As a frequent sufferer of headaches, the only over-the-counter medication that works really well for my headaches are the Excedrin formulations that include acetaminophen, aspirin and caffeine. Each of those ingredients alone is nowhere near as effective in my experience as the combination.
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For anybody else who is as puzzled by “NoVa: NVC” as I was, NVC is, judging from this and a few other references, Non-Violent Communication.
Please spell out an acronym the first time you use it in every article. It takes you 20 seconds to do that, and it took me a couple of frustrating minutes of searching, just as it will take others minutes of searching unless they see my comment.
ETA: thank you for the edits.
Why would it be more likely that you’re speaking to a deity than that you are in a simulation speaking to the principal investigator of an experiment or some other non-theistic scenario?
The difficulty I have with this thought experiment is that I can’t decide how to distinguish between the hypothesis that there is a deity with whom I’m now conversing, and the many hypotheses that preserve a purely naturalistic universe in which my brain (or a simulation of my brain) is receiving coherent sensory inputs that make it seem like I’m interacting with a deity who can read my mind and show me absolutely anything I ask for—he could even give me the memories of having proven the Riemann hypothesis to my satisfaction, of having taken me to my funeral...
My gut feeling is that the simulation hypothesis and some other non-theistic hypotheses have higher prior probability for me, and any evidence for the theistic alternative is also consistent with the simulation and some other hypotheses—which I guess indicates with a problem with simulation hypothesis in this case, since it’s not falsifiable.
We know he doesn’t provide false evidence, but the person in the scenario doesn’t know that. How could they distinguish between that scenario and the scenario where the gentleman lies when says he will always tell the truth.
LessWrong and Rationality ebooks via Amazon
I always thought Edge.org was basically Brockman’s way of getting cheap publicity for the intellectuals his literary agency represents and the books they are currently selling.
Thanks for the interesting investigation, which largely confirms my suspicion.
I’m reading Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain at the moment, and it seems a good textbook for people like me who don’t have a hardcore background in biology.
A popular non-textbook on the topic of memory in particular is Kandel’s In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, which I really liked. The following, by the same author, looks very interesting, and has just gone on my future purchase list: Memory: From Mind to Molecules.
I’m curious to hear opinions from more knowledgeable people than me though.
I agree. I was hoping somebody could make a coherent and plausible sounding argument for their position, which seems ridiculous to me. The paper you referenced shows that if you present an extremely simple problem of probability and ask for the answer in terms of a frequency (and not as a single event), AND you present the data in terms of frequencies, AND you also help subjects to construct concrete, visual representations of the frequencies involved by essentially spoon-feeding them the answers with leading questions, THEN most of them will get the correct answer. From this they conclude that people are good intuitive statisticians after all, and they cast doubt on the entire heuristics and biases literature because experimenters like Kahneman and Tversky don’t go to equally absurd lengths to present every experimental problem in ways that would be most intuitive to our paleolithic ancestors. The implication seems to be that rationality cannot (or should not) mean anything other than what the human brain actually does, and the only valid questions and problems for testing rationality are those that would make sense to our ancestors in the EEA.
This definitely seems like main material to me. Thanks for putting it together and for the very nice summary of results.
I don’t recall any discussion on LW—and couldn’t find any with a quick search—about the “Great Rationality Debate”, which Stanovich summarizes as:
An important research tradition in the cognitive psychology of reasoning—called the heuristics and biases approach—has firmly established that people’s responses often deviate from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example, people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utility theory, they do not properly calibrate degrees of belief, they overproject their own opinions onto others, they display illogical framing effects, they uneconomically honor sunk costs, they allow prior knowledge to become implicated in deductive reasoning, and they display numerous other information processing biases (for summaries of the large literature, see Baron, 1998, 2000; Dawes, 1998; Evans, 1989; Evans & Over, 1996; Kahneman & Tversky, 1972, 1984, 2000; Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982; Nickerson, 1998; Shafir & Tversky, 1995; Stanovich, 1999; Tversky, 1996).
It has been common for these empirical demonstrations of a gap between descriptive and normative models of reasoning and decision making to be taken as indications that systematic irrationalities characterize human cognition. However, over the last decade, an alternative interpretation of these findings has been championed by various evolutionary psychologists, adaptationist modelers, and ecological theorists (Anderson, 1990, 1991; Chater & Oaksford, 2000; Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; 1994b, 1996; Gigerenzer, 1996a; Oaksford & Chater, 1998, 2001; Rode, Cosmides, Hell, & Tooby, 1999; Todd & Gigerenzer, 2000). They have reinterpreted the modal response in most of the classic heuristics and biases experiments as indicating an optimal information processing adaptation on the part of the subjects. It is argued by these investigators that the research in the heuristics and biases tradition has not demonstrated human irrationality at all and that a Panglossian position (see Stanovich & West, 2000) which assumes perfect human rationality is the proper default position to take.
Stanovich, K. E., & West, R. F. (2003). Evolutionary versus instrumental goals: How evolutionary psychology misconceives human rationality. In D. E. Over (Ed.), Evolution and the psychology of thinking: The debate, Psychological Press. [Series on Current Issues in Thinking and Reasoning]
The lack of discussion seems like a curious gap given the strong support to both the schools of thought that Cosmides/Tooby/etc. represent on the one hand, and Kahneman/Tversky/etc. on the other, and that they are in radical opposition on the question of the nature of human rationality and purported deviations from it, both of which are central subjects of this site.
I don’t expect to find much support here for the Tooby/Cosmides position on the issue, but I’m surprised that there doesn’t seem to have been any discussion of the issue. Maybe I’ve missed discussions or posts though.
I interpret the first part as saying that there are no laws of matter other than ones our minds are forced to posit (forced over many generations of constantly improving our models). And the second part is something like “minds are subject [only] to physics”, as you said. The second part explains how and why the first part works.
Together, I interpret them as suggesting a reductive physicalist interpretation of mind (in the 19th century!) according to which our law-making is not only about the universe but is itself the universe (or a small piece thereof) operating according to those same laws (or other, deeper laws we have yet to discover).
Much of the heavy lifting is also done by the assignment of numbers and colors to indicate the impact of the experiment on a hypothesis. That’s much easier to grok as a whole than plain text. I can also easily make quick judgments from the chart that are much more difficult to do from a review paper, such as “later experiments generally oppose this hypothesis, and only early experiments strongly support it” (among those in the chart, of course).
Nice link. Chess and piano performance were the two examples that came to mind for me before clicking the link.
However, increasing the quality that yields the greatest marginal benefit is not necessarily the same as increasing the minimum of the individual actions (assuming you don’t define “minimum quality” in terms of marginal benefit). For example, if the lowest quality action only has a small impact on outcome, there is probably something else it would be more beneficial to improve. Of course, some composite skills probably do have performance proportional to min(indvidual_skill), in which case increasing the minimum would always be most beneficial, but most don’t.
Every truth is a path traced through reality: but among these paths there are some to which we could have given an entirely different turn if our attention had been orientated in a different direction or if we had aimed at another kind of utility; there are some, on the contrary, whose direction is marked out by reality itself: there are some, one might say, which correspond to currents of reality. Doubtless these also depend upon us to a certain extent, for we are free to go against the current or to follow it, and even if we follow it, we can variously divert it, being at the same time associated with and submitted to the force manifest within it. Nevertheless these currents are not created by us; they are part and parcel of reality.
Henri L. Bergson—The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 218
ETA: retracted. I posted this on the basis of my interpretation of the first sentence, but the rest of the quote makes clear that my interpretation of the first sentence was incorrect, and I don’t believe it belongs in a rationality quotes page anymore.
Very often in mathematics the crucial problem is to recognize and discover what are the relevant concepts; once this is accomplished the job may be more than half done.
Yitz Herstein
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
Richard P. Feynman
The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.
James Clerk Maxwell
Rat lover here. They’re adorable little creatures, and have distinct personalities and quirks. The only shortcoming of rats is that they don’t live that long, so you’re having to deal with the death of your cherished little friends every 2 or 3 years or so.
For anybody who likes rats or is just curious to learn more about them, I highly recommend the most awesome ratbehavior.org
Do you wear a retainer or any other kind of orthodontic device? I still wear a retainer now and then, and I often get a very severe headache the first night I wear it (I only wear it at night sometimes) if I’ve forgotten to wear it for a longer period than usual.
Don’t know if that’s at all relevant to your case, but am throwing it out there just in case.