On Being Rational. 10 skills of a rational person.

Posted by on April 25, 2012 No comments
A list of skills that I thought up today.  Ordered by which came to mind first, not by importance.
  1. Introspection.  Understand why you believe the things you do.  Understand why you act the way you do.
  2. Scholarship.  Stand on the shoulders of giants.  Scientists and philosophers have settled many issues, discovered many biases, created many de-biasing techniques.  You’ll do better to read academic sources than popular science sources.  I’m constantly surprised by what science knows about _how to think_ and how much of this people generally don’t know we know.
  3. American physicist Richard Feynman Português: ...

    American physicist Richard Feynman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Take joy in the merely real.  Internalize the concept that there doesn’t need to be mystical causes for things to be joyful and beautiful. “Nothing is ‘mere’.” –Richard Feynman

  4. Recognize rationalization.  Rationalization argues for a side already chosen.  As a rationalist you want to effectively pick a belief based upon evidence, you don’t want to find evidence to support your belief.
  5. Probabilistic universe.  You don’t know anything with 100% probability.  Visualize a little number between 0 and 1 floating next to every idea you hold dear.  This number represents the weight of the evidence that this idea represents reality.  Sometimes we have reasons to be _really_ confident that an idea represents reality, but that little number won’t ever reach 100%.  Where we most need to remember this is when ideas are controversial.  When others don’t think the idea is the best fit for the evidence.  If we don’t remember that we’re dealing with probabilities, it becomes too hard to update our beliefs on new incoming evidence.
  6. Fallible minds.  Recognize from your scholarship efforts in (2), that human minds are crappy kluges of systems and layers all intertwined with failure modes lying all over the place.
  7. Fix your opponents arguments. “If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you
    Spock

    Spock (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    will refute your opponents’ arguments.  But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them.  To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse.”  — Black Belt Bayesian

  8. Argue yourself out of your beliefs.  Try to think of what evidence would convince you that your cherished beliefs are wrong.  If you can’t think of any evidence, then you have to really question if the belief is the belief of a truth-seeker.
  9. Statistics.  The effectiveness of your scholarship will be increased the more you understand statistics.  You don’t have to be some sort of whiz, but even some popular-level book on statistics will help you understand more.
  10. Remember that rationality is about winning.  It’s about achieving your goals.  Spock was a

    straw man cariacture of rationality.  A real rationalist doesn’t look anything like Spock.  A rationalist revels in joy, and experience sadness.  A rationalists goals may be set by emotion.  A rationalist tries to avoid having his emotions interfere with his goals.

Dolphin fight.

Posted by on March 28, 2012 No comments

The male dolphins of Shark Bay, Australia, are known to marine biologists for their messy social entanglements. Their relationships with each other are so unusual — they’re more like the intricate webs of the Mafia than the vertical hierarchies of chimpanzees — that, in a new paper, one team of scientists argues that the dolphins live in a social system that is “unique among mammals.” Intriguingly, the researchers also suggest that these complex, and often cooperative, relationships may stem in part from one simple, unexpected factor: the dolphins’ low cruising speed.

Interesting stuff.

However, one part of this article got me thinking about a tangential subject.  Dolphin’s rights.  Every so often I’ll hear about people calling for giving dolphins rights like humans give each other.  I guess this is because of the dolphin’s intelligence.

At first glance, dolphins seem to have a somewhat similar social system. Two or three adult males form a tight alliance and cooperate to herd a female for mating. (Female dolphins rarely form strong alliances.) Other male teams may try to spirit away the female—particularly if she is in estrus. To fight back, the first-level alliances form partnerships with other first-level alliances, thus creating a larger second-level alliance. Some of these second-level alliances have as many as 14 dolphins and can last 15 years or more. On some occasions, the second-level alliance can call in the troops from yet another group, “a third-order alliance,” as the researchers call them—leading to huge battles with more than 20 dolphins biting and bashing each other with their heads and tails over the right to keep or steal a single female.

Dolphins can be jerks.

I’m not any sort of expert about dolphins, but a surface reading of this makes this sound like a brutal sort of arrangement that wouldn’t be tolerated in civilized human society.

If we grant dolphins the same sort of rights we grant humans, are we obligated to try and police their behavior and protect those dolphins that are less fortunate than others?

Posted by on March 8, 2012 7 comments

Embedded Link

Arizona Senate votes to let anti-abortion docs lie to pregnant women
The Arizona Senate has passed a bill that immunizes doctors from malpractice suits if they deliberately withhold information about prenatal problems because they don’t want the woman carrying the fetus to consider an abortion.

(Thanks, Nodeg!)


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Science with a capital S is better than you.

Posted by on February 8, 2012 No comments

So, yesterday I shared this post on Google+:

This boulder on the moon was set a-rollin’ by whatever process. The interesting thing to me is that you can see some craters overlapping the track it created as it rolled.

From this, scientists estimate this track was created 50-100 million years ago.

Notice the impact craters overlapping the track created by the rolling boulder.

This got me to thinking about how they determined the age.  While I haven’t talked to the scientists who came up with this age figure, I imagine it went something like this:

  1. Have a model for frequency of asteroid impacts over time per unit of area of Moon surface.
  2. Determine area of tracks.
  3. Count impact craters overlapping tracks.
  4. Using impact frequency model determine how much time would have to pass before you would see the number of overlapping impact craters.

The interesting thing here is that, going by a layperson’s definition of “wrong”, the number you come up with in this scenario could be completely wrong.  I think a lot of reporting on science, and even the statements scientists make to the public, are “wrong” in the same manner.

You see, the 50-100 million year figure doesn’t make a lot of sense in isolation.  It should have probabilities assigned to it.  The real answer isn’t “50-100 million years”, it’s a, for example, (rough and dirty) graph like this:

Impact Probabilities

You see, it’s possible that the asteroid impacts all happened yesterday.  It’s unlikely, but it’s possible.

So anyway, this is usually acknowledged when actually doing Science-with-a-capital-S, it’s just that this is often lost when communicating with the public.  The thing I find interesting about this, is that, this view of things having probabilities attached to them is the way the word actually works and yet the general attitude people have doesn’t acknowledge this.

GTFO Naked Girl. I'm doing science!

Most people operate as if things either happened or not.  Of being real or not real.  Even things that you would say you’re 100% sure of…like the color of the sky…have a probability assigned to them.  You may be 100% sure, but that 100% is a measure of your over-confidence, not of reality.  For example, there’s a non-zero chance you may be living in a dream or hallucination.

What about your values, your religion, your politics?  Are your values self-consistent?  Is there a God?  Do your political leanings actually lead to the type of world you want?  There’s probabilities assigned to all of ’em, and that probability is a lot lower than the previous example about the color of the sky.

The Sun!

Posted by on December 10, 2011 No comments

Click each image to enlargenate it.

sm_solarnirvana

Taken by Alan Friedman in the wavelength of hydrogen alpha light.

174735main_LEFTFullDisk

Taken by NASA’s STEREO satellites.  False color image taken in the 1 million degree C range.

174719main_LEFTREDSouthPole304

Another STEREO image.  False color in the 60,000-80,000 C range.

174606main_Image-4A-RIGHT

STEREO image.  False color in 2.5 million degree range.

174602main_FullDisk3D

STEREO image in 3D!  Need red/cyan 3d glasses to see the 3d effect.

Fleeing leopard

Posted by on December 10, 2011 No comments

Forest Hill resident and apparently amateur shutterbug Brenda Rusnak captured the magnificent and unusual scene on the Serengeti: a leopard bounding atop a tree, with the lightness of a character from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as it escapes from the roaring lion a branch below that has laid claim to the leopard’s quarry – a freshly killed gazelle.

Text from this article.

Click image to get a much larger size.

Animal eye photos

Posted by on December 9, 2011 No comments

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A bunch of close-up photos of the eyes of different animals.

Mirrors are counter-intuitive

Posted by on December 9, 2011 No comments

Most people don’t understand how mirrors work.  For example, when presented with the following scenario, most people get it wrong.

Imagine you’re at the entrance to a narrow corridor and further down, several feet away, hanging on the right-hand wall, there are three rectangular mirrors (30cm x 45cm) at head height. At what point, as you proceed down the corridor, do you think you’ll be able to see your face in the mirrors?

In another demonstration of the fallibility of our intuitions when it comes to mirrors:

If I asked you to draw a full-size outline of your head on a flip chart, and then to draw the outline of your head as it appears in the mirror, would you draw the two outlines the same size? You shouldn’t do because the mirror image of your head (as it appears to you) is exactly half its true size, irrespective of how far you are from the mirror, a fact that few people realise.

Benford’s Law and corporate lies

Posted by on October 13, 2011 No comments

Benford’s Law is one of those things that has always made me scratch my head.  It just doesn’t make sense!  Here’s what the law boils down to:

A second earth-shattering fact is that there are more numbers in the universe that begin with the digit 1 than 2, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, or 7, or 8, or 9.  And more numbers that begin with 2 than 3, or 4, and so on.  This relationship holds for the lengths of rivers, the populations of cities, molecular weights of chemicals, and any number of other categories.  What a blow to any of us who purport to have mastered the basic facts of the world around us!

One of the cool things this law allows us to do is to detect inaccurate corporate accounting!

In fact, Benford’s law has been used in legal cases to detect corporate fraud, because deviations from the law can indicate that a company’s books have been manipulated.

Jialan Wang wanted to find out if corporate accounting deviated from Benford’s law and how that changed over time.

So according to Benford’s law, accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what’s really going on inside of companies.  The major reform that was passed after Enron and other major accounting standards barely made a dent.
Next, I looked at Benford’s law for three industries: finance, information technology, and manufacturing.  The finance industry showed a huge surge in the deviation from Benford’s from 1981-82, coincident with two major deregulatory acts that sparked the beginnings of that other big mortgage debacle, the Savings and Loan Crisis.  The deviation from Benford’s in the finance industry reached a peak in 1988 and then decreased starting in 1993 at the tail end of the S&L fraud wave, not matching its 1988 level until … 2008.
Read the post with more data here.

Math elementary education

Posted by on September 4, 2011 No comments

I think elementary math education in the USA is, on average, quite bad. The worst part about it is that the mental habits acquired during these formative years are nearly impossible to break. I’m fairly competent at math now (though, I don’t know as much as I’d like), but I still struggle against the attitudes and habits from school. How much more understanding would I have if my early education had been more appropriate?

Numerical arithmetic should look to children like a simpler and faster way of doing things that they know how to do already, not a set of mysterious recipes for getting right answers to meaningless questions.
– John Holt, How Children Fail

This reminds me of the essay Guessing the Teacher’s Password by Eliezer Yudkowsky:

Suppose the teacher presents you with a confusing problem involving a metal plate next to a radiator; the far side feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. The teacher asks “Why?” If you say “I don’t know”, you have no chance of getting a gold star – it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection”, “because of heat conduction”, and “because of radiant heat”. One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?”

This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password.

I worry about my 2-year-old daughter’s future. Especially given the fact that I don’t know how to find good teachers. There is no thriving industry of teacher and school reviews like there is for some of the other products we use (see gadgets and cars, for example).