Contriving

You’re not in control.

And by “you’re”, I mean your conscious mind.  Robin Hanson points to the latest Nature:

Our conscious minds control less than we think.  From the latest Nature:

A person’s responses can often be explained by non-linguistic behaviours of other people and simple instincts for social display and response, without any recourse to conscious cognition. This `second channel’ of human communication acts in parallel with that based on rational thinking and verbal communication, and it is much more important in human affairs than most people like to think. …

Every day I see more evidence that points towards a simple conclusion: It requires rigorous self-examination to determine our own motives and the correct, rational response to any given problem. This rigorous self-examination is beyond what the vast majority of people are either capable of or are willing to do.

I’ll take 300 cents, please. Or, people’s brains are broken.

The New York Times points to research demonstrating the effect of big numbers on people’s ability to reason.

You would probably never sell out your friend for $5. But 500 cents? Now you’re talking!

UFO rants are fun.

Since I enjoy rants against those holding beliefs with no basis in reality, I enjoyed this little post on Skeptic Blog.

I had to laugh when I read fellow Skeptologist Brian Dunning’s article about the UFO True Believer™ Stan Friedman hating him. What an elite club! Friedman is no fan of me, either. A few years ago I wrote an article for Sky and Telescope magazine about UFOs, basically making the same claim I made here last week: if all these UFO sightings we hear about were real, the majority of them would be seen by amateur astronomers.

Friedman took exception to that (shocker, I know). In his internet newsletter (subscription required), he said: “Plait among other gems says about Amateur [sic] astronomers [sic] ‘Logically, they should be reporting most of the UFOs’. This is logic?”

Um, yeah, Mr. Friedman, it is. Maybe you should acquaint yourself with it. Note that this is all he said, just dismissing my point without actually saying anything about it. I know, it’s hard to believe that someone with such stature in the UFO community would make a claim with no evidence, and dismiss a claim that does have evidence!

Be sure to click on over and read it all.

“I told you so” is stupid.

Everything is a probability.

When I say Event X is going to happen, I of course don’t know this with 100% probability.

When you say “No, Event Y is going to happen.”, you do not know this with 100% probability, even if you think you do.

If Event Y happens, the fact that it happened says little about your “rightness” at the time of your prediction.  If I think Event X has a 75% chance of happening and Event Y has a 25% chance of happening, but Event Y is what actually ends up happening, that doesn’t mean my estimates at the time were wrong.

This is why “I told you so” is stupid.  It doesn’t increase your stature as an accurate predictor.  The only things that should increase your stature as an accurate predictor is a history of predictions that match with events that happen.  For bonus points your predictions calibrated probabilities should match the real events.

As an aside, the problems related to this include our societies reliance on ‘pundits’.  There is no central clearinghouse for recording well-defined predictions which matches those with their results.  Such a mechanism would help us better pick our leaders and those who advise our leaders.

Quoted

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

St. Augustine

Spock is a lie

Spock has done a horrible disservice to the rationalist.  Let me explain…

I’ve had discussions with people who, after being shown their side of the argument didn’t hold, would respond with:  “You’re just being too rational.”  As if there can be such a thing.  I suspect what they really mean is that they feel like I’m not addressing their emotional need.

Spock has convinced the world (or at least some of it’s inhabitants) that rationality is the flipside of emotion.  This is far from the case.  Being rational doesn’t mean being emotionless or disregarding other people’s emotion.

When deciding what to believe, or what course of action you should take, the rational thing to do is consider how other people would react, how you would react, how you would feel.  Emotional responses are just another part of the environment in which we live, to not account for them in our reasoning is folly.

The most important post on this blog…ever

Shermer and confirmation bias

Michael Shermer in the LA Times:

Confirmation bias explains why so many rumors about candidates were eagerly embraced recently. On the left, commentators glommed onto false gossip about Sarah Palin’s ignorance (she doesn’t know that Africa is a continent) and bigotry (she tried to ban books from the public library) because liberals think that conservatives are dumb and dogmatic, and after eight years of George W. Bush’s malapropisms and Palin’s interview fumbles, such rumors merely confirmed what liberals already believed.

It’s been my experience that confirmation bias is one of the most powerful (powerful in the sense of most likely to lead us astray) faults of the human mind. Shermer’s op-ed piece is a nice overview of the pitfalls found within.

It’s a pretty difficult bias to counteract, as it requires you to consciously step back from everything you learn and think about why you agree or disagree with it.

Calibrating our sense of the future.

No, the economic downturn doesn’t prove you right

In a post entitled “The Relevance of the Great Depression“, David Friedman states:

One can imagine a future in which President Obama, supported by Democratic majorities in both houses, engages in massive interventions in the economy following the massive interventions already under way and the result is a serious economic downturn prolonged for years, perhaps for two terms. If that happens many people–most obviously, the same people who insist that the collapse of Fannie Mae and the associated difficulties are the fault of laissez-faire and deregulation–will conclude that only massive intervention preserved us from a still worse outcome.

He is absolutely correct and beat me to a blog post about it. As soon as I heard people blaming the free market, it rung as a false claim to me. Or, perhaps not false, but a conclusion not justified by the evidence at hand.

Whether or not free markets are “bad”, the current crisis says little about them. Economic markets are already heavily regulated, but whether or not we need more, different, or less regulations is by no means clear.