Experimental Support for Monkey Self-Agency

For a contemporary press release relevant to my recent debate with Alex Knapp, “Rhesus monkeys have a form of self awareness not previously attributed to them”:

In the first study of its kind in an animal species that has not passed a critical test of self-recognition, cognitive psychologist Justin J. Couchman of the University at Buffalo has demonstrated that rhesus monkeys have a sense of self-agency — the ability to understand that they are the cause of certain actions — and possess a form of self awareness previously not attributed to them.

The study, which will be published July 6 in Biology Letters, a journal of the Royal Society, may illuminate apparent self-awareness deficits in humans with autism, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and developmental disabilities. Rhesus monkeys are one of the best-known species of Old World monkeys, and have been used extensively in medical and biological research aimed at creating vaccines for rabies, smallpox and polio and drugs to manage HIV/AIDS; analyzing stem cells and sequencing the genome. Humans have sent them into space, cloned them and planted jellyfish …

Read More →

Thiel Foundation Press Release Quotes Leaders of Singularity Institute, Halcyon Molecular

The Thiel Foundation recently formally announced the “20 Under 20″ initiative:

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 29 /PRNewswire/ — Warning that America’s long-term economic prospects are uncertain without radical innovation in technology, Peter Thiel this week launched the Thiel Fellowship to foster the next generation of tech visionaries.

“Our world needs more breakthrough technologies,” said Thiel. “From Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world’s most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn’t wait until graduation. This fellowship will encourage the most brilliant and promising young people not to wait on their ideas, either. The Thiel Fellows will change the world and call it a senior thesis.”

The Thiel Foundation will award 20 people under 20 years old cash grants of $100,000 to further their innovative scientific and technical ideas. In addition, over a two year period, Peter Thiel’s network of tech entrepreneurs and philanthropists—drawn from PayPal, Facebook, Palantir Technologies, Founders Fund, the Singularity Institute, and others—will teach the recipients about creating disruptive technologies and offer mentorship, employment …

Read More →

Michael Vassar’s Google TechTalk

Over at Singularity Hub, Aaron Saenz is gushing over Michael Vassar’s Google TechTalk.

Aaron said:

Vassar is the president of the Singularity Institute and a prominent advocate for the belief that technologies may develop exponentially in the future.

Not really… my understanding is that the reason that Michael V. talks about the Enlightenment a lot is that he thinks that was the last major boost in human understanding and reason. He tends to focus more on human thinking than on our technologies, and sees the latter as an outgrowth of the former. That’s the primary idea behind the Vingean Singularity as well. (Remember that one?)

One of the apparent purposes of Less Wrong is to start a new Enlightenment. The jury’s still out on that one, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

Read More →

Which Consequentialism? Machine Ethics and Moral Divergence

Here’s a extended abstract presented at the 2009 Asia-Pacific Conference on Computing and Philosophy that is making the rounds. The point of the paper, which was written by Carl Shulman, Nick Tarleton, and Henrik Jonsson, is that consequentialism as commonly discussed has a number of “free variables” where intuitions disagree about the right values of these variables. Therefore, machine ethics should draw on the emerging field of moral psychology to figure out how to fill in these free variables. This point is plainly put in the title of one of the last sections, “Current moral theories are inadequate for machine ethics”.

A reply from UK philosopher David Pearce has recently been posted by Roko at Less Wrong. Roko points out that David is a moral realist, i.e., that he believes there is a fact of the matter about what is right and wrong.

My immediate response to David would be that I agree with him that superhappiness is possible and worth pursuing, but to say that the propositional content of goals does not matter for humans, …

Read More →

Smart Fraction Theory

Here is a paper from Talent Development and Excellence, Vol. 1, No. 1, (2009), “The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability of politicians and average competence of peoples on social development”. Abstract:

Smart fraction theory supposes that gifted and talented persons are especially relevant for societal development. Using results for the 95th percentile from TIMSS 1995-2007, PISA 2000-2006 and PIRLS 2001-2006 we calculated an ability sum value (N=90 countries) for the upper level group (equivalent to a within country IQ-threshold of 125 or a student assessment score of 667) and compared its influence with the mean ability and the 5th percentile ability on wealth (GDP), patent rates, Nobel Prizes, numbers of scientists, political variables (government effectiveness, democracy, rule of law, political liberty), HIV, AIDS and homicide. Additionally, using information on school and professional education, we estimated the cognitive competence of political leaders in N=90 countries. Results of correlations, regression and path analyses generally show a larger impact of the smart fractions’ ability on positively valued outcomes than of the mean result or the 5th percentile fraction. The influence …

Read More →

Learning Styles Challenged

From Eurekalert:

Learning styles challenged There is no evidence supporting auditory and visual learning, psychologists say

Are you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you’ve pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you’re not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student’s particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public.

The wide appeal of the idea that some students will learn better when material is presented visually and that others will learn better when the material is presented verbally, or even in some other way, is evident in the vast number of learning-style tests and teaching guides available for purchase and used in schools. But does scientific research really support the existence of different learning styles, or the hypothesis that people learn better when taught in a …

Read More →

IQ: “Lonely Ice Floe” or Consensus Science?

Malcolm Gladwell calls those who accept the Mainstream Science on Intelligence statement “IQ fundamentalists”, but the reality of g and the predictive validity of intelligence tests are widely accepted as consensus science by intelligence researchers, with some caveats. Reading Eurekalert and PhysOrg, I see press releases practically every day that analyze the correlation of intelligence with a variety of genetic and environmental factors. Here’s one from yesterday:

Fit teenage boys are smarter But muscle strength isn’t the secret, study shows In the first study to demonstrate a clear positive association between adolescent fitness and adult cognitive performance, Nancy Pedersen of the University of Southern California and colleagues in Sweden find that better cardiovascular health among teenage boys correlates to higher scores on a range of intelligence tests – and more education and income later in life.

“During early adolescence and adulthood, the central nervous system displays considerable plasticity,” said Pedersen, research professor of psychology at the USC College of Letters, Arts & Sciences. “Yet, the effect of exercise on cognition remains poorly understood.”

…

Read More →

On Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

As somewhat of an aside, Mr. Lynch criticized my critique of Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences” as “irreverent”. This is extremely unfair. All I said was that his theory is “something that doesn’t stand up to scientific scrutiny.” I criticize an ad hoc, unscientific theory that has practically no empirical evidence to support it, and the popular appeal of which derives entirely from its egalitarian and inclusive political flavor, and get called irreverent.

Calling Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences unscientific is not even nearly the most irreverent thing I’ve said, by a long shot. It shouldn’t even be considered irreverent, period. Theories of this sort, which have great popular appeal to the public and practically zero appeal to cognitive psychologists, should be regarded as guilty before proven innocent. Skepticism should be our default mode. Rain on as many unscientific parades as you can.

Read More →

Stephen Pinker Responds to Malcolm Gladwell

Here is the exchange of letters. Pinker’s response:

What Malcolm Gladwell calls a “lonely ice floe” is what psychologists call “the mainstream.” In a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence, 52 signatories wrote, “I.Q. is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic and social outcomes.” Similar conclusions were affirmed in a unanimous blue-ribbon report by the American Psychological Association, and in recent studies (some focusing on outliers) by Dean Simonton, David Lubinski and others.

Gladwell is right, of course, to privilege peer-reviewed articles over blogs. But sports is a topic in which any academic must answer to an army of statistics-savvy amateurs, and in this instance, I judged, the bloggers were correct. They noted, among other things, that Berri and Simmons weakened their “weak correlation” (Gladwell described it in the New Yorker essay reprinted in “What the Dog Saw” as “no connection”) by omitting the lower-drafted quarterbacks who, unsurprisingly, turned out not to merit many plays. In any case, the relevance to teacher selection (the focus of …

Read More →

Why I Care About Malcolm Gladwell’s Igon Values

Why do I care so much about the Malcolm Gladwell issue? First is the matter of scientific integrity in journalism. Science-oriented folks care about it, and most everyone else doesn’t. For instance, here is John Horgan from Slate:

Almost four years ago, an esteemed science journalist — OK, it was me — suggested that the days of truly momentous scientific discovery might be over. One symptom of science’s plight, I predicted, would be that my fellow science writers would become increasingly desperate for and willing to invent “revolutionary” theories. To my delight, Malcolm Gladwell has provided the most spectacular confirmation of my hypothesis to date.

Compare this to the Columbia Journalism Review:

The answer to this charge is: Of course Gladwell lacks rigor — he’s a feature writer, not a brain scientist. Why some people — including the corporate titans who pay Gladwell’s speaking fees — seem confused about this I haven’t a clue. I can’t also help but wonder what would prompt the Times to haul out the heavy gun that is Pinker …

Read More →

The Problem is That Gladwell is Wrong, Not That He’s Popular, But the Latter Certainly Doesn’t Help

Malcolm Gladwell is acting slightly odd as the criticism of his thinking is reaching a “tipping point”, to use the phrase he popularized. He posted a screenshot of the “igon value” section of his Taleb essay from the New Yorker, but the essay on his website still has the error, which is clearly not a casual spelling error as he claimed, but an idea error. If it were a spelling error, he wouldn’t have made it two words.

Even the earliest commenters are confused about what point he is trying to make:

Not sure why my initial post is gone. Also not sure what your point is here. The image you posted is clearly from a computer screen, and all it shows is that the New Yorker finally cleaned up after you. The original article used “Igon”, as does the version of the article hosted on your own website. (Readers can check the cached version of the article, in case Gladwell edits the current version without fessing up.)

Even his advocates know this:

Perhaps …

Read More →
← Older Entries