Science and Technology

Switch

Posted by Peter on October 20, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath.

This book uses an understanding of the limits to human rationality to explain how it’s sometimes possible to make valuable behavioral changes, mostly in large institutions, with relatively little effort.

The book presents many anecdotes about people making valuable changes, often demonstrating unusually creative thought. The theories about why the changes worked are not very original, but are presented better than in most other books.

Some of the successes are sufficiently impressive that I wonder whether they cherry-picked too much and made it look too easy. One interesting example that is a partial exception to this pattern is a comparison of two hospitals that tried to implement the same change, with one succeeding and the other failing. Even with a good understanding of the book’s ideas, few people looking at the differences between the hospitals would notice the importance of whether small teams met for afternoon rounds at patients’ bedsides or in a lounge where other doctors overheard the discussions.

They aren’t very thoughtful about whether the goals are wise. This mostly doesn’t matter, although it is strange to read on page 55 about a company that succeeded by focusing on short-term benefits to the exclusion of long-term benefits, and then on page 83 to read about a plan to get businesses to adopt a longer term focus.

Choke

Posted by Peter on October 5, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To, by Sian Beilock.

This book provides some clues about why pressure causes some people to perform less well than they otherwise would, and gives simple (but not always easy) ways to reduce that effect. There’s a good deal of overlap between this book’s advice and other self-improvement advice. The book modestly enhances how I think about the techniques and how motivated I am to use them.

The main surprise about the causes is that people with large working memories are more likely to choke because they’re more likely to over-analyze a problem, presumably because they’re better at analyzing problems. They’re also less creative. There are also interesting comments about the role of small working memories in ADHD.

The book includes some interesting comments on how SAT tests provide misleading evidence of sexual differences in ability, and how social influences can affect sexual differences in ability (for example, having a more feminine name makes a girl less likely to learn math).

The book’s style is unusually pleasant.

Brain Preservation Prize

Posted by Peter on September 14, 2010
Posted in: Science and Technology. Tagged: , , .

Ken Hayworth has created an interesting prize for Brain Preservation Technology, designed to improve techniques of relevance to cryonics and mind uploading, but intended to be relevant to goals that don’t require preserving individual identity (such as better understanding of generic brains).

Many of the prize criteria are well thought out, especially the ones concerning quality of preservation. But there a few criteria for which it’s hard to predict how the judges would evaluate a proposed technique, and they will significantly impair the effectiveness of the prize.

The requirement that it have the potential to be performed for less than $20,000 requires a number of subjective judgments, such as the cost of training the necessary personnel (which will be affected by the quality of the trainers and trainees).

The requirement that it “be absolutely safe for the personnel involved” would seem to be prohibitive if I try to interpret it literally. A somewhat clearer approach would be to require that it be at least as safe as some commonly preformed procedure. But the effort required to compare risks will be far from trivial.

The requirement that we have reason to expect the preserved brains to remain stable for 100 years depends on some assumptions that aren’t well explained, such as why a shorter time period wouldn’t be enough (which depends on the specific goals of preservation and on predictions about how fast technology progresses), and what we should look at to estimate the durability – I suspect the obstacles to long-term stability are different for different techniques.

(I noticed this prize in connection with the ASIM 2010 conference, although I didn’t get much out of the part of the conference that I was able to attend).

Drive

Posted by Peter on August 31, 2010
Posted in: Economics, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink.

This book explores some of the complexities of what motivates humans. It attacks a stereotype that says only financial rewards matter, and exaggerates the extent to which people adopt that fallacy. His style is similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s, but with more substance than Gladwell.

The book’s advice is likely to cause some improvement in how businesses are run and in how people choose careers. But I wonder how many bosses will ignore it because their desire to exert control over people outweighs their desire to create successful companies.

I’m not satisfied with the way he and others classify motivations as intrinsic and extrinsic. While feelings of flow may be almost entirely internally generated, other motivations that he classifies as intrinsic seem to involve an important component of feeling that others are rewarding you with higher status/reputation.

Shirking may have been a been an important problem a century ago for which financial rewards were appropriate solutions, but the nature of work has changed so that it’s much less common for workers to want to put less effort into a job. The author implies that this means standard financial rewards have become fairly unimportant factors in determining productivity. I think he underestimates the importance they play in determining how goals are prioritized.

He believes the changes in work that reduced the importance of financial incentives was the replacement of rule-following routine work with work that requires creativity. I suggest that another factor was that in 1900, work often required muscle-power that consumed almost as much energy as a worker could afford to feed himself.

He states his claims vaguely enough that they could be interpreted as implying that broad categories of financial incentives (including stock options and equity) work poorly. I checked one of the references that sounded like it might address that (“When performance-related pay backfires”), and found it only dealt with payments for completing specific tasks.

His complaints about excessive focus on quarterly earnings probably have some value, but it’s important to remember that it’s easy to err in the other direction as well (the dot-com bubble seemed to coincide with an unusual amount of effort at focusing on earnings 5 to 10 years away).

I’m disappointed that he advises not to encourage workers to compete against each other without offering evidence about its effects.

One interesting story is the bonus system at Kimley-Horn and Associates, where any employee can award another employee $50 for doing something exceptional. I’d be interested in more tests of this – is there something special about Kimley-Horn that prevents abuse, or would it work in most companies?

Quantifying Artificial Intelligence

Posted by Peter on August 17, 2010
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence. Tagged: , , .

The most interesting talk at the Singularity Summit 2010 was Shane Legg‘s description of an Algorithmic Intelligence Quotient (AIQ) test that measures something intelligence-like automatically in a way that can test AI programs (or at least the Monte-Carlo AIXI that he uses) on 1000+ environments.

He had a mathematical formula which he thinks rigorously defines intelligence. But he didn’t specify what he meant by the set of possible environments, saying that would be a 50 page paper (he said a good deal of the work on the test had been done last week, so presumably he’s still working on the project). He also included a term that applies Occam’s razor which I didn’t completely understand, but it seems likely that that should have a fairly non-controversial effect.

The environments sound like they imitate individual questions on an IQ test, but with a much wider range of difficulties. We need a more complete description of the set of environments he uses in order to evaluate whether they’re heavily biased toward what Monte-Carlo AIXI does well or whether they closely resemble the environments an AI will find in the real world. He described two reasons for having some confidence in his set of environments: different subsets provided roughly similar results, and a human taking a small subset of the test found some environments easy, some very challenging, and some too hard to understand.

It sounds like with a few more months worth of effort, he could generate a series of results that show a trend in the AIQ of the best AI program in any given year, and also the AIQ of some smart humans (although he implied it would take a long time for a human to complete a test). That would give us some idea of whether AI workers have been making steady progress, and if so when the trend is likely to cross human AIQ levels. An educated guess about when AI will have a major impact on the world should help a bit in preparing for it.

A more disturbing possibility is that this test will be used as a fitness function for genetic programming. Given sufficient computing power, that looks likely to generate superhuman intelligence that is almost certainly unfriendly to humans. I’m confident that sufficient computing power is not available yet, but my confidence will decline over time.

Brian Wang has a few more notes on this talk

Disadvantages of Stories

Posted by Peter on August 12, 2010
Posted in: Investing, The Human Mind.

Tyler Cowen has a good video describing why we shouldn’t be too influenced by stories. He exaggerates a bit when he says

There are only a few basic stories. If you think in stories, that means you are telling yourself the same thing over and over

but his point that stories allow storytellers to manipulate our minds deserves more emphasis. For me, one of the hardest parts of learning how to beat the stock market was to admit that I did poorly when I was influenced by stories, and did well mainly when I relied on numbers that are available and standardized for most companies, and on mechanical rules which varied little between companies (I sometimes use different rules for different industries, but beyond that I try to avoid adapting my approach to different circumstances).

For example, The stories I heard about Enron’s innovative management style gave me a gut feeling that it was a promising investment. But its numbers showed an uninteresting company, and persuaded me to postpone any investment.

But I’ve only told you a story here (it’s so much easier to do than provide rigorous evidence). If you really want good reasons, try testing for yourself story versus non-story approaches to something like the stock market.

(HT Patri).

Probability Theory

Posted by Peter on July 31, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, Science and Technology.

Book review: Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, by E. T. Jaynes.

This book does an impressive job of replacing ad hoc rules of statistics with rigorous logic, but it is difficult enough to fully understand that most people will only use small parts of it.

He emphasizes that probability theory consists of logical reasoning about the imperfect information we have, and repeatedly rants against the belief that probabilities or randomness represent features of nature that exist independent of our knowledge. Even something seemingly simple such as a toss of an ordinary coin cannot have some objectively fixed frequency unless concepts such as “toss” are specified in unreasonable detail. What we think of as randomness is best thought of as a procedure for generating results of which we are ignorant.

He derives his methods from a few simple axioms which appear close to common sense, and don’t look much like they are specifically designed to produce statistical rules.

He is careful to advocate Bayesian methods for an idealized robot, and avoids addressing questions of whether fallible humans should sometimes do something else. In particular, his axiom that the robot should never ignore information is a goal that will probably reduce the quality of human reasoning in some cases where there’s too much information for humans to handle well.

I’m convinced that when his methods can be properly applied and produce different results than frequentist methods do, we should reject the frequentist results. But it’s not obvious how easy it is to apply his methods properly, nor is it obvious whether he has accurately represented the beliefs of frequentists (who I suspect often don’t think clearly enough about the issues he raises to be clearly pinned down).

He does a good job of clarifying the concept of “induction”, showing that we shouldn’t try to make it refer to some simple and clearly specified rule, but rather we should think of it as a large set of rules for logical reasoning, much like the concept of “science”.

Hierarchy in the Forest

Posted by Peter on July 20, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Christopher Boehm.

This book makes a good argument that a major change from strongly hierarchical societies to fairly egalitarian societies happened to the human race sometime after it diverged from Chimpanzees and Bonobos. Not due to any changes in attitudes toward status, but because language enabled low-status individuals to cooperate more effectively to restrain high-status individuals, and because of he equalizing effects of weapons. Hunter-gatherer societies seem rather consistently egalitarian, and the partial reversion to hierarchy in modern times may be due to the ability to accumulate wealth or the larger size of our societies.

He provides a plausible hypothesis that this change enabled group selection to become more powerful than in a typical species, but that doesn’t imply that group selection became as important as within-group selection, and he doesn’t have a good way of figuring out how important the effect was.

He demonstrates that humans became more altruistic, using a narrow biological definition of altruism, but it’s important to note that this only means agreeing to follow altruistic rules. He isn’t able to say much about how well people follow those rules when nobody notices what they’re doing.

Much of the middle of the book recounting anthropological evidence can be skipped without much loss – the most important parts are chapters 8 and 9.

Breakdown of Will

Posted by Peter on July 8, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Breakdown of Will, by George Ainslie.

This book analyzes will, mainly problems connected with willpower, as a form of intertemporal bargaining between a current self that highly values immediate temptation and future selves who prefer that current choices be more far-sighted. He contrasts simple models of rational agents who exponentially discount future utility with his more sophisticated and complex model of people whose natural discount curve is hyperbolic. Hyperbolic discounting causes time-inconsistent preferences, resulting in problems such as addiction. Intertemporal bargains can generate rules which bundle rewards to produce behavior more closely approximating the more consistent exponential discount model.

He also discusses problems associated with habituation to rewards, and strategies that can be used to preserve an appetite for common rewards. For example, gambling might sometimes be rational if losing money that way restores an appetite for acquiring wealth.

Some interesting ideas mentioned are that timidity can be an addiction, and that pain involves some immediate short-lived reward (to draw attention) in addition to the more obvious negative effects.

For someone who already knows a fair amount about psychology, only small parts of the book will be surprising, but most parts will help you think a bit clearer about a broad range of problems.