Marcus Gary Fred - Kluge: the haphazard construction of the human mind

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK 2008

Copyright 2008 by Gary Marcus
All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marcus, Gary F. (Gary Fred)
Kluge : the haphazard construction of the human
mind / Gary Marcus.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-618-87964-9
1. Psychology. 2. Cognitive psychology. 3. Cognitive
neuroscience. 1. Title.
BF 38. M 355 2008 153dc22

Printed in the United States of America

MP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Lines from "Laments for a Dying Language" copyright 1960
by Ogden Nash. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Ltd.

For my father,
who taught me the word

1 REMNANTS OF HISTORY

2 MEMORY

3 BELIEF

4 CHOICE

5 LANGUAGE

6 PLEASURE

7 THINGS FALL APART

8 TRUE WISDOM

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Living organisms are historical structures: literally creations
of history. They represent not a perfect product of engineering,
but a patchwork of odd sets pieced together when and where
opportunities arose.

F RANOIS J ACOB

Bad luck is better than no luck at all.

T RADITIONAL

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

B ERTRAND R USSELL

A RE HUMAN BEINGS "noble in reason" and "infinite in faculty" as William Shakespeare famously wrote? Perfect, "in God's image," as some biblical scholars have asserted? Hardly.

If mankind were the product of some intelligent, compassionate designer, our thoughts would be rational, our logic impeccable. Our memory would be robust, our recollections reliable. Our sentences would be crisp, our words precise, our languages systematic and regular, not besodden with irregular verbs (sing-sang, ring-rang, yet bring-brought) and other peculiar inconsistencies. As the language maven Richard Lederer has noted, there would be ham in hamburger, egg in eggplant. English speakers would park in parkways and drive on driveways, and not the other way around.

At the same time, we humans are the only species smart enough to systematically plan for the futureyet dumb enough to ditch our most carefully made plans in favor of short-term gratification. ("Did I say I was on a diet? Mmm, but three-layer chocolate mousse is my favorite ... Maybe I'll start my diet tomorrow") We happily drive across town to save $25 on a $100 microwave but refuse to drive the same distance to save exactly the same $25 on a $1,000 flat-screen TV. We can barely tell the difference between a valid syllogism, such as All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal, and a fallacious counterpart, such as All living things need water, roses needwater, therefore roses are living things (which seems fine until you substitute car batteries for roses). If I tell you that "Every sailor loves a girl," you have no idea whether I mean one girl in particular (say, Betty Sue) or whether I'm really saying "to each his own." And don't even get me started on eyewitness testimony, which is based on the absurd premise that we humans can accurately remember the details of a briefly witnessed accident or crime, years after the fact, when the average person is hard pressed to keep a list of a dozen words straight for half an hour.

I don't mean to suggest that the "design" of the human mind is a total train wreck, but if I were a politician, I'm pretty sure the way I'd put it is "mistakes were made." The goal of this book is to explain what mistakes were madeand why.

Where Shakespeare imagined infinite reason, I see something else, what engineers call a "kluge." A kluge is a clumsy or inelegantyet surprisingly effectivesolution to a problem. Consider, for example, what happened in April 1970 when the CO2 filters on the already endangered lunar module of Apollo 13 began to fail. There was no way to send a replacement filter up to the crewthe space shuttle hadn't been invented yetand no way to bring the capsule home for several more days. Without a filter, the crew would be doomed. The mission control engineer, Ed Smylie, advised his team of the situation, and said, in effect, "Here's what's available on the space capsule; figure something out." Fortunately, the ground crew was able to meet the challenge, quickly cobbling together a crude filter substitute out of a plastic bag, a cardboard box, some duct tape, and a sock. The lives of the three astronauts were saved. As one of them, Jim Lovell, later recalled, "The contraption wasn't very handsome, but it worked."

Not every kluge saves lives. Engineers sometimes devise them for sport, just to show that somethingsay, building a computer out of Tinkertoyscan be done, or simply because they're too lazy to do something the right way. Others cobble together kluges out of a mixture of desperation and resourcefulness, like the TV character MacGyver, who, needing to make a quick getaway, jerry-built a pair of shoes from duct tape and rubber mats. Other kluges are created just for laughs, like Wallace and Gromit's "launch and activate" alarm clock/coffeemaker/Murphy bed and Rube Goldberg's "simplified pencil sharpener" (a kite attached to a string lifts a door, which allows moths to escape, culminating in the lifting of a cage, which frees a woodpecker to gnaw the wood that surrounds a pencil's graphite core). MacGyver's shoes and Rube Goldberg's pencil sharpeners are nothing, though, compared to perhaps the most fantastic kluge of them allthe human mind, a quirky yet magnificent product of the entirely blind process of evolution.

Some trace the word to the old Scottish word cludgie, which means "an outside toilet." Most believe the origins lie in the German word Kluge, which means "clever." The Hacker's Dictionary of Computer Jargon traces the term back at least to 1935, to a "Kluge [brand] paper feeder," described as "an adjunct to mechanical printing presses."

The Kluge feeder was designed before small, cheap electric motors and control electronics; it relied on a fiendishly complex assortment of cams, belts, and linkages to both power and synchronize all its operations from one motive driveshaft. It was accordingly temperamental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly difficult to repairbut oh, so clever!

Virtually everybody agrees that the term was first popularized in February 1962, in an article titled "How to Design a Kludge," written, tongue in cheek, by a computer pioneer named Jackson Granholm, who defined a kluge as "an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole." He went on to note that "the building of a Kludge ... is not work for amateurs. There is a certain, indefinable, masochistic finesse that must go into true Kludge building. The professional can spot it instantly. The amateur may readily presume that 'that's the way computers are.'"

The engineering world is filled with kluges. Consider, for example, something known as vacuum-powered windshield wipers, common in most cars until the early 1960s. Modern windshield wipers, like most gizmos on cars, are driven by electricity, but back in the olden days, cars ran on 6 volts rather than 12, barely enough power to keep the spark plugs going and certainly not enough to power luxuries like windshield wipers. So some clever engineer rigged up a kluge that powered windshield-wiper motors with suction, drawn from the engine, rather than electricity. The only problem is that the amount of suction created by the engine varies, depending on how hard the engine is working. The harder it works, the less vacuum it produces. Which meant that when you drove your 1958 Buick Riviera up a hill, or accelerated hard, your wipers slowed to a crawl, or even stopped working altogether. On a rainy day in the mountains, Grandpa was out of luck.