"It Teaches You How To Think"

Many pursuits apparently fall under this purview: programming, economics, history, philosophy, english, physics, math (often called "mental weightlifting"), sociology, classics, engineering, college (esp. the liberal arts), grad school, law school, medical school, business school, multi-level marketing, neuro-linguistic programming, and chess, to name a few.

I'm not at all opposed to this idea and I do favor "raising the sanity waterline." But I'd like to see the claims evaluated more systematically against 1) how beneficial the most common alternative activity that the median person who would otherwise invest in these pursuits would be and 2) how beneficial the most useful alternative activity that the median person who would otherwise invest in these subjects could be.

Surely there is not enough time, given our current healthspans, to invest ourselves in all or even most of these activities. So, for those of us who do value good "thinking" skills, how should we choose?

(The above link anecdotes do not prove much, as it is possible to make nearly any point with a little google-fu, but I have read and heard this sort of statement repeated over and over to the point that it seems to me to be nigh-gospel. If anyone knows of a systematic way to determine whether these are commonly held beliefs, I'm all ears.)

The Best Movies Of 2011

In reverse order: 5) Hugo (not bad, but fragmented and too long, e.g. they could have cut out the station inspector storyline, which relied upon sadly hackneyed deterministic developmental psychology), 4) HP7P2 (technically stunning, but Radcliffe just doesn't do it for me), 3) Drive (I do sympathize with the "too violent" critiques, but I loved the pacing), 2) Warrior (I'm slacking), and 1) A Separation (still not out in my area).

All in all this has been a down year for offerings on the big screen. Currently there are only 5 movies in the top 250, and that number will surely drop as they come out on video and the attrition of time does its damage. I predict only 3 movies from this year will still remain on the list come this time next year. Compare that to 7 for 2009 and 8 for 2010. Hollywood needs to stop investing so heavily in sequels!

Six Thoughts On Rewatchability

1) Let's consider movies that are driven at least in part by plot uncertainty. Watching such a movie a second time is by no means necessarily worse (e.g., many enjoy Inception even more the second time through), but it is different.

For example, watching a movie could really force you to question some of your beliefs and adjust your corresponding models of the world. This could be a very worthwhile experience, yet you could quite reasonably expect that watching the movie again would be unlikely to yield the same reward.

In such a case, it'd be fair to say that the experience you derived from that particular movie (i.e., watching it and thinking about it after) was better than the experience you derived from any other, yet you still might not especially want to watch it a second time.

2) Touching the Void is an example of such a movie, for me. Watching it meant a lot to me and I have thought about it often since doing so, but I wouldn't want to watch it again in the near future.

3) I'd agree that, all things equal, wanting to re-watch a movie is a proxy for how much you got out of it. But I don't think people should have to "prove" that they like a movie by watching it over and over.

4) And further, I don't think the metric is all that good of a proxy. I doubt that there'd be a very high correlation between the movies with the highest average subjective experience rating and the ones that people watch over and over.

This is because I expect people ultimately get the most out of movies that challenge them, and in the moment they are less likely to choose to re-watch such a movie, because of the insidious effects of delay discounting.

5) The counter is that people are too likely to be signaling when they merely say what their favorite movie is, which is why we need some measure of how people actually behave. I do sympathize with this argument.

For example, people tend to watch a lot of comedies, yet there are few comedies in the top 250 and actors in comedies hardly ever win awards. Yes, some of this is because humor does not cut across cultures well. But surely on some level comedies are underrated because liking them does not allow us to as effectively signal our sophistication.

6) The main upside to any behavioral metric is that it slices through the noisy opinion market. The downsides are that we might not be measuring what we think we are, and, to the extent that the metric is widely held, it can lead to costly gaming.

Full Disclosure: When a movie that I have seen more than once is brought up in conversation, I will almost always brag about how many times I have seen it, to collect some street cred.

Disease Olympics

This is my favorite new phrase, which I first heard in this article by Carl Bialik about the ethics of using sometimes tenuous statistics to rouse advocacy for diseases. It is used to refer to situations in which different maladies "compete" against one another for funding, attention, empathy, and the like.

As Otis Brawley points out, in many avenues of biomedical research, disease olympics relies upon a false dichotomy. For example, the antimicrotubule agent estramustine was the first targeted therapy for breast cancer cells, for which it failed. Instead, it became the first (and until recently, only) chemotherapy agent for prostate cancer. Sites like prostatecancerpetition.org, although laudable in some respects, often neglect these crucial second-order effects.

I love this phrase because it articulates what was previously an unconscious anxiety of mine, its meaning is intuitively obvious (i.e., it doesn't propagate "insider baseball"), and it addresses an important issue. One thing I don't like about the phrase is that the word "olympics" is usually capitalized. I worry that this will hurt its memetic staying power, because capitalization often perturbs the flow of a sentence. 

Yawn Contagion Increases With Social Bond

The social bond categories are 0 = strangers, 1 = acquaintances, 2 = friends, and 3 = kin and life partners, more details here. Perhaps this would be a good litmus test for how close you are with someone?

Note that merely reading about yawning is often sufficient to elicit a yawn.

Reference

Norscia I, Palagi E (2011) Yawn Contagion and Empathy in Homo sapiens. PLoS ONE 6(12): e28472. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028472

Time Estimation Correlates With Math Smarts

Details here. For the five tone durations, the mean correlation coefficient was 0.59, and was still significant when the authors adjusted for a measure of general intelligence.

Suddenly "what time is it?" isn't such an innocuous question.

Reference

Kramer P, Bressan P, Grassi M (2011) Time Estimation Predicts Mathematical Intelligence. PLoS ONE 6(12): e28621. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028621

Reviewing Newt's Reviews

That is a histogram of his Amazon book ratings, and here is the source (HT TC). He is quite the pushover, and the above is a classic example of why a good rating system must rate the raters or suffer from bias. What about the content? Two trends stick out:

1) He is highly positive. Among his most common adjectives are "masterful," "remarkable," and "brilliant." Even when he gives a book four stars, he rarely says anything negative, and in fact it's usually not clear why books didn't get the top score of five.

2) He is highly technical. By this I mean that the majority of his sentences are devoted to strict summary rather than analysis. This makes sense, as it is probably smarter for a politician to say something obviously factual (and thus unassailable) than to take a risk.

(A Big) Part Of Science Is Publicizing Your Results

I’ve actually seen this sort of thing—claiming a result while backing off from claiming it, circulating a writeup to a few people but not really circulating it, burying an observation where no one will find it—happen over and over again in science, and its invariable effect is to leave fields in a state of utter confusion. There’s an excellent reason why, 350 years ago, science moved from the “announce-by-cryptogram” model to the model of rapid, widespread dissemination of research. And I’m not willing to forsake the attendant gains in human progress, just because some commenters here seem to enjoy the romantic image of someone stuffing the proof of a theorem into a bottle, throwing the bottle into the ocean, then going back to collecting seashells (or whatever), secure in the knowledge that the history of mathematics will need to be rewritten once the bottle washes up on some distant beach a thousand years later. Sorry, not how it works in this civilization.

That is yet more interestingness by Scott Aaronson in the comments of his blog. There is a thin line here, no doubt, as too much marketing and not enough meat is anathema to progress. But yes, in order for our results to be useful, we must attempt to ensure that they are heard by people who can use them. One way to do this is to split disparate ideas into separate, shorter papers, even though that practice is sometimes disparaged.

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Of the well-subscribed to bloggers I read, Aaronson is one of the few who consistently responds to commenters. He also seems to have grown quite tired of his commenters, as he has threatened to shut down his blog more than once. Perhaps long-lasting success in the blogosphere selects for people who do not respond to comments. 

What Does "Statistical" Mean To You?

What exactly do [the authors] mean by a quantum state being “statistically interpretable”?... Basically, [the authors] call something “statistical” if two people, who live in the same universe but have different information, could rationally disagree about it.... As for what “rational” means, all we’ll need to know is that a rational person can never assign a probability of 0 to something that will actually happen. 

To illustrate, suppose a coin is flipped, and you (but not I) get a tip from a reliable source that the coin probably landed heads. Then you and I will describe the coin using different probability distributions, but neither of us will be “wrong” or “irrational”, given the information we have.

That's Scott Aaronson discussing a paper about the nature of quantum states. Googling "define statistical," I see, unsurprisingly, "of or relating to the use of statistics," and then googling "define statistics," I see "the practice or science of collecting and analyzing numerical data in large quantities." 

To me, the large quantities bit emphasizes that the role of statistics is to parse signal from noise, which is only possible with more than two data points (or, to be fair, some assumptions). So, I'd consider the authors' use of the word statistical to be sort of non-standard, because it seems to be able to be used for interpreting just one quantum state. 

Quite possibly this is actually standard use of the word statistical among certain physicists, which would make this yet another example of why you shouldn't assume that terminology is at all consistent across disciplines. 

The Self-Reinforcing Effects Of Ignorance

Outside of baseball there had been, for decades, an intellectual revolt, led by a free thinker named Bill James, devoted to creating new baseball knowledge. The movement generated information of value in the market for baseball players, but the information went ignored by baseball insiders. The market’s willful ignorance had a self-reinforcing quality: the longer the information was ignored, the less credible it became. After all, if this stuff had any value, why didn’t baseball insiders pay it any attention? To see the value in what Bill James and his crowd were up to you had first to believe that a market as open and transparent as the market for baseball players could ignore valuable information—that is, that it could be irrational.

That's Michael Lewis, more here. In particular, to find value in old, unorthodox stances, you have to believe in the possibility of status quo bias. 

A New Solution To A Grid Coloring Challenge

It is here, as explained by Alexandre Thiery. The challenge is to find a four color schema such that a 17 x 17 grid has no rectangle with the same four colors at each corner. The best known solution, shown below, has three rectangles. They are denoted by the black lines.

Who can find a schema with no such rectangles? Does one exist?

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The fact that I enjoy this so much indicates some sort of bias towards colorful things. Or maybe just pretty things, more generally. 

Casnocha On Felten On Loyalty vs Universality

[L]oyalty is essential in human affairs. Without loyalty, trust disappears and relationships crumble. The problem is, loyalties conflict. For example, when friends commit immoral acts, should you stand by them (loyal to friend) or uphold moral principles (loyal to principle)?...  

What's the difference between a little and a lot of wickedness? That's up to you. Figuring it out is an example of a tough decision Felten says we need to make, case by case.

More here. Loyalty vs universality is great example of a trade-off that comes up often and leads to tough decisions. Every time you spend luxury money on yourself or friends that could have gone to an effective charity or basic research, you're implicitly choosing loyalty. Two thoughts:

1) Contra Felten, I'm reluctant to say that decisions for any trade-off must be made on a case by case basis, because there are huge gains to be reaped in cognitive efficiency by creating rules and following them.

2) The trade-off can interact with some now vs more later. That is, being loyal to your associates and thus building connections in the short run can help you achieve your goals in the long run. These long run goals, in turn, may be designed to make a larger set of people (or even "everyone") better off, thus justifying a universally beneficial motive.

Yet, how many historical atrocities were once rationalized with this logic? If you really favor the welfare of everyone equally, it's probably safer to act that way while on the way to your goals, instead of planning to do so in some future world. 

The Value Of Thinking About Rating Systems

A new project I have just started is going to generate personalized movie ratings for users. The way it works is as follows. You rate the movies you have seen. Then the system finds other users with similar tastes to extrapolate how much the you will like some other movies. It is currently written entirely in Python.

That's from Sergey Brin's 1996 resume. Prior, of course, to co-founding Google.

Correlation, causation, or aberration? You tell me. 

Can You Keep Your Job While Innovating?

Justin Lall says, at least in the context of competitive bridge, basically no. This is similar to NFL coaches not going for it on fourth down as often as they should, but a little bit more nuanced.

The situation in bridge is less dire, as percentage plays are respected, and the math is often easily demonstrable. However, a large part of becoming a great bridge player, good enough to be hired to play on professional teams, is having excellent judgement about when situations to go against conventional wisdom or A priori odds.... 

The biggest problem is that you are not just thinking about a bridge problem anymore, that’s the easy part, you’re deciding if making this play is worth possibly getting fired, get a bad reputation, maybe never get hired again and be forced to get a 9-5 job that pays much less.

You can generalize his argument to the claim that some now vs more later trade-offs are a superset of exploration vs exploitation trade-offs.

I agree. In the short run people who follow the status quo have an edge, especially in the absence of good long run indicators.

One prediction of this is that if 1) the football season were longer, or 2) instantaneous ratings for the probability that a team would win became standard (like "pawn units" in chess), more coaches would go for it on fourth down.

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If you think this post was just an elaborate excuse to use the word "superset," you know too much.