Human thought is by default compartmentalized for the same good reason warships are compartmentalized: it limits the spread of damage.
A decade or thereabouts ago, I read a book called Darwin’s Black Box, whose thesis was that while gradual evolution could work for macroscopic features of organisms, it could not explain biochemistry, because the intricate molecular machinery of life did not have viable intermediate stages. The author is a professional biochemist, and it shows; he’s really done his homework, and he describes many specific cases in great detail and carefully sets out his reasons for claiming gradual evolution could not have worked.
Oh, and I was able to demolish every one of his arguments in five minutes of armchair thought.
How did that happen? How does a professional put so much into such carefully constructed arguments that end up being so flimsy a layman can trivially demolish them? Well I didn’t know anything else about the guy until I ran a Google search just now, but it confirms what I found, and most Less Wrong readers will find, to be the obvious explanation.
If he had only done what most scientists in his position do, and said “I have faith in God,” and kept that compartmentalized from his work, he would have avoided a gross professional error.
Of course that particular error could have been avoided by being an atheist, but that is not a general solution, because we are not infallible. We are going to end up taking on some mistaken ideas; that’s part of life. You cite the Singularity as your primary example, and it is a good one, for it is a mistaken idea, and one that is immensely harmful if not compartmentalized. But really, it seems unlikely there is a single human being of significant intellect who does not hold at least one bad idea that would cause damage if taken seriously.
We should think long and hard before we throw away safety mechanisms, and compartmentalization is one of the most important ones.
Compartmentalized ships would be a bad idea if small holes in the hull were very common and no one bothered with fixing them as long as they affected only one compartment.
Human thought is by default compartmentalized for the same good reason warships are compartmentalized:
I’m going to ask you to recall your 2010 self now, and ask if you were actually trying to argue for a causal relationship that draws an arrow from the safety of compartmentalization to its existence. This seems wrong. It occurs to me that if you’re evolution, and you’re cobbling together a semblance of a mind, compartmentalization is just the default state, and it doesn’t even occur to you (because you’re evolution and literally mindless) to build bridges between parts of the mind.
Well, even if we agree that compartmentalized minds were the first good-enough solution, there’s a meaningful difference between “there was positive selection pressure towards tightly integrated minds, though it was insufficient to bring that about in the available time” and “there was no selection pressure towards tightly integrated minds” and “there was selection pressure towards compartmentalized minds”.
Rwallace seems to be suggesting the last of those.
Point, but I find the middle of your three options most plausible. Compartmentalization is mostly a problem in today’s complex world; I doubt it was even noticeable most of the time in the ancestral environment. False beliefs e.g. religion look like merely social, instrumental, tribal-bonding mental gestures rather than aliefs.
Yeah, I dunno. From a systems engineering/information theory perspective, my default position is “Of course it’s adaptive for the system to use all the data it has to reason with; the alternative is to discard data, and why would that be a good idea?”
But of course that depends on how reliable my system’s ability to reason is; if it has failure modes that are more easily corrected by denying it certain information than by improving its ability to reason efficiently with that data (somewhat akin to programmers putting input-tests on subroutines rather than write the subroutine so as to handle that kind of input), evolution may very well operate in that fashion, creating selection pressure towards compartmentalization.
What’s about facts from environment—is it good to gloss over applicability of something that you observed in one context, to other context? The compartmentalization may look like good idea when you are spending over a decade to put the effective belief system into children. It doesn’t look so great when you have to process data from environment. We even see correlations where there isn’t any.
The information compartmentalization may look great if the crew of the ship is to engage in pointless idle debates over intercom. Not so much when they need to coordinate actions.
I agree that if “the crew” (that is, the various parts of my brain) are sufficiently competent, and the communications channels between them sufficiently efficient, then making all available information available to everyone is a valuable thing to do. OTOH, if parts of my brain aren’t competent enough to handle all the available information in a useful way, having those parts discard information rather than process it becomes more reasonable. And if the channels between those parts are sufficiently inefficient, the costs of making information available to everyone (especially if sizable chunks of it are ultimately discarded on receipt) might overcome the benefits.
In other words, glossing over the applicability of something I observed in one context to another context is bad if I could have done something useful by non-glossing over it, and not otherwise. Which was reliably the case for our evolutionary predecessors in their environment, I don’t know.
Well, one can conjecture the counter productive effects of intelligence in general and any aspects of it in particular, and sure there were a few, but it stands that we did evolve the intelligence. Keep in mind that without highly developed notion of verbal ‘reasoning’ you may not be able to have the ship flooded with abstract nonsense in the first place. The stuff you feel, it tracks the probabilities.
Can you clarify the relationship between my comment and counterproductive effects of intelligence in general? I’m either not quite following your reasoning, or wasn’t quite clear about mine.
A general-purpose intelligence will, all things being equal, get better results with more data.
But we evolved our cognitive architecture not in the context of a general-purpose intelligence, but rather in the context of a set of cognitive modules that operated adaptively on particular sets of data to perform particular functions. Providing those modules with a superset of that data might well have gotten counterproductive results, not because intelligence is counterproductive, but because they didn’t evolve to handle that superset.
In that kind of environment, sharing all data among all cognitive modules might well have counterproductive effects… again, not because intelligence is counterproductive, but because more data can be counterproductive to an insufficiently general intelligence.
The existence of evolved ‘modules’ within the frontal cortex is not settled science and is in fact controversial. It’s indeed hard to tell how much data do we share, though. Maybe without habit of abstract thought, not so much. On other hand the data about human behaviours seem important.
The default state, is that anything which is not linked to limb movement or other outputs ever, could as well not exist in the first place.
I think the issue with compartmentalization, is that integration of beliefs is a background process, that ensures coherent response whereby one part of the mind would not come up with one action, and other with another, which would make you e.g. drive a car into a tree if one part of brain wants to turn left and other wants to turn right.
The compartmentalization of information is anything but safe. When you compartmentalize your e.g. political orientation, from your logical thinking, I can make you do either A or B by presenting exact same situation in either political, or logical, way, so that one of the parts activates, and arrives at either action A or action B. That is not safe. That is “it gets you eaten one day” unsafe.
And if you compartmentalize the decision making on a warship, it will fail to coordinate the firing of the guns, and will be sunk, even if it will take more holes. Consider a warship that is being attacked by several enemies. If you don’t coordinate the firing of torpedoes, you’ll have overkill fire at some of the ships, wasting firepower. You’ll be sunk. It is known issue in RTS games. You can beat human with pretty dumb AI if it simply coordinates the fire between units better.
The biologist in this example above is a single cherry picked example, from the majority of scientists, for whom the process has worked correctly, and they stopped believing that God created animals, or have failed to integrate beliefs, and are ticking time bombs wrt producing bad hypotheses. An edge case between atheists and believers, he is.
The compartmentalization of information is anything but safe.
I agree in most cases; however, there are some cases where ideas are very Big and Scary and Important where a full propagation through your explicit reasoning causes you to go nuts. This has happened to multiple people on Less Wrong, whom I will not name for obvious reasons.
I would like to emphasize that I agree in most cases. Compartmentalization is bad.
I think it happens due to ideas being wrong and/or being propagated incorrectly. Basically, you would need extremely high confidence in a very big and scary idea, before it can overwrite anything. The MWI is very big and scary. Provisionally, before I develop moral system based on MWI, it is perfectly consistent to assume that it has probability of being wrong, q, and the relative morality of actions, unknown under MWI, and known under SI, does not change, and consequently no moral decision (involving comparison of moral values) changes before there is a high quality moral system based on MWI. As a quick hack moral system based on MWI is likely to be considerably incorrect and lead to rash actions (e.g. quantum suicide that actually turns out to be as bad as normal suicide after you figure stuff out)
The ship is compartmentalized against hole in the hull, not against something great happening to it. Incorrect idea with high confidence can be a hole in the hull; the water be the resulting nonsense overriding the system.
Sure, compartmentalization can protect you from your failures, but it also protects you from your successes.
If you can understand Reason as memetic immune disorder, you should also be able to get to the level of taking this into account. That is, think about how there is a long history of failure to compartmentalize causing failures- a history of people making mistakes, and asking yourself if you’re still confident enough to act on it.
The author was an idiot. I too found the fatal flaw in about five minutes—in a bookshop.
IMO, the mystery here is not the author’s fail, but how long the “evolution” fans banged on about it for—explaining the mistake over and over and over again.
IMO, the mystery here is not the author’s fail, but how long the “evolution” fans banged on about it for—explaining the mistake over and over and over again.
Because lots of people (either not as educated or not as intelligent) didn’t realize how highly flawed the book was. And when someone is being taken seriously enough that they are an expert witness in a federal trial, there’s a real need to respond. Also, there were people like me who looked into Behe’s arguments in detail simply because it didn’t seem likely that someone with his intelligence and education would say something that was so totally lacking in a point, so the worry was that one was missing something. Of course, there’s also the irrational but highly fun aspect of tearing arguments into little tiny pieces. Finally, there’s the other irrational aspect that Behe managed to trigger lots of people to react by his being condescending and obnoxious (see for example his exchange with Abbie Smith where he essentially said that no one should listen to her he because he was a prof and she was just a lowly grad student).
Dawkins and Dennet have subsequently got into the god bashing. What a waste of talent that is. I call it their “gutter outreach” program
Standard beliefs in deities are often connected with a memetic structure that directly encourages irrationalism. Look at the emphasis on “faith” and on mysterious answers. If one is interested in improving rationality, removing the beliefs that directly encourage irrationality is an obvious tactic. Religious beliefs are also responsible for a lot of deaths and resources taken up by war and similar problems. Removing those beliefs directly increases utility. Religion is also in some locations (such as much of the US) functioning as a direct barrier to scientific research and education (creationism and opposition to stem cell research are good examples). Overall, part of why Dawkins has spent so much time dealing with religion seems to be that he sees religion as a major barrier for people actually learning about the interesting stuff.
Finally, note that Dawkins has not just spent time on dealing with religious beliefs. He’s criticized homeopathy, dousing, various New Age healing ideas, and many others beliefs.
I figure those folk should be leading from the front, not dredging the guttering.
Anyone can dispense with the ridiculous nonsense put forth by the religious folk—and they do so regularly.
If anything, Dennet and Dawkins add to the credibility of the idiots by bothering to engage with them.
If the religious nutcases’ aim was to waste the time of these capable science writers—and effectively take them out of productive service—then it is probably “mission acomplished” for them.
those folk should be leading from the front, not dredging the guttering.
So what would constitute leading from the front in your view?
If the religious nutcases’ aim was to waste the time of these capable science writers—and effectively take them out of productive service—then it is probably “mission acomplished” for them.
But there are a lot of science writers now. Carl Zimmer and Rebecca Skloot would be two examples. And the set of people who read about science is not large. If getting people to stop having religious hangups with science will make a larger set of people reading such material how is that not a good thing?
I was much happier with what they were doing before they got sucked into the whirlpool of furious madness and nonsense. Well, “Freedom Evolves” excepted, maybe.
If getting people to stop having religious hangups with science will make a larger
set of people reading such material how is that not a good thing?
Your question apparently presumes falsehoods about my views :-(
If I may attempt an interpretation, Tim is saying that the Great Minds should be busy thinking Great Thoughts, and that they should leave the swatting of religious flies to us lesser folk.
Ah, sorry bad phrasing on my part. Withdraw last question, and replace end with following argument “And the set of people who read about science is not large. Getting people to stop having religious hangups with science will make a larger set of people reading such material is a good thing, and people like Dawkins will do that aspect more effectively than if they were simply one of many science popularizers talking to largely the same audience.”
As I understand it, there is precious little evidence of much marginal benefit—no matter who is making the argument. The religious folk realise it is the devil talking, put their fingers in their ears, and sing the la-la song—which works pretty well. Education will get there in the end. We have people working on that—but it takes a while. The internet should help too.
Dennett once explained:
“Yes, of course I’d much rather have been spending my time working on consciousness and the brain, or on the evolution of cooperation, for instance, or free will, but I felt a moral and political obligation to drop everything for a few years and put my shoulder to the wheel doing a dirty job that I thought somebody had to do.”
Someone has to clean the toilets too—but IMO it doesn’t have to be Daniel Dennett.
If you don’t read creationists, it looks like there aren’t any, and it looks like “evolution fans” are banging on about nothing. But, in reality, there are creationists, and they were also banging on in praise of the book. David Klinghoffer, for instance (prominent creationist with a blog.)
Human thought is by default compartmentalized for the same good reason warships are compartmentalized: it limits the spread of damage.
A decade or thereabouts ago, I read a book called Darwin’s Black Box, whose thesis was that while gradual evolution could work for macroscopic features of organisms, it could not explain biochemistry, because the intricate molecular machinery of life did not have viable intermediate stages. The author is a professional biochemist, and it shows; he’s really done his homework, and he describes many specific cases in great detail and carefully sets out his reasons for claiming gradual evolution could not have worked.
Oh, and I was able to demolish every one of his arguments in five minutes of armchair thought.
How did that happen? How does a professional put so much into such carefully constructed arguments that end up being so flimsy a layman can trivially demolish them? Well I didn’t know anything else about the guy until I ran a Google search just now, but it confirms what I found, and most Less Wrong readers will find, to be the obvious explanation.
If he had only done what most scientists in his position do, and said “I have faith in God,” and kept that compartmentalized from his work, he would have avoided a gross professional error.
Of course that particular error could have been avoided by being an atheist, but that is not a general solution, because we are not infallible. We are going to end up taking on some mistaken ideas; that’s part of life. You cite the Singularity as your primary example, and it is a good one, for it is a mistaken idea, and one that is immensely harmful if not compartmentalized. But really, it seems unlikely there is a single human being of significant intellect who does not hold at least one bad idea that would cause damage if taken seriously.
We should think long and hard before we throw away safety mechanisms, and compartmentalization is one of the most important ones.
Compartmentalized ships would be a bad idea if small holes in the hull were very common and no one bothered with fixing them as long as they affected only one compartment.
It seems like he had one way decompartmentalisation so that his belife in god was weighing on “science” but not the other way round.
I’m going to ask you to recall your 2010 self now, and ask if you were actually trying to argue for a causal relationship that draws an arrow from the safety of compartmentalization to its existence. This seems wrong. It occurs to me that if you’re evolution, and you’re cobbling together a semblance of a mind, compartmentalization is just the default state, and it doesn’t even occur to you (because you’re evolution and literally mindless) to build bridges between parts of the mind.
Well, even if we agree that compartmentalized minds were the first good-enough solution, there’s a meaningful difference between “there was positive selection pressure towards tightly integrated minds, though it was insufficient to bring that about in the available time” and “there was no selection pressure towards tightly integrated minds” and “there was selection pressure towards compartmentalized minds”.
Rwallace seems to be suggesting the last of those.
Point, but I find the middle of your three options most plausible. Compartmentalization is mostly a problem in today’s complex world; I doubt it was even noticeable most of the time in the ancestral environment. False beliefs e.g. religion look like merely social, instrumental, tribal-bonding mental gestures rather than aliefs.
Yeah, I dunno. From a systems engineering/information theory perspective, my default position is “Of course it’s adaptive for the system to use all the data it has to reason with; the alternative is to discard data, and why would that be a good idea?”
But of course that depends on how reliable my system’s ability to reason is; if it has failure modes that are more easily corrected by denying it certain information than by improving its ability to reason efficiently with that data (somewhat akin to programmers putting input-tests on subroutines rather than write the subroutine so as to handle that kind of input), evolution may very well operate in that fashion, creating selection pressure towards compartmentalization.
Or, not.
What’s about facts from environment—is it good to gloss over applicability of something that you observed in one context, to other context? The compartmentalization may look like good idea when you are spending over a decade to put the effective belief system into children. It doesn’t look so great when you have to process data from environment. We even see correlations where there isn’t any.
The information compartmentalization may look great if the crew of the ship is to engage in pointless idle debates over intercom. Not so much when they need to coordinate actions.
I’m not sure I’m understanding you here.
I agree that if “the crew” (that is, the various parts of my brain) are sufficiently competent, and the communications channels between them sufficiently efficient, then making all available information available to everyone is a valuable thing to do. OTOH, if parts of my brain aren’t competent enough to handle all the available information in a useful way, having those parts discard information rather than process it becomes more reasonable. And if the channels between those parts are sufficiently inefficient, the costs of making information available to everyone (especially if sizable chunks of it are ultimately discarded on receipt) might overcome the benefits.
In other words, glossing over the applicability of something I observed in one context to another context is bad if I could have done something useful by non-glossing over it, and not otherwise. Which was reliably the case for our evolutionary predecessors in their environment, I don’t know.
Well, one can conjecture the counter productive effects of intelligence in general and any aspects of it in particular, and sure there were a few, but it stands that we did evolve the intelligence. Keep in mind that without highly developed notion of verbal ‘reasoning’ you may not be able to have the ship flooded with abstract nonsense in the first place. The stuff you feel, it tracks the probabilities.
Can you clarify the relationship between my comment and counterproductive effects of intelligence in general? I’m either not quite following your reasoning, or wasn’t quite clear about mine.
A general-purpose intelligence will, all things being equal, get better results with more data.
But we evolved our cognitive architecture not in the context of a general-purpose intelligence, but rather in the context of a set of cognitive modules that operated adaptively on particular sets of data to perform particular functions. Providing those modules with a superset of that data might well have gotten counterproductive results, not because intelligence is counterproductive, but because they didn’t evolve to handle that superset.
In that kind of environment, sharing all data among all cognitive modules might well have counterproductive effects… again, not because intelligence is counterproductive, but because more data can be counterproductive to an insufficiently general intelligence.
The existence of evolved ‘modules’ within the frontal cortex is not settled science and is in fact controversial. It’s indeed hard to tell how much data do we share, though. Maybe without habit of abstract thought, not so much. On other hand the data about human behaviours seem important.
The default state, is that anything which is not linked to limb movement or other outputs ever, could as well not exist in the first place.
I think the issue with compartmentalization, is that integration of beliefs is a background process, that ensures coherent response whereby one part of the mind would not come up with one action, and other with another, which would make you e.g. drive a car into a tree if one part of brain wants to turn left and other wants to turn right.
The compartmentalization of information is anything but safe. When you compartmentalize your e.g. political orientation, from your logical thinking, I can make you do either A or B by presenting exact same situation in either political, or logical, way, so that one of the parts activates, and arrives at either action A or action B. That is not safe. That is “it gets you eaten one day” unsafe.
And if you compartmentalize the decision making on a warship, it will fail to coordinate the firing of the guns, and will be sunk, even if it will take more holes. Consider a warship that is being attacked by several enemies. If you don’t coordinate the firing of torpedoes, you’ll have overkill fire at some of the ships, wasting firepower. You’ll be sunk. It is known issue in RTS games. You can beat human with pretty dumb AI if it simply coordinates the fire between units better.
The biologist in this example above is a single cherry picked example, from the majority of scientists, for whom the process has worked correctly, and they stopped believing that God created animals, or have failed to integrate beliefs, and are ticking time bombs wrt producing bad hypotheses. An edge case between atheists and believers, he is.
I agree in most cases; however, there are some cases where ideas are very Big and Scary and Important where a full propagation through your explicit reasoning causes you to go nuts. This has happened to multiple people on Less Wrong, whom I will not name for obvious reasons.
I would like to emphasize that I agree in most cases. Compartmentalization is bad.
I think it happens due to ideas being wrong and/or being propagated incorrectly. Basically, you would need extremely high confidence in a very big and scary idea, before it can overwrite anything. The MWI is very big and scary. Provisionally, before I develop moral system based on MWI, it is perfectly consistent to assume that it has probability of being wrong, q, and the relative morality of actions, unknown under MWI, and known under SI, does not change, and consequently no moral decision (involving comparison of moral values) changes before there is a high quality moral system based on MWI. As a quick hack moral system based on MWI is likely to be considerably incorrect and lead to rash actions (e.g. quantum suicide that actually turns out to be as bad as normal suicide after you figure stuff out)
The ship is compartmentalized against hole in the hull, not against something great happening to it. Incorrect idea with high confidence can be a hole in the hull; the water be the resulting nonsense overriding the system.
That’s the idea behind Reason as memetic immune disorder.
Sure, compartmentalization can protect you from your failures, but it also protects you from your successes.
If you can understand Reason as memetic immune disorder, you should also be able to get to the level of taking this into account. That is, think about how there is a long history of failure to compartmentalize causing failures- a history of people making mistakes, and asking yourself if you’re still confident enough to act on it.
I replied to your comment here.
The author was an idiot. I too found the fatal flaw in about five minutes—in a bookshop.
IMO, the mystery here is not the author’s fail, but how long the “evolution” fans banged on about it for—explaining the mistake over and over and over again.
Because lots of people (either not as educated or not as intelligent) didn’t realize how highly flawed the book was. And when someone is being taken seriously enough that they are an expert witness in a federal trial, there’s a real need to respond. Also, there were people like me who looked into Behe’s arguments in detail simply because it didn’t seem likely that someone with his intelligence and education would say something that was so totally lacking in a point, so the worry was that one was missing something. Of course, there’s also the irrational but highly fun aspect of tearing arguments into little tiny pieces. Finally, there’s the other irrational aspect that Behe managed to trigger lots of people to react by his being condescending and obnoxious (see for example his exchange with Abbie Smith where he essentially said that no one should listen to her he because he was a prof and she was just a lowly grad student).
Re: “there’s also the irrational but highly fun aspect of tearing arguments into little tiny pieces”
I think that was most of it—plus the creationsts were on the other side, and the they got publicly bashed for a long time.
I was left wondering why so many intelligent people wasted so much energy and time on such nonsense for so long.
Dawkins and Dennet have subsequently got into the god bashing. What a waste of talent that is. I call it their “gutter outreach” program.
Standard beliefs in deities are often connected with a memetic structure that directly encourages irrationalism. Look at the emphasis on “faith” and on mysterious answers. If one is interested in improving rationality, removing the beliefs that directly encourage irrationality is an obvious tactic. Religious beliefs are also responsible for a lot of deaths and resources taken up by war and similar problems. Removing those beliefs directly increases utility. Religion is also in some locations (such as much of the US) functioning as a direct barrier to scientific research and education (creationism and opposition to stem cell research are good examples). Overall, part of why Dawkins has spent so much time dealing with religion seems to be that he sees religion as a major barrier for people actually learning about the interesting stuff.
Finally, note that Dawkins has not just spent time on dealing with religious beliefs. He’s criticized homeopathy, dousing, various New Age healing ideas, and many others beliefs.
I figure those folk should be leading from the front, not dredging the guttering.
Anyone can dispense with the ridiculous nonsense put forth by the religious folk—and they do so regularly.
If anything, Dennet and Dawkins add to the credibility of the idiots by bothering to engage with them.
If the religious nutcases’ aim was to waste the time of these capable science writers—and effectively take them out of productive service—then it is probably “mission acomplished” for them.
So what would constitute leading from the front in your view?
But there are a lot of science writers now. Carl Zimmer and Rebecca Skloot would be two examples. And the set of people who read about science is not large. If getting people to stop having religious hangups with science will make a larger set of people reading such material how is that not a good thing?
I was much happier with what they were doing before they got sucked into the whirlpool of furious madness and nonsense. Well, “Freedom Evolves” excepted, maybe.
Your question apparently presumes falsehoods about my views :-(
Clarify please? What presumptions am I making that are not accurate?
If I may attempt an interpretation, Tim is saying that the Great Minds should be busy thinking Great Thoughts, and that they should leave the swatting of religious flies to us lesser folk.
“Why Richard Dawkins Doesn’t Debate Creationists”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhmsDGanyes
Yudkowsky proposes that we let them debate college students:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/17f/let_them_debate_college_students/
Uh, I never claimed that getting people to stop having religious hangups was not a good thing in the first place.
Ah, sorry bad phrasing on my part. Withdraw last question, and replace end with following argument “And the set of people who read about science is not large. Getting people to stop having religious hangups with science will make a larger set of people reading such material is a good thing, and people like Dawkins will do that aspect more effectively than if they were simply one of many science popularizers talking to largely the same audience.”
As I understand it, there is precious little evidence of much marginal benefit—no matter who is making the argument. The religious folk realise it is the devil talking, put their fingers in their ears, and sing the la-la song—which works pretty well. Education will get there in the end. We have people working on that—but it takes a while. The internet should help too.
Dennett once explained:
“Yes, of course I’d much rather have been spending my time working on consciousness and the brain, or on the evolution of cooperation, for instance, or free will, but I felt a moral and political obligation to drop everything for a few years and put my shoulder to the wheel doing a dirty job that I thought somebody had to do.”
Someone has to clean the toilets too—but IMO it doesn’t have to be Daniel Dennett.
If you don’t read creationists, it looks like there aren’t any, and it looks like “evolution fans” are banging on about nothing. But, in reality, there are creationists, and they were also banging on in praise of the book. David Klinghoffer, for instance (prominent creationist with a blog.)