Most of it is just noise

From The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. Page 13.

Meanwhile, if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn't. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine - but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.

When they fail they fail badly

From The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. Page 13.

Complex systems like the World Wide Web have this property. They may not fail as often as simpler ones, but when they fail they fail badly. Capitalism and the Internet, both of which are incredibly efficient at propagating information, create the potential for bad ideas as well as goods ones to spread.

3 terabytes

From The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver. Page 12.

The human brain is quite remarkable; it can store perhaps three terabytes of information. And yet that is only about one one-millionth of the information that IBM says is now produced in the world each day. So we have to be terribly selective about the information we choose to remember.

The source for the information is from IBM.

What is big data?
Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data.

And from Robert Birge in Human Brain.

The typical adult human brain weighs about 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms). It contains several billion neurons connected at a hundred trillion synapses. The male brain is bigger; typically 1,300–1,500 cubic centimeters while the female's is typically 1,200–1,350 cubic centimeters. Volume, however, is not necessarily a figure of merit. Neanderthals had very large brains. Whales and dolphins have bigger brains than humans.

Robert Birge (Syracuse University) who studies the storage of data in proteins, estimated in 1996 that the memory capacity of the brain was between one and ten terabytes, with a most likely value of 3 terabytes. Such estimates are generally based on counting neurons and assuming each neuron holds 1 bit. Bear in mind that the brain has better algorithms for compressing certain types of information than computers do.

I was astounded that the effect was so large

From The Marshmallow Study Revisited by Susan Hagen.

The original study, as the article indicates, established that the behavioral trait of self-control is strongly predicitive of life success and that to a significant degree, self-control at such a young age is an innate condition.

In this permutation of the classic experiment, what they have shown is that environmental circumstances also influence the actions of the child.

The Rochester team wanted to explore more closely why some preschoolers are able to resist the marshmallow while others succumb to licking, nibbling, and eventually swallowing the sugary treat. The researchers assigned 28 three- to five-year-olds to two contrasting environments: unreliable and reliable. The study results were so strong that a larger sample group was not required to ensure statistical accuracy and other factors, like the influence of hunger, were accounted for by randomly assigning participants to the two groups, according to the researchers. In both groups the children were given a create-your-own-cup kit and asked to decorate the blank paper that would be inserted in the cup.

In the unreliable condition, the children were provided a container of used crayons and told that if they could wait, the researcher would return shortly with a bigger and better set of new art supplies for their project. After two and a half minutes, the research returned with this explanation: "I'm sorry, but I made a mistake. We don't have any other art supplies after all. But why don't you use these instead?" She then helped to open the crayon container.

Next a quarter-inch sticker was placed on the table and the child was told that if he or she could wait, the researcher would return with a large selection of better stickers to use. After the same wait, the researcher again returned empty handed.

The reliable group experienced the same set up, but the researcher returned with the promised materials: first with a rotating tray full of art supplies and the next time with five to seven large, die-cut stickers.

[snip]

Children who experienced unreliable interactions with an experimenter waited for a mean time of three minutes and two seconds on the subsequent marshmallow task, while youngsters who experienced reliable interactions held out for 12 minutes and two seconds. Only one of the 14 children in the unreliable group waited the full 15 minutes, compared to nine children in the reliable condition.

"I was astounded that the effect was so large," says Aslin. "I thought that we might get a difference of maybe a minute or so… You don't see effects like this very often."

In prior research, children's wait time averaged between 6.08 and 5.71 minutes, the authors report. By comparison, manipulating the environment doubled wait times in the reliable condition and halved the time in the unreliable scenario. Previous studies that explored the effect of teaching children waiting strategies showed smaller effects, the authors report. Hiding the treat from view boosted wait times by 3.75 minutes, while encouraging children to think about the larger reward added 2.53 minutes.

The article focuses on this as being a nature versus nurture issue but I think that is the wrong formulation. I think about this sort of thing in terms of productivity. What conditions favor greater productivity? What this experiment seems to indicate is that 1) Innate self-control is significantly predictive (we knew that already), 2) that teaching habits of self-control can help increase productivity but only in the context of a stable system.

It seems to me that a corolary lesson of this experiment is a powerful endorsement for predictability (i.e. rule of law, systems constrained by checks and balances, etc.). Where there is high predictability, it rewards self-control and therefore more self-control is exercised. The more self-control exercised, the greater the opportunity for investment, experimentation, etc.

Recognizing objects in difficult situations means generalizing

A massive amount of single source quoting about to begin. I have been reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. A lot of good information brought together in a single place. Well written and sourced. New ideas and some with which I disagree but so well presented that it forces me to revisit my own position. I love this type of book.

Biologically, we are not very different from our ancestors. But some stone-age strengths have become information-age weaknesses.

Human beings do not have very many natural defenses. We are not all that fast, and we are not all that strong. We do not have claws or fangs or body armor. We cannot spit venom. We cannot camouflage ourselves. And we cannot fly. Instead, we have to survive by means of our wits. Our minds are quick. We are wired to detect patterns and respond to opportunities and threats without much hesitation.

"This need of finding patterns, humans have this more than any other animals," I was told by Tomas Poggio, an MIT neuroscientist who studies how our brains process information. "Recognizing objects in difficult situations means generalizing. A newborn baby can recognize the basic pattern of a face. It has been learned by evolution, not by the individual."

The problem, Poggio says, is that these evolutionary instincts sometimes lead us to see patterns when there are none there. "People have been doing that all the time," Poggio said. "Finding patterns in random noise."

Situations matter most

Prompted by David Brooks essay, What Moderation Means.

He makes the comment that:

The moderate does not believe that there are policies that are permanently right. Situations matter most.

While true, I would recast this somewhat. A moderate and an ideologist might share a common goal but the moderate pursues the goal within a context to which he remains responsive whereas the ideologist simply pursues the goal.

The best way to degrade a civilization

Jacques Barzun, whome I have excerpted a number of times over the years, passed away yesterday at 104. From A Jacques Barzun Reader.

In a high civilization the things that satisfy our innumerable desires look as if they were supplied automatically, mechanically, so that nothing is owed to particular persons; goods belong by congenital right to anybody who takes the trouble to be born. This is the infant's normal greed prolonged into adult life and headed for retribution. When sufficiently general, the habit of grabbing, cheating, and evading reciprocity is the best way to degrade a civilization, and perhaps bring about its collapse.

I wish I loved the Human Race

There are days when I share this sentiment.

"Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914"
by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

I wish I loved the Human Race.
I wish I loved its silly face
I wish I liked the way it walks,
I wish I liked the way it talks,
And when I'm introduced to one,
I wish I thought, What jolly fun!

The sensation of breathing a different air

George Orwell in his essay, England Your England

When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd. Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene. How can one make a pattern out of this muddle?

But talk to foreigners, read foreign books or newspapers, and you are brought back to the same thought. Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillarboxes. It has a flavour of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches in to the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantlepiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillarboxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.

Five-Story Book Mountain Library

From Magnificent Five-Story Book Mountain Library by Katie Hosmer.

Wonderful.