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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