Author: Mark Davis

Entrepreneur, scientist, engineer, and author. Bent on worldwide understanding.

John Gray on Jonathan Haidt

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Excellent discussion (and review) of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by John Gray in The New Republic. Gray is skeptical of intellectual history but even more skeptical of scientism, or the attempt to apply scientific reasoning to the complexities of human politics. Summing up concerning evolutionary psychology:

Haidt’s attempt to apply evolutionary psychology is yet one more example of the failures of scientism. There is no line of evolutionary development that connects our hominid ancestors with the emergence of the Tea Party. Human beings are not amoebae that have somehow managed to turn themselves into clever primates. They are animals with a history, part of which consists of creating cultures that are widely divergent. Using evolutionary psychology to explain current political conflicts represents local and ephemeral differences as perennial divisions in the human mind. It is hard to think of a more stultifying exercise in intellectual parochialism.

E.O. Wilson, Sam Harris, and David Sloan Wilson undoubtedly also included. The trouble arises in trying to connect the dots in too simple a contour. Haidt’s observations about flavors of moral feelings among liberals and conservatives is interesting and perhaps useful. But, as Gray suggests, it is where this naturalism ignores the cascading complexities of history that trouble arises. And when it tries to crawl onto the shores of policy and normative ethics, Gray takes even greater exception; the is-ought barrier is unassailable.

There are some assumptions by Gray that could use some critiquing. He quotes Haidt’s favorable perspective on utilitarianism and contrasts it with Berlin’s values pluralism. Gray is skeptical that culture war topics like abortion or gay rights can be cast into a utilitarian form and are better entertained through a recognition that a divergent moral landscape is the inevitable product of the complexities that culture hath wrought.… Read the rest

Lies, Damn Lies, and the Statistics of Mortality

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I spent a few minutes calculating my expected date of death today since I just turned 45. It turns out that I am beyond the half-way point in this journey.  I’ve created a spreadsheet that you can use to calculate your own demise and produce charts like the one above. The current spreadsheet uses the US Male/Female mortality numbers from the World Bank dataset and then a linear regression for future gains in life expectancy. Other country sets can be easily incorporated.

Enter your year of birth in the yellow box and it will create a plot of how long you can expect to live, as well as the transition point from green to red in your, eh, lifecycle.  Don’t forget to get your trusts, wills, organ donations, and directives in order.

Of course, there are no more compelling lies than statistical ones, and yet there are no other ways to guess the future than to extrapolate from the past.… Read the rest

On the Non-Simulation of Human Intelligence

Mark DavisLeave a comment

There is a curious dilemma that pervades much machine learning research. The solutions that we are trying to devise are supposed to minimize behavioral error by formulating the best possible model (or collection of competing models). This is also the assumption of evolutionary optimization, whether natural or artificial: optimality is the key to efficiently outcompeting alternative structures, alternative alleles, and alternative conceptual models. The dilemma is whether such optimality is applicable to the notoriously error prone, conceptual flexible, and inefficient reasoning of people. In other words, is machine learning at all like human learning?

I came across a paper called “Multi-Armed Bandit Bayesian Decision Making” while trying to understand what Ted Dunning is planning to talk about at the Big Data Science Meetup at SGI in Fremont, CA a week from Saturday (I’ll be talking, as well) that has a remarkable admission concerning this point:

Human behaviour is after all heavily influenced by emotions, values, culture and genetics; as agents operating in a decentralised system humans are notoriously bad at coordination. It is this fact that motivates us to develop systems that do coordinate well and that operate outside the realms of emotional biasing. We use Bayesian Probability Theory to build these systems specifically because we regard it as common sense expressed mathematically, or rather `the right thing to do’.

The authors continue on to suggest that therefore such systems should instead be seen as corrective assistants for the limitations of human cognitive processes! Machines can put the rational back into reasoned decision-making. But that is really not what machine learning is used for today. Instead, machine learning is used where human decision-making processes are unavailable due to the physical limitations of including humans “in the loop,” or the scale of the data involved, or the tediousness of the tasks at hand.… Read the rest

Eusociality, Errors, and Behavioral Plasticity

Mark DavisLeave a comment

I encountered an error in E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth where the authors intended to assert an alternative to “kin selection” but instead repeated “multilevel selection,” which is precisely what the authors wanted to draw a distinction with. I am sympathetic, however, if for no other reason than I keep finding errors and issues with my own books and papers.

The critical technical discussion from Nature concerning the topic is available here. As technical discussion, the issues debated are fraught with details like how halictid bees appear to live socially, but are in fact solitary animals that co-exist in tunnel arrangements.

Despite the focus on “spring-loaded traits” as determiners for haplodiploid animals like bees and wasps, the problem of big-brained behavioral plasticity keeps coming up in Wilson’s book. Humanity is a pinnacle because of taming fire, because of the relative levels of energy available in animal flesh versus plant matter, and because of our ability to outrun prey over long distances (yes, our identity emerges from marathon running). But these are solutions that correlate with the rapid growth of our craniums.

So if behavioral plasticity is so very central to who we are, we are faced with an awfully complex problem in trying to simulate that behavior. We can expect that there must be phalanxes of genes involved in setting our developmental path (our nature and the substrate for our nurture). We should, indeed, expect that almost no cognitive capacity is governed by a small set of genes, and that all the relevant genes work in networks through polygeny, epistasis, and related effects (pleiotropy). And we can expect no easy answers as a result, except to assert that AI is exactly as hard as we should have expected, and progress will be inevitably slow in understanding the mind, the brain, and the way we interact.… Read the rest

Mental Religious Math

Mark DavisLeave a comment

The Los Angeles Times reports on an article from Science that shows that analytical thinking and religious belief may be inversely proportional. That may not be news to some, but at least one of the example problems (that the religious failed to complete at higher rates than the non-religious) is quite interesting:

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Here there is an initial intuitive leap that says that $1 more than 10 cents is precisely $1.10. Therefore, the ball costs $0.10 or 10 cents. It is easy and clear, but the math undermines that result:

Bat + Ball = $1.10

Bat = Ball + $1.00

(Ball + $1.00) + Ball = $1.10

2*Ball + $1.00 = $1.10

2*Ball = $0.10

Ball = $0.05

Bat = $1.05

This result makes sense if one considers that the cost of the bat must be greater than $1.00 because it is $1.00 more than the ball (and not $1.00 itself). But it is obscured by the initial intuitive leap based on simple subtraction.

But that example is a pretty hard one to reconcile concerning historical and faith-based judgments. I doubt that there is good reason to suspect that mathematical prowess and intuitive dispositions about the costs of things correlates with faith decisions because I suspect that there are other reasons that the faithful believe what they believe. Specifically, most religious faithful believe because they were told to believe by their parents or community. The fact that they do so doesn’t seem to translate into mathematical prowess or ineptness. They may very well score more poorly on these kinds of results because of other individual differences like that those who are more predisposed to critical analytical skills are less likely to have come from highly religious backgrounds, and vice versa.… Read the rest

Brain Size and Fitness

Mark DavisLeave a comment

An interesting data point taken from E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth: bigger brains mean better adaptation to new environments. That seems trivial in a way because it is part of the “folk” evolutionary theory that seems to flow naturally from the assumption of human uniqueness and our ostensive position at the apex of the evolutionary mountain.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. A very narrowly adapted organism could conceivably outcompete an intelligent generalist. The generalist requires massive physiological commitments to the energetic requirements of behavioral plasticity. The specialist is economical, efficient. So it has largely been an article of projective faith in folk theory that the human condition is explainable.

So it is always refreshing when I learn that there is empirical evidence that brings clarity to issues like this:

Big brains are hypothesized to enhance survival of animals by facilitating flexible cognitive responses that buffer individuals against environmental stresses. Although this theory receives partial support from the finding that brain size limits the capacity of animals to behaviourally respond to environmental challenges, the hypothesis that large brains are associated with reduced mortality has never been empirically tested. Using extensive information on avian adult mortality from natural populations, we show here that species with larger brains, relative to their body size, experience lower mortality than species with smaller brains, supporting the general importance of the cognitive buffer hypothesis in the evolution of large brains.

From Sol et. al., Big-brained birds survive better in nature. The emphasis in the title on “nature” suggests that perhaps they fail in captivity? Avian ennui?… Read the rest

The Orchard of Belief

Mark DavisLeave a comment

CherriesOne of the most important impacts of the “new atheists” was to break religious discussion out of its silos. Before their recent rise, it was easy for the sophisticated secularist to laugh at the Pat Robertsons because they seemed absurd caricatures of Christianity in America. It was equally irrelevant to the Catholic theologian what analytical philosophy was up to in worrying over the meaning of meaning. And Muslims largely kept to their mosques. But with the critiques of the new atheism came a new willingness to hold remarkable, frank, and intelligent discussions about religion and modern life.

Take Andrew Sullivan’s article in Newsweek that attacks a range of Christian movements within the US through the critical lens of the Jefferson Bible. Sullivan promotes the sermon-on-the-mount Jesus as a radical guru focused exclusively on love. The surrounding texts and their subsequent grafting onto church doctrines are the source of strife both within Christianity and in its interactions with other peoples down through history.

And so as Andrew Sullivan cherry picks on Jefferson’s intellectual plantation, Gary Cutting of Notre Dame points out that there is not much fruit on the vine in the New York Times:

Read alone, the Sermon on the Mount will either confuse us or merely reinforce the moral prejudices we bring to it.

The moral messaging is just too diffuse for Cutting to be able to render into a ethical road map: Should we try to maximize happiness or focus on individual rights? Is the state the proper vehicle for charity? Is democracy better than totalitarianism? These are all contemporary notions that are beside the point in the orchard of Sullivan’s love.

We can contrast this sparring with Ross Douthat at Slate in his ongoing debate cycle centered on his new book, Bad Religion, that picks at the same line of criticism as Sullivan with regard to some of the current strains of evangelism in America.… Read the rest

Signals and Noise: Chapter 7 (Parsimony)

Mark DavisLeave a comment

Monotony is the essential character of those late nights, so familiar to Zach and all his fellows. Monotony, but restful and calm, withholding the sharp edges and the intaglios of faces that define everyday interactions, while still remaining a part of the web of life. He could send an AetherNote or email and get a response, but without the complexities of the face had he been talking to the person. There were gigabytes of missed nuance, pursing lips, pauses, dilating pupils, flush responses—all lost behind the veil of electronica. Moreover, he could pause for that brief moment without any awkwardness, and they could pause as well, waiting for the ideas to filter out of the calamity of neural collisions. When everyone can order thoughts a hair faster than ever before in history, yet still interact deep into the night like they were sitting at a pub or around a campfire, there is an acceleration of competitiveness, a capacity for intellectual posturing. The new assholes, the new religionists, the new atheists, the new technologists, the strident politicos, the snarky personalities—everyone primps and props their online identities behind this veil of witty pretense, hearts racing as they snap at the refresh icon, waiting for the cannonball retort.

Democratizing it is, but with the side effect of drowning out the instant, unfiltered and emotive response on the one hand, and the dramatically conditioned and elaboratively intellectualized riposte on the other. There was too much lag for spontaneity and too little for detailed flourish. It is a channel that emphasizes bluster and bombast in securely short constructs. And thought followed suit. Thought on the average got better, but the best thought was drowned out by the long tails of opinions washing through them like the wake of a whale.… Read the rest