Psychology and Unified theory

Theory and why it's time Psychology got one.

Short term memory

And now something on a more light-hearted note:

A few weeks ago I picked up this mobile app, that tests your short-term memory. It's basically the classical "find pairs of matching cards" game that kids always play, just with a lot of variations, and difficulty levels. On the Android store, it's called "Matchup", and I highly recommend it.

Here's some observations I made about this game:

• It doesn't get that much easier with time. While with many "fundamental knowledge / trivia" games you might end up knowing all the answers at the end, and be quicker, with Matchup, you don't really have much of an advantage, whether you're new at it or have been a seasoned player. 
• Your skill goes up after a while, and then down again, as you get fatigued and start getting confused
• It really helps to pronounce the names of objects either out loud, or at least internally. Your short-term memory is better when you connect it to auditory clues, instead of visual ones. 
• Unfortunately that means that any auditory distractions (and most external distractions are auditory), will have a tendency to throw you off
• It helps to repeat, and when matching pairs are found, to re-pronounce the list of remaining cards to yourself. It helps to know the names of the objects, or have an internal self-made name for them. I typically play the flag version of the game, and I found that if I don't know the flag names, improvising them on the fly takes up more energy and is more error-prone.
• The other thing that can throw you off is if you think you need one word to represent the object, but in fact it is not sufficient to distinguish it from other objects. For example if you flip a card with a car in it, the first word that comes to mind is "car", until a car of another color comes up, then it's important to re-pronounce the list with "yellow car" and "blue car" in it.

What I find frustrating about this game is that the skill is not really cumulative,  and doesn't work like IQ tests or math puzzles. Many times math or visual puzzles can be hard, but once you get the trick, your speed can go up drastically. Unfortunately, short-term memory games don't follow this rule. As soon as you lose focus, you'll start missing a lot of points. There are tricks, but they're not automatic, and take effort every time, so how well you do depends on you following the script, more than it does on "getting good".

Why Vasco Da Gama went to India

A book I might want to read some day, in the meantime, here's a review by the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/books/review/holy-war-by-nigel-cliff-book-review.html?src=recg

Understanding the Nazis: Part 3

Warning: this post is quite gruesome, and rich with disturbing mental images. It was inspired by my visit to Auschwitz.

Yesterday I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau near Krakow, and witnessed the pictures of horror up close and personal. Historically, Auschwitz was the culmination of how bad things got, probably a testament to the most heinous crimes ever committed on this planet.
One of the things that struck me the most was the exhibition of the mountain of hair, that went on and on. All of the hair was original from the victims, discolored into a nameless mixture. The hair was meant to be used in textile manufacturing. There was another mountain, this time of suitcases that the Jews brought with them thinking they had a new life ahead of them. The suitcases were marked with names, and dates of birth. All of the suitcases were emptied, sorted, accounted for meticulously, and used to enrich the perpetrators, in a systematic way. There was no negligence here. Everything was done with thoroughness, meticulousness and genuine disregard for human life.

Even though just about everyone in German society at that time was implicit in the crime, not everyone participated to the same degree or had the same level of exposure to the suffering. There were people who rounded Jews up and hoarded them on trains, there were people who shaved their heads and took away everything they had, there were people who did the sorting of their belongings. They all knew the fate they were sending the Jews to, and yet they did not have to be exposed to the suffering up close. There were the people who sorted the Jews left and right - who would be sent directly to the gas chambers and who would be sentenced to a more slow death from exhaustion, starvation and brutality. There were the people who dropped poisoned gas into the gas chambers and heard the screams of the victims (or tried not to, as they typically turned on loud music or engines to drown the sounds). So there we see a tiny trace of humanity, as little as the Nazis cared about the Jews, they were not entirely immune to the horrors going on around them, and tried to dissociate themselves from the situation as much as possible, so they wouldn't have to deal with it as directly. Or was this trace of humanity called disgust? It's hard to say, there may be a fine line there.

The cleanup of the piles of corpses was outsourced to the prisoners themselves, again, so the Germans wouldn't have to. Then comes the starvation, and the humiliation. The Nazi officers outsourced the worst of that too. The most direct and brutal atrocities, that were up close and personal were committed by the kapos, true criminals, with background in violent gangs, for whom brutality was second nature. In any other situation, they would have been in prison by themselves. In the concentration camps, those bastards were put in charge of the other prisoners. They were given batons, and were "responsible" for distribution of food. It is directly at the hands of the kapos that the most inhumane treatment took place. They did the "dirty work" of torture and humiliation that most of the SS personnel couldn't be bothered to do, there were next-to-last on the "food chain", and could be turned into victims at any time. This was the last and most brutal link in the chain of the "final solution".

The typical prisoner in Auschwitz, who didn't go directly to the gas chambers, lived between a few weeks and a few months. Something to think about.

Understanding the Nazis, Part 2

(... continued from Part 1)
In September of 1923, the bank's interest rate reaches 90%.
In November of 1923, at the height of hyperinflation, Hitler attempts a coup. He fails, and gets put in jail, and shortly thereafter, the deutch mark is partly stabilized.

However, part of the success of stabilization lie in the Dawes Plan, which helped Germany by easing the burden of reparations and getting some help from the U.S. government. Initially, this was a blessing, unemployment went down, inflation was under control and Germany seemed on a path to recovery. However, this couldn't go on without continual support from the U.S., and unfortunately in 1929 shit hit the fan yet again with the infamous U.S. market crash. German unemployment went thru the roof, reaching to 30% in 1932, the German government once again found itself with a bigger mess on its hands than it could handle.

The tired and beaten Germans have reached a breaking point. They couldn't take it any more. The resentment of the impotent government, the foreign powers and the Jews, has spilled over into radicalization of the country. Where was the glory of Prussia / Germany once respected and feared all over the world? The Germans who could once pride themselves as a nation with prominent political and military power have seen their dreams shattered, and everything they know turn to rubble. To recap, in the years between 1918, they've been crushed by war, starved, witnessed lawlessness on the streets, their savings completely wiped out, their jobs gone. And just as things seemed to improve, and they could see the light at the end of the tunnel, the rug was pulled out from underneath them once more by the Great Depression.

The people of the generation growing up in Germany in the 1910s-1920s must have witnessed death, crime, and injustice from all directions, either as victims or as perpetrators, or both. They were significantly desensitized to horrors of war (and peace) throughout the decades. Their concept of right and wrong was quite different from what we're used to. There would certainly not have been a shortage of bastards who have slid down the slippery moral slope in times of pre-war chaos. Many people were used to looting, mugging, extortion, gang violence, and other activities that characterize lawlessness and civil unrest. Some of the German kids growing up as teenagers in those times may even have known no other life but the life of looting, theft, and intimidation of the neighbors. And these were the people who would go on to become Gestapo police, Nazi soldiers and wardens at concentration camps.

These are the conditions under which Hitler got elected into power. Far from everyone was on that page, far from everyone was down with Hitler, in fact it took a few rounds and heavy manipulation by the National Socialists. But they had up to 30% of the vote, and combined with political trickery, this was enough support to put him in power. After 1933, he was already in the position to dismantle democracy, squash the opposition, and quickly build up the most horrifying regime of death and destruction known to man. As they say, the rest is history.

[Disclaimer: I understand a lot of the details of this narrative do not come with any direct sources or citations, instead based on cursory knowledge of German history, and other periods of history, or which I know more. At the moment I'm also inspired by the events of the riots in London and other places England (2011), and extrapolating the intensity of these events to a situation much more dire, leads my imagination to the horrors or peace-time that preceded World War II and the Holocaust. My interest in the subject of societal collapse is drawing me to further reading on the matter, but for now I conclude this post]

Understanding the Nazis : part 1

I'm in Berlin on my 3rd trip, enjoying my time, but also trying to understand the Nazis and Hitler. Not in the way Lars von Trier does, but for real, in depth. I set out on a journey to get in the head of the Nazis, who were directly responsible for the death of my grandmother's family, to really dig down into what they were about and what drove them to this madness.

We all know the story. Hitler was democratically elected in 1933. He hated the Jews. He was an evil evil man, arguably the most evil man in history. Fair enough, he probably was. But he was not alone in his evil ways. He did not single-handedly invent and carry out the holocaust. He was surrounded by like-minded people. Behind him, and his minions, was a whole nation of those who even before being brainwashed were willing to give his ideas a chance. How could this happen? How could so many monsterous masterminds (Goebels, Himmel, Heydrich, etc.) Coexist in this one place in history. How could so many people in the general public be on the same page even before the infamous propaganda machine kicked in and the opponents put away in concentration camps?

For answers to that, we gotta look back at the environment the Germans were in after World War One, and how they were shaped by their experience up until 1933

The predicted collapse of the US Empire, and the historical perspective

http://fora.tv/2010/07/28/Niall_Ferguson_Empires_on_the_Edge_of_Chaos#fullprogram

Fast forward to about 10mins for the real lecture