Miscellany

What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

This year, the Edge World Question Center asks people what they have changed their minds about. Here are excerpts from some of the most interesting answers. (Not that I necessarily agree with them.)

Joseph LeDoux changed his mind about how memories are accessed in the brain.

Like many scientists in the field of memory, I used to think that a memory is something stored in the brain and then accessed when used. Then, in 2000, a researcher in my lab, Karim Nader, did an experiment that convinced me, and many others, that our usual way of thinking was wrong. In a nutshell, what Karim showed was that each time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. Research on this topic, called reconsolidation, has become the basis of a possible treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, drug addiction, and any other disorder that is based on learning.

Tor Nørretranders now thinks that it’s more appropriate to think of your body as software, rather than hardware.

What is constant in you is not material. An average person takes in 1.5 ton of matter every year as food, drinks and oxygen. All this matter has to learn to be you. Every year. New atoms will have to learn to remember your childhood.

Helen Fischer now believes that human beings are serial monogamists.

Perhaps human parental bonds originally evolved to last only long enough to raise a single child through infancy, about four years, unless a second infant was conceived. By age five, a youngster could be reared by mother and a host of relatives. Equally important, both parents could choose a new partner and bear more varied young.

Paul Steinhardt is now skeptical about inflation.

Most cosmologists would say the answer is “inflation,” and, until recently, I would have been among them. But “facts have changed my mind” — and I now feel compelled to seek a new explanation that may or may not incorporate inflation.

John Baez is no longer enthusiastic about working on quantum gravity.

Jaron Lanier put it this way: “One gets the impression that some physicists have gone for so long without any experimental data that might resolve the quantum-gravity debates that they are going a little crazy.” But even more depressing was that as this debate raged on, cosmologists were making wonderful discoveries left and right, getting precise data about dark energy, dark matter and inflation. None of this data could resolve the string-loop war! Why? Because neither of the contending theories could make predictions about the numbers the cosmologists were measuring! Both theories were too flexible.

Xeni Jardin is depressed by the lack of spontaneous self-moderation in online communities…

But then, the audience grew. Fast. And with that, grew the number of antisocial actors, “drive-by trolls,” people for whom dialogue wasn’t the point. It doesn’t take many of them to ruin the experience for much larger numbers of participants acting in good faith.

…but Kevin Kelly is impressed by the success of Wikipedia.

How wrong I was. The success of the Wikipedia keeps surpassing my expectations. Despite the flaws of human nature, it keeps getting better. Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.

Oliver Morton has changed his mind about human spaceflight.

I have, falteringly and with various intermediary about-faces and caveats, changed my mind about human spaceflight. I am of the generation to have had its childhood imagination stoked by the sight of Apollo missions on the television — I can’t put hand on heart and say I remember the Eagle landing, but I remember the sights of the moon relayed to our homes. I was fascinated by space and only through that, by way of the science fiction that a fascination with space inexorably led to, by science. And astronauts were what space was about.

Jonathan Haidt no longer believes that sports and fraternities are entirely bad. (This is my favorite.)

I was born without the neural cluster that makes boys find pleasure in moving balls and pucks around through space, and in talking endlessly about men who get paid to do such things. I always knew I could never join a fraternity or the military because I wouldn’t be able to fake the sports talk. By the time I became a professor I had developed the contempt that I think is widespread in academe for any institution that brings young men together to do groupish things. Primitive tribalism, I thought. Initiation rites, alcohol, sports, sexism, and baseball caps turn decent boys into knuckleheads. I’d have gladly voted to ban fraternities, ROTC, and most sports teams from my university.

I came to realize that being a successful scientific heretic is harder than it looks.

Growing up as a young proto-scientist, I was always strongly anti-establishmentarian, looking forward to overthrowing the System as our generation’s new Galileo. Now I spend a substantial fraction of my time explaining and defending the status quo to outsiders. It’s very depressing.

Stanislas Deheane now thinks there may be a unified theory of how the brain works.

Although a large extent of my work is dedicated to modelling the brain, I always thought that this enterprise would remain rather limited in scope. Unlike physics, neuroscience would never create a single, major, simple yet encompassing theory of how the brain works. There would be never be a single “Schrödinger’s equation for the brain”…

Well, I wouldn’t claim that anyone has achieved that yet… but I have changed my mind about the very possibility that such a law might exist.

Brian Eno’s disillusionment with Maoism changed his views on how politics can be transformative.

And then, bit by bit, I started to find out what had actually happened, what Maoism meant. I resisted for a while, but I had to admit it: I’d been willingly propagandised, just like Shaw and Mitford and d’Annunzio and countless others. I’d allowed my prejudices to dominate my reason. Those professors working in the countryside were being bludgeoned and humiliated. Those designers were put in the steel-foundries as ‘class enemies’ — for the workers to vent their frustrations upon. I started to realise what a monstrosity Maoism had been, and that it had failed in every sense.

Anton Zeilinger now believes that you should never describe your own research as “useless.” (Hmmm…)

When journalists asked me about 20 years ago what the use of my research is, I proudly told them that it has no use whatsoever. I saw an analog to the usefulness of astronomy or of a Beethoven symphony. We don’t do these things, I said, for their use, we do them because they are part of what it means to be human. In the same way, I said, we do basic science, in my case experiments on the foundations of quantum physics. it is part of being human to be curious, to want to know more about the world. There are always some of us who are just curious and they follow their nose and investigate with no idea in mind what it might be useful for.

Martin Rees thinks we need to take the “Posthuman Era” seriously.

Public discourse on very long-term planning is riddled with inconsistencies. Mostly we discount the future very heavily — investment decisions are expected to pay off within a decade or two. But when we do look further ahead — in discussions of energy policy, global warming and so forth — we underestimate the possible pace of transformational change. In particular, we need to keep our minds open — or at least ajar — to the possibility that humans themselves could change drastically within a few centuries.

It might sound a little crazy, but betting against Sir Martin is a bad idea.

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Holiday Lynx

A few internet tidbits to keep you going through the intra-holiday blogging lull.

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Things Happen, Not Always for a Reason

Two stories, superficially unrelated, neatly tied together by a deep lesson at the end.

The first is the case of Lucia de Berk, a Dutch nurse sentenced to life imprisonment in 2003 for multiple murders of patients under her care. However, there was very little direct evidence tying her specifically to the deaths of the individual cases. Much of the prosecution’s case against her was statistical: it was simply extremely unlikely, they argued, that so many patients would die under the care of a single nurse. Numbers like “one in 342 million chance” were bandied about.

But statistics can be tricky. Dutch mathematician Richard Gill has gone over the reasoning presented in the case, and found it utterly wrong-headed; he has organized a petition asking Dutch courts to re-open the case. Gill estimates that 1 in 9 nurses would experience a similar concentration of incidents during their shifts. And he notes that there were a total of six deaths in the ward where de Berk worked during the three years she was there, and seven deaths in the same ward during the three years before she arrived. Usually, the arrival of serial killers does not cause the mortality rate to decrease.

But patients had died, some of them young children, and someone had to be responsible. Incidents that had originally been classified as completely natural were re-examined and judged to be suspicious, after the investigation into de Berk’s activities started. The worst kinds of confirmation bias were in evidence. Here is a picture of what de Berk actually looks like, along with a courtroom caricature published in the newspapers.

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Also, she read Tarot cards. Clearly, this is a woman who is witch-like and evil, and deserved to be punished.

The other story involves a brilliant piece of psychological insight from Peter Sagal’s The Book of Vice, previously lauded in these pages. It involves the reason why people play slot machines, or gamble more generally. There are many complicated factors that go into such a phenomenon, of course, but it nevertheless remains a deep puzzle why people would find it so compelling to roll the dice when everyone knows the odds are against you.

Peter asks us to consider the following joke:

An old man goes to the synagogue and prays, every day, thusly: “God, let me win the lottery. Please, just one big win. I’ll give money to the poor, and live a righteous life. . . . Please, let me win the lottery!”

For years, he comes to the synagogue, and the same prayer goes up: “Let me win the lottery! Please, Lord, won’t you show your grace, and let me win the lottery!”

Finally, one day, after fifteen years of this, as the man mutters, “The lottery, Lord, let me win the lottery. . . ,” a golden light suffuses the sanctuary, and a chorus of angels singing a major C chord is heard. The man looks up, tears in his blinded eyes, and says, “Lord . . . ?”

And a deep resonant voice rings out, “Please . . . would you please BUY A TICKET already?”

And that’s why we gamble: so God can answer our prayers. Fortune’s wheel, in other words, might occasionally want to favor us, but how can it if we don’t give it a chance? By playing the slots, we make it so much easier for Providence to bestow its bounty upon our deserving heads.

The common thread, of course, is the deep-seated aversion that human beings have to accepting randomness in the universe. We are great pattern-recognizers, even when patterns aren’t really there. Conversely, we are really bad at accepting that unlikely things will occasionally happen, if we wait long enough. When people are asked to write down a “random” sequence of coin flips, the mistake they inevitably make is not to include enough long sequences of the same result.

Human beings don’t want to accept radical contingency. They want things to have explanations, even the laws of physics. They want life to have a purpose, chance events to have meaning, and children’s deaths to have a person to blame. They want life to make sense, and they want to hit the triple jackpot because they’ve been through a lot of suffering and they damn well deserve it.

Of course, sometimes things do happen for a reason. And sometimes they don’t. That’s life here at the edge of chaos, and I for one enjoy the ride.

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reCAPTCHA

We’ve all seen CAPTCHA‘s — those distorted words that function as a cut-rate Turing test, separating humans from spambots on any number of websites.

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This weekend I was at a Kavli Frontiers of Science meeting at the National Academies of Science office in Irvine, and one of the participants was Luis von Ahn — the guy who was responsible for inventing the CAPTCHA idea. He gave a great one-minute talk, in which he traced his personal feelings about being responsible for something that is so useful, yet so annoying.

CAPTCHA, you will not be surprised to hear, is ubiquitous. Luis figured out that the little buggers are filled out about sixty million times per day by someone on the web. So, as the inventer, he first felt a certain amount of pride at having exerted such a palpable influence on modern life. But after a bit of reflection, and multiplying sixty million times by the five seconds it might take to fill in the form, he became depressed at the enormous number of person-hours that were essentially wasted on this task.

Being a clever guy, Luis decided to make lemonade. What we have here is a huge number of people who are recognizing words that a computer can’t make out. Luis realized that there was a separate circumstance in which you would want the computer to recognize the words, even though it wasn’t quite up to the task — optical character recognition, and in particular the problem of digitizing old texts. Apparently, before the advent of the Internet, people would store information by binding together pieces of paper with words printed on them, forming compact volumes known as “books.” In the interest of preserving the products of this outmoded technology, various efforts around the world are attempting to scan in all of those books and store the results digitally. But often the text is not so clear, and the computers don’t do such a great job at translating the images into words.

sample-ocr.gif

Thus, reCAPTCHA was born. At this point you should be able to guess what it does: takes scanned images from actual books, with which optical character recognition software are struggling, and uses them as the source material for CAPTCHA’s. The project is up and running, and can be implemented anywhere the ordinary CAPTCHA’s are used. Now, when you get annoyed at having to make out those squiggly words with lines slashed through them, you can take some solace in knowing that you’re making the world a better place. Or at least saving some books from the trash bin of history.

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Smart Women are Scary

Via Seed, a group of economists chose to study human relationship dynamics under tightly controlled conditions: speed dating. Emphasis added.

With the obvious qualification that we’re talking here about a four-minute version of love and dating, we found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks from research assistants, who were hired for the much sought-after position of hanging out in a bar to rate the dater’s level of attractiveness on a scale of one to 10.

By contrast, intelligence ratings were more than twice as important in predicting women’s choices as men’s. It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter—but only up to a point. In a survey we did before the speed dating began, participants rated their own intelligence levels, and it turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition—a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.

When women were the ones choosing, the more intelligence and ambition the men had, the better. So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own. Women, on the other hand, care more about how men think and perform, and they don’t mind being outdone on those scores.

Men can be such wimps sometimes.

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Do Good Things

The crazy kids over at ScienceBlogs have been doing a good deed: running a fundraising campaign for the DonorsChoose charity, an organization that helps out with numerous small-scale projects at public schools across the country. Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles has been going all-out, drumming up support for a series of worthy proposals. Many of his fundraising pitches involve making fun of atheists such as myself, calling us cheap bastards and referring to St. Richard Dawkins as a doodyhead. But now he needs our help, to spread the word beyond the insular world of ScienceBlogs and ask people in the larger community to help out with the challenge. That’s what we like about Chad: shamelessness!

So let’s prove that we cold-hearted totalizing materialists can also go soft and squishy in the face of needy children, by opening our wallets and donating to a good cause, either to one of Chad’s challenges or to any of the others. Afterwards, you are free to return to your customary relativistic eudaemonic ways, savoring martinis spiced with the chilled blood of baby seals.

And speaking of things to do, Chad also brings up the topic of N things every person/man/woman should know/do/experience. These lists usually serve as cheap ways for writers who have run out of ideas to fill up a few column inches, and typically consist of a dizzy amalgamation of several things that are perfectly trivial, other things that are actually worthy, and many things that make no sense or are strictly impossible. With that paradigm in mind, some time back I whiled away the minutes during an especially boring seminar by constructing my own List of 25 Things Every Person Should Do Once In Their Life. I think it is just as good as anybody else’s list!

  1. Found a utopian colony.
  2. Integrate by parts.
  3. Decode the Voynich manuscript.
  4. Defy gravity.
  5. Recover lost treasure.
  6. Translate the pre-Socratics.
  7. Make love on the 50-yard line.
  8. Raise a pig and make sausage from it.
  9. Lead a witness.
  10. Outrun a bear.
  11. Raise a point of order.
  12. Memorize Paradise Lost.
  13. Swoon.
  14. Wake up in Vegas in a stranger’s house.
  15. Collapse a wavefunction.
  16. Run for public office.
  17. Resign in disgrace.
  18. Prove Fermat’s Last Theorem.
  19. Hack into NORAD.
  20. Problematize a binary opposition.
  21. Square the circle.
  22. Kiss in anger.
  23. Batten a hatch.
  24. Unscramble an egg.
  25. Donate to charity.

How many have you done?

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The Best Arguments for Things I Don’t Believe

Have you ever heard someone arguing in favor of a position with which you disagree, but their arguments are so bad that you can’t help but think “Man, I could do a better job arguing for their side than they are, and I don’t even agree with them!” I thought it might be interesting to do exactly that — consider some interesting issues, and come up with my own versions of what the people who I think are wrong should be saying.

The rules would be: (1) The claims would be somewhat judgmental, rather than straightforwardly empirical. I’m not going to waste my time arguing that the universe is not expanding, or anything like that. (2) I have to stick to making individual statements that I really do believe, even if I don’t think they are sufficient to support the ultimate conclusion. I reserve the right to come up with more rules as I think of them.

Here are some possible claims to be considered:

  1. God exists.
  2. The Iraq war was a good idea.
  3. Women scientists shouldn’t complain about discrimination.
  4. Research on string theory is a waste of time.
  5. Talking about the multiverse is intrinsically non-scientific.
  6. We shouldn’t worry about global climate change.

Any other suggestions? I’m sure there are lots of things I don’t believe, but could come up with better arguments for than I usually hear. It’ll be like being on the debate team again.

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I Don’t Trust Ketchup, Either

Brynn at Shakesville points to a study by Kristine Nowak and Christian Rauh of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Connecticut. The authors investigated the impact of the appearance of digital avatars on people’s perceptions of trustworthiness. (Here’s what appears to be an earlier version of the study.) They did a blind test, with participants chatting online via various sorts of avatars. Some looked recognizably human and gender-specific, others were cats or lizards or apples. They then asked the participants to rate the credibility of the people they had been talking to.

avatars

Everyone is talking about the fact that the participants rated androgynous avatars as less trustworthy. Images that were recognizably male or female were thought of as more credible than those sneaky in-between ones.

To me, the more important finding was that the ketchup bottle finished near the very bottom of the trustworthiness scale, only beating out a menacing-looking lizard beast. Even the cat was judged more trustworthy than the ketchup bottle; if you’ve ever met a cat, you’ll understand that that’s saying something. I’m happy to see that my long-standing distrust of ketchup has been scientifically vindicated.

(Others have suggested that the study’s authors are just dumb bitches. Happily, sexism has been eradicated, so that web page must be at least fifty years old.)

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Thoughtful, Consistent Diplomacy

This morning’s Chicago Tribune website, via The American Sector:

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I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that it is a mistake. But I do wonder how exactly that happened.

Also interesting on the internets: Randy Barnett gives you the inside scoop on being a technical consultant for, and landing a minor role in, a legitmate Hollywood movie; and Ezra Klein talks about the importance of changing areas of specialization throughout one’s career. Both of which I note because it would be very easy to substitute “scientist” for “lawyer” and “pundit” in the respective discussions.

Consider this an open thread in which you are encouraged to mock my co-bloggers for being the slackers they so obviously are. Also, if you have any groundbreaking theories about the fundamental nature of space and time and would like someone to have a look at them because reading up on the literature yourself sounds like too much of a bother and besides which great wisdom only springs forth from a position of ignorance, this is the place!

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Open Thread

Everyone is too busy to blog this week. But I’ll point you to my favorite quotes from Ezra Klein’s liveblogging of last night’s Republican presidential debate:

  • 7:15 If this election is to be decided on ties, Ron Paul is totally going to win. And Sam Brownback will be executed.
  • 7:41 Does anybody really believe religion is a “very important” part of Giuliani’s life? He seems like the type who would make holy water sizzle.
  • 7:47 McCain thinks Americans should be exposed to “all theories.” All children will now go to school until the end of time.

Talk amongst yourselves, as long as it doesn’t involve Paris Hilton.

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