Science and Technology

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.

Convergence08

Posted by Peter on November 29, 2008
Posted in: Science and Technology. Tagged: , , , .

Convergence08 had an amazing number of interesting people in attendance. No one person stood out as unusually impressive – it was more that the average was unusually high for a 300 person gathering. I’ll list many small ideas, which partly reflects the fact that I was trying to sample a wide enough variety of sessions that I didn’t manage to absorb any one presentation in depth.
Genescient is a new company whose founders include SF author Greg Benford. It has a strain of fruit flies bred for lifespans more than 4 times normal, and has used their DNA to identify substances that might improve human lifespan. It sounds like they will soon offer dietary supplements which have little risk and a hope of slowing down aging by some hard to predict (probably small) amount.

Advice from Eliezer Yudkowsky (responding to a concern that transhumanists have few children): don’t reproduce until you can code your child from scratch.

Several ideas from a session run by Anders Sandberg:

  • AntiGroupware is designed to remove many social pressures from group decision-making
  • Once it’s easy to make copies of people, political campaigns will be run by a large number of copies. [This assumes that democracy can attempt to survive – are copies going to be denied votes?]
  • Politicians should be selected from losers of the game Diplomacy [It might be hard to keep them from deliberately losing, but with big incentives winning plus a low probability of any one loser becoming a politician, it might work.]

Ideas from a session run by Milton Huang:

  • Keeping Skype video connections open for hours at a time changes remote interactions between two people in ways that make them seem very different from telephone conversations, and more like being physically together
  • We should try to implement a way to transmit hugs remotely
  • We might be able to make people (especially those with autistic tendencies) experience more empathy via an “empathy machine” that measures and reports on what others are feeling

Global Catastrophic Risks conference

Posted by Peter on November 20, 2008
Posted in: Molecular Assemblers (Advanced Nanotech), Science and Technology. Tagged: , , , .

The Global Catastrophic Risks conference last Friday was a mix of good and bad talks.
By far the most provocative was Josh‘s talk about “the Weather Machine”. This would consist of small (under 1 cm) balloons made of material a few atoms thick (i.e. needed nanotechnology that won’t be available for a couple of decades) filled with hydrogen and having a mirror in the equatorial plane. They would have enough communications and orientation control to be individually pointed wherever the entity in charge of them wants. They would float 20 miles above the earth’s surface and form a nearly continuous layer surrounding the planet.
This machine would have a few orders of magnitude more power over atmospheric temperatures to compensate for the warming caused by greenhouse gasses this century, although it would only be a partial solution to the waste heat farther in the future that Freitas worries about in his discussion of the global hypsithermal limit.
The military implications make me wish it won’t be possible to make it as powerful as Josh claims. If 10 percent of the mirrors target one location, it would be difficult for anyone in the target area to survive. I suspect defensive mirrors would be of some use, but there would still be serious heating of the atmosphere near the mirrors. Josh claims that it could be designed with a deadman switch that would cause a snowball earth effect if the entity in charge were destroyed, but it’s not obvious why the balloons couldn’t be destroyed in that scenario. Later in the weekend Chris Hibbert raised concerns about how secure it would be against unauthorized people hacking into it, and I wasn’t reassured by Josh’s answer.

James Hughes gave a talk advocating world government. I was disappointed with his inability to imagine that that would result in power becoming too centralized. Nick Bostrom’s discussions of this subject are much more thoughtful.

Alan Goldstein gave a talk about the A-Prize and defining a concept called the carbon barrier to distinguish biological from non-biological life. Josh pointed out that as stated all life fit Goldstein’s definition of biological (since any information can be encoded in DNA). Goldstein modified his definition to avoid that, and then other people mentioned reports such as this which imply that humans don’t fall within Goldstein’s definition of biological due to inheritance of information through means other than DNA. Goldstein seemed unable to understand that objection.