DANIEL KAHNEMAN: THE KING OF HUMAN ERROR

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: THE KING OF HUMAN ERROR

Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair:

We’re obviously all at the mercy of forces we only dimly perceive and events over which we have no control, but it’s still unsettling to discover that there are people out there—human beings of whose existence you are totally oblivious—who have effectively toyed with your life. I had that feeling soon after I published Moneyball. The book was ostensibly about a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, whose general manager, Billy Beane, had realized that baseball players were sometimes misunderstood by baseball professionals, and found new and better ways to value them. The book attracted the attention of a pair of Chicago scholars, an economist named Richard Thaler and a law professor named Cass Sunstein (now a senior official in the Obama White House). “Why do professional baseball executives, many of whom have spent their lives in the game, make so many colossal mistakes?” they asked in their review in The New Republic. “They are paid well, and they are specialists. They have every incentive to evaluate talent correctly. So why do they blunder?” My book clearly lacked a satisfying answer to that question. It pointed out that when baseball experts evaluated baseball players their judgment could be clouded by their prejudices and preconceptions—but why? I’d stumbled upon a mystery, the book reviewers noted, and I’d failed not merely to solve it but also to see that others already had done so.

More here.

NUDGE' POLICIES ARE ANOTHER NAME FOR COERCION

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi in New Scientist:

WE HAVE all cringed watching friends and family make terrible decisions, and been tempted by visions of the pain spared if we could only make them follow our advice. The same feeling motivates well-intentioned technocrats to take charge of the public: people are plainly making sad blunders they will regret.
Economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein (now a senior policy-maker in the Obama administration) present the latest, and subtlest, version of this temptation in their influential work on "nudging" people into making wiser choices. They argue that wise decision-makers should tweak the options and information available so that the easiest choice is the right one. For example, this can guide people to donate their organs if they die unexpectedly by making organ donation an opt-out rather than an opt-in choice. And it can encourage people to plan for their pensions by making pension contributions automatic for everyone who does not explicitly opt out of the system.
"Nudging" is appealing because it provides many of the benefits of top-down regulation while avoiding many of the drawbacks. Bureaucrats and leaders of organisations can guide choices without dictating them. Thaler and Sunstein call the approach "libertarian paternalism": it lets people "decide" what they want to do, while guiding them in the "right" direction.
Much criticism of this approach comes, in fact, from libertarians, who see little difference between guiding a person's choices and eliminating them. A nudge is like a shove, they argue, only more disreputable because it pretends otherwise. The real problem, though, is that Thaler and Sunstein's ideas presume good technocrats can use statistical and experimental results to guide people to make choices that serve their real interests. This is a natural belief for scientists and intellectuals, especially those who see the awful ways scientific knowledge is abused politically, and think life would be better if scientists had more authority.
However natural, though, this won't work because libertarian paternalists are often wrong on the underlying social science.

A BRIEF GUIDE TO EMBODIED COGNITION: WHY YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN

Samuel McNerney  over at a guest post at one of Scientific American's blogs:

Embodied cognition, the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind, is one of the more counter-intuitive ideas in cognitive science. In sharp contrast is dualism, a theory of mind famously put forth by Rene Descartes in the 17th century when he claimed that “there is a great difference between mind and body, inasmuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible… the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” In the proceeding centuries, the notion of the disembodied mind flourished. From it, western thought developed two basic ideas: reason is disembodied because the mind is disembodied and reason is transcendent and universal. However, as George Lakoff and Rafeal Núñez explain:

Cognitive science calls this entire philosophical worldview into serious question on empirical grounds… [the mind] arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences. This is not just the innocuous and obvious claim that we need a body to reason; rather, it is the striking claim that the very structure of reason itself comes from the details of our embodiment… Thus, to understand reason we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanism of neural binding.

What exactly does this mean? It means that our cognition isn’t confined to our cortices. That is, our cognition is influenced, perhaps determined by, our experiences in the physical world. This is why we say that something is “over our heads” to express the idea that we do not understand; we are drawing upon the physical inability to not see something over our heads and the mental feeling of uncertainty. Or why we understand warmth with affection; as infants and children the subjective judgment of affection almost always corresponded with the sensation of warmth, thus giving way to metaphors such as “I’m warming up to her.”
Embodied cognition has a relatively short history. Its intellectual roots date back to early 20th century philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey and it has only been studied empirically in the last few decades. One of the key figures to empirically study embodiment is University of California at Berkeley professor George Lakoff.
Lakoff was kind enough to field some questions over a recent phone conversation, where I learned about his interesting history first hand.

CONSCIOUSNESS: THE BLACK HOLE OF NEUROSCIENCE

Megan Erickson in Big Think:

The simplest description of a black hole is a region of space-time from which no light is reflected and nothing escapes. The simplest description of consciousness is a mind that absorbs many things and attends to a few of them. Neither of these concepts can be captured quantitatively. Together they suggest the appealing possibility that endlessness surrounds us and infinity is within.
But our inability to grasp the immaterial means we’re stuck making inferences, free-associating, if we want any insight into the unknown. Which is why we talk obscurely and metaphorically about "pinning down" perception and “hunting for dark matter” (possibly a sort of primordial black hole). The existence of black holes was first hypothesized a decade after Einstein laid the theoretical groundwork for them in the theory of relativity, and the phrase "black hole" was not coined until 1968.
Likewise, consciousness is still such an elusive concept that, in spite of the recent invention of functional imaging - which has allowed scientists to visualize the different areas of the brain - we may not understand it any better now than we ever have before. “We approach [consciousness] now perhaps differently than we have in the past with our new tools," says neuroscientist Joy Hirsch.
"The questions [we ask] have become a little bit more sophisticated and we’ve become more sophisticated in how we ask the question," she adds - but we're still far from being able to explain how the regions of the brain interact to produce thought, dreams, and self-awareness. “In terms of understanding, the awareness that comes from binding remote activities of the brain together, still remains what philosophers call, ‘The hard problem.'"

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快乐遗传学：亚洲人最不快乐？

《经济学人》说，快乐铭刻在你的DNA中，不同的种族有不同的快乐倾向。人们常说，人生是一张白纸，经验是书写者。然而，过去二十年的研究让这一说法灰飞烟灭。通过比较同卵双胞胎和异卵双胞胎，科学家建立了人类各种行为的遗传可能性。最近的研究认为，快乐具有高可遗传性。来自伦敦大学学院、加州圣迭戈、哈佛医学院和苏黎世大学的科学家检查了一千多对双胞胎，他们得出结论，人类快乐中三分之一的变异是被继承的。伦敦大学学院研究员Jan-Emmanuel De Neve选择了一个最受怀疑的对象——编码5-烃色胺转运体蛋白质的基因(5-HTT)，检查5-HTT基因变异如何影响快乐程度。5-HTT基因有两个功能性变体——一长一短，人类携带了每个基因的两个版本（等位基因），分别来自父母。在分析了2500多名健康调查参与者的遗传数据之后，De Neve发现，携带一个长等位基因的人形容自己生活满足的可能性比没有长等位基因的人高8%，携带有两个长等位基因的人则高17%。有趣的是，亚裔美国人平均有0.69个长等位基因，白人1.12个，黑人1.47个。基因是否在人类心理健康上扮演重要作用长期以来备受怀疑，这项研究首次表明基因如何塑造个人的快乐程度（PDF）blackhat 发表于 2011年10月19日 19时18分 星期三

一种抑制性欲的化合物

有些雄性会喷洒香水以吸引异性，也有雄性会给交配过的异性喷射特殊的化合物，以驱逐其它同性。现在，研究人员发现了这种性抑制化合物的秘密。报告发表在《动物行为》杂志上。雄性蝽虫会在交配中，通过精囊给雌性注入特殊的化合物醋酸肉豆蔻酸酯（myristyl acetate）。研究人员将这种化合物应用在未交配过的“处女雌蝽”上，结果发现其它雄性会避开这些雌性。性抑制化合物不仅仅能帮助雄性独占一位雌性，还可以阻止其它雄性不要浪费时间去追求一位异性。由于蝽是一种破坏农作物的害虫，这项发现可以用于创造出新的杀虫方法。blackhat 发表于 2011年10月23日 19时15分 星期日