Cass Sunstein writes about an experiment that shows that political discussions tend to produce polarizing groupthink rather than understanding.
The Human Mind
Book Review: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things : What Categories Reveal about the Mind by George Lakoff
I would have found this book well worth reading if I had read it when it was published, but by now I’ve picked up most of the ideas elsewhere.
He does a good job of describing the problems of the classical view of categories. His description of the alternative prototype theory is not as clear and convincing as what I’ve found in the neural net literature.
His attacks on objectivism and the “God’s eye view” of reality are pretty good. I found this claim interesting: (page 301) “to be objective requires one to be a relativist of an appropriate sort”.
The chapter on the mind-as-machine paradigm gives a superficial impression of saying more than it actually does. It discredits an approach to AI that was mostly recognized as a failure by the AI community when the book was published or shortly after that. He could confuse some people into thinking he discredits more than this by his strange use of the word algorithm. He says “Algorithms concern the manipulation of meaningless disembodied symbols”, and admits his arguments don’t discredit connectionism. Yet by the normal computer science usage of “algorithm”, it is quite sensible to say that connectionism uses algorithms to manipulate meaningful concepts.
Book Review: The God Gene : How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes by Dean H. Hamer
This book is entertaining but erratic. To start with, the title is misleading. The important parts of the book are about spirituality (as in what Buddhists seek), which has little connection with God or churches. He does a moderately good job of describing evidence that he has identified a gene that influences spirituality. He makes plausible claims that spirituality makes people happy (that part of the book resembles the works of Csikszentmihalyi and Seligman). He makes a half-hearted attempt to argue that spirituality has evolutionary advantages which isn’t very convincing by itself, but in combination with the sexual selection arguments in Miller’s book The Mating Mind it becomes moderately plausible.
About halfway through the book, he runs out of things to say on those subjects and proceeds to wander through a bunch of marginally related subjects.
His descriptions of psilocybin, prozac, and ecstasy were interesting enough to make me want to learn more about those and similar drugs.
His claims that placebos are effective seem very exaggerated (see this abstract).
Why did many people decide not to leave New Orleans in advance of Katrina? Part of the problem may have been that they relied on storytellers rather than weather experts.
NBC’s Brian Williams reports on his blog NBC’s reaction to this weather alert:
URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA
1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005
…DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…
HURRICANE KATRINA…A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED
STRENGTH…RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969.
MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER.
AT LEAST HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL
FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING
APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. … WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE
HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.
Williams says “The wording and contents were so incendiary that our folks were concerned that it wasn’t real”, and implies that he and others at NBC translated this into something less scary for their viewers.
My most memorable experience with hurricane forecasts was with hurricane Gloria in 1985 when I was in Block Island (off Rhode Island). I recall a TV weather forecast that winds might reach 135 to 175 mph, and marine weather radio forecasts of 50 to 70 knot sustained winds with gusts to 90 knots (i.e. less than 105 mph). The marine radio forecasts seem to be more direct relays of what the weather service puts out, and it was fairly simple for me to determine that the TV forecast was bogus (the marine radio forecasts proved pretty accurate).
So it’s easy to imagine that people are aware that TV forecasts have a habit of overstating the threat from storms, and thought they could infer expert forecasts from TV forecasts by assuming a simple pattern of exaggeration, when it may be that the storytellers have a more complex model of how viewers’ behavior should be manipulated by biasing their reports. Do people actually rely on TV reports rather than more direct and reliable sources of expert opinion when accurate forecasts are important? If so, is it because they use weather forecasts mainly as entertainment or a catalyst for smalltalk at parties, and don’t want to be aware of the flaws?
And of course there was the problem of key government leaders failing to believe the expert forecast: (from The Agitator) [then] FEMA Director Brown:
Saturday and Sunday, we thought it was a typical hurricane
situation — not to say it wasn’t going to be bad, but that the
water would drain away fairly quickly. Then the levees broke and
(we had) this lawlessness. That almost stopped our
efforts…Katrina was much larger than we expected.
Robin Hanson writes in a post on Intuition Error and Heritage:
Unless you can see a reason to have expected to be born into a culture or species with more accurate than average intuitions, you must expect your cultural or species specific intuitions to be random, and so not worth endorsing.
Deciding whether an intuition is species specific and no more likely than random to be right seems a bit hard, due to the current shortage of species whose cultures address many of the disputes humans have.
The ideas in this quote follow logically from other essays of Robin’s that I’ve read, but phrasing them this way makes them seem superficially hard to reconcile with arguments by Hayek that we should respect the knowledge contained in culture.
Part of this apparent conflict seems to be due to the Hayek’s emphasis on intuitions for which there is some unobvious and inconclusive evidence that supports the cultural intuitions. Hayek wasn’t directing his argument to a random culture, but rather to a culture for which there was some evidence of better than random results, and it would make less sense to apply his arguments to, say, North Korean society. For many other intuitions that Hayek cared about, the number of cultures which agree with the intuition may be large enough to constitute evidence in support of the intuition.
Some intuitions may be appropriate for a culture even though they were no better than random when first adopted. Driving on the right side of the road is a simple example. The arguments given in favor of a judicial bias toward stare decisis suggest this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Some of this apparent conflict may be due the importance of treating interrelated practices together. For instance, laws against extramarital sex might be valuable in societies where people depend heavily on marital fidelity but not in societies where a divorced person can support herself comfortably. A naive application of Robin’s rule might lead the former society to decide such a law is arbitrary, when a Hayekian might wonder if it is better to first analyze whether to treat the two practices as a unit which should only be altered together.
I’m uncertain whether these considerations fully reconcile the two views, or whether Hayek’s arguments need more caveats.
Book Review: The Blank Slate : The Denial of Human Nature and Modern Intellectual Life by Steven Pinker
Pinker makes a good case that there’s a widespread bias toward a blank-slate world-view. But when dealing with serious scientific literature, his attempts to find clearcut enemies seem mistaken.
Pinker’s claim that “The second scientific defense of the Blank Slate comes from connectionism” is pretty puzzling. This “defense” consists of modeling the mind as “a general-purpose learning device”. But the books that Pinker references (Rethinking Innateness, and Parallel Distributed Processing), are both careful to point out why their models are completely consistent with the kind of genetic influences on behavior that evolutionary psychologists are talking about. Their disagreements with Pinker seem to be at most about how those influences are implemented, and even there I can’t find anything in Pinker’s arguments that clearly rejects what the connectionists believe.
Pinker’s attacks on Gould’s quasi-defense of the blank slate mainly convinced me that Gould didn’t want to think clearly about the subject, probably because he considered that any mechanistic explanation of the mind (genetic or environmental) was demeaning.
Pinker’s arguments that it’s silly to believe in the tabula rasa and noble savage world-views are eloquent and compelling, but his response to the “it’s demeaning” attitudes will convince fewer people, because he ignores the very real benefits of holding an unrealistically high opinion of one’s self (overestimating one’s abilities seems to be an effective means of advertising one’s strengths). To those who want to portray themselves as angelic or as wiser than software of the future, an accurate model of the mind is genuinely demeaning.
Pinker seems somewhat inconsistent about how important it is to know whether the mind is a blank slate.
On pages x – xi he says “the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history.” But in the chapter on fear of inequality, he claims (more convincingly), while defending his views from the charge they will encourage Nazism, that the differences between Nazi beliefs in genetic superiority and the blank slate viewpoints of Stalin and the Khmer Rouge didn’t have much effect on whether those tyrannies engaged in genocide – it was the greater tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups that best distinguishes the worst of the genocidal tyrants.
Pinker exaggerates the importance of finding the correct answer to the nature-nurture debate in other ways as well (I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that an author overestimates the importance of what he’s selling).
He gives examples such as forcing people to live in drab cement boxes (as if their taste for a more natural surrounding could be reversed by social engineers), or releasing psychopaths (because societal problems caused their insanity).
But a genetic component to these behaviors doesn’t prove that they can’t be altered (I have genes for brown hair – does that mean I can’t dye my hair blue?). It only gives hints as to why they might be difficult to alter.
It sure looks like careful scientific studies of whether we knew how to alter these behaviors would be a more reliable way of debunking the faulty conclusions.
Bryan Caplan writes about Robin Hanson’s contrarian views on the effectiveness of medicine and parenting.
Caplan’s conclusion about medicine involving a mix of beneficial and harmful practices is probably correct (and probably consistent with Robin’s views), but some of his reasoning is bogus:
Start with medicine. Modern techniques have clearly saved a lot of lives. If memory serves me, survival rates for premature babies have skyrocketed from 10% to 90%.
Part of Robin’s point is that we can’t tell from the improved survival rates that medicine was responsible. It may be that improved maternal nutrition has made babies better able to withstand premature birth. There is no easy way to distinguish the causes, and there’s some reason to think doctors are more effective at biasing consumers to credit them with improving peoples’ health than farmers are.
The evidence that medicine is less effective than most believe has fewer practical implications than a superficial glance suggests. It implies that you shouldn’t choose an expensive health plan over a cheap one, but leaves open the possibility that you should still see your doctor fairly often, and the possibility that you can “buy” health care that will slightly increase your life expectancy by moving from, say, Havana to San Francisco.
The argument (started by Judith Rich Harris) that parenting styles have little effect has a stronger conclusion. Caplan claims:
The same goes for parenting. We all know kids who let their parents plan their lives for them. Maybe it’s 100% genetic, but that’s a stretch. It’s more plausible to acknowledge that these pliable kids exist, but point out that they’re only half the story. We also all know kids who heard their parents’ plans for their future, and did exactly the opposite just to spite them.
I do not know kids who come close to fitting the first pattern after puberty. Essentially all kids need to demonstrate to their peers by about puberty that they are mature enough to be somewhat independent of their parents. And if you think about the sexual selection pressures on children around that age, you should expect that to be just one symptom of the pattern that Harris points out. Their reproductive success is heavily dependent on their ability to compete with and to impress people who are sufficiently close to their age to become a mate or to compete for a mate. That implies that it is important for them to adapt their personalities in ways that respond to evidence about their peers, and to treat parental opinions as much less relevant.
Unlike the arguments about the ineffectiveness of medicine, the evidence against the importance of parenting styles appears to show that all attempts to improve parenting styles (except for those, such as choosing the best school, which influence whom the child can have as peers) have failed to show benefits.
We have a large industry devoted to convincing parents to buy its advice on parenting styles. This creates a nontrivial incentive to provide evidence that some parenting styles work better than others. That includes incentives to distinguish children that will be helped by style X from those who will be helped by the opposite style. And unlike the evidence that some medical practices work, the evidence for the value of advice on parenting styles consistently fails when subjected to close scrutiny.
It is still possible that parenting styles are sometimes helping and sometimes hurting, but theory and the breadth of the evidence suggest betting against that. Eventually, given tools as drastic as manipulating the child’s genes, parents will someday find ways to manipulate their kids minds. But since there’s little reason to think that children are currently suffering from negligent parenting styles, and there are moderately good reasons to guess that youthful rebellion is mainly the result of children pursing their (gene’s?) interests, it’s hard to see why parents should be trying to alter their children’s behavioral strategies rather than ensuring that they have the resources to do what they want. (Unless, of course, parents have good reasons for pursuing different goals than their children. I’m having trouble analyzing that possibility.)
Book Review: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins
This book presents strong arguments that prediction is a more important part of intelligence than most experts realize. It outlines a fairly simple set of general purpose rules that may describe some important aspects of how small groups of neurons interact to produce intelligent behavior. It provides a better theory of the role of the hippocampus than I’ve seen before.
I wouldn’t call this book a major breakthrough, but I expect that it will produce some nontrivial advances in the understanding of the human brain.
The most disturbing part of this book is the section on the risks of AI. He claims that AIs will just be tools, but he shows no sign of having given thought to any of the issues involved beyond deciding that an AI is unlikely to have human motives. But that leaves a wide variety of other possible goals systems, many of which would be as dangerous. It’s possible that he sees easy ways to ensure that an AI is always obedient, but there are many approaches to AI for which I don’t think this is possible (for instance, evolutionary programming looks like it would select for something resembling a survival instinct), and this book doesn’t clarify what goals Hawkins’ approach is likely to build into his software. It is easy to imagine that he would need to build in goals other than obedience in order to get his system to do any learning. If this is any indication of the care he is taking to ensure that his “tools” are safe, I hope he fails to produce intelligent software.
For more discussion of AI risks, see sl4.org. In particular, I have a description there of how one might go about safely implementing an obedient AI. At the time I was thinking of Pei Wang’s NARS as the best approach to AI, and with that approach it seems natural for an AI to have no goals that are inconsistent with obedience. But Hawkins’ approach seems approximately as powerful as NARS, but more likely to tempt designers into building in goals other than obedience.
Robin Hanson has another interesting paper on human attitudes toward truth and on how they might be improved.
See also some related threads on the extropy-chat list here and here.
One issue that Robin raises involves disputes between us and future generations over how much we ought to constrain our descendants to be similar to us. He is correct that some of this disagreement results from what he calls “moral arrogance” (i.e. at least one group of people overestimating their ability to know what is best). But even if we and our descendants were objective about analyzing the costs and benefits of the alternatives, I would expect some disagreement to remain, because different generations will want to maximize the interests of different groups of beings. Conflicting interests between two groups that exist at the same time can in principle be resolved by one group paying the other to change it’s position. But when one group exists only in the future, and its existence is partly dependent on which policy is adopted now, it’s difficult to see how such disagreements could be resolved in a way that all could agree upon.
Science Blog has an interesting article on the effects of autism which helps to explain why it’s not an accident that autism has both advantages and disadvantages.