As some of you have been dragged into conversations about conspiracy theories and why we love them, you will not be surprised that I plan to start writing about it here. This first post is an introduction and overview of some of the best-loved CSs. The pictures in this article make an easy staring point.
Whether you support McCain or Obama, this is a well-spoken and nicely considered endorsement. Thank you Mr. Powell, for taking a moment to upgrade political discourse at a time when it has sunk low. Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama.
Hat tip to HalsHop.
"So, who should be helped to clear out the over priced homes and underperforming mortgages? Leamer suggests the government might purchase the homes available for sale right now. It would take a purchase of half a million homes to solve problem. That would cost about $150 billion and would help homeowners directly, not Hank’s pals on Wall Street or those sketchy guys at Fannie and Freddie and Country Wide. My option approach would cost a lot less and put cash in the hands of homeowners and the banks right away. Follow the government buy out of overpriced homes with mortgages that are under water with tax credits for first-time homebuyers and a tax rebate for buyers of existing homes. This would clear out the stock of homes for sale quickly."
In Stuart Kauffman's book Reinventing the Sacred
Two problems face problem solvers:
Apprehending the Current Actual, and
Perceiving the Adjacent Possible.
Action becomes clear and easy to motivate (a choice rather than a struggle) given that a leader can accomplish both of these. The problem is that we don't have as direct a connection to apprehending the current actual (epistemology) nor as complete an understanding of the the adjacent states that are actually possible (science) as we sometime assume. That means particulars have to be worked out and that it is sometimes very difficult.
Fundamentalism ignores the problem completely. Instead of worrying about apprehending the Current Actual or perceiving the Adjacent Possible, fundamentalism both assumes the current state is an illusion and the final state will result from fiat transformation, in some cases no matter what we do (e.g. many Christian's contempt for stewardship of the Earth is based on a vague mix of a belief in the insignificance of human actions and conviction of an ultimate apocalyptic outcome).
When the end point is “known” to be inevitable, why worry about denial or realism? Why struggle against either? You don't need to hear the rest of the question when you know the answer. This may be a useful or even necessary state of mind for some (personal!) spiritual pursuits, but it is a bad way to make decisions about systems like the economy, the environment, the judiciary branch of government, foreign relations or the military. We've had 8 years of “principled” (read: willfully uninformed regarding the Current Actual and the Adjacent Possible) action from our executive leadership. Let's move ahead with something more hopeful.
I don't post much about politics here because I don't like the requirement of rediculous, overly simplistic side taking. But I have to give in on this one...
I am a big fan of Lessig. He is a key force in the creation of the Creative Commons and presistently in favor of smart thinking on intellectual property. He has created a nice presentation on Palin's Experience claims. First, I really love the preamble--enough with binary, loyalty-at-the-cost-of-reality thinking and speech. And, second, thanks for taking the time to present some verifiable facts.
Is there a bias? Yes. Lessig's thoughts are organized to tell a story. But the the thinking is considered, deep and informed by history and context. Thanks for that. It is a welcome addition to useful political discourse.
Evil Mad Scientist has fun analysis of this question for all kinds of materials from different forms of money (dimes = quarters by weight) to flour and culminating in antimatter (BTW, very valuable by weight!). EMS gives the question a few entertaining twists. Here is an excerpt:
Kopi Luwak coffee costs approximately the same amount per pound as human blood. (Knowing where it comes from, I think I'd rather drink the blood. It's been pointed out before that printer ink is also up there, but I'd rather not drink that either.)
Would you have guessed that peacock feathers can be worth more than their weight in dollar bills? Or that a fancy steak costs twice as much as its weight in dollar coins?
DHS officials said that the newly disclosed policies--which apply to anyone entering the country, including US citizens--are reasonable and necessary to prevent terrorism... The policies cover 'any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,' including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover 'all papers and other written documentation,' including books, pamphlets and 'written materials commonly referred to as "pocket trash..."'"
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I have been working on a short essay sketching some thoughts on art, style, decoration and choice that resulted from visit to the Georgia O'Keeffe museum in Santa Fe a couple of years ago. This is a little different sort of project than I usually post here. I hope you find some of the thoughts interesting. (Download PDF).
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Continue reading "Essay: Art, Style, Decoration and Choice" »
...people are generally experts in a field for a reason. They've studied it. They've experienced it. They've done research, published papers, looked at the results, tried to interpret them, made predictions, done further experiments. They learn from what they experience.
That’s why they're experts.
Why is this topic interesting? Partly, because it is one of a handful of research areas in which sociology/psychology seems to contribute to fairly direct knowledge of how the brain works. More practically, H & B are interesting because one cannot avoid them.
Even when we are thinking hard and focusing narrowly on self awareness, it is practically impossible to avoid making these errors. The best we can hope for is to leave notes for ourselves (sometimes it might be wise to leave actual physical notes!) instructing us to distrust our convictions. But knowing you are wrong because you trust your passed-self’s authority isn’t really avoiding thinking with H & Bs, it is merely switching the train onto a different set of rails.
It seems true that, while many have explained the patterns of failure that can result from trusting these heuristics and biases, there are also important and powerful benefits from our brains having evolved to work this way.
In the table below, I outline simplistic thoughts trying to illustrate that every bias identified in Yudkowsky’s paper as a potential failure pattern also accounts for a great deal of human success. Together, they not only represent potential pitfalls in perception and reasoning, but constitute a great deal of what we consider the basic, innate human ability to act, adapt and get on in the World.
This is a follow-up to my first coint toss post a few days ago. I was surprised at the size of the difference between the average tosses for various patterns of the same length. For example, for the patterns THT vs THH, the average number of coin tosses to achieve the patterns differed by 2 tosses.
In my last post, I argued that the difference can be understood by looking at the number of permutations of n coin tosses without the target pattern. Below, I make this very explicit by calculating the fraction of possible coin toss permutations without the pattern over the total number of permutations.
For low numbers of coin tosses, the differences are small (the are equal up to 4 tosses for the THT and THH example; 5 for the example patterns HT and HH. In the calculation of average value of n, the terms are multiplied by 
) The fraction of permutations of coin tosses without THT and THH are compared in the plot below. The corresponding data is in the table below.
I extended the code a little bit more to make this calculation. In Python script available in previous last post, I used a designed counting scheme for the series sum calculation. In this case, I extended the class to count the permutations without the pattern without ensuring the last len(pattern) terms equal the pattern (i.e. I just counted permutations this time). You can get the update here.
Yesterday, I watched Peter Donnelly's TED presentation on statistical mind-benders. Among other things (statistician jokes!), Peter observes that humans don't have good intuition for some kinds of statistical thinking. In the presentation, Donelly posses a coin toss problem to demonstrate his point. He chooses one that is easy to get wrong.
Consider a series of fair coin tosses. For example, one possible sequence of coin tosses is THTTHHTHTTH. How many tosses are required to get a particular pattern? How does this depend on the length of the pattern?
Peter poses a concrete question as follows. Consider the pattern HTH. If we do the experiment of tossing a coin repeatedly and counting the number of tosses, we find that the first occurrence of HTH arises in some average number of coin tosses 
. For a different pattern, say TTH, we can repeat the experiment and find that the first occurrence of this pattern arises in some average number of coin tosses 
.
One of the following statements must be true:
(a)
(b)
(c)
Which statement is correct?
My reflex reaction was (a). The heuristic leading to this conclusion is that the probability of getting TTH is the same as the probability of getting HTH in any 3 coin tosses, i.e.,
.
On the other hand, if the pattern was HHH the probability of getting this pattern on any three coin tosses is the same. But intuitively, I expect to have to make more coin tosses on average to get this pattern.
It is difficult to get to the correct answer with this kind of reasoning.
A little counter intuitively, (b) is the answer. It takes more tosses on average to get the pattern HTH than the pattern TTH. Peter spends some time arguing that this is plausible--watch his presentation to get those arguments. Below, I pursue calculating this for myself...
"It's just semantics" and "we're saying the same thing" are two responses to attempts at working out subtle and difficult differences I hate to hear. I find them lazy and cowardly. They neither reveal common ground nor do they move anyone toward generative understanding of diversity.
These responses do not build trust. They are disrespectful in the way they discredit one party's perceptions of the issues by elevating the perspective of the other who sees how things "actually" are. They imply it is smarter to gloss over facts and complex relationships between ideas. These responses imply that if you disagree, you should keep quiet until you see it the right way.
Holding disagreement, respecting one's own lack of understanding of an idea and going deeper without breaking trust with the people in the conversation is essential to progress.
And I think this is what many well meaning people who try to calm a contentious conversation with theses statements are trying to accomplish. But glossing over lanugage, distorting meanings, implying understanding where none exists, etc. doesn't work.
I was reminded of my experiences of colleagues killing a conversation by using the phrases above when I was reading Euphemism and American Violence by David Bromwich appearing in the New York Review of Books. After reading the article, I realized there are many more and more subtle ways to accomplish the same thing.
Here is a representative quote from the article:
The "global war on terrorism" promotes a mood of comprehension in the absence of perceived particulars, and that is a mood in which euphemisms may comfortably take shelter. There is (many commentators have pointed out) something nonsensical in the idea of waging war on a technique or method, and terrorism was a method employed by many groups over many centuries before al-Qaeda—the Tamil Tigers, the IRA, the Irgun, to stick to recent times. But the "war on crime" and "war on drugs" probably helped to render the initial absurdity of the name to some degree normal. This was an incidental weakness, in any case. The assurance and the unspecifying grandiosity of the global war on terrorism were the traits most desired in such a slogan.
It is a fairly long article and well worth the read. Thanks to Chris for the pointer.
I write in notebooks constantly for projects at work and at home. I write essays, do calculations, take notes from books and keep work notes in them, so I have one or two with me all of the time. As I have confessed earlier, I am a Moleskine fanatic.
I don't get this fussy about much else. But when I got a glimpse of leather Moleskine covers from GFeller Casemakers in Meridian, ID, I couldn't resist. These are beautiful covers!
The pics here show the cover for the small Moleskine notebook. This is number 215 and was made by leathersmith Steve Derricott.
I am using a local startup www.crowdfunder.com, to raise $5,000 for an orphanage (HOGAR DE REFUGIO INFANTIL VILLA JUAREZ) in Mexico I have supported for the last few years. My brother-in-law has visited many times and participated in construction projects at the old site. The old site is being abandoned due to being contaminated with pesticides during hurricane Henrietta in September of this year.
Click-through below to get more information, see photos and contribute to relocation and reconstruction efforts. Thanks much for your help.
I was unfamiliar with Randy Pausch until today. However, I cannot recommend anything I have seen in the last few months more than this lecture. Here is the description from Google videos:
Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.
Here is the link to the video.
All the info you could want on climbing Colorado's 14,000 ft + peaks can be found at 14ers.com, so I won't write much about the route. But I thought you might like to see the pictures. It was a beautiful spot and a great weekend of climbing with perfect weather. Thanks Joel for planning a great trip.
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Can we see any difference in IHR between meditation (such as my skills are) and reading Ann Coulter's web site? It turns out there are clear differences.
The y-scale is instantaneous heart rate (IHR). The Red curve is
"Reading Ann Coulter" while the Blue curve is "Meditation." Each curve
respresent the same amount of time recording with the
LightStone (see previous post).
First you can see that nearly all of the points on the Red curve are well above the Blue curve. My average heart rate for the upper curve was 85.9; for the lower, 65.9. (By the way, actual time in minutes is x-scale time divided by 60,000 so the elapsed time is about 3.5 minutes.) But also to variation in heat rate in the Blue curve is much more coherent. To make this clearer, here is the power spectrum for each curve.
The 3-4 strong peaks at the far left (the right half is a mirror image, an artifact of the FFT algorithm) in the upper power spectrum correspond the strong frequencies present in the HRV during meditation while the power spectum is spread into the upper frequencies in the lower plot.
Which is better for you? (We humans tend to like regualar patterns, so by that measure, meditation is "better".) Without knowing much more about the interactions of the systems are work here, it is hard to say.
I sporadically practice meditation. As soon as I started, I was curious about what is going on with the brain and body during meditation. The biofeedback game, The Journey To Wild Divine, uses a simple USB 3-finger sensor called the LightStone that measures heart rate and skin conductance give a simple answer to that question. These are two readily measurable quantities with patterns people associate with meditation practice.
Here is a nice description of The Journey To Wild Divine, reviewed for the Mac.
I tried out a friend’s copy late one Friday night and was out getting my own within a few weeks. After a few sessions, I completed the game and came back to practice some of the exercises with the data recording feature turned on ($).
The JWD game exports the instantaneous heart rate (IHR), the (calculated) heart rate variation (HRV) and skin conductance level (SCL). There are some open source programs for acquiring and analyzing the LightStone data. I just dumped the data into Mathematica via a Python import script.
The game presents visual “puzzles” (e.g. stack levitating rocks, unlock doors, etc.) one “solves” by controlling the readings on the LightStone. Some require becoming more energetic (agitated?), and many require great relaxation and steady attention. Below are the recordings from (what I found) a challenging exercise in the game. It took maybe 10 or more minutes. It is hard to keep track of time when you are solving the puzzles, and I didn’t time myself. (I haven’t taken the effort to figure out the time scale on the exported data yet.)
The most dramatic (graphically) change over the exercise was the decrease in SCL. At the beginning of the exercise, SCL is relatively high and unsteady. It decreased steadily with small sharp jumps upward until the puzzle was solved. (The change in pattern of all three quantities is visible when the puzzle was solved a little before the end of the recording.)
The HRV scale is in arbitrary units (i.e., I don’t understand them yet). There seems to be research and claims (and gadget-programs!) regarding the correlation between higher HRV and good health. Ah, causality. Anyway, in order to solve the puzzle in JWD, it appears that I had to raise my time-averaged HRV. (I don’t know the actual formula.)
The last graph shows the IHR. This one I think I understand. JWD use a heart beat pattern recognition algorithm to detect the spike in every heart beat and use that to mark the time between individual beats. The IHR is proportional to1/(time between two adjacent peaks).
The IHR starts out erratic, but settles into a pattern that raises and falls in relation to my respiration (it seems).
This is fun. Measuring a couple of readily available metrics started me thinking about the possibilities or getting to key points in other systems simultaneously. For example, it is easy to imagine that my endocrine system is involved, and so that metabolism is affected. And on and on…Our systems-level understanding of the body is very primitive, but the opportunities for deep understanding are starting to seem within reach.
Two things about this short video of a remarkable TED presentation caught my attention:
At the New Yorker, a small article hits the point I was trying to make in my previous post pretty squarely. Here is the last paragraph from Risk Management by Lauren Collins:
He acknowledged that the paragraph had come from a forwarded e-mail, but said that, before pasting it into his pitch, he had done “some simple calculations” that supported its conclusions. “In what I’ve seen in dealing with the war and the misperceptions of it,” he said, “it seemed to me like those would be the right numbers.” He went on, “I work in D.C. on a daily basis, and I’m afraid to get out of my car in a lot of places. I hear about police officers being murdered every day in D.C. and Baltimore. And I’ve had thousands of friends and colleagues go to Iraq and come back safely.”
Even without the explanation of the particulars of the question (murder rate in Washington DC vs soldier death rate in Iraq) this quote illustrates two habits of humans: our feelings about our personal experiences count for more than data (anecdotal evidence weighs a lot, passion over data!) and we are profoundly unskilled at probability and statistics. Policies made on this kind of thinking may have good or bad results. But they will be consistent only with the bias, not the way the world works.
My friend Hal over at halshop, has a quote from Bell Hooks' Where We Stand: Class Matters regarding housing on his blog today. Here is a small excerpt:
More than any other issue facing our nation, housing will be the concern that will force citizens to face the reality of class. Every day citizens of this nation buy houses they cannot afford and will not own in their lifetime. Ironically, in many parts of our nation the houses get bigger and grander even as incomes dwindle. The gap between those who have and those who have not will be registered by the revolt of citizens who once believed that they would always have the right to own, confronting the reality that housing is rapidly becoming a luxury that only those with unlimited resources can hold on to.
While my experience (anecdotal evidence) says that Hooks is pointing to something that is happening to people and that it is bad, some additional information would be helpful.
First, what is happening? And what does bad man? Is it bad to die in debt? Are the few people who own their homes outright better off? In what ways are they better off? What other quality-of -life vectors are affected?
Second, trends and statistics would give us hints about who this is happening to, and how it is happening. Correlations would tell us where to look for causes or at least coincidences. This is an inherently complex issue. I don’t mean complex in the sense that the causes and effects are a difficult-to-sort-out ball of spaghetti. What I mean is that small changes in initial conditions may result in (nonlinear!) large changes in outcomes.
I tend to agree with Hooks; therefore I tend to believe this understanding should inform behavior, policy. But saying so over and over—or hearing a story that supports the bias—doesn’t make it so. I admire Hooks’ passion; I long for a world with both passion and rigorous analysis.
