Children are beautifully adapted to learn about many possible worlds

From The Wisdom of Not Being Too Rational by Michael Balter.

The children were allowed five trials per experiment lasting 2 minutes each to learn the tasks. As might be expected, the older children did better than the younger children: By age 8, most children were able to successfully perform all three tasks during the first trial, and younger children required more trials, the researchers report today in PLoS ONE. But their performance contrasted in an important way with that of the birds. While the jays were able to learn the first two tasks by trial and error, they could not master the third experiment, in which the solution was not obvious and even counterintuitive.

Cheke and her colleagues conclude that this suggests a fundamentally different learning process between the birds and the children. Whereas the birds were put off by a seemingly physically impossible setup and couldn't learn the third task, children weren't stymied by the apparent impossibility of the task, but forged ahead and learned to raise the tokens anyway—even if it wasn't obvious how it was happening or the solution didn't seem to make intuitive sense.

"Children start off with no idea of what is possible and what is not possible," Cheke says. "If they did, they would never be able to learn. This is why children like magic, and why they will believe you when you tell them all kinds of fanciful things."

Alison Gopnik, an expert in child developmental psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, calls the study "fascinating and illuminating." The main difference between the birds and the children, Gopnik says, is that members of the crow family "have sophisticated but specific knowledge about how physical causal relationships work in the world," whereas children "seem to have broader and more wide-ranging causal learning abilities."

As a result, Gopnik adds, the birds "are beautifully adapted to learn about this world," but "children are beautifully adapted to learn about many possible worlds."

This strikes me as relevant to Stuart Kauffman's concept of adjacent possible. It would seem in this case that the adjacent possible for crows is simply a direct extension of acquired physical knowledge (put in a pebble and water rises) whereas for children the adjacent possible consists not only of extended knowledge but actually an extrapolation using imagination, analogy and metaphor. So that might prompt the question, does extensive childhood reading increase one's capacity to imagine, to think analogously and to think metaphorically and does that in turn improve one's problem solving capability?

It will incur a revision of belief

From The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A great explication about the differences between risk and uncertainty as well as an epistemological discussion about what is knowable and how we know it.

Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.

Distinguishing fish from bubbles

From Do dolphins think nonlinearly? from e! Science News, an excellent example of Kauffman's Adjacent Possible concept in play.

Research from the University of Southampton, which examines how dolphins might process their sonar signals, could provide a new system for human-made sonar to detect targets, such as sea mines, in bubbly water. When hunting prey, dolphins have been observed to blow 'bubble nets' around schools of fish, which force the fish to cluster together, making them easier for the dolphins to pick off. However, such bubble nets would confound the best human-made sonar because the strong scattering by the bubbles generates 'clutter' in the sonar image, which cannot be distinguished from the true target.

Taking a dolphin's sonar and characterising it from an engineering perspective, it is not superior to the best human-made sonar. Therefore, in blowing bubble nets, dolphins are either 'blinding' their echolocation sense when hunting or they have a facility absent in human-made sonar.

The study by Professor Tim Leighton, from the University's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), and colleagues examined whether there is a way by which dolphins might process their sonar signals to distinguish between targets and clutter in bubbly water.

In the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Professor Leighton along with Professor Paul White and student Gim Hwa Chua used echolocation pulses of a type that dolphins emit, but processed them using nonlinear mathematics instead of the standard way of processing sonar returns. This Biased Pulse Summation Sonar (BiaPSS) reduced the effect of clutter by relying on the variation in click amplitude, such as that which occurs when a dolphin emits a sequence of clicks.

Professor Leighton says: "We know that dolphins emit sequences of clicks and the amplitude of each click can vary from one to the next, so that not all the clicks are the same loudness. We asked, what if this variation in amplitude was not coincidental, but instead was key to distinguishing fish from bubbles.

"These clicks were shown to identify targets when processed using nonlinear mathematics, raising the question of whether dolphins also benefit from such mathematics. The variation in amplitude of these clicks is the key: it produces changes in the echoes which can identify the target (fish) in the bubble net, where human-made sonar does not work.

"Although this does not conclusively prove that dolphins do use such nonlinear processing, it demonstrates that humans can detect and classify targets in bubbly water using dolphin-like sonar pulses, raising intriguing possibilities for dolphin sonar when they make bubble nets."

The frontiers of knowledge and the leaps of innovation, advancing a sonar click at a time.

Complex ideas transmitted across time

From The limits of universalism by Henry A. Kissinger

Such an effort must be based on an awareness of our cultural heritage—the preservation of which is a vast challenge in our social media and Internet age. The generations brought up on books were obliged to internalize concepts and think through complex ideas transmitted across time. When information is acquired by being “looked up” on the Internet, a surfeit of information may inhibit the acquisition of knowledge, and respect for it. When facts are disaggregated from their context and called up only when needed, they risk losing the coherence of historical perspective. As Burke wrote, “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

When identity is established by a consensus of episodic “friends” on social media pages, the immediate may overwhelm the important. Reaction to stimuli may transcend reflection on substance. Overcoming this danger may be the ultimate cultural task for the Burkean conservative.

Inheritance and a point of departure

From The limits of universalism by Henry A. Kissinger

Burke confronted the conservative paradox: Values are universal, but generally have to be implemented as part of a process, that is to say, gradually. If they are implemented without respect for history or circumstance, they invalidate all traditional restraints. Burke sympathized with the American Revolution because he considered it a natural evolution of English liberties. Burke opposed the French Revolution, which he believed wrecked what generations had wrought and, with it, the prospect of organic growth.

For Burke, society was both an inheritance and a point of departure. As he wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, “[T]he idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement.” A society proceeding in this spirit will discover that “in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete.”

Hence prudence is “in all things a virtue, [and] in politics the first of virtues.” Its practice yields a politics which, as Burke wrote in November 1789,

lead[s] us rather to acquiesce in some qualified plan that does not come up to the full perfection of the abstract idea, than to push for the more perfect, which cannot be attained without tearing to pieces the whole contexture of the commonwealth.

The gaps between our assumptions and reality

The Science of Expectation: Using Humor To Understand Creativity by Sam McNerney.

There is a trade-off between heuristic knowledge that is readily available and can be deployed at the drop of a hat and analytical knowledge that requires time and diligence and that is more likely to be useful. Heuristic assumptions yield answers that are usefully right but not reliably right, the answer is good enough most of the time. For many less consequential issues, that is sufficient. Still it would be nice if our heuristic assumptions had a means of becoming more accurate over time so that we had both speedy decision-making as well as better decision-making.

In this article, it is posited that humor is the means by which the brain refines and improves heuristic assumptions.

In the book Inside Jokes cognitive scientists Matthew Hurley, Dan Dennett and Reginald Adams explore humor, jokes, and mirth with an evolutionary lens. They begin with the premise that the brain simplifies the world by creating and relying on a never-ending series of assumptions. This cognitive shortcut allows us to comfortably exist in the day-to-day without having to worry about trivial matters, but mistakes are inevitable and the brain sometimes guesses incorrectly. Mirth, according to the scientists, is an evolutionary adaptation that evolved to reward the brain when it corrects a mistaken assumption about the world; it helps our neurons stay on the lookout for the gaps between our assumptions and reality.

Humor takes advantage of this cognitive system by delivering super normal stimuli in the same way Big Macs and pornography deliver super normal stimuli for our appetite and libido. Like a good chef or porn star, a good comedian reverse engineers the mind to create jokes that generate the most mirth.

These results falsify the claim that Morton physically mismeasured crania based on his a priori biases

Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim by Nicholas Wade. This is disappointing. I had a long run of reading Stephen Jay Gould's articles and books and found them erudite and entertaining. I particularly enjoyed his The Mismeasure of Man and have occassionally used his example of measuring brain capacity to illustrate the subtle influence of unconscious bias.

And now it appears that it was Gould who was biased.

Scientists have often been accused of letting their ideology influence their results, and one of the most famous cases is that of Morton’s skulls — the global collection amassed by the 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton.

In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.

But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.

“Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate his data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould,” they write in the current PLoS Biology.

Dr. Gould, who died in 2002, based his attack on the premise that Morton believed that brain size was correlated with intelligence. But there is no evidence that Morton believed this or was trying to prove it, said Jason E. Lewis, the leader of the Pennsylvania team. Rather, Morton was measuring his skulls to study human variation, as part of his inquiry into whether God had created the human races separately (a lively issue before Darwin decreed that everyone belonged to the same species).

In his book, Dr. Gould contended that Morton’s results were “a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions.” This fudging was not deliberate, Dr. Gould said, but rather an instance of unconscious doctoring of data, a practice he believed was “rampant, endemic and unavoidable” in science. His finding is widely cited as an instance of scientific bias and fallibility.

But the Penn team finds Morton’s results were neither fudged nor influenced by his convictions. They identified and remeasured half of the skulls used in his reports, finding that in only 2 percent of cases did Morton’s measurements differ significantly from their own. These errors either were random or gave a larger than accurate volume to African skulls, the reverse of the bias that Dr. Gould imputed to Morton.

“These results falsify the claim that Morton physically mismeasured crania based on his a priori biases,” the Pennsylvania team writes.

Dr. Gould did not measure any of the skulls himself but merely did a paper reanalysis of Morton’s results. He accused Morton of various subterfuges, like leaving out subgroups to manipulate a group’s overall score. When these errors were corrected, Dr. Gould said, “there are no differences to speak of among Morton’s races.”

Gould was always something of a lightning rod but that was part of what made him fun to read. You felt that here was someone unconstrained by convention, willing to tackle anything and bringing an inspiring breadth and depth of knowledge to every inquiry.

So I am left a little disillusioned to find a hero's reputation tarnished. What is particularly striking to me though are two items. I do not recall being aware at the time of reading The Mismeasure of Man, that Gould's analysis was not based on a physical replication of Morton's measurements. I think I must have assumed that he did. That assumption combined with his credibility made for a powerful argument. Back to the old time religion - Trust but verify even from trusted sources, Never assume, etc.

The second striking item is the time frame. The Mismeasure of Man was published in 1981, excited much comment, was quite influential and among the reasons for its influence was the striking claim of Gould that Morton had been subtly and unconsciously influenced by his own biases. 31 years later, someone actually tests the data by reproducing the experiment.

Sometimes it seems as if we don't deserve the scientific method because we are so casual about it. Gould had a good story and we ran with that for a whole generation before anyone bothered to validate the data - Step 1 for any significant claim.

Oh dear.

UPDATE: This article, When Bad Theories Happen to Good Scientists by Matt Ridley would seem to suggest that the 31 year lag between proposition and testing might be because we want to believe that in the olden days, scientists were biased and racially prejudiced. When Gould came along with a good story confirming that assumption, we allowed our confirmation bias to play so well that we never got around to testing Gould's assertion for thirty one years. Someday we will learn to be humble. But not today.

We are rich and blessed to have such young men

I saw this article (The Victims: Real movie heroes saved their sweethearts during Colo. ambush by Caitlin Gibbons) the other day but decided not to post about it. Too great a tragedy.

Three young men are being hailed as heroes for their old-fashioned chivalry and courage under fire in saving the lives of their girlfriends.

While using their bodies as shields, Matt McQuinn, 27, Jonathan Blunk, 26, and Alex Teves, 24, were killed in the worst mass shooting in US history.

Then my son, just returned from Philmont, sent me the following article, Boy Scouts use talents to aid scout leader at Philmont by Aric Mitchell, and I reconsidered.

Ric Cooper, a resident of Northwest Arkansas, felt the clutching at his chest too late to turn back on Trek 4 of the Philmont Boy Scout Camp near Cimarron, N.M.

All he could get out was the word “Jim,” and he was tumbling backwards.

“Jim,” because the second chaperone on this journey was Dr. Jim Hattabaugh, principal at Trinity Junior High School in Fort Smith and second of a required two adult chaperones on the trip.

Cooper didn’t have time to call out the names of the nine boys with him: Brian Boatright, Eric Boltuc, Joseph Boltuc, Eli Hattabaugh, Ian Hattabaugh, Cameron Mask, Matthew Schultz, Alex Sharum, and Joseph Smith.

He didn’t need it. Instantly, the members of Boy Scout Troop 3 sprung to action and did “exactly what needed to be done to save the man’s life,” Hattabaugh said.

Jim rushed to Cooper, who’d taken “a five-foot drop,” according to 17-year old Subiaco Academy student Joseph Boltuc, and began chest compressions.

Then, Jim’s son Eli, a 17-year old student of Fort Smith Southside High School, stepped in and “gave two breaths” followed by another set of 30 chest compressions. Halfway through, “he started gasping for air and came back,” Eli said.

Meanwhile, Mask, Smith, and Sharum, set up a tarp using “ropes, hiking sticks, stuff like that,” said Smith, a 15-year old student of Fort Smith Northside High School. Their goal: to keep Cooper safe from the raging July sun.

“We (Mask, Sharum, Smith) actually stuck together most of the time. The wind coming through the trees kept sounding like there were cars coming down the roads, so me and Cameron went down to see if there actually was,” said Smith.

Boatright, Eric, Ian, and Schultz, lit out for the Cyphers Mine base camp to report the emergency.

The four boys made the run after three hours on the trail carrying 45-pound backpacks on an uphill journey of 2,000 feet, Jim Hattabaugh added.

They had four miles in front of them starting from an altitude of 11,000 feet.

As a scout master, I am proud of these young men. But there is something more.

News is news but it isn't always the type of news we need or want.

These articles are a testament to what is too often overlooked. We get caught up in the minutiae of things to worry about. We anticipate decline. We bemoan the loss of social cohesion and spiral of negativity. There is plenty of misery and tragedy upon which we can fixate.

It is too easy to overlook that there are many, many young men and growing boys out there eager and able to do the right thing, in a split second, as best they can and no matter the cost. We should bring attention to them and celebrate them. That is news worth reading. We are rich and blessed to have such young men.

Jonathan Blunk, 26
Matt McQuinn, 27
Alex Teves, 24
Brian Boatright
Eric Boltuc, 14
Joseph Boltuc, 17
Eli Hattabaugh, 17
Ian Hattabaugh, 14
Cameron Mask, 17
Matthew Schultz, 16
Alex Sharum, 15
Joseph Smith, 15

Competence without comprehension

From ‘A Perfect and Beautiful Machine’: What Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Reveal About Artificial Intelligence by Daniel C. Dennett.

What Darwin and Turing had both discovered, in their different ways, was the existence of competence without comprehension. This inverted the deeply plausible assumption that comprehension is in fact the source of all advanced competence. Why, after all, do we insist on sending our children to school, and why do we frown on the old-fashioned methods of rote learning? We expect our children's growing competence to flow from their growing comprehension. The motto of modern education might be: "Comprehend in order to be competent." For us members of H. sapiens, this is almost always the right way to look at, and strive for, competence. I suspect that this much-loved principle of education is one of the primary motivators of skepticism about both evolution and its cousin in Turing's world, artificial intelligence. The very idea that mindless mechanicity can generate human-level -- or divine level! -- competence strikes many as philistine, repugnant, an insult to our minds, and the mind of God.

and later;

It was, indeed, a strange inversion of reasoning. To this day many people cannot get their heads around the unsettling idea that a purposeless, mindless process can crank away through the eons, generating ever more subtle, efficient, and complex organisms without having the slightest whiff of understanding of what it is doing.

Is this not a mirror of much of the current political discourse between the centralizers who wish to achieve outcomes through directed action and the laissez-faire people who trust to an uncontrolled process as long as it bounded within some moral or ethical code (as Adam Smith presupposed). Both world views have a logical basis but only one is frequently demonstrated in reality. Enthusiastic seekers of justice believe that it can be attained through sufficient intellectual artifice. Every utopia predicated on the intelligence and rationality of man (or some small cadre of thought leaders of men), though, seems to come crashing down, not before having wreaked terrible injustice and inflicted suffering far and wide. But all of it logical. It calls to mind Thomas Wolfe’s “the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” There would seem to be a groundedness or pragmatism in the culture of the Anglosphere (or perhaps it is the attributes of agency, individualism and skepticism) which tends to forestall the worst excesses of scientific behaviorism and logical zeal.

In contrast, there are those believers in freedom and liberty who rely on the mysterious forces of dispersed individual decision-making, the chaos of the marketplace and the wisdom of crowds. Time and again, when exercised within some constraining moral or philosophical framework, the individual agent, market and the crowds end up delivering superior outcomes to those achieved by credentialed, cognitive, or inherited elites.

The markets and crowds deliver competence without comprehension while reason-based utopias seeking to achieve desired outcomes time and again founder on the human fallibilities of those deemed the best and the brightest and deliver up only failure and human misery.

It seems that the challenge is not to choose one or the other but to recognize the circumstances under which one may be more likely to yield success than the other, or really, how to blend a balance of the two for the particular situation. My guess is that the bedrock recipe is maximum liberty with a rare dash of occassional centralism.

Highfalutin but fun speculation.

Inattentional deafness, confirmation bias and lying

From Introducing "inattentional deafness" - the noisy gorilla that's missed by Christian Jarrett.

Inattentional Blindness and Inattentional Deafness would appear to be kissing cousins with the logical fallacy of confirmation bias.

I am currently involved in a neighorhood project to protect a nature preserve from being converted to a recreational hiking trail against the wishes of the neighbors. The advocacy group who are pushing the agenda appear to neighbors to be blatant liars in how they represent information neighbors have shared with them.

In faciliated sessions where the advocates are facilitators, neighbors will offer up a criticism of the project and the facilitator will record it on the flip chart as a positive comment. A neighbor will meet with an advocate and express opposition to the project and then the advocate will relay the conversation indicating that the neighbor was in support.

This comes across as blatant lying and misrepresentation.

A more charitable view is that the advocates are just so zealous that they suffer from confirmation bias. They are so convinced of the goodness of their project that they are incapable of comprehending alternate perspectives, a suspension of theory of mind. They hear only that which they expect or wish to hear.

What Inattentional Blindness and Inattentional Deafness suggest is that the problem might be even more deeply rooted. That the advocate is so focused on their own weltanschauung that they literally do not hear an alternate argument. It is not that they have heard the alternate argument and have cognitively screened out that which they did not wish to hear. Rather, they simply did not hear what they did not wish to hear.

An intriguing speculation. It goes a little bit against human nature to be quite that charitable but if we wish to think the best of our fellow man, that is one avenue to take.