psychology

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Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony

Posted by Peter on August 14, 2017
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind, by Kevin N. Laland.

This book is a mostly good complement to Henrich’s The Secret of our Success. The two books provide different, but strongly overlapping, perspectives on how cultural transmission of information played a key role in the evolution of human intelligence.

The first half of the book describes the importance of copying behavior in many animals.

I was a bit surprised that animals as simple as fruit flies are able to copy some behaviors of other fruit flies. Laland provides good evidence that a wide variety of species have evolved some ability to copy behavior, and that ability is strongly connected to the benefits of acquiring knowledge from others and the costs of alternative ways of acquiring that knowledge.

Yet I was also surprised that the value of copying is strongly limited by the low reliability with which behavior is copied, except with humans. Laland makes plausible claims that the need for high-fidelity copying of behavior was an important driving force behind the evolution of bigger and more sophisticated brains.

Laland claims that humans have a unique ability to teach, and that teaching is an important adaptation. He means teaching in a much broader sense than we see in schooling – he includes basic stuff that could have preceded language, such as a parent directing a child’s attention to things that the child ought to learn. This seems like a good extension to Henrich’s ideas.

The most interesting chapter theorizes about the origin of human language. Laland’s theory that language evolved for teaching provides maybe a bit stronger selection pressure than other theories, but he doesn’t provide much reason to reject competing theories.

Laland presents seven criteria for a good explanation of the evolution of language. But these criteria look somewhat biased toward his theory.

Laland’s first two criteria are that language should have been initially honest and cooperative. He implies that it must have been more honest and cooperative than modern language use is, but he isn’t as clear about that as I would like. Those two criteria seem designed as arguments against the theory that language evolved to impress potential mates. The mate-selection theory involves plenty of competition, and presumably a fair amount of deception. But better communicators do convey important evidence about the quality of their genes, even if they’re engaging in some deception. That seems sufficient to drive the evolution of language via mate-selection pressures.

Laland’s theory seems to provide a somewhat better explanation of when language evolved than most other theories do, so I’m inclined to treat it as one of the top theories. But I don’t expect any consensus on this topic anytime soon.

The book’s final four chapters seemed much less interesting. I recommend skipping them.

Henrich’s book emphasized evidence that humans are pretty similar to other apes. Laland emphasizes ways in which humans are unique (language and teaching ability). I didn’t notice any cases where they directly contradicted each other, but it’s a bit disturbing that they left quite different impressions while saying mostly appropriate things.

Henrich claimed that increasing climate variability created increased rewards for the fast adaptation that culture enabled. Laland disagrees, saying that cultural change itself is a more plausible explanation for the kind of environmental change that incentivized faster adaptation. My intuition says that Laland’s conclusion is correct, but he seems a bit overconfident about it.

Overall, Laland’s book is less comprehensive and less impressive than Henrich’s book, but is still good enough to be in my top ten list of books on the evolution of intelligence.

Update on 2017-08-18: I just read another theory about the evolution of language which directly contradicts Laland’s claim that early language needed to be honest and cooperative. Wild Voices: Mimicry, Reversal, Metaphor, and the Emergence of Language claims that an important role of initial human vocal flexibility was to deceive other species.

Daring Greatly

Posted by Peter on June 15, 2017
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , .

Book review: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, by Brene Brown.

I almost didn’t read this because I was unimpressed by the TEDx video version of it, but parts of the book were pretty good (mainly chapters 3 and 4).

The book helped clarify my understanding of shame: how it differs from guilt, how it often constrains us without accomplishing anything useful, and how to reduce it.

She emphasizes that we can reduce shame by writing down or talking about shameful thoughts. She doesn’t give a strong explanation of what would cause that effect, but she prompted me to generate one: parts of my subconscious mind initially want to hide the shameful thoughts, and that causes them to fight the parts of my mind that want to generate interesting ideas. The act of communicating those ideas to the outside world convinces those censor-like parts of my mind to worry less about the ideas (because it’s too late? or because the social response is evidence that the censor was mistakenly worried? I don’t know).

I was a bit confused by her use of the phrase “scarcity culture”. I was initially tempted to imagine she wanted us to take a Panglossian view in which we ignore the resource constraints that keep us from eliminating poverty. But the context suggests she’s thinking more along the lines of “a culture of envy”. Or maybe a combination of perfectionism plus status seeking? Her related phrase “never enough” makes sense if I interpret it as “never impressive enough”.

I find it hard to distinguish those “bad” attitudes from the attitudes that seem important for me to strive for self-improvement.

She attempts to explain that distinction in a section on perfectionism. She compares perfectionism to healthy striving by noting that perfectionism focuses on what other people will think of us, whereas healthy striving is self-focused. Yet I’m pretty sure I’ve managed to hurt myself with perfectionism while focusing mostly on worries about how I’ll judge myself.

I suspect that healthy striving requires more focus on the benefits of success, and less attention to fear of failure, than is typical of perfectionism. The book hints at this, but doesn’t say it clearly when talking about perfectionism. Maybe she describes perfectionism better in her book The Gifts of Imperfection. Should I read that?

Her claim “When we stop caring about what people think, we lose our capacity for connection” feels important, and an area where I have trouble.

The book devotes too much attention to gender-stereotypical problems with shame. Those stereotypes are starting to look outdated. And it shouldn’t require two whole chapters to say that advice on how to have healthy interactions with people should also apply to relations at work, and to relations between parents and children.

The book was fairly easy to read, and parts of it are worth rereading.

Be Yourself

Posted by Peter on April 27, 2017
Posted in: Book Reviews. Tagged: , , , .

[An unimportant book that I read for ARC; feel free to skip this.]

Book review: Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken: Transform Your Life with the Power of Authenticity, by Mike Robbins.

This book’s advice mostly feels half-right, and mostly directed at people who have somewhat different problems than I have.

The book’s exercises range from things I’ve already done enough of, to things I ought to practice more but which feel hard (such as the self-love exercise).
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The Measure of All Minds

Posted by Peter on March 31, 2017
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, The Flynn Effect, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: The Measure of All Minds: Evaluating Natural and Artificial Intelligence, by José Hernández-Orallo.

Much of this book consists of surveys of the psychometric literature. But the best parts of the book involve original results that bring more rigor and generality to the field. The best parts of the book approach the quality that I saw in Judea Pearl’s Causality, and E.T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory, but Measure of All Minds achieves a smaller fraction of its author’s ambitions, and is sometimes poorly focused.

Hernández-Orallo has an impressive ambition: measure intelligence for any agent. The book mentions a wide variety of agents, such as normal humans, infants, deaf-blind humans, human teams, dogs, bacteria, Q-learning algorithms, etc.

The book is aimed at a narrow and fairly unusual target audience. Much of it reads like it’s directed at psychology researchers, but the more original parts of the book require thinking like a mathematician.

The survey part seems pretty comprehensive, but I wasn’t satisfied with his ability to distinguish the valuable parts (although he did a good job of ignoring the politicized rants that plague many discussions of this subject).

For nearly the first 200 pages of the book, I was mostly wondering whether the book would address anything important enough for me to want to read to the end. Then I reached an impressive part: a description of an objective IQ-like measure. Hernández-Orallo offers a test (called the C-test) which:

  • measures a well-defined concept: sequential inductive inference,
  • defines the correct responses using an objective rule (based on Kolmogorov complexity),
  • with essentially no arbitrary cultural bias (the main feature that looks like an arbitrary cultural bias is the choice of alphabet and its order)[1],
  • and gives results in objective units (based on Levin’s Kt).

Yet just when I got my hopes up for a major improvement in real-world IQ testing, he points out that what the C-test measures is too narrow to be called intelligence: there’s a 960 line Perl program that exhibits human-level performance on this kind of test, without resembling a breakthrough in AI.
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Rationality Quotient

Posted by Peter on January 7, 2017
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , .

Book review: The Rationality Quotient: Toward a Test of Rational Thinking, by Keith E. Stanovich, Richard F. West and Maggie E. Toplak.

This book describes an important approach to measuring individual rationality: an RQ test that loosely resembles an IQ test. But it pays inadequate attention to the most important problems with tests of rationality.

Coachability

My biggest concern about rationality testing is what happens when people anticipate the test and are motivated to maximize their scores (as is the case with IQ tests). Do they:

  • learn to score high by “cheating” (i.e. learn what answers the test wants, without learning to apply that knowledge outside of the test)?
  • learn to score high by becoming more rational?
  • not change their score much, because they’re already motivated to do as well as their aptitudes allow (as is mostly the case with IQ tests)?

Alas, the book treats these issues as an afterthought. Their test knowingly uses questions for which cheating would be straightforward, such as asking whether the test subject believes in science, and whether they prefer to get $85 now rather than $100 in three months. (If they could use real money, that would drastically reduce my concerns about cheating. I’m almost tempted to advocate doing that, but doing so would hinder widespread adoption of the test, even if using real money added enough value to pay for itself.)

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Anxiety Anxiety

Posted by Peter on October 19, 2016
Posted in: Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , , , .

I’ve substantially reduced my anxiety over the past 5-10 years.

Many of the important steps along that path look easy in hindsight, yet the overall goal looked sufficiently hard prospectively that I usually assumed it wasn’t possible. I only ended up making progress by focusing on related goals.

In this post, I’ll mainly focus on problems related to general social anxiety among introverted nerds. It will probably be much less useful to others.

In particular, I expect it doesn’t apply very well to ADHD-related problems, and I have little idea how well it applies to the results of specific PTSD-type trauma.

It should be slightly useful for anxiety over politicians who are making America grate again. But you’re probably fooling yourself if you blame many of your problems on distant strangers.

Trump: Make America Grate Again!

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Morning Pages

Posted by Peter on August 18, 2016
Posted in: Health, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , .

I started writing morning pages a few months ago. That means writing three pages, on paper, before doing anything else [1].

I’ve only been doing this on weekends and holidays, because on weekdays I feel a need to do some stock market work close to when the market opens.

It typically takes me one hour to write three pages. At first, it felt like I needed 75 minutes but wanted to finish faster. After a few weeks, it felt like I could finish in about 50 minutes when I was in a hurry, but often preferred to take more than an hour.

That suggests I’m doing much less stream-of-consciousness writing than is typical for morning pages. It’s unclear whether that matters.

It feels like devoting an hour per day to morning pages ought to be costly. Yet I never observed it crowding out anything I valued (except maybe once or twice when I woke up before getting an optimal amount of sleep in order to get to a hike on time – that was due to scheduling problems, not due to morning pages reducing the available of time per day).
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Financial Procrastination

Posted by Peter on August 4, 2016
Posted in: Investing, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , , , , .

Why do people knowingly follow bad investment strategies?

I won’t ask (in this post) about why people hold foolish beliefs about investment strategies. I’ll focus on people who intend to follow a decent strategy, and fail. I’ll illustrate this with a stereotype from a behavioral economist (Procrastination in Preparing for Retirement):[1]

For instance, one of the authors has kept an average of over $20,000 in his checking account over the last 10 years, despite earning an average of less than 1% interest on this account and having easy access to very liquid alternative investments earning much more.

A more mundane example is a person who holds most of their wealth in stock of a single company, for reasons of historical accident (they acquired it via employee stock options or inheritance), but admits to preferring a more diversified portfolio.

An example from my life is that, until this year, I often borrowed money from Schwab to buy stock, when I could have borrowed at lower rates in my Interactive Brokers account to do the same thing. (Partly due to habits that I developed while carelessly unaware of the difference in rates; partly due to a number of trivial inconveniences).

Behavioral economists are somewhat correct to attribute such mistakes to questionable time discounting. But I see more patterns than such a model can explain (e.g. people procrastinate more over some decisions (whether to make a “boring” trade) than others (whether to read news about investments)).[2]

Instead, I use CFAR-style models that focus on conflicting motives of different agents within our minds.

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Smart Animals?

Posted by Peter on July 21, 2016
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , , .

Book review: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, by Frans de Waal.

This book is primarily about discrediting false claims of human uniqueness, and showing how easy it is to screw up evaluations of a species’ cognitive abilities. It is best summarized by the cognitive ripple rule:

Every cognitive capacity that we discover is going to be older and more widespread than initially thought.

De Waal provides many anecdotes of carefully designed experiments detecting abilities that previously appeared to be absent. E.g. asian elephants failed mirror tests with small, distant mirrors. When experimenters dared to put large mirrors close enough for the elephants to touch, some of them passed the test.

Likewise, initial observations of behaviorist humans suggested they were rigidly fixated on explaining all behavior via operant conditioning. Yet one experimenter managed to trick a behaviorist into demonstrating more creativity, by harnessing the one motive that behaviorists prefer over their habit of advocating operant conditioning: their desire to accuse people of recklessly inferring complex cognition.

De Waal seems moderately biased toward overstating cognitive abilities of most species (with humans being one clear exception to that pattern).

At one point he gave me the impression that he was claiming elephants could predict where a thunderstorm would hit days in advance. I checked the reference, and what the elephants actually did was predict the arrival of the wet season, and respond with changes such as longer steps (but probably not with indications that they knew where thunderstorms would hit). After rereading de Waal’s wording, I decided it was ambiguous. But his claim that elephants “hear thunder and rainfall hundreds of miles away” exaggerates the original paper’s “detected … at distances greater than 100 km … perhaps as much as 300 km”.

But in the context of language, de Waal switches to downplaying reports of impressive abilities. I wonder how much of that is due to his desire to downplay claims that human minds are better, and how much of that is because his research isn’t well suited to studying language.

I agree with the book’s general claims. The book provides evidence that human brains embody only small, somewhat specialized improvements on the cognitive abilities of other species. But I found the book less convincing on that subject than some other books I’ve read recently. I suspect that’s mainly due to de Waal’s focus on anecdotes that emphasize what’s special about each species or individual. Whereas The Human Advantage rigorously quantifies important ways in which human brains are just a bigger primate brain (but primate brains are special!). Or The Secret of our Success (which doesn’t use particularly rigorous methods) provides a better perspective, by describing a model in which ape minds evolve to human minds via ordinary, gradual adaptations to mildly new environments.

In sum, this book is good at explaining the problems associated with research into animal cognition. It is merely ok at providing insights about how smart various species are.

Made-Up Minds

Posted by Peter on June 20, 2016
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: .

Book review: Made-Up Minds: A Constructivist Approach to Artificial Intelligence, by Gary L. Drescher.

It’s odd to call a book boring when it uses the pun “ontology recapitulates phylogeny”[1]. to describe a surprising feature of its model. About 80% of the book is dull enough that I barely forced myself to read it, yet the occasional good idea persuaded me not to give up.

Drescher gives a detailed model of how Piaget-style learning in infants could enable them to learn complex concepts starting with minimal innate knowledge.
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