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anonymous

What Cost for Irrationality? - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...what_cost_for_irrationality

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Status Quo bias is a general human tendency to prefer the default state, regardless of whether the default is actually good or not.
  • Reporting on a study of 700 mutual funds during 1998-2001, finanical reporter Jason Zweig noted that "to a remarkable degree, investors underperformed their funds' reported returns - sometimes by as much as 75 percentage points per year."
  • But when group A had 100 children, each with an 80 percent chance of surviving when transplanted, and group B had 100 children, each with a 20 percent chance of surviving when transplanted, people still chose the equal allocation method even if this caused the unnecessary deaths of 30 children.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It was only when the question was framed as "group A versus group B" that people suddenly felt they didn't want to abandon group B entirely.
  • End up falsely accused or imprisoned
  • Researchers have estimated that over 300 more people died in the last months of 2001 because they drove instead of flying
  • In 1997, however, one half of the adult population had fallen victim to Ponzi schemes. In a Ponzi scheme, the investment itself isn't actually making any money, but rather early investors are paid off with the money from late investors, and eventually the system has to collapse when no new investors can be recruited.
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Kaj Sotala at Less Wrong on July 1, 2010
anonymous

What Do We Mean By "Rationality"? - 0 views

lesswrong.com/...what_do_we_mean_by_rationality

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory.  The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible.  This correspondence is commonly termed "truth" or "accuracy", and we're happy to call it that.
  • First, the Bayesian formalisms in their full form are computationally intractable on most real-world problems.  No one can actually calculate and obey the math, any more than you can predict the stock market by calculating the movements of quarks.
  • we have to learn our own flaws, overcome our biases, prevent ourselves from self-deceiving, get ourselves into good emotional shape to confront the truth and do what needs doing, etcetera etcetera and so on
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Second, sometimes the meaning of the math itself is called into question.  The exact rules of probability theory are called into question by e.g. anthropic problems in which the number of observers is uncertain. 
  • We aren't interested in probability theory because it is the holy word handed down from Laplace.  We're interested in Bayesian-style belief-updating (with Occam priors) because we expect that this style of thinking gets us systematically closer to, you know, accuracy, the map that reflects the territory.
  • How can you improve your conception of rationality?  Not by saying to yourself, “It is my duty to be rational.”  By this you only enshrine your mistaken conception.  Perhaps your conception of rationality is that it is rational to believe the words of the Great Teacher, and the Great Teacher says, “The sky is green,” and you look up at the sky and see blue.  If you think:  “It may look like the sky is blue, but rationality is to believe the words of the Great Teacher,” you lose a chance to discover your mistake.
  • You cannot change reality, or prove the thought, by manipulating which meanings go with which words.
  • Instrumental rationality: achieving your values.  Not necessarily "your values" in the sense of being selfish values or unshared values: "your values" means anything you care about.  The art of choosing actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences.  On LW we sometimes refer to this as "winning".
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Eliezer Yudkowsky at Less Wrong on March 16, 2009.
anonymous

Objectivism & Politics, Part 56 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...ectivism-politics-part-56.html

politics philosophy objectivism idiocy

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • When asked, “Why don’t you approve of the Libertarians, thousands of whom are loyal readers of your works?” Rand responded:Because Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and they denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication, when that fits their purpose. They are lower than any pragmatists, and what they hold against Objectivism is morality. They’d like to have an amoral political program.
  • ad hominem slur with no logical or objective value whatsoever
  • If Rand had to choose between (1) achieving widespread influence for her ideas but not being given credit for them, or (2) never suffering plagiarism but never achieving widespread influence, which would she choose?
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Her bitter complaints about plagiarism suggest that she would prefer the latter
  • Rand seemed to have gotten many of her ideas, both political and otherwise, from Isabel Paterson
  • This is merely guilt by association
  • the notion that Libertarians are collectivists is simply absurd
  • More ad hominem chatter
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Greg Nyquist at Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature on June 28, 2010. Amazingly, Rand had this great ability to alienate people who *loved* her.
anonymous

Pendulum, Escapement Prototypes Installed in Museum - 0 views

blog.longnow.org/...prototypes-installed-in-museum

longnow

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 10
     
    By Austin Brown at The Long Now Blog on June 24, 2010
anonymous

Iraq: A Bleak Future for the Islamic State of Iraq? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...leak_future_islamic_state_iraq

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Over the last 90 days, Iraqi and U.S. forces have eliminated more than 80 percent of the Islamic State of Iraq’s (ISI’s) top leadership, including its Egyptian chief of military operations and its Iraqi figurehead, according to the top U.S. commander in Iraq. These personnel losses are compounded by the fact that the al Qaeda-inspired jihadist group has been struggling financially and is reportedly having problems getting foreign fighters into the country. These setbacks will invariably complicate the ISI’s efforts to continue its campaign. While it is unlikely that the ISI’s propensity for violent attacks will wane, the group’s diminished leadership, operational capacity and logistics infrastructure make the militant organization’s future seem bleak.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    June 29, 2010
anonymous

The Geopolitics of Greece: A Sea at its Heart - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...7_geopolitics_greece_sea_heart

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    June 28, 2010
anonymous

Russia: Targeting Moldova's Wine Industry? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...rgeting_moldovas_wine_industry

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Russia’s chief medical officer and head of the Federal Consumer Protection Service Gennady Onishchenko said June 30 that Russia will tighten control of Moldovan wine exports to Russia after several batches of wine failed to meet Russian safety standards.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    June 30, 2010
anonymous

Israel, Turkey: Maintaining the Relationship - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...urkey_maintaining_relationship

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Ankara acknowledged July 1 that the Turkish foreign minister had met with a high-ranking Israeli official in Brussels. The previously-unannounced meeting underscores the dearth of options for both countries in finding strategic partners in the region and shows that their long-standing ties are unlikely to end in the near term.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    July 1, 2010
anonymous

Book review: '101 Theory Drive: A Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory' - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...rmott-20100627,0,4787722.story

books book

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    A book review by Sara Lippincott at the LA Times on June 27, 2010.
anonymous

How did life begin on Earth? - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

longnow biology

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Recent findings—such as that life seems to be everywhere on Earth—have encouraged scientific inquiries into the nature of life’s beginnings, said Szostak.
  • Two critical needs for life are to create a membrane, which defines a boundary that can contain genetic material, and to replicate. Szostak said it is relatively easy to create a membrane from fatty acids that could have arisen in conditions that mimic early Earth; fatty acids, mixed in water with a little salt, readily create closed structures called vesicles.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    By Mariette DiChristina at Scientific American Observations on June 29, 2010.
anonymous

Wanted: GM Seeds for Study - 0 views

seedmagazine.com/...wanted_gm_seeds_for_study

environment sustainability

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • A battle is quietly being waged between the industry that produces genetically modified seeds and scientists trying to investigate the environmental impacts of engineered crops. Although companies have recently given ground, researchers say these firms are still loath to allow independent analyses of their patented — and profitable — seeds.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    By Bruce Stutz at Seed Magazine on July 1, 2010.
anonymous

The Heartbreaking Truth About Flying Cars - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...58972

technology layscience

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Every principle of engineering leads to one inescapable conclusion about a flying car, or "roadable aircraft": it can ONLY be a lousy example of both. The practical reality is, you can have a crap car, and a crap airplane, for five times the money and ten times the chance of dying from sudden impact. IMHO, this particular pursuit can only be evidence of American greatness IF you think techno-triumphalism without foresight is a great thing. Americans love cars because they associate them with "freedom" in a quasi-religious fashion. But look at the unintended consequences of happy motoring: the astounding wealth squandered on the doomed project of suburbanization, and the paving of the American West. Suppose we were able to build a Blade Runner-esque hover-car that runs on magical cheap biofuel made from lawn clippings? Every alpine meadow, mountain lake, canyon rim, and forest vale would be colonized by fat "extreme suburbanites" who would fly to and from their "green" modular McMansions. Dude: walkable cities connected by mass transit. * P.S. As an avid paraglider pilot, I wince at the "Maverick" para-car. Once you understand that rudderless paragliders have no cross-wind landing capacity, and the wing-loading of that size canopy dictates a landing speed in excess of 30mph, you realize that the roll cage is there for a reason...
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    By James Fallows in the Science and Tech section of The Atlantic on July 1, 2010. Thanks to @paleofuture (and then @thebrandi) for the hat tip.
anonymous

How close are we to catastrophic climate change? - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

climate sustainability longnow

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • As you may have noticed, scientists remain convinced that humans are altering the global climate with an excess of greenhouse gas emissions—soot, methane and the ever-present carbon dioxide we pump out from our lungs and coal-burning power plants. The question is: how bad is said climate change going to get?
  • The interviewed experts don't expect to be any more able to understand clouds and the other uncertainties by 2030—even if funding for such research were tripled in the next 20 years. That matches real world results, since the experts interviewed back in the 1990s were just as uncertain about clouds and the like as when re-interviewed in the 2000s. Or, as climatologist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, one of the experts interviewed this time and last, told me last year: "We don't know much more than we did in 1975" about climate sensitivity.
  • Fortunately, as investor Vinod Khosla is fond of saying (about himself and others): "Experts are usually wrong" when it comes to forecasting the future. Let's hope he's right about that at least, in this case.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    By David Biello at Scientific American Observations on June 28, 2010.
anonymous

Quitting the hominid fight club: The evidence is flimsy for innate chimpanzee--let alon... - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...post.cfm

longnow evolution

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • He asserts that both male humans and chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, are "natural warriors" with an innate predisposition toward "coalitionary killing," which dates back to our common ancestor.
  • "Chimpicide," Pinker wrote in his 2002 bestseller The Blank Slate the Modern Denial of Human Nature, "raises the possibility that the forces of evolution, not just the idiosyncrasies of a particular culture, prepared us for violence."
  • I've been reading and talking to anthropologists about the demonic-males theory for years, and I've turned from a believer to a skeptic. Here are some reasons why:
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Mitani, for example, estimates the mortality rate from coalitionary attacks in Kibale to be as high as "2,790 per 100,000 individuals per year." But the researchers witnessed only 18 coalitionary killings. All told, since Jane Goodall began observing chimpanzees in Tanzania's Gombe National Park in 1960, researchers have directly observed 31 intergroup killings, of which 17 were infants.
  • In other words, researchers at a typical site directly observe one killing every seven years.
  • But that raises another question: Could unusual environmental conditions be triggering intergroup chimpanzee killing?
  • When we first offered the chimps bananas the males seldom fought over their food; …now…there was a great deal more fighting than ever before." (This quote appears in Sussman and Marshack's paper.)
  • Ian Tattersall, an anthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History, told me that chimpanzee violence is "plausibly related to population stress occasioned by human encroachment."
  • Researchers have never observed coalitionary killing among bonobos. Noting that bonobos are just as genetically related to us as chimpanzees, Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, suggested last year in The Wall Street Journal that bonobos may be "more representative of our primate background" than are chimpanzees.
  • One author, anthropologist Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University, told me that Ardi has triggered a "tectonic shift" in views of human evolution.
  • There is also no fossil or archaeological evidence that our ancestors fought millions or even hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yes, archaeological digs and modern ethnography have established that warfare was common among pre-state societies, notably hunter–gatherers; our ancestors are thought to have lived as hunter–gatherers since the emergence of the Homo genus two million years ago.
  • Advocates of the demonic-males thesis suggest that if hunter–gatherers ever engaged in warfare, they must have always done so.
  • But as the anthropologist Douglas Fry of Åbo Akademi University in Finland pointed out in his book Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (Oxford University Press, 2009), the oldest clear-cut relic of group violence is a 13,000-year-old grave along the Nile River in the Jebel Sahaba region of Sudan.
  • Evidence of earlier lethal human violence is ambiguous, at best.
  • But most Paleolithic injuries probably resulted from "hunting large animals who object to being speared," Trinkaus told me. "You find a lot of evidence of bumps and bruises and broken bones" among Neandertals and other early humans. "There is absolutely no evidence," Trinkaus says, that "war is continuous back to the common ancestor with chimps."
  • Advocates of the demonic-males thesis insist that absence of evidence of warfare does not equal evidence of absence, especially given the paucity of ancient human and prehuman remains.
  • These relics indicate that warfare arose as humans began shifting from "a nomadic existence to a sedentary one, commonly although not necessarily tied to agriculture," Ferguson says.
  • War's recent emergence, and its sporadic pattern, contradict the assertion of Wrangham and others that war springs from innate male tendencies, he argues. "If war is deeply rooted in our biology, then it's going to be there all the time. And it's just not," he says. War is certainly not as innate as language, a trait possessed by all known human societies at all times.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    By John Horgan at Scientific American Blog on June 29, 2010.
anonymous

Kraken Rising: How the Cephalopod Became Our Zeitgeist Mascot - 0 views

www.3quarksdaily.com/...came-our-zeitgeist-mascot.html

literature

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    A reference to Mark Dery in h+ magazine.
anonymous

2010-space-expenses - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    Breakdown of 2010 space program expenses by country, by expenditure.
anonymous

Computer program deciphers a dead language that mystified linguists - 0 views

io9.com/...guage-that-mystified-linguists

language longnow

shared by anonymous on 01 Jul 10 - Cached
  • The lost language of Ugaritic was last spoken 3,500 years ago. It survives on just a few tablets, and linguists could only translate it with years of hard work and plenty of luck. A computer deciphered it in hours.
  • anonymous on 01 Jul 10
     
    By Alasdair Wilkins at io9 on June 30, 2010
anonymous

Afghanistan: A Meeting Between Karzai and the Haqqanis? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ng_between_karzai_and_haqqanis

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 27 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The Taliban were quick to deny a June 27 Al Jazeera report that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had met personally with Sirajuddin Haqqani, the son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, who with his father forms the leadership of the Haqqani network (Karzai’s government also denied the report). The Haqqani network, which straddles the Afghan-Pakistani border, is part of the Taliban under Mullah Omar, but it remains the most distinct individual entity within the diffuse and multifaceted Taliban movement.
  • The Taliban perceive themselves to be winning the war, leaving little motivation for meaningful negotiation on their part. Kabul also has long been dominated by elements skeptical of — if not downright hostile to — Pakistani intentions in Afghanistan, and these elements remain intent on keeping the Taliban from power.
  • The report of Karzai’s meeting with the younger Haqqani, however unlikely, does reflect the fact that movement and discussions are taking place at some significant level and that geopolitical shifts are starting to occur in the region. The outcome is far from certain, but the game is undoubtedly under way.
  • anonymous on 27 Jun 10
     
    June 27, 2010
anonymous

Criminal Intent and Militant Funding - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...al_intent_and_militant_funding

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 27 Jun 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 27 Jun 10
     
    June 24, 2010
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