A TEST TO MEASURE HOW RATIONAL YOU REALLY ARE

George Dvorsky inteviews Keith E. Stanovich in io9:

Cognitive biases are an essential part of the modern definition of rationality in cognitive science.
To think rationally means taking the appropriate action given one’s goals and beliefs — what we call instrumental rationality — and holding beliefs that are in synch with available evidence, or epistemic rationality. Collectively, the many tasks of the heuristics and biases program — and the even wider literature in decision science — comprise the operational definition of rationality in modern cognitive science (see my book Rationality and the Reflective Mind, 2011).
Let me give you some examples of instrumental rationality and irrationality:

• The ability to display disjunctive reasoning in decision making [e.g. Either the Sun orbits the Earth, or the Earth orbits the Sun. The Sun does not orbit the Earth. Therefore, the Earth orbits the Sun.]
• The tendency to show inconsistent preferences because of framing effects [e.g. saying a ‘glass is half empty’ can often be more persuasive than suggesting the inverse; this is somewhat related to the negativity bias]
• The tendency to show a default bias [a.k.a. the status quo bias in which we hold a preference for the way things currently are]
• The tendency to substitute affect for difficult evaluations [sometimes when we have to answer a difficult question we actually answer a related but different question without realizing a substitution has taken place]
• The tendency to over-weight short-term rewards at the expense of long-term well-being [which is also referred to as the current moment bias]
• The tendency to have choices affected by vivid stimuli [e.g. men have been shown to make poor decisions in the presence of an attractive female]
• The tendency for decisions to be affected by irrelevant context

AFTER GEZI PARK

William Harris in The Point:

The peculiarity of the modern religious conservative gives rise to different shades of Erdoğan. Views of the controversial Prime Minister vary across the ideological spectrum. There’s the religious conservative Erdoğan, who called Turkey’s founder and most popular political figure a drunk; there’s neoliberal Erdoğan, who insisted, even as a court has delayed the “renovation” of Gezi Park, that a mall will be built; there’s pro-democracy Erdoğan, who fired military leaders allegedly involved in plotting a coup against him; there’s dictatorial Erdoğan, who fired those same officers (throughout modern Turkish history, the military was the protector of Kemalism, pulling coups, as it claimed, in order to restore democracy) in a scheme to amass more power; and there’s conspiracy-theorist Erdoğan, who lashed out against a mythical interest-rate lobby when foreign investors reacted negatively to a bloody police crackdown on protestors, and who has blamed the protests on the sinister alcohol lobby.

The strength of the protests has been their pluralism, banding together labor unions, liberals, anti-capitalists, feminists and environmentalists. They’ve been able to combine critiques of each shade of Erdoğan. Meanwhile, in a major break from Occupy Wall Street, the protestors have been quite clear on their demands: to preserve Gezi Park as it is; to free those involved in the protests who have been detained (including more than 50 lawyers at an Istanbul courthouse and a number, more recently, of volunteer doctors); and to end the violent police repression of the protests. Perhaps Erdoğan’s absolute refusal to compromise can be traced back to these demands—or, if not to the demands themselves, then to the form in which they reached him: If people out in the street can influence policy, what might they ask for next?

More here.

“This Is Bullshit”

JUN 10 2013 @ 11:58AM

If you read one commentary on the meta-data gathering by the US government, do yourself a favor and read David Simon’s. The creator of “The Wire,” he is not exactly unversed in the intricacies of government power, police work and, er, surveillance. And he, even more than I, is baffled by the tsunami of self-righteous indignation:

Frankly, I’m a bit amazed that the NSA and FBI have their shit together enough to be consistently doing what they should be doing with the vast big-data stream of electronic communication. For us, now — years into this war-footing and this legal dynamic — to loudly proclaim our indignation at the maintenance of an essential and comprehensive investigative database while at the same time insisting on a proactive response to the inevitable attempts at terrorism is as childish as it is obtuse. We want cake, we want to eat it, and we want to stay skinny and never puke up a thing. Of course we do.

I, like Simon, am actually impressed by the government’s efficacy in exploring these electronic trails and patterns. I thought that was largely being done by Facebook, Google or the Obama campaign. I never thought the feds would be that competent.

And when we stumble onto a government program that is clearly legal under the Patriot Act, when not a single case of abuse can be specifically found, when it only looks for patterns and algorithms, and would have to go to a court to do any more, are you not more relieved than creeped out? Wouldn’t you prefer that this stuff be found and isolated from two steps removed? Doesn’t this new Big Data actually increaseprivacy compared with the pre-FISA era wire-tapping? Not for the first time, Daniel Ellsberg is wrong. It’s not that Obama is not Nixon; it is that the new program is inherently different from previous ones, because of the new nature of the technology. And its sheer scope may actually be a refuge in some ways:

When the government grabs the raw data from hundreds or thousands of phone calls, they’re probably going to examine those calls. They’re going to look to establish a pattern of behavior to justify more investigation and ultimately, if they can, elevate their surveillance to actual monitoring of conversations. Sure enough.

When the government grabs every single fucking telephone call made from the United States over a period of months and years, it is not a prelude to monitoring anything in particular. Why not? Because that is tens of billions of phone calls and for the love of god, how many agents do you think the FBI has? How many computer-runs do you think the NSA can do? When the government asks for something, it is notable to wonder what they are seeking and for what purpose. When they ask for everything, it is not for specific snooping or violations of civil rights, but rather a data base that is being maintained as an investigative tool.

Exactly. And then this point, which seems to elude Snowden and Greenwald:

There is a lot of authoritarian overreach in American society, both from the drug war and the war on terror.

But those planes really did hit those buildings. And that bomb did indeed blow up at the finish line of the Boston marathon. And we really are in a continuing, low-intensity, high-risk conflict with a diffuse, committed and ideologically-motivated enemy. And for a moment, just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks.

Just for a moment. Imagine. Now listen to Snowden.

弗里德曼：比起侵犯隐私，我更担心9·11重演

• 弗里德曼：比起侵犯隐私，我更担心9·11重演

  
  如果再来一次9·11，美国社会的开放与自由就可能彻底断送。因此，为了将来不失去真正的自由，我可以容忍今天政府在法律监督下的数据侦查。

马建新作剖析当今中国自暴自弃的道德观

马建新作剖析当今中国自暴自弃的道德观

HELEN T. VERONGOS 06:37

旅居伦敦的中国作家马建出版新小说《阴之道》，再现道德沦丧的现世中国，被贫困扭曲了的迷信价值观体现马建作品一再回归的主题——旧中国和新中国之间的冲突。

The History of Typography - Animated Short

Rajesh Rao: Computing a Rosetta Stone for the Indus script

QUEST FOR 'GENIUS BABIES'?

UEST FOR 'GENIUS BABIES'?

Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Ed:

Jason Richwine swiftly resigned from the Heritage Foundation this month following revelations of his 2009 Harvard University dissertation on IQ and race, but the blogosphere continues to buzz with the story. In the aftermath, as Richwine continues to defend his research, some human biodiversity, or “HBD,” experts charge that a new generation of eugenicists may be coming of age. A recurring name is that of Stephen Hsu, the Michigan State University physicist and vice president for research and graduate studies who is researching intelligence and genetics at the world’s biggest genomics sequencing lab in Shenzhen, China.
“Richwine would probably also find a friend in Stephen Hsu, a theoretical physicist by training who is currently searching for an intelligence gene,” wrote Yong Chan, research director for the racial justice website ChangeLab. “Even though mainstream science has pretty much scrapped the notion that race has any kind of biological basis long ago, that hasn’t stopped [Hsu] from trying to link intelligence with race and getting a billion and a half dollars for research based in China.”
Michael Scroggins, a Ph.D. student at Teachers College of Columbia University, echoed Chan on Ethnography.com: “Suffice to say, [Richwine and Hsu] offer nothing new to debates over IQ, or poverty or immigration. Their innovation lies in the naked, unreflective application of a naïve sociobiology to policy debates over access to democratic institutions – citizenship and public education.”
Much of the controversy surrounding Hsu stems from a recent Vice article alleging Hsu's cognitive genomics project is ultimately helping China engineer “genius babies.”
“At BGI Shenzhen, scientists have collected DNA samples from 2,000 of the world’s smartest people and are sequencing their entire genomes in an attempt to identify the alleles which determine human intelligence,” the piece reads. “Apparently they’re not far from finding them, and when they do, embryo screening will allow parents to pick their brightest zygote and potentially bump up every generation's intelligence by five to 15 IQ points.”

POLITICAL IDEOLOGY AND THE AVOIDANCE OF DISSONANCE-AROUSING SITUATIONS

H. Hannah Nam, John T. Jost, and Jay J. Van Bavel over at PLOS One (via Chris Mooney):

Abstract

People often avoid information and situations that have the potential to contradict previously held beliefs and attitudes (i.e., situations that arouse cognitive dissonance). According to the motivated social cognition model of political ideology, conservatives tend to have stronger epistemic needs to attain certainty and closure than liberals. This implies that there may be differences in how liberals and conservatives respond to dissonance-arousing situations. In two experiments, we investigated the possibility that conservatives would be more strongly motivated to avoid dissonance-arousing tasks than liberals. Indeed, U.S. residents who preferred more conservative presidents (George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan) complied less than Americans who preferred more liberal presidents (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton) with the request to write a counter-attitudinal essay about who made a “better president.” This difference was not observed under circumstances of low perceived choice or when the topic of the counter-attitudinal essay was non-political (i.e., when it pertained to computer or beverage preferences). The results of these experiments provide initial evidence of ideological differences in dissonance avoidance. Future work would do well to determine whether such differences are specific to political issues or topics that are personally important. Implications for political behavior are discussed.

Three year old kid explains why he doesn't want to eat meat

PLATO

The Republic, c. 378 BC

No one willingly chooses to rule and to take other people’s troubles in hand and straighten them out, Socrates said, but each asks for wages; for anyone who intends to practice his craft well never does or orders what is best for himself—at least not when he orders as his craft prescribes—but what is best for his subject. It is because of this, it seems, that wages must be provided to a person if he’s willing to rule, whether in the form of money or honor or a penalty if he refuses.

What do you mean, Socrates? said Glaucon. I know the first two kinds of wages.

Then you don’t understand the best people’s kind of wages, the kind that moves the most decent to rule, when they are willing at all. Don’t you know that the love of honor and the love of money are despised, and rightly so? Therefore good people won’t be willing to rule for the sake of money or honor. So, if they’re willing to rule, some compulsion or punishment must be brought to bear on them; perhaps that’s why it is thought shameful to seek to rule before one is compelled to. Now, the greatest punishment, if one isn’t willing to rule, is to be ruled by someone worse than oneself. And I think that it’s fear of this that makes decent people rule when they do. They approach ruling not as something good or enjoyable, but as something necessary, since it can’t be entrusted to anyone better than, or even as good as, themselves. In a city of good men, if it came into being, the citizens would fight in order not to rule, just as they do now in order to rule. There it would be quite clear that anyone who is really a true ruler doesn’t by nature seek his own advantage but that of his subject. And everyone, knowing this, would rather be benefited by others than take the trouble to benefit them. So I can’t agree that justice is the advantage of the stronger—but we’ll look into that another time.

INTERVIEW WITH JONATHAN HAIDT ON HAPPINESS

From Five Books:

Tell me why you started with the sayings of the Buddha.

The Dhammapada is one of the greatest psychological works ever written, and certainly one of the greatest before 1900. It is masterful in its understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in particular the way we are always striving and never satisfied. You can turn to it – and people have turned to it throughout the ages – at times of trouble, at times of disappointment, at times of loss, and it takes you out of yourself. It shows you that your problems, your feelings, are just timeless manifestations of the human condition. It also gives specific recommendations for how to deal with those problems, which is to let go, to accept, and to work on yourself. So I think this is a kind of tonic that we ambitious Westerners often need to hear.

Is there a specific saying that you particularly like?

There are two big ideas that I found especially useful when I wrote The Happiness Hypothesis. One is an idea common to most great intellectual traditions. The quote is: ‘All that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world.’ It’s not unique to Buddha, but it is one of the earliest statements of that idea, that we need to focus on changing our thoughts, rather than making the world conform to our wishes.

The other big idea is that the mind is like a rider on an elephant. Buddha uses this metaphor: ‘My own mind used to wander wherever pleasure or desire or lust led it, but now I have it tamed, I guide it, as the keeper guides the wild elephant.’

More here.

THE BONOBOTOPIA.

In the heart of Africa, in a swamp forest near Lake Tumba in the Congo, a frolicking species of ape called the bonobo has long upset the Frazetta picture of our past. These apes, who, along with chimpanzees, share up to 98 percent of our DNA, confounded the first primatologists who observed them. Over time, they have created a colony far different from that of their intensely competitive, often violent, chimpanzee cousins. Bonobo society is based on cooperation and empathy; the culture is a matriarchy where competition is redirected into a communitarian sexual appetite. Bonobos also shocked these earliest scientists because they possessed a cheerful sense of general promiscuity, weaving wanton sex into their society, and they boasted a sexual repertoire once thought to be the exclusive property of Homo sapiens—deep kissing, foreplay, oral sex, homosexuality, and polyamory. Which is why bonobos have gained a certain notoriety in the animal kingdom and are so often bracketed by a kind of ridicule whenever some story about them appears in the paper.

more from Jack Hitt at Lapham's Quarterly here.

What is beauty?

TED Radio Hour asks: What is beauty?

Posted By Kate Torgovnick
April 19, 2013 at 12:47 pm BST

We all know what it feels like to stand in a place that overwhelms our eyes with splendor, to hear a piece of music that seems to pluck the strings of our heart, to behold a face whose shape is pleasing. Beauty: it’s a thing we all know and are drawn to. And yet what is […]

为什么美国不能实行“温情资本主义”

托马斯·B·埃兹尔

麻省理工学院的阿塞莫格鲁等经济学家认为，如果“残酷的领导者”美国实行像瑞典等北欧国家一样的自由派社会福利政策，会减缓创新的步伐，并降低全世界经济增长率。

全文：http://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20130613/c13edsall/