brendan_oconnor_ai brendan_oconnor_ai-2006 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
1 brendan oconnor ai-2006-09-01-Double thesis action
Introduction: Earlier this year, it turned out that humans socially evolved cooperation through group competition and conflict . And now, it seems that biased evidence assimilation can happen through bounded rationality . Hooray.
2 brendan oconnor ai-2006-08-30-A big, fun list of links I’m reading
Introduction: Since blogging is hard, but reading is easy, lately I’ve taken to bookmarking interesting articles I’m reading, with the plan of blogging about them later. This follow-through has happened a few times, but not that often. In an amazing moment of thesis procrastination, today I sat down and figured out how to turn my del.icio.us bookmarks into a nice blogpost, with the plan that every week a post will appear with links I’ve recently read, or maybe I’ll use the script to generate a draft for myself that I’ll revise, or something. But for this first such link post, I put in a whole bunch of them beyond just the last week — why have just a few when you could have *all* of them? Future link posts will be shorter, I promise. Ariel Rubinstein: Freak-Freakonomics July 2006 posted 8/19 under economics sarcastic, critical review of levitt & dubner’s Freakonomics New Yorker review of Philip Tetlock’s book on political expert judgment posted 8/19 under judgment , psycholo
3 brendan oconnor ai-2006-07-30-4-move rock, paper, scissors!
Introduction: Contrary to baseless speculation , it turns out it is possible to have a four-player, non-degenerate RPS game. The game below is assymetrical: B does better than others, but you don’t want to play it all the time because that makes you vulnerable to A. By contrast, D ain’t so hot. But if you never play D, then your opponent can get away with A. It’s uneven, but the optimal mixed strategy plays everything with non-zero probability. Notation: the arrow from A to B means that A beats B. Everyone ties themself. No arrow indicates a tie. There is a tie between A and C. The previous analysis indicated there is no non-degenerate 4-RPS with no ties. This has only 1 tie, so it seems to be the best possible. (This game is just the previous one with the link from A to C removed. This makes it so B no longer dominates C, since C is now invulnerable from A, unlike B.)
4 brendan oconnor ai-2006-07-25-Two Middle East politics visualizations
Introduction: These are both useful summaries. Slate has a chart of relationships between Hamas, Hezbollah, Israel, and Lebanon, versus a number of different actors in the region. NYTimes has something similar on a map , also showing the sizes of ethnic/religious groups. Seems the NYTimes is most interesting as far as visualization/graphic design goes. It also has rich relational information and lots of predicates: does group X have oil wealth? is group X in the government of country Y? Etc. Seems ripe for a relational concept-learning clustering analysis‌ [From Metafilter ]
5 brendan oconnor ai-2006-07-20-neuroscience and economics both ways
Introduction: I previously posted two neuroeconomics reviews. Here’s a new one from this year in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. It’s interesting because not only does it look at using psychological knowledge to inform economics, but it also reviews work in the other direction: using economic decision and organizational theory to study brain systems. For example, here’s a paper that analyzes brain reward circuitry using labor supply theory. The review: Sanfey, Loewenstein, McClure, Cohen: “Neuroeconomics: cross-currents in research on decision-making”
6 brendan oconnor ai-2006-06-28-Social network-ized economic markets
Introduction: Extremely interesting — a generalization of Arrow-Debreu equilibrium in which interactions are restricted along a social network. Kakade et al 2005 . (Found through NIPS 2004 (which looks like a great conference)). Also a longer and more detailed related version: Kakade et al 2004 .
7 brendan oconnor ai-2006-06-03-Rock, Paper, Scissors
Introduction: Pure game theory is debatably social science, so here goes. Inspired by various 5-, 7-, and even 25-move extensions to Rock, Paper, Scissors, my friends and I were wondering whether it’s possible to have an even-move version. It doesn’t seem possible, at least for 4-RPS. I conjecture that all even-RPS’s might be similarly impossible. Here’s a very! rough writeup .
8 brendan oconnor ai-2006-06-03-Neuroeconomics reviews
Introduction: Here are two great reviews, from 2003 then 2005. 1) PLoS Biology: Economy of the Mind nicely reviews the field and many interesting experiments. One annoyance: They need to say “Banburismus” is more commonly known as Bayesian learning. (Banbury, England was a city near Bletchley Park they got their paper from when doing Bayesian statistical codebreaking of the Enigma cipher in World War II. Read the story here in MacKay’s excellent free online textbook .) Thanks to neurodudes for the PLoS link. 2) Neuroeconomics: How neuroscience can inform economics is written by the leaders of the field, advocating their approach. I like the detail and their careful descriptions of how cognitive neuroscience findings can enhance our understanding of economic phenomena. Also, the second is useful to read since it’s the target of criticism by the more recent The case for mindless economics , which I view as an empire-strikes-back sort of paper. I’m waiting for Part III of this s
9 brendan oconnor ai-2006-05-21-Lordi goes to Eurovision
Introduction: Continuing our previous story : they’ve won! Check out the interview at the end of the semifinals here. NYT reports : ATHENS, May 20 (AP) — In what some fans called a stunning upset, a Finnish heavy metal band with monster masks and apocalyptic lyrics won the Eurovision Song Contest late Saturday. The band, Lordi, caused a bit of a national identity crisis in Finland, where opponents accused it of devil worship and cringed at the thought that it might win. The annual kitsch extravaganza, which was the springboard for the Swedish group Abba and Celine Dion, is known for its bland dance music and bubble-gum pop acts. This year groups from 24 countries faced off before tens of millions on television. The band’s members do not disclose their real names. The lead singer, Mr. Lordi, said its win, Finland’s first, was “a victory for open-mindedness.” “We are not Satanists,” he said. “This is entertainment.”
10 brendan oconnor ai-2006-05-11-Drunken monkeys experiment!
Introduction: Monkeys drink more alcohol when housed alone, and some like to end a long day in the lab with a boozy cocktail, according to a new analysis of alcohol consumption among members of a rhesus macaque social group. … “It was not unusual to see some of the monkeys stumble and fall, sway, and vomit,” Chen added. “In a few of our heavy drinkers, they would drink until they fell asleep.” … In yet another study, the scientists gave a group of male monkeys 24-hour access to the beverage dispensers. According to the researchers, a spike in consumption immediately followed the facility’s working hours. “Like humans, monkeys are more likely to drink after stressful periods, such as soon after the daily 8-5 testing hours and after a long week of testing,” said Chen. Link (courtesy of digg )
11 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
12 brendan oconnor ai-2006-04-24-high irony
Introduction: What do the newly enriched Chinese bourgeois spend their money on? Vacations to visit Marx’s home in Trier, of course!
13 brendan oconnor ai-2006-04-24-The identity politics of satananic zombie alien man-beasts
Introduction: I thought Eurovision was weird enough already. But in addition to the usual fun mix of kitschy pop and Cold War legacy nationalism in its telephone voting politics, this year will see Finland’s satanic band Lordi: HELSINKI, Finland — They have eight-foot retractable latex Satan wings, sing hits like “Chainsaw Buffet” and blow up slabs of smoking meat on stage. So members of the band Lordi expected a reaction when they beat a crooner of love ballads to represent Finland at the Eurovision song contest in Athens, the competition that was the springboard for Abba and Celine Dion. “In Finland, we have no Eiffel Tower, few real famous artists, it is freezing cold and we suffer from low self-esteem,” said Mr. Putaansuu, who, as Lordi, has horns protruding from his forehead and sports long black fingernails. As he stuck out his tongue menacingly, his red demon eyes glaring, Lordi was surrounded by Kita, an alien-man-beast predator who plays flame-spitting drums inside a cage
14 brendan oconnor ai-2006-03-26-new kind of science, for real
Introduction: Great Microsoft Research report (from a workshop they held?): 2020 Science where they argue that computer science will become part and parcel of science in general. For example, computation theory will be important to understand biological organisms as information processing systems. This is basically a much better version of Wolfram’s New Kind of Science argument — I believe this one. The big shared insight is that computers aren’t just about data storage and number crunching. Wolfram and the some of the Santa Fe complex systems people are really in to simulations, which is fine. But there’s tremendous potential in computation theory — algorithms, formal representations, and more. Empirical scientists are going to have to learn this stuff!
15 brendan oconnor ai-2006-03-18-Mark Turner: Toward the Founding of Cognitive Social Science
Introduction: Where is social science? Where should it go? How should it get there? My answer, in a nutshell, is that social science is headed for an alliance with cognitive science. Mark Turner, 2001, Chronicle of Higher Education
16 brendan oconnor ai-2006-02-21-Libertarianism and evolution don’t mix
Introduction: The best bit from a paper by Paul Rubin on evolution and politics : libertarianism could be unpopular today because libertarian societies would get destroyed in competition with egalitarian militaristic tribes back in the hunter-gatherer days. The paper has some great points on what prehistoric society was like — fierce intergroup wars and competition. Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau states of nature, not so much. (While we’re at it, I have to plug Boyd and Richerson’s gene-culture coevolution theory.) Evolutionary psychology has of course its own special dangers , but apparently Rubin also wrote a book on the subject of the biological basis of politics . Interesting…