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The Beginning of Infinity

Posted by Peter on April 20, 2012
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, Life, the Universe, and Everything, Science and Technology, The Flynn Effect. Tagged: , , .

Book review: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.

This is an ambitious book centered around the nature of explanation, why it has been an important part of science (misunderstood by many who think of science as merely prediction), and why it is important for the future of the universe.

He provides good insights on jump during the Enlightenment to thinking in universals (e.g. laws of nature that apply to a potentially infinite scope). But he overstates some of its implications. He seems confident that greater-than-human intelligences will view his concept of “universal explainers” as the category that identifies which beings have the rights of people. I find this about as convincing as attempts to find a specific time when a fetus acquires the rights of personhood. I can imagine AIs deciding that humans fail often enough at universalizing their thought to be less than a person, or that they will decide that monkeys are on a trajectory toward the same kind of universality.

He neglects to mention some interesting evidence of the spread of universal thinking – James Flynn’s explanation of the Flynn Effect documents that low IQ cultures don’t use the abstract thought that we sometimes take for granted, and describes IQ increases as an escape from concrete thinking.

Deutsch has a number of interesting complaints about people who attempt science but are confused about the philosophy of science, such as people who imagine that measuring heritability of a trait tells us something important without further inquiry – he notes that being enslaved was heritable in 1860, but that was useless for telling us how to change slavery.

He has interesting explanations for why anthropic arguments, the simulation argument, and the doomsday argument are weaker in a spatially infinite universe. But I was disappointed that he didn’t provide good references for his claim that the universe is infinite – a claim which I gather is controversial and hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves.

He sometimes gets carried away with his ambition and seems to forget his rule that explanations should be hard to vary in order to make it hard to fool ourselves.

He focuses on the beauty of flowers in an attempt to convince us that beauty is partially objective. But he doesn’t describe this objective beauty in a way that would make it hard to alter to fit whatever evidence he wants it to fit. I see an obvious alternative explanation for humans finding flowers beautiful – they indicate where fruit will be.

He argues that creativity evolved to help people find better ways of faithfully transmitting knowledge (understanding someone can require creative interpretation of the knowledge that they are imperfectly expressing). That might be true, but I can easily create other explanations that fit the evidence he’s trying to explain, such as that creativity enabled people to make better choices about when to seek a new home.

He imagines that he has a simple way to demonstrate that hunter-gatherer societies could not have lived in a golden age (the lack of growth of their knowledge):

Since static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge, they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness.

But that requires implausible assumptions such as that happiness depends more on the pursuit of knowledge than availability of sex. And it’s not clear that hunter-gatherer societies were stable – they may have been just a few mistakes away from extinction, and accumulating knowledge faster than any previous species had. (I think Deutsch lives in a better society than hunter-gatherers, but it would take a complex argument to show that the average person today does).

But I generally enjoyed his arguments even when I thought they were wrong.

See also the review in the New York Times.

Personalized Life Extension Conference 2012

Posted by Peter on April 8, 2012
Posted in: Health. Tagged: , .

The Personalized Life Extension Conference 2012 presented lots of ideas, with occasionally some science to back them up.

A lot of the advice backed up by the best science won’t be followed. In spite of the title of Brian Delaney’s Calorie Restriction talk, he didn’t have a solution to the problem of feeling hungry. When Max Peto reminded us of the dangers of sitting, the percentage of people who remained seated only dropped from maybe 97 to 95. There were vendors pushing food that had higher than optimal sugar content, and I think at least one pusher had some success.

I’ve been cutting back drastically on my vitamin/supplement consumption, and Stephen Spindler’s talk (arguing that most apparently good results in other animals were due to supplements inducing calorie restriction) has me thinking about cutting back farther to just fish oil and vitamin D.

The telomere guys still haven’t come up with a good theory for why evolution didn’t do the apparently easy thing and make some telomerase available to non stem cells, so I’m still assuming there’s some tradeoff such as cancer.

The most interesting talk was by David Asprey, describing an “upgraded paleo” diet – high fat, with careful attention to the quality of the fat. He has more ideas than he has time to communicate them.

Unfortunately he seems too busy throwing out new opinions to document the evidence behind them (or maybe the evidence is hiding somewhere on his poorly organized website). But in most cases he has a plausible paleo-like theory, and I’m generally confident they’d be little worse than a placebo, so I’m trying some of them.

At the moment that involves consuming more of some paleo-like foods that I’d already been starting to add to my diet. Grass-fed (Kerrygold) butter is possibly the most important, and coconut products are also rather high on the list. The butter tastes better than my dim recollection of butter from malnourished grain-fed cows. Coconut milk works well as a substitute for milk in dishes such as chowder and cream of onion soup.

Josh Whiton had an intriguing idea about trying to get the benefits of calorie restriction via a very low protein diet once or twice a week (with a paleo-like diet the rest of the time).

Neanderthal Brains and Eye Size

Posted by Peter on March 26, 2012
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

A post titled Neanderthals had differently organized brains reports evidence that Neanderthal brains did not have a larger volume devoted to intelligence (or at least that part of intelligence needed to handle social interactions in large groups) than humans.

A key fact is that “eye-socket size is correlated with latitude” – at least within a species.

Neanderthals were adapted to high latitudes, and had larger eye-sockets.

That suggests a relatively large part of their brain was devoted to the visual cortex, and it seems somewhat plausible to suspect that much of that involved low-level processing needed to make up for darker conditions at higher latitudes.

So Neanderthals’ larger skull size doesn’t imply any important advantage.

The Institutional Revolution

Posted by Peter on March 9, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics. Tagged: .

Book review: The Institutional Revolution: Measurement and the Economic Emergence of the Modern World, by Douglas W. Allen.

What do honor duels, purchases of commissions in the army, and privately managed lighthouses have in common?

According to Allen, they were institutions which made sense in the pre-modern age, but were abandoned when improvements in measurement (of labor quality, product quality, time, location, etc) made them obsolete in the nineteenth century.

Allen presents a grand theory of how large variations in job performance, product quality, etc, before 1800-1850 created large transaction costs which caused widespread differences from modern life, and which explain a wide variety of institutions which seem strange enough to people with a presentist bias that most have dismissed many pre-modern institutions as obviously foolish.

What starts out as an inquiry into some apparently quirky and unusual practices finishes as an ambitious attempt to explain the industrial revolution as a revolution whose institutional changes were more pervasive and valuable than the technological advances which triggered them.

The book convinced me that it explains the timing of some important and often forgotten social changes. But the frequent implication that the institutions in question were the most rational way to deal with limitations of pre-industrial life seem overdone. I suspect that there was often a mixture of reasons behind those institutions that included some foolishness and some catering to special interests.

For example, his theory requires that honor duels be designed so that skill at dueling is fairly unimportant compared to random luck. He provides some evidence that people tried to introduce randomness into the dueling process, but leaves me doubting that it made skill unimportant.

The book provides a framework that might be valuable in predicting future institutional changes as technological change further reduces transaction costs, and does a valuable job of offsetting the tendencies of economists other than Coase to downplay the importance of transaction costs.

This was the first book I’ve read in several years that seems too short.

Inside Jokes

Posted by Peter on February 25, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, Humor, The Human Mind.

Book review: Inside Jokes – Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind, by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.

This book has the best explanation I’ve seen so far of why we experience humor. The simplistic summary is that it is a reward for detecting certain kinds of false assumptions. And after it initially evolved it has been adapted to additional purposes (signaling one’s wit), and exploited by professional comedians in the way that emotions which reward reproductive functions are exploited by pornography.

Some of the details of which false beliefs qualify as a source of humor and how diagnosing them to be false qualifies as a source of humor seem arbitrary enough that the theory falls well short of the kind of insight that tempts me to say “that’s obvious, why didn’t I think of that?”. And a few details seem suspicious – the claims that people are averse to being tickled and that one sensation tickling creates is that of being attacked don’t seem consistent with my experience.

They provide some clues about the precursors of humor in other species (including laughter, which apparently originated independently from humor as a “false alarm” signal), and give some hints about why the greater complexity of the human mind triggered a more complex version of humor than the poorly understood versions that probably exist in some other species.

The book has some entertaining sections, but the parts that dissect individual jokes are rather tedious. Also, don’t expect this book to be of much help at generating new and better humor – it does a good job of clarifying how to ruin a joke, but it also explains why we should expect creating good jokes to be hard.

Manias, Panics and Crashes

Posted by Peter on February 12, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, Investing, Politics. Tagged: , .

Book review: Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises 6th ed., by Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Aliber.

The book starts with a good overview of how a typical bubble develops and bursts. But I found the rest of the book poorly organized. I often wondered whether the book was reporting a particular historical fact as an example of some broad pattern – if not, why weren’t they organized in something closer to chronological order? It has lots of information that is potentially valuable, but not organized into a useful story or set of references.

1493

Posted by Peter on January 29, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann.

This book is about the globalization triggered by Columbus. The book’s jacket describes this set of changes as “the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs”. But that was probably written by a poorly informed marketing person. The contents of the book promote a more plausible claim that the effects were bigger than most realize.

Some of the ideas that this book reports are surprising, potentially important, but also somewhat speculative. E.g. large-scale reforestation resulting from smallpox killing existing inhabitants apparently contributed to the little ice age by sequestering carbon.

Much of the book is devoted to the spread of non-human species, but there are long sections on slavery, including speculation about how cheap land might have made slavery more important, and how the differences between Algonkian and Mississippian Indian cultures may have affected attitudes toward slavery in northern and southern U.S.

The first quarter of the book seemed well written, but the remainder of the book wanders through anecdotes of unclear importance. If I’m trying to focus on long-term effects of the globalization that Columbus triggered, why should I care about the details of numerous battles?

The book might come closer to living up to the jacket’s hype if it argued that Columbus caused the industrial revolution. But Mann seems confused about what the industrial revolution was – he treats rubber as a necessary component of the industrial revolution, but that happened well after experts say the industrial revolution started.

It wouldn’t be hard to use the ideas in this book to generate speculation that Columbus caused the industrial revolution, e.g. the potato’s ability to feed several times as many people as wheat, as well as cheaper security due the difficulty of stealing potatoes which are left in the ground until needed, made more people available to invent technology, and might have generated wealth and predictability that enabled inventors to focus on more distant rewards. But my guess is that this is only a small part of what caused the industrial revolution.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Posted by Peter on January 15, 2012
Posted in: Book Reviews, Investing, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.

This book is an excellent introduction to the heuristics and biases literature, but only small parts of it will seem new to those who are familiar with the subject.

While the book mostly focuses on conditions where slow, logical thinking can do better than fast, intuitive thinking, I find it impressive that he was careful to consider the views of those who advocate intuitive thinking, and that he collaborated with a leading advocate of intuition to resolve many of their apparent disagreements (mainly by clarifying when each kind of thinking is likely to work well).

His style shows that he has applied some of the lessons of the research in his field to his own writing, such as by giving clear examples. (“Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular”).

He sounds mildly overconfident (and believes mild overconfidence can be ok), but occasionally provides examples of his own irrationality.

He has good advice for investors (e.g. reduce loss aversion via “broad framing” – think of a single loss as part of a large class of results that are on average profitable), and appropriate disdain for investment advisers. But he goes overboard when he treats the stock market as unpredictable. The stock market has some real regularities that could be exploited. Most investors fail to find them because they see many more regularities than are real, are overconfident about their ability to distinguish the real ones, and because it’s hard to distinguish valuable feedback (which often takes many years to get) from misleading feedback.

I wish I could find equally good book for overuse of logical analysis when I want the speed of intuition (e.g. “analysis paralysis”).

Islands of Genius

Posted by Peter on December 28, 2011
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Islands of Genius: The Bountiful Mind of the Autistic, Acquired, and Sudden Savant, by Darold A. Treffert.

This book contains a fair amount of interesting information, but the writing style leaves much to be desired, and many parts disappointed me.

It describes savant syndrome (formerly known as “idiot savant”), where unusually good numeric or artistic skills coexist with some sort of mental disability (and usually prodigious memory).

Some people appear to have been born with savant skills, a few developed the skills in what appears to be a sudden insight. But the cases that seem to tell us the most about what is special about savants are the ones where the skills emerge after a brain injury. Savant skill seem to be often caused by a left brain dysfunction removing some inhibitions that prevented the right side of the brain from developing or displaying unusual skills.

This suggests that there may be some sense in which we all can potentially develop savant skills.

He doesn’t provide a good explanation of why the syndrome is defined so that savants with no disability fail to qualify. There seems to be some tendency for savant skills to coexist with some drawbacks (such as the drawbacks associated with autism), but the author denies that there’s any trade-off requiring that savant skill cause deficiencies in other areas.

Some of the weaker parts of the book claim some savants know things they couldn’t have learned, and attribute skills to genetic memory. I find it much more plausible that the savants learned their skills in ways that would look like an extreme form of normal learning, and that we just don’t know how to observe when and where they accomplished the learning.

3 Idiots

Posted by Peter on December 15, 2011
Posted in: Movies.

I highly recommend the movie 3 Idiots.

It’s very popular in India, but hasn’t gotten as much attention in the U.S. as it deserves.

The early parts of the movie remind me of the better parts of Ferris Bueller and MacGyver (including some of the ethically questionable parts of Ferris Bueller). The last half is more serious, more impressive, and harder to describe. I was surprised at how quickly it could alternate between making me laugh and making me sad.

It’s longer than I normally want a movie to be, but there are hardly any parts that I would have wanted cut. I want to thank the Netflix recommendation system, without which I probably wouldn’t have heard of it.