Adding and removing complexity from models
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/adding-and-removing-complexity-from-models/
I had a really interesting conversation with a guy about modelling information. what I did when talking to him is in one case insist that his model be made more simple because adding more variation in the model was unhelpful, and then in another case in the same conversation, insist his model be made more complicated to account for the available information that didn't fit his model.
On reflection I realised that I had applied two opposing forces to models of information and could only vaguely explain why. With that in mind I decided to work out what was going on. The following is obvious, but that's why I am writing it out, so that no one else has to do the obvious thing.
Case where a model should be simplified
This all comes down to what you are measuring or describing. If you are trying to describe something rather general, like "what impact do number of beach-goers have on the pollution at the beach?", it's probably not important what gender, age, race, time spent at the beach or socioeconomic status the beach goers are. (With the exception of maybe socioeconomic status of the surrounding geopolitical territory), what is important is maybe two pieces of information:
- A measure of the number of beach goers
- A measure of the pollution
That's it. This would be a case for reducing the survey of beach goers down to a counter of beach goers and a daily photo of the remaining state of the beach at the end of the day (which could be compared to other similar photos). Or even just - 3 photos, one at 9am (start), one at 1pm (peak) and one at 5pm (end). This model needs no more moving parts. The day you want to start using historic information to decide how many beach cleaners you want to employ, you can do that from the limited but effective data you have gathered.
Case where a model should have more moving parts added to it.
Let's continue the same example. You have 3 photos of each day, but sometimes the 1pm photo is deserted. Nearly no one is at the beach, and you wonder why. It's also messing with your predictions because there is still a bit of rubbish at 5pm even though very few people were at the beach. The model no longer explains the state of the world. The map is wrong. But that's okay. We can fix it by adding more information. You notice that most days the model is good, so there might be something going on for the other days which needs a + k factor to the equation (+k is something added in chemistry, in algebra it's sometimes called a +c as in y=mx+b+c, and physics +x, but generally adding a variable to an equation is common to all science fields). Some new variable.
Let's say that being omniscient to our own made up examples we know that the cause is the weather. On stormy windy rainy days - no one goes to the beach, but some rubbish washes up. Does this match the data? almost perfectly. Does this help explain the map? Yes. Is it necessary? That depends on what you are doing with the information. Maybe it's significant enough in this scenario that it is necessary.
Second example
The example that came up in conversation was his own internal model that there is fundamentally something different between someone who does exercise, and someone who Doesn't exercise. I challenged this model for having too much complexity. I argue that the model of - there is a hidden and secret moving part between does/doesn't exercise, is a model that doesn't describe the world better than a model without that moving part.
The model does something else (and found its way into existence for this reason). If you find yourself on one side of the model (i.e. the "I don't exercise") then you can protect yourself from attributing the failure to exercise to your own inability to do it by declaring that there is a hidden and secret moving part that prevents me from being in the other observable group. This preserves your non-changing and let's you get away with it for a longer time. I know this model because that is what I did. I held this model very strongly. And then I went out and searched for the hidden and secret moving part that I could change in order to move myself into the other group. There was no hidden and secret moving part. Or if there was I couldn't find it. However, I did manage to stop holding the model that there was some hidden and secret moving part, and instead just start exercising more.
In figuring out if this model is real or a made up model to protect your own brain from being critical of itself, start to think of what the world would look like if it were true. If there was some difference between people who do exercise and people who do not - we might see people clustered in observable groups and never be able to change between them (This is not true because we regularly see people publishing their weight loss journeys, we also regularly see people getting fatter and unhealthier, suggesting that travel in either direction is entirely possible and happens all the time). If there were something describable it would be as obvious as different species, in fact - thinking evolutionarily - if such a thing existed, it's likely that it would have significantly shaped the state of the world already to be completely different... Given that we can't know for sure, this might not be a very strong argument.
If you got this far - as I did and wondered, so why can't I be in the other group - I have news for you. You can.
- Does this pattern of models with too many moving parts sound familiar to another model you have seen in action?
- Is there a model that you use that could do with more moving parts?
Meta: this took an hour to write. If I were to spend more time on it, it would probably be to tighten up the examples and maybe provide more examples. I am not sure that such time would be useful to you and am interested in if you think it will be useful.
Wicked Problems
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/wicked-problems/
Nothing is a wicked problem.
When I started researching problems and problem solving and solutions and meta-solving processes I stumbled across a wicked problem. This is from Wikipedia:
Rittel and Webber's 1973 formulation of wicked problems in social policy planning specified ten characteristics:[3][4]
- There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
- Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
- Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good or bad.
- There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
- Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
- Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
- Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
- The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
- The social planner has no right to be wrong (i.e., planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).
Conklin later generalized the concept of problem wickedness to areas other than planning and policy. The defining characteristics are:
- The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
- Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
- Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
- Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
- Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'
- Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.
Defeating a wicked problem
It took me a while to realise what a wicked problem was. It is evil. It's a challenge. It's a one-shot task that you don't really understand until you are attempting to solve it, and then you influence it by trying to solve it. It's wicked. And then I started paying attention to everything around me. And suddenly being a social human was a wicked problem. Every new interaction is not like the last ones, as soon as you enter the interaction it's too late; and then you only have one shot. Any action towards the problem adds more complexity to the problem.
Then I looked to time management. Time management is a wicked problem. You start out knowing nothing. It takes time to work out what takes time. And by the time you think you have a system in place you are already burning more time. Just catching up on a bad system is failing at the wicked problem.
Then I looked to cooking. No two ingredients are the same. Even if you are cooking a thing for the 100th time, the factors of the day, the humidity, temperature, it's going to be different. You can't know what's going to happen.
Then I looked at politics. And that's what wicked problems were invented around, social problems where trying to solve the problem changes the problem. And nothing makes it easier.
Then I took my man-with-a-hammer syndrome and I whacked myself on the head with it.
Okay so not everything is a hammer-nail wicked problem. Even wicked problems are not a wicked problem. There are problems out there that are really wicked problems, but it would be rare that you find one.
There is a trick to solving a wicked problem. The trick is to work out how it's not a wicked problem. Sure if it's wicked by design so be it. But real problems in the real world are only pretending to be wicked problems.
- The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
Yeah, okay. So you don't really get the problem. That's cool. You have done problems before. And done problems like this before too. The worst thing to do in the case of being presented with a problem which is not understood is to never attempt it. If you don't understand - it's time to quantify what you do understand and quantify what you don't understand. After that it's time to look at how much uncertainty you can get away with and how to solve that. If in doubt refer to the book How to measure anything.
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Real wicked problems don't have a stopping rule but real world problems do. Or you can give them one anyway. How many years is enough years of life. "I don't know I will decide when I get there". How much money is enough money? "I will first earn my next 10 million dollarydoos and then decide what to do next". Yes. A wicked problem has no stopping rule. But that's not the real world. In the real world even a fake stopping rule is good enough for your purposes.
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
Okay. Maybe a tricky one. Lots of things are not right or wrong. "should I earn to give, or should I bring around FAI sooner?". Who knows? Right now people are arguing about it but we don't really know. If you are making decisions based on right or wrong you probably want to do the right thing. We know already that if you can't decide that makes all options equally good and irrelevant what you choose. If you can make one more right than the other - do that. It's probably not a real wicked problem. "How should I format this word document" is not a right or wrong, but it's also irrelevant.
4. Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
Yes. If you are facing a truly novel and unique problem there is nothing I can say that can help you. But if you are not, there are many options. You can:
- build a model scenario and test solutions
- look for existing examples of similar problems and find similar solutions
- try to break the problem into smaller known parts
- consider doing nothing about the problem and see if it solves itself
IF a problem is truly unique, then you really have no reason to fear the unknown because it was not possible to be prepared. If it's not unique - be prepared (we are all always being prepared for problems all the time)
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'
Yea, these are hard. Maybe some of the solutions to 4 will help. Build models, try search or create similar scenarios (why do trolley problems exist other than to test one-shot problems with pre-thought-out examples). You only get one shot to launch a nuclear missile the first time (and we are very glad that we didn't ignite the atmosphere that time). Now days we have computer modelling. We have prediction markets, we have Bayes. We can know what we don't know. And we can make it significantly less dangerous to launch into space - risking the lives of astronauts when we do.
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.
Yes. Wicked problems don't, but real world problems could, and often do. Find those solutions, or the degrees of freedom in your problem. Search and try to confirm possible options, find friend scenarios, and use everything you have.
Nothing is a wicked problem.
Meta: This took 1 hour to write and has been on my mind for months. Coming soon: Defining what is a problem
Filter on the way in, Filter on the way out...
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/filter-on-the-way-in-filter-on-the-way-out/
I'd like to quote tact filters by Jeff Bigler:
All people have a "tact filter", which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it. Most "normal people" have the tact filter positioned to apply tact in the outgoing direction. Thus whatever normal people say gets the appropriate amount of tact applied to it before they say it. This is because when they were growing up, their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all!"
"Nerds," on the other hand, have their tact filter positioned to apply tact in the incoming direction. Thus, whatever anyone says to them gets the appropriate amount of tact added when they hear it. This is because when nerds were growing up, they continually got picked on, and their parents continually drilled into their heads statements like, "They're just saying those mean things because they're jealous. They don't really mean it."
When normal people talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they say, and no one's feelings get hurt. When nerds talk to each other, both people usually apply the appropriate amount of tact to everything they hear, and no one's feelings get hurt. However, when normal people talk to nerds, the nerds often get frustrated because the normal people seem to be dodging the real issues and not saying what they really mean. Worse yet, when nerds talk to normal people, the normal people's feelings often get hurt because the nerds don't apply tact, assuming the normal person will take their blunt statements and apply whatever tact is necessary.
So, nerds need to understand that normal people have to apply tact to everything they say; they become really uncomfortable if they can't do this. Normal people need to understand that despite the fact that nerds are usually tactless, things they say are almost never meant personally and shouldn't be taken that way. Both types of people need to be extra patient when dealing with someone whose tact filter is backwards relative to their own.
Later edit for clarification: I don't like the Nerd|Normal dichotomy because those words have various histories and baggage associated with them, so I renamed them (Stater, listener, Launch filter, Landing filter). "Normal" is pretty unhelpful when trying to convey a clear decision about what's good or bad.
Okay; so Tact filters. But what should we really do? What's better? Jeff's Nerd or Normal? And more importantly - In future ambiguous cases - what should we do?
Moving parts to this system
There are a few moving parts to tact, I am going to lay them out:
- Stater - the person stating something
- Statement - the thing being said
- Listener - the person hearing it, or the person who it is intended to be directed to.
- Tact filter - the filter that turns the Statement into a clean one.
- Launch responsibility - the Stater's responsibility to launch the statement in certain ways. (Jeff's normal)
- Landing responsibility - The listener's responsibility to receive the statement in certain ways. (Jeff's nerd)
In a chart it looks like this:
Who is responsible?
In Landing responsible culture, you are responsible for the incoming tact.
But this isn't great because it labels anyone you are talking to as "potential jerks".
In Launch responsible culture:
The responsibility to be tactful prepares the statement for a sensitive person. Which isn't great either. Tact takes time, takes energy and effort, what if no one ever needed to be tactful? Everything would also be fast.
The wild
So this is real life now. You don't really know if the other person is tactful or sensitive or a jerk or just normal... The best possible plan for unknowns:
It's not rocket science. Said again:
- actively be less offensive when you say things that might be taken offensively
- actively be less offended when you hear things that sound offensive
Q: But it's not my responsibility because I live in (Launch | Listener) responsibility land.
A: yes it is! No you don't! You live on earth. In the real world, where you sometimes encounter people living in the other land. Which is a fact. You can choose to piss them off when you meet them but you should know that's a choice and up to you. And now that you know this; the responsibility is on you to make the better choice.
Compounding factors
Even this model leaves out all the further compounding factors.
- What if the Stater thinks a statement is tactful but that same statement is taken as non-tactful by the listener?
- What if the stater is used to their statements being taken as tactful on every day except today?
- What if the particular pair of stater-listener has an existing negative relationship?
I don't know. Err on the side of caution.
Questions:
- What other communication habits have a filter? Does it pay to err on the side of caution?
- Aside from the fallacy of the middle, can this become a rule?
Another solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
Meta: this post was inspired by Sam's post on a similar topic.
Meta: this took 2 hours to think about, write and draw out what I meant.
Mental models - giving people personhood and taking it away
Original post: http://bearlamp.com.au/giving-people-personhood-and-taking-it-away
This post is about the Kegan levels of self development. If you don't know what that is, this post might still be interesting to you but you might be missing some key structure to understand where it fits among that schema. More information can be found here (https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence/)
I am not ready to definitely accept the Kegan levels as a useful model because often it makes retrospective predictions. Rather than predictions of the future. A model is only as useful as what it can predict, so if it can't be used on the fly when you want to explain the universe you might as well throw it out. Having said that, this idea is interesting.
When I was little, people fell into different categories. There was my parents - the olderClass humans (going to refer to them as Senior-humans), my siblings - which, as I grew up turned into my age-group humans and through school - my peergroup humans.
People like doctors fell into SeniorClass, Dentists, Vets, Plumbers, PIC (People In Charge) - all fell into the SeniorClass of humans. A big one was teachers - they were all PIC. A common trope among children is that the teachers sleep at school. Or to use a gaming term - we feel as though they are the NPC's of that part of our journey in life.
As far as I can tell (from trying to pinpoint this today); the people I meet on my own terms become peergroup humans. Effectively friends. People I meet not on my terms; as well as strangers - first join some kind of seniorclass of humans, if I get to know them enough they transition to my peergroup. Of course this is a bit strange because on the one hand I imagine I want to be friends with the PIC, or the senior-class humans because of the opportunity to get ahead in life. the good ol' I know a guy who know's a guy. Which is really not what a peergroup constitutes.
Peergroup humans are not "A guy with skills" much as we might hope for; they are (hopefully) all at our own, or near our own skill level. (on Kegan's stage 3) people who's opinions and ideas we care about because they are similar to us.
Recently I have noticed events that have taken some of my long term SeniorClass and shift them into my peergroup. Effectively "demoting" them from "Professional" to "human". When I think "person has their shit together" or "person doesn't have their shit together". I guess there were always people who seemed to have their shit together. Now that I am an adult it's clear that less and less people are competent and more and more people are winging it through their lives. It's mildly uncomfortable to think of people as being less "together" than I thought they were.
The other place where it's been an uncomfortable transition is in my memory. I will from time to time think back to a time when I deferred judgement, decision making capacity, or high-level trust in someone else having my own best interests at heart - where now looking back retrospectively they were just as lost and confused as I was in some of those situations, but they had a little kid to take care of/be in charge of/be in seniority to.
What I wonder about this process of demoting people is - what if instead of demoting my adults as they prove their humanity; I instead promote all the humans to Senior-Class. What would that do to my model of humans? And I guess I don't really know where I stand. Am I an adult? Am I a peer? I have always been an observer...
I'm not really getting at anything with this post. Just interesting to observe this reclassification happening and fit kegan's stages around it. Obviously some of the way that I sorted Senior-class humans is particularly relevant to a stage 3 experience of how I managed my relationships when I was smaller. I also wonder that given the typical mind - whether this is normal or unusual.
Question for today:
- Do you divide people into "advanced" and "equal" and "simpler" - (or did you do it when you were younger?)
- Do people ever change category on you? In which direction? What do you do about that?
- Assuming I am on some kind of path of gradually increasing understanding and growing and changing models of the world around me - what is next?
Meta: this took 3 hours to write over a few days.
Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
I posted a stupid question a couple of weeks ago and got some good feedback.
@
Analysis:
http://www.hypercapital.info/news/2015/4/19/a-published-model-of-hypercapitalism
Runnable Code - fork it and mess around with it:
http://runnable.com/VTBkszswv6lIdEFR/hypercapitalism-sample-economy-for-node-js-and-hello-world
I'd love some more feedback and opinions.
A couple of other things for context:
hypercapital.info - all about hypercapitalism
Overcoming bias about our money
Information Theory and the Economy
I need some help debugging my approach to informal models and reasoning
I'm having trouble understanding the process I should use when I am considering new models as they might apply to old data, like memories. This is primarily when reasoning with respect to qualitative models, like those that come out of development psychology, business, or military strategy. These models can be either normative or descriptive, but the big trait that they all seem to share is that they were all conceptualized with reference to the inside view more than the outside view - they were based on either memories or intuition, so they will have a lot of implicit internal structure, or they will have a lot of bullshit. Re-framing my own experiences as a way of finding out whether these models are useful is thus reliant on system one more than system two. Unfortunately now we're in the realm of bias.
My concrete examples of models that I am evaluating are (a) when I am attempting to digest the information contained in the "Principles" document (as discussed here) and for which situations the information might apply in; (b) learning Alfred Adler's "individual psychology" from The Rawness, which also expands the ideas and (c) the mighty OODA loop.
When I brought up the OODA loop during a meetup with the Vancouver Rationalists I ended up making some mistakes regarding the "theories" from which it was derived, adding the idea of "clout" to my mental toolkit. But it also makes me wary that my instinctive approach to learning about qualitative models such as this might have other weaknesses.
I asked at another meetup, "What is the best way to internalize advice from books?" and someone responded with thinking about concrete situations where the idea might have been useful.
As a strategy to evaluate the truth of a model I can see this backfiring. Due to the reliance on System One in both model structuring and model evaluation, hindsight bias is likely to be an issue, or a form of Forer effect. I could then make erroneous judgements on how effectively the model will predict an outcome, and use the model in ineffective ways (ironically this is brought up by the author on The Rawness). In most cases I believe that this is better than nothing, but I don't think it's good enough either. It does seem possible to be mindful of the actual conceptual points and just wait for relevance, but the reason why we reflect is so that we are primed to see certain patterns again when they come up, so that doesn't seem like enough either.
As a way of evaluating model usefulness I can see this go two ways. On one hand, many long-standing problems exist due to mental ruts, and benefit from re-framing the issue in light of new information. When I read books I often experience a linkage between statements that a book makes and goals that I have, or situations I want to make sense of (similar to Josh Kaufman and his usage of the McDowell's Reading Grid). However, this experience has little to do with the model being correct.
Here are three questions I have, although more will likely come up:
- What are the most common mistakes humans make when figuring out if a qualitative model applies to their experiences or not?
- How can they be worked around, removed, or compensated for?
- Can we make statements about when "informal" models (i.e. not specified in formal language or not mappable to mathematical descriptions other than in structures like semantic webs) are generally useful to have and when they generally fail?
- etc.
The Classic Literature Workshop
From EY's Facebook page, there were two posts that got me thinking about fiction and how to work it better and make it stronger:
It would have been trivial to fix _Revenge of the Sith_'s inadequate motivation of Anakin's dark turn; have Padme already in the hospital slowly dying as her children come to term, not just some nebulous "visions". (Bonus points if you have Yoda lecture Anakin about the inevitability of death, but I'd understand if they didn't go there.) At the end, Anakin doesn't try to choke Padme; he watches the ship with her fly out of his reach, away from his ability to use his unnatural Sith powers to save her. Now Anakin's motives are 320% more sympathetic and the movie makes 170% more sense. If I'd put some serious work in, I'm pretty sure I could've had the movie audience in tears.
I still feel a sense of genuine puzzlement on how such disastrous writing happens in movies and TV shows. Are the viewers who care about this such a tiny percentage that it's not worth trying to sell to them? Are there really so few writers who could read over the script and see in 30 seconds how to fix something like this? (If option 2 is really the problem and people know it's the problem, I'd happily do it for $10,000 a shot.) Is it Graham's Design Paradox - can Hollywood moguls just not tell the difference between competent writers making such an offer, and fakers who'll take the money and run? Are the producers' egos so grotesque that they can't ask a writer for help? Is there some twisted sense of superiority bound up with believing that the audience is too dumb to care about this kind of thing, even though it looks to me like they do? I don't understand how a >$100M movie ends up with flaws that I could fix at the script stage with 30 seconds of advice.
A helpful key to understanding the art and technique of character in storytelling, is to consider the folk-psychological notion from Internal Family Systems of people being composed of different 'parts' embodying different drives or goals. A shallow character is then a character with only one 'part'.
A good rule of thumb is that to create a 3D character, that person must contain at least two different 2D characters who come into conflict. Contrary to the first thought that crosses your mind, three-dimensional good people are constructed by combining at least two different good people with two different ideals, not by combining a good person and a bad person. Deep sympathetic characters have two sympathetic parts in conflict, not a sympathetic part in conflict with an unsympathetic part. Deep smart characters are created by combining at least two different people who are geniuses.
E.g. HPMOR!Hermione contains both a sensible young girl who tries to keep herself and her friends out of trouble, and a starry-eyed heroine, neither of whom are stupid. (Actually, since HPMOR!Hermione is also the one character who I created as close to her canon self as I could manage - she didn't *need* upgrading - I should credit this one to J. K. Rowling.) (Admittedly, I didn't actually follow that rule deliberately to construct Methods, I figured it out afterward when everyone was praising the characterization and I was like, "Wait, people are calling me a character author now? What the hell did I just do right?")
If instead you try to construct a genius character by having an emotionally impoverished 'genius' part in conflict with a warm nongenius part... ugh. Cliche. Don't write the first thing that pops into your head from watching Star Trek. This is not how real geniuses work. HPMOR!Harry, the primary protagonist, contains so many different people he has to give them names, and none of them are stupid, nor does any one of them contain his emotions set aside in a neat jar; they contain different mixtures of emotions and ideals. Combining two cliche characters won't be enough to build a deep character. Combining two different realistic people in that character's situation works much better. Two is not a limit, it's a minimum, but everyone involved still has to be recognizably the same person when combined.
Closely related is Orson Scott Card's observation that a conflict between Good and Evil can be interesting, but it's often not half as interesting as a conflict between Good and Good. All standard rules about cliches still apply, and a conflict between good and good which you've previously read about and to which the reader can already guess your correct approved answer, cannot carry the story. A good rule of thumb is that if you have a conflict between good and good which you feel unsure about yourself, or which you can remember feeling unsure about, or you're not sure where exactly to draw the line, you can build a story around it. I consider the most successful moral conflict in HPMOR to be the argument between Harry and Dumbledore in Ch. 77 because it almost perfectly divided the readers on who was in the right *and* about whose side the author was taking. (*This* was done by deliberately following Orson Scott Card's rule, not by accident. Likewise _Three Worlds Collide_, though it was only afterward that I realized how much of the praise for that story, which I hadn't dreamed would be considered literarily meritful by serious SF writers, stemmed from the sheer rarity of stories built around genuinely open moral arguments. Orson Scott Card: "Propaganda only works when the reader feels like you've been absolutely fair to other side", and writing about a moral dilemma where *you're* still trying to figure out the answer is an excellent way to achieve this.)
Character shallowness can be a symptom of moral shallowness if it reflects a conflict between Good and Evil drawn along lines too clear to bring two good parts of a good character into conflict. This is why it would've been hard for Lord of the Rings to contain conflicted characters without becoming an entirely different story, though as Robin Hanson has just remarked, LotR is a Mileu story, not a Character story. Conflicts between evil and evil are even shallower than conflicts between good and evil, which is why what passes for 'maturity' in some literature is so uninteresting. There's nothing to choose there, no decision to await with bated breath, just an author showing off their disillusionment as a claim of sophistication.
I was wondering if we could apply this process to older fiction, Great Literature that is historically praised, and excellent by its own time's standards, but which, if published by a modern author, would seem substandard or inappropriate in one way or another.
Given our community's propensity for challenging sacred cows, and the unique tool-set available to us, I am sure we could take some great works of the past and turn them into awesome works of the present.
Of course, it doesn't have to be a laboratory where we rewrite the whole damn things. Just proprely-grounded suggestions on how to improve this or that work would be great.
P.S. This post is itself a work in progress, and will update and improve as comments come. It's been a long time since I've last posted on LW, so advice is quite welcome. Our work is never over.
EDIT: Well, I like that this thread has turned out so lively, but I've got finals to prepare for and I can't afford to keep participating in the discussion to my satisfaction. I'll be back in July, and apologize in advance for being such a poor OP. That said, cheers!
The Wrongness Iceberg
As soon as I got out of college I got a job at a restaurant. At the time I had never had a job at a restaurant, but my mom had known the owners and I felt obligated to avoid performing badly. Yet inevitably I did perform badly, and how this performance was evaluated would greatly affect my way of perceiving my mistakes.
If you're entrenched in an organization, there's a good chance you have an idea of what it is you're supposed to do and what mistakes you will or will not be making. But suppose you're in a position like this one: by way of your ignorance you know you're going to make a lot of mistakes, and it's just a question of when and how much. Further, you know that if you make too many mistakes, you make people you care about look bad. And finally, there are a lot of unknown unknowns: you don't know what possible mistakes and acts of ignorance exist to begin with, so many mistakes you've made you will be blind to.
The proactive thing to do, naturally, is to try to minimize how many mistakes you make.
There are two key ways to gauge the depth of being told you have made a mistake. The first way is to take mistakes literally, as if no other mistake exists, and any other mistake would be pointed out to you. So if you correct this mistake, everything else should be fine. This is how you'd expect to take mistakes if you were, say, under the supervision of an editor.
But the second kind is where the title of this writeup comes in. Not everyone is literal, or critical enough to notice every mistake. Much of the time, you'll only receive news of a mistake if many other mistakes are already afoot, and this mistake just happens to stand out from the set of mistakes you've already made. And since you don't know what mistakes you could be making, you don't know if there are many more mistakes under your level of awareness that you could be correcting for, but aren't.
In short, you're tasked with avoiding a wrongness iceberg: a mistake indicative of a nautical mile of mistakes below the surface and your level of awareness.
This is a debilitating position to be in, because your mental map of your performance prior to discovering the iceberg needs to be completely rewritten; in addition to accounting for all of the new areas you need to work on, you will likely account for the embarrassment of realizing that you have opened up a new frontier of mistakes to reflect on from your period of unaware incompetence.
While I don't think it's impossible that people exist who have never been in a situation like this, I think anyone who dives into a new field or skill is familiar, at least, with this feeling of brief yet total incompetence. And if you're in a field with enough depth and subjective calls to allow for a wrongness iceberg scenario, there might not be much you can do to prevent it. The most you can do is provide adequate resistance for the inevitable.
That's why I've created this mental model to think about it constructively. In every situation where I've faced a wrongness iceberg, the anxiety has been catastrophic. If you can at least deal with it, you can realize why it is you're anxious and what's going on with your assessment of your own mistakes. From experience, knowing that I'm worried about making this kind of iceberg-revealing mistake is helpful for mitigating my stress. And if you can somehow preempt an iceberg, that's even better.
side note: I've extended this concept to other domains, and it works well. A "dishonesty iceberg" is when one person's lie reveals a nautical mile of lies below the surface, and an "attraction iceberg" is when one person's expression of attraction toward you are indicative of a much greater level of internal attraction.
Reading Math: Pearl, Causal Bayes Nets, and Functional Causal Models
Hi all,
I just started a doctoral program in psychology, and my research interest concerns causal reasoning. Since Pearl's Causality, the popularity of causal Bayes nets as psychological models for causal reasoning has really grown. Initially, I had some serious reservations, but now I'm beginning to think a great many of these are due in part to the oversimplified treatment that CBNs get in the psychology literature. For instance, the distinction between a) directed acyclic graphs + underlying conditional probabilities, and b) functional causal models, is rarely mentioned. Ignoring this distinction leads to some weird results, especially when the causal system in question has prominent physical mechanisms.
Say we represent Gear A as causing Gear B to turn because Gear A is hooked up to an engine, and because the two gears are connected to each other by a chain. Something like this:
Engine(ON) -> GearA(turn) -> GearB(turn)
As a causal Net, this is problematic. If I "intervene" on GearA (perform do(GearA=stop)), then I get the expected result: GearA stops, GearB stops, and the engine keeps running (the 'undoing' effect [Sloman, 2005]). But what happens if I "intervene" on GearB? Since they are connected by a chain, GearA would stop as well. But GearA is the cause, and GearB is the effect: intervening on effects is NOT supposed to change the status of the cause. This violates a host of underlying assumptions for causal Bayes nets. (And you can't represent the gears as causing each other's movement, since that'd be a cyclical graph.)
However, this can be solved if we're not representing the system as the above net, but we're instead representing the physics of the system, representing the forces involved via something that looks vaguely like newtonian equations. Indeed, this would accord better with people's hypothesis-testing behavior: if they aren't sure which gear has the engine behind it, they wouldn't try "intervening" on GearA's motion and GearB's motion, they'd try removing the chain, and seeing which gear is still moving.
At first it seemed to me like causal Bayes nets only do the first kind of representation, not the latter. However, I was wrong: Pearl's "functional causal models" appear to do the latter. These have been vastly less prevalent in the psych literature, yet they seem extremely important.
Anyways, the moral of the story is that I should really read a lot of Pearl's Causality, and actually have a grasp of some of the math; I can't just read the first chapter like most psychology researchers interested in this stuff.
I'm not much of an autodidact when it comes to math, though I'm good at it when put in a class. Can anyone who's familiar with Pearl's book give me an idea of what sort of prerequisites it would be good to have in order to understand important chunks of it? Or am I overthinking this, and I should just try and plow through.
Any suggestions on classes (or textbooks, I guess), or any thoughts on the above gears example, will be helpful and welcome.
Thanks!
EDIT: Maybe a more specific request could be phrased as following: will I be better served by taking some extra computer science classes, or some extra math classes (i.e., on calculus and probabilistic systems)?
Folk theories can be useful even when they're entirely wrong
Here's an interesting but very old paper - two theories of Heat Control.
It discusses mental models of home heating systems (thermostats) non-experts use.
These models tend to be extremely wrong from theoretical perspective, but surprisingly useful in practice.
The findings are applicable to a much wider range of subjects than just thermostats, and have certain epistemological significance, especially with regard to compartmentalization.
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