As you might know, fractal structures appear in a variety of natural situations and have found many technical applications (see Wikipedia for more information and examples). In this short article I want to ask the question, whether it makes sense to structure various activities according to a 'fractal timetable'? Cleaning...
Introduction When people on LW want to explain a bias, they often turn to Evolutionary psychology. For example, Lukeprog writes > Human reasoning is subject to a long list of biases. Why did we evolve such faulty thinking processes? Aren't false beliefs bad for survival and reproduction? I think that...
As you might know, fractal structures appear in a variety of natural situations and have found many technical applications (see Wikipedia for more information and examples). In this short article I want to ask the question, whether it makes sense to structure various activities according to a 'fractal timetable'?
When you have to clean a flat or a house you probably you have seen a list like this before. There are some tasks that one needs to do every day, others come along only once a week or once a month. Aside from those main cleaning tasks, there will be many small things you do several times during a day, like throwing something into... (read 368 more words →)
So what would be your other example of halo effect?
I haven't said that I have other examples of the halo effect, but examples of other biases which can also be explained by properties of how the brain processes sense inputs.
This is the flip side of the arguments I think you're alluding to, that the faulty thinking was actually beneficial in the EEA.
Yes. Some people I know, observe fact X about human behaviour and then conclude that it had to be beneficial for survival, for otherwise evolution would have eradicated X.
I do think we're getting sidetracked by your halo effect example, though -- it might be useful to give three or four examples to avoid this (although if each one has a different explanation, that might substantially increase the effort of presenting your idea).
My original plan was to give several examples of biases with different explanations, but since this is my first attempt to do something productive on LW, I decided to write a short article and get some feedback first. So, thanks for your suggestions!
I think you are right that there don't have to be collisions (in practice) if the representation space is big enough and has sufficient high dimension. On the other hand there is a metric aspect involved in the way the brain maps its data, which is not present in hash code (as far as I know). This reduces the effective dimension of the brain dramatically and I would guess that it is nowhere near 128 (as in your hash example) for the properties 'good looking', 'honest', etc. It would be an interesting research project to find out.
I think that the cultural aspect you mention might play a significant role. As I wrote in... (read more)
I am still reading through the older posts on LW and haven't seen CDT ot TDT yet (or haven't recognized it), but when I do, I will reread your comment and will hopefully understand how the second part of the comment is connected to the first...
Thanks for the feedback!
The reference to linear algebra should only show, that there have to be states which are mapped to similar representations, even if we don't know a priory which ones will be correlated.
But if we now look closer at the structure of the brain as a neural network and the learning mechanisms involved, then I think that we could expect positive concepts to be correlated by cross activation, as you explained.
The point of the article is not to come up with a perfect explanation for how the halo effect is actually caused, but to show that there doesn't have to be an evolutionary reason for it to evolve, besides the 'obvious' one that pwno mentions in his comment.
When people on LW want to explain a bias, they often turn to Evolutionary psychology. For example, Lukeprog writes
Human reasoning is subject to a long list of biases. Why did we evolve such faulty thinking processes? Aren't false beliefs bad for survival and reproduction?
I think that ''evolved faulty thinking processes'' is the wrong way to look at it and I will argue that some biases are the consequence of structural properties of the brain, which 'cannot' be affected by evolution.
I want to introduce a simple model, which relates the halo effect to a structural property of the brain. My hope is that this approach will be useful to... (read 359 more words →)
And letters are nothing more than ink. How can consciousness arise from mere neurons ? The same way that the meaning of a text can arise from mere letters.
I am not sure if this is a good analogy. The meaning of text is usually not hidden somewhere in the letters. Most of it is in the brain of the writer/reader. (But I agree that some meaning can be read out from a text without much previous knowledge.)
While I agree with your comment, I have an observation to make. While driving a car, I found it quite useful to consider the car as an extended part of my body. The same is true for spoons, knives and forks while eating.
Hi,
I was thinking quite a lot for myself about topics like
and after discovering LW some days ago I have tried to compare my "results" to the posts here. It was interesting to see that many ideas I had so far were also "discovered" by other people but I was also a little bit proud that I have got so far on my own. Probably this is the right place for me to start reading :-).
I am an Atheist, of course, but cannot claim many other standard labels as mine. Probably "a human being with a desire... (read more)
I am not sure, whether we actually have a disagreement here. Spaced repetition is a special facet of the idea that I outline in this article and I am currently experimenting with it exactly for the reason to test my "theory" above.