Today I learned... [insert what you read about]

InquilineKea
Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:42:38 +0000

oh what the heck…

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Basically, in the informational age, there is informational overload, that is, you can only learn and access a very minute subset of all of the information that you can theoretically access. That means that search and organization of the information become especially important. The individual only retains a small subset of information that he has access to - however - he can use key words to tag each stockpile of information that he encounters - such that he will no longer have to search for information that he has already encountered. Thus, all information previously encountered becomes very easy to access with the help of key words. There is a “natural selection” that goes on in “memetic retention” - that is, a person is likely to remember only a small subset of all the experiences he encounters - and environmental factors determine which one of those experiences are more likely to be retained than others.

Moreover, efficiency is key. There are inhibitory mechanisms that often prevent people from realizing “passive interests”/“passive incentives”. But yet, if the inhibitory mechanisms are removed, people can do much more. Think about it as this - the elements of time and effort are often inhibitory mechanisms that prevent people from doing a lot. If there were no inhibitory mechanisms in say, talking to someone (because the person was next to you), then the net result is that there is a larger net total of words exchanged between the two people, even though it was always theoretically possible for you to have the exchange with the same number of words. But what is theoretically possible is rarely realized.

Where information (on the individual level) is theoretically unlimited, one has to be wise to figure out which bits of information are (a) relevant to one’s own needs and (b) reliable. One may also be wise to split up (a) into (a1) information relevant in the immediate present and (a2) information of potential relevance in the far future. With informational storage and search algorithms, there is little reason to constrain (a2).

To be able to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information is a valuable skill. Those with such skills can be able to access websites with potentially high ratios of (unreliable info) to (reliable info) without falling prey to the (unreliable info). The fact is that such websites may often include “insider information” and informal knowledge that “official” websites would never disclose, even if the “official” websites have very low ratios of (unreliable info) to (reliable info). Nonetheless, the informal websites with high ratios of (unreliable info) to (reliable info) often contain more net knowledge than the formal websites with low ratios of (unreliable info) to (reliable info). Unfortunately, most humans may never have the intelligence to develop such skills.

Do not be too restrictive in the informational age. Those who dislike you will ignore you (and are unlikely to hinder you in your efforts in the future). But those who like you are likely to contact you. Sometimes, the indiscriminate befriending of people can land you a new contact who is more in tune with your interests than anyone you have met in real life - even if you had to befriend 500 people just for that new contact who is more in tune with such interests of yours. *

For me, information redundancy is undesirable. However, all past information is technically redundant information. Yet, the change in scene and in perspective is enough to render the information non-redundant, for the content of information changes along with a change in context.

The most important fields of the future are neurobiology, information technology, and cognitive psychology. This applies to ALL fields in ALL areas.

Finally, some old wisdom. People are more productive in some environments than others (I would say because of the lack of “inhibitory factors in producing such ideas in other environments”). Somehow, I first wrote this on Facebook, since I’m somehow most productive in putting thoughts into words on Facebook. I did not expect that I would be able to write as long as I did here - but nonetheless, I just started out informally, and let my stream of consciousness guide me. And I ended up with this very thoughtful post.


- this seems to be the rationale behind spam as well =P
EDIT 2: There also needs to be a variation in stimuli exposure in order to produce the types of stimuli that one is best suited to remember/use. That is why stimuli redundancy/informational redundancy is bad.


It also seems that variation in genotypes is necessary to exploit unfulfilled niches (just as variation in strategies is necessary to exploit unfulfilled opportunities). So variation in stimuli exposure is necessary to provide the information that is most useful to a specific person (and then natural selection governs which stimuli survive/which organisms survive/which strategies survive).

You forget the vast majority of stimuli that your brain processes. You forget the vast majority of your past conversations. You forget the vast majority of the instances that you have had fun. But through all of your experiences - your brain naturally selects the events/stimuli that are most memorable for you - and those events/stimuli are the events/stimuli that you will remember in the future (and hence explain the entire point of your learning - even though you forget the vast majority of what you learn). This is also why it’s important to vary the materials that you’re exposed to - since you tend to remember a little bit from each instance - and that little bit of information is oftentimes the information that is most relevant to your needs/desires.

of course one can be successful without preparing for the unexpected. That is, if the unexpected does not occur. There’s a probability that it will not occur, and for most people, that probability is small. The fact that it is small indicates that we should prepare for the unexpected.

After all, Hitler didn’t provide winter jackets for his troops on the Russian campaign. There was a possibility of success before the winter set in… But the possibility for success was rather low. Consequently, Hitler’s plans were severely hampered. Given a number of similar incidents, a few generals would have been successful. But most of them would not be. Moreover, since such intransigence is usually representative of a personality style that encompasses intransigence, most people with such personality style ultimately have to encounter many such experiences - a good percentage of them which may prove deadly.

There are differences between types of intransigence though. Some people are merely intransigent with their decisions w.r.t societal influences - these people may turn out remarkably successful. Marie Curie is one of the most famous examples. Many of them did consider alternative possibilities of their actions - and prepared for them as such. On the other hand, there are people who are intransigent with their decisions w.r.t alternative outcomes - that is, they do not consider alternative outcomes to their approach. These intransigents usually fail - because of their inability to consider other outcomes.

Sure, I could survive by reading math and science all day long. But if I prepare for nothing else, I have a higher probability of catastrophic failure than otherwise. And the fact is - catastrophic failure is likely for those who do not consider alternative possibilities.

A mature understanding of probability also demands that the person recognize what is significant in himself, and what is not so significant about himself. He realizes that the number of people who he knows is a very small sample size - and definitely not representative of that of the world. He might have a sense of intuition on which characteristics of his peer group are representative of that of the world’s citizens in general, and on which characteristics are not so representative. And he realizes which events of his are attributable to pure luck, and that the laws of pure probability establish that the chances of his achieving yet another incident of such luck are low - provided that there is an independence of the two events.

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An appreciation of probability demands an understanding of the central limit theorem, as well as the understanding of whether a group is representative of yet another group.

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He may come upon the Nobel laureate webpage and identify traits of Nobel laureates that he shares with them - but that does not automatically make him special. Instead, he can identify traits of Nobel laureates that are shared by a small segment of humanity, the vast majority of whom do not win Nobel prizes. That is, if he fits into this small segment of humanity, it is extremely unlikely that he will win the Nobel prize, even if that small segment of humanity is more likely than average to win the Nobel Prize

The representative sample. Those who give advice have only been exposed to a small sample of environments that the advice can be applied to. The question is, is that small sample of environments a representative sample of ALL potential environments that the person desires to advice about?

And if it isn’t, it’s often because the environment the person has been exposed to is DIFFERENT from the environment that the person intends to give his advice about.

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One must distinguish between (a) short-term impulses that quickly go away without fulfillment and (b) long-term impulses that will not quickly go away and thus require long-term thought suppression. In the case of (b), some action must be taken in order to maintain efficiency in other tasks.


Law of unintended consequences
Information redundancy (this is how I kicked my computer gaming habit =P - too much informational redundancy made me quite disgusted towards them)
Probability weighting functions and law of large numbers (if we eliminate death by aging, then the most risky careers will take a huge hit and people won’t even drive anymore - because all small events tend towards 1)
control group (and a very acute realization of all factors that cannot be controlled)
confidence intervals with more non-redundant info/data
memes: is the power of the meme related to its ability to utilize the “potential/latent interests” of people who happily receive and pass the meme on?
Thoughts on Intuition:
Sciam Mind Jun/July 2007:


Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerburg, and a number of other IT luminaries dropped out of college. Their decisions were rather intuitive decisions (or so I would think). Perhaps those intuitive decisions came out right. On the other hand - they only form a very small subset of college dropouts - the fact is that they form a large enough group as to demand another group on surveys by educational level.

Question:
How could intuitions of Stone Age brains sometimes be so accurate in judging information age events?

neural plasticity

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"Historically, developmentalists have been indifferent or hostile to evolutionary
modeling because the do not see how such dynamic historical models help them
develop the structural and developmental mechanisms characteristic of living
organisms. This stance is no longer fruitful. We now understand that evolutionary
models do not prove anything. Rather, they suggest hypotheses to be explored and
substantiated. Adaptationist arguments are essential because they suggest the function
of homologous and analogous physiological structures. Charting the development of
behaviorally-relevant characteristics, such as brain size and social organization, the
structure of brains and vocal apparati, using the paleographic evidence, sheds critical
light on the path to successfully modeling biological development from the level of
cell to that of the complex animal or human society. We increasingly need
researchers to explore the synergy between development and evolution. This ill-
tempered book could have been written in that spirit, but it was not. "
Herbert Gintis

Question 2:
When there is an unexploited niche…, [Is the severity of a pathogenic illness dependent on the number of pathogens?](Is the severity of a pathogenic illness dependent on the number of pathogens?)

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[The Sequence of the Human Genome – Venter et al. 291 (5507): 1304 – Science](http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/291/5507/1304), [FOXP2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](FOXP2 - Wikipedia)

What a Researcher Can Do:
Feb 16, 2007 10:11 PM

Anyways, I just took a Poincare walk and wrote this…

A researcher has several choices:

1) to write/produce
2) to read
3) to take a “Poincare walk”
4) to experiment/play around [mostly for the experimenters/modelers]

In any case, I have coined the new word “Poincare walk” when I decide to do something that requires absolutely no focus/mental activity for a while, in hopes of changing my mental state sufficiently enough that I may focus on nonlinear thoughts that may lead to some sort of insight. It is of course, named after Poincare’s infamous insight-producing walks.

Obviously, each reinforces each other. One must learn by reading and by producing output of one’s own. The researcher who hopes to integrate several fields together must read far more than the researcher focused on a single problem. That researcher, consequently, must devote more of his time to reading, and less to something else. Meanwhile, writing/producing is how the researcher gets his word out. The speed of it is determined by (a) the number of elements in the researcher’s active memory, and the “access speed” from long-term memory to active memory of the researcher (as well as various emotional factors).

So what is the point? I think that I’m overly focused on (2) - reading at the moment. Education mostly consists of (2), although the most successful education is arguably an ideal mix of (2) and (1). In any case, my desire is somehow to proceed to (1), soon, before I hit the Galois wall.

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6/22/07:
In any case, I must describe 2 in more detail. Reading. Now, an introduction to a particular field does not establish you as the master of the field. Nonetheless, you acquire information about the field - and a lot of that information is linked/mapped to information of a psychological nature (i.e. information about the field that is relevant to your ability to investigate it - how easy its concepts are to you, how long it takes for you to read some material on the field, and how the field compares to your original stack of knowledge). Acquiring psychologically relevant information about the field can be very enlightening - it makes you aware of your limitations the next time you encounter any material from that field (either on your own initiative or not on your own initiative - when you, say, suddenly hear about it in an incidental conversation). That is important - since if you realize the significance of the field and hear about it incidentally (perhaps you overhear a conversation of two people who took a course in the field) - it could influence your decision to investigate the field more thoroughly. Alternatively, it can also inform you that you probably shouldn’t pursue it more thoroughly.

With that all said, the sample knowledge you obtain of the field may not necessarily be a representative sample of all knowledge relevant to the field - in this case you may make a misinformed decision. The problem is knowing yourself - in knowing when you have acquired information that is a representative sample and in knowing when you have acquired information that is not a representative sample. This knowledge is intuitive and difficult to train oneself in formally.

With that said knowledge of a field can often be eventful in split-second decisions based on intuition. I may find 3 books, only one which I can take home free of charge. That is the sort of situation.

you’re not in a study mode all of the time and so the acquisition of such information can often pop up at a time when you’re thinking of something else
synonyms:
contingent upon/subject to the proviso of, ephemeral/temporary/transitory, vindicate/exonerate/exculpate,
notes:

When evaluating the “benefits/costs” of a decision - always think for yourself - would you have defined benefits/costs differently if you had chosen the other route? The example I have most in mind is that of early entrance. Sure, I’m glad I did early entrance because of the benefits associated with freeing myself from the restrictive environment of the high school. Nonetheless, if I stayed in high school - it’s entirely possible that I may have defined my benefits/costs differently - and that I would have valued that decision just as well. The problem is that I don’t know what I would have done had I stayed in high school. I can only project an outcome based on limited information - moreover - I certainly will not encounter all of the information that I have now had I gone that route.

so an understanding of conditional probability on the mathematical level often motivates an understanding of conditonal probability on an intuitive level that one can quickly pull out of one’s active memory (and actively apply it to situations)/
hence why thinking about a task on a deeper level often facilitates understanding. moreover it lowers activation energy needed to retrieve memory (as memory is more retrievable after repeats)

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Dec 31, 2006:

The counterargument that “people had shorter lifespans” is easily countered by the “correlation does not imply causation unless all other hypotheses are eliminated” argument, which is true. Because those shorter lifespans were due to (a) infant mortality and (b) infectious diseases.

I think that one of society’s main problems is that it places too much trust in people who have “proved themselves”. Yet, people who have “proved themselves” are often complacent and inflexible to change. They have no motivation to adapt, after all, they’ve always been successful in the past [a lot of this complacency is unconscious as well]. As a result, they really hamper things once they get into administrative positions.

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Alex wrote
at 9:45am
Very nice post. This is my first reading - I’ll have to read it again several times over to capture specific points.

I’d also like to address a few things.

1) implicit/latent interest. It is already theoretically possible for anyone to self-educate himself over the Internet and to work with professors to arrange a plan of self-study that allows him to effectively learn outside of courses. It is also theoretically possible for a person to homeschool himself all the way to college. However, the fact that those two options are theoretically possible does not necessarily mean that people will follow them. Rather, it could mean that there are potentially a large number of people who would be happier with this option than the current norm - but who do not realize this option yet. A movement with clear objectives that is well-publicized will capture the latent/unrealized/implicit interest that people have in this goal.
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Alex wrote
at 9:58am
2) search and organizational algorithms.

Since we live in the information age, where we can potentially access far more information that we can ever get a reliable hold on, we must find reliable search algorithms for such information. However, people often are not able to distinguish between the (a) relevant and (b) reliable sources of information - within a limited timeframe. While google is sometimes helpful in finding that information - there is much information that is not easily available on google - either due to low google page rank or due to its status in the deep web. Forums are sometimes the best sources of information for certain ideas or plans - although one must always rely on a form of skepticism in order not to be misled by them. Oftentimes, queries are better answered by a group pf people on an online forum than by google itself (due to the fact that the group of people on that online forum possess specialized knowledge that is not google-able).
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Alex wrote
at 10:01am
That being said, the many nuances of the English language allow for similar queries to be processed with different words. Thus, a search for a particular question may not land the end-user his desired information (or he may find information that is less desirable than information that was phrased differently than his search query and consequently irretrievable at that point for the end-user). Moreover, we must not neglect the psychological motivations behind latent/unrealized interest. People who are more open are more likely to realize that their research may lead to potentially desirable unexpected consequences and are consequently more likely to find latent/unrealized interest than those who are less open.
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Alex wrote
at 10:05am
There is also the issue of informational organization.

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=CC50D7BF-E7F2-99DF-34DA5FF0B0A22B50

is an interesting development that may come in the future.

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As we can only hold a limited distinct number of items in our memory at one point (due to the cognitive bottleneck idea of George Miller) - and as memory is notoriously fallible, we cannot hold onto every important idea that we find. Indeed some people may realize that a prior website that they impulsively accessed one day may be more useful to them at a later day. And since they have not taken the care to save it, they may have lost that website forever. If one has already identified the sources that are most relevant/reliable for him, he may find that his organization of such sources may make it easier for him to access such sources in the future. Search algorithms and key words are a key way of doing this. I use Gmail to store particularly insightful webpages - and use keywords
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Alex wrote
at 10:07am
to search for that information that is of most relevance/reliability that I have identified.

The person who is able to accurately pinpoint each and every point of information that is most relevant and reliable to his needs should be a comparatively satisfied person. The problem is that very few people are able to do this. Many people are notoriously subject to their cognitive biases and consequently unable to form an objective opinion of their sources (and are misled by them).

Of course people are also prone to attentional lapses and cognitive biases. There could be a way to evaluate each source of information.
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Alex wrote
at 10:15am
Another thing that I have noticed is that our society is a hierarchy of trained specialists. We tend to trust our trained specialists, and yet

One famous example is the medical profession. Some of you may have heard of the recent health scare regarding the drug Avandia. The fact is - even though safer anti-diabetic drugs like metformin were available - and that Avandia was known to have cardiovascular complications PRIOR to FDA approval - that many doctors prescribed Avandia to their patients even though they may not have informed the patients of each and every drug and the literature pertaining to each and every drug. While the warnings were on the labels - patients are notorious for not reading such labels. Perhaps patients would be better served by smart agents instead of “trained professionals.” The mere fact that trained professionals disagree about a particular topic means that they can be wrong - yet - patients often take them as authority due to the education of them.
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Alex wrote
at 10:17am
Of course trained professionals are less likely to follow unscrupulous “quack” remedies than patients are and if a random trained professional was taken out of a random sample, and a patient was taken out of a random sample, I would be inclined to trust the trained professional over the patient. HOWEVER, some patients do read the research journals behind medication, and do read the news surrounding each medication, and can be even better informed than such trained professionals. It is also of note that the interests of trained professional and patient do not always converge with one another - and this leads to conflict.

One interesting topic that i have read is that of “special agents” for each user- this I found from Bart Kosko’s “Heaven in a Chip”
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Alex wrote
at 10:21am
This is one of my favorite articles:
[List of cognitive biases - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](List of cognitive biases - Wikipedia)

Yet, most people are unlikely to realize the word “cognitive bias”, much less likely to appreciate the possibility that their decisions are fully based around such biases. This has been one of the most important articles I have ever read on Wikipedia - and one of the most important articles that anyone can bother to read. One of the biases is the familiarity bias - this leads to submission to the maxim that “classroom teaching is probably the best idea - since I don’t realize any alternatives to it” - even though such alternatives do exist. They are just not actively suggested. People are notoriously social creatures who follow the behavior of those around them. I can only owe my independence to the online forums that made me realize that there were people far more intelligent and thoughtful than my school classmates, for example.
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Alex wrote
at 10:44am
[Amazon.com: Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence (9780029252123): David Perkins: Books](http://www.amazon.com/Outsmarting-IQ-Emerging-Learnable-Intelligence/dp/0029252121/ref=cm_lm_byauthor_prod_0_0/102-9755210-9099301)
One of my favorite books (and very relevant to this)
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Most Influential Articles:
Scientific American:
The Expert Mind, Intuition, A Digital Life, The Tyranny of Choice, Myth of the Teenage Brain, Sick of Poverty, Raven Intelligence, Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth, The Neurobiology of the Self, an Earth Without People, The Science of Lasting Happiness

(why am I only reading the behavioral science articles off Sciam?)

Science: GRE predicts academic outcomes for graduate students, Birth Order and Intelligence

Nature: Britannica vs. Wikipedia, Scent of Food Terminates Benefits of Calorie Restriction in Fruit Flies

Science Daily: Highly Accomplished People More Prone To Failure Than Others When Under Stress

Psychology Today (I know the magazine title sounds corny =P): Secrets of Happiness

Others:
The Seattle Times: Local News: An unpleasant “surprise”: higher risks from pollution

Adult Manifestations of Adolescent Talent in Science: A Longitudinal Study of 1983 Westinghouse Science Talent Search Winners (Subotnik, Steiner)

The Engine of Folly (Perkins)