An engineer's Lament ...

If you are an IT engineer working in the trenches, you will relate ...

"Damn it! Why the hell isn’t my <insert application or device> working?" screams the irate <customer, manager, CIO>. "What do you get paid to do? Play video games all day?"

Ouch.

Let’s look at this objectively. What exactly is your job? Simple, right? Keep the IT systems running.

What exactly does that mean? Let’s be good engineers and model it. You land in Dumbonia and they have a brand new IT system. A stone tablet, a chisel, and hammer. Your job is to make sure the system doesn’t grind to a halt. They already figured out that the tablet breaks and everything goes offline. Or the hammer handle breaks with the same result. Or the chisel gets really dull and everything gets really slow. So you whip out your iPad (scratching your head over the stone table thing, but they are the customer and the customer is ALWAYS right), you do some calculations and decide that you can monitor the stone pad and hammer handle for micro-fractures and the chisel point for sharpness. You set up some thresholds and any time a threshold is breached, it is a fail state and you swap in a new piece of hardware before everything crashes. Swapping in new hardware is relatively quick and painless. You keep some hammers, tablets and chisels in the back room. Set up some change management protocols. Institute a communication chain.

Problem solved.

The killer here is the fail states. How many good states are there? How many fails states? Well let’s map it out. Three devices is easy.

Tablet	Hammer	Chisel	Result
accept	accept	accept	accept
accept	accept	fail	fail
accept	fail	accept	fail
accept	fail	fail	fail
fail	accept	accept	fail
fail	accept	fail	fail
fail	fail	accept	fail
fail	fail	fail	fail

Because only an engineer will have read this far, you should see where this is going. First, it is obvious that ALL OF YOU EFFORTS are directed towards maintaining ONE accept state out of all the possible states in the system. You should also see that this neatly maps onto a binary number.

Now use that massive brain of yours and extrapolate.

If you have a moderately sized IT system with only 500 devices, how many accept states are there? 500 really isn’t that many, especially if the granularity is useful at all. A server has a memory, hard drives, a NIC – that alone is 3 devices. 10 servers and 90 workstations is 500 separate monitoring points looking at just those three things.

So again, how many accept states?

Only 1.

Repeat that too yourself. ONLY ONE!!!

Any other state gets a phone call from a pissed off person. My hard drive is making funny noises! I don’t have internet! I keep getting blue screens with funny number on it.

How many fail states?

That’s easy. 2^500-1. That’s a big number. How big? Well some bright physicist calculated the number of atom in the known universe and came up with 10^87. That’s also a big number.

It’s easy to convert base 2 to base 10. 2^500 is approximately 10^150. That’s 10 raised to the 150^th power. That means there are more fail states in your 500 devices than there are atoms in the universe. By 63 orders of magnitude. You have more fail states in your moderately sized network than 10 raised to the 67^th power UNIVERSES.

Your job is to find the ONE accept state in all of that and KEEP THE ENTIRE SYSTEM IN THAT STATE.

Your job sucks because everyone thinks that there is nothing else in the universe but "it works or it doesn’t work". But what is actually in the universe is 10^150 ways for it to break and 1 way for it to work.

Reality bites.

Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood idiot savant, Bob Castleman

Theory of Mind - An Autistic Perspective. Part 2

Second in a series of posts on Theory Of Mind and autism. If you haven't already, you should read part 1 here: PART 1

Recall from part 1 the idea that what exists in our minds are representations of the things around us. We perceive stimuli, process it into representations, and correlate those representations to the external stimuli in an feedback loop that allows us to adjust those representation to increase their functional utility in a complex world.

To delve into the perceptual issues surrounding Theory Of Mind we need to take a little side trip. We need to visit the distant, and rather odd, planet Flibnarz. It's a strange place. Filled with strange plants, strange animals, and a strange people called Flibnians (though I have it on good authority that they believe it is we humans that are strange).

One of the oddest things about this place is a curious geological feature that appears nearly everywhere on the planet. Virtually the entire planet is dotted with blue and pink monoliths. They're quite harmless, even if a bit annoying, One simply avoids bumping into them by walking around them. Knocking them down isn't a good idea for the Flibnians since these odd piles of stone are symbiotically tied to the ecosystem of the planet. But that's another story. Suffice it to say, an important skill for a Flibnian is the ability to walk about their world without bumping head first into a hard pink and blue monolith.

Another oddity of the planet Flibnarz is that not all Flibnians perceive monoliths in the same way. For some unknown reason, some Flibnians are more receptive to blue and others perceive pink with greater ease. Some perceive blue squares, and subsequently create their mind's representation of the monoliths consisting solely of blue squares. The pink perceivers create an image of monoliths made entirely of pink triangles. Fortunately, both representations are functional. Both allow the Flibnians to successfully navigate their world without continually bumping into monoliths and bruising their noses.

But there does happen to be a problem on the planet Flibnarz. It turns out that the vast majority of Flibnians perceive red triangles. Only a very few see monoliths as blue squares. Recall that BOTH the internal representations are functional. Both allow freedom of movement around the monoliths without inconvenience or injury. But a problem arises when Flibnians talk about the monoliths. The vast majority go on about pink triangles. They describe their structure and properties in terms of pink triangles. Blue squares don't even exist in their description. Imagine the confusion of one the rare blue square seers. "What is everyone talking about? What is a pink triangle? This makes no sense! Monoliths are made of blue squares". Well, CLEARLY, the "Blue Squares" are delusional. EVERYONE knows a monolith is composed of pink triangles.

And so over time, Flibnians create a vast and complex culture based on the truth of the pink triangle. Their architecture, science, religion and entertainment are an exultation of the pink triangle. Their fashion, ceremonies, speech and thought are all infused with pink triangleness. Alas, the Blue Square Flibnians end up isolated and marginalized, not because they cannot perceive monoliths, but only because they perceive them differently. And the fact that they CAN perceive them is cause for great concern among the Pink Triangle crowd. They see a Blue Square successfully avoid the monoliths, but they cannot participate in the beautiful, complex society created around the monoliths? What are they? Lazy? Stubborn? Defective? Well something must be wrong with them so let's fix them. And up springs an entire theory to explain just exactly the type of defect that inflicts a Blue Square. They aren't able to build an adequate representation in their minds of the world around them. They lack Theory Of Triangle.

By now you should be understanding the point of this little story. As stated in part 1 of this series, Theory Of Mind is the ability to create a functional representation of other people's cognition. But the key word is functional. On Flibnarz, perceiving blue squares and building an internal representation of monoliths from that perception is quite functional - that is until a particular type of perception and representation becomes pervasive and dominates their environment. And isn't it it exactly this difference in perception and representation that challenges autistic individuals when faced with a culture that is steeped in social communication to the point that it infuses EVERYTHING?

I am autistic and yet I have a Theory Of Mind. It is simply built on a different way pf perceiving and processing the world around me. It is DIFFERENT than the Theory Of Mind created by 99% of the world, but it is still a Theory Of Mind. As proof, I offer this essay. Why is it that I chose analogy and allegory to present this idea? Why blue squares and pink triangles? Why aliens and monoliths? Simply because my Theory Of Mind tells me that most people don't have any interest in the highly technical aspects of cognitive science. They really don't want to read about neurotransmitters, neural pathways, the amygdala, the pre-frontal cortex, or standard deviations from a normalized testing instrument designed to segment differentials in perception and processing. My Theory Of YOUR Mind is sufficient to frame this in language that is more likely to be read from beginning to end by a larger number of people.

So who's Theory Of Mind are we talking about here, anyway?

Next time, more about what a functional Theory Of Mind is and isn't.

Theory of Mind - An Autistic Perspective. Just whose mind are we talking about?

Part 1 of what I hope to turn into a rather long essay on Theory Of Mind and autism.

There is a construct commonly used in describing autism known as Theory Of Mind. Autism is traditionally considered to be in part a deficit in this apparently ubiquitous ability of the more normal population. But, as one on the spectrum, I have found the concept itself to be rather ill defined. There is no truly precise definition – sometimes being described as “mind reading” or the ability to infer the mental states of others. Sometimes it is the ability to conceive that other people have thoughts and consciousness. And at other times it may be invoked in tandem with empathy or its absence. In one of its more sinister forms, it is invoked as a trait that defines humanness and that people with autism are missing the essential ingredient that raises them up to full human stature.

Needless to say, I take offense at that last definition and as such I am going to suggest that Theory Of Mind is at best a weak concept, and at worst, fundamentally flawed as a description of what "ails the autistic mind".

I must start with some obvious ideas. First, and foremost, we must recognize that, regardless of the actual brain mechanisms that allow a mind to exist, what happens in the mind is representational. There is no dog in your head. But that word, as soon as its image passed through your eyes and into your brain, invoked a representation of “dogness”. There are no rocks in your brain – but within the mass of brain cells, there is a representation of such a thing effective enough that you will duck your head if you see “a rock” flying towards you. This notion of representation is crucial for this is how we make our way through reality. Our perceptions and processing combine to form functional representations of the world around us.

Another crucial idea is that we heavily filter the information flowing into our brains. This is well documented experimentally, and it makes sense when you consider the amount of information in our environment. We are awash in sensory input. Sight, sound, touch, smell ... a constant barrage of data that we must ruthlessly edit down to manageable chunks that we can assimilate and utilize. From this it follows that the representations we create in our mind are built on partial information. The representation is at its very best, an abbreviated form of the thing it represents.

A third crucial point is how these representations become “real”. By this, I mean that a representation constructed from sensory input is an actual referent to something real that exists outside the mind. Again without delving into the actual mechanisms, the mind maintains a feed back loop between sensory input and its representations. When sensory input conflicts with a representation, the mind adjusts the model. As the model is adjusted, the representation becomes increasingly functional.

What Theory of Mind attempts to explain is how one person's mind represents the mind of another and how functional is the representation. What I hope to illustrate is that discussing representations of another's mind is much more straight forward than discussing the how functional that representation actually is. The creation of that representation is simply the aforementioned cognitive feedback loop between sensory input and output. The functional utility of that representation is a much more complex question because it is heavily bound to culture and context. It is this cultural and contextual component of contemporary Theory Of Mind conceptualizations that fatally weakens the idea.

Next post: A little more about perception and the construction of representations.

A Peek At The Man Behind The Curtain

One of the really weird things about being very high functioning autistic is that people say things like "but you seem so normal". Well ... maybe not normal normal, but not so weird that people make their children hide in a safe place, close and lock the doors and peer out the window as I walk by. I am obviously eccentric, with more than a dollop of quirkiness on top of it all. What isn't at all evident is that the quirky eccentricity (redundancy deliberate) is really just about the best I can pull off. It is a the social equivalent of a Mohammed Ali rope-a-dope. What you see on the surface is simply me bobbing and weaving through daily interactions that "normal" people take in stride, naturally flowing with the give and take of general conversation.

What follows below is a little peek at what goes on "behind the scenes", as it were. What is REALLY going on in my head much of the time.

If you were sitting around a table eating lunch with your coworkers, what would you talk about? Lots of stuff like your children, football, shopping - a whole host of different topics. What remains of this blog post relates one such lunch conversation. Both what was being said by everyone at the table, but more importantly, what was really going in my head at the time. This last part is important because this "other world" is really closer to where I exist as a sentient being. It's that part covered up by the rope-a-dope, bob and weave of my external "personality". It is the part I don't share with people. Well ... until now at least.

Yesterday during lunch (our office is small and we tend to eat together) everyone got to talking about school lunches and the kids buying junk food with their lunch accounts. Apparently the local school district requires all students have an account that can be charged if the kid forgets lunch money and such. The conversation rolls back and forth and they talk about how it works and how kids can get around the rules and how in the end its a good way to do things. Part of the issue is that the school is required by law to serve a lunch even if the student does not have money. So the district uses these accounts to recoup money from parents whose kids regularly do not bring, or have already spent, money.

Anyway, while they are talking back and forth my pattern thing starts kicking in and the underlying information flow starts to come together. Then the thing sort of blows up like a rapidly blooming flower and a complete pattern unfolds in my head. And at that point the pattern is telling me that the program is fundamentally flawed because the amount of "overhead" to manage the information exceeds any cost savings. At the heart is the informational analogy to entropy. The program appears to work because the local system has decreased local entropy by virtue of the organization of the local information flows. This is reflected in actual financial statements of the school system. But the "cost" of increasing localized informational organization is an increase in the disorganization of global information. So while the balance sheets and income statements of the school system may reflect a localize net positive, the actual information cost is simply shifted to the larger economic system as a whole. I am certain this is the case.

Now here is the epiphany.

There is no way I would have been able to convince the anyone at the table that this is true. Not because they aren't smart enough, but rather because their entire knowledge/information systems are fully localized. All of their data is coming from the local system that from a localized frame of reference is actually being optimized. Their point of observation is within the system. It would be entirely pointless to offer any information that contradicts the perception of optimization because it does not even exist within that system.

What is important is that this pattern that flowers in my head exists in many places. Large multi-nationals are assiduously working at localized increases in informational organization vis-a-vis team and department level changes in information structures, but the efforts simply push the disorganization to places outside the localized reference frame. Attempts to increase local organization of ANY information/knowledge system increases global/universal information disorganization.

The pattern goes deeper, but you get the idea.

So what is the point to all this? Well, I suppose I could go off on some information system thingy and lose anybody still reading. But the real point is that what you see on the outside is not even close to what is happening on the inside.

The man behind the current isn't standing at a control panel twiddling some knobs and levers.

He's running free in a giant universe.

I'm betting this is true for a lot of people on the autism spectrum.We hide our true nature and we LEARN to adopt behaviors that are not obviously autistic. We learn through rote repetition, trial and error, and the pain of many mistakes. Social behaviors that normal people learn by 5, 10 or 20 years of age we are still learning late into life. And so many of us cling to quirky eccentricity, attenuating our weirdness to a level that isn't immediately rejected, but quite often the recipient of those odd "WTF?" glances we are so familiar with.

So next time you are eating lunch with me and my eyes take on a far away look, it isn't because I'm not listening, but because what I am listening too is taking me to a completely different place. Instead of thinking I'm rude and disinterested, I am just letting the conversation flow through me in a different way. Take a chance. Ask me what I am REALLY thinking. Then hold on for the ride.

Autistics Speaking Day

November 1st is Autistics Speaking Day - an internet "event" designed to raise awareness of autism.
http://www.autisticsspeakingday.blogspot.com/ 

This is my contribution to the voices of autism.

My experience with autism is quite atypical. The standard progression through the challenges of autism starts with a diagnosis in early childhood. Therapies, special education, and a host of aggressive interventions are applied to "set free the child trapped inside" by communicative barriers and behaviors that impede learning and socialization. But some of us on the spectrum fall through the cracks. We don't fit the profile of the stereotypical autistic. We end up going it alone.

You might be thinking "Really? You expect me to believe a person with autism can go through life and no one even know it?". Not possible, you say. Someone with autism can't function in this world without assistance.

Part of answering this conundrum is knowing that some people with autism are wicked smart. As in miles above normal. But this intrinsic intelligence is imbedded in a consciousness that conspires to suppress its expression. An exquisitely active mind lies behind deficits in communication and social skills that render the outward presentation of such a person as nothing short of remarkably average.

I am one such autistic. I was not diagnosed with autism until late in life. Not until after high school. After attempts at attending university. After marriage and three children. And after many many years of frustration.

The "trick" to my survival is that even though I have perceptual difficulties; even though I have significant gaps in my capacity to understand social cues and body  language; even though I have serious deficits in executive functioning; I have been able to leverage my native intelligence sufficiently to build a workable model of reality. One that gets me through life even if my life is not triumphantly successful.

But having said all that, it is often astonishing to me that, while I am outwardly "almost normal" (I'm regularly called strange, odd, weird, etc), I find that my internal states and thinking patterns resonate far more harmoniously with the descriptions by severe autistics using various forms of assisted communication. It is very disconcerting to read something written by an autistic living in an assisted living setting, someone that cannot function in "normal" society, and understand EXACTLY what they are describing. It is unnerving to find that my true compatriots are actually those that this society calls "abnormal", "dysfunctional", "impaired" and "disabled".


So what's my point?

Simply this. If you truly want to understand autism, you need to broaden your scope. You need to look beyond the Hollywood characters like Rainman. You need to look at the entire range of experiences, the full breadth and depth of the autistic spectrum. You need to talk to people like me that are in a unique position to bridge the gap between those autistics that cannot speak (but I guarantee have far more active minds than you might think) and those, like myself, that can articulate and describe the cognitive maps of the autistic mind. And after talking to people like me you need to revisit all of your assumptions about that person with autism that you think you know. If you can allow it, you will be astonished what you will find within us.

Talk to us. It is why we have Autistics Speaking Day. Choose to learn about us. Don't tell us what we are. Listen to us as we speak.

Classic Autism - A Definition

Classic Autism - A tongue in cheek definition. If you know anything about autism, there are some inside jokes. If you don't know anything about autism, then this is just really weird.


Classic Autism was predominant in the late 17th century and was often recognized as an alternative to highly structured and restrictive Victorian social codes. This was supplanted by Neo-Classic Autism with the advent of the 18th Century and the rapid changes in governments vis-a-vis the French and American revolutions. The freedom of expression and dismantling of strict social hierarchies of this period created fertile ground for the growth of eclectic forms of expression that make Autism so distinctive. As the Industrial Age took hold Autism took an odd turn, avoiding the high intensity noise, chemical smells and chaotic expansionism and instead opted for solitude and a quiescent life style. Autism continued to follow its own path through the Modern and Post Modern periods nurturing an inventive and atypical way of thinking. It was a mistake of the world at large to assume that Autism was no longer a force to be reckoned with simply because there was little visible interaction with this eccentric community. While it is true that during this time period there was little obvious interaction with society, Autism was building the foundation for a strong, some say unstoppable, resurgence. With the explosion of technology in the 21st century, Autism has once again exploded on to the scene, their plans of world domination developed in their quiescent period bearing fruit as adherents have taken places in the highest levels of science an engineering. It will be interesting to see if Autism can survive the schizms between the Aspergian sect, the Kannerites and the more inclusive D5's (a corruption of the more formal DSM-V). If Autism is able to reconcile these profound differences within their ranks, they may hold the power to fully and finally transform human culture into something approaching the utopian visions of the greatest human thinkers.

More fractal fun.

Weird question of the day:

If a blog gets posted on the internet and nobody reads it does it exist?

One thing I've noticed is that I notice things. An artifact of autism is a poor capacity for socialization. In my case, this means effectively no social life. Let's be clear. It's not that I don't like people, though some are worthy of disdain, but rather that it often doesn't occur to me that socialization is an important part of life. It just doesn't cross my mind. So I just sit on the sidelines watching that part of life go by. A silent observer for the most part. What this has done is allowed me to watch closely, mostly undisturbed, somewhat objectively, as people frenetically try to advance their lives. I have concluded that a great deal of human activity comes from suspect motivations.

My biggest puzzlement is why is everyone in such a hurry? There is this intense pressure to "succeed" - get through school, go to college, get a career, buy a car, a house, plan your retirement, make more money, do it NOW because, well ... just because.

Then you die.

Now I'm no Luddite. I'm posting to a blog, Maybe I don't Twitter and I really am not so enamored with technology that I HAVE TO GET THE NEWEST GADGET. And truthfully, I'm quite content to use the technological tools around me. But all this push towards the next best thing seems to cost us something. We lose sight of the BEST thing - the people around us. We forget that at the other end of a Tweet, text, email or blog post are warm, living breathing human beings. Everything is becoming this highly interconnected abstraction, removing much of the messiness of real human contact. Even holidays are increasingly hyper-kinetic indulgences in fantasy. When did a good birthday party begin to require a bounce house? Is it really necessary to bankrupt the parents for a wedding? Forgotten in the activity is that the best parts of holidays, social gatherings, weddings birthdays and just plan hanging out is the people you are with not the gadgets and toys that you build up around you,


This theme has been broached many many times. But isn't it a little ironic that an autistic, a person that is effectively a social cripple, is telling the rest of the world to drop all the "stuff" and actually socialize?

The take away is this. It seems to me that the world is becoming "autistic". As individualism becomes increasingly the path to contentment, we isolate our core selves with our technology, layering superficial noise via social media on top of our true selves. This superficiality is how autistics are often FORCED to relate. Much of the external traits of an autistic are not indicative of their internal selves, but often more truncations of abbreviations of their mental states. The shallow communications of contemporary culture eerily mirror the isolation of what for an autistic experiences as a communicative disorder, but strangely, it is by choice. Which leads me to wonder, why would people that are so capable of the genuine social inter-connectivity that as an autistic I cannot experience, choose to trade that for a dim replicant?