Wednesday, 27 June 2018
An epic fire on an English moor
The last picture is especially intimidating.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-44626899
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-44626899
Heterosexual couples can now get civil partnerships
Huh, something sensible for once.
A heterosexual couple have won their legal bid for the right to have a civil partnership instead of a marriage. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favour of Rebecca Steinfeld, 37, and Charles Keidan, 41, from London. The court said the Civil Partnership Act 2004 - which only applies to same-sex couples - is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Announcing the court's decision, Lord Kerr said the government did not seek to justify the difference in treatment between same-sex and different sex couples. "To the contrary, it accepts that the difference cannot be justified," he said.
The Civil Partnership Act 2004 created civil partnerships but defined them as a 'relationship between two people of the same sex'. When the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 legalised same sex marriage, gay couples had two options as to how to formalise their relationship in law - marriage or civil partnership - whereas heterosexual couples could only marry. The Supreme Court has found that inequality to amount to discrimination and a breach of the right to a family life.
The government accepted the inequality between same sex and different sex couples, but argued that it needed to have time to assemble sufficient information to allow a confident decision to be made about the future of civil partnerships. Lord Kerr gave that argument short shrift, saying: "What it (the government) seeks is tolerance of the discrimination while it sorts out how to deal with it. That cannot be characterised as a legitimate aim."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44627990
A heterosexual couple have won their legal bid for the right to have a civil partnership instead of a marriage. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favour of Rebecca Steinfeld, 37, and Charles Keidan, 41, from London. The court said the Civil Partnership Act 2004 - which only applies to same-sex couples - is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights.
Announcing the court's decision, Lord Kerr said the government did not seek to justify the difference in treatment between same-sex and different sex couples. "To the contrary, it accepts that the difference cannot be justified," he said.
The Civil Partnership Act 2004 created civil partnerships but defined them as a 'relationship between two people of the same sex'. When the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 legalised same sex marriage, gay couples had two options as to how to formalise their relationship in law - marriage or civil partnership - whereas heterosexual couples could only marry. The Supreme Court has found that inequality to amount to discrimination and a breach of the right to a family life.
The government accepted the inequality between same sex and different sex couples, but argued that it needed to have time to assemble sufficient information to allow a confident decision to be made about the future of civil partnerships. Lord Kerr gave that argument short shrift, saying: "What it (the government) seeks is tolerance of the discrimination while it sorts out how to deal with it. That cannot be characterised as a legitimate aim."
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-44627990
Japan is going to shoot an asteroid because they just don't like it I guess
A copper projectile, or "impactor" will separate from the spacecraft, floating down to the surface of the asteroid. Once Hayabusa 2 is safely out of the way, an explosive charge will detonate, driving the projectile into the surface. "We have an impactor which will create a small crater on the surface of Ryugu. Maybe in spring next year, we will try to make a crater... then our spacecraft will try to reach into the crater to get the subsurface material. But this is a very big challenge."
Hayabusa 2 will spend about a year and a half surveying the 900m-wide space rock, which is about 290 million km (180 million miles) from Earth. During this time, it will aim to deploy several landing craft to the surface, including small rovers and a German-built instrument package called Mascot (Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout).
The onboard Lidar (light detection and ranging) instrument is used partly as a navigation sensor for rendezvous, approach, and touchdown. It illuminates the target with pulsed laser light to measure variable distances between the two objects. On Tuesday, scientists successfully used the Lidar to measure the distance from Hayabusa to the asteroid for the first time.
The mission will depart from Ryugu in December 2019 with the intention of returning to Earth with the asteroid samples in 2020.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44603120
Hayabusa 2 will spend about a year and a half surveying the 900m-wide space rock, which is about 290 million km (180 million miles) from Earth. During this time, it will aim to deploy several landing craft to the surface, including small rovers and a German-built instrument package called Mascot (Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout).
The onboard Lidar (light detection and ranging) instrument is used partly as a navigation sensor for rendezvous, approach, and touchdown. It illuminates the target with pulsed laser light to measure variable distances between the two objects. On Tuesday, scientists successfully used the Lidar to measure the distance from Hayabusa to the asteroid for the first time.
The mission will depart from Ryugu in December 2019 with the intention of returning to Earth with the asteroid samples in 2020.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44603120
Randomising choices helps avoid flawed reasoning
‘What lotteries are very good for is for keeping bad reasons out of decisions,’ Stone told me. ‘Lotteries guarantee that when you are choosing at random, there will be no reasons at all for one option rather than another being selected.’ He calls this the sanitising effect of lotteries – they eliminate all reasons from a decision, scrubbing away any kind of unwanted influence. As Stone acknowledges, randomness eliminates good reasons from the running as well as bad ones. He doesn’t advocate using chance indiscriminately. ‘But, sometimes,’ he argues, ‘the danger of bad reasons is bigger than the loss of the possibility of good reasons.’
Advocates of sortition suggest applying that principle more broadly, to congresses and parliaments, in order to create a legislature that closely reflects the actual composition of a state’s citizenship. They are not (just to be clear) advocating that legislators randomly choose policies. Few, moreover, would suggest that non-representative positions such as the US presidency be appointed by a lottery of all citizens. The idea is not to banish reason from politics altogether. But plenty of bad reasons can influence the election process – through bribery, intimidation, and fraud; through vote-purchasing; through discrimination and prejudices of all kinds. The question is whether these bad reasons outweigh the benefits of a system in which voters pick their favourite candidates.
The ISU system conflicts with two common modern assumptions: that it is always desirable (and usually possible) to eliminate uncertainty and chance from a situation; and that achievement is perfectly reflective of effort and talent. Sortition, college admission lotteries, and randomised judging run against the grain of both of these premises. They embrace uncertainty as a useful part of their processes, and they fail to guarantee that the better citizen or student or skater, no matter how much she drives herself to success, will be declared the winner.
Let me suggest that, in the fraught and unpredictable world in which we live, both of those ideals – total certainty and perfect reward – are delusional. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to increase knowledge and reward success. It’s just that, until we reach that utopia, we might want to come to terms with the reality of our situation, which is that our lives are dominated by uncertainty, biases, subjective judgments and the vagaries of chance.
Another recent proposal was that research grants could be assigned pseuo-randomly, after some human inspection to remove the very worst. The idea seems sound enough to me. Human judgement isn't useless, it just has limited precision.
https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly
Advocates of sortition suggest applying that principle more broadly, to congresses and parliaments, in order to create a legislature that closely reflects the actual composition of a state’s citizenship. They are not (just to be clear) advocating that legislators randomly choose policies. Few, moreover, would suggest that non-representative positions such as the US presidency be appointed by a lottery of all citizens. The idea is not to banish reason from politics altogether. But plenty of bad reasons can influence the election process – through bribery, intimidation, and fraud; through vote-purchasing; through discrimination and prejudices of all kinds. The question is whether these bad reasons outweigh the benefits of a system in which voters pick their favourite candidates.
The ISU system conflicts with two common modern assumptions: that it is always desirable (and usually possible) to eliminate uncertainty and chance from a situation; and that achievement is perfectly reflective of effort and talent. Sortition, college admission lotteries, and randomised judging run against the grain of both of these premises. They embrace uncertainty as a useful part of their processes, and they fail to guarantee that the better citizen or student or skater, no matter how much she drives herself to success, will be declared the winner.
Let me suggest that, in the fraught and unpredictable world in which we live, both of those ideals – total certainty and perfect reward – are delusional. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t try to increase knowledge and reward success. It’s just that, until we reach that utopia, we might want to come to terms with the reality of our situation, which is that our lives are dominated by uncertainty, biases, subjective judgments and the vagaries of chance.
Another recent proposal was that research grants could be assigned pseuo-randomly, after some human inspection to remove the very worst. The idea seems sound enough to me. Human judgement isn't useless, it just has limited precision.
https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-can-t-choose-wisely-choose-randomly
The brain's material reward system is the same one it uses for evidence
This confirms something we already know : people seek out information that they like and shun what they don't. The new feature seems to be discussing that the brain uses the same reward system for information as it does for materials. What it doesn't address is the conditions under which people seek out information for its own sake. Clearly there are situations in which people are willing to acknowledge things they don't like, so what's going on there ? Does their reward system value truth above everything else, and if so why ? How does the brain work differently in those situations and how can we encourage this ?
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also finds that people will spend money to both obtain advance knowledge of a good upcoming event and to remain ignorant of an upcoming bad event.
"Our research shows that the brain's reward circuitry selectively treats the opportunity to gain knowledge about future favorable outcomes, but not unfavorable outcomes, as a reward in and of itself, explaining why knowledge may not always be preferred."
The researchers found that activity in the brain's reward system—the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area—in response to the opportunity to receive information about good lotteries, but not about bad lotteries, displayed a pattern similar to what is observed in response to material rewards. This brain signal was independent from the brain response observed when participants found out whether they won or lost the lottery and predicted their preference for information.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-brain-knowledge.html
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also finds that people will spend money to both obtain advance knowledge of a good upcoming event and to remain ignorant of an upcoming bad event.
"Our research shows that the brain's reward circuitry selectively treats the opportunity to gain knowledge about future favorable outcomes, but not unfavorable outcomes, as a reward in and of itself, explaining why knowledge may not always be preferred."
The researchers found that activity in the brain's reward system—the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area—in response to the opportunity to receive information about good lotteries, but not about bad lotteries, displayed a pattern similar to what is observed in response to material rewards. This brain signal was independent from the brain response observed when participants found out whether they won or lost the lottery and predicted their preference for information.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-06-brain-knowledge.html
Tuesday, 26 June 2018
Plants can learn and remember, but are they thinking ?
I already went off on something of a rant about consciousness here :
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/1arJX2qaYZb
... but this one is a bit different.
Plants have preferences—their roots move toward water, sensing its acoustic vibes—and defense mechanisms. They also have memories, and can learn from experience. One 2014 experiment, for example, involved dropping potted plants called Mimosa pudicas a short distance. At first, when the plants were dropped, they curled up their leaves defensively. But soon the plants learned that no harm would come to them, and they stopped protecting themselves.
I read the linked paper, which is rather interesting regardless of whether plants can think or not. The researchers also investigated whether the plants would stop their defence mechanism when stimulated in a similar but not identical manner (shaken on a platform instead of being dropped). They don't. Only the behaviour they have learned is safe prevents (or reduces) their leaf-closing. They have to be conditioned through several drops before they stop reacting, but thereafter can repeat this behaviour at least a month after any drops have occurred. They also seem to account for the available light levels, since closing leaves reduces photosynthesis.
What they did not do was really demonstrate if plants learn to do this because they realise the drop is perfectly safe. What I'd want is a control experiment where some plants are deliberately damaged immediately after or during the drop. If the plants are learning to avoid unnecessary defensive responses, they ought to show the standard defensive reaction to the drop (or even an enhanced one) when it causes damage.
Also interesting :
Researchers had arrested plant motion with anesthetics—a new take on a 1902 experiment by biologist and physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who used chloroform to put plants to sleep. The Times wrote that the vegetal response to anesthetics suggests that plants are intelligent. Basically, the article argued that to lose consciousness, one must have consciousness—so if plants seem to lose consciousness under anesthetics, they must, in some way, possess it.
Marder points out that plant cuttings can survive and grow independently. That suggests that if plants do have a self, it is likely dispersed and unconfined, unlike the human sense of self. It’s notable, too, that many scientists and mystics argue that the human feeling of individuality—of being a self within a particular body—is a necessary illusion.
Well, good for them, but I'll never believe it. I'm me, you're you. You're not me and I'm not you. Done.
https://qz.com/1294941/a-debate-over-plant-consciousness-is-forcing-us-to-confront-the-limitations-of-the-human-mind/
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/1arJX2qaYZb
... but this one is a bit different.
Plants have preferences—their roots move toward water, sensing its acoustic vibes—and defense mechanisms. They also have memories, and can learn from experience. One 2014 experiment, for example, involved dropping potted plants called Mimosa pudicas a short distance. At first, when the plants were dropped, they curled up their leaves defensively. But soon the plants learned that no harm would come to them, and they stopped protecting themselves.
I read the linked paper, which is rather interesting regardless of whether plants can think or not. The researchers also investigated whether the plants would stop their defence mechanism when stimulated in a similar but not identical manner (shaken on a platform instead of being dropped). They don't. Only the behaviour they have learned is safe prevents (or reduces) their leaf-closing. They have to be conditioned through several drops before they stop reacting, but thereafter can repeat this behaviour at least a month after any drops have occurred. They also seem to account for the available light levels, since closing leaves reduces photosynthesis.
What they did not do was really demonstrate if plants learn to do this because they realise the drop is perfectly safe. What I'd want is a control experiment where some plants are deliberately damaged immediately after or during the drop. If the plants are learning to avoid unnecessary defensive responses, they ought to show the standard defensive reaction to the drop (or even an enhanced one) when it causes damage.
Also interesting :
Researchers had arrested plant motion with anesthetics—a new take on a 1902 experiment by biologist and physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who used chloroform to put plants to sleep. The Times wrote that the vegetal response to anesthetics suggests that plants are intelligent. Basically, the article argued that to lose consciousness, one must have consciousness—so if plants seem to lose consciousness under anesthetics, they must, in some way, possess it.
Marder points out that plant cuttings can survive and grow independently. That suggests that if plants do have a self, it is likely dispersed and unconfined, unlike the human sense of self. It’s notable, too, that many scientists and mystics argue that the human feeling of individuality—of being a self within a particular body—is a necessary illusion.
Well, good for them, but I'll never believe it. I'm me, you're you. You're not me and I'm not you. Done.
https://qz.com/1294941/a-debate-over-plant-consciousness-is-forcing-us-to-confront-the-limitations-of-the-human-mind/
Deliberately breeding smarter guppies
I decided to google, "breeding animals for intelligence" to see if anyone had tried to breed the smartest animal possible. My five minutes of in-depth, extensive research revealed that not much has been done in this area. The top result is a reddit thread :
I know that many scientists study animal intelligence, but has there been any effort to produce more intelligent animals through selctive breeding or genetic manipulation? My choice for this project would the octopus :
They are already intelligent
they have a short life cycle, so the process would go quickly
they're very good at manipulating objects with their tentacles
and also, I want to live in a world where our shores our lined with cities of sentient cephalopods.
Well who wouldn't ? But I also found the article below, which is quite interesting. The Swedes are breedingan army a shoal of killer counting guppies, apparently.
In a Swedish lab, Alexander Kotrschal has deliberately moulded the intelligence of small fish called guppies. From a starting population, he picked individuals with either unusually large or small brains for their bodies, and bred them together. It’s what farmers and pet-owners have done for centuries, selectively breeding animals with specific traits, from shorter legs or more muscle.
Or bigger and smaller brains. After just two generations, Kotrschal had one lineage of guppies with brains that were 9 percent bigger than the other. And these individuals proved to be smarter—they outclassed their peers at a simple learning task, where they learned to discriminate between two and four symbols. This may seem like child’s play for us, but it’s a “relatively advanced cognitive task” for a fish, says Kotrschal.
Their boosted smarts came at a price—the big-brained fish developed smaller guts and produced fewer offspring. Brains are expensive energy-guzzling organs. Ours, for example, make up just 2 percent of our body weight but consume 20 percent of our energy. Many scientists think that to pay for our larger brains, we had to scale back other parts of our bodies like our guts or fat stores, and that’s exactly what Kotrschal found in his guppies.
Caveats :
It’s still a controversial idea. Just last year, Isler led a study that seemed to disprove it, with an intense series of dissections that showed no connection between the size of a mammal’s brain and its other organs (although big-brained species did have smaller fat stores). Again: more comparisons and correlations. “Careful experimental work is what has been lacking,” says Aiello.
My uninformed guess would be that bigger brains can cause higher intelligence, but this won't be the only factor. Greater complexity and different types of brain structure will also play a role.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/03/scientists-breed-smarter-fish-but-reveal-the-costs-of-big-brains/
I know that many scientists study animal intelligence, but has there been any effort to produce more intelligent animals through selctive breeding or genetic manipulation? My choice for this project would the octopus :
They are already intelligent
they have a short life cycle, so the process would go quickly
they're very good at manipulating objects with their tentacles
and also, I want to live in a world where our shores our lined with cities of sentient cephalopods.
Well who wouldn't ? But I also found the article below, which is quite interesting. The Swedes are breeding
In a Swedish lab, Alexander Kotrschal has deliberately moulded the intelligence of small fish called guppies. From a starting population, he picked individuals with either unusually large or small brains for their bodies, and bred them together. It’s what farmers and pet-owners have done for centuries, selectively breeding animals with specific traits, from shorter legs or more muscle.
Or bigger and smaller brains. After just two generations, Kotrschal had one lineage of guppies with brains that were 9 percent bigger than the other. And these individuals proved to be smarter—they outclassed their peers at a simple learning task, where they learned to discriminate between two and four symbols. This may seem like child’s play for us, but it’s a “relatively advanced cognitive task” for a fish, says Kotrschal.
Their boosted smarts came at a price—the big-brained fish developed smaller guts and produced fewer offspring. Brains are expensive energy-guzzling organs. Ours, for example, make up just 2 percent of our body weight but consume 20 percent of our energy. Many scientists think that to pay for our larger brains, we had to scale back other parts of our bodies like our guts or fat stores, and that’s exactly what Kotrschal found in his guppies.
Caveats :
It’s still a controversial idea. Just last year, Isler led a study that seemed to disprove it, with an intense series of dissections that showed no connection between the size of a mammal’s brain and its other organs (although big-brained species did have smaller fat stores). Again: more comparisons and correlations. “Careful experimental work is what has been lacking,” says Aiello.
My uninformed guess would be that bigger brains can cause higher intelligence, but this won't be the only factor. Greater complexity and different types of brain structure will also play a role.
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/03/scientists-breed-smarter-fish-but-reveal-the-costs-of-big-brains/
Monday, 25 June 2018
Does the law actually make us more moral ?
To test whether people are willing to do the right thing German Police, with the assistance of a local media agency, set up a fake car crash that was graphic in its depiction of serious hurt caused to car occupants. They then sat back and watched to see how many people stopped to help.
The results are pretty dismal. Despite the law and despite Germany’s strong culture of morality only 10% of those who passed by stopped to assist what were people whose bloodied demeanor signaled that they, indeed, were in need of help. The Press Release about this (unfortunately in German) along with the video that shows how the stunt was staged show just how graphic the accident appeared to be which only makes people’s behavior appear all that more callous.
The obvious take away is that morality is hard to do when no one’s looking. So, apparently is being law abiding. The less obvious thing is that we live in a world where speed, complexity and uncertainty combine to challenge our decision making and make it more likely that we will do the wrong thing.
How do we deal with this? It would appear there is no real substitute for training ourselves to use our brains better. When untrained reflex action is likely to lead us down the wrong path the only other avenue left to us is to train ourselves and develop new reflexes.
https://thesnipermind.com/blog/can-the-law-make-us-moral.html
The results are pretty dismal. Despite the law and despite Germany’s strong culture of morality only 10% of those who passed by stopped to assist what were people whose bloodied demeanor signaled that they, indeed, were in need of help. The Press Release about this (unfortunately in German) along with the video that shows how the stunt was staged show just how graphic the accident appeared to be which only makes people’s behavior appear all that more callous.
The obvious take away is that morality is hard to do when no one’s looking. So, apparently is being law abiding. The less obvious thing is that we live in a world where speed, complexity and uncertainty combine to challenge our decision making and make it more likely that we will do the wrong thing.
How do we deal with this? It would appear there is no real substitute for training ourselves to use our brains better. When untrained reflex action is likely to lead us down the wrong path the only other avenue left to us is to train ourselves and develop new reflexes.
https://thesnipermind.com/blog/can-the-law-make-us-moral.html
THe history of early computation
A fascinating little history of early computation, best read as a narrative.
Previous attempts at effort-saving devices did not suit Blaise’s plans. He needed a machine that would add up large sums of numbers automatically, or repeatedly subtract. Napier’s Bones, created by John Napier (1550–1617) were efficient for multiplying and dividing numbers. Based on the multiplication table, they drew upon a lattice form of multiplication, and by aligning the bones, or rods, in a certain way, addition could be done instead of multiplication, and subtraction in place of division.
A calculating clock had been invented by Wilhelm Schickard in the 1620s, based on Napier’s bones. It used pinwheels to ‘carry’, and was designed to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide. It was described in letters from Schickard to Johannes Kepler, but was never seen working. Later examination of the descriptions in the correspondence suggest that the mechanism would jam, especially if several carrying actions happened simultaneously.
Blaise opted for a simple design based on addition. The machine would be set to zero, and then the operator would use a stylus to enter an initial number by using the digits around the circumference each dial as reference points. The stylus would reach a stop bar, as the dial was turned, just like on a rotary telephone dial.
He wanted to sell the calculators for widespread use, but they proved to be very expensive due to the intricate parts. Instead, the Pascaline was seen more as a status symbol for European nobility. Even though fewer than 20 were sold, the Pascaline was the first working automatic calculator, inspiring later inventors and mathematicians. Mechanical calculators were used around the world well into the 1970s, when electronic versions started to take over.
http://chalkdustmagazine.com/biographies/roots-blaise-pascal/
Previous attempts at effort-saving devices did not suit Blaise’s plans. He needed a machine that would add up large sums of numbers automatically, or repeatedly subtract. Napier’s Bones, created by John Napier (1550–1617) were efficient for multiplying and dividing numbers. Based on the multiplication table, they drew upon a lattice form of multiplication, and by aligning the bones, or rods, in a certain way, addition could be done instead of multiplication, and subtraction in place of division.
A calculating clock had been invented by Wilhelm Schickard in the 1620s, based on Napier’s bones. It used pinwheels to ‘carry’, and was designed to be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide. It was described in letters from Schickard to Johannes Kepler, but was never seen working. Later examination of the descriptions in the correspondence suggest that the mechanism would jam, especially if several carrying actions happened simultaneously.
Blaise opted for a simple design based on addition. The machine would be set to zero, and then the operator would use a stylus to enter an initial number by using the digits around the circumference each dial as reference points. The stylus would reach a stop bar, as the dial was turned, just like on a rotary telephone dial.
He wanted to sell the calculators for widespread use, but they proved to be very expensive due to the intricate parts. Instead, the Pascaline was seen more as a status symbol for European nobility. Even though fewer than 20 were sold, the Pascaline was the first working automatic calculator, inspiring later inventors and mathematicians. Mechanical calculators were used around the world well into the 1970s, when electronic versions started to take over.
http://chalkdustmagazine.com/biographies/roots-blaise-pascal/
Stronger than silk
Originally shared by Event Horizon
Spider silk has long been considered the strongest biological material in the world and has inspired generations of materials scientists to understand and mimic its properties. However, new findings knock spider silk off its pedestal, reporting that engineered cellulose fibers, derived from plant cell walls, are the strongest biobased material. The material is more than 20% stronger than and eight times as stiff as spider silk. It could eventually be used in lightweight biobased composites for cars, bikes, and medical devices, the researchers say.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/biobased-materials/Worlds-strongest-biomaterial-comes-tree/96/web/2018/06
Spider silk has long been considered the strongest biological material in the world and has inspired generations of materials scientists to understand and mimic its properties. However, new findings knock spider silk off its pedestal, reporting that engineered cellulose fibers, derived from plant cell walls, are the strongest biobased material. The material is more than 20% stronger than and eight times as stiff as spider silk. It could eventually be used in lightweight biobased composites for cars, bikes, and medical devices, the researchers say.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/biobased-materials/Worlds-strongest-biomaterial-comes-tree/96/web/2018/06
Greenwich resumes observing after a 60 year gap
The Royal Observatory Greenwich (ROG) is to start studying the sky again after a break of 60 years. British astronomy's historic home has installed new telescopes in its Grade II listed Altazimuth Pavilion, which has also undergone a restoration. The new facility is to be named after Annie Maunder, one of the first female scientists to work at the ROG and who made key discoveries about the Sun. Professionals, amateurs and school children will use the instruments.
That's Maunder as in Maunder Minimum. More details :
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37496677
Charles II founded the Greenwich site in 1675. Its purpose was to map the stars and compile tables that could then be used for navigation at sea. It was a working observatory until 1957, after which serious science retreated to the countryside to get away from urban smog and light pollution. But with cleaner air and new technologies, it is now possible for telescopes to take very decent pictures again from the capital, says ROG astronomer Brendan Owens.
"We can use what are called narrow-band filters to get around the light pollution, and then there are the new processing techniques. We can take very fast frame-rate snapshots and use only the steadiest shots to build the final result. It's known as 'lucky dip imaging'," he told BBC News.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44581891
That's Maunder as in Maunder Minimum. More details :
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37496677
Charles II founded the Greenwich site in 1675. Its purpose was to map the stars and compile tables that could then be used for navigation at sea. It was a working observatory until 1957, after which serious science retreated to the countryside to get away from urban smog and light pollution. But with cleaner air and new technologies, it is now possible for telescopes to take very decent pictures again from the capital, says ROG astronomer Brendan Owens.
"We can use what are called narrow-band filters to get around the light pollution, and then there are the new processing techniques. We can take very fast frame-rate snapshots and use only the steadiest shots to build the final result. It's known as 'lucky dip imaging'," he told BBC News.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44581891
You can't steal a job
Found on the internet.
Other options include the immigrant having a job that you didn't want (strawberry pickers) or aren't even remotely qualified for (medical doctor).
Gaming the housing market : supply is not the answer
The problem with this was that only around 2000 housing plots were made available per server, and the wealthy guilds and individual players with a lot of time on their hands to accumulate the necessary in-game means, snapped them all up immediately, exactly as you would expect.
Other players were outraged. How could today’s ambitious young Hyur break into the property market when these sorts of players had it all sewn up? Could they maybe buy in the blasted hellscape of Eureka and rent-vest in the nicer, more gentrified bits of Eorzea? How does negative gearing even work in this universe?
Anyway, Square Enix heard the furious cries of their customers and did exactly what Turnbull et al would suggest: they increased supply. Over seven hundred new plots were made available per server; which were immediately bought up, exactly like the original ones. What mitigated the problem? Increasingly delicate regulation.
In the end Square Enix put limits on how many homes a player could own, and put in a waiting period for resellers to discourage profiteers from flipping properties at a premium within the game, and are still assessing whether more regulation is required. In other words, the company responsible for an online adventure game with trolls is giving more assiduous attention to housing accessibility than the government of our most populous state.
https://www.domain.com.au/news/how-a-video-game-proved-that-increasing-supply-wont-fix-the-housing-affordability-crisis-20180416-h0ymjz/
Other players were outraged. How could today’s ambitious young Hyur break into the property market when these sorts of players had it all sewn up? Could they maybe buy in the blasted hellscape of Eureka and rent-vest in the nicer, more gentrified bits of Eorzea? How does negative gearing even work in this universe?
Anyway, Square Enix heard the furious cries of their customers and did exactly what Turnbull et al would suggest: they increased supply. Over seven hundred new plots were made available per server; which were immediately bought up, exactly like the original ones. What mitigated the problem? Increasingly delicate regulation.
In the end Square Enix put limits on how many homes a player could own, and put in a waiting period for resellers to discourage profiteers from flipping properties at a premium within the game, and are still assessing whether more regulation is required. In other words, the company responsible for an online adventure game with trolls is giving more assiduous attention to housing accessibility than the government of our most populous state.
https://www.domain.com.au/news/how-a-video-game-proved-that-increasing-supply-wont-fix-the-housing-affordability-crisis-20180416-h0ymjz/
Our idea of perfection is surprisingly modest
Perhaps one (of many) reasons people are so terribly unhappy is because what they actually want is very modest, entirely achievable economically, yet denied them for ideological reasons. What would be really interesting though, and I suspect might undermine the findings, is to slice the data according to existing status. I'm betting that those in relative wealth and poverty (perhaps not those at the real extremes, but maybe them too) claim that what they want is only small fractional change of what they actually have. A poor person may only want a slightly less leaky roof; a rich person may "only" want a slightly faster superyacht. It would also be interesting to compare the desires of those born into high status, those who achieve it, and those who have it thrust upon them. Those who have actually experienced both ends of the spectrum will be in a better position to judge their current status and assess what it is they actually want. Maybe. I'll further bet that those claiming they only want modest improvements, even if given the option of access to magic, do so because they simply cannot imagine the consequences of an extreme change. No-one can, probably. That's enough supposition for one day.
“Our research shows that people’s sense of perfection is surprisingly modest,” says psychological scientist Matthew J. Hornsey of the University of Queensland, first author on the research. “People wanted to have positive qualities, such as health and happiness, but not to the exclusion of other darker experiences – they wanted about 75% of a good thing.”
Furthermore, people said, on average, that they ideally wanted to live until they were 90 years old, which is only slightly higher than the current average life expectancy. Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old. And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.
In general, participants tended to rate their ideal levels of individual characteristics to be about 70-80%, although there was some variation across the traits. For example, many more participants chose to maximize health than chose to maximize happiness. Participants’ ideals were also relatively modest for both intelligence and longevity, even when there were no limits on the levels they could choose.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/around-the-world-people-have-surprisingly-modest-notions-of-the-ideal-life.html
“Our research shows that people’s sense of perfection is surprisingly modest,” says psychological scientist Matthew J. Hornsey of the University of Queensland, first author on the research. “People wanted to have positive qualities, such as health and happiness, but not to the exclusion of other darker experiences – they wanted about 75% of a good thing.”
Furthermore, people said, on average, that they ideally wanted to live until they were 90 years old, which is only slightly higher than the current average life expectancy. Even when participants imagined that they could take a magic pill guaranteeing eternal youth, their ideal life expectancy increased by only a few decades, to a median of 120 years old. And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.
In general, participants tended to rate their ideal levels of individual characteristics to be about 70-80%, although there was some variation across the traits. For example, many more participants chose to maximize health than chose to maximize happiness. Participants’ ideals were also relatively modest for both intelligence and longevity, even when there were no limits on the levels they could choose.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/around-the-world-people-have-surprisingly-modest-notions-of-the-ideal-life.html
Making plants taste as good as meat
This isn't yer fancy-schamncy lab-grown meat, it's a plant-based burger that claims to be as good as a meat burger. It has the virtue of actually being available for purchase in restaurants, though the price is not stated. Environmental stats are not as good as synthetic meat burgers but still a dramatic improvement : "74% less water, 87% less ghg emissions, 95% of the land".
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/06/impossible-foods-makes-a-wheat-protein-burger-with-taste-and-aroma-of-meat.html
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/06/impossible-foods-makes-a-wheat-protein-burger-with-taste-and-aroma-of-meat.html
Never mind changing other people's minds - our minds change themselves
They're not particularly great reasons, to be honest. It's the old "familiarity breeds acceptance", because you literally can't be angry the whole time.
Kristin Laurin of the University of British Columbia examined people’s attitudes before plastic water bottles were prohibited in San Francisco. The ban wasn’t favoured by everyone, but was introduced nonetheless. Just one day later, her team again tested public attitudes. Already, views had changed: people were less opposed. There hadn’t been time for people to change their behaviour to adjust to the practicalities of the ban. So it seemed their mindset itself had changed. In other words, we rationalise the things we feel stuck with. It’s as though we free up brain space to get on with our lives by deciding it’s not so bad, after all. Laurin likens this to a “psychological immune system”.
Next, Laurin looked at views on Ontario’s 2015 ban on smoking in parks and restaurant patios. She found that people didn’t only change their opinions after the ban had been brought in – they changed what they remembered about their own behaviour. Before, smokers told her team that they did about 15% of their smoking in these public places. Afterwards, they estimated that only about 8% of their smoking had taken place in these areas. They had adjusted their own memories, altering their judgements to convince themselves the ban’s effect wasn’t so bad after all.
Drumpf currently has the lowest approval ratings of any US President since World War II. You might expect that this reflects that the people who didn’t vote for him dislike him even more now that he is president. But that’s not what happened. Laurin’s team found that just a couple of days after his inauguration, those same people felt more positively about him.
“It actually turned out, even with the people in our sample who said he did really badly at the inauguration and hated how he performed there, [that] their attitudes moved in a positive direction. This again suggests this isn’t something that you’re learning once this new policy or this new official comes into effect.” Instead, “your brain is scrambling to make you feel okay and allow you to get on with your life”.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180622-the-surprising-reason-people-change-their-minds
Kristin Laurin of the University of British Columbia examined people’s attitudes before plastic water bottles were prohibited in San Francisco. The ban wasn’t favoured by everyone, but was introduced nonetheless. Just one day later, her team again tested public attitudes. Already, views had changed: people were less opposed. There hadn’t been time for people to change their behaviour to adjust to the practicalities of the ban. So it seemed their mindset itself had changed. In other words, we rationalise the things we feel stuck with. It’s as though we free up brain space to get on with our lives by deciding it’s not so bad, after all. Laurin likens this to a “psychological immune system”.
Next, Laurin looked at views on Ontario’s 2015 ban on smoking in parks and restaurant patios. She found that people didn’t only change their opinions after the ban had been brought in – they changed what they remembered about their own behaviour. Before, smokers told her team that they did about 15% of their smoking in these public places. Afterwards, they estimated that only about 8% of their smoking had taken place in these areas. They had adjusted their own memories, altering their judgements to convince themselves the ban’s effect wasn’t so bad after all.
Drumpf currently has the lowest approval ratings of any US President since World War II. You might expect that this reflects that the people who didn’t vote for him dislike him even more now that he is president. But that’s not what happened. Laurin’s team found that just a couple of days after his inauguration, those same people felt more positively about him.
“It actually turned out, even with the people in our sample who said he did really badly at the inauguration and hated how he performed there, [that] their attitudes moved in a positive direction. This again suggests this isn’t something that you’re learning once this new policy or this new official comes into effect.” Instead, “your brain is scrambling to make you feel okay and allow you to get on with your life”.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180622-the-surprising-reason-people-change-their-minds
Exploring the effects of statistical variation in the Fermi Paradox
This is an interesting new take on the Fermi Paradox. Like all paradoxes, there shouldn't really be any contradiction actually occurring - it just points to a gap in our knowledge and/or assumptions.
I hadn't realised it before but the Bayesian and anthropic approaches aren't dissimilar. Starting from what we know to be true now, we can infer something about the processes that led to this point. A universe actually containing life (or bookshelves or cabbages or dust or whatever) must be suitable for making and sustaining life. However, this does not guarantee that life will be abundant. So, a universe only containing a little bit of life, but without that life standing much chance of detecting anything else, must be suitable for only generating a little bit of life and/or sustaining it for a short while.
I was particularly interested in three things from this analysis (I'm somewhat pressed for time, so I read the blog post but only skimmed the paper) :
1) Life could be abundant in some galaxies, but not necessarily throughout the Universe. They infer a distribution of civilisations where the median is 1 civilisation [per galaxy ?], the mean 27 million, and 21% of all galaxies are completely empty. So there could still be plenty of life out there, just not that much in our own part of it.
My question on that front would be : what's special about our region ? What physical processes are at work to cause this widely varying distribution ? I would imagine that the probability of life occurring should be evaluated on a world-by-world basis, not galaxy by galaxy. Oh, sure, there will be some large-scale influence, but probably not very much. I rather suspect we're back to Great Filters, which the authors want to avoid.
The authors aren't astronomers so it's fine that they just raise the statistical argument, but it would be oh so much more interesting with a physical justification. Without this, it's not really clear if they're solved the paradox after all. If the statistics says one thing and the physics another, then the paradox remains.
2) The paradox is essentially solved by simply admitting that we're suitably rare. Our assumption is that life is abundant but there is as yet, they say, sufficient uncertainty in our understanding of the processes needed for life to form for that assumption to be questionable. So, given that clearly no Galactic Empire has yet arisen, they re-evaluate the probability of life occurring in light of this. There's no paradox if we're just alone.
Again though, the paradox would return if it could be shown with a more science-based (rather than statistical) approach that there should be every reason to expect an abundance of life.
3) : Modern genetics required >1/5 of the age of the universe to evolve intelligence. A genetic system like the one that preceded ours might both be stable over a google cell divisions and evolve more slowly by a factor of 10, and run out the clock. Hence some genetic systems may be incapable of ever evolving intelligence.
I don't know if its fair to say "required" in that first sentence. Maybe it's correct. Maybe intelligence evolved as soon as the genetic code allowed it, and previously no animals were actually capable of a human-like intelligence. Anyone of the species that evolves it first is unavoidably going to find the situation very strange (and therefore, during that special period soon after achieving higher reasoning, should avoid making any Carterian inferences about the lifespan of intelligence, since they're at a special point in history). On the other hand, it seems at least equally plausible to me that intelligence is a freak accident that could have arisen at almost any point since the emergence of complex organisms. That's very much my non-geneticist, non-neuroscientist speaking, mind you.
https://www.universetoday.com/139467/new-model-predicts-that-were-probably-the-only-advanced-civilization-in-the-observable-universe/
http://aleph.se/andart2/space/seti/dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/
I hadn't realised it before but the Bayesian and anthropic approaches aren't dissimilar. Starting from what we know to be true now, we can infer something about the processes that led to this point. A universe actually containing life (or bookshelves or cabbages or dust or whatever) must be suitable for making and sustaining life. However, this does not guarantee that life will be abundant. So, a universe only containing a little bit of life, but without that life standing much chance of detecting anything else, must be suitable for only generating a little bit of life and/or sustaining it for a short while.
I was particularly interested in three things from this analysis (I'm somewhat pressed for time, so I read the blog post but only skimmed the paper) :
1) Life could be abundant in some galaxies, but not necessarily throughout the Universe. They infer a distribution of civilisations where the median is 1 civilisation [per galaxy ?], the mean 27 million, and 21% of all galaxies are completely empty. So there could still be plenty of life out there, just not that much in our own part of it.
My question on that front would be : what's special about our region ? What physical processes are at work to cause this widely varying distribution ? I would imagine that the probability of life occurring should be evaluated on a world-by-world basis, not galaxy by galaxy. Oh, sure, there will be some large-scale influence, but probably not very much. I rather suspect we're back to Great Filters, which the authors want to avoid.
The authors aren't astronomers so it's fine that they just raise the statistical argument, but it would be oh so much more interesting with a physical justification. Without this, it's not really clear if they're solved the paradox after all. If the statistics says one thing and the physics another, then the paradox remains.
2) The paradox is essentially solved by simply admitting that we're suitably rare. Our assumption is that life is abundant but there is as yet, they say, sufficient uncertainty in our understanding of the processes needed for life to form for that assumption to be questionable. So, given that clearly no Galactic Empire has yet arisen, they re-evaluate the probability of life occurring in light of this. There's no paradox if we're just alone.
Again though, the paradox would return if it could be shown with a more science-based (rather than statistical) approach that there should be every reason to expect an abundance of life.
3) : Modern genetics required >1/5 of the age of the universe to evolve intelligence. A genetic system like the one that preceded ours might both be stable over a google cell divisions and evolve more slowly by a factor of 10, and run out the clock. Hence some genetic systems may be incapable of ever evolving intelligence.
I don't know if its fair to say "required" in that first sentence. Maybe it's correct. Maybe intelligence evolved as soon as the genetic code allowed it, and previously no animals were actually capable of a human-like intelligence. Anyone of the species that evolves it first is unavoidably going to find the situation very strange (and therefore, during that special period soon after achieving higher reasoning, should avoid making any Carterian inferences about the lifespan of intelligence, since they're at a special point in history). On the other hand, it seems at least equally plausible to me that intelligence is a freak accident that could have arisen at almost any point since the emergence of complex organisms. That's very much my non-geneticist, non-neuroscientist speaking, mind you.
https://www.universetoday.com/139467/new-model-predicts-that-were-probably-the-only-advanced-civilization-in-the-observable-universe/
http://aleph.se/andart2/space/seti/dissolving-the-fermi-paradox/
Saturday, 23 June 2018
Friday, 22 June 2018
The AI that can explain what it's doing, but is hilariously bad at it
We've had psychopathic AIs, racist AIs, AI that can debate the merits of space exploration in a convincing manner, and now we have an AI that believes birds have horns and bunnies have warp technology. That one's going to be tough to beat.
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http://aiweirdness.com/post/175110257767/the-visual-chatbot
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http://aiweirdness.com/post/175110257767/the-visual-chatbot
Birds use quantum entanglement to navigate
Well that's weird, but what on Earth is it like to possess such a sense ?
In the early 2000s, researchers narrowed down the possibilities where the birds’ magnetoreceptive sensor could be. It was found that migratory birds can use a compass-like sensory mechanism in their eye for navigation, more specifically a certain protein that can sense the difference in lights during flight, which help the brain to plot the differential information into a travel plan. In a way, the protein acts like the magnetic needle in a compass. The focus of the hypothesis was on a class of magnetoreception proteins known as cryptochromes. But no one knows which variation of this protein can do the job.
From the video transcript :
The scientists theorise that as incoming light enters the eye, a photon hits the cryptochrome protein and that excites the electrons on it. The energy is then transferred between two molecules within the protein, yielding two free electrons that are quantum entangled and therefore correlated. They theorise the electrons spin forms a coherent quantum state that reacts to a weak external magnetic field, say, for example, the Earth's magnetic field.
Basically if they're right these two electrons are reacting to the bird flying through Earth's magnetic field. As the bird turns from moves [sic] the electron spin differently, causing different messages to be sent to the bird's brain. The chemical signals that are sent to the brain allow it to detect the magnetic field - again, if they're right - to within just five degrees.
https://www.labroots.com/trending/chemistry-and-physics/11818/compass-eyes-how-migratory-birds-navigate
In the early 2000s, researchers narrowed down the possibilities where the birds’ magnetoreceptive sensor could be. It was found that migratory birds can use a compass-like sensory mechanism in their eye for navigation, more specifically a certain protein that can sense the difference in lights during flight, which help the brain to plot the differential information into a travel plan. In a way, the protein acts like the magnetic needle in a compass. The focus of the hypothesis was on a class of magnetoreception proteins known as cryptochromes. But no one knows which variation of this protein can do the job.
From the video transcript :
The scientists theorise that as incoming light enters the eye, a photon hits the cryptochrome protein and that excites the electrons on it. The energy is then transferred between two molecules within the protein, yielding two free electrons that are quantum entangled and therefore correlated. They theorise the electrons spin forms a coherent quantum state that reacts to a weak external magnetic field, say, for example, the Earth's magnetic field.
Basically if they're right these two electrons are reacting to the bird flying through Earth's magnetic field. As the bird turns from moves [sic] the electron spin differently, causing different messages to be sent to the bird's brain. The chemical signals that are sent to the brain allow it to detect the magnetic field - again, if they're right - to within just five degrees.
https://www.labroots.com/trending/chemistry-and-physics/11818/compass-eyes-how-migratory-birds-navigate
Thursday, 21 June 2018
Electric skin to allow sensation in prosthetic limbs
Well that's just awesome.
"We've made a sensor that goes over the fingertips of a prosthetic hand and acts like your own skin would," says Luke Osborn, a graduate student in biomedical engineering. "It's inspired by what is happening in human biology, with receptors for both touch and pain.
"This is interesting and new," Osborn said, "because now we can have a prosthetic hand that is already on the market and fit it with an e-dermis that can tell the wearer whether he or she is picking up something that is round or whether it has sharp points."
The team created a "neuromorphic model" mimicking the touch and pain receptors of the human nervous system, allowing the e-dermis to electronically encode sensations just as the receptors in the skin would. Tracking brain activity via electroencephalography, or EEG, the team determined that the test subject was able to perceive these sensations in his phantom hand.
The researchers then connected the e-dermis output to the volunteer by using a noninvasive method known as transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, or TENS. In a pain-detection task, the team determined that the test subject and the prosthesis were able to experience a natural, reflexive reaction to both pain while touching a pointed object and non-pain when touching a round object.
I wonder how this could be used in VR and other remote sensing devices.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180620171004.htm
"We've made a sensor that goes over the fingertips of a prosthetic hand and acts like your own skin would," says Luke Osborn, a graduate student in biomedical engineering. "It's inspired by what is happening in human biology, with receptors for both touch and pain.
"This is interesting and new," Osborn said, "because now we can have a prosthetic hand that is already on the market and fit it with an e-dermis that can tell the wearer whether he or she is picking up something that is round or whether it has sharp points."
The team created a "neuromorphic model" mimicking the touch and pain receptors of the human nervous system, allowing the e-dermis to electronically encode sensations just as the receptors in the skin would. Tracking brain activity via electroencephalography, or EEG, the team determined that the test subject was able to perceive these sensations in his phantom hand.
The researchers then connected the e-dermis output to the volunteer by using a noninvasive method known as transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, or TENS. In a pain-detection task, the team determined that the test subject and the prosthesis were able to experience a natural, reflexive reaction to both pain while touching a pointed object and non-pain when touching a round object.
I wonder how this could be used in VR and other remote sensing devices.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180620171004.htm
Trapping CO2 in cement
A Canadian startup has invented a new system for making concrete that traps CO2 emissions forever and at the same time reduces the need for cement. CarbonCure's system takes captured CO2 and injects it into concrete as it's being mixed. Once the concrete hardens, that carbon is sequestered forever. Even if the building is torn down, the carbon stays put. That's because it reacts with the concrete and becomes a mineral.
"The best thing about it is the mineral itself improves the compressive strength of the concrete," Christie Gamble, the director of sustainability at CarbonCure, told CNNMoney. "Because the CO2 actually helps to make the concrete stronger, concrete producers can still make concrete as strong as they need to but use less cement in the process."
CarbonCure's Gamble noted if the industry is able to reduce 5% of its carbon footprint, that is a significant change from where it is right now. "If this technology is deployed across the globe, we could reduce about 700 megatons of CO2 each year. That's the same as taking 150 million cars off the road every year," Gamble said.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/12/technology/concrete-carboncure/index.html
"The best thing about it is the mineral itself improves the compressive strength of the concrete," Christie Gamble, the director of sustainability at CarbonCure, told CNNMoney. "Because the CO2 actually helps to make the concrete stronger, concrete producers can still make concrete as strong as they need to but use less cement in the process."
CarbonCure's Gamble noted if the industry is able to reduce 5% of its carbon footprint, that is a significant change from where it is right now. "If this technology is deployed across the globe, we could reduce about 700 megatons of CO2 each year. That's the same as taking 150 million cars off the road every year," Gamble said.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/06/12/technology/concrete-carboncure/index.html
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a hoax : people are not that pliable
An excellent long read on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Some of this I was aware of previously, much else is new.
The very short version is that Zimbardo is an arse.
The slightly less short version is that Zimbardo is a victim of his own flawed narrative, depicting himself as a victim of circumstance. Actually, the prison experiment, when the full facts are described, reveals basically the opposite of the popular conclusion. People don't naturally become psychopaths through such rudimentary conditioning. Not only were there heavy selection effects at work in the choice of prisoners and guards, and not only were Zimbardo and others actively encouraging the behaviour they were seeking, but much of the resulting "behaviour" was simply fake. Rather than everyone falling victim to the situation and becoming brutal sadists, Zimbardo's own innately arsehole nature seems to be the overwhelmingly dominant force here. Not only did he force the conclusions that he wanted the experiment to show, but he goes on to actively promote those conclusions for decades afterwards.
The appeal of the experiment is that it lets people off the hook for committing atrocities. While there's no doubt that the situation does play a role, it's nothing like what Zimbardo claimed. This is somewhat good news for decent people (caveat : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/DUBMNo9PFZj) but bad news for arseholes.
“You have a vertigo when you look into it,” Le Texier explained. “It’s like, ‘Oh my god, I could be a Nazi myself. I thought I was a good guy, and now I discover that I could be this monster.’ And in the meantime, it’s quite reassuring, because if I become a monster, it’s not because deep inside me I am the devil, it’s because of the situation. I think that’s why the experiment was so famous in Germany and Eastern Europe. You don’t feel guilty. ‘Oh, okay, it was the situation. We are all good guys. No problem. It’s just the situation made us do it.’ So it’s shocking, but at the same time it’s reassuring. I think these two messages of the experiment made it famous.”
It also has a bunch of consequences for prison reform :
“When I heard of the study,” recalls Frances Cullen, one of the preeminent criminologists of the last half century, “I just thought, ‘Well of course that’s true.’ I was uncritical. Everybody was uncritical.” In Cullen’s field, the Stanford prison experiment provided handy evidence that the prison system was fundamentally broken. “It confirmed what people already believed, which was that prisons were inherently inhumane,” he said."
“What the Stanford Prison Experiment did,” Cullen says, “was to say: prisons are not reformable. The crux of many prison reforms, especially among academic criminologists, became that prisons were inherently inhumane, so our agenda had to be minimizing the use of prisons, emphasizing alternatives to prison, emphasizing community corrections.”
Most criminologists today agree that prisons are not, in fact, as hopeless as Zimbardo and Martinson made them out to be. Some prison programs do reliably help inmates better their lives. Though international comparisons are difficult to make, Norway’s maximum-security Halden prison, where convicted murderers wear casual clothing, receive extensive job-skill training, share meals with unarmed guards, and wander at will during daylight hours through a scenic landscape of pine trees and blueberry bushes, offers a hopeful sign. Norwegians prisoners seldom get in fights and reoffend at lower rates than anywhere else in the world. To begin to ameliorate the evils of mass incarceration, Cullen argues, will require researching what makes some forms of prison management better than others, rather than, as the Stanford prison experiment did, dismissing them all as inherently abusive.
https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62
The very short version is that Zimbardo is an arse.
The slightly less short version is that Zimbardo is a victim of his own flawed narrative, depicting himself as a victim of circumstance. Actually, the prison experiment, when the full facts are described, reveals basically the opposite of the popular conclusion. People don't naturally become psychopaths through such rudimentary conditioning. Not only were there heavy selection effects at work in the choice of prisoners and guards, and not only were Zimbardo and others actively encouraging the behaviour they were seeking, but much of the resulting "behaviour" was simply fake. Rather than everyone falling victim to the situation and becoming brutal sadists, Zimbardo's own innately arsehole nature seems to be the overwhelmingly dominant force here. Not only did he force the conclusions that he wanted the experiment to show, but he goes on to actively promote those conclusions for decades afterwards.
The appeal of the experiment is that it lets people off the hook for committing atrocities. While there's no doubt that the situation does play a role, it's nothing like what Zimbardo claimed. This is somewhat good news for decent people (caveat : https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/DUBMNo9PFZj) but bad news for arseholes.
“You have a vertigo when you look into it,” Le Texier explained. “It’s like, ‘Oh my god, I could be a Nazi myself. I thought I was a good guy, and now I discover that I could be this monster.’ And in the meantime, it’s quite reassuring, because if I become a monster, it’s not because deep inside me I am the devil, it’s because of the situation. I think that’s why the experiment was so famous in Germany and Eastern Europe. You don’t feel guilty. ‘Oh, okay, it was the situation. We are all good guys. No problem. It’s just the situation made us do it.’ So it’s shocking, but at the same time it’s reassuring. I think these two messages of the experiment made it famous.”
It also has a bunch of consequences for prison reform :
“When I heard of the study,” recalls Frances Cullen, one of the preeminent criminologists of the last half century, “I just thought, ‘Well of course that’s true.’ I was uncritical. Everybody was uncritical.” In Cullen’s field, the Stanford prison experiment provided handy evidence that the prison system was fundamentally broken. “It confirmed what people already believed, which was that prisons were inherently inhumane,” he said."
“What the Stanford Prison Experiment did,” Cullen says, “was to say: prisons are not reformable. The crux of many prison reforms, especially among academic criminologists, became that prisons were inherently inhumane, so our agenda had to be minimizing the use of prisons, emphasizing alternatives to prison, emphasizing community corrections.”
Most criminologists today agree that prisons are not, in fact, as hopeless as Zimbardo and Martinson made them out to be. Some prison programs do reliably help inmates better their lives. Though international comparisons are difficult to make, Norway’s maximum-security Halden prison, where convicted murderers wear casual clothing, receive extensive job-skill training, share meals with unarmed guards, and wander at will during daylight hours through a scenic landscape of pine trees and blueberry bushes, offers a hopeful sign. Norwegians prisoners seldom get in fights and reoffend at lower rates than anywhere else in the world. To begin to ameliorate the evils of mass incarceration, Cullen argues, will require researching what makes some forms of prison management better than others, rather than, as the Stanford prison experiment did, dismissing them all as inherently abusive.
https://medium.com/s/trustissues/the-lifespan-of-a-lie-d869212b1f62
Quantitative easing in plants
Quantitative easing for plants has unexpected consequences.
Plants have their own form of money: carbon dioxide. For decades, our fossil fuel industry has been artificially inflating their currency. What happens to plants during inflation—when CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise?
The same thing that happens if you drop money from the sky over Times Square, leaving everyone there with $1,000 in their pockets, says Hope Jahren, a geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo. “Some people would save it; some people would run out and buy clothes; some people would gamble it away within 5 minutes,” she told Nautilus editor in chief Michael Segal. Plants face similar choices. “Some build a bunch of new leaves; some make a bunch more flowers; some shunt it into their roots; some stop making defence compounds. I call that the Costco effect. If you go buy 100 rolls of toilet paper, you’re going to use toilet paper at your house very differently than if you’re buying it roll by roll. So plants, if it’s that easy to make a new leaf, you’re going to treat the ones you have very differently, if that sugar is just coming in free.”
http://nautil.us/blog/climate-change-is-making-plants-behave-like-costco-shoppers
Plants have their own form of money: carbon dioxide. For decades, our fossil fuel industry has been artificially inflating their currency. What happens to plants during inflation—when CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise?
The same thing that happens if you drop money from the sky over Times Square, leaving everyone there with $1,000 in their pockets, says Hope Jahren, a geochemist and geobiologist at the University of Oslo. “Some people would save it; some people would run out and buy clothes; some people would gamble it away within 5 minutes,” she told Nautilus editor in chief Michael Segal. Plants face similar choices. “Some build a bunch of new leaves; some make a bunch more flowers; some shunt it into their roots; some stop making defence compounds. I call that the Costco effect. If you go buy 100 rolls of toilet paper, you’re going to use toilet paper at your house very differently than if you’re buying it roll by roll. So plants, if it’s that easy to make a new leaf, you’re going to treat the ones you have very differently, if that sugar is just coming in free.”
http://nautil.us/blog/climate-change-is-making-plants-behave-like-costco-shoppers
Wednesday, 20 June 2018
The EU's stupid proposed copyright law is stupid
Stupidy stupidy stupid, as Baldrick one said.
On Wednesday, a European Union committee will vote on Article 11, a proposal to create a new copyright over links to news stories. If the proposal is adopted, a service that publishes a link to a story on a news website with a headline or a short snippet would have to get a license before linking. News sites could charge whatever they want for these licenses, and shut down critics by refusing to license to people with whom they disagreed. And the new rule would apply to any service where a link to a news story can appear, including social media platforms, search engines, blogging platforms, and even nonprofits like Wikipedia.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9k8vd5/europe-link-tax-copyright-reform
On Wednesday, a European Union committee will vote on Article 11, a proposal to create a new copyright over links to news stories. If the proposal is adopted, a service that publishes a link to a story on a news website with a headline or a short snippet would have to get a license before linking. News sites could charge whatever they want for these licenses, and shut down critics by refusing to license to people with whom they disagreed. And the new rule would apply to any service where a link to a news story can appear, including social media platforms, search engines, blogging platforms, and even nonprofits like Wikipedia.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9k8vd5/europe-link-tax-copyright-reform
The EU is threatening to make the internet unusable
This is a seriously stupid law. However, it has only passed the first stage. There's still time to prevent it coming into effect, and this first approval was a very narrow win for article 11. This needs a John Oliver style (or literally) call to arms to get people to tell them en masse that this is ridiculous.
The European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs voted by 15 votes to 10 to adopt Article 13 and by 13 votes to 12 to adopt Article 11. It will now go to the wider European Parliament to vote on in July.
Article 13 puts more onus on websites to enforce copyright and could mean that every online platform that allows users to post text, sounds, code or images will need some form of content-recognition system to review all material that users upload. Activist Cory Doctorow has called it a "foolish, terrible idea". Writing on online news website BoingBoing, he said: "No filter exists that can even approximate this. And the closest equivalents are mostly run by American companies, meaning that US big tech is going to get to spy on everything Europeans post and decide what gets censored and what doesn't."
Article 11 has been called the "link tax" by opponents. Designed to limit the power over news publishers that tech giants such as Facebook and Google have, it requires online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content. The theory is that this would help support smaller news publishers and drive users to their homepages rather than directly to their news stories. But critics say it fails to clearly define what constitutes a link and could be manipulated by governments to curb freedom of speech.
But publishers, including the Independent Music Companies Association (Impala) welcomed the vote. "This is a strong and unambiguous message sent by the European Parliament," said executive chair Helen Smith. "It clarifies what the music sector has been saying for years: if you are in the business of distributing music or other creative works, you need a licence, clear and simple. It's time for the digital market to catch up with progress."
But linking to content isn't a form of distribution. Now, linking directly to copyrighted, commercial material is one thing. Linking to a publisher's website where users can make legal purchases is completely different.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44546620
The European Parliament's Committee on Legal Affairs voted by 15 votes to 10 to adopt Article 13 and by 13 votes to 12 to adopt Article 11. It will now go to the wider European Parliament to vote on in July.
Article 13 puts more onus on websites to enforce copyright and could mean that every online platform that allows users to post text, sounds, code or images will need some form of content-recognition system to review all material that users upload. Activist Cory Doctorow has called it a "foolish, terrible idea". Writing on online news website BoingBoing, he said: "No filter exists that can even approximate this. And the closest equivalents are mostly run by American companies, meaning that US big tech is going to get to spy on everything Europeans post and decide what gets censored and what doesn't."
Article 11 has been called the "link tax" by opponents. Designed to limit the power over news publishers that tech giants such as Facebook and Google have, it requires online platforms to pay publishers a fee if they link to their news content. The theory is that this would help support smaller news publishers and drive users to their homepages rather than directly to their news stories. But critics say it fails to clearly define what constitutes a link and could be manipulated by governments to curb freedom of speech.
But publishers, including the Independent Music Companies Association (Impala) welcomed the vote. "This is a strong and unambiguous message sent by the European Parliament," said executive chair Helen Smith. "It clarifies what the music sector has been saying for years: if you are in the business of distributing music or other creative works, you need a licence, clear and simple. It's time for the digital market to catch up with progress."
But linking to content isn't a form of distribution. Now, linking directly to copyrighted, commercial material is one thing. Linking to a publisher's website where users can make legal purchases is completely different.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44546620
Einstein was a racist, but then he got better
It's an uncomfortable reality that we're all products of the system in which we're embedded as well as our own natural inclinations.
Depending on the details I think this story could be used to spin various narratives. One might be of crude hypocrisy. An even worse conclusion would be to justify present racism. The one I prefer is Einstein doing what any good scientist does : unavoidably starting out with his own prejudices (which influenced his interpretation of what he saw in foreign parts), he later came to make an evidenced-based change of opinion. As well the hypothesis itself he also considered and saw the effects of racism; perhaps, charitably, he'd hitherto never really actively considered it, but passively accepted it as everyone does about most of their beliefs.
Personally I don't want scientists dominating the political scene; scientists should first and foremost do science. But I would like a more scientific approach to the political system, where evidence at least sometimes trumps ideology when it comes to policy. Buggered if I know how to go about that, mind you.
You should also read J. Steven York's excellent commentary below.
Originally shared by J. Steven York
When considering historical figures, and even people of a certain age, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that many of them, maybe even most of them, were, to modern eyes, racists and sexists. It shouldn't be surprising because, for most them them, these attitudes were the default social norm. And what it is had for many people, especially the younger ones, to understand is that any positive deviation from those attitudes was a step OUTSIDE the norm, and not TOWARDS it. These people were making huge and often costly shifts, even if to our current sensibilities, those shifts were limited, flawed, and incomplete.
Enlightenment doesn't happen in a day, or even a generation, and I don't think it's entirely fair to judge people of the past based on the standards of the present. The enlightened attitudes many hold today where achieved in small increments by men and women who retained now-shocking blind spots and foibles. It may now seem logical to embrace that all people are equal, regardless of race, origin, gender or age, but that didn't all happen at once, and progress was slow and inconsistent, and continues today.
A few years ago I decided to go back and watch my way though "Magnum P.I.," an iconic show I'd somehow missed in first run (I think I worked nights through most of it). I got through a couple seasons before getting sidetracked.
It was good fun, and the show was an early running in having a regular, competent, admirable character in the form of helicopter pilot T.C. The show did a number of episodes dealing with discrimination against blacks, and while they were a bit ham-handed at times, and timid at others, it was good to see them trying. But running concurrent with this, the show's handling of Asian characters was rather horrific. There was yellow-face, stereotypes, and painfully tasteless humor. Asians were often portrayed as comic fools, or stock sneering villains. Somehow the progress reflected in relations with blacks didn't translate to Asian characters.
Because, of course it didn't. Women were often treated very poorly as well. And I doubt there were many jews, arabs or hispanics in evidence either, and certainly not LGBTQ characters. Small steps. Those changes in thinking would come later, or be achieved elsewhere.
We don't have to accept these old attitudes and presentations, but we need to recognise that they were the default of their times, and understand the value of progress that happened then, even when it was slow and fractured.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfrancis/2018/06/18/what-should-we-think-about-albert-einsteins-racism/2/#7ebb43801a79
Depending on the details I think this story could be used to spin various narratives. One might be of crude hypocrisy. An even worse conclusion would be to justify present racism. The one I prefer is Einstein doing what any good scientist does : unavoidably starting out with his own prejudices (which influenced his interpretation of what he saw in foreign parts), he later came to make an evidenced-based change of opinion. As well the hypothesis itself he also considered and saw the effects of racism; perhaps, charitably, he'd hitherto never really actively considered it, but passively accepted it as everyone does about most of their beliefs.
Personally I don't want scientists dominating the political scene; scientists should first and foremost do science. But I would like a more scientific approach to the political system, where evidence at least sometimes trumps ideology when it comes to policy. Buggered if I know how to go about that, mind you.
You should also read J. Steven York's excellent commentary below.
Originally shared by J. Steven York
When considering historical figures, and even people of a certain age, it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that many of them, maybe even most of them, were, to modern eyes, racists and sexists. It shouldn't be surprising because, for most them them, these attitudes were the default social norm. And what it is had for many people, especially the younger ones, to understand is that any positive deviation from those attitudes was a step OUTSIDE the norm, and not TOWARDS it. These people were making huge and often costly shifts, even if to our current sensibilities, those shifts were limited, flawed, and incomplete.
Enlightenment doesn't happen in a day, or even a generation, and I don't think it's entirely fair to judge people of the past based on the standards of the present. The enlightened attitudes many hold today where achieved in small increments by men and women who retained now-shocking blind spots and foibles. It may now seem logical to embrace that all people are equal, regardless of race, origin, gender or age, but that didn't all happen at once, and progress was slow and inconsistent, and continues today.
A few years ago I decided to go back and watch my way though "Magnum P.I.," an iconic show I'd somehow missed in first run (I think I worked nights through most of it). I got through a couple seasons before getting sidetracked.
It was good fun, and the show was an early running in having a regular, competent, admirable character in the form of helicopter pilot T.C. The show did a number of episodes dealing with discrimination against blacks, and while they were a bit ham-handed at times, and timid at others, it was good to see them trying. But running concurrent with this, the show's handling of Asian characters was rather horrific. There was yellow-face, stereotypes, and painfully tasteless humor. Asians were often portrayed as comic fools, or stock sneering villains. Somehow the progress reflected in relations with blacks didn't translate to Asian characters.
Because, of course it didn't. Women were often treated very poorly as well. And I doubt there were many jews, arabs or hispanics in evidence either, and certainly not LGBTQ characters. Small steps. Those changes in thinking would come later, or be achieved elsewhere.
We don't have to accept these old attitudes and presentations, but we need to recognise that they were the default of their times, and understand the value of progress that happened then, even when it was slow and fractured.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewfrancis/2018/06/18/what-should-we-think-about-albert-einsteins-racism/2/#7ebb43801a79
America's Big Society
My hypothesis is that Americans who hate big government do so not because big government is inherently evil, but simply because it genuinely doesn't work in America - perhaps in part (but only in part) as a result of certain elements doing their damnedest to break it.
[I should clarify. I definitely don't mean to suggest that it doesn't work in other countries, because it very much does. I don't even want to say that it's wholly useless in America, because it isn't. What I mean to say is that there's clearly some level on which big government does fail in America, at which it appears incapable of taking even the most basic actions or of making the simplest choices, which does not happen in other countries.]
As the country continues its long recovery from recession, there are signs that a much deeper shift is happening at a local level, the seeds of which were sown years ago. Indicators far more subtle than job numbers suggest a flourishing of entrepreneurship, collaboration and problem-solving, away from the gaze of national media.
After five years spent visiting dozens of towns, The Atlantic writer James Fallows and his wife Deborah have written a book Our Towns which paints a portrait of renewal, a story at odds with the well-documented gridlock of higher levels of government. Fallows says that in several areas - civic engagement, returning talent, growth of tech start-ups, downtown revitalisation, an openness to immigrants and thriving libraries - local America seems to be flourishing.
He's not alone. Another book called The New Localism says a growing number of US cities are addressing the problems of post-industrial America in increasingly imaginative and flexible ways - succeeding where bigger government fails. There is also optimism from the world of tech. After visiting communities in the heart of the country, in a huge drive to help entrepreneurs, internet pioneer Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, says the future looks bright. "I believe that we are entering the Third Wave of the internet, a period in which entrepreneurs will leverage technology to revolutionise major sectors of the economy - healthcare, financial services, agriculture and others," he says.
How cities are rolling up their sleeves and getting things done is the subject of New Localism, a book co-authored by Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution. "For the past 40 years, we have seen an evolution of urban problem-solving that's becoming more sophisticated and more impactful with every passing year," he says. This "localism" first emerged in the 1980s, he says, when cities began to realise that the "cavalry wasn't coming" from federal and state government, and they were going to have to tackle their problems on their own. City leaders are discovering that problem-solving from the bottom up - in partnerships with others from the worlds of business, technology and education - is more democratic and effective, says Katz.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44349211
[I should clarify. I definitely don't mean to suggest that it doesn't work in other countries, because it very much does. I don't even want to say that it's wholly useless in America, because it isn't. What I mean to say is that there's clearly some level on which big government does fail in America, at which it appears incapable of taking even the most basic actions or of making the simplest choices, which does not happen in other countries.]
As the country continues its long recovery from recession, there are signs that a much deeper shift is happening at a local level, the seeds of which were sown years ago. Indicators far more subtle than job numbers suggest a flourishing of entrepreneurship, collaboration and problem-solving, away from the gaze of national media.
After five years spent visiting dozens of towns, The Atlantic writer James Fallows and his wife Deborah have written a book Our Towns which paints a portrait of renewal, a story at odds with the well-documented gridlock of higher levels of government. Fallows says that in several areas - civic engagement, returning talent, growth of tech start-ups, downtown revitalisation, an openness to immigrants and thriving libraries - local America seems to be flourishing.
He's not alone. Another book called The New Localism says a growing number of US cities are addressing the problems of post-industrial America in increasingly imaginative and flexible ways - succeeding where bigger government fails. There is also optimism from the world of tech. After visiting communities in the heart of the country, in a huge drive to help entrepreneurs, internet pioneer Steve Case, co-founder of AOL, says the future looks bright. "I believe that we are entering the Third Wave of the internet, a period in which entrepreneurs will leverage technology to revolutionise major sectors of the economy - healthcare, financial services, agriculture and others," he says.
How cities are rolling up their sleeves and getting things done is the subject of New Localism, a book co-authored by Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution. "For the past 40 years, we have seen an evolution of urban problem-solving that's becoming more sophisticated and more impactful with every passing year," he says. This "localism" first emerged in the 1980s, he says, when cities began to realise that the "cavalry wasn't coming" from federal and state government, and they were going to have to tackle their problems on their own. City leaders are discovering that problem-solving from the bottom up - in partnerships with others from the worlds of business, technology and education - is more democratic and effective, says Katz.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44349211
The case for a galaxy without dark matter gets stronger
Remember that galaxy without dark matter ? Well there was one strangely deviant measurement that meant it might have had a dark halo after all. However, this is now shown not to be the case. It was strangely deviant because the measurement was simply wrong. Also, van Dokkum here officially respond to other criticism, though there are more details on his blog : https://www.pietervandokkum.com/ngc1052-df2
I'm very keen on figure 1, I think this is a nice and convincing comparison of the data with a theoretical Gaussian distribution.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv180604685V
I'm very keen on figure 1, I think this is a nice and convincing comparison of the data with a theoretical Gaussian distribution.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018arXiv180604685V
The Trump administration does not understand morality
Why, 'tis almost as if the administration prefers outright tyrants to its closest friends. Oh how I wonder what the reason for that might be. For the professed sake of the occasional hypocrisy of its allies, the US is courting despots. The idea that it's leaving because the UN isn't doing a good enough job, at a time when it's putting children into cages and separating them from their families, is highly refined bullshit indeed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/44537372
https://www.bbc.com/news/44537372
A topic quote from Edward Gibbon
I'm still working my way, very, very slowly, through Gibbon's massively over-rated ginormous tome. He isn't a fan of the prophet Mohammed. Nevertheless :
"Even in a conqueror or a priest, I can surprise a word or action of unaffected humanity; and the decree of Mahomet that, in the sale of captives, the mothers should never be separated from their children may suspend or moderate the censure of the historian."
"Even in a conqueror or a priest, I can surprise a word or action of unaffected humanity; and the decree of Mahomet that, in the sale of captives, the mothers should never be separated from their children may suspend or moderate the censure of the historian."
Tuesday, 19 June 2018
An AI that can form long, coherent arguments
Now this is impressive. However, my two rules for any AI article still apply :
1) It's just an elaborate way of rearranging information with no deeper understanding or what it's doing
2) It does not have to actually become sentient to have an impact.
Or more concisely, it isn't sentient but that doesn't necessarily matter if it can produce an output comparable to an sentient, intelligent human.
The machine drew from a library of “hundreds of millions” of documents - mostly newspaper articles and academic journals - to form its responses to a topic it was not prepared for beforehand. Its performance was not without slip-ups, but those in attendance made clear their thoughts when voting on who did best. While the humans had better delivery, the group agreed, the machine offered greater substance in its arguments.
Ms Ovadia was Israel’s national debating champion in 2016, and began working with IBM a few months ago as an opponent to its machine. She told the BBC: “I think eventually when it can do what we do but better, that’ll be great thing for the human race - for informed decision-making, for informed voting, for informed everything.”
Urk, I wish. You'd have to feed it the most unbiased information possible, except that would probably determine it would be better for everyone if the human race went extinct or something.
Project Debater was not hooked up to the internet. Instead, it drew its information from a data bank of carefully curated sources chosen by IBM’s researchers.
As with the psychopathic Norman, data matters more than the algorithm. Though the mastery of language here is undeniably impressive. Not sure what that means for those who think language is key to human intelligence. Hugely interesting anyway...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44531132
1) It's just an elaborate way of rearranging information with no deeper understanding or what it's doing
2) It does not have to actually become sentient to have an impact.
Or more concisely, it isn't sentient but that doesn't necessarily matter if it can produce an output comparable to an sentient, intelligent human.
The machine drew from a library of “hundreds of millions” of documents - mostly newspaper articles and academic journals - to form its responses to a topic it was not prepared for beforehand. Its performance was not without slip-ups, but those in attendance made clear their thoughts when voting on who did best. While the humans had better delivery, the group agreed, the machine offered greater substance in its arguments.
Ms Ovadia was Israel’s national debating champion in 2016, and began working with IBM a few months ago as an opponent to its machine. She told the BBC: “I think eventually when it can do what we do but better, that’ll be great thing for the human race - for informed decision-making, for informed voting, for informed everything.”
Urk, I wish. You'd have to feed it the most unbiased information possible, except that would probably determine it would be better for everyone if the human race went extinct or something.
Project Debater was not hooked up to the internet. Instead, it drew its information from a data bank of carefully curated sources chosen by IBM’s researchers.
As with the psychopathic Norman, data matters more than the algorithm. Though the mastery of language here is undeniably impressive. Not sure what that means for those who think language is key to human intelligence. Hugely interesting anyway...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44531132
Behold the Space Force !
Ahh, the Space Force, the wet dream of teenage nerds across the world. As stupid in fact as it is in fiction, because if there's one thing America absolutely definitely needs more of, it's military investment. Never going to happen. It's just Trumpy continuing to be be pitiably desperate to escape the Mexicans at any cost.
Also, watch the second video, and witness Buzz Aldrin's wonderful reaction at about 2 minutes in.
Mind you, if they use this handy recruitment video, I'd definitely sign up were I eligible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMTz9nIUkGc
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44527672
Also, watch the second video, and witness Buzz Aldrin's wonderful reaction at about 2 minutes in.
Mind you, if they use this handy recruitment video, I'd definitely sign up were I eligible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMTz9nIUkGc
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44527672
Finland's immigrants are just as happy as its natives
This year, for the first time, the World Happiness Report asked immigrants to take part in the survey, and the happiness of the immigrant populations were virtually identical to the results for the overall population, with Finland at the top. That is to say, both Finnish-born people and those who migrated there are equally happy. This is interesting because it essentially refutes the theory that happiness is intrinsically Finnish.
“Looking at immigrants’ happiness shatters the idea that Nordic countries are closed, homogenic societies,” Helliwell said. “If happiness is to do with something in the Finnish psyche, it’s equally available to someone from Bangladesh. So it’s got to be more about the way the country is run.”
But it could be feedback and assimilation. The country is well-run, which engenders a Finnish mindset in newcomers, which leads to contentedness, which perpetuates a well-run country.
When these happiness evaluations are released, Wiking says there is always a great deal of curiosity about the top-ranked nations. We are naturally fascinated by people who seem to achieve happiness, this great emotional state we all aspire to, and even more so by the idea of an entire nation of people who live in glee. There are fewer questions asked about the nations on the bottom of the happiness list – places like Syria, Liberia and Afghanistan – because unhappiness is obvious. If we believe there is some sort of secret to Finnish happiness, perhaps the closest thing is to live in a society that emphatically values trust and generosity.
A big problem in the west is that there's quite a lot to make people justifiably angry and afraid, which makes it very hard indeed to get them to be trusting and generous.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180617-why-the-finns-dont-want-to-be-happy
“Looking at immigrants’ happiness shatters the idea that Nordic countries are closed, homogenic societies,” Helliwell said. “If happiness is to do with something in the Finnish psyche, it’s equally available to someone from Bangladesh. So it’s got to be more about the way the country is run.”
But it could be feedback and assimilation. The country is well-run, which engenders a Finnish mindset in newcomers, which leads to contentedness, which perpetuates a well-run country.
When these happiness evaluations are released, Wiking says there is always a great deal of curiosity about the top-ranked nations. We are naturally fascinated by people who seem to achieve happiness, this great emotional state we all aspire to, and even more so by the idea of an entire nation of people who live in glee. There are fewer questions asked about the nations on the bottom of the happiness list – places like Syria, Liberia and Afghanistan – because unhappiness is obvious. If we believe there is some sort of secret to Finnish happiness, perhaps the closest thing is to live in a society that emphatically values trust and generosity.
A big problem in the west is that there's quite a lot to make people justifiably angry and afraid, which makes it very hard indeed to get them to be trusting and generous.
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180617-why-the-finns-dont-want-to-be-happy
Network graphs of the structure of society
This is quite interesting, though not really what I'm after. I have this somewhat grandiose vision of depicting society (or more realistically, little bits and aspects of it) as a network. I think it would be useful to visually depict the various forces influencing individuals, showing how people (groups and individuals alike) are subject to but also influence other social groups in different ways. This may or may not be useful for actual knowledge discovery but I'm pretty sure, if done well, it would be useful for teaching. I may or may not attempt such a thing.
There are a few things out there which are close to what I'm after, but no cigar. There are tonnes of highly detailed ones on specific organisations and governmental types, many of which are pretty good, but that's much more focused than what I want. For example this hideous mess explains why Afghanistan is a hideous mess, except that it doesn't because it's too much of a hideous mess to understand :
https://organizationsandmarkets.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/coin2.jpg
This one (admittedly for kids so I wouldn't expect too much) is too simple and has the hugely naive problem of showing power flowing only from one source, rather than in a (partially ?) closed loop from many sources as I'd rather depict :
http://web-japan.org/kidsweb/explore/government/index.html
The closest one to what I'm after that I could find is here (both figures) :
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2012/07/watching-the-political-system-er-circus.html
Note that I only skimmed the text. The figures are nice, but a little too broad.
Isotype (International System Of Typographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial form. It consisted of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik), due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Social and economic museum of Vienna) between 1925 and 1934.
The aim was to “represent social facts pictorially” and to bring “dead statistics” to life by making them visually attractive and memorable. One of the museum’s catch-phrases was: “To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures”.... A central task in Isotype was the “transformation” of complex source information into a sketch for a self-explanatory chart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotype_(picture_language)
There are a few things out there which are close to what I'm after, but no cigar. There are tonnes of highly detailed ones on specific organisations and governmental types, many of which are pretty good, but that's much more focused than what I want. For example this hideous mess explains why Afghanistan is a hideous mess, except that it doesn't because it's too much of a hideous mess to understand :
https://organizationsandmarkets.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/coin2.jpg
This one (admittedly for kids so I wouldn't expect too much) is too simple and has the hugely naive problem of showing power flowing only from one source, rather than in a (partially ?) closed loop from many sources as I'd rather depict :
http://web-japan.org/kidsweb/explore/government/index.html
The closest one to what I'm after that I could find is here (both figures) :
http://questioneverything.typepad.com/question_everything/2012/07/watching-the-political-system-er-circus.html
Note that I only skimmed the text. The figures are nice, but a little too broad.
Isotype (International System Of Typographic Picture Education) is a method of showing social, technological, biological and historical connections in pictorial form. It consisted of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik), due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Social and economic museum of Vienna) between 1925 and 1934.
The aim was to “represent social facts pictorially” and to bring “dead statistics” to life by making them visually attractive and memorable. One of the museum’s catch-phrases was: “To remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures”.... A central task in Isotype was the “transformation” of complex source information into a sketch for a self-explanatory chart.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotype_(picture_language)
The organisation of language
Not really sure where to file this, so it's going in here.
You can see this effect by deciding which of these two sentences is easier to understand: “John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen,” or “John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out.” To many English speakers, the second sentence will sound strange—we’re inclined to keep the words “threw” and “out” as close together as we can. This process of limiting distance between related words is called dependency length minimisation, or DLM.
The researchers wanted to look at language as it’s actually used rather than make up sentences themselves, so they gathered databases of language examples from 37 different languages. Each sentence in the database was given a score based on the degree of DLM it showed: those sentences where conceptually related words were far apart in the sentence had high scores, and those where related words sat snugly together had low scores.
They found what they expected: “All languages have average dependency lengths shorter than the random baseline,” they write. This was especially true for longer sentences, which makes sense—there isn’t as much difference between “John threw out the trash,” and “John threw the trash out” as there is between the longer examples given above.
This research adds an important piece of the puzzle to the overall picture, says Jennifer Culbertson, who researches evolutionary linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. “There are many proposed universal properties of language, but basically all of them are controversial,” she explained. But it’s plausible, she added, that DLM—or something like it—could be a promising candidate for a universal cognitive mechanism that affects how languages are structured.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/mit-claims-to-have-found-a-language-universal-that-ties-all-languages-together/?linkId=35106910&linkId=53026118
You can see this effect by deciding which of these two sentences is easier to understand: “John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen,” or “John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out.” To many English speakers, the second sentence will sound strange—we’re inclined to keep the words “threw” and “out” as close together as we can. This process of limiting distance between related words is called dependency length minimisation, or DLM.
The researchers wanted to look at language as it’s actually used rather than make up sentences themselves, so they gathered databases of language examples from 37 different languages. Each sentence in the database was given a score based on the degree of DLM it showed: those sentences where conceptually related words were far apart in the sentence had high scores, and those where related words sat snugly together had low scores.
They found what they expected: “All languages have average dependency lengths shorter than the random baseline,” they write. This was especially true for longer sentences, which makes sense—there isn’t as much difference between “John threw out the trash,” and “John threw the trash out” as there is between the longer examples given above.
This research adds an important piece of the puzzle to the overall picture, says Jennifer Culbertson, who researches evolutionary linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. “There are many proposed universal properties of language, but basically all of them are controversial,” she explained. But it’s plausible, she added, that DLM—or something like it—could be a promising candidate for a universal cognitive mechanism that affects how languages are structured.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/mit-claims-to-have-found-a-language-universal-that-ties-all-languages-together/?linkId=35106910&linkId=53026118
Saving the giant sequoias
With bark that can be more than one foot thick and high levels of tannins to repel insects, giant sequoias are regarded by experts as some of the world’s most resilient trees. Close to 130 million trees of other species died in California over the past decade after being weakened by a five-year drought, but no mature giant sequoias perished, according to Sue Beatty, a restoration ecologist who helped lead the project. Even so, Ms. Beatty and other experts said they saw some signs of stress in the sequoias.
Giant sequoias do not have a central taproot. Instead, they develop a shallow network of roots, around 3 feet deep, that spreads as far as 200 feet from the trunk, Ms. Beatty said. The asphalt and the trampling feet of visitors in the grove were making the trees more vulnerable.
“This project was all about the trees,” she said. “We wanted to improve their survivability in the time of a changing climate.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/us/yosemite-sequoia-mariposa-grove.html
Giant sequoias do not have a central taproot. Instead, they develop a shallow network of roots, around 3 feet deep, that spreads as far as 200 feet from the trunk, Ms. Beatty said. The asphalt and the trampling feet of visitors in the grove were making the trees more vulnerable.
“This project was all about the trees,” she said. “We wanted to improve their survivability in the time of a changing climate.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/18/us/yosemite-sequoia-mariposa-grove.html
Monday, 18 June 2018
Privilege and relative comparisons mean that equality feels like oppression
Well, as I was saying the other day (https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/DghoijjqfcV), we judge things by our own standards. This can have extremely negative consequences if one group is given unfairly high standards.
All this anger we see from people screaming “All Lives Matter” in response to black protesters at rallies… All this anger we see from people insisting that THEIR “religious freedom” is being infringed because a gay couple wants to get married… All these people angry about immigrants, angry about Muslims, angry about “Happy Holidays,” angry about not being able to say bigoted things without being called a bigot… They all basically boil down to people who have grown accustomed to walking straight at other quaint country bumpkins, and expecting THEM to move. So when “those people” in their path DON’T move… When those people start wondering, “Why am I always moving out of this guy’s way?” When those people start asking themselves, “What if I didn’t move? What if I just kept walking too?” When those people start believing that they have every bit as much right to that aisle as anyone else… It can seem like THEIR rights are being taken away.
Equality can FEEL like oppression. But it’s not. What you’re feeling is just the discomfort of losing a little bit of your privilege… The same discomfort that an only child feels when she goes to preschool, and discovers that there are other kids who want to play with the same toys as she does. It’s like an old man being used to having a community pool all to himself, having that pool actually opened up to everyone in the community, and then that old man yelling, “But what about MY right to swim in a pool all by myself?!?”
https://theboeskool.com/2016/03/05/when-youre-accustomed-to-privilege-equality-feels-like-oppression/
All this anger we see from people screaming “All Lives Matter” in response to black protesters at rallies… All this anger we see from people insisting that THEIR “religious freedom” is being infringed because a gay couple wants to get married… All these people angry about immigrants, angry about Muslims, angry about “Happy Holidays,” angry about not being able to say bigoted things without being called a bigot… They all basically boil down to people who have grown accustomed to walking straight at other quaint country bumpkins, and expecting THEM to move. So when “those people” in their path DON’T move… When those people start wondering, “Why am I always moving out of this guy’s way?” When those people start asking themselves, “What if I didn’t move? What if I just kept walking too?” When those people start believing that they have every bit as much right to that aisle as anyone else… It can seem like THEIR rights are being taken away.
Equality can FEEL like oppression. But it’s not. What you’re feeling is just the discomfort of losing a little bit of your privilege… The same discomfort that an only child feels when she goes to preschool, and discovers that there are other kids who want to play with the same toys as she does. It’s like an old man being used to having a community pool all to himself, having that pool actually opened up to everyone in the community, and then that old man yelling, “But what about MY right to swim in a pool all by myself?!?”
https://theboeskool.com/2016/03/05/when-youre-accustomed-to-privilege-equality-feels-like-oppression/
Visualising the network of human interactions
In 1928 Jacob Levy Moreno, a Vienna-trained psychiatrist who had recently emigrated to New York, developed an innovative way of identifying ‘at risk’ children. He analysed social patterns at the State Training School for Girls and the Riverdale Country School by asking students who their friends were, and charting their answers. The resulting graphs used geometric shapes to represent individuals and lines to indicate friendships: he called them sociograms. Noticing that two particular girls in the graph appeared isolated, he predicted that they would soon run away. They did.
The New York Times trumpeted Moreno’s ‘new geography’ in April 1933. Moreno’s sociograms mapped not the physical terrain but the world of affect, the ‘emotional currents, cross-currents and under-currents of human relationships in a community’. He agreed. ‘With [such] charts,’ he enthused, ‘we will have the opportunity to grasp the myriad networks of human relations and at the same time view any part or portion of the whole which we may desire to relate or distinguish.’
A while back I made one of these in an attempt to show that the process of doing science is much, much more complicated than the hypothesis testing model taught in school :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/04/fifty-shades-of-science.html
Of course one could expand this even further and delve into minute details, but then the usefulness of the thing would be lost. Similarly, I'd very much like to have one showing large-scale societal networks and the flow of information, money, and other factors that influence individuals and the resulting society. For example, information flows back and forth into the political system from a variety of sources : directly from the general public, via the media, scientists, etc... such information influences both the governed and the government in a feedback loop. Anyone know of such a plot ?
https://aeon.co/ideas/network-visualisations-show-what-we-can-and-what-we-may-know
The New York Times trumpeted Moreno’s ‘new geography’ in April 1933. Moreno’s sociograms mapped not the physical terrain but the world of affect, the ‘emotional currents, cross-currents and under-currents of human relationships in a community’. He agreed. ‘With [such] charts,’ he enthused, ‘we will have the opportunity to grasp the myriad networks of human relations and at the same time view any part or portion of the whole which we may desire to relate or distinguish.’
A while back I made one of these in an attempt to show that the process of doing science is much, much more complicated than the hypothesis testing model taught in school :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/04/fifty-shades-of-science.html
Of course one could expand this even further and delve into minute details, but then the usefulness of the thing would be lost. Similarly, I'd very much like to have one showing large-scale societal networks and the flow of information, money, and other factors that influence individuals and the resulting society. For example, information flows back and forth into the political system from a variety of sources : directly from the general public, via the media, scientists, etc... such information influences both the governed and the government in a feedback loop. Anyone know of such a plot ?
https://aeon.co/ideas/network-visualisations-show-what-we-can-and-what-we-may-know
Sunday, 17 June 2018
Increase your thinking bandwidth to avoid madness
And also spatial bandwidth : an awareness that other countries do things differently. What seems impossible in one is taken as normal and inevitable in others; exotic is a relative state. Trump is a baffling symptom of a mode of thought I am completely unable to empathise with. Neither are hundreds of millions of others - Europeans, Americans and others alike. Unless there is a truly bizarre American condition, this means Trump is a result of social factors which are not unavoidable (misinformation, lack of education, lack of material resources, lack of social justice, tribalism, lack of opportunities for advancement, etc.), but are difficult to prevent. Luckily for you lot I'm on mobile so it's hard to go on a long rant. :P
It is hard to imagine a time more completely presentist than our own, more tethered to the immediate; and is hard to imagine a person more exemplary of our presentism than the current president of the United States.
Donald Trump is a creature of the instant, responsive only and wholly to immediate stimulus – which is why Twitter is his exclusive medium of written communication, and why when he speaks he cannot stick to a script. In this respect he differs little from anyone who spends a lot of time on social media; the social media ecosystem is designed to generate constant, instantaneous responses to the provocations of Now.
We cannot, from within that ecosystem, restore old behavioural norms or develop new and better ones. No, to find a healthier alternative, we must cultivate what the great American novelist Thomas Pynchon calls “temporal bandwidth” – an awareness of our experience as extending into the past and the future.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/16/temporal-bandwith-social-media-alan-jacobs
It is hard to imagine a time more completely presentist than our own, more tethered to the immediate; and is hard to imagine a person more exemplary of our presentism than the current president of the United States.
Donald Trump is a creature of the instant, responsive only and wholly to immediate stimulus – which is why Twitter is his exclusive medium of written communication, and why when he speaks he cannot stick to a script. In this respect he differs little from anyone who spends a lot of time on social media; the social media ecosystem is designed to generate constant, instantaneous responses to the provocations of Now.
We cannot, from within that ecosystem, restore old behavioural norms or develop new and better ones. No, to find a healthier alternative, we must cultivate what the great American novelist Thomas Pynchon calls “temporal bandwidth” – an awareness of our experience as extending into the past and the future.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/16/temporal-bandwith-social-media-alan-jacobs
No more gaming bigots at E3
On the E3 show floor, the only women I see in skimpy outfits are fans who have decided to dress as characters - not models paid to attract men to a booth. Opening this show up to the general public, as they did for the first time last year, has made the clientele at E3 look a lot more like the gaming community in the US where women make up 45% of players.
Female leads are everywhere on the show floor this year - including the original female lead, Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, who has been far more realistically-proportioned of late. The new title is playable here, and as you load up the game, the developers display a short passage of text.
“Shadow of the Tomb Raider was created by a diverse and talented team comprised of multiple genders, backgrounds, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and personalities,” it reads. “No matter where you come from or who you are, allow us to be the first to say: Welcome to Shadow of the Tomb Raider.”
What’s of note here is that these games have moved beyond tokenism, with publishers instead taking the view that angering a small section of the gaming community is a price worth paying in order to better reflect the rest. Checking in with what’s left of the Gamergate movement these days finds little discussion about “ethics in games journalism”. As I leave Los Angeles, with another E3 behind us, it’s clear that the Gamergate way of thinking has lost. The industry has stepped up - and video games will be all the better for it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44504344
Female leads are everywhere on the show floor this year - including the original female lead, Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, who has been far more realistically-proportioned of late. The new title is playable here, and as you load up the game, the developers display a short passage of text.
“Shadow of the Tomb Raider was created by a diverse and talented team comprised of multiple genders, backgrounds, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and personalities,” it reads. “No matter where you come from or who you are, allow us to be the first to say: Welcome to Shadow of the Tomb Raider.”
What’s of note here is that these games have moved beyond tokenism, with publishers instead taking the view that angering a small section of the gaming community is a price worth paying in order to better reflect the rest. Checking in with what’s left of the Gamergate movement these days finds little discussion about “ethics in games journalism”. As I leave Los Angeles, with another E3 behind us, it’s clear that the Gamergate way of thinking has lost. The industry has stepped up - and video games will be all the better for it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44504344
Friday, 15 June 2018
Not everything is worth knowing
There are more things you might not want to know besides your h-index.
AI can find patterns and make inferences using relatively little data. Only a handful of Facebook likes are necessary to predict your personality, race, and gender, for example. Another computer algorithm claims it can distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual men with 81 percent accuracy, and homosexual and heterosexual women with 71 percent accuracy, based on their picture alone.1 An algorithm named COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) can predict criminal recidivism from data like juvenile arrests, criminal records in the family, education, social isolation, and leisure activities with 65 percent accuracy.
First off, those numbers aren't very impressive. Second, they're misleading. What it's finding is people who correlate with societal expectations of sexuality, which is not the same thing as their actual sexuality at all. There is no intrisinic difference in appearance between people of different sexuality, or at least not much evidence of any. There's no way it can ever know that unless you directly identify your sexual orientation. The same can applies to the other parameters : all it can do is make a probabilistic guess. A 99% statistical chance that you're from Texas has no force against factual proof that you're actually from Greenland. A 65% chance of success is hardly evidence that it's able to discern some amazing deeper insight - it's a bad guess, not knowledge or understanding. However, this does not invalidate the central point.
Knowledge can sometimes corrupt judgement, and we often choose to remain deliberately ignorant in response. For example, peer reviews of academic papers are usually anonymous. Insurance companies in most countries are not permitted to know all the details of their client’s health before they enroll; they only know general risk factors. This type of consideration is particularly relevant to AI, because AI can produce highly prejudicial information.
Deliberate ignorance, Hertwig and Engel write, can help people to maintain “cherished beliefs,” and avoid “mental discomfort, fear, and cognitive dissonance.” The prevalence of deliberate ignorance is high. About 90 percent of surveyed Germans want to avoid negative feelings that may arise from “foreknowledge of negative events, such as death and divorce,” and 40 to 70 percent also do not want to know about positive events, to help maintain “positive feelings of surprise and suspense” that come from, for example, not knowing the sex of an unborn child.
The AI “gaydar” algorithm, for example, appears to have close to zero potential benefits, but great potential costs when it comes to impartiality and fairness. As The Economist put it, “in parts of the world where being gay is socially unacceptable, or illegal, such an algorithm could pose a serious threat to safety.”
These examples illustrate the utility of identifying individual motives for ignorance, and show how complex questions of knowledge and ignorance can be, especially when AI is involved. There is no ready-made answer to the question of when collective ignorance is beneficial or ethically appropriate. The ideal approach would be to consider each case individually, performing a risk-benefit analysis. Ideally, given the complexity of the debate and the weight of its consequences, this analysis would be public, include diverse stakeholder and expert opinions, and consider all possible future outcomes, including worst-case scenarios.
http://nautil.us/issue/61/coordinates/we-need-to-save-ignorance-from-ai?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication
AI can find patterns and make inferences using relatively little data. Only a handful of Facebook likes are necessary to predict your personality, race, and gender, for example. Another computer algorithm claims it can distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual men with 81 percent accuracy, and homosexual and heterosexual women with 71 percent accuracy, based on their picture alone.1 An algorithm named COMPAS (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) can predict criminal recidivism from data like juvenile arrests, criminal records in the family, education, social isolation, and leisure activities with 65 percent accuracy.
First off, those numbers aren't very impressive. Second, they're misleading. What it's finding is people who correlate with societal expectations of sexuality, which is not the same thing as their actual sexuality at all. There is no intrisinic difference in appearance between people of different sexuality, or at least not much evidence of any. There's no way it can ever know that unless you directly identify your sexual orientation. The same can applies to the other parameters : all it can do is make a probabilistic guess. A 99% statistical chance that you're from Texas has no force against factual proof that you're actually from Greenland. A 65% chance of success is hardly evidence that it's able to discern some amazing deeper insight - it's a bad guess, not knowledge or understanding. However, this does not invalidate the central point.
Knowledge can sometimes corrupt judgement, and we often choose to remain deliberately ignorant in response. For example, peer reviews of academic papers are usually anonymous. Insurance companies in most countries are not permitted to know all the details of their client’s health before they enroll; they only know general risk factors. This type of consideration is particularly relevant to AI, because AI can produce highly prejudicial information.
Deliberate ignorance, Hertwig and Engel write, can help people to maintain “cherished beliefs,” and avoid “mental discomfort, fear, and cognitive dissonance.” The prevalence of deliberate ignorance is high. About 90 percent of surveyed Germans want to avoid negative feelings that may arise from “foreknowledge of negative events, such as death and divorce,” and 40 to 70 percent also do not want to know about positive events, to help maintain “positive feelings of surprise and suspense” that come from, for example, not knowing the sex of an unborn child.
The AI “gaydar” algorithm, for example, appears to have close to zero potential benefits, but great potential costs when it comes to impartiality and fairness. As The Economist put it, “in parts of the world where being gay is socially unacceptable, or illegal, such an algorithm could pose a serious threat to safety.”
These examples illustrate the utility of identifying individual motives for ignorance, and show how complex questions of knowledge and ignorance can be, especially when AI is involved. There is no ready-made answer to the question of when collective ignorance is beneficial or ethically appropriate. The ideal approach would be to consider each case individually, performing a risk-benefit analysis. Ideally, given the complexity of the debate and the weight of its consequences, this analysis would be public, include diverse stakeholder and expert opinions, and consider all possible future outcomes, including worst-case scenarios.
http://nautil.us/issue/61/coordinates/we-need-to-save-ignorance-from-ai?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS_Syndication
Past performance is a very reliable guide to your career success
There are some things it's definitely better not to know. Like a prediction of one's h-index.
We fed a neural network with data about the publication activity of physicists and tried to make a “fake” prediction, for which we used data from the years 1996 up to 2008 to predict the next ten years. To train the network, we took a random sample of authors and asked the network to predict these authors’ publication data. In each cycle the network learned how good or bad its prediction was and then tried to further improve it.
Concretely, we trained the network to predict the h-index, a measure for the number of citations a researcher has accumulated. We didn’t use this number because we think it’s particularly important, but simply because other groups have previously studied it with neural networks in disciplines other than physics. Looking at the h-index, therefore, allowed us to compare our results with those of the other groups.
However, that our prediction is better than the earlier ones is only partly due to our network’s performance. Turns out, our data are also intrinsically easier to predict, even with simple measures. You can for example just try to linearly extrapolate the h-index, and while that prediction isn’t as good as that of the network, it is still better than the prediction from the other disciplines.
We fed a neural network with data about the publication activity of physicists and tried to make a “fake” prediction, for which we used data from the years 1996 up to 2008 to predict the next ten years. To train the network, we took a random sample of authors and asked the network to predict these authors’ publication data. In each cycle the network learned how good or bad its prediction was and then tried to further improve it.
Concretely, we trained the network to predict the h-index, a measure for the number of citations a researcher has accumulated. We didn’t use this number because we think it’s particularly important, but simply because other groups have previously studied it with neural networks in disciplines other than physics. Looking at the h-index, therefore, allowed us to compare our results with those of the other groups.
However, that our prediction is better than the earlier ones is only partly due to our network’s performance. Turns out, our data are also intrinsically easier to predict, even with simple measures. You can for example just try to linearly extrapolate the h-index, and while that prediction isn’t as good as that of the network, it is still better than the prediction from the other disciplines.
Physicists are very predictable
I have a new paper on the arXiv, which came out of a collaboration with Tobias Mistele and Tom Price. We fed a neural network with data about the publication activity of physicists and tried to make a "fake" prediction, for which we used data from the years 1996 up to 2008 to predict the next ten years.
Thursday, 14 June 2018
Space Nazis in Space
Huh, I seem to have done a write-up only on the first paper in this series and not the second. How time flies...
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/eQY6ws8jiD7
Anyway the bottom line is that this is a paper looking at the minimum (starting) number of inhabitants a world ship requires for long-term genetic stability. The answer is about 100. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll have an entirely natural breeding situation but you don't have to have a crazy eugenics program going on to stop inbreeding either. Also, as I pointed out to Frederic (and it's mentioned in the first paper, can't remember about this one), you could also take along frozen genetic material so the minimum number could be considerably smaller. It's still interesting to establish the minimum size of a semi-naturally breeding population though.
Irritatingly the article claims the credit for the image below is from "silodrome.co", which turns out to be a website without the m. Well, it's not from them, it's a very old one of mine. So old that I don't even keep this version on my website any more.
https://www.universetoday.com/139456/whats-the-minimum-number-of-people-you-should-send-in-a-generational-ship-to-proxima-centauri/
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+RhysTaylorRhysy/posts/eQY6ws8jiD7
Anyway the bottom line is that this is a paper looking at the minimum (starting) number of inhabitants a world ship requires for long-term genetic stability. The answer is about 100. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll have an entirely natural breeding situation but you don't have to have a crazy eugenics program going on to stop inbreeding either. Also, as I pointed out to Frederic (and it's mentioned in the first paper, can't remember about this one), you could also take along frozen genetic material so the minimum number could be considerably smaller. It's still interesting to establish the minimum size of a semi-naturally breeding population though.
Irritatingly the article claims the credit for the image below is from "silodrome.co", which turns out to be a website without the m. Well, it's not from them, it's a very old one of mine. So old that I don't even keep this version on my website any more.
https://www.universetoday.com/139456/whats-the-minimum-number-of-people-you-should-send-in-a-generational-ship-to-proxima-centauri/
Unintended implications
The music chosen to accompany her father's words is a "beautiful and symbolic gesture that creates a link between our father's presence on this planet, his wish to go into space and his explorations of the universe in his mind", the professor's daughter Lucy said. "It is a message of peace and hope, about unity and the need for us to live together in harmony on this planet."
She added: "The broadcast will be beamed towards the nearest black hole, 1A 0620-00, which lives in a binary system with a fairly ordinary orange dwarf star."
Wait... you're going to take a message of peace and hope and... shoot it into a black hole ?
I don't think you've thought this through.
#Irony
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-44481914
She added: "The broadcast will be beamed towards the nearest black hole, 1A 0620-00, which lives in a binary system with a fairly ordinary orange dwarf star."
Wait... you're going to take a message of peace and hope and... shoot it into a black hole ?
I don't think you've thought this through.
#Irony
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-44481914
New paradigm for psychology : everyone is stupid
The article describes how expectations influence perception. This is ironic, since I wasn't expecting very much from the title (and the even worse subtitle, "Why we’re better off giving up the myth of perfect rationality" - who thinks anyone is perfectly rational anyway ?) but it turned out to be very good. Unless the author is playing a very deep and clever game of reverse psychology... Maybe the article is objectively crap, but my low expectations have caused me to more impressed than I thought I'd be, so I perceive it as good. Or something.
Aaanyway :
We are influenced by various cognitive biases that we are not aware of. The music we are listening to influences our opinion of the wine we drink, the weight of the spoon influences how creamy we find the yoghurt and our moral assessment of strangers depends on what movie we have just watched. I call this paradigm of empirical findings the ‘We’re All Stupid’ paradigm.
Adrian North had a wine-shop play accordion music in the background and this made the sales of French wine shoot up. But when he had Oom-pah band music played, the sales of French wine plummeted, and people were more likely to buy German wine. And this is not a minor change. With the accordion music, people bought five bottles of French wine for every bottle of German wine and the ratio was two bottles of German wine for every bottle of French wine with the Oom-pah band music. Strictly speaking this result says nothing about savouring or about taste or flavour, but it is an important reference point for the ”we are all stupid” paradigm. I mean, how stupid can you be to buy German wine just because you hear Oom-pah band music?
The standard move in response to these findings is that while the reasoning abilities of the “ordinary people” may be subject to these biases, academics, philosophers and experts are safe: psychiatrists are not fooled by warm coffee or teddy bears. Only amateurs are. And professors of moral philosophy could watch as much Saturday Night Live as they want; this would not change their moral assessment of anything. This move is sometimes called the ‘expertise defence.’ But I’ll call it what it really is: the ‘they are all stupid’ paradigm.
Even more importantly, the ‘they are all stupid’ paradigm, however we interpret it, is factually incorrect, at least in some fields of expertise. It is definitely factually incorrect when it comes to food and wine perception. As we have seen, even wine experts are fooled by the changed colour of wine (and, remarkably, they are fooled more than ”ordinary people”).
Perception in general depends on these top-down expectations, as does the perception of food and wine. And experts have way more, and more precise, top-down expectations than novices: They have spent years developing exactly these expectations. So in unusual scenarios when they are misled (by artificial colouring), they rely on their expectations more than novices do. Novices may lack any specific expectation about the odour of wine on the basis of its colour.
But, maybe it's only incorrect for certain specialists ? As the old saying goes, if all you've got is a hammer then everything looks like a nail. If you've been trained to expect wine to be a certain way then you might perceive it that way regardless of how it actually is. If, on the other hand, you've been trained to expect the unexpected and to consider multiple possibilities, maybe you'll be less biased. Or as Archchancellor Ridcully once noted : "We're wizards. We can see things which are really there." It would be very interesting to test if people have different levels of how much their expectations influence their perception.
Here is a famous illustration of how experience depends on expectations. Parmesan cheese is very different from vomit. And they don’t really smell the same either. But their smell is similar enough so that if you are presented with a nontransparent box full of parmesan cheese but you are told that it is vomit, you will in fact smell vomit (and the other way round). The top-down information is winning out and trumps what your senses in fact tell you.
We know that perceptual experience in general is multimodal : Information from a number of sense modalities is combined when you see or hear something. And given this deep multimodality of our perceptual system, what we should expect when it comes to the enjoyment of food and wine is that all the sense modalities can be involved in these experiences.
If there is a flash in your visual scene and you hear two beeps while the flash lasts, you experience it as two flashes. This is one of the few examples where seeing does not trump hearing. The two beeps we hear influence the processing of the one flash in our visual sense modality and, as a result, our visual experience is as of two flashes.
What is the lesson of all this for the ‘we are all stupid’ paradigm more generally? Assuming that we should be good at assessing the taste of food only, independently of all other sense modalities sets the bar way too high. We are creatures with multimodal perception. That’s what we’re good at. Expecting us to be good at blocking all sense modalities but one would just set us up for failure.
Similarly, we are remarkably good at navigating our complex emotion-infused social environment. We are not very good at screening out all emotional and other biases. Does this make us stupid? In some sense, it does – it makes us less than perfectly rational beings... And just as it is only in very special circumstances when our taste perception is not influenced by all the other senses, it also happens very rarely and exceptionally that we can achieve perfect rationality. As scientists and academics, we should of course try and try hard. But one important step of trying is that instead of fighting the ‘we are all stupid’ paradigm, we should just make peace with, and learn to cherish, our stupidity.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/psychology-tomorrow/201806/stupidity-is-part-human-nature
Aaanyway :
We are influenced by various cognitive biases that we are not aware of. The music we are listening to influences our opinion of the wine we drink, the weight of the spoon influences how creamy we find the yoghurt and our moral assessment of strangers depends on what movie we have just watched. I call this paradigm of empirical findings the ‘We’re All Stupid’ paradigm.
Adrian North had a wine-shop play accordion music in the background and this made the sales of French wine shoot up. But when he had Oom-pah band music played, the sales of French wine plummeted, and people were more likely to buy German wine. And this is not a minor change. With the accordion music, people bought five bottles of French wine for every bottle of German wine and the ratio was two bottles of German wine for every bottle of French wine with the Oom-pah band music. Strictly speaking this result says nothing about savouring or about taste or flavour, but it is an important reference point for the ”we are all stupid” paradigm. I mean, how stupid can you be to buy German wine just because you hear Oom-pah band music?
The standard move in response to these findings is that while the reasoning abilities of the “ordinary people” may be subject to these biases, academics, philosophers and experts are safe: psychiatrists are not fooled by warm coffee or teddy bears. Only amateurs are. And professors of moral philosophy could watch as much Saturday Night Live as they want; this would not change their moral assessment of anything. This move is sometimes called the ‘expertise defence.’ But I’ll call it what it really is: the ‘they are all stupid’ paradigm.
Even more importantly, the ‘they are all stupid’ paradigm, however we interpret it, is factually incorrect, at least in some fields of expertise. It is definitely factually incorrect when it comes to food and wine perception. As we have seen, even wine experts are fooled by the changed colour of wine (and, remarkably, they are fooled more than ”ordinary people”).
Perception in general depends on these top-down expectations, as does the perception of food and wine. And experts have way more, and more precise, top-down expectations than novices: They have spent years developing exactly these expectations. So in unusual scenarios when they are misled (by artificial colouring), they rely on their expectations more than novices do. Novices may lack any specific expectation about the odour of wine on the basis of its colour.
But, maybe it's only incorrect for certain specialists ? As the old saying goes, if all you've got is a hammer then everything looks like a nail. If you've been trained to expect wine to be a certain way then you might perceive it that way regardless of how it actually is. If, on the other hand, you've been trained to expect the unexpected and to consider multiple possibilities, maybe you'll be less biased. Or as Archchancellor Ridcully once noted : "We're wizards. We can see things which are really there." It would be very interesting to test if people have different levels of how much their expectations influence their perception.
Here is a famous illustration of how experience depends on expectations. Parmesan cheese is very different from vomit. And they don’t really smell the same either. But their smell is similar enough so that if you are presented with a nontransparent box full of parmesan cheese but you are told that it is vomit, you will in fact smell vomit (and the other way round). The top-down information is winning out and trumps what your senses in fact tell you.
We know that perceptual experience in general is multimodal : Information from a number of sense modalities is combined when you see or hear something. And given this deep multimodality of our perceptual system, what we should expect when it comes to the enjoyment of food and wine is that all the sense modalities can be involved in these experiences.
If there is a flash in your visual scene and you hear two beeps while the flash lasts, you experience it as two flashes. This is one of the few examples where seeing does not trump hearing. The two beeps we hear influence the processing of the one flash in our visual sense modality and, as a result, our visual experience is as of two flashes.
What is the lesson of all this for the ‘we are all stupid’ paradigm more generally? Assuming that we should be good at assessing the taste of food only, independently of all other sense modalities sets the bar way too high. We are creatures with multimodal perception. That’s what we’re good at. Expecting us to be good at blocking all sense modalities but one would just set us up for failure.
Similarly, we are remarkably good at navigating our complex emotion-infused social environment. We are not very good at screening out all emotional and other biases. Does this make us stupid? In some sense, it does – it makes us less than perfectly rational beings... And just as it is only in very special circumstances when our taste perception is not influenced by all the other senses, it also happens very rarely and exceptionally that we can achieve perfect rationality. As scientists and academics, we should of course try and try hard. But one important step of trying is that instead of fighting the ‘we are all stupid’ paradigm, we should just make peace with, and learn to cherish, our stupidity.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/psychology-tomorrow/201806/stupidity-is-part-human-nature
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