[cross-posted from: http://garybasin.com/reason-as-attentional-prosthesis/] What are we doing when thinking, or reasoning? Often, thinking is goal-directed. There is some outcome we are trying to achieve or problem we are trying to solve. In hindsight, answers often seem obvious. “Why didn’t I think of that?” For the most interesting problems, there is...
Original post at http://garybasin.com/thinking-toys/ My mind seems to mostly act as an emotional problem-solving machine. It's trying to find paths to get to pleasure and avoid pain. Of course, this often requires solving abstract problems, as well. Watching myself, and others, identify and solve problems suggests the existence of underlying...
I would call it a tie:
To play devil's advocate, would you have said the same thing about computers and the internet (improving productivity in a lot of things)? If so, would you expect it to impact GDP? Because it's not clear that it did. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?width=880&height=440&id=RTFPNAUSA632NRUG
Stock market feels like one of the last places that modern AI will have a huge impact on (beyond the basics that are already in use). All the breakthroughs seems to be coming in the form of models which are really bad at non-stationarity and extremely high noise. Could be interesting to build a stack of LLMs that ingests 10K's and macro econ data and tries to infer causal models, but I'm skeptical it'll be better than humans at this for a long while. I think you're safe for now :)
[cross-posted from: http://garybasin.com/reason-as-attentional-prosthesis/]
What are we doing when thinking, or reasoning?
Often, thinking is goal-directed. There is some outcome we are trying to achieve or problem we are trying to solve. In hindsight, answers often seem obvious. “Why didn’t I think of that?” For the most interesting problems, there is no formula or system that will lead to an optimal solution. The hard part becomes framing the problem. How do we do that? I have some thoughts on the role of attention.
But first, pigeons! In an experiment, pigeons are rewarded for pecking a toy banana hanging from the ceiling of their enclosure, but only while standing on a box placed below it.... (read 504 more words →)
Those titles should link to explanations, or did you mean something more specific?
I'm working towards more content, of course. I wasn't aware CFAR workbook was public and they wanted their stuff shared more broadly, in which case I will definitely add those.
Original post at http://garybasin.com/thinking-toys/
My mind seems to mostly act as an emotional problem-solving machine. It's trying to find paths to get to pleasure and avoid pain. Of course, this often requires solving abstract problems, as well. Watching myself, and others, identify and solve problems suggests the existence of underlying patterns. There seem to be recurring strategies. Some simple and some compound. Some that an individual may use almost every time and others that rarely come up. There are strategies that seem obvious to one person and remain unheard of to others. Sometimes we deploy these strategies consciously but often they seem to run unconsciously.
I call these strategies Thinking Toys. Little tricks we can
Tl;dr markets are hard to beat, but it's not impossible. Case in point, there is probably alpha in understanding AI's impact but it's very hard to time and finance the associated bets