brendan_oconnor_ai brendan_oconnor_ai-2007 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
1 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
2 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
3 brendan oconnor ai-2007-12-09-Race and IQ debate – links
Introduction: William Saletan, a writer for Slate, recently wrote a loud series of articles on genetic racial differences in IQ in the wake of James Watson’s controversial remarks . It prompted lots of discussion; here is an excellent response from Richard Nisbett , a leading authority in the field on the environmentalist side of the debate. More academic articles: Rushton and Jensen’s 2005 review of evidence for genetic differences; and what I’ve found to be the most balanced so far, the 1995 APA report Inteligence: Knowns and Unknowns which concludes for all the heated claims out there, the scientific evidence tends to be pretty weak. Blog world: Funny title from Brad DeLong ; and another Slate response to Saletan and Rushton/Jensen . The politics of the race and intelligence question is a huge distraction from trying to find out the actual truth of the matter. But I suppose the political implications are why it attracts so much attention — for good or bad. The most interesting
4 brendan oconnor ai-2007-11-26-How did Freud become a respected humanist?!
Introduction: Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department : PSYCHOANALYSIS and its ideas about the unconscious mind have spread to every nook and cranny of the culture from Salinger to “South Park,” from Fellini to foreign policy. Yet if you want to learn about psychoanalysis at the nation’s top universities, one of the last places to look may be the psychology department. A new report by the American Psychoanalytic Association has found that while psychoanalysis — or what purports to be psychoanalysis — is alive and well in literature, film, history and just about every other subject in the humanities, psychology departments and textbooks treat it as “desiccated and dead,” a historical artifact instead of “an ongoing movement and a living, evolving process.” I’ve been wondering about this for a while, ever since I heard someone describe Freud as “one of the greatest humanists who ever lived.” I’m pretty sure he didn’t think of himself that way. If you’re a
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
6 brendan oconnor ai-2007-11-14-Pop cog neuro is so sigh
Introduction: A good anti-pop-cognitive-neuroscience rant on Language Log: In closing, there is a larger issue here, beyond the validity of a specific study of voter psychology. A number of different commercial ventures, from neuromarketing to brain-based lie detection, are banking on the scientific aura of brain imaging to bring them customers, in addition to whatever real information the imaging conveys. The fact that the UCLA study involved brain imaging will garner it more attention, and possibly more credibility among the general public, than if it had used only behavioral measures like questionnaires or people’s facial expressions as they watched the candidates. Because brain imaging is a more high tech approach, it also seems more “scientific” and perhaps even more ‘objective.” Of course, these last two terms do not necessarily apply. Depending on the way the output of UCLA’s multimillion dollar 3-Tesla scanner is interpreted, the result may be objective and scientific, or of no more value
7 brendan oconnor ai-2007-11-13-Authoritarian great power capitalism
Introduction: Before I forget — a while back I read a terrific Foreign Affairs article, The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers . The argument is, just a century or so ago, states based on authoritarian capitalism were very powerful in the world; e.g. imperial Japan and Germany. They got plenty of the economic benefits of capitalism but not so much the democratic effects people like to talk about today. (And there are interesting points that the failure of fascism in the second world war was contingent and not inherent to the ideology.) The author argues this looks like the future: Russia and China are becoming economically strong world powers but keeping solidly non-democratic ways of governance. The period of liberal democracy we live in, with all its overhyped speculation about the inevitable spread democracy and free market capitalism — say, an “end of history” — might just be that, a moment caused by the vagaries of 20th century history. After I read the article last June, I actually
8 brendan oconnor ai-2007-10-31-neo institutional economic fun!
Introduction: [Like medieval Christian societies,] Islamic societies similarly found ingenious ways to circumvent the usury ban. The primary one was the double sale . In this transaction, the borrower would get, for example, both 100 dinars cash and a small piece of cloth valued at the absurdly high price of 15 dinars. In a year he would have to pay back 100 dinars for the loan of the cash and 15 for the cloth. These debts were upheld by Sharia courts. The cognition of rules and ethics sure is complex. I’d love to read the reasoning from those courts. From from Gregory Clark’s rather intense review of Avner Greif ‘s new-ish book on institutional economics. (Clark’s the one who wrote that interesting but weird evolutionary argument about European economic development.) If you’re in to the little worlds of institutional, evolutionary, and behavioral economics, Greif’s work is really interesting. Along with other institutional (or is it neo-institutional?) economists, he works to und
9 brendan oconnor ai-2007-10-13-Verificationism dinosaur comics
Introduction: I love dinosaur comics . What a quicker way to learn philosophy than reading all those books. For example: Now I have an opinion on verificationism! I like the yellow dinosaur better. Scientific empiricism is great, dithering about strict notions of meaning, not so great. See, isn’t epistemology easy?
10 brendan oconnor ai-2007-09-26-EEG for the Wii and in your basement
Introduction: There’s a company, Emotiv , that’s building an EEG interface for the game systems. Any company with a science-fiction-y vision statement sounds like a good time to me: Communication between man and machine has always been limited to conscious interaction, with non-conscious communication — expression, intuition, perception — reserved solely for the human realm. At Emotiv, we believe that future communication between man and machine will not only be limited to the conscious communication that exists today, but non-conscious communication will play a significant part. Our mission is to create the ultimate interface for the next-generation of man-machine interaction, by evolving the interaction between human beings and electronic devices beyond the limits of conscious interface. Emotiv is creating technologies that allow machines to take both conscious and non-conscious inputs directly from your mind. They even have a cyborg-looking woman on the page. Their claim is to det
11 brendan oconnor ai-2007-09-15-Dollar auction
Introduction: I got nervous and panicky just reading about this game. I wonder if I could con some people into playing it. Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a “dollar auction.” The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in. The first bids a penny, looking to make 99 cents. The second bids 2 cents, the third 3 cents, and so on, each feeling they have a chance at something good on the cheap. The early stages are fun, and the bidders wonder what possessed the professor to be willing to lose some money. The problem surfaces when the bidders get up close to a dollar. After 99 cents the last vestige of profitability disappears, but the bidding continues between the two highest players. They now realize that they stand
Introduction: This is off-topic for this blog but here goes. ConnectU , a small college social networking site, has been in the news due to their apparently weak lawsuit against Facebook , in which they claim Mark Zuckerberg stole their business plan and computer code back when they all were Harvard undergraduates. (Judges involved have noted the case’s flimsy evidence; some technology commentators — as well as everyone I know — have noted that the business idea wasn’t all that brilliant or original in the first place.) Zuckerberg, of course, went on to found Facebook and bring it to incredible success. I tried to use the ConnectU site recently, but got an error when searching for a funny name with an apostrophe, o’connor . It turns out this was symptomatic of a very grave security flaw in their code, an SQL injection vulnerability . While Facebook recently had a minor security-related glitch , ConnectU’s flaw is far more serious. A malicious attacker could use this to easily break in
Introduction: Sometimes it seems bad countries come with long names. North Korea is “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea”, Libya is “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya”, and the like. But on the other hand, there’s plenty of counter-examples — it’s the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” and “Republic of Cuba”, after all. Do long names with good-sounding adjectives correspond with non-democratic governments? Fortunately, this can be tested. First, what words are out there? From the CIA Factbook’s data on long form names, here are some of the most popular words used by today’s countries, listed with the number of occurrences across all 194 names. I limited to tokens that appear >= 3 times. A majority of countries are Republics, while there are some Kingdoms, and even a few Democracies. (146 of) (127 Republic) (17 Kingdom) (8 the) (8 Democratic) (6 State) (6 People’s) (5 United) (4 and) (4 Islamic) (4 Arab) (3 States) (3 Socialist) (3 Principality) (3 Is
Introduction: Standard problem: humans lived like crap for thousands and thousands of years, then suddenly some two hundred years ago dramatic industrialization and economic growth happened, though unevenly even through today. Here’s an interesting proposal to explain all this. Gregory Clark found startling empirical evidence that, in the time around the Industrial Revolution in England, wealthier families had more children than poorer families, while middle-class social values — non-violence, literacy, work ethic, high savings rates — also became more widespread during this time. According to the article at least, he actually seems to favor the explanation that human biological evolution was at work; though he notes cultural evolution is possible too. (That is, the children of wealthier families are socialized with their values; as the children of middle-class-valued families increase in proportion in society, the prevalence of those values increases too.) In any case, the argument is tha
15 brendan oconnor ai-2007-08-05-Are ideas interesting, or are they true?
Introduction: From an NYT Magazine article this Sunday, paraphrasing Isaiah Berlin : The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life. In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm. I can’t speak for that level of politics, but I’ve
16 brendan oconnor ai-2007-07-31-Cooperation dynamics – Martin Nowak
Introduction: Nice little NYT article on Martin Nowak, of evolution-of-cooperation fame . He’s the directory of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics which looks neat. I love the the Price Equation . Sweet.
17 brendan oconnor ai-2007-07-27-China: fines for bad maps
Introduction: This is fascinating — In China, you can get fined if you make a map of China without Taiwan or other disputed territories . Reminds me of being confused trying to find the primary airline of China. Based of vague recollections of its name, I searched Google for {{ china air }} . The first hit was for China Airlines . But the second hit was Air China . The first is the state carrier of the ROC (Taiwan), the second is the PRC (mainland China). Turns out my intended concept, “Official Chinese airline”, isn’t a coherent concept if your political worldview includes both the ROC and PRC as entities. But maybe what I should have wanted was just airlines that fly around East Asia and various parts of China; in that case, getting both airlines is the right thing to do. At least Google got them both at the top of the list. (p.s. anyone know how to force blogger to *not* destructively resize your images? sigh)
18 brendan oconnor ai-2007-07-25-Cerealitivity
Introduction: This is pretty funny, an old cartoon reprinted on Language Log .
19 brendan oconnor ai-2007-07-08-Washington in 1774
Introduction: [I]t is not the wish, or the interest of the Government, or any other upon this Continent, separately, or collectively, to set up for Independence… I am well satisfyed, as I can be of my existence, that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in all North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace & tranquility, upon Constitutional grounds, may be restored, & the horrors of civil discord prevented. – George Washington to Robert McKenzie, October 1774 Found this in an alternative history “what if?” essay on how the American Revolution could have never happened. In Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson .
20 brendan oconnor ai-2007-07-08-Game outcome graphs — prisoner’s dilemma with FUN ARROWS!!!
Introduction: I think game theory could benefit immensely from better presentation. Its default presentation is pretty mathematical. This is good because it treats social interactions in an abstract way, highlighting their essential properties, but is bad because it’s hard to understand, especially at first. However, I think I have a visualization that can sometimes capture the same abstract properties of the mathematics. Here’s a stab at using it to explain everyone’s favorite game, the prisoner’s dilemma. THE PD: Two players each choose whether to play nice, or be mean — Cooperate or Defect. Then they simultaneously play their actions, and get payoffs depending on what both played. If both cooperated, they help each other and do well; if both defect, they do quite poorly. But if one tries to cooperate and the other defects, then the defector gets a big win, and the cooperator gets a crappy “sucker’s payoff”. The formal PD definition looks like this: where each of the four pairs
21 brendan oconnor ai-2007-07-07-Happiness incarnate on the Colbert Report
22 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-29-Evangelicals vs. Aquarians
23 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-17-"Time will tell, epistemology won’t"
24 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-11-Richard Rorty has died
25 brendan oconnor ai-2007-06-10-Freak-Freakonomics (Ariel Rubinstein is the shit!)
26 brendan oconnor ai-2007-05-29-"Stanford Impostor"
27 brendan oconnor ai-2007-05-24-Rock Paper Scissors psychology
28 brendan oconnor ai-2007-05-09-Simpson’s paradox is so totally solved
29 brendan oconnor ai-2007-04-08-Random search engine searcher
30 brendan oconnor ai-2007-04-08-More fun with Gapminder - Trendalyzer
31 brendan oconnor ai-2007-04-08-Gapminder.org — terrific world data visualizations
32 brendan oconnor ai-2007-04-05-Evil
33 brendan oconnor ai-2007-03-27-Seth Roberts and academic blogging
34 brendan oconnor ai-2007-03-21-Statistics is big-N logic?
36 brendan oconnor ai-2007-03-15-Computability and induction and ideal rationality and the simpsons
37 brendan oconnor ai-2007-02-17-Iraq is the 9th deadliest civil war since WW2
38 brendan oconnor ai-2007-02-15-Pascal’s Wager
39 brendan oconnor ai-2007-02-05-When linguists appear on ironic parody talk shows
40 brendan oconnor ai-2007-01-02-funny comic
41 brendan oconnor ai-2007-01-02-The Jungle Economy
42 brendan oconnor ai-2007-01-02-Anarchy vs. social order in Somalia