Year: 2017

Nudge – (erroneous) internalisation of small (but significant) facts – Scary!

Just a bookmarking post.

Hat-tip to @anitaleirfall for posting this link to Daniel Kahnemann’s “retraction” of underpowered statistical significance data in his Thinking Fast and Slow based on his earlier work with Amos Tversky.

Noted previously that super-statistician Taleb had profound effect on Kahnemann.

Kahnemann’s work is behind “Nudge“.
(He and Tversky much referenced in Thaler and Sunstein’s eponymous book?)

Taleb had been involved with Nudge with UK as well as US governments (The David Cameron story?). AND Taleb had indicated the problem with Nudge when, as so often, the wrong or false facts were used as the basis of Nudge, or unintended consequences resulted.

Does the technical error – which changes the significance of the facts – actually change the implied / accepted reality, prove it wrong or simply leave it unproven?

Many meta-meta-levels in this …. me internalising Kahnemann’s error – doing so correctly – making the right Kahnemann / Taleb / Nudge inference(s) – and the question of how significant these might be … as Nudges. (There’s a lot more in Thinking Fast and Slow – not all dependent on the above error.)

The real dilemma here is small facts
having much greater significance than might appear,
despite seeming insignificant and easy to internalise implicitly
– non-contentious, easy fit with prejudice –
yet being significantly wrong!

Story of our lives?

(Of course the opposite case exists too – as Kahnemann himself admits – failure to internalise a significant correct fact because it’s insignificant appearance.)

Irrational Science Portends Inhuman Transhumanism

References to Yuval Noah Harari’s “Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow” are coming thick and fast:

Andy Martin in The Independent “Transhumanism: The final chapter in humanity’s perpetual quest to be kitted out in comforting accessories.” (Previous brief reference solely on Information aspect).

Philip Kitcher in the LA Review of Books “Future Frankensteins: The Ethics of Genetic Intervention” (ht @KenanMalik) which is combined with a comparative review of “A Crack in Creation – Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution” By Jennifer A Doudna, Samuel H Sternberg.

Rory Fenton in the New Humanist – “Will progress kill humanism? – the idea that scientific knowledge might one day undermine democratic values.”

I still need to read Homo Deus and digest all three reviews, but initial thoughts are as follows:

In reverse order starting with Fenton in the NH, there is indeed a risk, one that exercises me daily, that science is indeed in danger of undermining our human values and democratic freedoms. But that is a narrow ill-conceived, an arrogant populist kind of science; a too reductionist, too objectively deterministic conception of science. It’s a dogmatic ideology I tend to refer to as scientism.

Fenton summarises one aspect of Harari’s position with the following:

“For humanists, free will is absolute, our sole driver. But advances in both neuroscience and computers are undermining this view. Harari cites experiments that seem to show a decision is made before the person is actually conscious of that decision, and fascinating experiments with people who have had their left- and right-brain hemisphere disconnected, who will then justify the same decision with different logic, depending on which hemisphere is being stimulated. Advances in computers that make machines intelligent, if not conscious, leave more scientists convinced that a similar computer-like process must govern the mind. Harari paints a picture of the brain making decisions automatically, which the conscious mind then justifies and takes credit for.”

At this point I can’t be sure whether this says as much about Fenton as it does Harari, but that paragraph captures both the dogma and the incoherence of the scientistic position. In doing so, we would be right to fear a disaster if machine automation were permitted to embody such a flawed scientific conception of reality. Those flaws become out of sight, out of mind, ignorantly accepted and ever more remote from human correction with the increasing pace and scale of automation of machine-learning, processing and control, and their embodiment in invisible layers of algorithms within the web on which we depend.  True rationality, true free-thought-based Humanism, needs to get a grip on the the reality of flaws in our scientific model before it accepts their mechanisation.

An irony often mentioned here is the implicit importance of democratic freedoms to “free-thought” humanism – maybe not “absolute, sole driver” as suggested above but pretty fundamental – yet falling hook line and sinker for the determinism of science banishing our conscious free-will from the functional picture. It has become a cliche to cite the Libet (and other) experiments supporting “a picture of the brain making decisions automatically, which the conscious mind then justifies and takes credit for” in support of that ludicrous position. (Much written about here, see also post-note.) Neuroscience and information science are undermining human freedom only because they are reinforcing the flawed – objectively deterministic, reductively scientistic – dogma rather than actually advancing. That dogma is in danger of becoming a bar to the self-correcting evolution of science and rationality itself. Let’s not automate it before we fix it by freeing the dogma.

Malik tweeting a reference to Kitcher’s review refers to:

“The superficiality of Yuval Noah Harari’s post-humanism.”

Amen to that. In fact it’s a summary of a quote from Kitcher “The gods glorified in the post-humanism of Homo Deus are capricious, superficial, and cruel” Malik’s thinking is generally nuanced and high quality, so it would seem to bear out my position on the rather pale imitation of scientific rationality being presented by the science offered.

Fenton is non-committal on his own position, simply presenting Harari’s warning:

As [flawed] science and technology undermine concepts of free will and a true inner “self”, Harari foresees a threat to the prospect of a world in which we value the uniqueness of each person and trust them to make their own lives. This is not something he necessarily welcomes; rather, his book serves as a warning about where we might be headed.

The reason we may be headed where we humanists should fear to tread is because the science we subscribe to is flawed in a dangerously dogmatic way. The content of science may always be contingent and self-correcting, but this is a more systemic problem we need to address directly. What makes science rational?

In concluding, Kitcher says:

“Readers of Homo Deus wait in vain … for a clear recognition of what has been achieved and a sensitive reflection on how it might valuably be employed. Harari’s stampede to the post-humanist future is unchecked by ethical ruminations.”

“Humanity surely needs more grown-ups.”

That last phrase nicely captures my problem with the populism of Science-101. Good science needs to grow up and respect a wiser view of rationality.

[To be continued, more reading to be done.]

I suspect it may turn out as Martin commented, that “Harari’s Homo Deus is endlessly fascinating.” Humanists who worship the rationality of public scientists need to be just as vocal supporting public interest in the humanities.

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[Post Note: Nigel Warburton writing on more android than generic AI, also invokes Libet:

Libet himself left some room for control.

He suggested we can think of ourselves as having “free won’t” rather than free will …

Whether or not he was right, the thrust of much recent neuroscience is that far more of what we fundamentally are occurs beyond the control of our conscious mind …. a bleak picture of what it is to be human, but it may be accurate. Perhaps we are closer to [the robot] in some respects than we might like to think.

“Closer; Far more; In some respects”; all carefully qualified, but odd again to find the philosopher so open to the bleak conclusion, even though he brings in many other sources that I use here. I too invoke “free-won’t” as the better model. Far from being bleak, the recognition that our conscious will is very small compared to our many layers of pre-conscious action is encouraging evidence that our consciousness really is an emergent, evolved capability of an intelligent, sentient mind. Furthermore it is evidence that it has evolved to be efficient. The kind of consciousness worth having. It’s the greedy reductionists that see “small” as some minor skirmish standing in the way of determinism’s total victory over humanity.]

Vive la Différence, one more time.

Despite writing much about this before (in the links below) I needed to collate again and add the recent Twitter exchange with Jonathan Haidt (also below):

Vive la Différence – April 2015 prompted by gender difference denial by Alice Roberts with Michael Mosely in BBC2 Horizon 29th September 2014. Gender difference is a good thing, better not to deny it.

Vive la Différence — Let’s Get Physical – March 2016 prompted by PC response to Djokovic opinions about earnings of female tennis players. (Maybe need to also to consider the recent BBC presenter earnings gender differential – more market than either psychological or physical gender differences – where market is probably most appropriate for celebrity media presenters – so long as BBC is expected to behave as a market player, but that’s a separate non-gender issue?) 

Vive La Différance, Again – Feb 2017 prompted my more general polarisation issues in our “Age of Extremes”. Gender is obviously binary (conventionally, there are of course grey, fuzzy exceptions) but true of so many this<>that labels.

The Google Gender & Diversity Furore – August 2017 my original reaction to the Google memo.

The reason to collect these previous links, a series of tweets via Jonathan Haidt regarding The Economist analysis of the Google Memo.

That is the reasoning and analysis are indeed thorough and nuanced, but the actual argument is too biased – clearly intended to attack the offender for his motives, rather than stick to the facts.

“gender balance as the engine
of intellectual diversity and innovation”

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[Post Note: An earlier recent “Brains and Gender” addition, and the biological never ends:

Race, Religion and Cultural Labels

Excellent piece by Kenan Malik (originally from last weekend’s Observer).

“words still fail us when we talk about muslims”

It’s what I call “identity politics“, [and more here] but the choice of words is invariably polemic or politically motivated rhetoric rather than objective reporting of facts. These are subjectively entangled issues, and the lazy solution is the familiar PC option of euphemistically avoiding the “offending” terms, but as Malik says we need to talk about them and we need to do it using language that recognises reality.

“trapped between hostility towards Muslims
& fear of creating such hostility
or of offending Muslims”

“a broader confusion about
the relationship between race and culture
[and religion and labelling]”

As some of the Twitter responses indicate, even when being careful, each use of each chosen word nevertheless reduces individual sentences to this <> not-this duality. This is inevitable if we are to consider each point, each distinction, one at a time. To reduce language to nebulous catch-all terms to talk about the whole, is to talk honestly about nothing. The trap of being caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the PC and the Polemic.

Kantian Introduction

Somewhere on the shelf behind me, I do have Critique of Pure Reason but I was pretty inexperienced in philosophy, 15 years or so ago, when I first (and last) tried to read it. I didn’t get very far. Which doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate Kant’s significance, just that I’ve formed my views on Kant from only second-hand readings (so far).

In “Five Books” Nigel Warburton interviews Adrian Moore on his 5 recommended Kant readings, four of which are Kant’s own writings. A seriously heavy-weight recommendation, but fortunately the interview style teases out some summary content.

It’s a good piece, recommended generally, but I wanted to capture this topical point:

We have knowledge only of phenomena — ‘phenomena’ is Kant’s word for appearances — and we [can never have any] knowledge of noumena … how things are in themselves.

Everything is completely causally determined in the phenomenal world. So how can there be freedom in the phenomenal world? The answer to that question is: there can’t be.

We have to regard our belief in our own freedom – [in our real noumenal selves] – as an article of faith.

I subscribe to the phenomenal / noumenal distinction – the world beyond our “experience” can never be “known”. Even though that boundary gets pushed back by prosthetic extensions to our experience of phenomenal properties all we are ever doing is building a better “model” of the noumenal according to the phenomenal and our Reasoning.

What bothers me is that causal determination is based on a Newtonian billiard-balls model, and the article of faith is a doubly convenient way to preserve faith in divine will too.

Whatever the value of what Kant has to say about limits to Reason – logical, ethical, categorical, the lot – what he has to say about free-will really cannot be taken seriously?

Rationality and Common Sense

Two things I need to write about.

Jared Diamond on Common Sense, in Edge 2017. “common sense should be invoked more often in scientific discussions, where it is sometimes deficient and scorned” Too right.

And “Why do we use reason to reach nonsensical conclusions?” from the New Humanist which I’ve been meaning to respond to since April 2017.

Closed-minded adherence to the technicalities and process of rational – would-be scientific – discourse, is often at the expense of sensible content. Don’t throw your intuitions out just yet.

Ergodic or non-Ergodic, that is the question.

Ergodicity is my new favourite word.

Some things are ergodic, some are not, they’re non-ergodic.
And rather than a definition (see also post-note below),
it deserves a riff …

A ubiquitous question is, does the end always justify the means or maybe no end ever justifies any & all means?

You might achieve the same physical state, some “objective” end, but we all know intuitively that sometimes the collateral damage to the rest of the cosmos and collective human psychology might outweigh the (local) objective result. For some things, when it comes to getting stuff done, we already know that the how is as important as the what.

The more complex the situation, the more we may need to consider, maybe also need to be seen to have considered, all the possible options and steps, and the more ingenuity, imagination, skill or craft may be needed to pick a best route to the desired solution.

At the level of society, politics, culture and psychology – the humanities – I doubt that would be considered remotely contentious, probably more like second nature. Duh – obvs!

But what about physics, science generally, the real world of natural philosophy? Surely “atoms” – the particles of matter and energy – don’t care how they got to some arrangement, do they? The same arrangement is the same result, surely? You’d be mad – it’s inconceivable, impossible – to think otherwise. That’s what a hard-determinist would say. In reality and in thought experiments, running repeated cases from the same starting condition to the same final state, must achieve the same result, identical in absolutely every way. Indeed, even the thought experiment’s stock-in-trade, “if” the situation was reset to an identical starting state, we can safely ignore questions of how the reset could conceivably, possibly, let alone tractably or physically be achieved, after all it’s only a thought experiment. Physics is deterministic, therefore … all bets on variations beyond statistical uncertainty are off.

Well the hard-determinists, the greedy-reductionists, are wrong. Many processes in the natural world exhibit both route-dependent and route-independent properties. The properties of states depend on their histories as well as their arrangements. The net result of their histories cannot be reduced to the arrangements of the component parts in their end states. Think about that.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses Ergodicity in the context of downside risk-management in a chapter he’s pre-published from his forthcoming book Skin in the Game. Where downside risks in probability tails involve not simply cumulative damage but binary all or nothing, dead or alive, result or ruin, success or failure, it makes a hell of a difference how you arrive at a population of cases to derive and interpret your stats. One person taking the same risk many times is quite different from a distributed population of individuals each risking their own skin in their own games. “Average” risk is pretty meaningless in the former case where the sequence of repeated risks clearly matters unlike the latter.

Ergodicity

… a situation is deemed non-ergodic here when observed past probabilities do not apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents people with skin in the game from emerging from it —and to which the system will invariably tend. Let us call these situations “ruin”, as the entity cannot emerge from the condition. The central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost benefit analyses are no longer possible.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Stuart Kauffman chooses non-Ergodic as the key concept more people really need to understand in his response to the 2017 Edge Question. It’s very brief and profound, so presented with acknowledgement in its entirety here:

Non-Ergodic
“Non-ergodic” is a fundamental but too little known scientific concept.
Non-ergodicity stands in contrast to “ergodicity. “Ergodic” means that the system in question visits all its possible states. In Statistical Mechanics this is based on the famous “ergodic hypothesis, which, mathematically, gives up integration of Newton’s equations of motion for the system. Ergodic systems have no deep sense of “history.” Non-ergodic systems do not visit all of their possible states. In physics perhaps the most familiar case of a non-ergodic system is a spin glass which “breaks” ergodicity and visits only a tiny subset of its possible states, hence exhibits history in a deep sense.
Even more profoundly, the evolution of life in our biosphere is profoundly “non-ergodic” and historical. The universe will not create all possible life forms. This, together with heritable variation, is the substantial basis for Darwin, without yet specifying the means of heritable variation, whose basis Darwin did not know. Non-ergodicity gives us history.
Stuart A Kauffman

I’m pretty sure now I’ve seen Dennett use ergodicity in his evolutionary explanations towards consciousness, and I know now Kauffman must have used it in his Reinventing the Sacred which I’ve read and reviewed before, but it never really registered – as a word – until I saw those two references above within 24 hours yesterday.

There are so many corollaries from appreciating the distinction, that I’d probably better stop and leave the concept as food for thought.

[END]

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[Post Note: Firstly, a “working definition” might be useful:

Ergodicity is a technical concept about the probability of states at the fundamental entropy level, after Boltzmann. Ergodic theory is about the relationship between any one state of a system and all the possible states it might otherwise be in or have been through on its “path” to that state.

Essentially when the probability of a given (outcome) state has no dependency on previous or alternative states – ie they’re all equally likely and independent of any actual path(s) through states to get there – a system is “ergodic”.

Most evolving macro systems are non-ergodic and actual history matters. Obvious to the humanities, not so obvious to greedy-reductionist scientists.]

[Post Note: Below are a growing lists of (very rough) thoughts sparked-off already.
Shout up if you’d like me to elaborate.

Conscious, intentional stuff happening within physics, but not supported by physics ?!?
Because – info underlies both material / energetic physics AND information processing (conscious or otherwise).

Reality. Ontology. Possibility. Conceivability. (Marletto in Edge 2017)
(Spookily, if one substitutes Shakespeare’s original verb “to be” it’s remarkably close to the – objective, deterministic – existential point, but not the reason I posted with that allusive title. Was the Bard on this case already?)

Evolved or Divinely created. Hardly matters to a determinist, ironically, but natural history should be fundamental to normal rational people.

Causal dependency can be backward.
Kauffman reverse causality …. Taleb too points out similar error.

Bayesian approaches look more sophisticated than simple chance, where knowledge gained from earlier choices / chances affect current decisions, but we really need to be aware what kind of ergodic / non-ergodic systems we are dealing with first. Bayes can be as misleading as naive single-choice chance.

Is there any genuinely objective reality (that matters)?
Realities that matter have subjectivity – “skin in the game”

Reversibility. History matters in irreversible incorporation – integration is more than arrangement of components. (Tad Bonicziewski – quality management). Entropy, 2nd Law and probabilistic mechanics are fundamental – ubiquitous – here.

So … Integrated Information Theory?

(Irony of historicity given Taleb / Beard spat? I won’t mention it if you don’t 😉

Think also about those fuzzy areas between “hard” science and “soft” humanities …
(eg Engineering, psychology, statistics and risk?)
Engineering humanities – “Rivets in formation” (Ingenuity is the root of engineering.)
However many things and layers in our ontology, EVERY thing and every interface comes in 3-layers.
Thing <> Interface <> Thing = 3 things
Interface <> Thing <> Interface = 3 things
Difference is simply the choice of edge vs node view in system networks?

Evolutionary design-space (in Dennett B2BnB sense) clearly closely related to evolution not visiting all possible states (in the Kauffman sense above) – directedness of evolution, as opposed to a random walk, is not just an illusion.

Here, Anthony Garrett Lisi, another physicist from Edge 2017 that sees the limits to greedy-reductionist determinism. Emergent objects are better treated as independent of their components parts!?!]

[Post Note August 2018: Taleb’s brutal style is making the running in public consciousness, but this is a real and deep issue:

(Boltzmann acknowledged in there too.)
I really do have to create a coherent piece
based on the above rough notes.]