Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational? | The New Yorker - 0 views
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an unusually large number of books about rationality were being published this year, among them Steven Pinker’s “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” (Viking) and Julia Galef’s “The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t” (Portfolio).
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When the world changes quickly, we need strategies for understanding it. We hope, reasonably, that rational people will be more careful, honest, truthful, fair-minded, curious, and right than irrational ones.
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And yet rationality has sharp edges that make it hard to put at the center of one’s life
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The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think - James Somers - The Atlantic - 1 views
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Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.
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“If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done
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Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.
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Are the New 'Golden Age' TV Shows the New Novels? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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it’s become common to hear variations on the idea that quality cable TV shows are the new novels.
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Thomas Doherty, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, called the new genre “Arc TV” — because its stories follow long, complex arcs of development — and insisted that “at its best, the world of Arc TV is as exquisitely calibrated as the social matrix of a Henry James novel.”
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Mixed feelings about literature — the desire to annex its virtues while simultaneously belittling them — are typical of our culture today, which doesn’t know quite how to deal with an art form, like the novel, that is both democratic and demanding.
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To Justify Every 'A,' Some Professors Hand Over Grading Power to Outsiders - Technology... - 0 views
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The best way to eliminate grade inflation is to take professors out of the grading process: Replace them with professional evaluators who never meet the students, and who don't worry that students will punish harsh grades with poor reviews. That's the argument made by leaders of Western Governors University, which has hired 300 adjunct professors who do nothing but grade student work.
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These efforts raise the question: What if professors aren't that good at grading? What if the model of giving instructors full control over grades is fundamentally flawed? As more observers call for evidence of college value in an era of ever-rising tuition costs, game-changing models like these are getting serious consideration.
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Professors do score poorly when it comes to fair grading, according to a study published in July in the journal Teachers College Record. After crunching the numbers on decades' worth of grade reports from about 135 colleges, the researchers found that average grades have risen for 30 years, and that A is now the most common grade given at most colleges. The authors, Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, argue that a "consumer-based approach" to higher education has created subtle incentives for professors to give higher marks than deserved. "The standard practice of allowing professors free rein in grading has resulted in grades that bear little relation to actual performance," the two professors concluded.
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A Vote for Reason - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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In Haidt’s view, the philosophers’ dream of reason isn’t just naïve, it is radically unfounded, the product of what he calls “the rationalist delusion.” As he puts it, “Anyone who values truth should stop worshiping reason
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According to Haidt, not only are value judgments less often a product of rational deliberation than we’d like to think, that is how we are supposed to function. That it is how we are hardwired by evolution. In the neuroscientist Drew Westen’s words, the political brain is the emotional brain.
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Indeed, reason sometimes seems simply beside the point. Consider some of Haidt’s own well-known research on “moral dumbfounding.”
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The teaching of economics gets an overdue overhaul - 0 views
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Change, however, has been slow to reach the university economics curriculum. Many institutions still pump students through introductory courses untainted by recent economic history or the market shortcomings it illuminates.
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A few plucky reformers are working to correct that: a grand and overdue idea. Overhauling the way economics is taught ought to produce students more able to understand the modern world. Even better, it should improve economics itself.
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Yet the standard curriculum is hardly calibrated to impart these lessons. Most introductory texts begin with the simplest of models. Workers are paid according to their productivity; trade never makes anyone worse off; and government interventions in the market always generate a “deadweight loss”. Practising economists know that these statements are more true at some times than others
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Opinion | How Fear Distorts Our Thinking About the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views
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When it comes to making decisions that involve risks, we humans can be irrational in quite systematic ways — a fact that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman famously demonstrated with the help of a hypothetical situation, eerily apropos of today’s coronavirus epidemic, that has come to be known as the Asian disease problem.
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This is irrational because the two questions don’t differ mathematically. In both cases, choosing the first option means accepting the certainty that 200 people live, and choosing the second means embracing a one-third chance that all could be saved with an accompanying two-thirds chance that all will die. Yet in our minds, Professors Tversky and Kahneman explained, losses loom larger than gains, and so when the options are framed in terms of deaths rather than cures, we’ll accept more risks to try to avoid deaths.
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Our decision making is bad enough when the disease is hypothetical. But when the disease is real — when we see actual death tolls climbing daily, as we do with the coronavirus — another factor besides our sensitivity to losses comes into play: fear.
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Opinion | How Fear Distorts Our Thinking About the Coronavirus - The New York Times - 0 views
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When it comes to making decisions that involve risks, we humans can be irrational in quite systematic ways
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asked people to imagine that the United States was preparing for an outbreak of an unusual Asian disease that was expected to kill 600 citizens. To combat the disease, people could choose between two options: a treatment that would ensure 200 people would be saved or one that had a 33 percent chance of saving all 600 but a 67 percent chance of saving none. Here, a clear favorite emerged: Seventy-two percent chose the former.
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when Professors Tversky and Kahneman framed the question differently, such that the first option would ensure that only 400 people would die and the second option offered a 33 percent chance that nobody would perish and a 67 percent chance that all 600 would die, people’s preferences reversed. Seventy-eight percent now favored the second option.
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How Elastic Is Your Brain? - The New York Times - 0 views
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you are not merely your brain — your body and the broader circumstances of your life also make you who you are.
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you are not merely your brain — your body and the broader circumstances of your life also make you who you are.
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we mythologize brains, creating false boundaries that divorce them from bodies and the outside world, blinding us to the biological nature of the mind.
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A Tantalizing Signal From the Early Universe - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Near the beginning, not long after the Big Bang, the universe was a cold and dark place swirling with invisible gas, mostly hydrogen and helium. Over millions of years, gravity pulled some of this primordial gas into pockets. The pockets eventually became so dense they collapsed under their own weight and ignited, flooding the darkness with ultraviolet radiation. These were the very first stars in the universe, flashing into existence like popcorn kernels unfurling in the hot oil of an empty pan.
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Everything flowed from this cosmic dawn. The first stars illuminated the universe, collapsed into the black holes that keep galaxies together, and produced the heavy elements that would make planets and moons and the human beings that evolved to gaze upon it all.
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This epoch in our cosmic history has long fascinated scientists. They hoped that someday, using technology that was calibrated just right, they could detect faint signals from that moment. Now, they think they’ve done it.
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Poker and Decision Making - 2 views
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our tendency to judge decisions based on how they turn out, known in poker as “resulting.”
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our strategy is often based on beliefs that can be biased or wrong. We are quick to form, and slow to update our beliefs. We tend towards absolutes, and indulge in “motivated reasoning,” seeking out confirmation while ignoring contradictory evidence
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solution is to embrace uncertainty by calibrating our confidence
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Silicon Valley's Safe Space - The New York Times - 0 views
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The roots of Slate Star Codex trace back more than a decade to a polemicist and self-described A.I. researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who believed that intelligent machines could end up destroying humankind. He was a driving force behind the rise of the Rationalists.
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Because the Rationalists believed A.I. could end up destroying the world — a not entirely novel fear to anyone who has seen science fiction movies — they wanted to guard against it. Many worked for and donated money to MIRI, an organization created by Mr. Yudkowsky whose stated mission was “A.I. safety.”
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The community was organized and close-knit. Two Bay Area organizations ran seminars and high-school summer camps on the Rationalist way of thinking.
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