brendan_oconnor_ai brendan_oconnor_ai-2005 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
1 brendan oconnor ai-2005-11-21-academic blogging
Introduction: Interesting aricle on Slate about the risks and rewards of academic blogging . I’ve added John Hawks ‘ interesting anthropology weblog to the of ones to read…
2 brendan oconnor ai-2005-11-20-science writing bad!
Introduction: An two-step explanation for distrust of science: (1) journalists write up poor science or take out the evidence and information from a scientific study, then (2) people read that and criticize science for being unfounded, arbitrary, etc. Link . Some fun quotes: Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn’t about something being true or not true: that’s a humanities graduate parody. It’s about the error bar, statistical significance, it’s about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it’s about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence. and So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. “Scientists today said … scientists revealed … scientists warned.” And if t
3 brendan oconnor ai-2005-09-07-Kurzweil interview
Introduction: Ray Kurzweil interviewed on his new book, The Singularity Is Near . Good points on neuroscience, artificial intelligence, nanotech and the like. But man, I thought Age of Spiritual Machines was a bit wacky… Complete model of the human brain by 2030? Please. (Though the observation that brain scan resolutions are doubling yearly is interesting.) I like the discussion about the relationship of power and intelligence of orgnizations. Thinking about Kurzweil’s bizarre-sounding scenarios is good because in his world, humans and organizations start becoming the same thing… which leads to insights on the intelligence of normal organizations today.
4 brendan oconnor ai-2005-09-02-cognitive modelling is rational choice++
Introduction: Rational choice has been a huge imperialistic success, growing in popularity and being applied to more and more fields. Why is this? It’s not because the rational choice model of decision-making is particularly realistic. Rather, it’s because rational choice is a completely specified theory of human behavior , and therefore is great at generating hypotheses. Given any situation involving people, rational choice can be used to generate a hypothesis about what to expect. That is, you just ask, “What would a person do to maximize their own benefit?” Similar things have been said about evolutionary psychology: you can always predict behavior by asking “what would hunter-gatherers do?” Now, certainly both rational choice and evolutionary psychology don’t always generate correct hypotheses, but they’re incredibly useful because they at least give you a starting point. Witness the theory of bounded rationality: just like rational choice, except amended to consider computational l
5 brendan oconnor ai-2005-09-02-Submit your poker data!
Introduction: Upload your poker hand histories to www.pokernomics.com , economist Stephen Levitt’s fringe-of-economics project to study what are effective strategies in poker. This absolultely makes sense to me as an economics research project, only because I’m used to thinking of economics from the view of multi-agent systems and game theory… This is definitely all about game theory, maybe not economics. Game theory reaches beyond the bounds of the study of goods and services… blog entry on it
6 brendan oconnor ai-2005-08-01-searchin’ for our friend, homo economicus
Introduction: I must have seen a zillion draft versions of this study floating around online, but here’s a terrific preprint: “Economic manâ€? in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies (Henrich, Boyd, Bowles, Camerer, Fehr, Gintis, McElreath, Alvard, Barr, Ensminger, Henrich, Hill, Gil-White, Gurven, Marlowe, Patton, and Tracer 2005 (!)). So looks like we’re now pretty sure, culture affects cooperation, you can see it in social practices. It’s a really neat study. The writeup in this version is terrific, they talk about implications for culture-gene evolution and have great statistical analysis of cultural factors on ultimatum game performance.
7 brendan oconnor ai-2005-08-01-Bayesian analysis of intelligent design (revised!)
Introduction: This is a revision of my earlier post . In Jaynes’ awesome statistical manifesto book ( another link ), I just saw for the second time the odds ratio form of Bayes’ rule, which is a lot cleaner for this sort of static analysis. So anyway… Pick an organism. Two propositions, H and E, each may be either true or false about it. H : the organism was designed by an intelligent creator. E : the organism looks like it was designed by an intelligent creator. Most of what I know about Intelligent Design theory (ID) is from seeing a talk by Michael Behe (may 2005). He had to major lines of argument: (1) it is implausible that an evolutionary process could produce life that looks as if it was intelligently designed. (2) Since it looks like it was intelligently designed, it was. He really emphasized the E component of the argument. Justifications for E: Lots of organisms look like they were intelligently designed. They have complex and intricate mechanisms involving coordina
8 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-31-war death statistics
Introduction: What a project — an impressively painstaking compilation of 20th century civilian and military casualties . Summary: lots of people were killed. Interesting are the comments on morality and how prejudgement leads to differing casualty estimations — estimates vary wildly for controversial regimes, like Castro’s Cuba (I’ve heard lots about), but are suspiciously round and agreed-upon for incidents that scholars seem to care less about, like the Congo Crisis of the 1960′s (I’ve heard not so much about.)
9 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-31-balkanized USA
Introduction: From the same site, this is fun.
10 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-11-guns, germs, & steel pbs show?!
Introduction: Looks like it’s become a mini-series: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel has hit PBS! Great book, if repetitive and a little too ambitious — he has a great environmental/technology explanation of the differences in societal development between Europe and the Americas, but he’s pretty weak when trying to tackle Asia vs. Europe, or a number of other situations talked about near the end of the book. But anyway, it’s fantastic social science. Wish I had a TV around… it would be nice if the show made it onto the web. For some time, I remember hearing that all of Commanding Heights was available for free on the web, but it looks like they’ve taken it down. We shall see.
11 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-09-the psychology of design as explanation
Introduction: Since I posted the link to his blog, Baron just wrote about Cardinal Schönborn’s anti-evolution Op-Ed piece . I agree absolutely that people should learn about the psychology of judgment and probability for these sorts of questions, where it’s really hard to understand that random processes can generate things that seem not so random. I’m still thinking about how the psychology of judgment plays in to the analysis below . I have a feeling that people’s intuitions are usually too hospitable for explanations based on intention. E.g.: People are poor, therefore someone is trying to make them poor. Organizations (corportations, governments) do things, therefore someone (say, at the top) ordered them to do these things. Natural disasters happen, therefore someone is wishing them upon us. Etc., etc. I’m still not sure how a bayesian dissection of whether “looks intentful” implies “is intentful” shows us whether such an “intent-seeking” bias (hey, I have to call it something) is
12 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-09-another blog: cog psych and political-social stuff
Introduction: By cognitive psychologist Jon Baron When is it time to stop accruing links to yet more blogs? Blogging makes no sense whatsoever.
13 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-09-a bayesian analysis of intelligent design
Introduction: UPDATE: just wrote a revision of this . Pick an organism. Two propositions, H and E, each may be either true or false about it. H : the organism was designed by an intelligent creator. E : the organism looks like it was designed by an intelligent creator. Most of what I know about ID is from seeing a talk by Michael Behe (may 2005). He had to major lines of argument: (1) it is implausible that an evolutionary process could produce life that looks as if it was intelligently designed. (2) Since it looks like it was intelligently designed, it was. He really emphasized the E component of the argument. Justifications for E: Lots of organisms look like they were intelligently designed. They have complex and intricate mechanisms involving coordination among many components. Sometimes they look like things humans would design: for example, bacteria locomotion devices sometimes bear uncanny resemblance to human-designed motors or propellers. Behe was really into showing al
14 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-05-finding some decision science blogs
Introduction: Decision Science News looks active & useful. The cognitive neuroscience of decision making is such a great topic — I mean, there are studies of the neurobiology of sarcasm ! There are some terrific older posts on the naturally named “Neuroeconomics” . Steve Saletti also has there a post on Bernheim & Rangel’s cue-triggered addiction paper , which I wrote about earlier (while taking taking a neuroeconomics course co-taught by Rangel, so I guess I’m biased!)
15 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-04-freakonomics blog
Introduction: Here it is! Still need to read the book. I’m a little bothered by people proclaiming it to be the first application of economic principles to social questions — hasn’t social economics been around for decades? — but the spirit and approach is right.
16 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-04-City crisis simulation (e.g. terrorist attack)
Introduction: WP: Computers simulate terrorist extremes Los Alamos scientists are running terrorist attack/response simulations. Well, the article title is misleading, they’re not simulating terrorists (which would pose a whole set of interesting questions about scientific knowledge, social construction and security), but rather, the impact on telecomm, health, and infrastructure systems. They’re using the standard justifications for systems simulation: these are big, highly complex, highly interdependent systems that are ill-understood and have had drastic domino-effect collapses before (like the northeast power blackout). The article also talks about epidemiology simulations (smallpox in this case, following the terrorist scenario again) that take into account the interactions of individual people with each other — very much along the lines of agent-based simulations, and satisfying complexity theory’s arguments about tipping points and emergent effects. [The article doesn't seem to say wh
17 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-03-Supreme Court justices’ agreement levels
Introduction: Cool visualization of agreement levels among Supreme Court justices . I like how they’re ordered so that the smallest amount of agreement ends up in the lower-left. Hopefully it’s not deceptive for certain cases: I imagine that summarizing their tendencies to vote certain ways into a one dimensional spectrum would lose important information of other dimensions of agreement or coalitions.
18 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-02-$ echo {political,social,economic}{cognition,behavior,systems}
Introduction: The current subtitle is “where {political, social, economic} crosses {cognition, behavior, systems}”. Amusingly enough, this syntax on a unix shell actually gets you the 9 combinations: ~% echo {political,social,economic}{cognition,behavior,systems} politicalcognition politicalbehavior politicalsystems socialcognition socialbehavior socialsystems economiccognition economicbehavior economicsystems Tossing together groups of words is a good thing, since unexpected phrases suggest unexpected meanings. For example: Scott McCloud’s story machine , where the point is to force yourself to see randomly generated new ideas.
19 brendan oconnor ai-2005-07-01-Modelling environmentalism thinking
Introduction: It’s a human political belief model — based on Cyc! I’m not sure logic represents how people think all that well, but seeing the formalization of ideology is fascinating. And besides, the methodology of cognitive modelling is awesome. The link: Modeling How People Think About Sustainability David C. James, M. P. Aff LBJ School of Public Affairs The University of Texas at Austin May 2005 First Reader: Lodis Rhodes Second Reader: Chandler Stolp How effectively can a computer model represent the belief systems of different people? How would one go about representing a belief system using formal logic? How would that ideology react to different scenarios related to sustainable development? The author constructs the Cyc Agent-Scenario (CAS) model as a way to investigate these questions. The CAS model is built on top of ResearchCyc, a knowledge base (KB) and logical inference engine. The model consists of two agents (Libertarian and Green) and two scenarios. The model simula
20 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-26-monkey economics (and brothels)
Introduction: This is a fun one: researchers trained capuchin monkeys to understand tokens as currency by letting them exchange them for food. Then they did all sorts of behavioral economics-y tests like finding consistency of preferences revealed in price shocks. The monkeys even displayed loss aversion at rates almost identical to humans! And along the way they got “prostitution”: Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys’ true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who
21 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-25-zombies!
22 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-25-more argumentation & AI-formal modelling links
23 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-25-looking for related blogs-links
24 brendan oconnor ai-2005-06-25-idea: Morals are heuristics for socially optimal behavior
26 brendan oconnor ai-2005-05-16-Online Deliberation 2005 conference blog & more is up!