Psybertron Asks

All this recent negative stuff around football contrasts with the real thing seen as Barca visited Leverkusen last night.

Scrap handshakes ? That’s how to do it. Defenders laughing and congratulating Messi when he beats them. Messi continuing regardless as he is repeatedly mis-tackled, and coming back for more. Contrast the grace of Messi (again) with the graceless Ballack, fortunately dropped from Leverkusen’s squad for the game.

Interesting that Malcy MacKay actually suggested scrapping handshakes – to put the focus back on the game. Gentlemanly conduct is part of the game. Suarez could / should have been sent off before the kick-off – full marks to the ref for not doing so, so as to better manage the situation – and again at the end. Let’s hope the apologies are not hollow politics. The beautiful game needs grace.

[Though misery-guts German director of football Rudi Voller  wishes his players weren’t quite so enthusiastic about their opponent 😉 ]

Matt’s 2008 article on Philosophos – just capturing the link so I don’t lose it.

It’s customary to reckon Godfather III as the weakest of the trilogy; it happens to be my favourite, so I notice the fact. I also noticed this Simpson’s gag that reinforces the meme. Thanks to Jorn for the link.

“Moe Baby Blues,” Season 14 – Moe becomes Maggie’s caretaker, rescuing her from a standoff between Fat Tony’s crew and rival gangsters, moving them to tears with a paean to Maggie’s goodness.

“I ain’t cried like this since I paid to see Godfather III,”
Tony sobs.

Or does it ?

Tickled by this “high energy” physics story.

Apparently the potential of a particle hurtling round CERN’s LHC at its full power of several TeV’s (Tera 1,000,000,000,000. electron volts)

… is equivalent to the energy of …

… one whole mosquito in flight.

[Post Note : See ex-page-footer for the significance of the “fly on a windshield”.]

Ooh another fight. This one runs and runs – like any catchy black vs white meme. Of course militant secularism is a threat to religious faith – that’s its point by definition.

Sadly popular secularism has become a one-trick militant pony – whose sole purpose is to attack religion and/or faith in public. The professor for the public understanding of science would do well to focus on his job rather than shooting fish in a barrel – it sets such a poor example of what makes for quality science. It wouldn’t be an issue if science weren’t such a public shambles itself in these days of mass media, public funding and crass sound bites.

Roll on Alain deBotton. Or Zizek; taking sides in a battle to the death is never the best course.

[Post Note : From Zizek’s “Empty Wheelbarrow” –

“… clearly perceived by GK Chesterton who – in the very last pages of his Orthodoxy, the ultimate Catholic propaganda piece – exposed the deadlock of the pseudo-revolutionary critics of religion: they start by denouncing religion as the force of oppression that threatens human freedom; but in fighting religion, they are compelled to forsake freedom itself, thus sacrificing precisely what they wanted to defend: the atheist radical universe, deprived of religious reference, is the grey universe of egalitarian terror. Today the same holds for advocates of religion themselves: how many fanatical defenders of religion started by ferociously attacking secular culture and ended up forsaking religion itself, losing any meaningful religious experience?”

And the “militant” BHA gets one thing right at last;
Andrew Copson quoted in response to Baroness Warsi;

“In an increasingly non-religious and, at the same time, diverse society, we need policies that will emphasise what we have in common as citizens rather than what divides us.” 

Let’s focus on the humanity, rather than picking fights. I’m a fully paid up atheist member of the BHA, I support what it’s for – but not for being what it is against.]

Richard Price in TechCrunch (via David Gurteen).

The democratization of the web is good for the freedom, but not for the quality, of information. Of course if peer-review is too narrowly subject-matter focussed, the opposite “censoring” effect can distort and slow-down or even destroy the knowledge-evolution processes, but some level of editorial quality control (see Bruce Charlton) is needed to counter memetic spread of fashionable but dumb “reactionary” science.

Interesting.

Strangers, over
Friends, over
Brands.

I’m listening to the infamous William Lane Craig vs Christopher Hitchens “Does God Exist” debate, and I was reminded of Carl Sagan’s clear and simple (opening) statements of how pointless the cosmological / cosmogenetic first-cause “something from nothing” argument is as a basis for a “creator”. Craig leads off on this – before going off on a misunderstood summary of “fine-tuning” arguments against coincidence and improbability.

The theist is concerned primarily with “objectivity” and “evidence” of “great facts” – Jeez – yet says we mustn’t focus on “external arguments” for our individual beliefs and inner voices – Jeez. And shameless strawmen like “atheists say there is nothing wrong with rape” etc. Why am I listening to this ? (Just interested in why so many evangelical theists see Hitchens as having been slaughtered in this debate … 2 hours of it … but all the standard rehearsed arguments and tricks from the theist side so far.)

And lo and behold, Hitch leads off on the irony of the theist using “scientistic” arguments, physics and cosmology that could never have been available to the original prophets. Retrospective evidentialism – infinitely updatable hindsight – not worth arguing against. If that’s your argument, you win the undisprovable pointless point. And eventually we get to first cause  … see above.

Interesting that the riposte is basically agnosticism vs atheism. The “meta-why” argument. Why would you want “proof” – what would “proof” look like anyway ? It’s why I say non-theist. (Oooh, Craig also suggests non-theism.) Too important to be agnostic (evasive), too sceptical to expect proof – just balance of rational argument needed to “explain”. The wrong argument(s) – a non-debate.

The ubiquitous golden rule. Human solidarity.

I’m often guilty of confirmation bias. I have a particular world-view that favours balance across multi-levelled patterns, over extreme positions at any one level, so being an unfashionable position (in the blogosphere) I often latch onto examples that illustrate points that support my position. I was expecting Kahneman’s best selling “Thinking Fast and Slow” to be one long confirmation. In a sense it is, but it’s also a major disappointment in that it falls short and remains remarkably naive, for a Nobel-prize-winning effort.

OK, so there’s nowt so queer as folk, and psychology is everything when it comes to human behaviour in the world, even the world of economics. My agenda is the psychology of decision-making, how we use what we know to make (moral) decisions that govern our activities. So “the most important psychologist alive today”, also being an economics Nobel-laureate has to be a winning combination.

Kahneman’s book is full of “cognitive biases” that confound simple rational logic. The trouble is, his book is a summary of 30+ years research of his, with Amos Tversky and Nassim Taleb to name but two. So, if it’s a subject you’re interested in you’ve probably heard of most of them before, and seen references to most of the key experiments and case-studies, in works by others. If the concept of “cognitive biases” messing with our economic decisions as “rational agents” is new to you then Kahneman’s collection is definitely worth reading. His “prospect theory” overturns most utility-theory-based economics textbooks. But any economics that favours statistical objectivity over the subjectivity of its “subjects” has long been branded “autistic” – economics without social skills. Personally, I’ve already moved on.

In fact as I write this I’m a chapter or two from completing “Thinking Fast and Slow” and I’m documenting some criticisms in the hope Kahneman is about to overturn them in his conclusions.

(1) So many of the case studies and experiments are academics using their students as source material. One issue is that so many such “experiments” are questionnaire-based or if not the “real value” in the choices is nevertheless in an experimental context. However the biggest criticism is the participants – intelligent and educated, but still students – the lack of “wisdom” involved.

(2) Much of the book, the title is a reference to the fact, is about System 1 and System 2 thinking. 1 being intuitive and immediate (fast) 2 being considered and calculating (slow). Clearly the subjective psychological angle of 1 is constantly traded against the objectively reasoned angle of 2, and in particular – we are often talking about academic subject matter experts here – how 1 interferes with even expert judgements applied to the inputs and outputs of 2. Seems strange to me to completely miss any opportunity to link this to the right-left-right brain behaviours (see Iain McGilchrist “The Master and his Emissary“. Where R-L-R = 1-2-1; That is inputs (and outputs) are filtered and interpreted by our intuition even if the process of deliberation is explicitly objective and rationally considered.)

(3) He makes a couple of asides about “something your grannie could have told you” when commenting on empirically demonstrated effects, but doesn’t seem to pick up on the existence of wisdom in adages like “a bird in the hand” or “possession is 9/10ths”. The biases in accounting for cost and risk vs strict statistical odds for losses and gains are not some perversion of rationality – they are refinements of rationality. Long run odds may be relevant to actuaries but are irrelevant to individuals – we don’t live by endless streams of binary choices with clear odds, such as those presented in the experimental tests, not every swing has a roundabout. Heuristics of what really matters are probably built into System 1 behaviours – eg: I’ve done the calculation, but on balance I’d prefer …

Wisdom says, life’s just complicated enough for simple logic to not be quite enough.

It’s almost as if (as I said before) we don’t actually want to believe what’s right before our eyes.
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