Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett, Reginald B. Adams Jr. contains the best theory I’m familiar with that explains humor.

As longtime readers of this blog know, I’ve been interested in what makes things funny for a long time, and wrote an early post about it.

I cannot hope to do justice to the theory of the book, so I won’t really try. I hope all who are interested will read the book itself. It’s very rewarding. While it does spend a bit of time on background issues, it’s very readable and is peppered with lots of good jokes and witticisms used for illustration.

For those who won’t read it, or are curious about the theory, I’ll try to give a small taste.

Humor, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. There isn’t a formula guaranteed to generate mirth, but mirth is something that happens within the receiver’s brain, and different people will have different reactions to the same stimulus (of course).

The basic idea is that various reward systems have evolved to help human genes propagate. Just as we evolved a “Sweet Tooth” reward system that leads us to find pleasure in tastes that are correlated with high-energy content, we also evolved a “Joy of Debugging” reward system that leads us to find pleasure (mirth) in detecting and refuting certain sorts of errors that make their way into our thinking. Basically, the sorts of error-detections that generate mirth tend to be that of refuting covertly entered, active, committed, beliefs.

In the book, the details are explained and refined. There is much discussion of mental-spaces, JITSA (Just-In-Time Spreading Activation), etc., as well as many variations (first-person, third-person, recursive levels of modeling various intentional agents) and lots of analysis of how various types of mirth-inducing stimuli (including tickling!) conform to the theory, and much discussion of related issues.

Again, if you’re interested in what humor is all about, I’m sure you’ll find the book well worth your time.

Yesterday morning, just after getting off of my commuter bus and it started driving away, I realized that I had left my Kindle on the bus.

I really didn’t want to lose it, and forgot how old and out of shape I am, so I started chasing after it, running quickly (for me) waving my arms like a lunatic… I wasn’t feeling optimistic, but after a while I saw that the bus had stopped at a red light just over a block ahead, so I thought there might be a chance to catch up with it. Unfortunately, in the middle of a street, my weight got too far forward and I fell on the asphalt.

I got right back up and started running again and, fortunately, a construction worker up ahead saw me and figured out from my wild gesturing that I was trying to get to that bus, and he got the driver to wait for me.

So, I recovered my Kindle!

Unfortunately, I had scraped my left palm a little and my right arm (below the elbow) more, but the brunt of the impact was borne by my ribs, which were already hurting.

Today, I feel like I was hit in the chest with a baseball bat. Everything is sore, but the pain is mostly in my ribs and stomach, which seem to be more involved in every movement than I realized. It hurts to lie down, to get up, to sneeze (!!!), to walk, to stand, to sit down, to lift my arms, and to breathe (deeply). My left hand is so tender I can’t grip anything with it. But, if I sit fairly still and work on the computer (as I do most of the day), the discomfort level is fairly low.

So, I’m working from home today and trying not to move too much or quickly.

Even though I would pay much more than the price of a Kindle to avoid this experience, it seems like it would be much much worse if I’d lost the Kindle too. Maybe it’s just my desperate attempt to see a bright side, but I’m sticking to it.

Over ten years ago, I posed, and answered, The Toilet Paper Question (read it now, if you aren’t familiar with it).

Yesterday, while on vacation, I noticed an interesting design that
implements the solution:

The covered roll has a panel labeled “SLIDE DOOR OVER WHEN EMPTY” and it has a mechanism that makes it difficult to slide when the other roll
isn’t empty.

Now, there will be an entire roll available for use when an empty one is ready to be replaced; minimizing the chance that they will both be empty before maintenance workers can replace an empty roll.

This is a much better solution than waiting for most people to adopt this reasonable practice themselves.

I just saw this article and interview of Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who leaked information about NSA activities.

It seems to me that he has exercised his personal judgment about something that he (along with many, many, others) thinks is wrong in a way that would expose what the public should know and would not endanger individuals. That is patriotism. It’s much more honorable than just following orders.

If the president really believes in transparency, as he has always claimed, he will issue a pardon for Edward Snowden.

Let’s see if he does.

Update: You can sign the whitehouse.gov petition here.

Last week, President Obama gave a commencement address at The Ohio State University.

Here are some excerpts that have garnered attention:

And that’s precisely what the Founders left us — the power, each of us, to adapt to changing times. They left us the keys to a system of self-government, the tools to do big things and important things together that we could not possibly do alone — to stretch railroads and electricity and a highway system across a sprawling continent. To
educate our people with a system of public schools and land-grant colleges, including The Ohio State University. To care for the sick and the vulnerable, and provide a basic level of protection from falling into abject poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth. (Applause.) To conquer fascism and disease; to visit the Moon and Mars; to gradually secure our God-given rights for all of our citizens, regardless of who they are, or what they look like, or who they love. (Applause.)

We, the people, chose to do these things together — because we know this country cannot accomplish great things if we pursue nothing greater than our own individual ambition.

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

…

The founders trusted us with this awesome authority. We should trust ourselves with it, too. Because when we don’t, when we turn away and get discouraged and cynical, and abdicate that authority, we grant our silent consent to someone who will gladly claim it. That’s how we end up with lobbyists who set the agenda; and policies detached from what middle-class families face every day; the well-connected who publicly demand that Washington stay out of their business — and then whisper in government’s ear for special treatment that you don’t get.

…

But more than anything, what we will need is political will — to harness the ingenuity of your generation, and encourage and inspire the hard work of dedicated citizens. To repair the middle class, to give more families a fair shake, to reject a country in which only a lucky few prosper because that’s antithetical to our ideals and our democracy — all of this is going to happen if you are involved, because it takes dogged determination — the dogged determination of our citizens.

There have been many responses to the speech that I liked. Here’s Gene Healy, Andrew Napolitano, Roger Pilon, and David Boaz (among others).

The speech was loaded with bad advice. The commentators above touched on the historical inaccuracy of the President’s characterization of what the founders thought, the conflation of private help and public help, the dangerous characterization of our relationship with strangers as like that of a family (which I’ve criticized before).

What bothers me most is the dangerously bad idea of replacing healthy skepticism of big government (which the President confuses with cynicism) with blind credulity in political leaders’ assertions about the great things that come from more government spending and power.

It’s as if the President is the leader of the statist religion, urging citizens to reject their own personal judgments about costs and benefits and put their faith behind the words of their political leaders. But, this faith isn’t merely harmless signaling of solidarity with other group members (as with most modern religions). This faith, while it also gives people self-righteous satisfaction and the joy of tribal efficacy, leads to people getting killed, people getting imprisoned for offending the sensibilities of neighbors and leaders, people obstructed from peacefully following their dreams, people impoverished by the satiating of egalitarian “crab-mentality” emotional reactions of their neighbors.

I’m sure the President doesn’t view himself as tyrannical, but he’s professing “virtues” that make tyranny easier.

I have some advice for graduates (and everybody else):

If you want to make the world a better place, do it peacefully through voluntary institutions; not through government. If your goal seems  great enough to justify forcing your neighbors to support, there should be strong enough arguments to garner plenty of support without coercing those who disagree.

If you feel the urge to improve the world through political action, try to expand the sphere of freedom and to shrink the sphere of coercion.

It’s a sad fact of life that it’s much easier to be destructive than constructive.

The recent bombings in Boston is our latest major reminder of this.

We’ll never be able to prevent determined, misguided, people from doing great harm to innocent people and property.

But, one thing we can do is to try to avoid reacting stupidly and adding our own self-inflicted damage to that of the attackers.

That will make us better off, and remove some of the incentive from the next would-be attackers.

Rand Paul has become my favorite politician. Of course, that’s a bit like being the tallest pygmy.

I found his talking filibuster in the senate the other day to be inspiring; and I’m somebody who’s very skeptical of any romantic associations with government activity. It did remind me of the dramatic filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Every politician talks about principles, but Rand Paul seems to really take them seriously.

The administration was getting away with not responding to congressional inquiries about its theories about limits to its authority to kill Americans who were not active, imminent, threats to security without due process of law. Most of the people who would have been outraged by a Republican administration doing this were busy covering for their guy.

The issue of explicit, clearly defined, limits to executive authority is an important one. I understand the administration’s reluctance to announce any limits to its power, but that’s part of the reason we need it done. It’s not about whether we really believe that there’s a serious threat of Barack Obama ordering our death or indefinite detention for annoying him without any due process. It’s about not having to worry about any future president thinking that he has the power to do things like that, or about people following such orders.

The system shouldn’t depend on angels being in power; it should be able to handle bad people (or normal, corrupted, people) in power. The issue deserves public attention, and it took a dramatic act like this to make it happen.

Also, Rand Paul has distinguished himself as a smart, formidable, leader (2016???). Many people will disparage this as a stunt, and want to paint all tea-party supporters as simple-minded slogan shouters. But, Rand Paul was able to stand and speak intelligently on the record in front of the world for almost thirteen hours.

I couldn’t do it. Could you?

For those who weren’t following it, here are some good links on it:

Julian Sanchez in words and audio.

Nick Gillespie with three takaways.

And some video:

Reason.TV short video with the beginning and end of the filibuster bookending other related clips.

Some highlights of the filibuster.

Jon Stewart on the filibuster. (first few minutes of this, anyway)

Senator Ted Cruz letting Paul rest his voice while “asking” him about (aka “reading”) #StandWithRand tweets.

Lawrence O’Donnell (and Lindsay Graham and John McCain) being an ass.

So, it looks like the budget sequestration might actually go into effect tomorrow.

I don’t need to remind anyone who’s been paying attention of the degree of exaggeration that’s been going on in describing the size of these “cuts”. Even with these modest spending reductions (from proposed budget levels), 2013 federal spending will exceed 2012 spending.

Of course, I understand Obama’s interest in portraying this as drastic, and using fear to rally political support for fewer cuts and more tax hikes.

But, if he actually prioritizes these tiny cuts in such a way as to inflict the greatest harm to people who have come to rely on federal programs, rather than eliminating wasteful spending in ways that the public shouldn’t even notice, it will only demonstrate his incredible incompetence as an executive.

I didn’t watch the presidential inauguration live, and I didn’t watch any video of it until today when I saw a video of the inaugural address.

I, personally, find the pomp of the inauguration and the adoring crowds distasteful. But, I understand that others see it as an important tradition, and an opportunity for the newly elected president to set a tone for his administration.

There have been many reactions to the speech, with many on the left praising it as a bold statement of progressive principles that will be furthered regardless of what the opposition thinks of them; and, many on the right criticizing it for similar reasons. I suppose that it’s refreshing, in a way, that he’s stopped pretending to be interested in reaching out to those who disagree, and that there’s any reason to “Hope” for any positive “Change.”

I didn’t think much of the speech. There was a promising section that seemed to recognize reality, and the distinctive virtues of this country:

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise, our insistence on hard work and personal  responsibility, these are constants in our character.

But, the rest of the speech belied any commitment to those words.

One particularly despicable section was this straw man argument:

No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.

Sheldon Richman wrote a better comment on this than I could.

But, beyond the usual rhetorical tripe, what struck me about the speech was the constant use of “We”, and “Together.”

I never felt included in these assertions about what “We” believe and what “We” must do, except as one of the intended victims of the extortion that would finance the schemes of the real “We”. And, the real “We” is Obama himself, the government, and those who collude with them. When Obama says “We” he means himself (The Royal “We”) and his misguided followers.

And, “Royal” seems to be an apt adjective for this president, since his behavior has often been reminiscent of a king or dictator (e.g., going to war without congressional approval, illegal “recess” appointments and other abuses of executive orders, kill lists, targeted killing of an American and his child without due process, declarations that he will not debate with Congress on issues legally requiring its approval…).

This video put out by the California Federation of Teachers (narrated by Ed Asner) is amazing in its spectacular stupidity and noxious contempt for the  economically successful as well as the intelligence of its viewers.

Here’s a rebuttal video that addresses just a few of the problems, but it hardly  seems necessary to anyone with even a passing familiarity with how the world works.

I’m not completely sure how much of this the creators believe and how much is an attempt to manipulate idiotic viewers into supporting tax increases on the rich and blaming them, rather than excessive and ineffectual government spending, for our economic troubles. I’m also not sure whether assuming it was the former vs. the latter would be more charitable. In either case it’s contemptible.

As I commented to the facebook post that brought this to my attention, I don’t think this is anti-Semitism (although there’s always this), but the nature of the argument (with its misinformation and emotional appeals to outgroup animosity) makes me think that this is what anti-Semitic propaganda would  look like.

I wonder how many of the union’s members are proud of this production, and I pity the students forced to endure them.