Today's adventure: to locate, excavate and eventually raise the wrecks of the Cordelière and the Regent - two behemoths of the Tudor seas that sank together in the Battle of Saint-Mathieu in 1512. And filling the Cousteau role is Michel L'Hour, marine archaeologist extraordinaire and veteran of a thousand missions to explore France's underwater heritage. "I have been obsessed with finding these ships for 40 years," he says, ruddy-faced and bearded like any proper sea-dog.
For the French, or rather for the people of Brittany, the Cordelière has mythic status. She was the flagship of the duchy's last independent ruler and revered heroine, the Duchess Anne. And she was captained up until the moment of sinking (and his death) by another Breton hero, Hervé de Portzmoguer, a kind of patriot-corsair. His Frenchified name Primauguet is still given to vessels of the French navy to this day.
But the English have a hand in this tale too. The Regent was, in its day, every bit as important as its sister ship the Mary Rose, which was famously raised from the Solent 40 years ago and is now on display in Portsmouth. If anything, the Regent was the bigger ship. And if Henry VIII's Mary Rose is anything to go by, then this would be a stupendous find indeed. The trouble is no-one knows exactly where the Battle of Saint-Mathieu took place. It was during one of the lesser-known wars between England and an alliance of France and a still-independent Brittany.
Well you can't expect us to keep track of all our wars...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44806083
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
Stealing a shark by disguising it as a baby, because movies are real now
Uhh-huuuhhh.....
A shark disguised by thieves as a baby in a pram and abducted from a Texas aquarium has been found and returned. The horn shark - called Miss Helen - "is in quarantine right now resting" and "is doing good so far", San Antonio Aquarium said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45016893
A shark disguised by thieves as a baby in a pram and abducted from a Texas aquarium has been found and returned. The horn shark - called Miss Helen - "is in quarantine right now resting" and "is doing good so far", San Antonio Aquarium said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45016893
Spotting fake news via algorithm
The answer is a cautious, "probably", but the details of how the algorithms work are very interesting. It reminds me of algorithms used to search HI data cubes, of all things - automatic techniques are really only semi-automatic. You use them to spot a possible source, then get a human to check. From the original data set there's no foolproof criteria to judge if a source is real - the ultimate verification is to do a repeat observation and see if a source is still there. With news, that step would have to be an on-site inspection or contacting the affected people directly. Like HI source verification, short of looking again for ourselves we don't have an objective standard of truth. But we may generate criteria for a better initial guess, minimising the amount of follow-up time required.
When it comes to inspecting news content directly, there are two major ways to tell if a story fits the bill for fraudulence: what the author is saying and how the author is saying it. Ciampaglia and colleagues automated this tedious task with a program that checks how closely related a statement’s subject and object are. To do this, the program uses a vast network of nouns built from facts found in the infobox on the right side of every Wikipedia page — although similar networks have been built from other reservoirs of knowledge, like research databases.
Writing style may be another giveaway. Compared with real news, false articles tended to be shorter and more repetitive with more adverbs. Fake stories also had fewer quotes, technical words and nouns... The fake news in this analysis also tended to use more positive language and express more certainty.
Oher telltale signs of false news might be much harder to manipulate — namely, the kinds of audience engagement these stories attract on social media. Cao’s team built a system that could round up the tweets discussing a particular news event, then sort those posts into two groups: those that expressed support for the story and those that opposed it. The system considered several factors to gauge the credibility of those posts. If, for example, the story centered on a local event that a user was geographically close to, the user’s input was seen as more credible than the input of a user farther away. If a user had been dormant for a long time and started posting about a single story, that abnormal behavior counted against the user’s credibility. By weighing the ethos of the supporting and the skeptical tweets, the program decided whether a particular story was likely to be fake.
Li and colleagues studied the shapes of repost networks that branched out from news stories on social media. Li’s team found most people tended to repost real news straight from a single source, whereas fake news tended to spread more through people reposting from other reposters. A typical network of real news reposts “looks much more like a star, but the fake news spreads more like a tree,” Li says. This held true even when Li’s team ignored news originally posted by well-known, official sources, like news outlets themselves. Reported March 9 at arXiv.org, these findings suggest that computers could use social media engagement as a litmus test for truthfulness, even without putting individual posts under the microscope.
Even as algorithms get more astute at flagging bogus articles, there’s no guarantee that fake news creators won’t step up their game to elude detection. If computer programs are designed to be skeptical of stories that are overly positive or express lots of certainty, then con authors could refine their writing styles accordingly. “Fake news, like a virus, can evolve and update itself,” says Li.
This last point may be particularly interesting. Anything that evolves must propagate. And to propagate, fake news must attract viewers. How does it do that ? Through rhetorical incitement of emotion. An often overlooked point about fake news is that yes, lies can spread more quickly than truths. But this isn't because there's anything special about lies per se, it's just that it's easier to construct a lie which excites the senses than find a new truth which does the same. Universally appealing truths do also go viral, it just happens less because they're rarer.
So I'm wondering if you have an mechanism which is reasonably good at spotting fake news by its rhetorical appeal and propagation, and if you find some way to remove/reduce/suppress it, where would it go from there ? Clearly it would then have to sell itself by some other method, but making it seem less emotionally appealing won't work because then it would no advantage over actual news stories. What would be the alternative ? Centralised sites won't work either, since spotting a liar is often easier than spotting a lie (under the assumption that we could appoint people who aren't so idiotic that they think that obvious liars are decent people). It seems to me there are relatively few avenues. I suppose one option might be subtle manipulation of real news stories, resharing them with minor modifications to give a different message than intended. This would have to be very careful in order to actually get people to believe them (e.g., it's obvious to anyone when you meant to say, "would" as opposed to "wouldn't). Another option might be to play the "merchants of doubt" card : rather than suggesting alternative facts, undermine the notion of objective truth by exaggerating scope for disagreement. This then makes people much more vulnerable to whatever sources of alternative facts are still available.
To help sort fake news from truth, programmers are building automated systems that judge the veracity of online stories. A computer program might consider certain characteristics of an article or the reception an article gets on social media. Computers that recognize certain warning signs could alert human fact-checkers, who would do the final verification.
Automatic lie-finding tools are “still in their infancy,” says computer scientist Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia of Indiana University Bloomington. Researchers are exploring which factors most reliably peg fake news. Unfortunately, they have no agreed-upon set of true and false stories to use for testing their tactics. Some programmers rely on established media outlets or state press agencies to determine which stories are true or not, while others draw from lists of reported fake news on social media. So research in this area is something of a free-for-all.
But teams around the world are forging ahead because the internet is a fire hose of information, and asking human fact-checkers to keep up is like aiming that hose at a Brita filter. “It’s sort of mind-numbing,” says Alex Kasprak, a science writer at Snopes, the oldest and largest online fact-checking site, “just the volume of really shoddy stuff that’s out there.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/can-computer-programs-flag-fake-news
When it comes to inspecting news content directly, there are two major ways to tell if a story fits the bill for fraudulence: what the author is saying and how the author is saying it. Ciampaglia and colleagues automated this tedious task with a program that checks how closely related a statement’s subject and object are. To do this, the program uses a vast network of nouns built from facts found in the infobox on the right side of every Wikipedia page — although similar networks have been built from other reservoirs of knowledge, like research databases.
Writing style may be another giveaway. Compared with real news, false articles tended to be shorter and more repetitive with more adverbs. Fake stories also had fewer quotes, technical words and nouns... The fake news in this analysis also tended to use more positive language and express more certainty.
Oher telltale signs of false news might be much harder to manipulate — namely, the kinds of audience engagement these stories attract on social media. Cao’s team built a system that could round up the tweets discussing a particular news event, then sort those posts into two groups: those that expressed support for the story and those that opposed it. The system considered several factors to gauge the credibility of those posts. If, for example, the story centered on a local event that a user was geographically close to, the user’s input was seen as more credible than the input of a user farther away. If a user had been dormant for a long time and started posting about a single story, that abnormal behavior counted against the user’s credibility. By weighing the ethos of the supporting and the skeptical tweets, the program decided whether a particular story was likely to be fake.
Li and colleagues studied the shapes of repost networks that branched out from news stories on social media. Li’s team found most people tended to repost real news straight from a single source, whereas fake news tended to spread more through people reposting from other reposters. A typical network of real news reposts “looks much more like a star, but the fake news spreads more like a tree,” Li says. This held true even when Li’s team ignored news originally posted by well-known, official sources, like news outlets themselves. Reported March 9 at arXiv.org, these findings suggest that computers could use social media engagement as a litmus test for truthfulness, even without putting individual posts under the microscope.
Even as algorithms get more astute at flagging bogus articles, there’s no guarantee that fake news creators won’t step up their game to elude detection. If computer programs are designed to be skeptical of stories that are overly positive or express lots of certainty, then con authors could refine their writing styles accordingly. “Fake news, like a virus, can evolve and update itself,” says Li.
This last point may be particularly interesting. Anything that evolves must propagate. And to propagate, fake news must attract viewers. How does it do that ? Through rhetorical incitement of emotion. An often overlooked point about fake news is that yes, lies can spread more quickly than truths. But this isn't because there's anything special about lies per se, it's just that it's easier to construct a lie which excites the senses than find a new truth which does the same. Universally appealing truths do also go viral, it just happens less because they're rarer.
So I'm wondering if you have an mechanism which is reasonably good at spotting fake news by its rhetorical appeal and propagation, and if you find some way to remove/reduce/suppress it, where would it go from there ? Clearly it would then have to sell itself by some other method, but making it seem less emotionally appealing won't work because then it would no advantage over actual news stories. What would be the alternative ? Centralised sites won't work either, since spotting a liar is often easier than spotting a lie (under the assumption that we could appoint people who aren't so idiotic that they think that obvious liars are decent people). It seems to me there are relatively few avenues. I suppose one option might be subtle manipulation of real news stories, resharing them with minor modifications to give a different message than intended. This would have to be very careful in order to actually get people to believe them (e.g., it's obvious to anyone when you meant to say, "would" as opposed to "wouldn't). Another option might be to play the "merchants of doubt" card : rather than suggesting alternative facts, undermine the notion of objective truth by exaggerating scope for disagreement. This then makes people much more vulnerable to whatever sources of alternative facts are still available.
To help sort fake news from truth, programmers are building automated systems that judge the veracity of online stories. A computer program might consider certain characteristics of an article or the reception an article gets on social media. Computers that recognize certain warning signs could alert human fact-checkers, who would do the final verification.
Automatic lie-finding tools are “still in their infancy,” says computer scientist Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia of Indiana University Bloomington. Researchers are exploring which factors most reliably peg fake news. Unfortunately, they have no agreed-upon set of true and false stories to use for testing their tactics. Some programmers rely on established media outlets or state press agencies to determine which stories are true or not, while others draw from lists of reported fake news on social media. So research in this area is something of a free-for-all.
But teams around the world are forging ahead because the internet is a fire hose of information, and asking human fact-checkers to keep up is like aiming that hose at a Brita filter. “It’s sort of mind-numbing,” says Alex Kasprak, a science writer at Snopes, the oldest and largest online fact-checking site, “just the volume of really shoddy stuff that’s out there.”
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/can-computer-programs-flag-fake-news
A parasite that gets it hosts high
The miracle of life, via Gopindra Hannigan.
[The fungus] Massospora and its butt-eating powers were first discovered in the 19th century, but Kasson and his colleagues have only just shown that it has another secret: It doses its victims with mind-altering drugs. Perhaps that’s why “the cicadas walk around as if nothing’s wrong even though a third of their body has fallen off,” Kasson says.
The team took great pains to check that Massospora really does contain these unexpected drugs. They showed that the substances are found only in the infected cicadas and not in the uninfected ones. They found that the fungus has the right genes for making these chemicals, and contains the precursor substances that you’d expect.
And at some point during this work, it dawned on Kasson that he was working with illicit substances. Psilocybin, in particular, is a Schedule I drug, and researchers who study it need a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. “I thought: Oh, crap,” he says. “Then I thought: OH CRAP. The DEA is going to come in here, tase me, and confiscate my flying saltshakers.”
He sent them an email. “This is … interesting,” read the initial response. “You have to understand that this is not something we normally get emails about.” After some discussion, the agency decided that no permit was required, since the drug is found in such small quantities within the cicadas, and since Kasson had no plans for concentrating it.
I asked Kasson if it’s possible to get high by eating Massospora-infected cicadas. Surprisingly, he didn’t say no.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/massospora-parasite-drugs-its-hosts/566324/
[The fungus] Massospora and its butt-eating powers were first discovered in the 19th century, but Kasson and his colleagues have only just shown that it has another secret: It doses its victims with mind-altering drugs. Perhaps that’s why “the cicadas walk around as if nothing’s wrong even though a third of their body has fallen off,” Kasson says.
The team took great pains to check that Massospora really does contain these unexpected drugs. They showed that the substances are found only in the infected cicadas and not in the uninfected ones. They found that the fungus has the right genes for making these chemicals, and contains the precursor substances that you’d expect.
And at some point during this work, it dawned on Kasson that he was working with illicit substances. Psilocybin, in particular, is a Schedule I drug, and researchers who study it need a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. “I thought: Oh, crap,” he says. “Then I thought: OH CRAP. The DEA is going to come in here, tase me, and confiscate my flying saltshakers.”
He sent them an email. “This is … interesting,” read the initial response. “You have to understand that this is not something we normally get emails about.” After some discussion, the agency decided that no permit was required, since the drug is found in such small quantities within the cicadas, and since Kasson had no plans for concentrating it.
I asked Kasson if it’s possible to get high by eating Massospora-infected cicadas. Surprisingly, he didn’t say no.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/07/massospora-parasite-drugs-its-hosts/566324/
Monday, 30 July 2018
Aumann's Agreement Theorem : why we can't call just get along
I've noticed that some people care deeply about the truth, but come up with batshit crazy statements. And I've caught myself rationalising my existing opinions on numerous occasions, rather than actually changing my stance. Even when I did change my opinion, I've often been guilty of minimising my own mistakes (http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/12/persuasion-users-guide-to-manipulating.html), but this is perhaps something that can be exploited for persuasive purposes.
One of the key founding principles of science is that objective facts exist and can be proven. Underlying mechanisms can eventually be understood, but often require expert dedication : not everyone is capable of understanding everything. There are huge swathes of scientific inquiry I will never have any insight into whatsoever - if I need to use their findings, I've no choice but to trust in expertise. Yet sometimes I feel rather skeptical about findings in these mysterious areas I have no real understanding of, and the internet is chock-full of people who go very much further than this and pronounce the whole scientific edifice a complete farce, cheerily dismissing things of which they have not the slightest glimpse of comprehension.
There are two related problems : how we decide whose opinion gets the most weight, and how we treat dissenting voices. Dissent is absolutely crucial to establishing a consensus. For front-line professional researchers, it's usually possible to come to at least a crude agreement : "yes, if those assumptions are correct, then it follows that your theory is right and mine is wrong". Doesn't mean everyone instantly changes their mind, cos that'd be bloody daft. But it does mean that most of them can at least entertain the alternatives, most of the time. This generally works well enough that usually the consensus is the best approximation to the truth given the current evidence (note that this is not even slightly the same as saying that mainstream science is always right, and I will spit in the eye of anyone who thinks so). And usually - and the is the really important bit - everyone is making the same basic assumptions. Scientific dissent at the coalface of research doesn't go on about gravity not existing or cats being able to see through time or whether virtue can be measured using psychic lollipops. Forefront research is messy, but its debates are coherent and logical.
In contrast, what the political arena of much of the Western world appears to be currently facing (or at least this is what it feels like to me) is debate between the sensible and the absurd. You can't have a meaningful, reasonable, intelligent debate if one side won't agree that fire is hot, and our systems appear to be utterly inadequate to the task of dealing with nonsense. Partisan politics sometimes works well if both sides are debating controversial topics, not if they're debating things which should be axiomatic. Partisan politics makes an enemy of the truth for the sake of choice.
I've said this before, but I'm baffled as to how to deal with people who can't see the, err, blindingly obvious, as it were. The scientific world just ignores them, but there they make up such a small fraction that they hardly ever amount to anything anyway. So academia provides no real answers here, because it simply doesn't have much of a problem with crackpots. Unfortunately that's not necessarily the case in politics.
Similarly, scientific consensus (assigning weights to an opinion) can be established by testing theories and seeing which gives the better results. This largely works, and so far as I can tell is in no more danger now than it was a century ago or more. In contrast, in the political arena it feels as though people are either unable to accept basic facts or weave the most tortured webs of logic to sustain them within their incompatible ideology. There is no established procedure for deciding who's more credible or how to deal with dissent. Everyone must be equal at all times ! Every opinion must be heard ! And with that methodology, no wonder agreement is not possible... the whole logic and moral values of one side appear to be completely orthogonal to the other.
Debates between scientists don't have this problem, because debate with crackpots is never allowed to be much of a thing; crackpot views rarely spread because of accepted (albeit always evidenced-based and provisional) truth. Science only advances, and accepted truth only changes, with evidence to back it up. Compare this with politics, where any lunatic with enough money can say whatever they want on network television. Everything becomes subjective and unprovable.
Disagreements happen in several circumstances, including but not limited to :
- Not having the correct information
- Incorrectly assessing the credibility of a source, such that information can be known but disregarded
- Having the correct information, (possibly) accepting it but not caring about it (what I define as bullshitting)
- Having the correct information, passionately caring about the truth, but lacking and/or not caring about the correct methods to analyse that information
This concludes my pointless rant. You may go about your business.
Originally shared by Michael J. Coffey
Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
This theorem describes something that I've had an intuitive understanding of but didn't have a good way (or at least, not a brief way) of describing. The basic idea of Autmann's agreement theorem is that if both people in a conversation are being rational (epistemic rationality, that is--updating their beliefs in light of new evidence), then it's impossible for them not to come to an agreement eventually.
When I go into conversations with people, I expect that we will be able to come to agreement. I am interested in hearing the evidence that got the other person to come to their different-than-mine view. Heck, I often even go out of my way to guide them toward things that will convince me that their perspective is more correct or accurate than mine. For example, I'll ask them to describe when they came to believe a particular thing, or ask for a specific real-world example that they found particularly convincing or illustrative of what they mean. I seek out people who share different views because they're more likely to nudge my beliefs towards greater accuracy than people who agree with me.
The thing is, when we aren't able to come to agreement, it is usually because the other person doesn't respond with that kind of information. It may be that instead of offering observations that would trigger my updating of beliefs, they instead say something like "everyone knows that" or "your'e an idiot if you don't agree" or "I said so and that's enough." But it isn't. It isn't providing any reason whatsoever to update my beliefs. And I've found that very troubling, but wasn't quite able to put into words why.
Aumann's agreement theory answers it, though. By not talking about why they believe what they believe, and what evidence they have, it means that they can't possibly be even attempting to be epistemically rational. The same holds for those who do the reverse--who say things like "it doesn't matter what stats you have, I'm right" or "I don't care what you say, I won't change my mind." It's both sides of a coin that is completely separated from epistemic rationality. Either they're saying "I will not help others stop believing things that aren't true," or they're saying "I refuse to give up believing things that aren't true." Neither is any good to anyone.
And that is where you are if someone says "we'll have to agree to disagree." At least one person is being irrational, whether by accident or on purpose. That's what's been troubling to me. Agreement is possible--at some level, mathematically inevitable--if only two things are present: (a) caring about what the truth is, and (b) having a conversation that tries to move both people toward it. And I'm dumbfounded by how many people can't get on board with those two things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem
(And yes, I know it's not possible for any human to be completely rational. And most people's picture of what "rational" or "logical" looks like is deeply flawed because they're thinking of Spock. But it's not impossible to care about the truth, to seek it out, and to try to balance "I might be wrong" and "I think I'm right.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem
One of the key founding principles of science is that objective facts exist and can be proven. Underlying mechanisms can eventually be understood, but often require expert dedication : not everyone is capable of understanding everything. There are huge swathes of scientific inquiry I will never have any insight into whatsoever - if I need to use their findings, I've no choice but to trust in expertise. Yet sometimes I feel rather skeptical about findings in these mysterious areas I have no real understanding of, and the internet is chock-full of people who go very much further than this and pronounce the whole scientific edifice a complete farce, cheerily dismissing things of which they have not the slightest glimpse of comprehension.
There are two related problems : how we decide whose opinion gets the most weight, and how we treat dissenting voices. Dissent is absolutely crucial to establishing a consensus. For front-line professional researchers, it's usually possible to come to at least a crude agreement : "yes, if those assumptions are correct, then it follows that your theory is right and mine is wrong". Doesn't mean everyone instantly changes their mind, cos that'd be bloody daft. But it does mean that most of them can at least entertain the alternatives, most of the time. This generally works well enough that usually the consensus is the best approximation to the truth given the current evidence (note that this is not even slightly the same as saying that mainstream science is always right, and I will spit in the eye of anyone who thinks so). And usually - and the is the really important bit - everyone is making the same basic assumptions. Scientific dissent at the coalface of research doesn't go on about gravity not existing or cats being able to see through time or whether virtue can be measured using psychic lollipops. Forefront research is messy, but its debates are coherent and logical.
In contrast, what the political arena of much of the Western world appears to be currently facing (or at least this is what it feels like to me) is debate between the sensible and the absurd. You can't have a meaningful, reasonable, intelligent debate if one side won't agree that fire is hot, and our systems appear to be utterly inadequate to the task of dealing with nonsense. Partisan politics sometimes works well if both sides are debating controversial topics, not if they're debating things which should be axiomatic. Partisan politics makes an enemy of the truth for the sake of choice.
I've said this before, but I'm baffled as to how to deal with people who can't see the, err, blindingly obvious, as it were. The scientific world just ignores them, but there they make up such a small fraction that they hardly ever amount to anything anyway. So academia provides no real answers here, because it simply doesn't have much of a problem with crackpots. Unfortunately that's not necessarily the case in politics.
Similarly, scientific consensus (assigning weights to an opinion) can be established by testing theories and seeing which gives the better results. This largely works, and so far as I can tell is in no more danger now than it was a century ago or more. In contrast, in the political arena it feels as though people are either unable to accept basic facts or weave the most tortured webs of logic to sustain them within their incompatible ideology. There is no established procedure for deciding who's more credible or how to deal with dissent. Everyone must be equal at all times ! Every opinion must be heard ! And with that methodology, no wonder agreement is not possible... the whole logic and moral values of one side appear to be completely orthogonal to the other.
Debates between scientists don't have this problem, because debate with crackpots is never allowed to be much of a thing; crackpot views rarely spread because of accepted (albeit always evidenced-based and provisional) truth. Science only advances, and accepted truth only changes, with evidence to back it up. Compare this with politics, where any lunatic with enough money can say whatever they want on network television. Everything becomes subjective and unprovable.
Disagreements happen in several circumstances, including but not limited to :
- Not having the correct information
- Incorrectly assessing the credibility of a source, such that information can be known but disregarded
- Having the correct information, (possibly) accepting it but not caring about it (what I define as bullshitting)
- Having the correct information, passionately caring about the truth, but lacking and/or not caring about the correct methods to analyse that information
This concludes my pointless rant. You may go about your business.
Originally shared by Michael J. Coffey
Aumann's Agreement Theorem.
This theorem describes something that I've had an intuitive understanding of but didn't have a good way (or at least, not a brief way) of describing. The basic idea of Autmann's agreement theorem is that if both people in a conversation are being rational (epistemic rationality, that is--updating their beliefs in light of new evidence), then it's impossible for them not to come to an agreement eventually.
When I go into conversations with people, I expect that we will be able to come to agreement. I am interested in hearing the evidence that got the other person to come to their different-than-mine view. Heck, I often even go out of my way to guide them toward things that will convince me that their perspective is more correct or accurate than mine. For example, I'll ask them to describe when they came to believe a particular thing, or ask for a specific real-world example that they found particularly convincing or illustrative of what they mean. I seek out people who share different views because they're more likely to nudge my beliefs towards greater accuracy than people who agree with me.
The thing is, when we aren't able to come to agreement, it is usually because the other person doesn't respond with that kind of information. It may be that instead of offering observations that would trigger my updating of beliefs, they instead say something like "everyone knows that" or "your'e an idiot if you don't agree" or "I said so and that's enough." But it isn't. It isn't providing any reason whatsoever to update my beliefs. And I've found that very troubling, but wasn't quite able to put into words why.
Aumann's agreement theory answers it, though. By not talking about why they believe what they believe, and what evidence they have, it means that they can't possibly be even attempting to be epistemically rational. The same holds for those who do the reverse--who say things like "it doesn't matter what stats you have, I'm right" or "I don't care what you say, I won't change my mind." It's both sides of a coin that is completely separated from epistemic rationality. Either they're saying "I will not help others stop believing things that aren't true," or they're saying "I refuse to give up believing things that aren't true." Neither is any good to anyone.
And that is where you are if someone says "we'll have to agree to disagree." At least one person is being irrational, whether by accident or on purpose. That's what's been troubling to me. Agreement is possible--at some level, mathematically inevitable--if only two things are present: (a) caring about what the truth is, and (b) having a conversation that tries to move both people toward it. And I'm dumbfounded by how many people can't get on board with those two things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem
(And yes, I know it's not possible for any human to be completely rational. And most people's picture of what "rational" or "logical" looks like is deeply flawed because they're thinking of Spock. But it's not impossible to care about the truth, to seek it out, and to try to balance "I might be wrong" and "I think I'm right.")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem
For a sensible democracy, ad hominem attacks are essential
The first and most fundamental issue is the binary nature of the decision. Even though all choices eventually come down to a selection between two things, the psychological evidence shows that human beings are really bad at making such a choice. The studies show that humans are no good at choosing between several different things and we are pretty much useless at deciding between two different things, such as remain or leave. We are only any good at making binary decisions when the two things we have to choose between are similar.
This means that a proportion of the votes in the referendum were from people who could not really decide but made a choice because they felt they had to. What happens in such situations is those individuals then subconsciously seek rational justification for their random selection.
Another series of psychological effects relate to the ballot paper itself. One issue is known as the “order effect”. In surveys and multiple-choice tests, people tend to answer either the first option or the last option. This is because of personality differences in whether an individual is a “primacy” person or a “recency” individuals. Primacy personalities are most likely to choose the first thing they see, and recency people tend to select the last option. To counter this effect, academics, market researchers and so on will change the order of the options for each person taking part in the questionnaire. That way you eliminate the impact of the effect of the order of the choices.
The referendum ballot paper was the same for everyone, meaning there was an inherent bias in the responses. A higher number of people have a “recency” personality which makes them more likely to select the second option on the ballot paper, which was “leave”. That too will be a contributory factor to the small margin in favour of “leave”.
I wonder how it is if the choices are placed side by side instead ?
Another issue with the ballot paper is the length of the questions. There is evidence that people tend to choose the shorter option in a questionnaire or multiple-choice exam. To counter this, academics, for instance, will make sure that each option is pretty much the same length. In the referendum ballot paper, the remain option was 37 characters, and the leave one was 24 characters. This also means the referendum had an inbuilt psychological tendency for people to choose “leave”, rather than “remain”, if they were undecided.
Interesting stuff. As far as the issue itself goes this makes a lot of sense : a crappy campaign, bereft of the the leadership it deserved, without clear information presented and properly explained, reduced to simplifications and fearmongering. So a binary choice being used to determine a complex issue without adequate explanations. Indecision makes sense.
And yet... with all the information floating around, how did it come down to such issues as the wording an arrangement of the ballot ? More specifically, but somewhat tangentially to the article, how is it that people aren't able to point to Nigel Farage and quickly say, "Yep, that man's a complete and total pillock." Or, "Boris is clearly a pompous, goofy-haired buffoon who shouldn't be in charge of a village fête, much less let anywhere near the Cabinet" ?
Now, some (most, even) Brexit voters may in fact have done so, of course, and they would have voted on the issue, not the personalities. But in prior elections a sizeable percentage of voters actually voted for UKIP (thus giving them prominence and legitimising the discussion), suggesting they were wholly unable to recognise dickishness. And while ad hominem attacks aren't very nice, they are, I claim, absolutely necessary, logical, and justifiable. Even if you can't evaluate a position, evaluating dickishness is an essential skill in a representative democracy. We are already epistocratic (https://decoherency.blogspot.com/2018/07/voting-prove-youre-worthy-mortal.html) in the sense that we generally elect people to vote for us, rather than making decisions themselves. The old quote that "small minds discuss people" is a laudable goal but a foolish instruction. It doesn't always hold true in all circumstances, and a representative democracy is one of them. Had the dickish nature of the Brexiteers been properly recognised, the debate wouldn't have been censored (because there are a very few extremely intelligent and respectable - albeit misguided IMHO - individuals who want to leave the E.U.) but it would never have come to the forefront of politics. The need to judge people's character and intentions is hardly a task for small minds : it is essential to a functioning society.
The real crisis isn't even so much that the vote was flawed, it's that the government hasn't got a sodding clue how to deal with that reality.
https://medium.com/@grahamjones/the-psychology-of-brexit-b0f62bad10ca
This means that a proportion of the votes in the referendum were from people who could not really decide but made a choice because they felt they had to. What happens in such situations is those individuals then subconsciously seek rational justification for their random selection.
Another series of psychological effects relate to the ballot paper itself. One issue is known as the “order effect”. In surveys and multiple-choice tests, people tend to answer either the first option or the last option. This is because of personality differences in whether an individual is a “primacy” person or a “recency” individuals. Primacy personalities are most likely to choose the first thing they see, and recency people tend to select the last option. To counter this effect, academics, market researchers and so on will change the order of the options for each person taking part in the questionnaire. That way you eliminate the impact of the effect of the order of the choices.
The referendum ballot paper was the same for everyone, meaning there was an inherent bias in the responses. A higher number of people have a “recency” personality which makes them more likely to select the second option on the ballot paper, which was “leave”. That too will be a contributory factor to the small margin in favour of “leave”.
I wonder how it is if the choices are placed side by side instead ?
Another issue with the ballot paper is the length of the questions. There is evidence that people tend to choose the shorter option in a questionnaire or multiple-choice exam. To counter this, academics, for instance, will make sure that each option is pretty much the same length. In the referendum ballot paper, the remain option was 37 characters, and the leave one was 24 characters. This also means the referendum had an inbuilt psychological tendency for people to choose “leave”, rather than “remain”, if they were undecided.
Interesting stuff. As far as the issue itself goes this makes a lot of sense : a crappy campaign, bereft of the the leadership it deserved, without clear information presented and properly explained, reduced to simplifications and fearmongering. So a binary choice being used to determine a complex issue without adequate explanations. Indecision makes sense.
And yet... with all the information floating around, how did it come down to such issues as the wording an arrangement of the ballot ? More specifically, but somewhat tangentially to the article, how is it that people aren't able to point to Nigel Farage and quickly say, "Yep, that man's a complete and total pillock." Or, "Boris is clearly a pompous, goofy-haired buffoon who shouldn't be in charge of a village fête, much less let anywhere near the Cabinet" ?
Now, some (most, even) Brexit voters may in fact have done so, of course, and they would have voted on the issue, not the personalities. But in prior elections a sizeable percentage of voters actually voted for UKIP (thus giving them prominence and legitimising the discussion), suggesting they were wholly unable to recognise dickishness. And while ad hominem attacks aren't very nice, they are, I claim, absolutely necessary, logical, and justifiable. Even if you can't evaluate a position, evaluating dickishness is an essential skill in a representative democracy. We are already epistocratic (https://decoherency.blogspot.com/2018/07/voting-prove-youre-worthy-mortal.html) in the sense that we generally elect people to vote for us, rather than making decisions themselves. The old quote that "small minds discuss people" is a laudable goal but a foolish instruction. It doesn't always hold true in all circumstances, and a representative democracy is one of them. Had the dickish nature of the Brexiteers been properly recognised, the debate wouldn't have been censored (because there are a very few extremely intelligent and respectable - albeit misguided IMHO - individuals who want to leave the E.U.) but it would never have come to the forefront of politics. The need to judge people's character and intentions is hardly a task for small minds : it is essential to a functioning society.
The real crisis isn't even so much that the vote was flawed, it's that the government hasn't got a sodding clue how to deal with that reality.
https://medium.com/@grahamjones/the-psychology-of-brexit-b0f62bad10ca
A quantitative method of knowing who to trust
An excellent, fascinating insight into quantifying self-knowledge and metaknowledge as a means of weighting opinions. Via Benjamin Ljung.
One reason that crowds mess up is the hegemony of common knowledge. Even when people make independent judgments, they might be working off the same information. When you average everyone’s judgments, information that is known to all gets counted repeatedly, once for each person, which gives it more significance than it deserves and drowns out diverse sources of knowledge.
The solution, Prelec suggests, is to weight answers not by confidence but by metaknowledge: knowledge about knowledge. Metaknowledge means you are aware of what you know or don’t know, and of where your level of knowledge stands in relation to other people’s. That’s a useful measure of your value to the crowd, because knowledge and metaknowledge usually go together. ‘Expertise implies not only knowledge of a subject matter but knowledge of how knowledge of that subject matter is produced,’ says Aaron Bentley, a graduate student at the City University of New York Graduate Center who studies social cognition.
Whereas you might have no independent way to verify people’s knowledge, you can confirm their metaknowledge. When you take a survey, ask people for two numbers: their own best guess of the answer (the ‘response’) and also their assessment of how many people they think will agree with them (the ‘prediction’). The response represents their knowledge, the prediction their metaknowledge. After you have collected everyone’s responses, you can compare their metaknowledge predictions to the group’s averaged knowledge. That provides a concrete measure: people who provided the most accurate predictions – who displayed the most self-awareness and most accurate perception of others – are the ones to trust.
Sociologists have long relied on a version of this approach, asking people not just what they know but what they think other people know. In so doing, the researchers can gauge the prevalence of beliefs and activities that people won’t admit, even to themselves. It’s suspicious whenever people say an activity is common but claim they’d never – never! – do it themselves... Truly innocent people are inclined to think the best of others.
A strong consensus is the closest proxy to truth that we have. The lone wolf who knows better than the misguided masses is much rarer than Hollywood movies would lead you to believe. To take advantage of these principles yourself, you don’t have to do a formal survey; just pay attention to the metaknowledge exhibited by people around you. Experts are more likely to recognise that other people will disagree with them, and they should be able to represent other points of view even if they don’t agree. Novices betray themselves by being unable to fathom any position other than their own. Likewise, you can monitor your own metaknowledge by noting when you find that more people hold a certain belief than you expected. That doesn’t automatically make you wrong, but does suggest you should take another look at your beliefs.
https://aeon.co/essays/a-mathematical-bs-detector-can-boost-the-wisdom-of-crowds
One reason that crowds mess up is the hegemony of common knowledge. Even when people make independent judgments, they might be working off the same information. When you average everyone’s judgments, information that is known to all gets counted repeatedly, once for each person, which gives it more significance than it deserves and drowns out diverse sources of knowledge.
The solution, Prelec suggests, is to weight answers not by confidence but by metaknowledge: knowledge about knowledge. Metaknowledge means you are aware of what you know or don’t know, and of where your level of knowledge stands in relation to other people’s. That’s a useful measure of your value to the crowd, because knowledge and metaknowledge usually go together. ‘Expertise implies not only knowledge of a subject matter but knowledge of how knowledge of that subject matter is produced,’ says Aaron Bentley, a graduate student at the City University of New York Graduate Center who studies social cognition.
Whereas you might have no independent way to verify people’s knowledge, you can confirm their metaknowledge. When you take a survey, ask people for two numbers: their own best guess of the answer (the ‘response’) and also their assessment of how many people they think will agree with them (the ‘prediction’). The response represents their knowledge, the prediction their metaknowledge. After you have collected everyone’s responses, you can compare their metaknowledge predictions to the group’s averaged knowledge. That provides a concrete measure: people who provided the most accurate predictions – who displayed the most self-awareness and most accurate perception of others – are the ones to trust.
Sociologists have long relied on a version of this approach, asking people not just what they know but what they think other people know. In so doing, the researchers can gauge the prevalence of beliefs and activities that people won’t admit, even to themselves. It’s suspicious whenever people say an activity is common but claim they’d never – never! – do it themselves... Truly innocent people are inclined to think the best of others.
A strong consensus is the closest proxy to truth that we have. The lone wolf who knows better than the misguided masses is much rarer than Hollywood movies would lead you to believe. To take advantage of these principles yourself, you don’t have to do a formal survey; just pay attention to the metaknowledge exhibited by people around you. Experts are more likely to recognise that other people will disagree with them, and they should be able to represent other points of view even if they don’t agree. Novices betray themselves by being unable to fathom any position other than their own. Likewise, you can monitor your own metaknowledge by noting when you find that more people hold a certain belief than you expected. That doesn’t automatically make you wrong, but does suggest you should take another look at your beliefs.
https://aeon.co/essays/a-mathematical-bs-detector-can-boost-the-wisdom-of-crowds
Agent-based models : a fad or the future ?
Please ignore the clickbaity idiotic headline. This is either a passing fad or the next big thing to worry about. My guess is that this particular implementation is just a primitive beginning of something more sophisticated - and yes, some of their findings are at the level of the bleedin' obvious. Gotta start somewhere. Under my working hypothesis that populations are easier to model than individuals, I'd be inclined to worry.
An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country’s population using survey data from that country. They also “train” the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures.
And then they experiment: Add in 50,000 newcomers, say, and invest heavily in education. How does the artificial society change? The model tells you. Don’t like it? Just hit that reset button and try a different policy.
The goal of the project is to give politicians an empirical tool that will help them assess competing policy options so they can choose the most effective one. It’s a noble idea: If leaders can use artificial intelligence to predict which policy will produce the best outcome, maybe we’ll end up with a healthier and happier world. But it’s also a dangerous idea: What’s “best” is in the eye of the beholder, after all.
Suppose the tool becomes widely used. Then things get meta : you have to model a population with access to the population-modelling tool...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/artificial-intelligence-religion-atheism/565076/
An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country’s population using survey data from that country. They also “train” the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures.
And then they experiment: Add in 50,000 newcomers, say, and invest heavily in education. How does the artificial society change? The model tells you. Don’t like it? Just hit that reset button and try a different policy.
The goal of the project is to give politicians an empirical tool that will help them assess competing policy options so they can choose the most effective one. It’s a noble idea: If leaders can use artificial intelligence to predict which policy will produce the best outcome, maybe we’ll end up with a healthier and happier world. But it’s also a dangerous idea: What’s “best” is in the eye of the beholder, after all.
Suppose the tool becomes widely used. Then things get meta : you have to model a population with access to the population-modelling tool...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/artificial-intelligence-religion-atheism/565076/
Friday, 27 July 2018
Superfluids created by bacteria
Recently, evidence has been mounting that while a free lunch is off the table, a cheap snack might be feasible with a system built around a living fluid. Experimental oddities began to surface in 2015 when a French team confirmed that solutions of E. coli and water could get unnaturally slick. Sandwiching a drop between two small plates, they recorded the force needed to make one plate slide at a certain speed. Liquids usually get harder to stir, or more viscous, when they contain additional suspended particles (think water vs. mud), but the opposite turns out to be true when the particles can swim. When the solution was around half a percent E. coli by volume, keeping the plate moving required no force at all, indicating zero viscosity. Some trials even registered negative viscosity, when the researchers had to apply a bit of force against the plates’ motion to keep them from speeding up. The liquid was doing work, which for any inert fluid would have meant a violation of the Second Law.
The straightforward conclusion was that the organisms were swimming in a way that neutralized the solution’s internal friction to produce something like a superfluid, a liquid with zero resistance. The apparent thermodynamics violation was an illusion because the bacteria were doing the work to offset or overcome the viscosity.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/swarming-bacteria-create-an-impossible-superfluid-20180726/
The straightforward conclusion was that the organisms were swimming in a way that neutralized the solution’s internal friction to produce something like a superfluid, a liquid with zero resistance. The apparent thermodynamics violation was an illusion because the bacteria were doing the work to offset or overcome the viscosity.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/swarming-bacteria-create-an-impossible-superfluid-20180726/
The icecaps can melt in weirdly stochastic ways
Ice behaving badly.
The increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity will contribute to future sea-level rises, but new research has revealed that rapid ice age sea-level drops were not caused by changes in CO2 concentrations.
The international study involving ANU found that the climate during the last ice age, which ended tens of thousands of years ago, could flip with smaller, more localised disruptions such as the discharge of huge masses of ice.
"During the last ice age, the state of the climate could flip with relatively small disturbances. Ice discharges were of sufficient volume to suddenly change the sea level by 10 to 15 metres in a matter of decades."
Dr Esat said the study found that abrupt sea-level drops during the Last Glacial Maximum were not precipitated by any concrete climate indicators, such as changes in carbon dioxide levels or temperature. "Transitions appear to have occurred spontaneously," he said.
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/ice-age-sea-level-drops-not-caused-by-co2-level-changes
The increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity will contribute to future sea-level rises, but new research has revealed that rapid ice age sea-level drops were not caused by changes in CO2 concentrations.
The international study involving ANU found that the climate during the last ice age, which ended tens of thousands of years ago, could flip with smaller, more localised disruptions such as the discharge of huge masses of ice.
"During the last ice age, the state of the climate could flip with relatively small disturbances. Ice discharges were of sufficient volume to suddenly change the sea level by 10 to 15 metres in a matter of decades."
Dr Esat said the study found that abrupt sea-level drops during the Last Glacial Maximum were not precipitated by any concrete climate indicators, such as changes in carbon dioxide levels or temperature. "Transitions appear to have occurred spontaneously," he said.
http://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/ice-age-sea-level-drops-not-caused-by-co2-level-changes
Theresa May's voting record
A pretty accurate (also hilarious) summary of the situation if you ask me. When exactly has she ever got anything right based on principle and not mere coincidence ? Never, so far as I can tell. The wonder is that she keeps getting elected, grumble grumble.... [wanders off muttering things about "relative comparisons" and "any twit next to Michael Gove looks competent" and "no-one even knows who their MP is...", etc.].
For example, yesterday was the anniversary of the Section 28 law being passed, which banned teachers from talking about being gay. Theresa May supported the act at the time, saying: “Most parents want the comfort of knowing Section 28 is there.”
But she doesn’t seem to support such a law now – so when did she change her mind? Does she regret supporting it then?
It’s the same with the war in Iraq. She supported the war, now accepts it didn’t go as well as hoped, but doesn’t appear to have any idea why she supported it or what changed her mind, or be at all bothered she might have been wrong.
Throughout the 1980s, May was an enthusiastic member of a party whose leader declared Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, and who was friends with a South American dictator. There’s no record of her ever commenting on this, which is right and proper, because you can’t be an effective politician if you’re expected to have opinions on trivia such as apartheid and torture.
On every major issue, she’s supported the side that’s turned out to be awful. And that’s why being a politician is her perfect job.
[Politicians, even arsey ones like May, have it rough. Ideally they should change their mind according to the best, latest evidence regarding their policy. If they don't, then they are rightly harangued for not listening or not respecting the evidence. But if they do, then they are depicted as unprincipled, untrustworthy, and only pandering to the voters. Even more problematically, sometimes they very clearly are just pandering to the voters but haven't actually changed their opinion at all. They are criticised regardless of which stance they take because the opposition are largely opposed to them, not their policies. This environment is a near-perfect shitstorm for degrading rational judgement.]
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/theresa-may-career-voting-record-worst-option-a8465391.html
For example, yesterday was the anniversary of the Section 28 law being passed, which banned teachers from talking about being gay. Theresa May supported the act at the time, saying: “Most parents want the comfort of knowing Section 28 is there.”
But she doesn’t seem to support such a law now – so when did she change her mind? Does she regret supporting it then?
It’s the same with the war in Iraq. She supported the war, now accepts it didn’t go as well as hoped, but doesn’t appear to have any idea why she supported it or what changed her mind, or be at all bothered she might have been wrong.
Throughout the 1980s, May was an enthusiastic member of a party whose leader declared Nelson Mandela was a terrorist, and who was friends with a South American dictator. There’s no record of her ever commenting on this, which is right and proper, because you can’t be an effective politician if you’re expected to have opinions on trivia such as apartheid and torture.
On every major issue, she’s supported the side that’s turned out to be awful. And that’s why being a politician is her perfect job.
[Politicians, even arsey ones like May, have it rough. Ideally they should change their mind according to the best, latest evidence regarding their policy. If they don't, then they are rightly harangued for not listening or not respecting the evidence. But if they do, then they are depicted as unprincipled, untrustworthy, and only pandering to the voters. Even more problematically, sometimes they very clearly are just pandering to the voters but haven't actually changed their opinion at all. They are criticised regardless of which stance they take because the opposition are largely opposed to them, not their policies. This environment is a near-perfect shitstorm for degrading rational judgement.]
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/theresa-may-career-voting-record-worst-option-a8465391.html
Voting ? Prove you're worthy, mortal !
An idea I've long advocated, albeit half-jokingly. The discussion is better than the idea, and worth reading in full. For me the crucial point is the final one :
I like to say I’m a fan of democracy, and I’m also a fan of Iron Maiden, but I think Iron Maiden has quite a few albums that are terrible — and I think democracy is kind of like this. It’s great, it’s the best system we have so far, but we shouldn’t accept that it can’t be improved.
We might recognize that it’s better than anything else we’ve tried, and yet we can also see that there are all these persistent pathologies that exist, and so we should be asking, “How can we fix them?” We should be constantly experimenting and discovering what works and what doesn’t.
So epistocracy is just an idea, an attempt to do even better than we’re currently doing. There’s a lot at stake. We’ve eliminated a lot of problems. We have equal rights for LGBTQ people now; we treat African Americans better than we used to, though still much worse than we should. Women have more rights. We’ve reduced poverty. These are all good things.
But we’ve also bombed lots of countries and committed atrocities and engaged in all sorts of injustices at home and abroad. We can always do better.
Actually working out improvements to the system are beyond the scope of an early-morning G+ post so I'll just add a few points :
- Stop saying "democratisation" as though that automatically makes literally anything better. It doesn't.
- Democracy at least occasionally produces enormous problems. We've known about the vulnerabilities to ideology-driven (rather than evidence-driven) rhetoric since its very beginning. And right from the start this has led to disasters.
- Any suggested improvements don't need to make the system utopian, they just need to make it perform better than it does now. They ought to be tested on small scales before being applied generally, whenever possible.
- Consider whether the problem is simple ignorance or of evaluating information. Do you know the Prime Minister's middle name ? I don't. Wouldn't help me if I did. You can either try and modify the voting system to select better voters, or try and improve the voters themselves. Either way this may necessitate much broader changes to the information system, e.g. education and the media.
I could go on, but there's stuff to do. As with most things, that's what blog posts are for :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/09/building-better-worlds-i.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iia.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iib.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iic.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/01/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/10/what-some-nerd-thinks-about-star-trek-ii.html
Via Joerg Fliege.
Originally shared by Johnny Stork, MSc
Should People Need to Prove They Are Informed Before Being Allowed to Vote?
"In 2016, Georgetown University political philosopher Jason Brennan published a controversial book, Against Democracy. He argued that democracy is overrated — that it isn’t necessarily more just than other forms of government, and that it doesn’t empower citizens or create more equitable outcomes."
"According to Brennan, we’d be better off if we replaced democracy with a form of government known as “epistocracy.” Epistocracy is a system in which the votes of people who can prove their political knowledge count more than the votes of people who can’t. In other words, it’s a system that privileges the most politically informed citizens."
#philosophy #democracy #epistocracy
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-book-epistocracy-jason-brennan
I like to say I’m a fan of democracy, and I’m also a fan of Iron Maiden, but I think Iron Maiden has quite a few albums that are terrible — and I think democracy is kind of like this. It’s great, it’s the best system we have so far, but we shouldn’t accept that it can’t be improved.
We might recognize that it’s better than anything else we’ve tried, and yet we can also see that there are all these persistent pathologies that exist, and so we should be asking, “How can we fix them?” We should be constantly experimenting and discovering what works and what doesn’t.
So epistocracy is just an idea, an attempt to do even better than we’re currently doing. There’s a lot at stake. We’ve eliminated a lot of problems. We have equal rights for LGBTQ people now; we treat African Americans better than we used to, though still much worse than we should. Women have more rights. We’ve reduced poverty. These are all good things.
But we’ve also bombed lots of countries and committed atrocities and engaged in all sorts of injustices at home and abroad. We can always do better.
Actually working out improvements to the system are beyond the scope of an early-morning G+ post so I'll just add a few points :
- Stop saying "democratisation" as though that automatically makes literally anything better. It doesn't.
- Democracy at least occasionally produces enormous problems. We've known about the vulnerabilities to ideology-driven (rather than evidence-driven) rhetoric since its very beginning. And right from the start this has led to disasters.
- Any suggested improvements don't need to make the system utopian, they just need to make it perform better than it does now. They ought to be tested on small scales before being applied generally, whenever possible.
- Consider whether the problem is simple ignorance or of evaluating information. Do you know the Prime Minister's middle name ? I don't. Wouldn't help me if I did. You can either try and modify the voting system to select better voters, or try and improve the voters themselves. Either way this may necessitate much broader changes to the information system, e.g. education and the media.
I could go on, but there's stuff to do. As with most things, that's what blog posts are for :
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/09/building-better-worlds-i.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iia.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iib.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2018/04/building-better-worlds-iic.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2017/01/be-careful-what-you-wish-for.html
http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2016/10/what-some-nerd-thinks-about-star-trek-ii.html
Via Joerg Fliege.
Originally shared by Johnny Stork, MSc
Should People Need to Prove They Are Informed Before Being Allowed to Vote?
"In 2016, Georgetown University political philosopher Jason Brennan published a controversial book, Against Democracy. He argued that democracy is overrated — that it isn’t necessarily more just than other forms of government, and that it doesn’t empower citizens or create more equitable outcomes."
"According to Brennan, we’d be better off if we replaced democracy with a form of government known as “epistocracy.” Epistocracy is a system in which the votes of people who can prove their political knowledge count more than the votes of people who can’t. In other words, it’s a system that privileges the most politically informed citizens."
#philosophy #democracy #epistocracy
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/23/17581394/against-democracy-book-epistocracy-jason-brennan
Thursday, 26 July 2018
Complexity explained simply
On complex systems and the need to embrace uncertainty. Excellent stuff, nevertheless there are some things I believe we must accept (even if only provisionally) as facts in order to even hold a sensible conversation.
https://extranewsfeed.com/making-sense-of-complexity-ee78755d56b9
https://extranewsfeed.com/making-sense-of-complexity-ee78755d56b9
The Brexit referendum result is (apparently) invalid
I did not know this :
There have been calls for the referendum to be re-run as a result. According to the Venice Commission on referendums, which the UK is a signatory, “if the cap on spending is exceeded by a significant margin, the vote must be annulled”.
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
‘Will of the people’? 10 reasons why politicians need to stop saying it
Aren’t you sick of hearing the phrase “will of the people”? It has been parroted by Leavers since the EU referendum – but the Brexit decision neither represents the views of the UK nor is it likely to become so.
#StopBrexit #PeoplesVote
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/why-politicians-brexiteers-and-leavers-need-to-stop-saying-will-of-the-people-1-5625131
There have been calls for the referendum to be re-run as a result. According to the Venice Commission on referendums, which the UK is a signatory, “if the cap on spending is exceeded by a significant margin, the vote must be annulled”.
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
‘Will of the people’? 10 reasons why politicians need to stop saying it
Aren’t you sick of hearing the phrase “will of the people”? It has been parroted by Leavers since the EU referendum – but the Brexit decision neither represents the views of the UK nor is it likely to become so.
#StopBrexit #PeoplesVote
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/why-politicians-brexiteers-and-leavers-need-to-stop-saying-will-of-the-people-1-5625131
MOND is not as successful as it claims to be
In some ways I'd go even further. Claims that MOND successfully explains small-scale structures like galaxies have yet to be actually demonstrated because there aren't any MOND simulations employing full baryonic physics. And that ain't trivial; they might well have all the same problems that current simulations do, or worse, or just completely different problems altogether. With the caveat that the code to do so now exists, and we should expect results in the not too distant future, there's not really much evidence that MOND actually does solve all the so-called problems with dark matter. And when you look at them in detail, virtually all of these aren't nearly as serious for dark matter as MOND supporters like to claim (e.g. http://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2015/08/seven-very-good-reasons-to-be-little.html).
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that dark matter is a virtual certainty; I hold my own assessment at roughly 85% in favour of it existing. There are plenty of weird objects out there that make little or no sense, but they are may or may not say anything at all about dark matter. I view dark matter as a thoroughly sensible evidence-backed assumption and no other theory comes close. It's certainly a good - in fact the best - default option to assume when explaining observations, and any counter-evidence has to be pretty darn strong at this point. Doesn't mean we can't investigate alternatives, though after 30-odd years of trying to make it work, MOND looks like a dead end to me. Maybe someone will eventually come up with a relativistic version that will solve everything, but at this point I'd bet in favour of discovering a plausible dark matter particle/substance before that happens. Which does not, of course, mean that a spectacular physics revolution won't happen, just not in the way the MONDers would like.
That's my informed opinion, at any rate.
Originally shared by Ethan Siegel
“On the scales of groups of galaxies, individual galaxy clusters, colliding galaxy clusters, the cosmic web, and the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, MOND’s predictions fail to match reality, whereas dark matter succeeds spectacularly. It’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that someday we will understand enough about dark matter to understand why and how the MOND phenomenon on the scales of individual galaxies arises. But when you look at the full suite of evidence, dark matter is practically a scientific certainty. It’s only if you ignore all of modern cosmology that the modified gravity alternative looks viable. Selectively ignoring the robust evidence that contradicts you may win you a debate in the eyes of the general public. But in the scientific realm, the evidence has already decided the matter, and 5/6ths of it is dark.”
Look at a galaxy, watch it rotate, and be extremely careful. Look at how the rotation speeds vary as you move farther and farther away from the center. And then look at all the matter you can see: gas, dust, stars, black holes, neutron stars, plasma, etc. Does the matter describe the galactic motions you see? No, no it doesn’t. Immediately, there are probably two potential solutions that pop into your head:
1.) Either there’s some additional, invisible, unseen mass, like dark matter, or,
2.) The law of gravity that you’re using is wrong.
Both of these seem like reasonable options, and if all you had was individual galaxies, they both would be.
But we have an entire Universe. And when you look at the full suite of evidence available, one of these options is no option at all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/07/26/theres-a-debate-raging-over-whether-dark-matter-is-real-but-one-side-is-cheating/
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that dark matter is a virtual certainty; I hold my own assessment at roughly 85% in favour of it existing. There are plenty of weird objects out there that make little or no sense, but they are may or may not say anything at all about dark matter. I view dark matter as a thoroughly sensible evidence-backed assumption and no other theory comes close. It's certainly a good - in fact the best - default option to assume when explaining observations, and any counter-evidence has to be pretty darn strong at this point. Doesn't mean we can't investigate alternatives, though after 30-odd years of trying to make it work, MOND looks like a dead end to me. Maybe someone will eventually come up with a relativistic version that will solve everything, but at this point I'd bet in favour of discovering a plausible dark matter particle/substance before that happens. Which does not, of course, mean that a spectacular physics revolution won't happen, just not in the way the MONDers would like.
That's my informed opinion, at any rate.
Originally shared by Ethan Siegel
“On the scales of groups of galaxies, individual galaxy clusters, colliding galaxy clusters, the cosmic web, and the leftover radiation from the Big Bang, MOND’s predictions fail to match reality, whereas dark matter succeeds spectacularly. It’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that someday we will understand enough about dark matter to understand why and how the MOND phenomenon on the scales of individual galaxies arises. But when you look at the full suite of evidence, dark matter is practically a scientific certainty. It’s only if you ignore all of modern cosmology that the modified gravity alternative looks viable. Selectively ignoring the robust evidence that contradicts you may win you a debate in the eyes of the general public. But in the scientific realm, the evidence has already decided the matter, and 5/6ths of it is dark.”
Look at a galaxy, watch it rotate, and be extremely careful. Look at how the rotation speeds vary as you move farther and farther away from the center. And then look at all the matter you can see: gas, dust, stars, black holes, neutron stars, plasma, etc. Does the matter describe the galactic motions you see? No, no it doesn’t. Immediately, there are probably two potential solutions that pop into your head:
1.) Either there’s some additional, invisible, unseen mass, like dark matter, or,
2.) The law of gravity that you’re using is wrong.
Both of these seem like reasonable options, and if all you had was individual galaxies, they both would be.
But we have an entire Universe. And when you look at the full suite of evidence available, one of these options is no option at all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/07/26/theres-a-debate-raging-over-whether-dark-matter-is-real-but-one-side-is-cheating/
Edward Gibbon is not for mere mortals
TLDR : Too Long Don't Read. You'll regret it if you do.
It's a crappy book full of dreary, inscrutably dense and dry prose and whoever did the editing of this particular version ought to be thrown to the lions or given some other suitably Roman punishment... imagine the most stereotypically boring librarian you can can conjure up and pretend you gave them unlimited funding for twenty years to write an encyclopedia about cabbage production. That's roughly what you get from Edward Gibbon.
His History is one of pure observation. As a compendium of citations with raw descriptions of what happened, it is indeed peerless and will never be surpassed. The amount of reading and note-taking the poor sap must have had to do in an age before the invention of ctrl+f should give everyone horrifying nightmares. The problem is that that is literally the only good thing about it.
Take his legendary rhetoric. At best, this is vastly over-rated. It's not that he didn't know how to turn a phrase so much as it was that he wouldn't stop doing it. Ever. Who needs clarity when you can have pseeudopoetry ? Except that it's rather worse than that... it's more pseudo-poetric ramblings. The occasional flash of rhetorical brilliance can't compensate for the impenetrable fug of verbal diarrhoea that fills most of the book. The real annoyance is that there's just enough good stuff in there - whole chapters, even - that I can't blame this on the writing style of the age. Some parts of the text are crystal clear, flowing narrative. The rest is what I'm calling Gibbonish... not exactly gibberish, but sort of half-narrative, half general commentary that ends up as the worst of both worlds. So focused is Gibbon, nay obsessed, with constructing rhetoric that it feels almost like deliberate obfuscation. It's not text you read so much as parse. And that quickly becomes mentally exhausting and whatever godforsaken point Gibbon was trying to make is utterly lost.
It's a crappy book full of dreary, inscrutably dense and dry prose and whoever did the editing of this particular version ought to be thrown to the lions or given some other suitably Roman punishment... imagine the most stereotypically boring librarian you can can conjure up and pretend you gave them unlimited funding for twenty years to write an encyclopedia about cabbage production. That's roughly what you get from Edward Gibbon.
His History is one of pure observation. As a compendium of citations with raw descriptions of what happened, it is indeed peerless and will never be surpassed. The amount of reading and note-taking the poor sap must have had to do in an age before the invention of ctrl+f should give everyone horrifying nightmares. The problem is that that is literally the only good thing about it.
Take his legendary rhetoric. At best, this is vastly over-rated. It's not that he didn't know how to turn a phrase so much as it was that he wouldn't stop doing it. Ever. Who needs clarity when you can have pseeudopoetry ? Except that it's rather worse than that... it's more pseudo-poetric ramblings. The occasional flash of rhetorical brilliance can't compensate for the impenetrable fug of verbal diarrhoea that fills most of the book. The real annoyance is that there's just enough good stuff in there - whole chapters, even - that I can't blame this on the writing style of the age. Some parts of the text are crystal clear, flowing narrative. The rest is what I'm calling Gibbonish... not exactly gibberish, but sort of half-narrative, half general commentary that ends up as the worst of both worlds. So focused is Gibbon, nay obsessed, with constructing rhetoric that it feels almost like deliberate obfuscation. It's not text you read so much as parse. And that quickly becomes mentally exhausting and whatever godforsaken point Gibbon was trying to make is utterly lost.
I Read Edward Gibbon So You Don't Have To
Literally. There is no point anyone reading this book unless they're an actual historian. Pretty much any history of Rome will mention, at some point, Gibbon's mighty tome, often in exalted terms as though its sheer magisterialness can be absorbed through osmosis. Well, as y'all know, I prefer to read the source material myself.
Wednesday, 25 July 2018
A liquid lake on Mars
Insert all the usual caveats about press releases here, but this doesn't seem to be too overtly crazy.
Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars. What they believe to be a lake sits beneath the Red Planet's south polar ice cap, and is about 20km across. Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day.
The discovery was made using Marsis, a radar instrument on board the Mars Express orbiter. "It's probably not a very large lake," says Prof Roberto Orosei from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who led the study. Marsis wasn't able to determine how deep the layer of water might be, but the research team estimate that it is a minimum of one metre. "This really qualifies this as a body of water. A lake, not some kind of meltwater filling some space between rock and ice, as happens in certain glaciers on Earth," Prof Orosei added.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44952710
Researchers have found evidence of an existing body of liquid water on Mars. What they believe to be a lake sits beneath the Red Planet's south polar ice cap, and is about 20km across. Previous research found possible signs of intermittent liquid water flowing on the martian surface, but this is the first sign of a persistent body of water on the planet in the present day.
The discovery was made using Marsis, a radar instrument on board the Mars Express orbiter. "It's probably not a very large lake," says Prof Roberto Orosei from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, who led the study. Marsis wasn't able to determine how deep the layer of water might be, but the research team estimate that it is a minimum of one metre. "This really qualifies this as a body of water. A lake, not some kind of meltwater filling some space between rock and ice, as happens in certain glaciers on Earth," Prof Orosei added.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44952710
Treating violence as a network problem
A long and fascinating read.
Since the VRU was launched in 2005, the murder rate in Glasgow has dropped by 60%. The number of facial trauma patients passing through Glasgow’s hospitals has halved, Goodall says, and now stands at around 500 a year.
The VRU’s strategy is described as a “public health” approach to preventing violence. This refers to a whole school of thought that suggests that violent behaviour itself is an epidemic that spreads from person to person. One of the primary indicators that someone will carry out an act of violence is being a victim of one beforehand. The idea that violence spreads between people, reproducing itself and shifting group norms, explains why one area might see fewer stabbings or shootings than another – even if it has many of the same social problems.
Since the VRU was launched in 2005, the murder rate in Glasgow has dropped by 60%. The number of facial trauma patients passing through Glasgow’s hospitals has halved, Goodall says, and now stands at around 500 a year.
Changing behavioural norms is far more effective than simply giving people information. To change behaviour – whether it’s using rehydration solutions, avoiding dirty water or using condoms – credible messengers are essential. “In all of these outbreaks we used outreach workers from the same group” as the target population, says Slutkin. “Refugees in Somalia to reach refugees with TB or cholera, sex workers to reach sex workers with Aids, moms to reach moms on breastfeeding and diarrhoeal management.”
After more than a decade working overseas, Slutkin returned to his native Chicago in the late 1990s. “I wanted a break from all these epidemics,” he says. But he returned to a different kind of problem: a skyrocketing homicide rate. Wanting to tackle this, too, he gathered maps and data on gun violence in Chicago. As he did so, the parallels with the maps of disease outbreaks he was accustomed to were unavoidable. “The epidemic curves are the same, the clustering. In fact, one event leads to another, which is diagnostic of a contagious process. Flu causes more flu, colds cause more colds, and violence causes more violence.”
In 2000, he launched a pilot project in the West Garfield neighbourhood of Chicago. It replicated the same steps as the WHO takes to control outbreaks of cholera, TB or HIV: interrupt transmission, prevent future spread, and change group norms. Within the first year, there was a 67% drop in homicides. More neighbourhoods were piloted. Everywhere it launched, homicides dropped by at least 40%. The approach began to be replicated in other cities.
Violence interrupters use numerous techniques, some borrowed from cognitive behavioural therapy: “constructive shadowing”, which means echoing people’s words back to them; “babysitting”, which is simply staying with someone until they have cooled down; and emphasising consequences. Interrupters’ ability to be effective depends on their credibility. Many, like Cole, have served long prison sentences and can speak from experience. Most also have a close relationship with the local community.
A lot of people come into A&E plotting revenge and it’s very important that they leave not doing that,” says Goodall. In the violence prevention industry, this is referred to as a “reachable, teachable moment”, when someone is more receptive than usual to help. “Pain is an incredible motivator for change,” says Linden. After an initial conversation, the navigator follows up by helping the person get drug or alcohol treatment, job opportunities or therapy. They try to move quickly. “When someone wants to change, you have to be able to adapt and move,” says Linden. “In six or 12 weeks, they’ll be in a different mindset. We make sure if we refer someone, they’re not in a queue.” This requires significant cooperation between different agencies.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180723-why-we-should-treat-violence-like-an-epidemic
Since the VRU was launched in 2005, the murder rate in Glasgow has dropped by 60%. The number of facial trauma patients passing through Glasgow’s hospitals has halved, Goodall says, and now stands at around 500 a year.
The VRU’s strategy is described as a “public health” approach to preventing violence. This refers to a whole school of thought that suggests that violent behaviour itself is an epidemic that spreads from person to person. One of the primary indicators that someone will carry out an act of violence is being a victim of one beforehand. The idea that violence spreads between people, reproducing itself and shifting group norms, explains why one area might see fewer stabbings or shootings than another – even if it has many of the same social problems.
Since the VRU was launched in 2005, the murder rate in Glasgow has dropped by 60%. The number of facial trauma patients passing through Glasgow’s hospitals has halved, Goodall says, and now stands at around 500 a year.
Changing behavioural norms is far more effective than simply giving people information. To change behaviour – whether it’s using rehydration solutions, avoiding dirty water or using condoms – credible messengers are essential. “In all of these outbreaks we used outreach workers from the same group” as the target population, says Slutkin. “Refugees in Somalia to reach refugees with TB or cholera, sex workers to reach sex workers with Aids, moms to reach moms on breastfeeding and diarrhoeal management.”
After more than a decade working overseas, Slutkin returned to his native Chicago in the late 1990s. “I wanted a break from all these epidemics,” he says. But he returned to a different kind of problem: a skyrocketing homicide rate. Wanting to tackle this, too, he gathered maps and data on gun violence in Chicago. As he did so, the parallels with the maps of disease outbreaks he was accustomed to were unavoidable. “The epidemic curves are the same, the clustering. In fact, one event leads to another, which is diagnostic of a contagious process. Flu causes more flu, colds cause more colds, and violence causes more violence.”
In 2000, he launched a pilot project in the West Garfield neighbourhood of Chicago. It replicated the same steps as the WHO takes to control outbreaks of cholera, TB or HIV: interrupt transmission, prevent future spread, and change group norms. Within the first year, there was a 67% drop in homicides. More neighbourhoods were piloted. Everywhere it launched, homicides dropped by at least 40%. The approach began to be replicated in other cities.
Violence interrupters use numerous techniques, some borrowed from cognitive behavioural therapy: “constructive shadowing”, which means echoing people’s words back to them; “babysitting”, which is simply staying with someone until they have cooled down; and emphasising consequences. Interrupters’ ability to be effective depends on their credibility. Many, like Cole, have served long prison sentences and can speak from experience. Most also have a close relationship with the local community.
A lot of people come into A&E plotting revenge and it’s very important that they leave not doing that,” says Goodall. In the violence prevention industry, this is referred to as a “reachable, teachable moment”, when someone is more receptive than usual to help. “Pain is an incredible motivator for change,” says Linden. After an initial conversation, the navigator follows up by helping the person get drug or alcohol treatment, job opportunities or therapy. They try to move quickly. “When someone wants to change, you have to be able to adapt and move,” says Linden. “In six or 12 weeks, they’ll be in a different mindset. We make sure if we refer someone, they’re not in a queue.” This requires significant cooperation between different agencies.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180723-why-we-should-treat-violence-like-an-epidemic
Tuesday, 24 July 2018
Britain is actually stockpiling medicine in the event of a no deal Brexit
Good God, what the fuck are we doing people ? Can we stop now ? Please. This is insanity.
Originally shared by Joerg Fliege
Tweet from the Health and Social Care Committee:
.@MattHancock : "The department is working up options with industry for stockpiling medicines, medical devices and substances of human origin in the case of a no-deal Brexit. Obviously there will be a cost for this."
I wonder how they stockpile Insulin? And nurses?
https://twitter.com/CommonsHealth/status/1021783791323553792?s=19
Originally shared by Joerg Fliege
Tweet from the Health and Social Care Committee:
.@MattHancock : "The department is working up options with industry for stockpiling medicines, medical devices and substances of human origin in the case of a no-deal Brexit. Obviously there will be a cost for this."
I wonder how they stockpile Insulin? And nurses?
https://twitter.com/CommonsHealth/status/1021783791323553792?s=19
And then there was one
Taking back control eh ? So that's what it meant. Smells more like wanton desperation to me. This is a do-or-die move; the only reason the government hasn't actually collapsed is... well, actually, it has. It's scarcely better than one of Galvani's twitching frogs, occasionally thrashing out randomly due to mysterious and poorly understood external forces but with no will or direction of its own. The only reason these muppets are still "in charge", for want of a better expression, is because no-one wants to inherit the shitstorm that is Brexit. Not even Brexiteers are quite that stupid.
The only problem is what comes next. The opposition forces are just the opposite kind of deranged.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-44941792
The only problem is what comes next. The opposition forces are just the opposite kind of deranged.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-44941792
Targeted advertising is more persuasive, but no better at getting views
How effective is targeted advertising ? This study attempted to find out by conducting a real world experiment. They used available data of Facebook "likes" to assess whether users were more likely to be introverted, extroverted, of high or low openness, and sent them correspondingly targeted adverts for beauty products and apps. This improves the effectiveness of the advertising (initial clicks and sales) by ~40%. However, the base rate is very low, ~0.3%, but the sample size is very large (>100,000 users). So it has an effect, but it turns a very low success rate into a slightly less very low success rate. Doesn't mean that isn't important, of course, but it's hardly dramatic. They note that other factors such as current mood might also be important, so further increases may be possible.
This more or less pans out the way I would have expected : advertising works, but not very well, and targeted adverts work better, but only slightly. But there are major caveats. The targeted personality types were extremely broad and based off very limited data. As far as fake news goes, adverts are usually explicitly labelled and easy to spot even if they're not. News doesn't carry such a label, so the click through rate may be much higher.
People are exposed to persuasive communication across many different contexts: Governments, companies, and political parties use persuasive appeals to encourage people to eat healthier, purchase a particular product, or vote for a specific candidate. Laboratory studies show that such persuasive appeals are more effective in influencing behavior when they are tailored to individuals’ unique psychological characteristics. However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.
Capitalizing on this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we test the effects of psychological persuasion on people’s actual behavior in an ecologically valid setting. In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases.
Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts. Our findings suggest that the application of psychological targeting makes it possible to influence the behavior of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audiences.
PDF document.
https://4f46691c-a-dbcb5f65-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/michalkosinski.com/michalkosinski/PNAS-2017-Matz-1710966114.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cptCUQqdiCtR6eqNs0-9EWP8xr28Eww4lzk6F6zzxiTb8QjOp8IkrggDfsYtAlue3QmQOosNNS9cWNjp_GiDw8n15tt_Syq7mdhyUqlQ3RVQfQRxCs9TDXUZZhIjYptmNw4YQXrxBzVcro30Qw5pAQMNniVRm2Mm66thNBWB-6XTt_ocQ3-KnKNdtC_wqTbxHU5sk_ErV61j-jFiycs_BQOIP5Ci5lCFfxbjf377uFwTMHKGqg%3D&attredirects=0
This more or less pans out the way I would have expected : advertising works, but not very well, and targeted adverts work better, but only slightly. But there are major caveats. The targeted personality types were extremely broad and based off very limited data. As far as fake news goes, adverts are usually explicitly labelled and easy to spot even if they're not. News doesn't carry such a label, so the click through rate may be much higher.
People are exposed to persuasive communication across many different contexts: Governments, companies, and political parties use persuasive appeals to encourage people to eat healthier, purchase a particular product, or vote for a specific candidate. Laboratory studies show that such persuasive appeals are more effective in influencing behavior when they are tailored to individuals’ unique psychological characteristics. However, the investigation of large-scale psychological persuasion in the real world has been hindered by the questionnaire-based nature of psychological assessment. Recent research, however, shows that people’s psychological characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.
Capitalizing on this form of psychological assessment from digital footprints, we test the effects of psychological persuasion on people’s actual behavior in an ecologically valid setting. In three field experiments that reached over 3.5 million individuals with psychologically tailored advertising, we find that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases.
Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to-experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts. Our findings suggest that the application of psychological targeting makes it possible to influence the behavior of large groups of people by tailoring persuasive appeals to the psychological needs of the target audiences.
PDF document.
https://4f46691c-a-dbcb5f65-s-sites.googlegroups.com/a/michalkosinski.com/michalkosinski/PNAS-2017-Matz-1710966114.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7cptCUQqdiCtR6eqNs0-9EWP8xr28Eww4lzk6F6zzxiTb8QjOp8IkrggDfsYtAlue3QmQOosNNS9cWNjp_GiDw8n15tt_Syq7mdhyUqlQ3RVQfQRxCs9TDXUZZhIjYptmNw4YQXrxBzVcro30Qw5pAQMNniVRm2Mm66thNBWB-6XTt_ocQ3-KnKNdtC_wqTbxHU5sk_ErV61j-jFiycs_BQOIP5Ci5lCFfxbjf377uFwTMHKGqg%3D&attredirects=0
Can you think complex thoughts without language ?
Yes, of course you can. As Plato said, "Names would have an absurd effect on the things they name, if they resembled them in every respect, since all of them would be duplicated, and no-one would be able to say which was the thing and which was the name."
Language is a description of reality, not reality itself. Visual mental imagery doesn't require language : complex mathematical functions can be imagined without their associated formulae. The brain doesn't calculate them by calculating the value of sin(x) or e^x because it's not a computer in the conventional sense. Plenty of less esoteric phenomena can be visualised without language too, like the colour red or the concept of circularity, say. What's really interesting is, as that Oxford introductory philosophy course pointed out, to try and visualise a circle without colour... It's also interesting to consider things which are purely conceptual and immeasurable, like goodness.
Whenever I'm trying to solve a tricky problem, there's a moment before I can express it linguistically where I know the answer but can't articulate it. By definition, this is impossible to describe. When it "clicks" (or as I think of it, crystallises) into a linguistic state, it's very much easier to preserve. I can then also transmit the concept to others vastly more easily. And they can communicate other ideas to me. Language unlocks our deeper understanding, providing handy mental tools for compressing complex concepts and making certain mental gymnastics easier. But it certainly isn't the be-all and end-all of thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=_UqxSq19_Aw
Language is a description of reality, not reality itself. Visual mental imagery doesn't require language : complex mathematical functions can be imagined without their associated formulae. The brain doesn't calculate them by calculating the value of sin(x) or e^x because it's not a computer in the conventional sense. Plenty of less esoteric phenomena can be visualised without language too, like the colour red or the concept of circularity, say. What's really interesting is, as that Oxford introductory philosophy course pointed out, to try and visualise a circle without colour... It's also interesting to consider things which are purely conceptual and immeasurable, like goodness.
Whenever I'm trying to solve a tricky problem, there's a moment before I can express it linguistically where I know the answer but can't articulate it. By definition, this is impossible to describe. When it "clicks" (or as I think of it, crystallises) into a linguistic state, it's very much easier to preserve. I can then also transmit the concept to others vastly more easily. And they can communicate other ideas to me. Language unlocks our deeper understanding, providing handy mental tools for compressing complex concepts and making certain mental gymnastics easier. But it certainly isn't the be-all and end-all of thought.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=_UqxSq19_Aw
Measuring the happiness of a horse
For our troubled times of woe and madness, a story about happy horsies.
In this study, researchers examined horses in riding schools and those kept in naturalistic conditions. The horses in the riding schools were kept in small stalls and were ridden for 4-12 hours a week under the supervision of a riding teacher. They were allowed out on grass for differing but limited amounts of time. In contrast the horses kept in natural conditions lived in small groups on pasture and were occasionally used for relaxed outdoor leisure riding.
The scientists stared at the horses for five minutes and recorded the snorting activities of all groups and also noted what they were doing and the position of their ears - backward pointing ears is associated with negative emotional states in horses while forward pointing are seen as an indication of positive feelings.
Horses snorted far more when they were out in pasture than when they were in a stall. Among riding school horses, snorts occurred at a rate of around five per hour which was about half of what the horses in naturalistic conditions produced. These were also correlated with positive behaviours such as ears pointing forward. When the researchers looked at other measures of welfare and stress they concluded that "the more snorts emitted the more they were in a good welfare state".
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44796915
In this study, researchers examined horses in riding schools and those kept in naturalistic conditions. The horses in the riding schools were kept in small stalls and were ridden for 4-12 hours a week under the supervision of a riding teacher. They were allowed out on grass for differing but limited amounts of time. In contrast the horses kept in natural conditions lived in small groups on pasture and were occasionally used for relaxed outdoor leisure riding.
The scientists stared at the horses for five minutes and recorded the snorting activities of all groups and also noted what they were doing and the position of their ears - backward pointing ears is associated with negative emotional states in horses while forward pointing are seen as an indication of positive feelings.
Horses snorted far more when they were out in pasture than when they were in a stall. Among riding school horses, snorts occurred at a rate of around five per hour which was about half of what the horses in naturalistic conditions produced. These were also correlated with positive behaviours such as ears pointing forward. When the researchers looked at other measures of welfare and stress they concluded that "the more snorts emitted the more they were in a good welfare state".
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44796915
Monday, 23 July 2018
Cities are creating new species
Researchers in the US found that the wingspan of American cliff swallows, which took up the habit of colonising concrete highway bridges in the 1980s, had decreased by about two millimetres a decade since then. Not much, and perhaps not really worth noticing if their measurements on the roadkill had not shown the exact opposite pattern: by the 2010s, the wings of dead birds by the roadside were about half a centimetre longer than those of live birds still happily flapping along. Also, even though the pressure of traffic had remained the same or even increased, the numbers of dead birds declined by almost 90%.
Across Europe and North Africa, city blackbirds have been found to have shorter, stubbier bills than forest blackbirds, presumably thanks to the easy pickings at bird feeders and other places in the cities where food can be had without pecking, probing or pincering. Whether it’s due to those different beaks is not sure yet, but urban blackbirds sound different too. The urban background noise forces the blackbird songsters to change their pitch and timing.
As researchers in the Netherlands found out after recording almost 3,000 songs, urban blackbird concerts are performed at a higher pitch than forest ones, while a German research team discovered that, as foretold by Paul McCartney, urban blackbirds are singing in the dead of night. In the city centre of Leipzig, they start a full three hours before sunrise, well before the trams and cars start creating a racket. Forest blackbirds open their beaks only at dawn. They also start breeding earlier in the year than their sylvan relatives, as their biological clocks are advanced by more than a month.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/23/darwin-comes-to-town-how-cities-are-creating-new-species
Across Europe and North Africa, city blackbirds have been found to have shorter, stubbier bills than forest blackbirds, presumably thanks to the easy pickings at bird feeders and other places in the cities where food can be had without pecking, probing or pincering. Whether it’s due to those different beaks is not sure yet, but urban blackbirds sound different too. The urban background noise forces the blackbird songsters to change their pitch and timing.
As researchers in the Netherlands found out after recording almost 3,000 songs, urban blackbird concerts are performed at a higher pitch than forest ones, while a German research team discovered that, as foretold by Paul McCartney, urban blackbirds are singing in the dead of night. In the city centre of Leipzig, they start a full three hours before sunrise, well before the trams and cars start creating a racket. Forest blackbirds open their beaks only at dawn. They also start breeding earlier in the year than their sylvan relatives, as their biological clocks are advanced by more than a month.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/23/darwin-comes-to-town-how-cities-are-creating-new-species
Saturday, 21 July 2018
Consciousness as a parasite
45 minutes long, but this is just too interesting not to summarise. I saw this in my feed a while back and bookmarked it for the occasion I had 45 minutes spare, but unfortunately I don't remember who shared it originally.
First we get a look at the possibility that ants are self aware. Apparently ants pass the mirror test. If coloured paint is applied to them, an ant seeing its own reflection will attempt to remove it. They don't try this if the paint matches their own colour, suggesting they really are responding to the visual information and not any itching or other stimulus from the paint, and that they distinguish their reflections from themselves. Self awareness ?
Watts is keen to note that this research was done by otherwise reputable scientists, appears to be rigorous and well-documented, but was published in a journal which looks for all the world like a spam/predator journal ("Journal of Science"). The site has a picture of a smiling guy wearing a hard hat for no reason, for God's sake. He notes that this is strange considering how easy it would be to replicate the study, which is more than I got after a quick Google (anyone want to dig deeper, please do). So this is interesting but suspicious.
Watts notes that there is other research being done on insect intelligence/consciousness. One group claims that consicousness is "rooted in the verterbrate mid-brain", but since all parts of the mid-brain have a function analogue in the insect brain, insects ought to be just as conscious. Other animals - parrots, octopus - have totally different brain structures but also seem to be intelligent. It's almost as though the shape of brain doesn't matter all that much, as long as it has enough synapses. He mentions Penrose and other more woo-variants of consciousness, but doesn't dwell on them.
Next he suggests a different way to tackle the problem is to ask what consciousness is good for. His answer is... nothing. We don't really need it, but we've got it anyway. He notes that brain scans show that the signal to wiggle our fingers is sent before we're consciously aware of it. The artist Lee Hadwin creates art - good, careful art - in his sleep, while being barely able to draw while awake; he also notes various cases of sleepwalkers doing all kinds of strange (sometimes criminal) activities while asleep. Perhaps most interestingly, he cites a study in which people were given a choice of cars to buy. One group was allowed to think about it for four minutes while the other group were given distracting tasks to do. The distracted group consistently made the better choice (assessed on 12 variables; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/311/5763/1005).
Here I will interject briefly to say that I've long found it odd that I can think in complete, coherent sentences. It's like they're being assembled unconsicously, while my consicous mind is, almost, merely a witness. This doesn't mean I have no role to play, I simply have to redefine "me" to mean my entire self, including my subconscious. It's still me thinking and choosing to wiggle my fingers, just not always my consious self. My guess would be that there's an interplay between consicous and unconsious - some decisions are probably best made subconsiously, others are not. It would be interesting to hear more details about the car study, e.g. if having the car decisions in the back of their minds made the distracted group worse at the distracting task than they otherwise would... maybe the extra stimulation actually helped, maybe they were processing both consciously but intermittently and with more efficiency. Some problems seem to require flow while others are best solved with a fresh mind. So maybe they were constanly being distacted but constantly returning to it. Or maybe consciousness is indeed nothing more than a commentary on the subconsious, or something.
All that notwithstanding, Watts suggests that consciousness is a like a parasite. To its host, a parastite isn't useful at all - it's an accident, not an adaptation. He came up with this as the punchline for a sci-fi novel but now it's apparently being taken seriously by neuroscientists.
He goes on to describe a fascinating study in which researchers were able to create a "ratborg" - a rat hive mind - by linking four rats brains together (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27869-animal-brains-connected-up-to-make-mind-melded-computer/). He also cites the development of an artifical hippocampus for storing memories by Theodore Berger, though I think he greatly exaggerates the progress of this and other experiments.
Finally he goes on to describe the "hive mind" as being simply an extension of our existing brains. Individual sections of the brain function differently when integrated into the whole - it's like our personality is created from lots of sub-personalities. Watts describes "alien hand" syndrome, where suffers don't feel in control of their own hands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome); a split-brain case where one hemisphere was Christian and the other was atheist (my very brief search couldn't find a nice impartial link); and how communication between the two brain hemispheres depends on the connection speed. There are different ways the two can communicate and the slower method results in behaviour differences, because the two halves are processing information effectively separately. He notes a patient who demonstrated a distinctly different personality while one half of his brain was anaethistised.
His last and perhaps most interesting example are the conjoined Hogan twins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan) who share a double, joined brain. Apparently they can see through each other's eyes and sense when each other is being tickled and maybe even each others thoughts. They have distinct personalities, but use the pronoun "I" to refer to each other. Watts argues that in a true hive mind, the separate personalities become completely subsumed into a greater whole - a completely new individual arises from the component minds. He concludes with a note that while still highly uncertain, estimate of the communication bandwidth between the two hemispheres of the brain is to comparable to that of a mobile phone, and thus a hive mind is something we should start to be concerned about.
EDIT : Watts also asks if there's anything we do consciously that we couldn't do unconsciously instead. And maybe the answer is indeed "no", but... for it to have an evolutionary function, all it needs to do is make things easier for most people, most of the time. That, I think, is generally the case for memory. Once ideas crystallise out of their deeper subconscious construction, how much easier they become to remember ! And how much easier they become to store externally. It's well-known that short-term memory has powerful information processing capacity but can only hold a few - maybe seven or so - "items" at once, albeit "item" is somewhat ambiguous, whereas long-term memory storage is vast but slow. Items have to persist in short-term memory for some time before they even have a chance of making it to the long term storage, and this seems to require consciousness. It would be fascinating to see if anyone's done any studies on short/long-term memory in animals.
Artists drawing in their sleep are certainly interesting exceptions but by far and way they are not the norm, and therefore from an evolutionary standpoint may not tell us that much about consciousness : that it is possible doesn't mean it's easy. Also, I think it's important to note that consciousness, whatever it actually is, occurs in different states and levels. Is someone dreaming really unconscious ? What about lucid dreaming ? It's clearly a different state from a dreamless sleep. It may be that tasks Watts says can be done unconsciously are actually occuring on other levels. Consciousness certainly isn't binary.
I suspect consciousness is a bit like an interactive theatre, or, more appropriately, a pantomime. The audience both draw on information provided by the actors (existing memories) and influence the outcome of the play ("He's behind you !"). The stage hands behind the scenes are the subconscious. Sometimes you're better off letting them do the hard work, but sometimes the audience can spot things the actors and stage hands cannot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I
First we get a look at the possibility that ants are self aware. Apparently ants pass the mirror test. If coloured paint is applied to them, an ant seeing its own reflection will attempt to remove it. They don't try this if the paint matches their own colour, suggesting they really are responding to the visual information and not any itching or other stimulus from the paint, and that they distinguish their reflections from themselves. Self awareness ?
Watts is keen to note that this research was done by otherwise reputable scientists, appears to be rigorous and well-documented, but was published in a journal which looks for all the world like a spam/predator journal ("Journal of Science"). The site has a picture of a smiling guy wearing a hard hat for no reason, for God's sake. He notes that this is strange considering how easy it would be to replicate the study, which is more than I got after a quick Google (anyone want to dig deeper, please do). So this is interesting but suspicious.
Watts notes that there is other research being done on insect intelligence/consciousness. One group claims that consicousness is "rooted in the verterbrate mid-brain", but since all parts of the mid-brain have a function analogue in the insect brain, insects ought to be just as conscious. Other animals - parrots, octopus - have totally different brain structures but also seem to be intelligent. It's almost as though the shape of brain doesn't matter all that much, as long as it has enough synapses. He mentions Penrose and other more woo-variants of consciousness, but doesn't dwell on them.
Next he suggests a different way to tackle the problem is to ask what consciousness is good for. His answer is... nothing. We don't really need it, but we've got it anyway. He notes that brain scans show that the signal to wiggle our fingers is sent before we're consciously aware of it. The artist Lee Hadwin creates art - good, careful art - in his sleep, while being barely able to draw while awake; he also notes various cases of sleepwalkers doing all kinds of strange (sometimes criminal) activities while asleep. Perhaps most interestingly, he cites a study in which people were given a choice of cars to buy. One group was allowed to think about it for four minutes while the other group were given distracting tasks to do. The distracted group consistently made the better choice (assessed on 12 variables; http://science.sciencemag.org/content/311/5763/1005).
Here I will interject briefly to say that I've long found it odd that I can think in complete, coherent sentences. It's like they're being assembled unconsicously, while my consicous mind is, almost, merely a witness. This doesn't mean I have no role to play, I simply have to redefine "me" to mean my entire self, including my subconscious. It's still me thinking and choosing to wiggle my fingers, just not always my consious self. My guess would be that there's an interplay between consicous and unconsious - some decisions are probably best made subconsiously, others are not. It would be interesting to hear more details about the car study, e.g. if having the car decisions in the back of their minds made the distracted group worse at the distracting task than they otherwise would... maybe the extra stimulation actually helped, maybe they were processing both consciously but intermittently and with more efficiency. Some problems seem to require flow while others are best solved with a fresh mind. So maybe they were constanly being distacted but constantly returning to it. Or maybe consciousness is indeed nothing more than a commentary on the subconsious, or something.
All that notwithstanding, Watts suggests that consciousness is a like a parasite. To its host, a parastite isn't useful at all - it's an accident, not an adaptation. He came up with this as the punchline for a sci-fi novel but now it's apparently being taken seriously by neuroscientists.
He goes on to describe a fascinating study in which researchers were able to create a "ratborg" - a rat hive mind - by linking four rats brains together (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27869-animal-brains-connected-up-to-make-mind-melded-computer/). He also cites the development of an artifical hippocampus for storing memories by Theodore Berger, though I think he greatly exaggerates the progress of this and other experiments.
Finally he goes on to describe the "hive mind" as being simply an extension of our existing brains. Individual sections of the brain function differently when integrated into the whole - it's like our personality is created from lots of sub-personalities. Watts describes "alien hand" syndrome, where suffers don't feel in control of their own hands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_hand_syndrome); a split-brain case where one hemisphere was Christian and the other was atheist (my very brief search couldn't find a nice impartial link); and how communication between the two brain hemispheres depends on the connection speed. There are different ways the two can communicate and the slower method results in behaviour differences, because the two halves are processing information effectively separately. He notes a patient who demonstrated a distinctly different personality while one half of his brain was anaethistised.
His last and perhaps most interesting example are the conjoined Hogan twins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krista_and_Tatiana_Hogan) who share a double, joined brain. Apparently they can see through each other's eyes and sense when each other is being tickled and maybe even each others thoughts. They have distinct personalities, but use the pronoun "I" to refer to each other. Watts argues that in a true hive mind, the separate personalities become completely subsumed into a greater whole - a completely new individual arises from the component minds. He concludes with a note that while still highly uncertain, estimate of the communication bandwidth between the two hemispheres of the brain is to comparable to that of a mobile phone, and thus a hive mind is something we should start to be concerned about.
EDIT : Watts also asks if there's anything we do consciously that we couldn't do unconsciously instead. And maybe the answer is indeed "no", but... for it to have an evolutionary function, all it needs to do is make things easier for most people, most of the time. That, I think, is generally the case for memory. Once ideas crystallise out of their deeper subconscious construction, how much easier they become to remember ! And how much easier they become to store externally. It's well-known that short-term memory has powerful information processing capacity but can only hold a few - maybe seven or so - "items" at once, albeit "item" is somewhat ambiguous, whereas long-term memory storage is vast but slow. Items have to persist in short-term memory for some time before they even have a chance of making it to the long term storage, and this seems to require consciousness. It would be fascinating to see if anyone's done any studies on short/long-term memory in animals.
Artists drawing in their sleep are certainly interesting exceptions but by far and way they are not the norm, and therefore from an evolutionary standpoint may not tell us that much about consciousness : that it is possible doesn't mean it's easy. Also, I think it's important to note that consciousness, whatever it actually is, occurs in different states and levels. Is someone dreaming really unconscious ? What about lucid dreaming ? It's clearly a different state from a dreamless sleep. It may be that tasks Watts says can be done unconsciously are actually occuring on other levels. Consciousness certainly isn't binary.
I suspect consciousness is a bit like an interactive theatre, or, more appropriately, a pantomime. The audience both draw on information provided by the actors (existing memories) and influence the outcome of the play ("He's behind you !"). The stage hands behind the scenes are the subconscious. Sometimes you're better off letting them do the hard work, but sometimes the audience can spot things the actors and stage hands cannot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I
New archaeology revealed thanks to a brutal heatwave
Some benefits from the heatwave. You can see it extremely clearly in the second video.
The discovery of a 5,500-year-old megalithic tomb in County Meath has been described as the "find of a lifetime" by archaeologists. Two burial chambers, six kerbstones and two suspected satellite tombs have been found during the dig. The find was made at the 18th Century Dowth Hall, within the Brú na Bóinne complex, a Unesco World Heritage site.
The project is being carried out by the agri-technology company Devenish and University College Dublin (UCD). Teams from UCD School of Archaeology and Devenish, the Belfast-based firm which acquired Dowth Hall and its lands in 2013, have been working on the site for more than a year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44850668
The discovery of a 5,500-year-old megalithic tomb in County Meath has been described as the "find of a lifetime" by archaeologists. Two burial chambers, six kerbstones and two suspected satellite tombs have been found during the dig. The find was made at the 18th Century Dowth Hall, within the Brú na Bóinne complex, a Unesco World Heritage site.
The project is being carried out by the agri-technology company Devenish and University College Dublin (UCD). Teams from UCD School of Archaeology and Devenish, the Belfast-based firm which acquired Dowth Hall and its lands in 2013, have been working on the site for more than a year.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44850668
Lidar scanning a telescope which is partly built out of oldbattleships, in order to make it prettier. As one does.
Lidar scanning a telescope which is partly built out of old battleships, in order to make it prettier. As one does.
For the last two years though, Lovell's 5,000 square metre bowl has been undergoing restoration, which means it has to be kept static and pointed directly upward. As a result, artists and designers are deprived of its huge circular "screen".
"All we had was the superstructure, so we convinced the powers-that-be that we needed a 3-D scan of the whole thing," said Mr Bluman.
The need for that scan dates from when construction first began on Professor Bernard Lovell's great telescope in 1952. Even as the structure took shape, there were many unsolved engineering problems. Many ad hoc solutions that allowed the 1,500 tonne bowl to be steered with pinpoint accuracy were devised along the way, including the use of racks from battleship gun turrets. Possibly as a result of these swift engineering fixes during construction, there were no accurate technical drawings of the telescope available.
"We used a Lidar scan, which essentially shoots lasers at the entire telescope to create an enormously detailed point cloud - a three-dimensional map of the structure," Mr Bluman explained.
Once he and his team had simplified this map, they used it to virtually "flatten out" the whole structure into a two-dimensional plan, and used that to design the animations that would be projected onto every single strut.
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
Lovell lights: turning a telescope into an art installation #bluedotfestival
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44900634
For the last two years though, Lovell's 5,000 square metre bowl has been undergoing restoration, which means it has to be kept static and pointed directly upward. As a result, artists and designers are deprived of its huge circular "screen".
"All we had was the superstructure, so we convinced the powers-that-be that we needed a 3-D scan of the whole thing," said Mr Bluman.
The need for that scan dates from when construction first began on Professor Bernard Lovell's great telescope in 1952. Even as the structure took shape, there were many unsolved engineering problems. Many ad hoc solutions that allowed the 1,500 tonne bowl to be steered with pinpoint accuracy were devised along the way, including the use of racks from battleship gun turrets. Possibly as a result of these swift engineering fixes during construction, there were no accurate technical drawings of the telescope available.
"We used a Lidar scan, which essentially shoots lasers at the entire telescope to create an enormously detailed point cloud - a three-dimensional map of the structure," Mr Bluman explained.
Once he and his team had simplified this map, they used it to virtually "flatten out" the whole structure into a two-dimensional plan, and used that to design the animations that would be projected onto every single strut.
Originally shared by Jenny Winder
Lovell lights: turning a telescope into an art installation #bluedotfestival
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-44900634
The similarity between art and equations
On scientific jargon, minimalist art and the compression (and lack thereof) from equations.
In language: where a complex word or compound phrase most effectively captures or articulates a specific question, solution or description of an actual state of affairs in the world, its effective use in message transmission is dependent upon a variety of factors. The intelligence and vocabulary of the intended receiver of the message generally has to be assumed or taken for granted, albeit true that writing to a more general audience usually implies the use of simple words and many more sentences to convey the same message that complex words and clever idioms or motifs might achieve in less overall message information-complexity and string-length.
The use of specialist vocabularies and contextual knowledge allows for message compression, but at the apparently mandatory cost of displacing the complexity elsewhere: into assumed knowledge, specialist technical skills, cultural contexts or extensive experience and (again) into an implicit, certain assumed level of intelligence in the message recipient or target audience.
It seems to the mathematically unitiated that advanced physical equations are a little like this minimalist enigma. That the reduction to short strings of symbols and mathematical relationships inversely displaces vast swathes of assumed or required knowledge elsewhere such that, while I acknowledge and deeply respect the beauty, depth and explanatory power of mathematics in physical theory, the view from here is that the relative simplicity of an equation is always implicitly dependent upon a complex network of assumed or implied information and knowledge external to it, a theoretical context perhaps but not necessarily limited to this as full comprehension clearly requires more than mere generalised insights or intuitions.
https://daedeluskite.com/2018/07/21/on-equations-art-and-information-compression/
In language: where a complex word or compound phrase most effectively captures or articulates a specific question, solution or description of an actual state of affairs in the world, its effective use in message transmission is dependent upon a variety of factors. The intelligence and vocabulary of the intended receiver of the message generally has to be assumed or taken for granted, albeit true that writing to a more general audience usually implies the use of simple words and many more sentences to convey the same message that complex words and clever idioms or motifs might achieve in less overall message information-complexity and string-length.
The use of specialist vocabularies and contextual knowledge allows for message compression, but at the apparently mandatory cost of displacing the complexity elsewhere: into assumed knowledge, specialist technical skills, cultural contexts or extensive experience and (again) into an implicit, certain assumed level of intelligence in the message recipient or target audience.
It seems to the mathematically unitiated that advanced physical equations are a little like this minimalist enigma. That the reduction to short strings of symbols and mathematical relationships inversely displaces vast swathes of assumed or required knowledge elsewhere such that, while I acknowledge and deeply respect the beauty, depth and explanatory power of mathematics in physical theory, the view from here is that the relative simplicity of an equation is always implicitly dependent upon a complex network of assumed or implied information and knowledge external to it, a theoretical context perhaps but not necessarily limited to this as full comprehension clearly requires more than mere generalised insights or intuitions.
https://daedeluskite.com/2018/07/21/on-equations-art-and-information-compression/
Toxic masculinity in a comic
In essence, toxic masculinity is the idea that men should behave in a specific way which is harmful to themselves and others. It does not mean that all forms of masculinity are bad.
Toxic masculinity says that men must not express their feelings - except anger - and instead deal with them through sheer manly fortitude. They are not supposed to ever ask anyone for help or engage in harmless activities that are deemed to be the realm of women. The most common expression of it is the ludicrous instruction parents tell their children : boys don't cry.
https://thenib.com/toxic-masculinity
Toxic masculinity says that men must not express their feelings - except anger - and instead deal with them through sheer manly fortitude. They are not supposed to ever ask anyone for help or engage in harmless activities that are deemed to be the realm of women. The most common expression of it is the ludicrous instruction parents tell their children : boys don't cry.
https://thenib.com/toxic-masculinity
Fruit flies can communicate with each other
There's a nice little view from the institute roof where in summer it's interesting to watch the butterflies. I imagine that a butterfly perceives the world quite differently to me - their eyes must be much smaller and therefore of much lower resolution, they must feel the effects of smaller breezes much more intensely than I do (though the wind level they can fly in is surprisingly high). One butterfly on its own is like watching a goldfish : sort of relaxing, but not terribly interesting. A little bit of flapping followed by long periods of aimless gliding, generally staying in the same area with no obvious driving goal. Get two together and things change. Once they get within a certain distance - I don't know whether they're seeking each other out somehow or it's just chance - their flight pattern instantly goes into a series of tight crazy spirals and larger loops, soaring and diving and occasionally chasing each other at longer distances, alternating with astonishingly fast reaction times. You'd need a slow-motion camera to analyse it properly. However rudimentary, some form of cognition appears to be at work in these tiny critters. And now I find out that fruit flies can communicate with each other...
Fruit flies from different species can warn each other when parasitic wasps are near. But according to a new study led by Balint Z. Kacsoh of Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, published July 19th in PLOS Genetics, they are more likely to get the message across if the fly species have previously cohabited and learned each other's dialects.
Previous experiments from Bosco's group showed that females use wing movements to communicate the threat of the wasps to other females, who will then lay fewer eggs, despite never having seen a wasp. In the new study, the researchers tested whether fruit flies from different species could communicate that wasps are near. They found that when testing distantly related flies could not communicate as effectively as flies of the same species, but that communication improved when the two species cohabitated. Living together enabled the flies to learn new dialects composed of different visual and scent cues. Further genetic experiments showed that learning another dialect requires a part of the brain called the mushroom body, which is the center of learning and memory in flies.
[I remain convinced that at least some animals possess a true language, even if not necessarily as complex as human language. However, I would be surprised if their language was purely oral - instead it will rely on other sensory cues such as body movement, scent, etc. Why should not syntax be encoded in gestures or a scent ?]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180719142014.htm
Fruit flies from different species can warn each other when parasitic wasps are near. But according to a new study led by Balint Z. Kacsoh of Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, published July 19th in PLOS Genetics, they are more likely to get the message across if the fly species have previously cohabited and learned each other's dialects.
Previous experiments from Bosco's group showed that females use wing movements to communicate the threat of the wasps to other females, who will then lay fewer eggs, despite never having seen a wasp. In the new study, the researchers tested whether fruit flies from different species could communicate that wasps are near. They found that when testing distantly related flies could not communicate as effectively as flies of the same species, but that communication improved when the two species cohabitated. Living together enabled the flies to learn new dialects composed of different visual and scent cues. Further genetic experiments showed that learning another dialect requires a part of the brain called the mushroom body, which is the center of learning and memory in flies.
[I remain convinced that at least some animals possess a true language, even if not necessarily as complex as human language. However, I would be surprised if their language was purely oral - instead it will rely on other sensory cues such as body movement, scent, etc. Why should not syntax be encoded in gestures or a scent ?]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180719142014.htm
ESA doesn't develop better rockets because they genuinely don't want them
An excellent long read.
As a general rule, the European Space Agency feels under appreciated. Russia has a storied history. NASA has the Apollo program and five decades of interplanetary missions. China, the third nation to put a human into space, has a rising program and great ambitions. And the Europeans? Even their own citizens don’t seem to know that much about their space agency.
Because they resolutely refuse to develop a manned space program (see below), don't do enough marketing*, and don't have an inspirational leader. Say what you like about Musk, he's made tech - big, engineering tech, not smartphones - cool again. Yes, he's a bit of dick, but it's still easier to be inspired by a dick than a faceless, suit-wearing committee. And that's the corporate, dull image ESA has very successfully managed to project, largely because - I suspect - that's exactly what it is. It doesn't have any underlying program to rally behind. Neither does NASA, really. Space X, on the other hand...
* That said, both ESO and ESA's public outreach divisions (especially the policy of doing observations solely for outreach and making all outreach data public) is excellent. They just don't sell it enough.
Since its debut in 1996, the Ariane 5 rocket has flown 98 missions, with just two significant failures. The Europeans are justifiably proud of their rocket and its capabilities. Asked about how the Ariane 5 compares to lower-cost alternatives on the market today, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Stefano Bianchi, Head of ESA Launchers Development Department, responded with a question of his own. “Are you buying a Mercedes because it is cheap?” Ranzo, sitting nearby, chimed in and referenced the India-based maker of the world’s least expensive car. As he put it, “We don’t sell a Tata.”
Which is just bloody stupid. Do you buy a Mercedes so that you can throw it away ? Of course not. Worse, only selling Mercedes - to only cater for the rich - that's just bollocks. A bunch of really clever idiots at work here. Stop catering to the elite and sell to the masses, you bunch of berks. It gets worse :
If everything works, when the Ariane 6 debuts in mid-2020, it will offer comparable service to the Ariane 5 rocket at a 40 to 50 percent reduction of cost. It will not be reusable, of course, and it can never reach the theoretically super-low cost of a fully reusable Falcon 9. But having eight to 10 launches a year, from an economic standpoint, simply does not justify the expense of developing and flying a reusable rocket, European officials say. Two dozen or more launches a year might, but that is not the scale Europe operates at or seeks.
Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much. This is one difference between rocket-by-government and rocket-by-billionaire programs.
.... which is just mwwwaaaaaaaarrrghh. Cheaper rockets = more launches, not less. Space X have proved that, but it wasn't something that needed proving, it was in-your-face obvious.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/as-the-spacex-steamroller-surges-european-rocket-industry-vows-to-resist/
As a general rule, the European Space Agency feels under appreciated. Russia has a storied history. NASA has the Apollo program and five decades of interplanetary missions. China, the third nation to put a human into space, has a rising program and great ambitions. And the Europeans? Even their own citizens don’t seem to know that much about their space agency.
Because they resolutely refuse to develop a manned space program (see below), don't do enough marketing*, and don't have an inspirational leader. Say what you like about Musk, he's made tech - big, engineering tech, not smartphones - cool again. Yes, he's a bit of dick, but it's still easier to be inspired by a dick than a faceless, suit-wearing committee. And that's the corporate, dull image ESA has very successfully managed to project, largely because - I suspect - that's exactly what it is. It doesn't have any underlying program to rally behind. Neither does NASA, really. Space X, on the other hand...
* That said, both ESO and ESA's public outreach divisions (especially the policy of doing observations solely for outreach and making all outreach data public) is excellent. They just don't sell it enough.
Since its debut in 1996, the Ariane 5 rocket has flown 98 missions, with just two significant failures. The Europeans are justifiably proud of their rocket and its capabilities. Asked about how the Ariane 5 compares to lower-cost alternatives on the market today, such as SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Stefano Bianchi, Head of ESA Launchers Development Department, responded with a question of his own. “Are you buying a Mercedes because it is cheap?” Ranzo, sitting nearby, chimed in and referenced the India-based maker of the world’s least expensive car. As he put it, “We don’t sell a Tata.”
Which is just bloody stupid. Do you buy a Mercedes so that you can throw it away ? Of course not. Worse, only selling Mercedes - to only cater for the rich - that's just bollocks. A bunch of really clever idiots at work here. Stop catering to the elite and sell to the masses, you bunch of berks. It gets worse :
If everything works, when the Ariane 6 debuts in mid-2020, it will offer comparable service to the Ariane 5 rocket at a 40 to 50 percent reduction of cost. It will not be reusable, of course, and it can never reach the theoretically super-low cost of a fully reusable Falcon 9. But having eight to 10 launches a year, from an economic standpoint, simply does not justify the expense of developing and flying a reusable rocket, European officials say. Two dozen or more launches a year might, but that is not the scale Europe operates at or seeks.
Truthfully, if Europe ever did develop a reusable rocket, one that could fly all the missions in a year, this would be unhelpful politically. What would the engine and booster factories sprinkled across Europe do if they built one rocket and then had 11 months off? The member states value the jobs too much. This is one difference between rocket-by-government and rocket-by-billionaire programs.
.... which is just mwwwaaaaaaaarrrghh. Cheaper rockets = more launches, not less. Space X have proved that, but it wasn't something that needed proving, it was in-your-face obvious.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/as-the-spacex-steamroller-surges-european-rocket-industry-vows-to-resist/
The moment things started to go wrong
Via Gaythia Weis.
Originally shared by Lynn Keller
Worker: $39,500
CEO: $819,000
Ratio: 1 to 20
2013:
Worker: $52,100
CEO: $15,175,000
Ratio: 1 to 295
Working class wages have stagnated for the past 40 years.
CEO salaries and bonuses continue to go through the roof #Oligarchy
Friday, 20 July 2018
Europe's Mars rover needs a name
Currently called ExoMars, the six-wheeled robot needs something a bit more engaging and inspiring for when it lands on the Red Planet. Astronaut Tim Peake is leading the hunt for a great moniker. He wants everyone to go to a special website set up for the purpose and enter a suggestion. But don't think "Spacey McSpaceFace" is a goer because this is not an online poll.
Marsy McMarsface ? Rocky McRockface ? Frank ? The Crushinator ? Why Not Zoidberg ?
I mean, it would stop accusations of elitism in their tracks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44889596
Marsy McMarsface ? Rocky McRockface ? Frank ? The Crushinator ? Why Not Zoidberg ?
I mean, it would stop accusations of elitism in their tracks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44889596
"Accidentally" killing whales is stupid
Leave the damn whales alone. Yes, all of them.
Genetic material from a large whale killed off the coast of Iceland has confirmed the creature was a rare hybrid. Campaigners had been concerned that the slaughtered animal was a protected blue whale, the largest species on the planet. Now DNA has shown it to be the offspring of a blue and a fin whale, as the whaling company had claimed. Researchers say these hybrids are rare and trading their meat is illegal.
While there is an international moratorium on killing all whales, Iceland doesn't agree that fin whales are threatened and gives permits for their hunting. Hybrids between fin and blue whales are a grey area, say specialists.
Iceland sells almost all of its whale meat to Japan; one of a handful of countries that reject the international consensus to protect whales. Now that this whale has been confirmed as a hybrid it means the meat can't be legally shipped anywhere. Under the international regulations that govern animal trading, it is the protected status of the hybrid parents that matter - so as it has blue whale parentage, the Japanese market would be closed to it. As this whale has been shown to be a hybrid, it is likely there won't be major repercussions for the whalers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44809115
Genetic material from a large whale killed off the coast of Iceland has confirmed the creature was a rare hybrid. Campaigners had been concerned that the slaughtered animal was a protected blue whale, the largest species on the planet. Now DNA has shown it to be the offspring of a blue and a fin whale, as the whaling company had claimed. Researchers say these hybrids are rare and trading their meat is illegal.
While there is an international moratorium on killing all whales, Iceland doesn't agree that fin whales are threatened and gives permits for their hunting. Hybrids between fin and blue whales are a grey area, say specialists.
Iceland sells almost all of its whale meat to Japan; one of a handful of countries that reject the international consensus to protect whales. Now that this whale has been confirmed as a hybrid it means the meat can't be legally shipped anywhere. Under the international regulations that govern animal trading, it is the protected status of the hybrid parents that matter - so as it has blue whale parentage, the Japanese market would be closed to it. As this whale has been shown to be a hybrid, it is likely there won't be major repercussions for the whalers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44809115
I don't know how to persuade people that Donald Trump is a bad person.
I don't know how to persuade people that Donald Trump is a bad person. It's like trying to persuade them that fire is hot.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44895384
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44895384
Debt relief is now a game show
Picture the scene: a stage and three podiums at which three contestants line up to face a studio audience. A charismatic host materializes from backstage and asks the guests to share the typical autobiographical facts: first name, college, outstanding student-loan burden. The crowd greets each precise figure (“$8,480 in debt … $12,583 in debt … $28,587 in debt”) with an ohhh pitched halfway between sadness and shock. Then, the three contenders face off over several rounds of trivia, until one of them wins the right to pay down the balance.
Ladies and gentlemen: It’s debt relief, the game show.
Soon we'll have shows where the hungry compete to win a trip to KFC or get to eat the host or something. Bonkers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/win-a-game-show-pay-off-your-student-debt/564980/
Ladies and gentlemen: It’s debt relief, the game show.
Soon we'll have shows where the hungry compete to win a trip to KFC or get to eat the host or something. Bonkers.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/win-a-game-show-pay-off-your-student-debt/564980/
Thursday, 19 July 2018
Petitioning to cancel Brexit because Vote Leave broke the rules
I signed it, even though they're just gonna say, "nope", insisting that it was that one marginal vote that counted and was obviously utterly flawless and no-one is ever allowed to change their minds at all. On the other hand, no confidence letters are being written, so we'll see.
I really just do not understand the democratic "logic" at work here. The arguments on the validity of the result have been raised time and time again, and in my opinion they're pretty sensible. Yet they've never addressed - they are simply denied. So a pro-remain Tory is now supposedly leading (if you can call it that) a government (if you can call it that) towards a confused Brexit deal that nobody wants and is supported by the pro-EU Labour party led by a EU skeptic whilst facing off a tiny minority of hard Brexiteers who apparently are more important than anyone else, for some reason. Completely and utterly baffling to me.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/07/18/petition-cancel-brexit-grows-vote-leave-found-cheated-7729144/?ito=article.desktop.share.top.twitter
I really just do not understand the democratic "logic" at work here. The arguments on the validity of the result have been raised time and time again, and in my opinion they're pretty sensible. Yet they've never addressed - they are simply denied. So a pro-remain Tory is now supposedly leading (if you can call it that) a government (if you can call it that) towards a confused Brexit deal that nobody wants and is supported by the pro-EU Labour party led by a EU skeptic whilst facing off a tiny minority of hard Brexiteers who apparently are more important than anyone else, for some reason. Completely and utterly baffling to me.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/07/18/petition-cancel-brexit-grows-vote-leave-found-cheated-7729144/?ito=article.desktop.share.top.twitter
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