Science and Technology

Human Enhancement

Posted by Peter on July 10, 2009
Posted in: Book Reviews, Health, Humor, Science and Technology. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: Human Enhancement, edited by Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom.

This book starts out with relatively uninteresting articles and only the last quarter of so of it is worth reading.

Because I agree with most of the arguments for enhancement, I skipped some of the pro-enhancement arguments and tried to read the anti-enhancement arguments carefully. They mostly boil down to the claim that people’s preference for natural things is sufficient to justify broad prohibitions on enhancing human bodies and human nature. That isn’t enough of an argument to deserve as much discussion as it gets.

A few of the concerns discussed by advocates of enhancement are worth more thought. The question of whether unenhanced humans would retain political equality and rights enables us to imagine dystopian results of enhancement. Daniel Walker provides a partly correct analysis of conditions under which enhanced beings ought to paternalistically restrict the choices and political power of the unenhanced. But he’s overly complacent about assuming the paternalists will have the interests of the unenhanced at heart. The biggest problem with paternalism to date is that it’s done by people who are less thoughtful about the interests of the people they’re controlling than they are about finding ways to serve their own self-interest. It is possible that enhanced beings will be perfect altruists, but it is far from being a natural consequence of enhancement.

The final chapter points out the risks of being overconfident of our ability to improve on nature. They describe questions we should ask about why evolution would have produced a result that is different from what we want. One example that they give suggests they remain overconfident – they repeat a standard claim about the human appendix being a result of evolution getting stuck in a local optimum. Recent evidence suggests that the appendix performs a valuable function in recovery from diarrhea (still a major cause of death in places) and harm from appendicitis seems rare outside of industrialized nations (maybe due to differences in dietary fiber?).

The most new and provocative ideas in the book have little to do with the medical enhancements that the title evokes. Robin Hanson’s call for mechanisms to make people more truthful probably won’t gather much support, as people are clever about finding objections to any specific method that would be effective. Still, asking the question the way he does may encourage some people to think more clearly about their goals.

Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg describe an interesting (original?) hypothesis about why placebos (sometimes) work. It involves signaling that there is relatively little need to conserve the body’s resources for fighting future injuries and diseases. Could this understanding lead to insights about how to more directly and reliably trigger this effect? More effective placebos have been proposed as jokes. Why is it so unusual to ask about serious research into this subject?

Greatness

Posted by Peter on June 23, 2009
Posted in: Book Reviews, Politics, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Greatness: Who Makes History and Why by Dean Keith Simonton.

This broad and mediocre survey of psychology of people who stand out in history probably contains a fair number of good ideas, but it’s hard to separate them from the many ideas that are questionable guesses. He’s inconsistent about distinguishing his guesses from claims backed by good evidence.

One of the clearest examples is his assertion that childhood adversity builds character. He presents evidence that eminent figures were unusually likely to have had a parent die early, and describes this as the “most impressive proof” of his claim. He ignores the possibility those people come from families with a pattern of taking sufficiently unusual risks to explain that evidence.

In other places, he makes mistakes which seemed reasonable when the book was published, such as “Mendelian laws of inheritance are blind to whether an individual is first-born or later-born” (parental age has a measurable effect on mutation rates).

He avoids some of the worst mistakes that a psychology of history could make, such as trying to psychoanalyze individuals without having enough information about them.

He mentions some approaches to analyzing presidential addresses and corporate letters to stockholders, which have some potential to be used in predicting whether leaders have the appropriate personality for their jobs. I wonder what would happen if many voters/stockholders demanded that leaders pass tests of this nature (I’m assuming the tests can be scored objectively, but that may be shaky assumption). I’m confident that we’d get leaders with rhetoric that passes those tests. Would that simply mean the leaders change their rhetoric, or would it be hard enough to maintain a mismatch between rhetoric and thought patterns that we’d get leaders with better thought patterns?

Autism and Rationality

Posted by Peter on March 27, 2009
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

This paper reports that people with autistic spectrum symptoms are less biased by framing effects. Unfortunately, the researchers suggest that the increased rationality is connected to an inability to incorporate emotional cues into some decision making processes, so the rationality comes at a cost in social skills.

Some analysis of how these results fit in with the theory that autism is the opposite end of a spectrum from schizophrenia can be found here:

It seems that the schizophrenic is working on the basis of an internal model and is ignoring external feedback: thus his reliance on previous response.I propose that an opposite pattern would be observed in Autistics with Autistics showing no or less mutual information, as they have poor self-models; but greater cross-mutual information , as they would base their decisions more on external stimuli or feedback.

The 10,000 Year Explosion

Posted by Peter on March 15, 2009
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending.

This provocative book describes many recent genetic changes in humans, primarily those resulting from the switch from hunter-gatherer lifestyles to agricultural lifestyles. Large changes in diets and disease are the simplest causes of change, but the book also describes subtler influences that alter human minds as well.

I had believed that large populations rarely evolve very fast due to the time required for a mutation to spread. This is true for mutations which provide negligible selective advantage, but the book shows that it’s plausible that a number of mutations have recently gained a large enough selective advantage that the rate at which they become widespread is only modestly dependent on population size. Also, the book makes a surprising but plausible claim that the larger supply of mutations in large populations can mean large populations evolve faster than small populations.

The book is occasionally not as rigorous as I would like. For instance, the claim that Ashkenazi “must have been exposed to very similar diseases” as their neighbors is false if the diseases were sexually transmitted.

Most of their claims convince me that conventional wisdom underestimates how important human genetic differences compared to cultural differences, but leave plenty of room for doubt about the magnitude of that underestimation.

They provide an interesting counterargument to the claim that differences within human populations are larger than the differences between populations. Their belief that differences between populations are more important seems to rest on little more than gut feelings, but they convince me that the conventional wisdom they’re disputing is poorly thought out.

They convinced me to take more seriously the possibility that some Neanderthal genes have had significant effects on human genes, although I still put the odds on that at less than 50 percent.

Stroke of Insight

Posted by Peter on March 4, 2009
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor.

This book provides a unique description of the differences between the left and right sides of the brain, because she experienced about as big a decrease in the functioning of her left hemisphere as anyone who has recovered enough to write about it. It’s a very quick read, but didn’t have as much information as I’d hoped.

She makes plausible claims (with minimal mysticism) that her stroke helped her experience nirvana and continues to help her choose to have the best parts of her brain dominate her personality. It makes me wish there were something better than the Wada test that would enable the rest of us to more safely experiment with such experiences.

It helps me understand what I’m not accomplishing when I try (with little success) to meditate, but it appears that her advice for how to do better only works for people who are starting with a mind that is less strongly dominated by the left brain than mine.

It’s important to remember that the parts of her brain that are reporting the benefits of her experience are the ones that survived. We have little information about how the parts of her brain that died would have evaluated the experience.

Influence

Posted by Peter on February 26, 2009
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini.

This book gives clear descriptions of six strategies that salesmen use to influence customers, and provides advice on how we can somewhat reduce our vulnerability to being exploited by them. It is one of the best books for laymen about heuristics and biases.

It shows why the simplest quick fixes would produce more problems than they solve, by showing that there are good reasons why we use heuristics that create opportunities for people to exploit us.

The author’s willingness to admit that he has been exploited by these strategies makes it harder for readers to dismiss the risks as something only fools fall for.

Body Language

Posted by Peter on January 29, 2009
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: .

I’ve been learning how to read body language and how to alter my body language, and I’m wondering how much of the changes in my body language that I’m hoping to create should be considered honest communications.
Increased eye contact and mimicking a person’s body language seem to be unavoidably genuine expressions of interest. The fact that people can have bad motives for such interest doesn’t seem like it should make me hesitant when my motives for being interested in someone are good.

Posture is harder to evaluate. One function of altering my posture to look as tall as I can is to signal desirable qualities that correlate with height (e.g. good nutrition as a child, leading to good health and a well developed brain). If this led to costly status seeking, I’d feel guilty. But there’s little cost for everyone to match the degree to which I’m looking taller by paying attention to my posture, and little hope that competition for status can be reduced by people such as me ignoring my posture, so I feel negligible guilt.
Another function of posture is to indicate confidence. I’d feel guilty about artificially increasing the confidence I express about a specific factual claim. Most communication is either expressing factual claims of some sort or has no clear content. I’m unsure how to treat the confidence expressed by posture. It seems to say something about some poorly specified anticipated outcomes. Is it mostly a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that it will honestly indicate whether I’m going to be happy in the future even if I alter it in a way that seems artificial? I can’t pin down what it’s expressing well enough to say.

I often hide my hands in my pockets, and that reportedly gets interpreted as saying that I’m hiding something. I suspect this is a false signal. As far as I can recall, when I fail to communicate something that people might want to hear it’s due something like not figuring out whether someone wants to hear it or being too slow to notice a break in a conversation in which to start talking. If I can alter my hand position to better indicate when I’d like people to be more inquisitive about my thoughts, that will improve communication.
Hand movements such as scratching my head that get interpreted as nervousness are more problematic. That scratching does have some correlation with nervousness. I feel a bit dishonest when I hide increased nervousness by consciously resisting my temptation to scratch my head. But some of head scratching habits seem to reflect something other than nervousness (maybe a mild version Dermatillomania associated with obsessive tendencies that fall short of being a disorder), and are probably creating false impressions with most people. I’m unsure whether I can eliminate those false impressions without also eliminating accurate signals.

Honest Signals

Posted by Peter on January 21, 2009
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World by Alex (Sandy) Pentland.
This book makes it clear that verbal communication is a recent evolutionary development in humans which has only replaced a modest amount of the communication that our pre-linguistic ancestors used. The fact that we are much more aware of our verbal communication than our other forms of communication shouldn’t cause us to underestimate those other forms.
A good deal of the studies mentioned in the book consist of measures of nonverbal communication in, say, speed dating can predict results about as reliably as I’d expect from analyzing the words. These could be criticized for not ruling out the possibility that the nonverbal signals were merely responses to information communicated by words. But at least one study avoids this – entrepreneurs pitching business plans to VCs showed nonverbal signals that were excellent predictors of whether the VCs would accept the business plans, before getting any verbal feedback from the VCs. Even more surprising, investments made by VCs with nonverbal information about the entrepreneurs did better than those evaluated on written-only presentations.
The sociometers used to measure these nonverbal signals have potential to be used in helping group decision making by automatically detecting the beginnings of groupthink or polarization, which should in principle allow leaders to stop those trends before they do much harm. But it’s not obvious whether many people will want to admit that analyzing the words of a conversation has as little importance as this research implies.
One of the more interesting methods of communication is for people to mimic each others body language. This is surprisingly effective at creating mutual interest and agreement.
The sociometer data can be of some value for information aggregators by helping to distinguish independent pieces of information from redundant information by detecting which people are likely to have correlated ideas and which are likely to have independent ideas.
I wish this book were mistaken, and that most of human interaction could be analyzed the way we analyze language. But it seems clear that unconscious parts of our minds contain a good deal of our intelligence.

Imprinted Brain Theory of Autism

Posted by Peter on January 14, 2009
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: .

An unusual hypothesis about autism involves Genomic imprinting (“imbalances in the outcomes of intragenomic conflict between effects of maternally vs. paternally expressed genes.”).

It’s apparently somewhat well established that some regions of the brain are influenced more by paternal genes (the paternal brain), and some by maternally genes (the maternal brain).

The Imprinted Brain theory of autism says that autism results from the paternal brain being more developed, and the maternal brain being less developed, with an increased paternal brain causing Aspergers syndrome, and a reduced maternal brain causing more severe autism.

The father’s genes want the mother to invest more resources in a child than the mother’s genes do. Maternal genes have more desire for child to empathize with her and siblings to make childcare less costly. Paternal genes have more desire for competition between siblings over resources.

I had previously been impressed by a theory in the book Shadow Syndromes that involves a less developed cerebellum causing a slowness to shift one’s attention as a child, which makes one less likely to notice facial expressions. The Imprinted Brain theory can imply this (the cerebellum is one of the maternal brain areas which is underdeveloped).

The evidence is hard to summarize, but here’s an example:

autism increases with paternal (and maternal) age (Gillberg, 1980), and assisted reproduction via intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) may increase the risk for syndromes of dysregulated imprinting, including Angelman and Beckwith-Weideman (Paoloni-Giacobino & Chaillet, 2004; Waterland & Jirtle, 2004; Maher, 2005). Both paternal age and ICSI are expected to contribute to methylated-gene defects, which may include effects on brain-imprinted genes (Waterland & Jirtle, 2004; Malaspina et al., 2005).

I recommend reading the discussion section of the paper, which contains much more information than I can summarize.

The paper also mentions evidence that paranoid schizophrenia is an opposite of autism (involving a highly developed maternal brain) – schizophrenics are more likely than most people to notice/imagine that someone is looking at them (see (Mentalism and mechanism and The eyes have it).

Here is an apparently unrelated argument for schizophrenia and autism being opposites.

A Different Kind of Boy

Posted by Peter on January 7, 2009
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: A Different Kind of Boy: A Father’s Memoir on Raising a Gifted Child With Autism by Daniel Mont.
This book provides a clear and moving story of what it’s like to have a fairly autistic child. It reinforces my belief that autism (or at least some of the personalities classified as autistic) is one extreme of a range of human personalities. I was surprised at the extent to which Alex’s personality is an extreme version of the personality I had as a child.
The author demonstrates an unusual ability to treat his son as an equal for some purposes (such as logical reasoning) while simultaneously being aware that Alex finds it extremely hard to learn concepts most of us take for granted (e.g. the difference between lying and pretending).
Many of the problems people have interacting with Alex closely resemble the problems AI researchers discover when they try to translate an “obvious” concept into unambiguous language. But just when I thought the AI analogy provides a reliable guide, I noticed an exception – Alex finds long division harder than economic theory.