Power To The Wiki People

While reading Robert Kurzban's (mostly good) book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, I came across a fragment of a sentence which annoyed me.

Kurzban is in the midst of explaining a computer science topic when he writes, "according to Wikipedia, which I am usually hesitant to use, but will for this purpose," and then block quotes, starting with "creating a domain-specific language...".

As it turns out, Wikipedia is written by people. Rp, a Dutch software developer, added this sentence on April 24, 2008. The only difference between Rp's change and the current version is a superfluous "of course" which was removed on May 12, 2008. This is not hard to decipher based on a gander at the page's revision history. It took me about four minutes.

Listen, I recognize that Wikipedia is low status, which is why Kurzban had to express his hesitation to use it. But we all know how Wikipedia works now. People edit it. You aren't constrained to merely cite "Wikipedia", you can look back and see exactly which user wrote that passage first, and cite that user.

Some of my clever readers are probably already mentally defending the status quo by saying that some sentences or portions of articles have been edited so many times that it would be difficult to say who wrote them.

Yes, in very rare cases like The Iraq War this is the case, but it happens much less often than you'd expect. The vast majority of articles are edited in chunks of sentences, paragraphs, or sections, and these chunks are eminently traceable.

Perhaps the best thing about such a shift in citation norms is that it would help incentivize people to edit Wikipedia. If you think this is not an issue, you are sorely mistaken.

Consider the page on epigenetics. Inspired in part by Razib's manifesto about the growing importance of this topic, I have subscribed via RSS to the changes made to the page since January. What I expected were the vitriolic edit wars deserving of such an unfolding, important topic.

But I've seen nothing of the sort. In fact the page hasn't changed significantly since Team Cytokine Storm made some edits last November. In the meantime, how many words have been typed about epigenetics for publication elsewhere?

For example, in the past two months, there have been at least four academic reviews on topics in epigenetics (see here, here, here, and here). See for yourself--here is a pubmed search for "epigenetics review."

How many people will read these reviews? Do you think that more will read those reviews than will read the Wikipedia page? Is this a healthy division of labor?

nobody does homework on saturdays

Bottom Line: When quoting or referencing an article hosted on Wikipedia, cite the major user(s) that contributed, instead of just "Wikipedia."

Punishing Praise

[B]ecause we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.

That's Daniel Kahneman, more here. Regression to the mean will occur in situations that involve at least some luck, which is to say, almost everywhere.

Luck seems especially inevitable once we consider that spontaneous fluctuations in your brain's dynamic states (as seen in fMRI BOLD responses) can help account for trial-to-trial variability in behavior.

One study found that the amount of pain that people feel following laser stimulation (equivalent to a pinprick) can be predicted (beyond 5% chance) based on baseline, spontaneous activity in certain brain regions three seconds before the stimulation. (pubmed, PNAS)

Another study found that 74% of the within-participant variability in a button press force task could be attributed to ongoing fluctuations in neural activity. (pubmed)

In light of the fact that seemingly uncontrollable neural fluctuations play such an important role in behavior on any given attempt, punishing people for poor performance on small sample sizes seems particularly pernicious.

But then again, most punishment is probably not really intended to improve future performance, but rather to improve the mood and status of the punisher. 

Are We More Like Chimps Or Bonobos?

In Sex at Dawn, Ryan and Jethá argue that humans are more like bonobos. This is, in part, because we both 1) employ diverse sex positions, 2) have sex for non-reproductive ends, and 3) gaze into each other's eyes during sex (when this jives with #1).

In his review (pdf, OA), Ryan Ellsworth disputes their thesis and makes the case for the chimp model. He emphasizes that humans and chimps (but not bonobos) share "sex-based hierarchies, sex-biased cooperation and coalitions, and intergroup hostility."

I've only skimmed Sex at Dawn, but I find Ellsworth's review much more persuasive. I'm happy being chimp-like.

(photo credit to patries71)

Seven Thoughts On Rules And Willpower

1) John Tierney discusses ego depletion, the idea that willpower is an (unconsciously) expendable resource. He relates it to trade-offs: 

Once you’re mentally depleted, you become reluctant to make trade-offs, which involve a particularly advanced and taxing form of decision making.... To compromise is a complex human ability and therefore one of the first to decline when willpower is depleted. You become what researchers call a cognitive miser, hoarding your energy. If you’re shopping, you’re liable to look at only one dimension, like price: just give me the cheapest.

This is why I think learning about trade-offs can be so useful. The less novel a decision is, the less resources it should use up. The more general your schemas are, the more easily you'll adapt. 

2) How do people typically deal with ego depletion? Apparently,

[E]ventually [you] look for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences.... The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. 

I think Tierney is a bit off here, as he neglects a crucial strategy: devising rules. "No coffee after two, no liquor before five." "Always take the middle option." Even, much more perniciously, statistical discrimination. For better or worse, we advance cognitively by thinking less. 

3) Marketers know that we use rules, and they (wisely) use our rules against us. This makes rarer rules more valuable (holding effectiveness equal), as they will be less exploitable. 

4) Before you go off devising your own un-gameable rule system, recognize that there are trade-offs to thinking about topics like this. It might be a better use of your time to just go along with most of the status quo rules and accept that you'll sacrifice some small amount of money to savvy marketers. As Ice T says, it's not about being mad at everything, it's about being really mad at the right things.

5) If willpower is a muscle, can you train it? Yes, self-control training can improve one's willpower to complete unrelated tasks. For example, in one study, maintaining better posture for two weeks (and keeping a diary about it) significantly improved hand-grip persistance (link, pdf). More examples here. 

6) As Tierney's article discusses, decision fatigue often helps trap people in poverty. But since willpower is apparently like a muscle, shouldn't exercising decision circuits improve willpower enough over time to escape the trap? 

7) I expect that the confound with the above is an interaction with stress. Making self-control decisions when you feel comfortable and empowered increases your set "willpower" level. But the emotionally stable undergraduates studied are not very representative of the population at large. When people must make decisions under psychological duress, it might instead condition a sort of "decision avoidance." Kind of like how overtraining your muscles can actually decrease strength.

Addendum 8/25: See Robert Kurzban's astute criticisms of this model (HT Brian Potter).  

The Motion Mystery

Even to eminent thinkers, an explanation for motion was seemingly unknowable near the turn of the 20th century.

For example, in the late 19th century Thomas Huxley said that "existence, motion, and law-abiding operation in nature are more stupendous miracles than any recounted by the mythologies...".

Santiago Ramón y Cajal went further in the early 20th century, writing, "there is no doubt that the human mind is fundamentally incapable of solving these formidable problems (the origin of life, nature of matter, origin of movement, and appearance of consciousness)."

It turns out that in the early 21st century we now have a pretty good answer to this mystery. That answer comes in the form of molecular machines.

As Steven Pinker explains, "the stuff of life turned out to be not a quivering, glowing, wondrous gel but a contraption of tiny jigs, springs, hinges, rods, sheets, magnets, zippers, and trapdoors...".

One example of such a machine is ATP synthase, which literally works like a rotor:

Now, molecular machines don't explain why atoms themselves move (you'd need to go deeper for that), but their existence certainly does explain why you can move in the absence of an outside force and a rock cannot.

If we don't kill ourselves (from, e.g., an environmental disaster or nuclear war) first, we will to continue to solve puzzles that some of us currently consider intractable mysteries.

And in the meantime, we should cultivate some doubt in our doubt of the potential of science.

Searching For The Imdb Of Books, Part II

As watching imdb's top 250 most highly rated movies has proven to be such a smashing success, I have long yearned to find (and fleetingly, to develop) a similarly authoritative list for fiction books. The keys for a good list are: 1) a large sample size, 2) shrinkage estimation of ratings to the average, 3) a continuous scale (the more levels, the better, but yes we'll often have to settle for five stars), 4) defenses against gaming, and 5) a wide index of titles. To the best of my knowledge no site fulfills all of these requirements. These are the current contenders:

Amazon Reviews: Upside: They have a huge incentive to index all available books and are proficient at combining ratings across different editions of the same text. They also have a useful "was this review helpful to you?" tool which could eventually be employed to rate the raters and thus weight the overall ratings. Downsides: Their insistence on showing the average rating in half-star increments (typically 5, 4.5, 4, or 3.5) means that it involves manual calculation to distinguish between the two radically different scores of 4.24 and 3.76. I also often don't trust the resistance of their ratings to gaming. But most damningly, there is simply no attempt to create a good list of the most highly rated fiction books. Filtering by "highest average rating" in "literature and fiction", their #7 best fiction book of all time is currently Jim Gorant's The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption, which is probably a fine book, but I think the author would be insulted to hear that it was considered fiction, and I think more than three-quarters of the english profs across the country would be insulted to hear it called literature.  

One-Time Votes: By this I refer to ad-hock competitions of various websites which ask users to vote on their favorite books. There are many of these strewn across the web, for example, check out NPR's top 100 science fiction and fantasy books, or Modern Library's top 100 novels. Upside: These tend to get large sample sizes (NPR had >60,000 votes), which makes them more accurate and harder to game. Downside: The process is not iterative and requires manual input to update, so they won't last or scale. More troublingly, many (such as NPR's) only allow the option to select one's favorite books, without voting others down, which unfairly favors books with high variance as opposed to just high average quality. 

Google Books: The site aggregates ratings from elsewhere on the web, including major vendors and online "bookshelves." Upside: Transparent code, takes ratings from diverse sources, and has a clean layout. Downside: Like Amazon, also displays ratings in half-star increments (et tu, google?). But their biggest problem is that different editions of books are stored in different locations and the ratings are not aggregated across editions. See, for instance, the first four results of a search for "pride and prejudice" (here, here, here, and here). Now, even if they did manage to output one total score per novel, it still doesn't seem very google-like to actually curate such a list themselves. But in that case, it wouldn't be hard for someone else to scrape the ratings and convert them into a ranked list. 

Library Thing: Upside: They have scale, with over 10 million ratings, and they already have some pretty cool statistics (check out the most "connected" people--Napolean is #1). They also do have a top 25 books by rating. Downside: They need to split the rankings for non-fiction and fiction. At this point I've given up on searching for a canonical non-fiction ranked list, as those ratings are so context-dependent and world-view driven. And they need to do a better job of categorizing in general. For example, the movie for LoTR:Two Towers, while an awesome movie and in imdb's top 250, should not be among the highest rated 25 books. More importantly, the editors of the site have not implemented a rating system that punishes books with fewer ratings. Instead, books simply need a minimum total of 20 ratings to make the list. This is bothersome, but easily improved, as the editors could simply study and implement the imdb method. 

Good Reads: Upside: As far as I can tell, this is the largest "bookshelf" site with the most user ratings. Huge potential. Downside: They've made no attempt to publish a list of the highest rated books across the site! All I can ask is, what is holding you back, GoodReads editors? Qualms about alienating authors whose works won't make the list? Fears of being labelled imperialistic? These are both hogwash. Our time is scarce and in order to be informed consumers we need to know what the best books are. If you are worried about the arbitrariness of the minimum votes cut-off, then publish multiple lists with different scaling parameters. You will thank me later when the list gets out-of-control traffic. Indeed, a group of passionate GoodReads users recently called for such a list. To this valiant effort I can only say, Viva la Résistance!

Some Now Or More Later In Moth Reproduction

The abstract from a (gated) paper by Nokelainen et al:

[Wood tiger moth males] have two distinct colour morphs: white and yellow. The efficacy of the warning signal of these morphs was tested by offering them to blue tits in the laboratory. Birds hesitated significantly longer to attack yellow than white males. In a field experiment, the survival of the yellow males was also higher than white males. However, mating experiments in the laboratory revealed that yellow males had lower mating success than white males. Our results offer an explanation for the maintenance of polymorphism via trade-off between survival selection and mating success.

Yellow moths are less likely to be attacked because their conspicuous color acts to fend off predators. On the other hand, the authors cannot suggest a clear reason for why white male moths have greater mating success. Whatever the mechanism is, this is a clear example of some now vs more later in evolution.

Bill Simmons' Rating Nihilism

Earlier he claimed, on scarce evidence, that "Rotten Tomatoes scares me as a metric," because "people are idiots," and that "their 'top critics' rating is much more useful."[1]

Now he explains that:

I believe Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player ever, and I can prove it. I believe The Breaks of the Game is the greatest sports book ever, but I can't prove it. Books can't be measured that way — they hit everyone differently, so when we're evaluating them, we can only say, "You can't mention the greatest books (or albums, paintings, TV shows, movies or whatever) without mentioning that one." That's as far as you can go.

I don't get it. He thinks you can sort of rate movies (if you trust only the experts), but you can never rate books except for saying which ones are "among the best"? This is inconsistent.

He's right that there is a key difference between sports and film/writing, although it is not, as he claims, that the latter "hit[s] everyone differently." The difference is that in sports there is a known goal--for the team to win. That means that, at least theoretically, it is possible to tease out which player stats tend to correlate with winning, and then use those stats to evaluate players.

But notice the causality here. We can't evaluate individual players well until we know which stats are generally good indicators that a player will help eir team win. Intuition does not necessarily serve well here, an insight upon which books have been written and careers have been made.

In film/writing there is no such clear objective, and thus the ratings by individuals who have seen/read them must be subjective. So instead of evaluating statistics based on how they correlate with the objective of winning, we must instead evaluate rating systems based on inter-rater reliability. The goal is that if you added more independent ratings by unbiased raters, there should be as small of a deviation as possible between the new and old ratings.

The obvious suggestion is that, if we want better opinions, we need more of them to average out more of our random biases, like how hungry we were when we first saw the movie.

Again, the input must be subjective. But once we've decided upon the best rating system, its output is objectively our best estimate of that film/book's quality. Just as in sports, personal intuition is not the best estimate of quality, and to believe otherwise is simply hubris.

Perhaps it should not surprise us that a key opinion maker is arguing that we should only trust key opinion makers, instead of wide-scale opinion aggregators. But the rest of us don't have to buy it.

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[1]: Rotten Tomatoes ratings have many problems, like the fact that they threshold scores into "good" and "bad" and count the percentage of each instead of employing a continuous scale. But that is a straw man for the claim that open, aggregated movie ratings are bad.

Venkatesh Rao On Protection vs Freedom

Rao explores an application of this trade-off,

[The] industrial age of mass-scale production required paycheck workers. People who had to be trained in industrial-style schooling.... [The] unpublicized purpose was to create a class of people that was far more disciplined and risk-averse than natural for the human species. In other words, a domesticated, comfort-loving species. This was achieved through, quite literally, conditioning. Bells rang for waking up and meal-times. Food appeared magically. Retirement was taken care of. Everything happened like clockwork. 

The first few generations resisted being drafted into the industrial workforce mightily. Not despite their intimate familiarity with risks ranging from bad harvests to disease, hunger and death through poverty, but because of it. Because they understood that with those risks came freedom. After that, the next generations were born and raised in captivity and never had a chance to sample the environments that might have made their wilder risk-taking instincts come out.

I get anxious when I read the word "generation", since it's so hard to define the gradients of separation. But thinking back on the older films I've watched, some of them (e.g. Modern Times) do explore this anxiety of becoming trapped by industry.

If Rao is right, does this indicate that part of the "wiseness" of earlier generations can be encapsulated as a more thorough understanding of trade-offs? 

Why Trade-Offs Matter

A respected friend recently gave me some push-back on this, asking: at the meta-level, what exactly is the value in reading a list of trade-offs? I offer three main reasons, in order of descending plausibility:

1) Interestingness: There are many systems used for classifying stories (e.g., here, here, and here). Now, the classical "decision" is not necessarily more "important" than the story. (And they are often intertwined, as we use our decisions to construct and shift the trajectory of our personal narratives). But still, we might consider a similar sort of interestingness as is found in classifying stories to be a lower bound on the value of a good trade-off classification system.

2) Awareness: Daniel Gilbert writes that "because resources are finite, every sensible thing we do is another sensible thing we don't. Alas, research shows that when human beings make decisions, they tend to focus on what they are getting and forget about what we are forgoing." And apparently teaching people about cost-benefit reasoning really can improve their ability and propensity to use it (see here).

3) Tactics: Reading one of the trade-offs might allow someone to recognize a systematic bias towards one side of that trade-off. In the future, when that person identifies a situation which can be classified into that trade-off, they could try to adjust for their tendency towards bias. This ability to treat individual situations as merely examples of broader trends is crucial for aligning short-term decisions with long-term preferences.

Seeing Status-Seeking Statements Everywhere

I follow humblebrag on twitter, and have often chuckled when the feed re-tweets people boasting about their achievements under the guise of humility. But for some reason (curator) Harris Wittels' article summarizing the most flagrant humblebraggers gives me some anxiety about supporting the feed and evangelizing for it.

Perhaps this is just the paradox of funny things losing their appeal once they are explained, kind of like growing to loathe a song once you come to realize what the lyrics actually mean.

But I think my anxiety runs a bit deeper than that. Consider Wittels' sarcastic take-down of "a very specific type of humblebrag, which is the 'some person did something great and I am very good friends with them' Humblebrag."

There's no doubt that mentioning your association with high-status people and institutions is a great way to seem high-status. But we also have to respect these would-be humblebraggers' plausible deniability, which is that they might really just be happy for their friends.

To me, it is this plausible deniability that distinguishes between having a conversation and bragging. It is typically socially acceptable to mention an accomplishment of yours if it comes up naturally in a thread that you did not initiate.

The logical conclusion of humblebrag and like-minded feeds continuing to rise in popularity is that people will become especially conscious of not bragging. Rather than making people more earnest, I think this will likely make them more mysterious. Since I'd prefer more earnestness, I say to err on the side of bragging, as long as it is real.

Full disclosure: I once sent in a tweet to humblebrag@gmail.com that I thought was a particularly good instance of humblebragging and got no response, so I might just be bitter.

The Cost-Benefit Of Considering The Costs And Benefits

Pierre-Simon Laplace, in my opinion the greatest statistician of all time, wrote eloquently about the cost-benefit principle in his magnus opus:

Consequently we ought always in the conduct of life to make the product of the benefit hoped for, by its probability, at least equal to the similar product relative to the loss. But it is necessary, in order to attain this, to appreciate exactly the advantages, the losses, and their respective probabilities. For this a great accuracy of mind, a delicate judgment, and a great experience in affairs is necessary; it is necessary to know how to guard one's self against prejudices, illusions of fear or hope, and erroneous ideas, ideas of fortune and happiness, with which the majority of people feed their selflove.

Napolean made Laplace the Minister of the Interior in 1799, which he apparently begged for. But he struggled with it, as Napolean recounts,

Laplace was not long in showing himself a worse than average administrator; since his first actions in office we recognized our mistake. Laplace did not consider any question from the right angle: he sought subtleties everywhere, only conceived problems, and finally carried the spirit of "infinitesimals" into the administration.

Let's be careful not to read too much into this one anecdote, as it has an n of one. But still, it's scary that thinking too much is a plausible way for a politician to fail.

In other contexts, this paradox is often called "paralysis by analysis." Insofar as it holds true, what exactly would mediate the trade-off between probabilistic thinking and timely, necessary action?

I think it's secular vs sacred. In the real world you need to make assumptions to actually make things happen, but in the world of intellectuals, as Robin Hanson says, "sharp people... distinguish themselves by not assuming more than needed to keep the conversation going." 

There's no doubt Laplace caught onto this. For example, when asked by Napolean why he didn't mention religion in his tome on probability, he famously replied that he "had no need of that hypothesis."

Again, not sure how far this example generalizes and I'd like to see some systematic data, but this is something to ponder.

Reform "Marco Polo"

Back when I was a lifegaurd, I spectated countless sessions of this game. And what a truly awful game it is. Nobody has fun, and the noise pollution is unabashed.

It's once again summer up here in the northern hemisphere, and as my base tan isn't going to improve itself, I have been putting in work by the pool. So this weekend I had to endure another few games of "Marco Polo."

Here's one easy improvement. Just add a finite limit to the number of times the person who is "it" can call "Marco." Say, 20. This will prevent him or her from spamming that ability and actually introduce some strategy.

More generally, the fact that people play so much Monopoly, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Marco Polo, despite their terribleness, is one of the strongest arguments I can think of against status quo bias.

Trade-Off #20: Quality vs Quantity

If the above photo had two flowers instead of just this one, would each seem slightly less pretty? I don't know for sure (we are talking about aesthetics, after all), but I imagine that most would say yes, because each flower would stand out less from the background and seem less unique. The only exception would be if the flowers somehow contrasted or augmented each other's beauty.

In scarce environments, and aside from such cases where individuals interact to produce effects greater than the sum of their parts, the average quality of an agent's choice will be inversely related to its quantity. Here are some examples:

• People often wonder whether they should spend lots of time and energy pursuing one high-quality mate, or distribute those resources pursuing many lower-quality ones. This is a very general quandary, which many if not all reproductive species face. (see here)
• In searching a text, an increase in the proportion of relevant results to total results typically comes at the cost of missing more of the possible relevant results from the whole search space. (see here)
• For an individual using an online social network, adding more "friends" usually decreases the quality of his relationship with his average connection. (see here)

Trade-offs are found everywhere, even in making a list of the most important and widespread trade-offs. So given the quality vs quantity trade-off that we face in adding more trade-offs to this list, the first draft of the canon will end here.

(photo credit to domesticated diva)