Engineering Illusions of The Science, Part 2

The Science Wars Part IV

Here is Part 1 for those who missed it or would like to hold it open in a window to look back at any details.

Engineering Illusions of The Science, Part 1

Also, here is the documentary we are exploring for the moment. More time stamps to come.

Understand that I am writing this story now because there is a very serious need for people to understand that the institutions of science weren't just captured yesterday. We have been living in a Matrix

Excelsior…

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The Play-Doh "Experiment"

Restart the documentary at around 37:00 to find this part.

This is where I feel the story goes from silly to insulting my intelligence. There is nothing scientific about what's going on in that test, and nothing differentiates H1 from H2. Daniel clearly has a good memory, that's all. It's insulting because they present this test as if it should be regarded as some kind of "final proof" of Daniel's ability to see numbers as shapes and colors. We have no reason to believe Daniel hasn't been memorizing the basic descriptions, and holding up two little dildo-looking sculptures from day 1 and day 2 is not anything like a "rigorous test" of anything.

Good grief.

Notice that Daniel never said, "Um, 242 isn't just one color, and it's cobalt blue, with streaks of silver and green polka dots." Amazingly, all the numbers happen to be single colors that are all represented (at least to basic analog) in a standard play-doh kit.

Fascinating.

Now, I'm not going to say that's "an intentionally sham experiment designed to reach for research dollars." I won't say it. It...just...might...be...that...God made the universe so that Daniel's brain sees in play-doh-vision. But do you understand why I developed a strong opinion by this point (actually long before it) in the documentary?

Like Tammet, I memorize numbers well, but in a way that makes good use of context. If somebody gave me play-doh and told me to build numbers, I'd strategize. What comes to mind immediately would be to primarily use prime factorizations. For big prime numbers, maybe I'd have a fallback that wouldn't require immense decoding. That way, you could ask me five years later, and I'd recall that method perfectly, giving you the same answer each time you asked the question. I might even have a standard way to break down a number like 432, which is 4 powers of 2 multiplied by 3 powers of 3, that stacked the colors in alternating order to look whizzy neato despite following a simple rule I could repeat in all representations. Such a feat would not even be much of a memory feat, but the illusion would obscure that.

But has Tammet always given consistent answers when confronted with the same questions? We’ll come back to that…

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Anxiety Over Pi

So what that he has anxiety when shown a pattern that deviates from his familiar mental picture of pi? That's not a "mean" test—it's at best meaningless beyond the fact that Daniel has great [expressed] affinity for pi. At worst this is just a softball served up to make Daniel look really mathy in a sparkly mysterious kind of way. This feels unsciencey in that "unfalsifiable" sort of way, or noninvestigatable like so many bottom-feeder episodes of Unsolved Mysteries or "documentaries" about aliens.

I'm going to need a $2 million grant to study that.

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Is This A/The Science Drama?

Let's take a look at a few choice quotes from the documentary.

"His childhood holds a dramatic clue." (7:53)

I love this line. The drama is not the clue, but the effect of buildup the line itself has on an audience, talking the audience into believing whatever conclusions are conjured by the end. But really, Daniel's childhood betrays the real story—that a kid who focuses on numbers develops special abilities for working with them.

That was in fact the premise of my career as a math teacher. It's that simple. And being honest about it spurs greater and broader growth in human development. Making any form of excellence look like unattainable magic makes people quit working a little more often. It's that simple.

"By most measures, Daniel is autistic, but he's also picked up enough social skills to blend in." (14:41)

This quote really struck me. It's true that Daniel is interesting (or "interesting") in some regard. While I've bashed Daniel's explanations for his computational abilities, that's mostly because it appears to me to be a cheap grab at attention (for which I feel only pity). Daniel's standard set of social skills are not horrible, but they're not par either. They're weird, but whatever. Plenty of people manage through a bit of weirdness.

But really, what "measures" of autism are we talking about? Just diagnose him and show us how it's done and what that means. Or is the point to build mystique, not understanding?

"One day you'll be as great as I am." (28:12)

Superb line, and probably helps with the charade that Daniel and Kim are alike in some especially peculiar way. But I don't buy it at all. Kim expresses kindness, seeking to endow what makes him special onto another man. Daniel looks embarrassed by that, if anything.

The greatest similarity between Kim and Daniel is intense memory, but Kim's is far more intense. This is a difference by kind. He concentrates more wholly on his savant abilities. Of course, Daniel is more social, which may itself explain some of the difference. But overall, it's not clear that Kim is capable of less intensity, though I believe that Daniel is capable.

Here is a ten minute Ted Talk given by Daniel. You make the call.

Aside from the lisp, he presents as a typical geek seeking profoundness by quoting literature rarely read by an audience of credulous college graduates. But as is typical of many a conman, he thrusts his terrible watercolor art at the audience. I wonder if he's thought of NFTs yet?

It was interesting to experience the joke at around 7:50 (a good little joke!) that is the type of joke that strikes me as coming from a place of ordinary if well-observed human experience. Out of all the words he studied in Icelandic, he recognized the one around which he could build an entertaining moment in front of an audience that reads The Atlantic a little too seriously. Having worked closely with around a dozen autistic students (specifically as a specialist working with those who were gifted in mathematics), and less closely with numerous others, that strikes me as something I never once saw from any of them despite encouragement. To be clear, I once in a while took the moment to point out laughter, and cognitive friction behind it, and ask autistic students I worked with what might make another person laugh. Never once did I see substantial recognition of the meaning of the exercise.

”I’m very much a big skeptic of this.” (32:30)

Azoulai stuck me as one of the least skeptical scientists I’ve ever witnessed. My opinion of his body language is of a person who wants to be impressed or at least express that reaction performatively. But truthfully, I’m taking a shot at him here because the tests I saw in this documentary were so flimsy that I simply cannot respect any of this as a scientific exercise. Nothing here elevates H1 over H2, and when sits in a documentary near heavily-produced action shots of Daniel miming his play-doh-vision-arithmetic like Manga magic, I move a little closer to H2.

"It was something that you just can't fake. These are the things specifically that are showing me that he's not bullshitting and he's not scamming. Even the mistakes that Daniel makes are the mistakes that are telling me 'you know what? This is legit. A faker wouldn't be doing this.'" (39:39)

A faker wouldn't do this? That's a scientific opinion? I thought science was about testing a hypothesis. I can test the hypothesis. I have. I've taught middle schoolers to do nearly all the "amazing" things Daniel did in the documentary.

But I have a strong opinion about this quote. I can't prove it, but it strikes me as the kind of quote that comes out of somebody's mouth when they're staging something. The whole video seems to have this defensive quality to it, presented with a tenor of scientific analysis.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not accusing the researchers of staging the actual moments of computation. I think they’re just throwing him softballs. Then again, I have to wonder how those softballs would have been selected. Nothing here elevates H1 over H2.

"This could be the linchpin that spawns a whole new field of research. (40:56)

I find it utterly amazing that Daniel's shapes weren't put to any rigorous testing. I bet I could debunk them in 5 minutes. A researcher just says, "Wow, I'm blown away" as Daniel looks away, looking anxious. This line, with lack of all credible backing, does nothing but support my case. Nothing here distinguishes H1 from H2.

"The line between profound talent...and profound disability seems really a surprisingly thin one." (46:18)

That sounds to me like something somebody might say if they've gone through life playing mental games, never doing anything productive, finally deciding to play their cards in hoax, hoping for something good to happen. Hoping perhaps for a little fame? Some butter for the bread? Nothing here distinguishes H1 from H2.

"The bigger question is whether we all have some of those abilities within us. And that is what I refer to as the little rainman within us." (46:43)

Wow, that's so warm and fuzzy and conclusionary without respect to science that it makes me want to puke.

It is an interesting question, but the answer is plain: there are far more than 50 people with the abilities described in the documentary. There aren't a lot of people like Kim "the real rain man" Peek, but Daniel isn't like that either, even if he wants to act like he is. Daniel is just a guy with a fairly high IQ (but probably not too high if this is his shot in the world's game of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) who claims to squash shapes and sizes together to compute numbers—or that it just sort of happens with little or no effort—like hair growth or pooping.

Some Further (Basically Scientific or Scientifically Basic) Inquiry

I would be interested in knowing how all these shapes and sizes mash together when Daniel divides one integer by another. Am I really the only person who imagined imposing the arithmetic operator under which the integers are not a closed set?! Why was the one and only division problem he was served up one that happens to have the most perfect setup for an easy-to-employ, but difficult-to-identify tool? (Put 13/98 into a calculator and look at the pairs of digits. Do you see the doubling? Too many people would notice.)

13/98 = .(13)(26)(53)(06)(12)(24)(48)...

Does it strike nobody else at all that it is implausible that some brain abnormality results in both a rare and arithmetically effective form of synaesthesia and exceptional memory capacity—each enough to impress the gods on Mount Olympus?

If Daniel's abilities are so abnormal—if he uses shapes and sizes to compute in ways he can't explain...why is his primary profession as a tutor? Did he go out of his way to learn mathematical methods he doesn't actually need to use himself in order to teach the basics to children? Tutoring (well, professionally) means making connections with people and understanding where they are and how they can move forward. You don't hire an autistic Olympic medalist in fencing to coach offensive linemen in football.

In the Wikipedia article on Daniel Tammet, his synaesthesia is explained as such:

In his mind, Tammet says, each positive integer up to 10,000 has its own unique shape, colour, texture and feel. He has described his visual image of 289 as particularly ugly, 333 as particularly attractive, and pi, though not an integer, as beautiful. The number 6 apparently has no distinct image yet what he describes as an almost small nothingness, opposite to the number 9, which he says is large, towering, and quite intimidating. He describes the number 117 as "a handsome number. It's tall, it's a lanky number, a little bit wobbly."

If you’re doing mental computation, 17 is an ugly number to work with. Unless you couple it with another number, like 6 (to make 6*17 = 102), it’s hard to find a nice way to multiply by 17. 17 squared is 289. Now, when doing large computations, you have to pair 17 with “nice” numbers twice to perform well. So, if 289 is involved, the computations are “ugly” to try to do mentally. It makes for a nice excuse if you miss those problems: “The squiggles in my head were ugly this time—hard to read.”

On the other hand, multiplication by 333 is extraordinarily easy because, 

3*333 = 999 = 1000 – 1.

Powers of 10 are, as I have alluded to already, the key to quick mental computation. It strikes me as convenient for Daniel to have picked a power of 10 to stop at for “seeing” numbers as shapes, colors, and textures. If I wanted to script a story like his, that’s exactly what I would do. It would make all the crap I made up easier to remember anyway.

In 2020, while I was leading a Math Club for Adults (something I may reboot if the plandemonium ever subsides) I talked through some of Daniel's story and techniques of number sense in a video that YouTube quickly demonetized. I sent a message through the YouTube system with the reasonable observation that the use of a few clips in my videa was clearly fair use, but YouTube never responded.

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What's in it for Daniel?

If H2 is correct, can we identify a motive?

Why play the role of the willing lab rat? Maybe Tammet is perfectly happy to give up some of his prime years of productivity for the sake of The Science? Having one's ego stroked is nice, but too much of it makes one a target, so I'll say "possible, but unlikely." Speaking as a former almost-30-year-old man, I think that making a good living fits as a better motivation. We'll come back to that point…

The Boy with the Incredible Brain came out in 2005. Two years to the day later, Tammet published the first and most successful of his several books since. It spent months on the NYT best seller list.

After the Boy with the Incredible Brain came out, Tammet went on a bit of a media tour, including an appearance on David Letterman's Late Night program:

Tammet also appeared on 60 Minutes, which includes the 31^4 question which I noted as a repetition of computation from The Boy with the Incredible Brain.

It's unclear how much Tammet might have profited in book sales from all the publicity, but judging by a few crude metrics I found around the internet, I'm guessing Tammet sold several million dollars worth of books. Tammet also does or did run an education company, and the publicity likely buoyed that a bit.

Toward the end of the 60 Minutes video, it is mentioned that Tammet sometimes gives talks to parents of autistic children. Discovering that gave me a bit of a chill, and I may or may not come back to that point at a later time.

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Moonwalking with Einstein

Three years after my original critique of the Tammet story, journalist Joshua Foer published Moonwalking with Einstein, which debuted at number 3 on the NYT bestseller list. I own a copy and recommend it as a unique and exceptional piece of participatory journalism.

Foer's journey begins as an exploration of advanced or enhanced memory. His explorations took him to the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship where his mind was blown to find out that the participants did not think of themselves as savants. Participants explained to Foer the use of both short- and long-term memory enhancement that have been used for as many as 2,500 years (often refined for modern use or competition). He gives an excellent 20 minute TED Talk about some of what he learned.

Foer did not just learn about the techniques, he learned them—so well that he participated in and won the competition the very next year. Foer spent a year's worth of dedicated time proving to himself and the whole world that what most people think of as savant-level achievement (rare exceptions notwithstanding) can be the result of medium-term dedication to skill development. And it doesn't require any kind of elite conceit that could otherwise trap somebody (particularly a young person without the wisdom of a good guide) in a false reality of feeling or performatively behaving differently.

Chapter 10 of Foer's work includes a perspective on Daniel Tammet and the documentary that thrust him into the dazzling world of celebrity savants. All quotes are from the first page of that chapter (emphasis mine),

One day, after memorizing 138 digits in one of my five-minute practice sessions, I was sitting in front of the television, rifling through a deck of cards, as I often did to pass the time. I was looking at the queen of clubs, thinking about Roseanne Barr, about to form a disgusting memory, when I caught a trailer for a new documentary called Brainman about one of those rare prodigies. The subject of the film, which aired on the Science Channel, was a twenty-six-year-old British savant named Daniel Tammet, whose brain had been altered by an epileptic seizure he suffered as a toddler. Daniel could perform complex multiplication and division in his head, seemingly effortlessly. He could tell you if any number up to ten thousand was a prime. Most savants have just a single claim to exceptionality, a lone “island of genius,” but Daniel had a veritable archipelago. In addition to his lightning calculations, he was also a hyperpolyglot - a term used to describe the small number of people who can speak more than six languages. Daniel claimed to speak ten, and he said he learned Spanish in a single weekend. He’d even invented a language of his own called Mänti. To test his linguistic skills, the producers of Brainman flew Daniel to Iceland, and gave him one week to become conversational in Icelandic, one of the world’s most notoriously difficult languages. The talk-show host who tested him on national television at the end of the week pronounced himself “amazed.” Daniel’s tutor for the week called him a “genius” and “not human.”

Reading this, I felt that Foer had a similar reaction that I did, but with less background knowledge by which to judge Tammet's calculation methods. Having just spent time learning to perform a breadth of impressive memory feats, Foer found himself skeptical enough with Tammet's story that he sought Tammet out to observe him. Upon meeting Tammet, Foer remarked, "I was taken aback by how surprisingly ordinary Daniel seemed," after sharing food, drink, and a bit of conversation with Daniel and his partner.

Foer points out that Tammet changed his name at some point. The so-called "savant" Daniel Tammet was born Daniel Corney. Huh.

Foer talked about Tammet with other mental athletes whom he had gotten to know, and quite a number of them were skeptical about Tammet's story. "Any of us could do what he's done," remarked one of them. Foer researched Tammet by searching his forming name, Daniel Corney to discover that Tammet was himself a competitor in the World Memory Championship, playing fourth in 2000, but had his name legally changed in 2001. That seems to be shortly after advertising his own memory program:

I was especially surprised by one of Daniel’s posts to the WWBC. It was an ad from the year 2001 in which he offered to reveal the “secrets of his ‘Mindpower formula’ in his unique ‘Mindpower and Advanced Memory skills e-mail course.’ ” What secrets were those? I wondered. And why hadn’t he shared them with me when we met?

Does Daniel believe his abilities are teachable, or as the claim goes, the result of the damage of autism and childhood epilepsy coming together in a seemingly magical recipe that enhances mathematical, mnemonic, and linguistic ability all the same time?

Though I asked him repeatedly on several occasions, Daniel refused to perform even a single mental calculation for me.

Daniel says that he doesn't want a life of performing like a trained seal, but shying away from one single computation that would not come from somebody vested in his story does not demonstrate much-needed veracity for Hypothesis 1.

“There are a lot of people in the world who can do those kinds of things, but they’re still pretty impressive,” Ben Pridmore told me. In addition to competing on the memory circuit, Ben also competes in the Mental Calculation World Cup, a biennial contest in which participants carry out mental calculations far more extreme than Daniel’s, including multiplying eight-digit numbers without pencil or paper. None of these top calculators make any claims about seeing numerical shapes that fuse and divide in their minds’ eyes. They all readily admit to using techniques detailed in countless books and Web sites. I asked Ronald Doerfler, author of one of those books, Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments, to watch Brainman and tell me what he thought. “I’m not fantastically impressed with any of that,” he said of Daniel’s mathematical talents, and added, “The lore of mental calculators is rife with misdirection.”

Having grown bored of math contests early in high school, I don't bother with mental calculation events. But I know a few people who have since writing my article in 2008, and the opinions of Pridmore and Doerfler are absolutely the norm.

Now, here is a paragraph from Foer's chapter that requires special attention at the Big Picture level of The Science itself.

“You don’t use memory techniques?” I asked him. “No,” he assured me. If Daniel had concocted his story of being a natural savant, it would have required a degree of mendacity that I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe he possessed. If he was merely a trained mnemonist trying to cloak himself in the garb of a savant, why would he so willingly subject himself to scientific testing?

After working for a Summer at the statistical hub of the Human Genome Project at Washington University in St. Louis, I found myself heavily recruited by the biologists and geneticists, but my intention was to study Mathematics at the university level, whatever else I might do thereafter. I spent time poking around various corners of science during my freshman year and for reasons I may explain in other articles, came away with the impression that a great deal of The Science was fake. In particular, what I saw in the field of Psychology made me cringe, including all manner of methodological posing, posturing, and p-hacking that struck me as narcissistic, performative "science". But I suspect that the firehose of money in corners of every field ensures less than honest cash grabs. My strong opinion is that somewhere in the Tammet story is an intersection with that observation.

The researcher who diagnosed Tammet with Asperger syndrome is clinical psychologist and development pathologist Simon Baron-Cohen, cousin of comedic character creator Sacha Baron-Cohen. This coincidence somehow always remains in the back of my mind. Simon Baron-Cohen is also responsible for the mind-blindness theory of autism, which suggests a link between autism and an inability to formulate a theory of mind as a construct for personal recognition (as in relationships). I also find the theory lacking on many levels, but I'll save that conversation for another time.

If there is a motive to this story that could reach beyond establishing an upper-middle class living standard for a guy who was good at contests of mental feats, could it be the very story of autism itself?

To Be Continued…