Steven Pinker on the Genome

Nice article by Steven Pinker highlighting the search for meaning in in the human genome. He details nicely how even if we map the whole genome, it is unlikely that we will receive definitive diagnosis- we will most likely be told that we are x times more susceptible to this condition or the other. As he points out, this is not very useful information at the individual level.

But if you want to know whether you are at risk for high cholesterol, have your cholesterol measured; if you want to know whether you are good at math, take a math test. And if you really want to know yourself (and this will be the test of how much you do), consider the suggestion of François La Rochefoucauld: “Our enemies’ opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own.”

Barry Schwartz on Wisdom

From TED 2009.

The Black Swan: Why is this new?

I have come across the term “Black Swan Event” several times in the past few weeks, mostly in reference to the recent and ongoing financial turmoil in the world markets. I hadn’t heard the term before and so searched Buzzwhack’s compendium of office jargon for a humorous definition but didn’t find anything. I did some more digging and found a brief description on wikipedia which left me puzzled. By coincidence, a coworker had just received Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book and so I borrowed it to try to figure out what all the fuss was about.

Taleb spends over three hundred pages talking about the nature of “Black Swan” events but i couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few lines of different chapters. I kept looking for anything about the “Black Swan” theory that would make it useful above and beyond what is already known about paradigm shifts, the human mind and statistics.

In a nutshell, according to Taleb a “Black Swan” is anything that fits the following definition and corollary:

a) Significant events that cannot be predicted which have a very large impact.
a’) Humans offer post-hoc explanations of how the event might have been predicted, reducing their belief in the true randomness of the event.

That’s it. The rest of the book is a long list of anecdotes of how a+a’ have played out again and again in the history of mankind as the result of shortcomings in the way that human minds process information, i.e. cognitive biases.

Why is this useful?

For those of you that are interested, here’s the recipe on how to peddle academic pseudo-theories to the masses and make a fortune:

Step 1) Select some existing academic work in the field(s) of interest. (in this case: Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts and lots of work on cognitive biases)
Step 2) Choose examples from history where it is obvious the theories you chose played a role in the outcome of events.
Step 3) Find an obscure but catchy term to label your new “theory” (see The Tipping Point (debunked), long tail (problematic) for other examples of this sort of nonsense)
Step 4) Publish the book and wait to be booked as keynote speaker for conferences.
Step 5) Profit.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing that Taleb is plagiarizing, but rather that he adds precious little to our existing understanding of high impact improbable events. There’s nothing new to the term “Black Swan” because it has no explanatory power, it’s just a repackaging job. Understanding and getting better at predicting these types of events will only be helped by the underlying science (i.e. cognitive science, statistics) and not a new umbrella theory.

Cognitive Surplus

Excellent concept:

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

From a larger essay on the topic by Clay Shirky: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

Right Brain vs. Left Brain

Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise? Apparently most see anti-clockwise.

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plug-ins for your brain

The brain, it turns out, is dramatically more flexible than anyone previously thought, as if we had unused sensory ports just waiting for the right plug-ins. Now it’s time to build them.

This is where macrocognition (aka “intelligent design”, “distributed intelligence”) can really make a difference. People need to stop thinking in terms of screens with text and start thinking in terms of intuitive interfaces that take advantage of all the wonderful things our brains can be hacked to do. You’re smarter than you think.

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Clive Wearing: Life without memory

Saw this video during a cognitive psychology course at university a long time ago. It is about a patient who cannot recognize the past or the future, living only in the present. He is unable to form new memories, and yet some stored memories are still available (e.g. conducting) I think it is a excellent video to demonstrate exactly how tenuous our grip on reality is.