speedy rejections. For me this is a virtue. Obviously I prefer not to be rejected, (although for some a QJE rejection is a well-earned badge of honor) but conditional on being rejected (always the most likely outcome), the sooner the better.
Addendum: Alas, the paper was rejected 
It took about 3 1/2 months and I received 4 thoughtful referee reports. All in all I would say I was treated fairly.
I collect examples of Kludges. Luis Rayo has sent me a very nice one.
In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.
Apparently, some evolutionary biologists take this to be evidence of our fish ancestry.
“The circuitous path of the left recurrent laryngeal nerve in humans is evidence for their evolution from a fishlike ancestor… because the nerve remained behind this arch but still connected to a structure on the neck, it was forced to evolve a pathway that travels down to the chest, loops around the aorta and the remnants of the sixth aortic arch, and then travels back up to the larynx. The indirect path does not reflect intelligent design but can be understood only as the product of our evolution from ancestors having very different bodies.”
The latter quote is from “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry A. Coyne.
Recent Comments