December 22, 2011
True Stories
A few earlier posts have commented on the curious habits of mind in which we invent explanations for our own actions and decisions, though they were made without conscious thought. Kahneman speak is currently popular. There is a much older thought stream on the general subject. David Hume referred to causality as “the cement of the universe.” He was being ironic, since he knew that this so-called cement was a hallucination, a tale we tell ourselves to make sense of events and observations. No matter how precisely we knew a given system, Hume realized, its underlying causes would always remain mysterious, shadowed by error bars and uncertainty. Although the scientific process tries to makes sense of problems by isolating every variable—imagining a blood vessel, say, if HDL alone were raised—reality doesn’t work like that. Instead, we live in a world in which everything is knotted together, an impregnable tangle of causes and effects. Even when a system is dissected...
December 06, 2011
Grooves
There have been some interesting articles and papers dealing with neurological and behavioral insights. Some debunk the idea that humans behave rationally, thinking things through and making choices grounded in enlightened self-interest. Instead, it seems, we make up stories to explain ourselves to ourselves and others, and really have no clues about why we do what we do since the decisions are made before we become conscious of having made them. "There's someone inside my head, but it's not me". We think that we are Sherlock Holmes deducing reality from subtle clues, and taking precise actions based on analyses, but we are really Maxwell Smart, bumbling our way through life and asserting after the fact that we meant to do what we did, but only when the result is accidentally favorable. What is attractive to me about such writings isn't merely that they are contrarian - contrary for the sake of being contrary - it is that they jolt...
November 09, 2011
Blame Game
As the world seems to be crashing down around us I've spent more time than I'd like thinking about causes. It seems to me that there are some common features to #occupyfail, the slow motion disaster of the Arab Spring, and #eurofail, and that for the most part academics, journalists and pundits are not addressing the issues so much as trying like mad to justify themselves and their class, even though it's all coming apart. Think about this: In the debate on unemployment, Ryan Avent makes a common move ... though I think an incorrect one: There are over 2m unemployed college graduates of all ages; nearly three times the level of 2007. There are many millions more that are underemployed—unwillingly working less than full-time or unwillingly working in a job outside their field which pays less than jobs in their field. As far as I know, the distribution of college majors didn’t swing dramatically from quantitative fields to...
November 07, 2011
Book Learning
I read an article recently that discussed the areas of the brain that were dedicated to certain functions. Many of them were about operating the body, such as sensory apparatus - taste, touch and so forth. A researcher sought to communicate the nature of the mapping of brain to function with a cartoon figure of the man inside your head with its features sized to the proportions of that mapping. It had giant hands, huge lips and face, and a tiny little body except for selected bits. But it's more than that. A psychic mapping might show something even more surprising if you are new to this sort of investigation: Only a tiny fraction of the brain is dedicated to conscious behavior. The rest works feverishly behind the scenes regulating everything from breathing to mate selection. In fact, neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine argues that the unconscious workings of the brain are so crucial to everyday...
September 23, 2011
Baby Bayes
A few years ago (Jan. 2004!) in Probabilistic Sensorimotor Learning a paper was discussed that found that "subjects internally represent both the statistical distribution of the task and their sensory uncertainty, combining them in a manner consistent with a performance-optimizing bayesian process. The central nervous system therefore employs probabilistic models during sensorimotor learning." The claim isn't that we are all "hard wired Bayesian with a subconscious grasp of deep mathematics", and it wasn't clear that the observations pointed more clearly to a Bayesian or a frequentist model. The subject is still on some minds, Probabilistic Minds. Principles of probability, researchers are finding, may guide basic visual abilities, such as estimating the tilt of lines or finding targets hidden amid distractions. Other behaviors, and even simple math, may depend on similar number crunching, some scientists think. And such advanced statistical reasoning does not require paying attention in math class. New studies suggest that 1-year-olds are already tiny probabilistic machines who,...
September 17, 2011
Small L
Why prefer limited government? There are a couple of competing justifications for this preference. While it is true that we employ reason to explain preferences that are grounded in pre-conscious, emotion-based, ever-mysterious decisions, reason is, nonetheless, still required for comfort. One argument is that Government Is Force Government is significantly different from anything else in society. It is the only institution that can legally threaten and initiate violence; that is, under color of law its officers may use physical force, up to and including lethal force — not in defense of innocent life but against individuals who have neither threatened nor aggressed against anyone else. “Government is not reason. It is not eloquence,” George Washington reportedly said. “Government is force; like fire it is a dangerous servant — and a fearful master.” That’s not a controversial description of the State. Even people enthusiastic about government would agree. Given this unique feature, then, why isn’t everyone wary of the State?...
September 03, 2011
Moreover and However
The idiocy of collective action angst, and efforts to incite riots by activists, isn't just an ethical and aesthetic failure, it is first and foremost an intellectual failure. The outcome of such tantrums is unpredictable, and usually makes things worse. This isn't news, so one can then also criticize the ethics of knowingly fomenting probable disaster. When we look closely we usually find opportunists who have some chance of personal benefit from events that are harmful to the rest of society. They are, in that sense, social criminals. This is a current issue, as noted in the previous post about social media and the way it is manipulated by unethical opportunist to create havoc, such as we see in the Middle East. It isn't that the status quo is good, it is that mindless rebellion makes things worse. Some maturity of mind and attention to probable outcomes is required rather the juvenile tantrums. However, what has kept me thinking...
September 01, 2011
Daggre
The forecasting tournament discussed in Crowdcast has a Robin Hanson GMU entrant. I would like to announce that the DAGGRE forecasting site is now live, and we are recruiting participants! If you are interested, and not already enrolled in another ACE team (and not planning to be), please visit http://www.daggre.org and join us. Robin explains The government sponsor is IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity), under the ACE (Aggregative Contingent Estimation) program, and our team is DAGGRE (Decomposition-Based Elicitation & Aggregation). Our approach has three distinctive features, all visible to participants: We use an edit-based interface – a current consensus on all questions is visible to all participants, and any user may change any part. Each edit is scored on whether it moves the consensus closer to or further from the truth. (This is equivalent to a market-maker-based prediction market). For each question IARPA assigns, we “decompose” it by adding related questions, and letting participants forecast both related questions...
August 27, 2011
Nerd Merch
I read an article somewhere the other day that predicted a takeover of economies and society by software houses. The argument was that they are getting bigger and richer while the old economy of physical things was moving off shore at an accelerated pace, and old industry was going broke. It was one of a number of fawning articles written about the retirement of Steve Jobs. The chattering classes are wetting themselves in excitement about the celebration of, well, themselves, their values, their world view. Like children of every generation they think that they invented life and that before them all was grey and drab. They invented music, sex, celebrity and beauty. Again. To understand the cultural significance of Steve Jobs, you have to go back in time: to before the iPad or iPhone or iTunes, before Apple Inc.’s comeback products made candy-colored plastics and iAnything cool, before Jobs got kicked out of Apple, even before the Macintosh hurled...
August 04, 2011
Cool Kids
Yet another metaphor for the current dissatisfaction with the ruling class. The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth grade education or less. It always had its down side, and the arrogance and tin-eared obtuseness of self assured American liberal progressives has infuriated generations of Americans and foreigners who for one reason or another have the misfortune to fall under the power of a class still in the grip of a secularized version of the Puritan ideal. But in the conditions of late nineteenth and twentieth century America, the progressive vanguard fulfilled a vital and necessary social role. The deep crisis of the progressive ideal today is that it is no longer clear that the American clerisy is wanted or needed in that role. At bottom, that is what the populist revolt against establishments of all kinds is about. A growing section of...
August 03, 2011
Crowdcast
You may have given some attention to prediction markets, especially if you read Robin Hanson, but Philip Tetlock has a mudge and a proposal. Prediction markets can harness the "wisdom of crowds" to solve problems, develop products, and make forecasts. These systems typically treat collective intelligence as a commodity to be mined, not a resource that can be grown and improved. That’s about to change. Starting in mid-2011, five teams will compete in a U.S.-government-sponsored forecasting tournament. Each team will develop its own tools for harnessing and improving collective intelligence and will be judged on how well its forecasters predict major trends and events around the world over the next four years. In terms that I've been using lately this is an attempt to develop collective intelligence into collective cognition via a feedback mechanism. If you're willing to experiment with ways to improve your forecasting ability and if being part of cutting-edge scientific research appeals to you, then we...
June 16, 2011
Philo-Doodle
A few earlier posts have discussed the baleful effects of glibness: we tend to give greater weight to well written arguments even when the argumentation is poor. A similar thing happens in politics in that we trust well spoken politicians even though they may be scoundrels or intellectually underpowered. We are even subconsciously affected. A well written negative review - of a hotel for example - makes the hotel more attractive. It's not the content, it's the appearance. We should be suspicious of glibness since we are vulnerable. We should be extra critical of well written material and well spoken people to balance the cognitive confusion of their appealing presentation. Too often the well groomed are pretty idiots. Last month, however, saw a major philosophical event: the publication of Derek Parfit’s long-awaited book On What Matters. Until now, Parfit, who is Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had written only one book, Reasons and Persons, which appeared in...
June 11, 2011
Girl Music
I like music. It isn't just a fondness for the pop tunes of some significant phase of my life, and that I'll listen to over and over again for decades the way many people do - my kind of music, they say. I listen to all sorts of stuff and use different, hard to characterize criteria for selection. I hear music in natural systems, and likely would in the built environment if I was there more often and got used to it. One kind of music that is important to me is female voices. Not all of them, of course, but many. I sometimes pay quite close attention to their voices but only hear the music, not the lyrics, so to speak. There's information in the music as well as the lyrics, but it's difficult to articulate just what is being said. This can cause strife, of course, and is worth investigation. a study published in the journal NeuroImage...
May 21, 2011
Fevered Visions
In a brief discussion the other day a fellow hared off on one of the sophomoric vision soliloquies that plague the credentialed but uneducated alumni of university. It prompted me to be even more earthy than usual and reply with a modified old joke: visions are like ass holes; everyone has one and they all stink. There's a certain sort of self-ignorance that seems to afflict those who have a high opinion of themselves so that they think that their shit doesn't stink and prompts them to offer to share it with others, with an angelic smile, proud of themselves not only for having made the substance, but for their generosity as well. It's likely related to the Introspection Illusion mentioned in the previous post. A couple of items in today's reading brought this back to mind. One of the sillier visions that plagues shallow thinkers is the one about egalitarianism. The simplistic tribal feelings of sharing and reciprocity...
May 21, 2011
Introspection Illusion
To improve humans. Some economists argue that the pervasiveness and potential harmfulness of people's psychological biases and quirks justify government command of individual behavior, or at least some "nudging". But policy-makers, including voters, politicians, bureaucrats and scientific advisors, are people and thus have their own cognitive biases, including the bias blind spot, that result in commanding or nudging others in the wrong direction - not to mention that may seek their own good instead of that of society. Elisabeth Gsottbauer and Jeroen C. J. M. van den Bergh review the behavioral economics literature and draw some implications for environmental policy in the journal Environmental and Resource Economics (Environmental policy theory given bounded rationality and other-regarding preferences). It is a very good review. And it may illustrate the paradox of irrational people guiding other irrational people. At some point they write: Pichert and Katsikopoulos (2008) offer an experimental analysis of consumer decision-making relating to green electricity use. They examine peoples’...
May 05, 2011
Homo Argumentus
In addition to Homo Hypocritus and Homo Confabulus consider that "Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments." When you're trying to convince someone, you don't want to find arguments for the other side, you want to find arguments for your side. And that's what the confirmation bias helps you do. The idea here is that the confirmation bias is not a flaw of reasoning, it's actually a feature. It is something that is built into reasoning; not because reasoning is flawed or because people are stupid, but because actually people are very good at reasoning — but they're very good at reasoning for arguing. Not only does the argumentative theory explain the bias, it can also give us ideas about how to escape the bad consequences of the confirmation bias. People mostly have a problem with the confirmation bias when they reason on their own, when no one...
April 27, 2011
Tobacco Road
Worried about Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or other age related cognitive decline problems? Have a smoke, or better yet, just the safe active ingredients. Cotinine, a compound derived from tobacco, reduced plaques associated with dementia and prevented memory loss in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease ... "We found a compound that protects neurons, prevents the progression of Alzheimer's disease pathology, enhances memory and has been shown to be safe," said Valentina Echeverria, PhD, a scientist at Bay Pines VA Healthcare System and an assistant professor of Molecular Medicine at USF Health. "It looks like cotinine acts on several aspects of Alzheimer's pathology in the mouse model. That, combined with the drug's good safety profile in humans, makes it a very attractive potential therapy for Alzheimer's disease." While the current drugs for Alzheimer's may help delay the onset of symptoms, none halt or reverse the processes of Alzheimer's disease. In addition, existing drugs may have undesirable side effects. Some epidemiological studies...
March 31, 2011
Amygdala Triggers
Memories and insights endure better when they are burned in. When we suddenly get the answer to a riddle or understand the solution to a problem, we can practically feel the light bulb click on in our head. But what happens after the 'Aha!' moment? Why do the things we learn through sudden insight tend to stick in our memory? 'Much of memory research involves repetitive, rote learning,' says Kelly Ludmer, a research student in the group of Prof. Yadin Dudai of the Institute's Neurobiology Department, 'but in fact, we regularly absorb large blocks of information in the blink of an eye and remember things quite well from single events. Insight is an example of a one-time event that is often well-preserved in memory.' ... To reveal what occurs in the brain at the moment of insight, the initial viewing session was conducted in a functional MRI (fMRI) scanner. When the scientists looked at the fMRI results, they were...
March 27, 2011
Education Inversion
One of the cross blog discussion issues among some economists lately has been the uneven distribution of productivity increases across segments of society. Some have had large increases as technological innovations have been implemented, while others have not benefited so much. Their point is that labor migrates from productive to unproductive segments as a result. One of the areas that has not seen productivity improvements is education. Ever more is spent on education while the quality of the product declines. Some of the recent unrest and political dispute results from public backlash against the ever increasing costs of education on the one hand, and the demands for increased or at least equal spending by those who work in education or otherwise benefit from those public expenditures. One idea for improving education while also reducing costs is the insightful use of video teaching. Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy teaching videos, calls for “flipping” education: Let students watch video lectures...
March 18, 2011
Memory Lane
Do you remember when pundits did not spend a lot of time lamenting the degeneration of traditional skills, habits and behaviors? Neither do I. The book, for which Foer received more than $1m in advance royalties in the US, is an analysis of the importance of memorising events and stories in human history; the decline of its role in modern life; and the techniques that we need to adopt to restore the art of remembering. As Foer points out, we no longer need to remember telephone numbers. Our mobile phones do that for us. We don't recall addresses either. We send emails from computers that store electronic addresses. Nor do we bother to remember multiplication tables. Pocket calculators do the job of multiplying quite nicely. Museums, photographs, the digital media and books also act as storehouses for memories that were once internalised. As a result, we no longer remember long poems or folk stories by heart, feats of memory...
February 27, 2011
Blind Faith
It is sometimes amusing to listen to academics trying to defend technocracy. let us accept for the sake of argument that all else equal in ideological fields intellectual progress is slower, and claims tend to be make with more overconfidence. What exactly would this imply for your beliefs about this area? It certainly wouldn’t imply that you ignore what experts write. Yes, it makes sense to adjust your beliefs for the average overconfidence there, but even with large adjustments your best estimates should still rely heavily on average expert estimates. After all, even if they know less than they think, they still know a lot more than you. There are several defects in this argument. Much of what the experts "know" is wrong, though they know a lot of wrong things. Is this an asset or a liability? Does it help them make good decisions and arrive at good conclusions or hinder them? History indicates that it is a...
February 20, 2011
More Divergence
There have been many posts here over the years that pointed out that the plague of priggish dwarfs that infest our institutions, especially in education, were dumbing down society and selectively advancing the least capable among us: the "grinds", the uncreative but disciplined automatons beloved by authoritarians. They confused conformism for cooperation, and made a host of other cognitive errors leading to the wholesale drugging of children who did not fit the desired template. There is mounting scientific evidence of the error in such behavior. The scientists measured the success of 60 undergraduates in various fields, from the visual arts to science. They asked the students if they'd ever won a prize at a juried art show or been honored at a science fair. In every domain, students who had been diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder achieved more: Their inability to focus turned out to be a creative advantage. And this lesson doesn't just apply to people with a full-fledged...
February 10, 2011
Heuristic Diversity
Pielke has an interesting pair of quotes related to the recent flap about the lack of ideological diversity in the social sciences. First, Jonathan Haidt's response to a typically brain dead dismissal of his work by Krugman. My research, like so much research in social psychology, demonstrates that we humans are experts at using reasoning to find evidence for whatever conclusions we want to reach. We are terrible at searching for contradictory evidence. Science works because our peers are so darn good at finding that contradictory evidence for us. Social science — at least my corner of it — is broken because there is nobody to look for contradictory evidence regarding sacralized issues, particularly those related to race, gender, and class. I urged my colleagues to increase our ideological diversity not for any moral reason, but because it will make us better scientists. You do not have that problem in economics where the majority is liberal but there is...
January 30, 2011
Kids
I like kids. Due to my involvement in our local farmer's market I come in contact with the children of associates and other vendors since many of the participants have young families. Something about these farmer's markets seems to draw them. I talk with kids like I do any other human; no talking down or attempts to control them, no baby talk, but the subject matter is necessarily different. I am genuinely interested in their views and the subjects that they are currently wrestling with, even if it's just why they should avoid sloshing through mud puddles (as mom insists), or their semi-mystical ability to understand written materials without actually reading them ... as they claim. And so I found this video to be very interesting....
January 21, 2011
Homo Confabulus
We are the sack of meat that our dreams drag around. [Drew] Bailey and [David] Geary found population density did indeed track closely with brain size, but in a surprising way. When population numbers were low, as was the case for most of our evolution, the cranium kept getting bigger. But as population went from sparse to dense in a given area, cranial size declined, highlighted by a sudden 3 to 4 percent drop in [encephalization quotient, the ratio of brain volume to body mass] EQ starting around 15,000 to 10,000 years ago. “We saw that trend in Europe, China, Africa, Malaysia—everywhere we looked,” Geary says. The observation led the researchers to a radical conclusion: As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive. As Geary explains, individuals who would not have been able to survive by their wits alone could scrape by with the help of others—supported,...
January 19, 2011
Burn Baby
I helped an ailing friend today to burn some slash from dead and down trees cleared from the area where he is building a house. 2 big piles, lots of energy released. All day long a tune kept running through my head, prompted it seems by the big fire. I worked at a break neck speed to a Chopin scherzo: Opus 20, Resto con fuoco. Things like that happen to me regularly, which is one of the reasons that people think that I'm a bit twisted. They can't hear the music. So, why a Chopin scherzo instead of maybe something a couple of centuries newer? Perhaps it is because such music is easier to remember. There is a long held theory that the subconscious mind can recognize patterns within complex data and that we are hardwired to find simple patterns pleasurable. Dr Nicholas Hudson used 'lossless' music compression programs to mimic the brain's ability to condense audio information. He...
December 12, 2010
Theories
I read something the other day about some findings of neuroscientists that remembering the past and imagining the future used the same brain regions, and that those with memories of a more distant past also had imaginings of a more distant future. In some sense the idea of futures depends on the idea of pasts. I use the plural (futures, pasts) since there isn't just one imagined future and in truth the past isn't a single known place either. We have metaphors and models of the future and the past, but no theories. Theories deal with the world on its own terms, absolutely. Models are metaphors, relative descriptions of the object of their attention that compare it to something similar already better understood via theories. Models are reductions in dimensionality that always simplify and sweep dirt under the rug. Theories tell you what something is. Models tell you merely what something is partially like. The quoted passage from Ernest...
December 04, 2010
SOLE Survivors
Self Organized Learning Environments In a village in Tamil Nadu called Kalikuppam, Dr. Mitra asked a class of poor Tamil-speaking kids to use the Internet, which they had not yet encountered, to learn biotechnology, which they had never heard of, in English, which they did not speak. Two months later he was astounded at what they had taught themselves. ... The experiment is now going global. Schools in Australia, Colombia, England and India are trying SOLE and sharing their experiences of how to improve it. The U.S. has been slow to join, says Dr. Mitra, because Americans tend to view the program as relevant only to the developing world. But schools in Nevada, Maine and San Francisco have recently called on him to explain his ideas. The method, in brief, is to limit access points so that kids must work in small groups rather than in isolation. In a sense this means that they have heuristically diverse problem solving...
November 25, 2010
Variable Chunks
I've often complained here about the arrogance of so-called experts who seem to lack the expertise to do useful work even when they are recognized by their peers as being on top of the heap. I've offered a couple of remedies including wise crowds (independent minds) to prevent information cascades, and heuristic diversity in problem solving groups so that a larger tool set is brought to bear. A shared attribute of these methods is that they break down mental ruts, the crippling patterns of perception that conceal as much as they reveal and prevent accurate analyses. Pattern recognition is essential for real time analysis and prescription, and experience and skill in this are essential for high function, but experience can also be a handicap. The [chess] grandmasters didn’t remember the board better than amateurs. Rather, they saw the board better, instantly translating the thirty-two chess pieces into a set of meaningful patterns. ... This mental process is known as...
November 20, 2010
Information Cascade
I've written about them often in the past. Avoiding them are one of the key requirements for Wise Crowds. It is independent judgment that makes the aggregate opinion of groups more correct. Popular opinions have no reasoned relationship to correctness. A team of psychologists decided to look at what happens when we find out the majority opinion on an issue after we've developed our own opinion. ... They actually become more confident in their belief when they heard the majority of people disagreed with them than when they heard the majority agreed. What's happening here? Richard Petty, who worked on the study, suggests that: People may be thinking that "if I can find the flaws in a position that the majority of people believe, then my thoughts must really be good ones." The key, says Petty, is that the people in the experiment had thought about the issue first and made up their mind before they heard what other...
November 07, 2010
Hell Freezes
Other unusual things are happening too. If you had asked me to bet in which year the President of the World Bank would recommend that we consider some version of a gold standard, I would have picked the wrong number: ... the full proposal is here. I feel like I should pay something to somebody, but I am not sure to whom. Or in which medium of exchange. Also, The West is turning against big government. this massive reassessment of the role of government has not come about simply because of the economic crisis, and the terrifying degree of sovereign debt which it produced. The governments of what were the richest countries in the world may be broke, but what is interesting is their response to this: the plan is not to make themselves rich enough once again to do all the things that they used to do, but to rethink the whole enterprise so that government never again...
September 30, 2010
Tu quoque
Unhelpfully, I continue to think about some of the notions from the previous post: "though my principles and interests could be said to be aligned with the more leftist ideas . . . the methods and policies of the left were dim witted, mean spirited and counter productive." This seems particularly true of academia and "intellectuals". They think, and say, that I am stupid, and I think and say that they are stupid. Meanwhile, the political left is unable to argue that those average Americans are in some way responsible for their own exploitation because they are too shallow and misinformed — too stupid — to recognize their own interests. One of Shenkman's solutions is to require voters to pass a civics exam. Former Vice President Al Gore obviously has a dog in this hunt, and his book The Assault on Reason (2007) argues that the fundamental principles of American freedom — descended from the Enlightenment — are being...
September 19, 2010
Mixed Nuts
What should count as nutty? Two of my recent posts dealt with the question of whether Christine O'Donnell, currently the republican nominee for senate in Delaware, is a nut. That raises a more general question of some interest: What counts as nutty? . . . Pretty clearly, it isn't enough to merely hold mistaken beliefs; . . . I don't have any solid basis for my own moral beliefs, any way of proving to a reasonable and open minded skeptic that they are correct. That puts me in a poor position to condemn as obvious nonsense someone else's moral beliefs. . . But the special problems of moral beliefs don't answer the more general question. There are lots of people who disagree with me on factual questions whom I don't consider nutty either. So where do I, where should I, draw the line? . . . Once you accept the practical necessity of relying heavily on second hand information,...
August 27, 2010
The Mull
In the spirit of observations made earlier in Current Obsessions, a rumination about rumination. Grass does most of its growing invisibly, underground, the result of an intricate root system designed to retain water. For me, cutting grass involves a kind of invisible growth. Ironically, the very routine of grass cutting, its essential mindlessness, clears mental space to fill with intentional, task-unrelated thoughts. I call it “the mull.” I experience regrets; weigh alternatives and make choices; plan upcoming events; sing songs I find meaningful, which almost always means songs from the 1960s; make up poems or recite poems from memory; analyze books, movies, TV shows, and ads; wax nostalgic, sentimental, skeptical, or cynical about something or other, and then wonder why I feel that way; examine assumptions; ponder love, justice, free will, God, or the best recipe for pasta primavera; and wonder at string theory, quantum physics, and Mel Gibson’s proclivity for behavioral meltdowns. It could be that “the mull”...
August 24, 2010
Gricean Maxims
Thinking like an economist: assume a can opener. Checking the Wikipedia article on the Gricean maxims, I find the interesting comment that: “Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.” (Bach 2005). The maxims can thus be seen as an application of the economic approach to understanding behavior—the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the best way of achieving them. The objective is communication, the maxims describe how best to do it, and a listener dealing with potential ambiguity in speech—for example ambiguity in the meaning of “most”—can sometimes resolve it by assuming that the speaker is using the word with a meaning that achieves that objective. Where what is relevant is which candidate won an election, “most” is likely to mean a majority or even a plurality: “The...
August 02, 2010
WEIRD People
That is: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive a world full of separate objects, rather than relationships, and the more you use an analytical thinking style, focusing on categories and laws, rather than a holistic style, focusing on patterns and contexts. . . We have WEIRD chemistry. The chemistry produced by Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies is our chemistry, and it's a very good chemistry. And we have every reason to believe it's correct. And if a Ayurvedic practitioner from India were to come to a chemistry conference and say, "Good sirs and madams, your chemistry has ignored our Indian, you know, our 5,000-year-old chemistry," the chemists might laugh at them, if they were not particularly polite, and say, "Yeah, that's right. You know, we really don't care about your chemistry." But suppose that same guy were to come to this conference and say, "You know, your moral psychology has...
July 28, 2010
Fallibilism
Feynman's notion that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” is foundational. The great American license to err was, when it emerged, virtually unique in history, and a long time in the making. It was born out of (at least) three major developments. The first was the demise of the Divine Right of Kings, the medieval doctrine holding that political leaders were God’s elect, and therefore infallible. The second was the dramatic confrontation with error that began in Europe during the Renaissance. In just a few hundred years, fourteen centuries of received wisdom collapsed, and new information (about astronomy, biology, geology, you name it) rushed into the vacuum. . . The third, related development was the spread of both the mood and the method of the Scientific Revolution. The mood was one of broad curiosity and deep skepticism. . . Transpose these developments to the political sphere, and you arrive at the idea of democracy. America’s founders...
July 22, 2010
Current Obsessions
I was talking with a buddy this evening about his ongoing problems with being overworked. We've been talking about it for months and I've been helping him out a bit though I've no cycles to spare either. I've been urging him to focus on his core business, his core competencies, not to reduce his work load but because he'll do a better job. He'll spend just as much time at it but he'll get more benefit. So, how can I help him when I'm already too busy? It's because I don't think about the tasks I do for him, I just show up and do them. If things go well then a lot gets done but if there are impediments and SNAFUs I just go away. It's his problem and I gave it what I had to spare. It's his responsibility to have things well enough organized so that my time is used efficiently. He has to do that...
July 07, 2010
Personal Calibration
The plural of anecdote is not data. Burson and colleagues (2006), writing in JPSP, showed that when University of Chicago undergraduates were asked moderately difficult trivia questions about their university, the subjects who performed best were just as poorly calibrated as the people who performed worst, in the sense that their estimates of how well they did relative to other people were wildly inaccurate. . . when participants were given easier trivia (the diamond-studded line), Burson et al observed the standard pattern, with poor performers seemingly showing worse calibration. Simply knocking about 10% off the accuracy rate on the trivia questions was enough to induce a large shift in the relative mismatch between perceptions of ability and actual ability. Burson et al then went on to replicate this pattern in two additional studies involving a number of different judgments and tasks, so this result isn’t specific to trivia questions. In fact, in the later studies, Burson et al showed...
June 21, 2010
Dunning-Kruger
Obama explained. if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. . . If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute. The decision I just made does not make much sense. I had better go and get some independent advice.” But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer. . . There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest,...
June 15, 2010
Dream Time
One school of thought about why Obama in particular and Democrats in general are so bad at governance is that they don't pay attention to reality because it is inconsistent with their visions of how reality ought to be. This is not a big problem for academics or others in the talking trades since their ideas are never tested, but when they are able to persuade society to give them power it all comes crashing down. Robin quoted a William Deresiewicz article that ruminated on related themes. People who can climb the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy they decide to attach themselves to. But I think there’s something desperately wrong, and even dangerous, about that idea. … The head of my department had no genius for organizing or initiative or even order, no particular learning or intelligence, no distinguishing characteristics at all. Just the ability to keep the routine going. … Why is it so often that the best...
June 04, 2010
Gut Check
An old theme here has been that politics is stupid: approaching issues with a political bias guarantees failure. It's a special case of the general problem of bias in problem solving. A more recent thread of that notion is that "all you will get from political advocates is disinformation and misinformation intended to advance their agenda", which has been repeated a few times with varying examples. These thoughts came back to mind while following an extended conversation between David Friedman and Robert Frank, with Friedman in the role of provocateur needling Frank to examine his biases and reason in good faith. Frank obdurately declined, preferring to advance increasingly evasive and convoluted arguments that enabled him to stick with his gut feelings, his intuitions, which in the end seem to be all that he has. In a tangential post Friedman engaged with the idea of Following Arguments Where They Lead. each person's expenditure on schooling imposes negative externalities on other...
April 15, 2010
Tea Time
This morning I followed a link to The Anti-American Fallacy which extolled the work of Bernard DeVoto. It was only in the 1920s, the same decade in which Lawrence wrote his poem, that such contempt for the bourgeoisie—and with it a deep hostility toward the United States’s position as the quintessentially middle-class, democratic, and capitalist nation—found a wide audience in this country through a new generation of writers such as Sinclair Lewis and H.L. Mencken. Weaned on the work of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw and their loathing for conventional mores, Lewis and his confreres became the dominant force in American letters, and their views went largely unchallenged in the literary world. It was left to a critic named Bernard DeVoto to issue the first serious and meaningful challenge to their worldview—the opening salvo in a brave and lonely battle that still resonates, even though DeVoto and the book in which he took up arms for the United...
February 23, 2010
Likely Spurious
One of my secret, sometimes guilty pleasures is reading a variety of things on the net and allowing them to mingle in my mind, sometimes sparking connections that may or may not be valid when investigated further. For example, a message from a biochar/gasification list today noted that the type of charcoal making system used for centuries in the western part of Maharashtra State, India used what we now call TLUD (Top Lit UpDraft) technology. TLUD stove designs on a small scale are advocated as a simple, cheap but effective improvement on the old 3 stones and a pot cooking system, and which also produces biochar if the burn is quenched at the right moment. The TLUD idea is that air flow through the feedstock is controlled so that it is mostly the pyrolysis gases given off from heating the feedstock that burn rather than the feedstock itself. The traditional charcoal making system in India did the same thing....
February 21, 2010
Siesta, Again
I've written about it before: I'm a napper. The wisdom of napping gets further support. the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter. . . "Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap," . . In the latest study, Walker and his team have broken new ground in discovering that this memory- refreshing process occurs when nappers are engaged in a specific stage of sleep. Electroencephalogram tests, which measure electrical activity in the brain, indicated that this refreshing of memory capacity is related to Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which takes place between deep sleep (non-REM) and the dream state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM). Previously, the purpose of this stage was unclear, but the new results offer evidence as to why humans spend at least half their sleeping hours in...
February 16, 2010
Mind Control
Actually, it's brain control. Harnessing brain signals to control keyboards, robots or prosthetic devices is an active area of medical research. Now a rare peek at a human brain hooked up to a computer shows that the two can adapt to each other quickly, and possibly to the brain's benefit. . . "We get brain activity that's larger than normal by interacting with brain-computer interfaces. By using these interfaces, patients create super-active populations of brain cells." the researchers looked at signals when subjects imagined performing the action and those brain signals were used to move a cursor toward a target on a computer screen. After less than 10 minutes of practice, brain signals from imagined movement became significantly stronger than when actually performing the physical motion. . . "The rapid augmentation of activity during this type of learning bears testimony to the remarkable plasticity of the brain as it learns to control a non-biological device," Rao said. After less...
February 09, 2010
Fast Folk
A better grasp of natural systems. So what will happen when super-duper smarties wrinkle their brows so hard that out pops a deep math theory of cities, explaining clearly how city value is produced? What if they apply their theory to designing a city structure that takes best advantage of our most advanced techs, of 7gen phones, twitter-pedias, flying Segways, solar panels, gene-mod pigeons, and super-fluffy cupcakes? Making each city aspect more efficient makes the city more attractive, increasing the gains from making other aspects more efficient, in a grand spiral of bigger gains. Once they convince the world of the vast value in their super-stupendous city design, won’t everyone flock there and pay mucho trillions for the privilege? Couldn’t they leverage this lead into better theories enabling better designs giving far more trillions, and then spend all that on a super-designed war machine based on those same super insights, and turn us all into down dour super-slaves? So...
February 06, 2010
Super Tea
I noted a few posts ago that I write this journal for my own benefit, a way to note things of interest and my thoughts about them, so that I can refer to them again at a later date when something new comes up that is related, or simply as a memory aid. Usually this means searching my archives to find an earlier reference, but I also pay attention to what other people search for here, and check out what they are reading. This post from almost 5 years ago is getting hits lately. There’s been a lot of fuzzy thinking about what we mean when we talk about collective intelligence, network, and interaction. I want to parse these distinctions. In The Wisdom of Crowds, I wrote about the power of groups under certain circumstances to be remarkably intelligent. A model of collective intelligence: a large group of people reflecting diverse opinions offering judgments independently with some mechanism to...
February 04, 2010
Associative Memory
It improves with age. scientists at Baycrest's world-renowned Rotman Research Institute have demonstrated that when older adults "hyper-encode" extraneous information – and they typically do this without even knowing they're doing it – they have the unique ability to "hyper-bind" the information; essentially tie it to other information that is appearing at the same time. . . "We found that older brains are not only less likely to suppress irrelevant information than younger brains, but they can link the relevant and irrelevant pieces of information together and implicitly transfer this knowledge to subsequent memory tasks," . . . "This could be a silver lining to aging and distraction," said Dr. Hasher, senior scientist on the study. "Older adults with reduced attentional regulation seem to display greater knowledge of seemingly extraneous co-occurrences in the environment than younger adults. As this type of knowledge is thought to play a critical role in real world decision- making, older adults may be the...
February 04, 2010
Brain Status
It's good to be king. Dr. Martinez and colleagues found that increased social status and increased social support correlated with the density of dopamine D2/D3 receptors in the striatum, a region of the brain that plays a central role in reward and motivation, where dopamine plays a critical role in both of these behavioral processes. . . "We showed that low levels of dopamine receptors were associated with low social status and that high levels of dopamine receptors were associated with higher social status. . . "These data shed interesting light into the drive to achieve social status, a basic social process. It would make sense that people who had higher levels of D2 receptors, i.e., were more highly motivated and engaged by social situations, would be high achievers and would have higher levels of social support." These data also may have implications for understanding the vulnerability to alcohol and substance abuse, as the work of Dr. Nora Volkow,...
February 04, 2010
Impatience
More about cognition and motivation. Models describing the origin of ADHD tend to emphasise the relevance of attention processes and of the cognitive functions which guide our mental processes in achieving proposed objectives. Nevertheless, recent research has focused on neural gratification/pleasure circuits, which can be found in what is known as the brain's reward system, with the nucleus accumbens as the central part of this system. The nucleus accumbens is in charge of maintaining levels of motivation when commencing a task and continues to do so until reaching what experts name the "reinforcement", the proposed objective. This motivation can be maintained throughout time, even when the gratification obtained is not immediate. However, in children with ADHD motivational levels seem to drop rapidly and there is a need for immediate reinforcements to continue persisting in their efforts. . . Differences in the structure of the ventral striatum - particularly on the right-hand side - could be seen between those with...
February 03, 2010
Inattentional Blindness
Attention and cognition are interesting to me. See Skeptical Animus (hyperactive "oh shit circuit" and a hair trigger delete key to erase sensations from memory) and Unicycling Clowns (people who were so distracted by their cell phone use that they failed to see the bizarre occurrence of a unicycling clown passing them on the street) for earlier discussions. Individual variations also seem related to working memory capacities. What Miller called the informational bottleneck has been recognized as a profound constraint on human cognition. Crudely speaking, there are two ways to manage its effects. One is to "chunk" information so that you can, in effect, pack more material into one of those seven units. As Miller put it, "A man just beginning to learn radiotelegraphic code hears each dit and dash as a separate chunk. Soon he is able to organize these sounds into letters, and then he can deal with the letters as chunks. Then the letters organize themselves...
January 14, 2010
Thought Stinks
A few previous posts here - most recently in Technobabble - have asserted that thinking and feeling are not uniquely animal behaviors. Plants talk to one another, even bacteria talk to one another, and we can listen to them. They don't rattle and hum so much as stink their thoughts, but it is certainly communication carrying information, often at surprisingly great distances. Some researchers are working to learn bacterial senses and language. She and her colleagues focused on a receptor [in Azospirillum brasilense] they suspected was related to the way bacteria convert nitrogen gas from the atmosphere into a form -- ammonium -- that can be used by all organisms. This ability is called nitrogen fixation and while it is uniquely found in bacteria, it is critically important to all living organisms, as it is the only way nitrogen can eventually be incorporated into building blocks of cells. Well, no, there are natural chemical forms of nitrogen fixation too...
January 08, 2010
Seasonal Bloviation
In the spirit of Old Wine, a reprise of an old post that had been prompted by the Edge question of 2007, consider a new question: HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK? I've read a couple of reponses so far and not found much of interest. But consider this: my experience is that real, creative, insights or breakthroughs require prolonged and concentrated time in the 'wilderness.' There are lots of things I don't know, but personally I start to get excited when I uncover something that I don't know because it really is mysterious. I've come think that it is important to cultivate a 'don't know' mind: one that perceives a real and interesting enigma, and is willing to dwell in that perplexity and confusion. A sense of playful delight in that confusion, and a willingness to make mistakes — many mistakes — while floundering about, is a key part of what makes insight possible for...
January 04, 2010
Ugly Cousins
The problems that human mental equipment cause for science - discussed in previous posts - are as bad and worse for economics. I think that what happened was a combination of two things. First, the academic side of economics fell too much in love with beautiful mathematical models, which created a bias toward assuming perfect markets. (Perfect markets lead to nice math; imperfect markets are a lot messier). Second, the same forces that lead to financial bubbles – prolonged good news tends to silence the skeptics – also applied to economists. Those who rationalized the way things were going gained credibility until the day things fell apart. . . Economics is about modeling complex systems, and as such the models are always less than fully accurate. What economists do need, however, is some demonstrated ability to get big things right. They had that after the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics clearly made sense of both the depression and the...
December 31, 2009
Skeptical Animus
In Science Club a proposal for changes in the selection process for scientists was discussed. The proposal was: "to select elite revolutionary scientists on the basis of high IQ and moderately high Psychoticism . . .[and] devotion to the transcendental value of Truth. Elite revolutionary science should therefore be a place that welcomes brilliant, impulsive, inspired, antisocial oddballs – so long as they are also dedicated truth-seekers." My counter proposal was to seek heuristic diversity. It wasn't so much a matter of seeking brilliant and properly twisted individuals as it was of building high function teams. I've been saying that for a long time and have used the work of Scott Page and Lu Hong as authoritative support. Said another way: when Dunbar monitored the subjects in an fMRI machine, he found that showing non-physics majors the correct video triggered a particular pattern of brain activation: There was a squirt of blood to the anterior cingulate cortex, a collar...
December 11, 2009
The Ringing Chord
I've spent a lot of pixels bashing experts, noting many, many cases where such puffed up buffoons preening on the public stage have demonstrated their ignorance and lack of expertise. It's as true of congeries of experts as for individuals. Much of that criticism has dealt with subjects related to my narrow and modest expertise in agriculture, and includes general environmental and ecological subjects. Consideration of economic and cultural issues is inevitable too since the boundaries of such systems are not sharp. What then is expertise? If it's not an attribute of individual experts, and not the consensus view of groups of experts, does it mean anything? Does it exist? IMV it can be better understood as an emergent property most easily identified in hindsight, which is never embodied in any particular location, is never durably instantiated. It arises from full context and includes the disparate views of many individuals which influence one another. It's a combined vector, perhaps...
December 10, 2009
Pinky Promise
One of the mysteries I've ruminated about for many years is the scene - usually from some movie - where two people - most memorably young girls who are, after all, alien creatures to me - make a pact with one another. It's a multi-step process involving escalating verbal confirmations of intent to keep the agreement, with a great deal of intent gazing and facial expressions, often ending in a ritual entwining of the little fingers of the right hand - the pinky promise - which is represented as some sort of ultimate and inviolable act of commitment. As a rough boy, a bad boy, I could never understand much less make a pinky promise, except perhaps with a girl and then it would be meaningless since I had no idea how the pact was actually sealed. It was obviously not the mere act of finger entwining, there was some sort of mind meld involved and I lacked the...
November 11, 2009
Dysrationalia
For example: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? A) Yes. B) No. C) Cannot be determined. Regardless of IQ, most people get it wrong by choosing C because the status of Anne was not given. Looking at all the possibilities shows that A is correct whether Anne is married or not. The underlying reason why smart people get the wrong answer is (according to the article) that they simply don’t take the time to go carefully through all of the possibilities, instead taking the easiest inference. The patience required to go through all the possibilities doesn’t correlate very well with intelligence. You can quibble with the test, perhaps noting that for social primates the burning question is whether Anne is married or not, and so the problem isn't lack of patience it's just a silly example. But the...
October 26, 2009
F, A, T
I find this argument to be compelling. Eric Crampton notices a similar mistake: I’ve about a half dozen times heard … spokespersons … arguing that allowing private competitors into …. the New Zealand Accident Compensation Commission, is bad because private firms have to earn profits and so they’ll have to have higher cost structures than the public insurer. But no National Radio interviewer provided the obvious retort: If the argument were true, we’d want the government to be running everything! The core problem seems to be that folks who intuitively feel that area A deserves special treatment T look for a justification, and then stop when they find a feature F of area A that suggests treatment T might be a good idea. But by stopping there, they do not consider why this argument does not also justify the same special treatment T of areas B, C, D, etc. that also have feature F. This is an extremely common...
October 19, 2009
Unicycling Clowns
Robin ruminates: Bryan [Caplan, and others, but they're just examples so focus on the ideas] shares an all-to-common intellectual flaw with other very smart folks: he trusts his concept intuitions way too much. Our minds come built with concepts that let us categorize and organize the world we see. Those concepts evolved to be useful in the world of our ancestors, and we expect them to reflect real, important, and consistent patterns of experience in that ancestral world. Such concepts are surely far from random. Nevertheless, we have little reason to think that our evolved concepts map directly and simply onto the fundamental categories of the universe, whatever those may be. In particular, we have little reason to believe that categories that seem to us disjoint cannot in reality overlap. Which seems related to: Everyone tends to float off into space once in a while and fail to see what is sitting there right in front of them. Recently...
August 10, 2009
Babble Apes
We just don't have a good handle on this being human business. . . . when you ask people in situation X why they do Y, the reasons they give usually have only a weak connection to the reasons in related economic models. Yes people who have been taught economics can find it easy to explain their actions in economic model terms, but this is not how most folks usually think. Thus the practice of academic economics implicitly accepts that people often, perhaps even usually, do things for reasons other than the reasons they give. Consider also that something similar holds in sales and marketing. The rationale a marketer gives for why an ad or other product strategy works usually differs quite a bit from the reasons people give for why they like an ad or a product. Similarly, the reasons dating and other relation consultants give for why their suggested strategies help people like or respect you are...
July 25, 2009
Costly Punishment
Consider: I think that people start with a desire to be extremists — or, at least, to feel good about themselves and condemn others — and then look around for an ideology that gives them what they want. The actual merits are far less important, as is demonstrated by the transparent idiocy of most ideologies. This was commentary about an article warning about green extremism, likening it to the red extremism of the not too distant past. The article was semi-barren repetition of ideas voiced many times before by more careful thinkers and better writers (Gore as Marx? Ridiculous.) There has been a flurry of commentary recently about conformism, especially in academia, the sciences in particluar, though the charge has been leveled against other disciplines many times in the past. Economists have also been the target of such accusation, especially the quants. Should the Nobel Prize for economics be abolished? That is one of the suggestions in Pablo Triana’s...
June 20, 2009
Crafty Posers
A previous post, Soul Butter quoted an interview with Matthew Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. I just wanted to make one point: There's knowledge work and there's manual work, and the idea that these are two very different things seemed very bogus to me. I needed to make the case for how much thinking goes on in the trades. . . But it also seems to have a retro spin, or is seen that way by some. Crawford’s book arrives just as a vague sense of dissatisfaction with the demands and rewards of the modern economy is coalescing into something like a movement. In 1998, the sociologist Richard Sennett published “The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism,” in which he saw soul-destroying consequences in our new work habits—endless hours spent at flexible jobs, performing abstract tasks on computer screens. Last year, in “The Craftsman”...
June 12, 2009
Food Fools
A recurring thread here has been food myths of the illiberal pseudo-environmentalist posers, a collection of mindless dogmas that serve both the environment and human health poorly but somehow became fashionable in less thoughtful circles. The post Liberal Myths engaged the problem from a loosely academic perspective since it is rooted in the failures of liberal arts education. If I had to identify people who most absolutely represent the highest ideals of a liberal arts education, I would start with the hosts of the television show Mythbusters. If you’re not familiar with the show, the basic premise is that they take a commonly held belief or a commonly repeated cultural trope and try to concretely test its plausibility using some version of the scientific method. This quote from Jamie Hyneman, one of the MythBusters hosts, sets the bar. You can’t expect to teach someone everything he or she needs to know. A broad foundation of experience allows you to...
June 08, 2009
Soul Butter
A few sources have been talking up Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford. PM does an interview [via] I just wanted to make one point: There's knowledge work and there's manual work, and the idea that these are two very different things seemed very bogus to me. I needed to make the case for how much thinking goes on in the trades. . . And the truth is that some kids who are very smart would rather be learning to build things and fix things, but they're being hustled off into office work. For me, the tragedy of this is a kid who becomes maybe a B or C student in college because he doesn't really feel like it's the right place for him, and then goes on to becoming a mediocre accountant. But that same guy might have become a crack mechanic because he's more engaged in what he's doing....
May 03, 2009
Natural Search
"your computer will finally be able to act like you thought it would; it will answer your damned question." But will you like the answer? After all, the world abounds with blowhards who will answer you questions, but their answers leave much to be desired. Still, understood properly, such answers can be of use in formulating new questions. Think of it as interrogating an idiot that has a wondrous memory. The quality of the answer depends largely on the quality of the question, and the ability of the questioner to understand such answers in context. We have a lot of knowledge, but not enough, and in some sense everything that we do know is wrong. Will a time come when computers are able to answer questions that don't yet have answers for? If so, will we still be of some use?...
March 25, 2009
Another Country
In praise of diversity. We should realize that we gain far less info in an echo chamber than from being around folks with diverse views. The latest Journal of Experimental Psychology says we just don't get this: . . . Please, please, don't let yourself succumb to the very common bias to being confident in a view just because "everyone" at your favorite website agrees with it, if those people have been selected for this very agreement! Once you realize that many others elsewhere disagree, that disagreement should weigh heavily on your estimation. Read M&M. There's something here to offend everyone. It's good for you. If nothing else you can be offended with greater confidence and conviction. Keep your enemies closer....
March 05, 2009
In The Bag
Problem solving is improved by having more engaged minds. The researchers were able to provide concrete evidence for these ideas by running a series of experiments in which participants were asked to solve what is known as "the knapsack problem." In the knapsack problem, participants are given a large number of items to pack into a knapsack that cannot possibly hold all of the items; their job is to try to figure out how to maximize the number of "valuable" items they can fit into the knapsack. "These aren't always the most expensive items," says Bossaerts. "For instance, if you're packing the knapsack to go on a trip, one of the items you would consider most valuable would probably be a toothbrush." Participants in Bossaerts's knapsack experiment had to solve one set of problems under a regime that worked in much the same way as a traditional patent system, with a $66 reward for whoever figured out the solution...
February 22, 2009
Wrasling
It has been said that farmers argue with one another for the same reason that they wrestle pigs: they aren't angry with the pigs, and don't want to hurt or even defeat them, they just like to wrestle and are disappointed when the pig quits. There's some truth in that. It's a way of socializing, and the same base insight applies to other people and places. It's relevant in some ways to the previous post about debiasing and rote cognition since the farmers will argue from every position. If you say yin they may say yang, or the reverse. And since many subjects have more than two positions they seldom lack a position to argue. On farmer lists I'll do that for subjects that interest me. I don't want to "win", I want to know what the other fellow thinks and why he thinks it. I know many of the arguments for many issues, so it isn't so hard...
February 21, 2009
Misère
Try writing a hypothetical apostasy. Let's say you have been promoting some view (on some complex or fraught topic - e.g. politics, religion; or any "cause" or "-ism") for some time. When somebody criticizes this view, you spring to its defense. You find that you can easily refute most objections, and this increases your confidence. The view might originally have represented your best understanding of the topic. Subsequently you have gained more evidence, experience, and insight; yet the original view is never seriously reconsidered. You tell yourself that you remain objective and open-minded, but in fact your brain has stopped looking and listening for alternatives. Two candidates come to mind for me: biochar and human diversity. I don't quite fit Bostrom's initial condition requirement because I do have doubts about both. For biochar my antennae twitch whenever the durability of char in soil is discussed. We don't have good data on how long it lasts or the mechanisms that...
January 21, 2009
Monkey Mode
"when you participate in a spectacle you are giving the organizers superuser access to your emotions. Are you sure you trust them not to use it to install a rootkit?"...
January 18, 2009
Bayesian Ninjas
Thinking is very difficult. How much of rationality -- of being a good Bayesian Ninja or whatever -- isn't about intelligence, or knowing how to think, but about having the self-control and discipline to exercise those capacities? And what does it mean for our attempts to become more rational if, as a lot of recent psych research has been suggesting, our self-control generally is a limited resource? How can we overcome rote cognition, if it sticks around even when we're trying our best to be mentally alert and careful? My method, FWIW, is to remove distractions. Part of that is literally having fewer inputs, part of it is ignoring extraneous inputs, and part of it is calming my internal dialog. Rote cognition is a handy tool that should not be discarded, but it's not always the right tool for the job. I play games to try and jiggle myself out of rote mode. When I do a pasture walk...
December 24, 2008
Use The Force
Just don't think about it. Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice. "A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with." Pouget says that Kahneman's approach was to tell...
December 05, 2008
Green Gifts
More holiday spirit. Dear Ethan, Every year I give the gift of a goat to Africa, on the basis that a goat provides poor Africans with milk, cheese, grass-grazing skills, and company during those long, TV-less nights in the jungle – and it also helps them to continue living sustainable, machine-free lives. Yet now Animal Aid tells us it is wrong to give animals to Africans at Christmas time, because these beasts ‘add to rather than diminish poverty’, and what’s more ‘where impoverished people cannot afford to feed and care for their animals, those animals endure extreme suffering and die’. Aaah! I don’t want my paid-for goat to suffer at the hands of some witless African! Ethan, what should I do? Keep giving the goats – or rein them in? Peaches Ciccone West London Dear Peaches, . . . it is too risky to entrust animals to a continent where the RSPCA has very little clout and where PETA...
November 20, 2008
xDS
That's [whatever] Derangement Syndrome. here is Paul Samuelson: Libertarians are not just bad emotional cripples. They are also bad advice givers. . . . 4) When I see people writing sentences of this kind, I imagine them pressing a little button which makes them temporarily less intelligent. Because, indeed, that is how one's brain responds when one employs this kind of emotionally charged rhetoric. As you go through life and read various writers, I want you to keep this idea of the button in mind. As you are reading, think "Ah, he [she] is pressing the button now!" That may be helpful. I see this in my own stuff but thought of it as being inarticulate, of wanting to explain some important point but failing to find the words and settling for making noises and pointing. Gah! And, I see it and post about it in the writing of others. In the previous post about an otherwise useful article...
November 11, 2008
Early To Bed
Early to rise - healthy, wealthy, wise, yada yada. Actually, it seems ever clearer that there's a base cause for this and many other constructive behaviors - good brains. The authors tested ... with Raven's Progressive Matrices, a real IQ test. They then put pairs ... through a repeated prisoner's dilemma game, and found: [M]easures of cognitive skill [CS] predict social awareness and choices in a sequential Prisoner's Dilemma game. Subjects with higher CS's more accurately forecast others' behavior....[S]ubjects with higher CS's also cooperate more as first movers. This set of genuine experiments improves on this older paper, which found that students at high-SAT schools cooperated more in repeated prisoner's dilemmas than students at low-SAT schools. Now we know it's not just because posh, high-SAT schools facilitate a "culture of cooperation" or something like that. Smart individuals just figure it out on their own..... It isn't about playing nice or any other sort of socialization, it's about smart choices....
November 09, 2008
Auto-Pilot
If you have the impression that humans do not often think about things you are not alone and may be correct. Mark Twain, a skeptic of the idea of free will, argues in his essay "What Is Man?" that humans do not command their minds or the opinions they form. "You did not form that [opinion]," a speaker identified as "old man" says in the essay. "Your [mental] machinery did it for you—automatically and instantly, without reflection or the need of it." Twain's views get a boost this week from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and University of Chieti, Italy. In Nature Neuroscience, scientists report that a simple decision-making task does not involve the frontal lobes, where many of the higher aspects of human cognition, including self-awareness, are thought to originate. Instead, the regions that decide are the same brain regions that receive stimuli relevant to the decision and control the body's response to...
September 30, 2008
Milk Acid
It turns out that metabolic byproducts of exercise are brain fuel. Alternative energy is all the rage in major media headlines, but for the human brain, this is old news. According to a study by researchers from Denmark and The Netherlands published in the October 2008 print issue of The FASEB Journal, the brain, just like muscles, works harder during strenuous exercise and is fueled by lactate, rather than glucose. Not only does this finding help explain why the brain is able to work properly when the body's demands for fuel and oxygen are highest, but it goes a step further to show that the brain actually shifts into a higher gear in terms of activity. This opens doors to entirely new areas of brain research related to understanding lactate's specific neurological effects. "Now that we know the brain can run on lactate, so to speak, future studies should show us when to use lactate as part of a...
September 13, 2008
Stale Beer
Like the nature nurture debate, the collectivism individualism debate seems contrived since it blinks reality. It clearly tickles Brooks’ collectivist fancy “when John McCain talks at a forum about national service.” But that is precisely when McCain exposes his martial animosity to the character of his own country. Brooks may wish to join McCain in an effort to efface the separateness of lives, to degrade the dignity of self-creation and self-command by denying its possibility, to cultivate in Americans the docility of subjects ready to kill and die for the state. In Prussia this may have been a “conservative” project. But this is America. And defending American individualism is my one conservative impulse! So, David Brooks, here’s a line. Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Garrison, Spooner, Tucker, Twain, Mencken, Hayek, Friedman, Rand, and America are over here on this side. And there’s you over there. You are most welcome to step across and attempt to wrest the individualism from our...
August 25, 2008
Hearth Stones
Mothers, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys Don't let them ride horses and drive them old trucks Make them be doctors and lawyers and such . . . Actually, the intervention needs to start earlier. Gaps in both cognitive and noncognitive skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children emerge early and can be attributed, in part, to adverse early environments into which an increasing percentage of US children are being born. Figure 1 shows the gap in cognitive test scores by age of children stratified by the mother's education. Similar patterns are found for noncognitive skills (see Heckman, 2008, and Cunha, Heckman, Lochner and Masterov, 2006). Gaps in ability emerge early and persist. Most of the gaps in ability at age 18, which substantially explain gaps in adult outcomes, are present at age five. Schooling plays a minor role in creating or perpetuating gaps, even though American children go to very different schools depending on their family...
August 22, 2008
Closing Time
Coyote wisdom. Researchers ... randomly assigned 84 heterosexal students to consume either a non-alcoholic lime-flavoured drink or an alcoholic beverage with a similar flavour. ... After 15 minutes, the students were shown pictures of people their own age, from both sexes. Both men and women who had consumed alcohol rated the faces as being more attractive than did the controls ... The effect was not limited to the opposite sex - volunteers who had drunk alcohol also rated people from their own sex as more attractive. A C&W classic....
August 18, 2008
If You Knew
I seldom find much of worth in the views of any expert, yet I do find worth in a diverse group of experts. The key bit is diversity - heuristic diversity - since they aren't all simply clones of one another with the same blind spots and irrational tics. I seek out dissenting views almost in self defense since it is an article of faith that consensus always is wrong. The dissenters may well be wrong too, so you just have to give up on the idea of accepting authority, and when the situation requires action just take your best shot with the information you have. Said another, better way: "I grant that you've seen a lot of evidence that I haven't. But here's my question for you: If I saw and read everything that you've seen and read, what would I conclude?" Of course, the other guy could respond, "You'd agree with me," but he rarely does. When...
February 24, 2008
Bogusity
John clued me to this article: The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot of money. How are juries to evaluate them? Before 1993, court cases that hinged on the validity of scientific claims were usually decided simply by which expert witness the jury found more credible. Expert testimony often consisted of tortured theoretical speculation with little or no supporting evidence. Jurors were bamboozled by technical gibberish they could not hope to follow, delivered by experts whose credentials they could not evaluate. . . I have identified seven indicators that a scientific claim lies well outside the bounds of rational scientific discourse. Of course, they are only warning signs -- even a claim with several of the signs could be...
January 18, 2008
Clay Feet
Robin Hanson comments on another mind change, this time the disappointment of psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, described as a Darwinian medicine pioneer, with expertise. I used to believe that you could find out what is true by finding the smartest people and finding out what they think. However, the most brilliant people keep turning out to be wrong. . . I also used to believe that you could find out what is true by relying on experts — smart experts — who devote themselves to a topic. . . I used to believe that truth had a special home in universities. After all, universities are supposed to be devoted to finding out what is true, and teaching students what we know and how to find out for themselves. Universities may be best show in town for truth pursuers, but most stifle innovation and constructive engagement of real controversies, not just sometimes, but most of the time, systematically. . . by...
November 30, 2007
Why Listen?
Some will ask why we should listen to people like Herb Gintis (see previous post) since he has been so wrong in the past? Until the mid 1980s he was a Marxist. I've written about this before. This is a subject dealt with so many times here that I've taken to using the turn of phrase "cognitive kaleidoscope" as if everyone knows what it refers to. You may not if you haven't been following the extended discussion, but you can get the gist of it just from the words. But I think that Prometheus has missed the mark a bit by not giving sufficient weight to the fact that the apostates he cites weren't careful thinkers who formed pragmatic and provisional conclusions based on the evidence available, and then altered those conclusions in response to new and better evidence. They are dark-siders who took up arms to fight for a cause based on skimpy evidence floating in a lake...
March 08, 2007
Self Justification
Members of the hectoring classes and their supporters spend a great deal of effort seeking to justify themselves. In the process they conceal relevant information and offer mistaken analyses. Consider: Paternal policies fight cognitive bias, slash information costs, and privelege responsible subselves To help us avoid these biases we have hired representatives, who create agencies (like the FDA and the SEC) with committees and subcommittees that debate the issue: they put on seminars and conferences and write working papers and white papers and cost/benefit analyses, and invite comments, etc, in short, consider the matter in depth, and then decide to ban certain drugs or activities, and not others. We voters ratify this every 2 years, except when we change our mind, as with alcohol, tobacco, or thalidomide. Besides saving our lives, minds and fortunes, a side benefit is savings for us citizens in information costs, because we citizens don't have to read all the papers, and a good thing...
January 23, 2007
Wet Nets
Intelligence may be even more distributed than we thought. How humans are able to move at all remains a puzzle. Our muscles are controlled by thousands of nerve cells in the spinal cord. This entire, complex system must work as a whole in order to successfully create a single motion. The new research shows that even if we repeat a certain motion with high accuracy, the involved nerve cells never repeat their activity patterns. This particular observation reflects the organisation of the nerve cells of the cerebral cortex. . . . "Our findings contradict conventional wisdom about spinal cord functions," says Rune W. Berg from Department of Neuroscience and Pharmacology at the Faculty of Health Sciences. Until now, the general belief was that the spinal networks functioned mechanically and completely without random impulses. The new discovery enables researchers to use the theory on cortical networks to explore how spinal cords generate movements. It seems so. My body seems to...
December 18, 2006
Apparent Truth
Hal Finney finds thinking for himself to be an unreliable way to find truth. One of the problems that interests me is how best to learn the truth in controversial matters. . . One is to simply go along with what your peers believe. . . Another is to try to study the issue and become familiar with the arguments pro and con in some depth, and then to use your own judgment to determine the truth . . . Oversimplifying, I'd say that ordinary people use the first method, and smart people use the second method, but neither strikes me as very reliable on topics of controversy. . . Another method which I have found reasonably successful for certain matters is to try to learn the scientific consensus. . . It can reasonably be questioned whether this method is justified, whether scientific understanding can properly be viewed as an approximation to the truth. My answer is that science...
December 13, 2006
Home Again
I've been having another one of those sensory cortex days, a day when the world is so beautiful and comfortable that I have trouble staying conscious, trancing out on one thing and then another - the sight of nearly anything in the all day beauty light of a sun low in the south shining through clear air, the sound of a goose honking as it passes, the smell of leaves moldering, two calves licking another that has been feeling poorly for a day or two, a grinning dog, a shower of leaves lazily drifting down to grass I had just raked clean - it's all just so, so good. And all the better for being unexpected, a surpise gift. Unfortunately, consciousness returns, but perhaps I can make some lemonade of it. Annie Dillard said it so well in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises....
December 03, 2006
Future Imperfect
Hal Finney at Overcoming Bias ponders the nature and consequences of present orientation. It relates to one of the most curious of human failures, our inability to successfully act in our own self-perceived best interest. Now it's not clear that this is actually a case of bias in the sense of inability to see the truth. It may be the case that we often take actions we know we will regret, and fully and correctly predict our attitudes and responses throughout the time in which we will experience the consequences of our actions. Yet we find that as we move from one time period to the next, we perceive that the actions that we have taken were not in our self-interest. Herb Gintis thinks it is. . . . humans, like all other animals, do not maximize fitness, but rather an objective function (which may be called a preference function) based on immediate costs and benefits, that has evolved...
November 22, 2006
Rationality Dojo
I've been reading a new blog, Overcoming Bias: A forum for those serious about trying to overcome their own biases in beliefs and actions. It's a group blog, or forum as they style it (kinda old timey that), with some names I've paid attention to before such as Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson, as well as a dozen other less familiar names, brought to us by Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. It has been threatening to be interesting and today has done so: The Martial Art of Rationality. Alas, our minds respond less readily to our will than our hands. Muscles are evolutionarily ancient subjects of neural control, while cognitive reflectivity is a comparatively more recent innovation. We shouldn't be surprised that muscles are easier to use than brains. But it is not wise to neglect the latter training because it is more difficult. It is not by bigger muscles that the human species rose to prominence...
November 15, 2006
Unspeakable Defense
One of the clearest examples of exploiting moral wiggle room, the subject of the previous post, is the pervasiveness of support for obviously mistaken public assertions of political activists, by fellow travelers, for instrumental reasons. Norm points out a recent example - something he has done numerous times over a long period of time. In this case it's another wheezing attempt to obfuscate terrorism that Norm outs for moral (and I'd add intellectual) turpitude. Since the connection between choices and outcomes isn't perfectly clear, fairness is no longer as compelling a consideration for some as advancing their political agenda. Roger Pielke Jr. notes another example of such behavior that is closer to my core concerns. For me the most amazing aspect of the repeated misrepresentation of science related to disasters and climate change is not that political advocates look to cherry pick science or go beyond the state of the science. What is most amazing is that in the...
November 14, 2006
Social Illusions
Alex points to an interesting paper, Exploiting moral wiggle room: Experiments demonstrating an illusory preference for fairness : Subjects in economic experiments are often generous. This behavior is often interpreted as reflecting a preference for equitable, efficient, or otherwise desirable social outcomes. We show that a considerable proportion of such fair behavior may be driven by a desire to appear fair without actually wanting a fair outcome. To do so, we first demonstrate a high frequency of fair behavior in a modification of the standard dictator game, but then show that fairness decreases substantially when the connection between choices and outcomes is obfuscated. Specifically, we show that in a binary version of the dictator game, a majority of subjects choose the fair and efficient outcome. We then show that subjects playing the same game instead choose to maximize their own payoffs, at the expense of fairness and efficiency, when the recipients’ payoffs are uncertain, even if this uncertainty can...
November 11, 2006
It's Not Noise
I've been taking care of Nanette's ranchette for her while she and Chuck travel the world. They're doing a sort of post-retirement grand tour, having already done the retire to the ranch thing. I get the benefit of using her pastures for my stock, and she gets some peace of mind knowing that an uptight everything-must-fit manager is overseeing her dominion. She and Chuck stop by once or twice a year and I see that when they arrive all is in order. It's almost as if their own ranch is a B&B that they visit now and again. This is an emerging profession of sorts - ranch butler, a.k.a. mouse catcher - as more urban refugees buy up ranch land but have no interest or expertise in the grungy details. In general, I don't do television, but Nanette has a big screen and satellite programming. The last time she visited it was on the blink, a failure on my...
September 24, 2006
A Polymath
Or alternatively, a man of letters, an educated man but not, in the sense that has been discussed here recently, an intellectual since he is too well educated. OK, he might not like that and may think of himself as an intellectual or at least make common cause with those who do, but I beg to differ. He's insufficiently hedgehogish for that. One of the ideas I'm very fond of is that virtue isn't its own reward, it's a dominating strategy. More precisely, I am interested to see how far one can go towards showing that behaving ethically is actually a very good bet if one wants to come out ahead materially. . . The experiments of Robert Axelrod seem to indicate that a stance of "Be nice to everyone, but if someone hits you, hit back" is a very good bet. (When The Matrix came out, one reviewer, I think it was Stuart Klawans in The Nation, described...
September 14, 2006
Economists in Love
or at least in very strong like, or something - it's a bit beyond respect and admiration. In this post, I mentioned the incredible reasoning and rhetorical skills of Milton Friedman in an old video clip. I love the internet. I found the transcript. Turns out it's from 1975, not the '60s. It's wonderful. Read it. The post title was Milton on Fire and was a follow up to Milton Friedman Doesn't Beat His Wife. I've long been an admirer of Uncle Milty too, so I pretty much had to read it. Roberts selected this exchange to pull out of the transcript. HEFFNER: Yes, but it interests me that you just said that mankind is selfish and greedy. And that has always been the battle cry of those who have said; therefore, we must impose controls upon them. FRIEDMAN: Therefore, we have to put power into the hands of other selfish and greedy men. Now I want to apologize...
September 12, 2006
The Pansy Left
This, I have learned, is what Orwell called it. This bon mot is one of many in James Piereson's review of Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain by Stefan Collini. Pierson contrasts this work with The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969) by John Gross. The “man of letters,” as Gross understands him, is one who lives by writing and makes a living by doing so—that is, a professional writer, albeit one with literary interests. . . The disintegration of the literary culture of the nineteenth century was accompanied by the gradual disappearance after 1900 of the man of letters himself. Within a short time, the man of letters began to appear as a dilettante, a dabbler, a dying species, even as a crank. The term itself came to be used as an instrument of abuse to signify an aged and somewhat eccentric bookman. In short order, modern life began to evolve its own substitutes for the...
August 03, 2006
On A Roll
It seems that I point to Pielke in half my posts, but he's been on a roll. Read this one immediately. The almost daily use of current weather and climate events to argue for action on greenhouse gases by the media and political advocates is among the most egregious misuses of science in the climate debate. Not only does it redirect attention away from those actions most likely to have an effect on the impacts of weather and climate, but it creates disincentives for action on the longer-term problem of human-caused climate change. . . The hard reality is that the only justifiable use of current weather and climate events as a tool of promotion for action on climate change is in support of improving adaptive responses and reducing vulnerability. He supports those assertions by referencing work in cognitive heuristics. The research by John Sterman of MIT and Linda Booth Sweeny at Harvard on MIT graduate students - presumably...
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