brendan_oconnor_ai brendan_oconnor_ai-2007 brendan_oconnor_ai-2007-56 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: I must be too cynical. I thought I didn’t like Philip Zimbardo ‘s theatrics, but regardless I really appreciated this NYT interview with him on the universal capacity for evil. (S.P.E. is the Stanford Prison Experiment , whose pictures here are from that lovely basement hallway, still there behind the 420-40 and 41 lecture rooms.) In particular: Q. What was your reaction when you first saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib? A. I was shocked. But not surprised. I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S.P.E. What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples.” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples. That was why I was willing to be an expert witness for Sgt. Chip Frederick, who was ultimately sentenced to eight years for his role at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. Fr
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 is the Stanford Prison Experiment , whose pictures here are from that lovely basement hallway, still there behind the 420-40 and 41 lecture rooms. [sent-6, score-0.149]
2 I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S. [sent-12, score-0.09]
3 What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples. [sent-15, score-0.143]
4 ” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples. [sent-16, score-0.168]
5 Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. [sent-19, score-0.244]
6 When his reserve unit was first assigned to guard Abu Ghraib, Frederick was exactly like one of our nice young men in the S. [sent-26, score-0.072]
7 Three months later, he was exactly like one of our worst guards. [sent-29, score-0.072]
8 , civilian interrogators, military intelligence saying to the Army reservists, “Soften these detainees up for interrogation. [sent-36, score-0.33]
9 ” Those kinds of vague orders were the equivalent of my saying to the S. [sent-37, score-0.135]
10 ” At Abu Ghraib, you didn’t have higher-ups saying, “You must do these terrible things. [sent-41, score-0.185]
11 ” The authorities, I believe, created an environment that gave guards permission to become abusive — plus one that gave them plausible deniability. [sent-42, score-0.499]
12 The bottom line: If you’re going to have a secret interrogation center in the middle of a war zone, this is going to happen. [sent-46, score-0.196]
13 The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. [sent-53, score-0.185]
14 There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. [sent-54, score-0.1]
15 So you disagree with Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart? [sent-60, score-0.184]
16 She witnessed the guards putting bags over the prisoners’ heads, chain their legs and march them around. [sent-70, score-0.381]
17 ” If you ever see the official Stanford prison experiment video, Zimbardo continues: “She was right. [sent-75, score-0.431]
18 , Stanley Milgram told me: “Your study is going to take all the ethical heat off of my back. [sent-82, score-0.275]
19 People are now going to say yours is the most unethical study ever, and not mine. [sent-83, score-0.157]
20 ” There’s a lot to say about the ethical and methodological dimensions of the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments’ (unfortunate? [sent-84, score-0.118]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('frederick', 0.34), ('abu', 0.272), ('experiment', 0.225), ('ghraib', 0.204), ('guards', 0.204), ('milgram', 0.204), ('zimbardo', 0.204), ('situation', 0.149), ('chip', 0.136), ('detainees', 0.136), ('prison', 0.136), ('saying', 0.135), ('army', 0.118), ('ethical', 0.118), ('terrible', 0.118), ('night', 0.108), ('gave', 0.1), ('external', 0.1), ('going', 0.098), ('environment', 0.095), ('moral', 0.09), ('pictures', 0.09), ('bad', 0.084), ('later', 0.083), ('stanford', 0.075), ('exactly', 0.072), ('ever', 0.07), ('understand', 0.068), ('must', 0.067), ('believe', 0.067), ('people', 0.066), ('us', 0.064), ('thought', 0.064), ('study', 0.059), ('didn', 0.059), ('march', 0.059), ('spite', 0.059), ('heart', 0.059), ('witnessed', 0.059), ('civilian', 0.059), ('dangerous', 0.059), ('plug', 0.059), ('legacy', 0.059), ('philip', 0.059), ('spoke', 0.059), ('basement', 0.059), ('blamed', 0.059), ('chain', 0.059), ('chris', 0.059), ('disagree', 0.059)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000004 56 brendan oconnor ai-2007-04-05-Evil
Introduction: I must be too cynical. I thought I didn’t like Philip Zimbardo ‘s theatrics, but regardless I really appreciated this NYT interview with him on the universal capacity for evil. (S.P.E. is the Stanford Prison Experiment , whose pictures here are from that lovely basement hallway, still there behind the 420-40 and 41 lecture rooms.) In particular: Q. What was your reaction when you first saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib? A. I was shocked. But not surprised. I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S.P.E. What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples.” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples. That was why I was willing to be an expert witness for Sgt. Chip Frederick, who was ultimately sentenced to eight years for his role at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. Fr
2 0.08434815 122 brendan oconnor ai-2008-11-05-Obama street celebrations in San Francisco
Introduction: In San Francisco, it’s no secret who everyone wanted to win in this election. Shortly after Obama’s victory speech last night, people started celebrating in the streets near my house in the Mission. At Valencia and 19th, a big party formed and ran for several hours into the night. People and kids were cheering, high-fiving, playing music, and having a good time: Shades of Burning Man : There were happy combinations of alcohol, police, art cars, fireworks, and the Extra Action Marching Band . (That clip was the tensest situation I saw; after that, the police just moved everyone out of the intersection and watched carefully.) I yelled “Yes we can!” and was answered “Yes we DID!” Strangers hugged me. I went home at 1 a.m. and the party was still going strong. Not the worst way to celebrate making history. This election was also big locally, including a tight three-way race for the local district chair
3 0.078425877 83 brendan oconnor ai-2007-11-15-Actually that 2008 elections voter fMRI study is batshit insane (and sleazy too)
Introduction: A much more slashing commentary from Slate: An op-ed from Sunday’s New York Times, “This Is Your Brain on Politics,” proposes to answer what must be the most vexing question of modern American politics: What’s going on inside the head of a swing voter? The authors—a team of neuroscientists and political consultants—ran 20 of these undecided volunteers through a brain scanner and showed them pictures and video of the major candidates from both parties. The results, laid out both in print and an online slide show, purport to give us some insight as to how the upcoming primaries will play out: “Mitt Romney may have some potential,” the researchers conclude, and Hillary Clinton seems to have an edge at winning over her opponents. Don’t believe a word of it. To liken these neurological pundits to snake-oil salesmen would be far too generous. Their imaging study has not been published in any science journal, nor has it been vetted by experts in the field; it can’t rightly be called
4 0.071931891 87 brendan oconnor ai-2007-12-26-What is experimental philosophy?
Introduction: Experimental philosophy: Suppose the chairman of a company has to decide whether to adopt a new program. It would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Would you say that the chairman intended to help the environment? O.K., same circumstance. Except this time the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Would you say the chairman harmed the environment intentionally? in one survey, only 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment. When they had to think about the second situation, though, fully 82 percent thought that the chairman had intentionally harmed the environment. There’s plen
5 0.070248328 86 brendan oconnor ai-2007-12-20-Data-driven charity
Introduction: Some ex-hedge fund analysts recently started a non-profit devoted to evaluating the effectiveness of hundreds of charities, and apparently have been making waves (NYT) . A few interesting reports have been posted on their website, givewell.net — they make recommendations for which charities where donors’ money is used most efficiently for saving lives or helping the disadvantaged. (Does anyone else have interesting data on charity effectiveness? I’ve heard that evaluations are the big thing in philanthropy world now, and certainly the Gates Foundation talks a lot about it.) Obviously this sort of evaluation is tricky, but it has to be the right approach. The NYT article makes them sound like they’re a bit arrogant, which is too bad; on the other hand, any one who makes claims to have better empirical information than the established wisdom will always end up in that dynamic. (OK, so I love young smart people who come up with better results than a conservative, close-minded
6 0.068550542 62 brendan oconnor ai-2007-05-29-"Stanford Impostor"
7 0.068154991 90 brendan oconnor ai-2008-01-20-Moral psychology on Amazon Mechanical Turk
8 0.064680666 107 brendan oconnor ai-2008-06-18-Turker classifiers and binary classification threshold calibration
9 0.062357776 130 brendan oconnor ai-2008-12-18-Information cost and genocide
10 0.061948933 28 brendan oconnor ai-2005-11-20-science writing bad!
11 0.061174307 1 brendan oconnor ai-2004-11-20-gintis: theoretical unity in the social sciences
12 0.061074402 50 brendan oconnor ai-2007-02-15-Pascal’s Wager
13 0.058988731 6 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-25-idea: Morals are heuristics for socially optimal behavior
14 0.058609664 129 brendan oconnor ai-2008-12-03-Statistics vs. Machine Learning, fight!
15 0.054867756 10 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-26-monkey economics (and brothels)
16 0.054025427 19 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-09-the psychology of design as explanation
17 0.052442715 53 brendan oconnor ai-2007-03-15-Feminists, anarchists, computational complexity, bounded rationality, nethack, and other things to do
18 0.050806597 133 brendan oconnor ai-2009-01-23-SF conference for data mining mercenaries
19 0.049336981 125 brendan oconnor ai-2008-11-21-Netflix Prize
20 0.048321694 174 brendan oconnor ai-2011-09-19-End-to-end NLP packages
topicId topicWeight
[(0, -0.182), (1, 0.05), (2, -0.042), (3, -0.034), (4, -0.081), (5, -0.021), (6, -0.012), (7, -0.019), (8, 0.1), (9, -0.003), (10, 0.024), (11, -0.064), (12, -0.041), (13, -0.025), (14, 0.044), (15, -0.091), (16, -0.025), (17, -0.05), (18, -0.079), (19, -0.102), (20, 0.001), (21, 0.023), (22, -0.016), (23, 0.02), (24, -0.065), (25, 0.002), (26, -0.05), (27, 0.06), (28, -0.157), (29, 0.072), (30, 0.19), (31, 0.019), (32, -0.101), (33, 0.026), (34, -0.061), (35, -0.004), (36, -0.038), (37, -0.052), (38, -0.034), (39, 0.112), (40, 0.054), (41, 0.003), (42, -0.042), (43, 0.106), (44, 0.068), (45, 0.057), (46, 0.113), (47, 0.021), (48, -0.141), (49, 0.113)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.98347104 56 brendan oconnor ai-2007-04-05-Evil
Introduction: I must be too cynical. I thought I didn’t like Philip Zimbardo ‘s theatrics, but regardless I really appreciated this NYT interview with him on the universal capacity for evil. (S.P.E. is the Stanford Prison Experiment , whose pictures here are from that lovely basement hallway, still there behind the 420-40 and 41 lecture rooms.) In particular: Q. What was your reaction when you first saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib? A. I was shocked. But not surprised. I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S.P.E. What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples.” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples. That was why I was willing to be an expert witness for Sgt. Chip Frederick, who was ultimately sentenced to eight years for his role at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. Fr
2 0.66059959 122 brendan oconnor ai-2008-11-05-Obama street celebrations in San Francisco
Introduction: In San Francisco, it’s no secret who everyone wanted to win in this election. Shortly after Obama’s victory speech last night, people started celebrating in the streets near my house in the Mission. At Valencia and 19th, a big party formed and ran for several hours into the night. People and kids were cheering, high-fiving, playing music, and having a good time: Shades of Burning Man : There were happy combinations of alcohol, police, art cars, fireworks, and the Extra Action Marching Band . (That clip was the tensest situation I saw; after that, the police just moved everyone out of the intersection and watched carefully.) I yelled “Yes we can!” and was answered “Yes we DID!” Strangers hugged me. I went home at 1 a.m. and the party was still going strong. Not the worst way to celebrate making history. This election was also big locally, including a tight three-way race for the local district chair
3 0.62376964 90 brendan oconnor ai-2008-01-20-Moral psychology on Amazon Mechanical Turk
Introduction: There’s a lot of exciting work in moral psychology right now. I’ve been telling various poor fools who listen to me to read something from Jonathan Haidt or Joshua Greene , but of course there’s a sea of too many articles and books of varying quality and intended audience. But just last week Steven Pinker wrote a great NYT magazine article, “The Moral Instinct,” which summarizes current research and tries to spell out a few implications. I recommend it highly, if just for presenting so many awesome examples. (Yes, this blog has poked fun at Pinker before. But in any case, he is a brilliant expository writer. The Language Instinct is still one of my favorite popular science books.) For a while now I’ve been thinking that recruiting subjects online could lend itself to collecting some really interesting behavioral science data. A few months ago I tried doing this with Amazon Mechanical Turk , a horribly misnamed web service that actually lets you create web-based tasks
4 0.59628046 50 brendan oconnor ai-2007-02-15-Pascal’s Wager
Introduction: Either God is tricky, or maybe probability is. Pascal’s Wager: Say there’s only a small chance God exists. If you are an atheist but God does actually exist, He will send you to hell for eternity. This is infinitely bad. Therefore you should believe in God on the off-chance he does exist, since a small chance of something infinitely bad is worse than the alternative. Believe in Pascal’s Wager? Have I got a deal for you! says if you believe it, you should send Alex Tabarrok money because he will put in a good word to God for you. Hey, there’s a small chance he has a direct line to God, which yields infinite utility (or avoids hell’s infinite disutility). FWIW, I’m thinking the paradoxes in this sort of arithmetic always happen when you start doing addition/multiplication distribution across those darn infinities. Like on the third page Tabarrok starts talking about p1*Inf – p2*Inf = (p1-p2)*Inf. That’s shady shit. And more about the big PW . I don’t like the SEP ent
5 0.51846492 35 brendan oconnor ai-2006-04-28-Easterly vs. Sachs on global poverty
Introduction: I started reading Jeffrey Sachs’ new book The End of Poverty . The first 30 pages are excellent, but it starts getting arrogant and annoying quick. Substantively, I’m uncertain whether a big new development aid push will solve things. Since I enthusiastically bum around course websites I’m not taking (bad habit, will stop real soon now), I was fortunate to run across an excellent debate between Sachs and William Easterly: Easterly’s view on Africa: The West Can’t Take The Lead which has some amazing anecdotes about African educators and entrepreneurs. (Or, I think they’re amazing only because I’m a condescending Westerner?) Easterly reviews Sachs . Choice quote: “Success in ending the poverty trap,” Sachs writes, “will be much easier than it appears.” Really? If it’s so easy, why haven’t five decades of effort gotten the job done? Sachs should redirect some of his outrage at the question of why the previous $2.3 trillion didn’t reach the poor so that the next $2.3 trill
6 0.47739193 87 brendan oconnor ai-2007-12-26-What is experimental philosophy?
7 0.44408602 130 brendan oconnor ai-2008-12-18-Information cost and genocide
8 0.42296481 86 brendan oconnor ai-2007-12-20-Data-driven charity
9 0.42192823 62 brendan oconnor ai-2007-05-29-"Stanford Impostor"
10 0.38204527 63 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-10-Freak-Freakonomics (Ariel Rubinstein is the shit!)
11 0.37105042 46 brendan oconnor ai-2007-01-02-Anarchy vs. social order in Somalia
12 0.36919022 158 brendan oconnor ai-2010-03-31-How Facebook privacy failed me
13 0.36898211 77 brendan oconnor ai-2007-09-15-Dollar auction
14 0.36476073 65 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-17-"Time will tell, epistemology won’t"
15 0.35288343 204 brendan oconnor ai-2014-04-26-Replot: departure delays vs flight time speed-up
16 0.3216095 6 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-25-idea: Morals are heuristics for socially optimal behavior
17 0.31530991 120 brendan oconnor ai-2008-10-16-Is religion the opiate of the elite?
18 0.31213453 64 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-11-Richard Rorty has died
19 0.30947125 66 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-29-Evangelicals vs. Aquarians
20 0.29763746 10 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-26-monkey economics (and brothels)
topicId topicWeight
[(16, 0.034), (24, 0.024), (36, 0.014), (43, 0.019), (44, 0.057), (50, 0.489), (55, 0.026), (57, 0.019), (70, 0.03), (74, 0.144), (80, 0.03), (85, 0.026)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.98159617 52 brendan oconnor ai-2007-03-15-Computability and induction and ideal rationality and the simpsons
Introduction: Don’t have time to read much right now, but received word about a neat-looking paper: Uncomputability: The Problem of Induction Internalized by Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly’s website has an awesome statement that mirrors thoughts I’ve been having for the last few years — the incredible importance of computational constraints applied to reasoning and rationality: Kuhn teaches that a single, deep success suffices to keep a competing paradign on the table. Not surprisingly, computational learning theory shows its superiority over ideal theories of rationality when we trade in our ideal agents for more realistic, computable agents. The foundation of the deep success is a strong structural analogy between the halting problem and the problem of inductive generalization, allowing for a unified treatment of both, from the ground up. One consequence of the approach is that one can often show that computable agents are forced to choose between ideal rationality and finding the right answer
2 0.94706529 104 brendan oconnor ai-2008-05-23-Sub-reddit for Systems Science and OR
Introduction: I’ve been a big fan of Reddit’s Programing subsite for a while. Just this morning I found another sub-reddit: SYSOR: Systems Science, Operations Research and Everything In Between , and I’m loving it. Lots of links on data mining, graph software, image recognition, learning theory, etc etc. Not sure if the Operations Research part in the title is so big now — there’s some sort of complicated reorganization of a number of fields including operations research, systems science, computational learning, and more general computer science areas. I’m a fan of the great historical overview in the Introduction in Rusell and Norvig’s AI book ; I’m sure it’s slanted in various ways, but what else are overarching narratives for? :)
3 0.94273591 57 brendan oconnor ai-2007-04-08-Gapminder.org — terrific world data visualizations
Introduction: This entry was posted in Uncategorized . Bookmark the permalink .
same-blog 4 0.90604812 56 brendan oconnor ai-2007-04-05-Evil
Introduction: I must be too cynical. I thought I didn’t like Philip Zimbardo ‘s theatrics, but regardless I really appreciated this NYT interview with him on the universal capacity for evil. (S.P.E. is the Stanford Prison Experiment , whose pictures here are from that lovely basement hallway, still there behind the 420-40 and 41 lecture rooms.) In particular: Q. What was your reaction when you first saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib? A. I was shocked. But not surprised. I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S.P.E. What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples.” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples. That was why I was willing to be an expert witness for Sgt. Chip Frederick, who was ultimately sentenced to eight years for his role at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. Fr
Introduction: I was planning to write some WordNet lookup code tonight. But instead I’ve learned of too many intersecting things. First, there are a zillion things to do this weekend ( hooray flavorpill ): Picasso and American Art exhibit continuing at SFMOMA . I saw it very briefly last weekend but want some more. And Doug claims there’s an interesting photography exhibit there too. Reading from We Don’t Need Another Wave: Dispatches from the Next Generation of Feminists , a fascinating looking book I’ve seen many times in the bookstores around here. By that I mean at least Modern Times (the neat Mission bookstore) and the Anarchist Collective Bookstore (out on the Haight). And the reading is at Modern Times, just down the street from my house! Amazing. Tomorrow at 7:30. Since anarchists were just mentioned, fortuitously there also appears: the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair this Saturday and Sunday! Speakers and books down by Golden Gate Park, oh my. Can’t say I’m a ra
6 0.30527732 203 brendan oconnor ai-2014-02-19-What the ACL-2014 review scores mean
7 0.30000374 123 brendan oconnor ai-2008-11-12-Disease tracking with web queries and social messaging (Google, Twitter, Facebook…)
8 0.29610792 26 brendan oconnor ai-2005-09-02-cognitive modelling is rational choice++
9 0.29457015 63 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-10-Freak-Freakonomics (Ariel Rubinstein is the shit!)
10 0.2936717 200 brendan oconnor ai-2013-09-13-Response on our movie personas paper
11 0.2901364 105 brendan oconnor ai-2008-06-05-Clinton-Obama support visualization
12 0.2891812 77 brendan oconnor ai-2007-09-15-Dollar auction
13 0.28838769 129 brendan oconnor ai-2008-12-03-Statistics vs. Machine Learning, fight!
14 0.28813091 125 brendan oconnor ai-2008-11-21-Netflix Prize
15 0.28802192 19 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-09-the psychology of design as explanation
16 0.2785362 152 brendan oconnor ai-2009-09-08-Another R flashmob today
17 0.27733085 86 brendan oconnor ai-2007-12-20-Data-driven charity
18 0.27713731 138 brendan oconnor ai-2009-04-17-1 billion web page dataset from CMU
19 0.27540681 135 brendan oconnor ai-2009-02-23-Comparison of data analysis packages: R, Matlab, SciPy, Excel, SAS, SPSS, Stata
20 0.27381635 50 brendan oconnor ai-2007-02-15-Pascal’s Wager