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Rationality in the Media: Don't (New Yorker, May 2009)
Link: "Don't: The secret of self-control", Jonah Lehrer. The New Yorker. May 18, 2009.
Article Summary
Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Columbia University, has spent a long time studying what correlates with failing or passing a test intended to measure a preschooler's ability to delay gratification. The original experiment, involving a marshmallow and the promise of another if the first one remained uneaten for fifteen minutes, took place at Bing Nursery School in the "late 1960's". Mischel found several correlates, none of them really surprising. He discovered a few methods that allowed children to learn better delay gratification, but it is unclear if the learning the tricks changed any of the correlations. He and the research tradition he started are now waiting for fMRI studies, because that's what the discriminating 21st century psychologist does.
Best line: "'I know I shouldn't like them,' she says. 'But they're just so delicious!'"
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Too much feedback can be a bad thing
Didn't have the time to read the article itself, but based on the abstract, this certainly sounds relevant for LW:
Recent advances in information technology make it possible for decision makers to track information in real-time and obtain frequent feedback on their decisions. From a normative sense, an increase in the frequency of feedback and the ability to make changes should lead to enhanced performance as decision makers are able to respond more quickly to changes in the environment and see the consequences of their actions. At the same time, there is reason to believe that more frequent feedback can sometimes lead to declines in performance. Across four inventory management experiments, we find that in environments characterized by random noise more frequent feedback on previous decisions leads to declines in performance. Receiving more frequent feedback leads to excessive focus on and more systematic processing of more recent data as well as a failure to adequately compare information across multiple time periods.
Hat tip to the BPS Resarch Digest.
ETA: Some other relevant studies from the same site, don't remember which ones have been covered here already:
Threat of terrorism boosts people's self-esteem
The "too much choice" problem isn't as straightforward as you'd think
Toxic Truth
For those who haven't heard about this yet, I thought this would be a good way to show the potentially insidious effect of biased, one-sided analysis and presentation of evidence under ulterior motives, and the importance of seeking out counter-arguments before accepting a point, even when the evidence being presented to support that point is true.
"[DHMO] has been a part of nature longer than we have; what gives us the right to eliminate it?" - Pro-DHMO web site.
DHMO (hydroxilic acid), commonly found in excised tumors and lesions of terminal lung and throat cancer patients, is a compound known to occur in second hand tobacco smoke. Prolonged exposure in solid form causes severe tissue damage, and a proven link has been established between inhalation of DHMO (even in small quantities) and several deaths, including many young children whose parents were heavy smokers.
It's also used as a solvent during the synthesis of cocaine, in certain forms of particularly cruel and unnecessary animal research, and has been traced to the distribution process of several cases of pesticides causing genetic damage and birth defects. But there are huge political and financial incentives to continue using the compound.
There have been efforts across the world to ban DHMO - an Australian MP has announced a campaign to ban it internationally - but little progress. Several online petitions to the British prime minister on this subject have been rejected. The executive director of the public body that operates Louisville Waterfront Park was actually criticised for posting warning signs on a public fountain that was found to contain DHMO. Jacqui Dean, New Zealand National Party MP was simily told "I seriously doubt that the Expert Advisory Committee on Drugs would want to spend any time evaluating that substance".
If you haven't guessed why, re-read my first sentence then click here.
HT the Coalition to Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide.
[Edit to clarify point:] I'm not saying truth is in any way bad. Truth rocks. I'm reminding you truth is *not sufficient*. When they're given treacherously or used recklessly, truth is as toxic as hydroxilic acid.
Follow-up to: Comment in The Forbidden Post.
Helpless Individuals
Previously in series: Rationality: Common Interest of Many Causes
When you consider that our grouping instincts are optimized for 50-person hunter-gatherer bands where everyone knows everyone else, it begins to seem miraculous that modern-day large institutions survive at all.
Well—there are governments with specialized militaries and police, which can extract taxes. That's a non-ancestral idiom which dates back to the invention of sedentary agriculture and extractible surpluses; humanity is still struggling to deal with it.
There are corporations in which the flow of money is controlled by centralized management, a non-ancestral idiom dating back to the invention of large-scale trade and professional specialization.
And in a world with large populations and close contact, memes evolve far more virulent than the average case of the ancestral environment; memes that wield threats of damnation, promises of heaven, and professional priest classes to transmit them.
But by and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions—some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization—simply fail to exist in the first place.
I first realized this as a result of grasping how Science gets funded: namely, not by individual donations.
Deliberate and spontaneous creativity
Related to: Spock's Dirty Little Secret, Does Blind Review Slow Down Science?
After finding out that old scientists don't actually resist change, I decided to do a literature search to find out if the related assumption was true. Is it mainly just the young scientists who are productive? (This should be very relevant for rationalists, since we and scientists in general have the same goal - to find the truth.)
The answer was a pretty resounding no. Study after study after study found that the most productive scientists were those in middle age, not youth. Productivity is better predicted by career age than chronological age. One study suggested that middle-aged scientists aren't more productive as such, but have access to better resources, and that the age-productivity connection disappears once supervisory position is controlled for. Another argued that it was the need for social networking that led the middle-aged to be the most productive. So age, by itself, doesn't seem to affect scientific productivity much, right?
Well, there is one exception. Dietrich and Srinivasan found that paradigm-busting discoveries come primarily from relatively young scientists. They looked at different Nobel Prize winners and finding out the age when the winners had first had the idea that led them to the discovery. In total, 60% of the discoveries were made by people aged below 35 and around 30% were made by people aged between 35 and 45. The data is strongest for theoretical physics, which shows that 90% of all theoretical contributions occurred before the age of 40 and that no theoretician over the age of 50 had ever had an idea that was deemed worthy of the Nobel prize. Old scientists are certainly capable of expanding and building on an existing paradigm, but they are very unlikely to revolutionize the whole paradigm. Why is this so?
Actually, this wasn't something that Dietrich just happened to randomly stumble on - he was testing a prediction stemming from an earlier hypothesis of his. In "the cognitive neuroscience of creativity", he presents a view of two kinds of systems for creativity: deliberate and spontaneous (actually four - deliberate/cognitive, deliberate/emotional, spontaneous/cognitive and spontaneous/emotional, but the cognitive-emotional difference doesn't seem relevant for our purposes). Summarizing the differences relevant to the aging/creativity question:
Science vs. art
In the comments on Soulless Morality, a few people mentioned contributing to humanity's knowledge as an ultimate value. I used to place a high value on this myself.
Now, though, I doubt whether making scientific advances would give me satisfaction on my deathbed. All you can do in science is discover something before someone else discovers it. (It's a lot like the race to the north pole, which struck me as stupid when I was a child; yet I never transferred that judgement to scientific races.) The short-term effects of your discovering something sooner might be good, and might not. The long-term effects are likely to be to bring about apocalypse a little sooner.
Art is different. There's not much downside to art. There are some exceptions - romance novels perpetuate destructive views of love; 20th-century developments in orchestral music killed orchestral music; and Ender's Game has warped the psyches of many intelligent people. But artists seldom worry that their art might destroy the world. And if you write a great song, you've really contributed, because no one else would have written that song.
EDIT: What is above is instrumental talk. I find that, as I get older, science fails to satisfy me as much. I don't assign it the high intrinsic value I used to. But it's hard for me to tell whether this is really an intrinsic valuation, or the result of diminishing faith in its instrumental value.
I think that people who value rationality tend to place an unusually high value on knowledge. Rationality requires knowledge; but that gives knowledge only instrumental value. It doesn't (can't, by definition) justify giving knowledge intrinsic value.
What do the rest of you think? Is there a strong correlation between rationalism, giving knowledge high intrinsic value, and giving art low intrinsic value? If so, why? And which would you rather be - a great scientist, or a great artist of some type? (Pretend that great scientists and great artists are equally well-paid and sexually attractive.)
(I originally wrote this as over-valuing knowledge and under-valuing art, but Roko pointed out that that's incoherent.)
Under a theory that intrinsic and instrumental values are separate things, there's no reason why giving science a high instrumental value should correlate with giving it a high intrinsic value, or vice-versa. Yet the people here seem to be doing one of those things.
My theory is that we can't keep intrinsic and instrumental values separate from each other. We attach positive valences to both, and then operate on the positive valences. Or, we can't distinguish our intrinsic values from our instrumental values by introspection. (You may have noticed that I started using examples that refer to both intrinsic and instrumental values. I don't think I can separate them, except retrospectively; and with about as much accuracy as a courtroom witness asked to testify about an event that took place 20 years ago.)
It's tempting to mention friends and family in here too, as another competing fundamental value. But that would demand solving the relationship between personal values that you yourself take, and the valuations you would want a society or a singleton AI to make. That's too much to take on here. I want to talk just about intrinsic value given to science vs. art.
Oh, and saying science is an art is a dodge. You then have to say whether you value the knowledge, or the artistic endeavor. Also, ignore the possibility that your scientific work can make a safe Singularity. That would be science as instrumental value. I'm asking about science vs. art as intrinsic values.
EDIT: An obvious explanation: I was assuming that people here want to be rational as an instrumental value, and that we should find the distribution of intrinsic values to be the same as in the general populace. But of course some people are drawn here because rationality is an intrinsic value to them, and this heavily biases the distribution of intrinsic values found here.
Does blind review slow down science?
Previously, Robin Hanson pointed out that even if implementing anonymous peer review has an effect on the acceptance rate of different papers, this doesn't necessarily tell us the previous practice was biased. Yesterday, I ran across an interesting passage suggesting one way that anonymous review might actually be harmful:
Second, fame may confer license. If a person has done valuable work in the past, this increases the probability that his current work is also valuable and induces the audience to suspend its disbelief. He can therefore afford to thumb his nose at the crowd. This is merely the obverse of the "shamelessness" of the old, which Aristotle discussed. Peter Messeri argues in this vein that "senior scientists are better situated than younger scientists to withstand adverse consequences of public advocacy of unpopular positions," and that this factor may explain why the tendency for older scientists to resist new theories is, in fact, weak. And remember Kenneth Dover's negative verdict on old age (chapter 5)? He offered one qualification: "There just aren't any [aspects of old age which compensate for its ills] - except, maybe, a complacent indifference to fashion, because people no longer seeking employment or promotion have less to fear."
This point suggests that the use by scholarly journals of blind refereeing is a mistaken policy. It may cause them to turn down unconventional work to which they would rightly have given the benefit of doubt had they known that the author was not a neophyte or eccentric.
(From Richard A. Posner, "Aging and Old Age")
If this hypothesis holds (and Posner admits it hasn't been tested, at least at the time of writing), then blind review may actually slow down the acceptance of theories which are radical but true. Looking up the Peter Messeri reference gave me the article "Age Differences in the Reception of New Scientific Theories: The Case of Plate Tectonics Theory". It notes:
The Comedy of Behaviorism
Followup to: Humans in Funny Suits
"Let me see if I understand your thesis. You think we shouldn't anthropomorphize people?"
-- Sidney Morgenbesser to B. F. Skinner
Behaviorism was the doctrine that it was unscientific for a psychologist to ascribe emotions, beliefs, thoughts, to a human being. After all, you can't directly observe anger or an intention to hit someone. You can only observe the punch. You may hear someone say "I'm angry!" but that's hearing a verbal behavior, not seeing anger. Thoughts are not observable, therefore they are unscientific, therefore they do not exist. Oh, you think you're thinking, but that's just a delusion - or it would be, if there were such things as delusions.
And the Winner is... Many-Worlds!
This is one of several shortened indices into the Quantum Physics Sequence.
Macroscopic quantum superpositions, a.k.a. the "many-worlds interpretation" or MWI, was proposed in 1957 and brought to the general attention of the scientific community in 1970. Ever since, MWI has steadily gained in popularity. As of 2008, MWI may or may not be endorsed by a majority of theoretical physicists (attempted opinion polls conflict on this point). Of course, Science is not supposed to be an opinion poll, but anyone who tells you that MWI is "science fiction" is simply ignorant.
When a theory is slowly persuading scientists despite all academic inertia, and more and more graduate students grow up familiar with it, at what point should one go ahead and declare a temporary winner pending new evidence?
Reading through the referenced posts will give you a very basic introduction to quantum mechanics - algebra is involved, but no calculus - by which you may nonetheless gain an understanding sufficient to see, and not just be told, that the modern case for many-worlds has become overwhelming. Not just plausible, not just strong, but overwhelming. Single-world versions of quantum mechanics just don't work, and all the legendary confusingness and mysteriousness of quantum mechanics stems from this essential fact. But enough telling - let me show you.
Quantum Physics Revealed As Non-Mysterious
This is one of several shortened indices into the Quantum Physics Sequence.
Hello! You may have been directed to this page because you said something along the lines of "Quantum physics shows that reality doesn't exist apart from our observation of it," or "Science has disproved the idea of an objective reality," or even just "Quantum physics is one of the great mysteries of modern science; no one understands how it works."
There was a time, roughly the first half-century after quantum physics was invented, when this was more or less true. Certainly, when quantum physics was just being discovered, scientists were very confused indeed! But time passed, and science moved on. If you're confused about a phenomenon, that's a fact about your own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself - there are mysterious questions, but not mysterious answers. Science eventually figured out what was going on, and why things looked so strange at first.
The series of posts indexed below will show you - not just tell you - what's really going on down there. To be honest, you're not going to be able to follow this if algebra scares you. But there won't be any calculus, either.
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