Strictly speaking these are bar charts rather than histograms, aren't they?
As a first reaction (and without being read up on the details), I'm very skeptical. Assuming these three systems are actually in place, I don't see any convincing reason why any one of them should be trusted in isolation. Natural selection has only ever been able to work on their compound output, oblivious to the role played by each one individually and how they interact.
Maybe the "smart" system has been trained to assign some particular outcome a value of 5 utilons, whereas we would all agree that it's surely and under all circumstances worth mo...
At least for me, I've found that studying some machine learning has kind of broadened my perspectives on rationality in general. Even if we humans don't apply the algorithms that we find in machine learning textbooks ourselves, I still find it illuminating to study how we try make machines perform rational inference. The field also concerns itself with more general, if you will philosophical questions relating to e.g. how to properly evaluate the performance of predictive agents, the trade-off between model complexity and generality and the issue of overfitting. These kind of questions are very general in nature and should probably be of some interest to students of any kind of learning agents, be they human or machine.
I'm still not convinced that drawing has any real relevance to rationality. To me drawing seems to mostly involve unconscious motor learning that does not generalize much to other domains. For most rationality related purposes I don't see any major difference from other motor-based, practice-requiring skills such as juggling, playing golf, playing an instrument or patting-your-head-while-rubbing-your-stomach.
Sure, in some sense you will have to "see reality, as it truly is", and sure "your model of reality will be flawed, and you'll need to ...
The link for "Countdown to Zero" points to the wrong place (I presume).
You can't make a movie and say 'It was all a big accident' - no, it has to be a conspiracy, people plotting together. Because in a story, a story is about intention. A story is not about spontaneous order or complex human institutions which are the product of human action but not of human design - no, a story is about evil people plotting together.
Yeah sure, that's cool with me. We could also decide on the train for the way back (if you're going back), though SJ's site is down for maintenance at the moment. Anyhow I'll send you my contact info by PM.
I think "Get genotyped for free" would work, I don't know how many people will not fully understand what is meant but it'd be hard to come up with something else without getting non-snappy.
I will come - I'm in Uppsala currently but I'll take the train down there.
Actually, they will not sequence your genome - they will genotype you. It's actually quite a difference and I would recommend changing the title of this post. So what they do is use a so called "SNP chip" to test your genotype at a large number (hundreds of thousands) of positions known to be polymorphic in the human population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNP_genotyping). This is the same technology currently used by personal genomics companies such as 23andMe, and it's not particularly expensive.
Sequencing a genome is done by totally differen...
Clicking the first image for full size isn't working, seems to be a link problem there.
Gothenburg, Sweden.
I've heard about people doing this for sports events they care about - e.g. betting against their national team qualifying for the soccer World Cup.
While I don't disagree that it can be valuable to say that there's something wrong with a theory, it should be noted that at least for factual matters, if you can't provide an alternative explanation then your criticism isn't actually that strong. The probability of a hypothesis being the true explanation for an observation is the fraction its probability makes up of the total probability of that observation (summing over all competing hypothesis, weighed by their respective likelihoods). If you can't move in with another hypothesis to steal some probability clay from the first hypothesis (by providing likelihood values that better predict the observations), that first hypothesis is not going to take a hit.
Has anyone read, and could comment on, Scientific Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach by philosophers Howson and Urbach? To me it appears to be the major work on Bayes from within mainstream philosophy of science, but reviews are mixed and I can't really get a feel for its quality and whether it's worth reading.
Tabloid 100% gold. Hanson slayed me.
Where on Earth have you been for the last couple of days? : ] Hiding in a Croatian cave?
That being said, we currently have no reason to believe that this interbreeding had any phenotypic effects on the human lineage.
If we're looking to find out if humans vary significantly in their psychological phenotypes, why not compare these phenotypes directly rather than appealing to highly shaky evolutionary speculations about genotypes?
(Sure, environmental variation also contributes to phenotypic variation, but we have no reason to believe that the current level of human psychological variation is masked by environmental factors - especially since right now environmental variation is probably at its peak in human history)
Does anyone know a popular science book about, how should I put it, statistical patterns and distributions in the universe. Like, what kind of things follow normal distributions and why, why do power laws emerge everywhere, why scale-free networks all over the place, etc. etc.
Causality in Statistics Education Award: http://www.amstat.org/education/causalityprize/
via http://normaldeviate.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/causality-prize/