Most Interesting Sections of Year in Ideas

I've read this for three years now and it's perennially my favorite "best of" list, surpassing any list of books, video games, or movies. Here is the 2009 edition. These were the best ones:

• cognitive illiberalism,
  
• (the) cul de sac ban (no safer and causes more traffic congestion),
• drunken ultimatums,
  
• forensic polling analysis (by this point it should be common knowledge that if you want to create false numbers, use a random number generator),
  
• guilty robots,
  
• killer earth (agree that we do not want to go "back to nature"!),
  
• lithium in the water supply,
  
• man made greenery (let's celebrate the diversity of approaches to geoengineering!),
  
• (the) myth of the deficient older employee,
• printable batteries (small but efficient batteries--which this is a step towards--will be the biggest invention of the next 20 years),
  
• random promotions,
  
• resomation,
  
• (the) sound cannon, and
  
• weapons of mosquito destruction

The best one overall is "massively collaborative mathematics." Basically, some mathematician posted a tough math theorem on his blog and, 1000+ comments later, it was proven. Crowdsourcing needs to become the name of the game in every scientific endeavor. There's too many smart, educated people out there wasting their time with nothing better to do. More on this to come.

What's Your Probability of 2.5° C Warming?

Phil at Statistical Modeling asks everyone to get a little bit more quantitative about their estimates of global warming. He suggests:

Maybe we should start characterizing people by a single number... What probability do you assign to the following statement: increasing the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration above 800 ppm will change the global average surface temperature by more than 2.5 degrees C (4.5 F)? This would imply a climate sensitivity somewhat below the extreme low end of what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is credible... I've chosen 800ppm, which is a bit less than triple the pre-industrial level. It's likely that we're going to zoom right past 800ppm, too.

His number is 90%. Unfortunately the question is slightly incomplete because he doesn't include a deadline. Here are a few possibilities for the deadline: 1 year after we pass 800 ppm, 10 years after we pass 800 ppm, or 30 years after we pass 800 ppm. This would be a "last chance" deadline. Meaning, if the global average temperature increased by more than 2.5° C before then, that would count too. The global average temperature in 2008 was 14.3° C according to the UK's Met; a Google search of this took way too long to find the answer to such a simple question due to the hackery and charts of "temperature anamolies."

Hmm... so let's take the 10 years past 800 ppm deadline for checking to see if global temps have risen. Here's my probability, then: 20%. This is poorly calibrated, but I don't like the idea of either going higher or lower, so I'm sticking with it. Note also that I still favor higher prices for fossil fuels via a revenue-neutral carbon tax. I don't support subsidies, cap-and-trade, or other measures that epitomize the tryanny of the minority over the majority. In an ideal world, we would vote on values, but bet on these kinds of beliefs.

One Explanation of the Flynn Effect

From the NYT's bits blog:

[T]he average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day... This doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day — it means that 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period. That information comes through various channels, including the television, radio, the Web, text messages and video games... [O]n average, most Americans consume 11.8 hours of information a day... Overall, from 1980 to 2008, the number of bytes we consume has increased 6 percent each year, the researchers said, adding up to a 350 percent increase over 28 years.

Given that most of us are only awake for 16-18 hours a day, it is hard to imagine adding more than 4-6 hours more of bit consumption per day. There have been recent suggestions that memories can be strengthened during sleep, but the effect sizes in that procedure are modest--an improvement in object placement accuracy from a deviation of 1.23 +/- 0.10 cm without the sound cues during sleep to 1.07 +/- 0.08 cm with them.

So, eventually the only way to increase our overall bit consumption will be to improve in its efficiency. And increasing efficiency of bit consumption probably means finding some method more efficient than reading. Of course, that's assuming that increasing overall bit consumption is a goal for many of us. And a preference utilitarian who looked at this massive increase in consumption would have to assume that it is. Actions speak louder than words.

(HT to Larry for the story)

Unorthodox RSS Feeds I've Been Reading

The RSS invasion is upon us. More and more people are realizing every day that it doesn't make sense to visit any other websites when you can read it all from the comfort of your feed reader. One pervasive but misguided assumption remains that your only option for RSS subscriptions comes in the form of blogs. Oh no, my friend. You are mistaken.

In the interest of reversing this myth, here are my four favorite RSS feeds from non-blog sources:

• Ben Casnocha's del.icio.us feed. Many of his astute blog posts come from here first, so you will feel smart and informed when you already know what he's talking about.
  
• Cleaveland Clinic Journal of Medicine PubMed feed. Most of these are highly specific and the feed doesn't update much, but every now and then there is a legitimate must-read, like this one about public data reporting at hospitals. Very quant, plus all of the articles are free.
  
• Colin Marshall's twitter feed. As I said in my interview with Colin, it's possible that he's a better tweeter than blogger, and that's saying something. I especially like when he defines a previously ambiguous word. For example, "Procrastination: the temporary displacement of tasks at which it is possible to fail with tasks at which it is not possible to fail."
• Robin Hanson's LessWrong comment feed. This one is tricky because he is replying to someone else's writing and context is sometimes hard to pick up. But for OB fans it's a must, and there are some money quotes, like, "Conversation is a highly evolved system and random changes are usually for the worse."

Let me know if you know of any good unorthodox RSS feeds.

How to Read Books

Non-classical Top 1000 Amazon Reviewer Irfan Alvi reviews Rong Fan's How We Read here and offers bullet points of the best advice he found from the book. In order to further condense the knowledge, here are what I consider the key points from his review of the book I haven't yet read:

3. Since time is limited, choose books very carefully. Books of intermediate size, written by a single expert author, are often best. Use resources like Amazon to help find suitable books (since you're reading this review, you already know that).

6. Mastering the general principles of a subject is more important than remembering details, so read accordingly. For this purpose, read introductory chapters and paragraphs very carefully.

9. Take regular breaks during your reading sessions, even if you'd rather push on. Allow longer reading sessions for more complex topics.

12. Don't bother with speed-reading. Read at the proper pace to learn well, with slower usually being better.

21. Recognize that reading must be balanced with hands-on experience. Reading informs experience so that more is gained from experience, but reading is never a substitute for experience. For that matter, balance reading and experience with other aspects of your life, including rest and recreation. In other words, don't become a bookworm.

I just happened upon Irfan's reviews of books, and they're awesome--he clearly knows how to read books quite well himself. Here he reviews Secrets of a Buccanner-Scholar (and offers a defence of academia), here he reviews How Doctors Think (huge uncertainty means medicine is not a science), and here he reviews Creativity in Science, which is the best book I read all year.

Here he reviews Quantum Enigma and trashes it (correctly, from my opinion on QM and consciousness), but still gives it three stars! This indicates that you need to be fairly positive about a book even when you don't like it to get to the top 1000 reviewers. And it is more evidence for why Amazon needs to go to a ten star system--the five stars just aren't enough to fully indicate one's opinion.

Six Thoughts From Maine

1) In our car ride on the way up to Maine from school the convo was lively, but on the way back it was dead. This makes sense in terms of excitedness--people were looking forward to seeing family and relaxing over break but not to returning to the humdrum of school work. When people are excited they will talk more. This is helpful to watch for if you're trying to gauge the atmosphere in a room.

2) If you go to a barn party, bring a jacket because the insulation will be awful.

3) If you're in a bad mood one of the worst things that can happen is to be made fun of in front of a group of people. When this happens to you, the ones you will be most annoyed with are not those who actually are saying the joke but the others around who are "merely" laughing. As if they were innocent!

4) Are the lyrics to Phoenix's song 1901 "fall in" or "fold it" during the chorus? The first Google results give are mixed, indicating a lively debate. The real answer is "ballin'." Listen for yourself; they couldn't be singing anything else. The word is out of place but the band seems hipster enough to pull it off.

5) Hypothesis: Cops don't want to pull anyone over when it's raining.

6) Eastwood's Changeling (2008, #226) is a classic example of how it doesn't matter to the state whether the child has a biological relationship to the parent but it usually matters a great deal to the parent. The LAPD says, "Mrs. Collins, he has nowhere else to go." Mrs. Collins says, "Fuck them, and the horse they came in on." Thus it is an especially relevant movie for the recent push for mandatory paternity testing, as it represents an example of state-sponsored cuckoldry from the female perspective instead of the more typical male perspective.

(Thanks to Max, Brian, and Nick for stimulating conversations about these)

Personal vs Objective Rating Systems

Colin Marshall muses:

Me brains cannot compute the concept that how much I liked a film — or a book, or an album, or whatever — and how good it "really is" could be two distinct values. How much do I like Maborosi? I find it pretty much perfect. But how good is it? Well, pretty much perfect. That's why I called it that three sentences ago.

This is something I grapple with too. In my opinion the most accurate rating of a movie is the like-minded crowd's opinion, the closest approximation of which can currently be found on imdb. But I also rate movies with my own scores, which shouldn't be necessary if imdb's are the true ratings.

Here is my working definition. Imdb's scores are still the current accurate rating of how good a movie is. When somebody asks me whether a movie I have seen is good, I don't tell them my personal opinion because I recognize that I am probably biased. I tell them its score on imdb.

However, I am also willing to admit that imdb's ratings are not perfect--they are just currently the best. So I will speculate on which movies are underrated / overrated on imdb. And to do that, I rely on my own opinion. I define the most overrated movies by the ones that have the greatest negative deviation between my own score and imdb's score. By that metric, currently Crash, Slumdog Millionaire, The Apartment, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Escape, The Hangover, Gran Torino, and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) are the most overrated movies ever.

In Praise of Appreciative Thinking

In my psychology seminar last week my group and I presented three computational models for how attention could lead to consciousness. Based on the papers we assigned, one of them had strong support from the data (Taylor's CODAM), one of them had medium data-based support (Wang's LEABRA, small amount of data given via Figure 3 here), and one had little to no support from data (Cavanna's figure 1 here, the "ascending reticular activating system"). We asked the thirteen other students to rank the models at the beginning of the class, with 1 being the best. Taylor's model was ranked last, with an average rank of 2.21, Wang's was second best, with an average rank of 2.07, and Cavanna's was considered the best, with an average rank of 1.71. So, there was an inverse relationship between the amount of data presented for a model and how much people preferred it.

This is one example, but it's indicative of a larger trend I've noticed throughout my classes at Vassar. I notice it in myself, too, but it's something I'm trying to work against. It's that all the students here are so critical of every study or claim that they hear or read, and are unwilling to be convinced by more data. You can't blame them. It's probably what everyone has told them to do their whole lives: be critical of everything you read, don't trust statistics, etc. The better advice would be to simply try to gauge the veracity and utility of any individual claim based on the data you are given and your prior beliefs about the possible bias of the data source.

As compared to the theoretically optimal equilibrium of critical versus appreciative thinking, our marketplace of ideas has swung much too far towards the critical side. If people are critical of every new idea they encounter, all that will do is bias them towards favoring the status quo or the null hypothesis. I blame the market failure on our social norms: being critical is too often viewed as automatically synonymous with correct. So let's change those social norms... One blog reader at a time.

Job Security as Motivation

"Eight, Bob. So that means that when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired." - Peter Gibbons, Office Space

So much of the behavior of people in various professions makes more sense once you assume that their goal is not to do succeed, but simply to keep their job. For example,

• Football coaches don't want to win games, they just want to keep their jobs. So, they don't take as many risks (i.e., going for it on fourth down) as they should. Rationally, they are afraid of the kind of backlash that Belicheck is getting right now for his correct decision to go for it.
  
• Referees don't care about actually being unbiased, they just want to appear unbiased, so that they can keep their jobs. This explains some of their odd behaviors.
• Politicians pander to the desires of the median voter not because they want to represent the people's best interests because they want to get re-elected, gain more power, and keep their jobs.
  
• Professors, especially untenured ones, don't really care if their students learn much, they just want to get good student ratings at the end of the semester. This way they will do better when it comes to evaluation time, which lowers the probability that they will lose their job.

People who work for themselves shouldn't have this problem, but most do because they will have to pitch their products to consumers who will often judge them on how conventional they are. Perhaps the only ones in society that we can trust to actually say what they think are old people.

Can you think of any other examples?

The Fruits of Tinkering With Nature

Michael Chorost has an interesting article on the short history of optogenetics. In it he describes the work of Peter Hegemann, a biologist who studied the green algae in the 1990's that led to the discovery of the light-gated ion channel, channelrhodopsin. As Chorost describes it,

Under a microscope, the cell looks like a little football with a tail. When the organism is exposed to light, its tail wags madly, moving the cell forward.... This was good, solid cell research. Fascinating little machines! But completely useless fascinating little machines. It wasn’t until the end of the decade that scientists figured out how they might be put to use.

The research that led to optogenetics is a good example of how hard it is to tell whether or not a given line of inquiry will be "useful." Researchers can't know which experiments will be useful with a high degree of certainty prior to their execution. If they did, there would be no reason to even run them. Restricting research to only a "useful" subset takes away scientist's creativity in behavioral experiments, without which, progress will inevitably slow down.

Interview with Cormac McCarthy

He doesn't give many. You can find this one here, but I'll entice you with a few of the choice quotes. On travel:

I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

On less demanding forms of writing:

I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

On the future of cultural studies:

Well, I don't know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they're really good. And there's just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that's the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there's going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don't care whether it's art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don't think so.

Nine EYRGBHTV thoughts

The recent diavlog between Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robert Greene, found here, was a pleasure to watch. Both of them are intellectual and Greene is actually more willing than Eliezer to consider his own biases when prefacing a statement, which is impressive. I actually wish the subject matter had been slightly different, and Eliezer went off a little bit too much of a tangent while discussing his views on censorship in online communities, but overall their interaction was great. Here are my thoughts:

1) Greene says that as we have moved through history power has become more and more splintered. Now there is an opportunity for anyone to have power and affect the world, such that the ethos around stoicism and meekness that previously dominated the world have become less relevant.

2) Greene would rather have power than happiness, because happiness is fleeting and unremitting. True happiness comes only from continuing to seek victory in the various battles in life. Having power without wanting to act on it is in his conception a sin. His philosophy is a complete acceptance of the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation and of the pursuit of flow as the only appropriate response to an uncertain world. In many ways it stands in stark opposition to Buddhism. It is nice to see this reasonable position explicated sincerely and consistently.

3) The 50th law is all about how you must not be afraid to lose what you have. In Colin Marshall's terms, you must cultivate risk tolerance. Eliezer said that the best piece of advice he got from the book is "always attack before you're ready," because people often never feel that they are ready to accomplish their goals. Like Fifty, you must have the risk tolerance to be willing to abandon your sense of security.

4) Greene considers himself a detective, searching for the great story that he has in his mind. He's persistent and is willing to put in time to get what he wants. Eliezer wishes there was a secret to his success, but of course there isn't! TINSTAAFL. This is kind of like when people ask for advice in school or on tests. The fact that you're asking is a good sign, but of course you already know the answer. Hard work. As happened to Greene, it is possible to come to enjoy this work. It can be addictive.

5) Eliezer states that his life is focused on the truth, but recognizes that there are other people out there with other goals, for example people interested in stories or in competition of some form. Greene is at first unwilling to answer what precisely his goal in life is, but later on he explains that his life is all about reality, accepting it and embracing it face on. Neither of them are interested in delusions from the mainstream media or in pretty lies. This seems to be a common trait in interesting thinkers.

6) With respect to censorship, Eliezer recognizes that it's tough to keep a lively debate without being willing to tolerate a few stupid comments now and then, but if you allow too many of them then you will allow too many trolls to seep in to your community. Greene says that the art of being a leader is having these kind of feelings or gut instincts and being willing to act on them.

7) Eliezer says that the basic ability to distinguish between good arguments and bad arguments is a key skill of rationality. Sometimes I think that he is too willing to broaden his core tenets of rationality too wide, and that he should maybe refer to the twelve virtues more often, which remains in my opinion his best work and most concise mission statement.

8) Eliezer says, "The difference between technical problems and political problems is that technical problems are solvable." Amen. He then argues that the way to solve political problems is to turn political problems into technical problems. I think that in the interest of the division of labor the best approach to political problems for the technically-minded is simply to avoid them.

9) Eliezer notes that Greene can get both the "good" audience and the "evil" audience by presenting the laws of power without actually saying that he believes in them or not. Greene says that he is "sincere" about what he writes but then backtracks and says that he exaggerates at times and is tongue-in-cheek at other times. It is hard to say what Greene "really" thinks, but we do get one clue from this dialogue: Greene at one point says "sorry" when he and Eliezer both say something at the same time. Surely he knows that apologizing for no good reason is, for better or worse, an indication of weakness. What this small incident tells me is that, although he may not be willing to admit it, Greene is ultimately an observer into the world of power, much like Machiavelli. Instead of respecting him less, this actually makes me respect him more, as a pure intellectual. There is value in telling it how it is without necessarily acting upon such a worldview oneself.

Variation in Sports Highlights

Now that the NBA season has started and I have easy access to cable, I've been watching some Sportscenter. I love the highlights, but there's so little suspense, because basically you know that every shot they show is going to go in. They should throw in some missed shots, like 10% of the time, just so that the viewers are still a little bit on their toes.

No Big Deal, Just the "Name Ease" Effect

A study from Psychological Science:

We demonstrate that merely naming a research finding elicits feelings of ease (a "name-ease" effect). These feelings of ease can reduce or enhance the finding's perceived importance depending on whether people are making inferences about how understandable or how memorable the finding is. When people assess their understanding of a finding, feelings of ease reduce the finding's perceived importance. This is because people usually invest effort to understand important information but also mistakenly infer the reverse—namely, that information that requires effort to be understood is important. In contrast, when people assess the memorability of a finding, feelings of ease increase the finding's perceived importance. Because people usually recall important information easily, in this case they equate ease with importance.

Other parts that increase feelings of ease in understanding some phenomenon is if the visual features are clear, the vocab is simple, and the word is easy to pronounce.

Of the blogs I read, MR has the most "messy" visual look to it--a small header, an awkwardly large center section and cluttered sidebars with content asymmetrically distributed. Maybe this keeps people on their toes when they are reading it. Perhaps because it is more of a challenge it makes it more fun for people who self-select as smart enough to read it.