Lunch at the Labs

Various web links, including some related to how the human mind works, that I found to be of interest recently.

• Robert Burton on Being Certain

  Author interviewed by Russ Roberts on Econtalk podcast.

  Neurologist and author Robert Burton talks about his book, On Being Certain, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Burton explores our need for certainty and the challenge of being skeptical about what our brain tells us must be true. Where does what Burton calls "the feeling of knowing" come from? Why can memory lead us astray? Burton claims that our reaction to events emerges from competition among different parts of the brain operating below our level of awareness. The conversation includes a discussion of the experience of transcendence and the different ways humans come to that experience.

  For more on the subject see human-current,

  As humans, we somehow have to resist our biological urge to feel certain and embrace the very uncomfortable notion of uncertainty in order to navigate the complexity of the world around us. Understanding our own biology is a good place to start, although even then we become trapped in a paradox while on our path to self discovery. As Dr. Burton has concisely stated, "our mental limitations prevent us from recognizing our mental limitations".

  And in Science Based Medicine "On Being Certain",

  There is a "hidden layer" in our brain whose neurons are influenced by genetics, personal experience, hormones, and chemistry. These factors influence all our thought processes without our conscious knowledge. We would like to think that if everyone had the same information they would necessarily reach the same conclusion, but that just isn't so. There is no such thing as pure reason. "Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experiences."

• Bjørn Lomborg: the dissenting climate change voice who changed his tune

  But Lomborg's record on climate change is more nuanced than the stereotype suggests. From the beginning, he has said global warming is happening and is largely caused by humans. However, he has been consistently critical of what he sees as exaggeration of how much this matters, and of policies to tackle the problem. These would achieve too little and cost too much, he argues, meaning the money would be better spent on, say, reducing malaria and HIV/Aids, or extending clean water and sanitation.

• What economists have gotten wrong for decades

  Four economic ideas disproven by reality. By Jared Bernstein

  1. Going below the natural rate of unemployment could spark an inflationary spiral
  2. Everybody wins with globalization
  3. Deep budget deficits will crowd out private investment
  4. A higher minimum wage will only hurt workers
• The Myth of the Tight U.S. Labor Market

  Jobs growth is substantially slower than the headline employment data indicate.

  Since the unemployment rate is the ratio of the number unemployed to the labor force, the numerator has seen a bigger proportionate drop than the denominator. This is why the jobless rate has fallen from 3.9% to a half-century low of 3.6%. While that makes a great headline, it isn't good news. Said another way, employment as measured by the Household Survey has actually declined this year by almost 200,000, while twice as many who were earlier unemployed have apparently given up looking for jobs.

• The Psychology of Prediction

  But prediction is hard. Either you know that or you're in denial about it.
  A lot of the reason it's hard is because the visible stuff that happens in the world is a small fraction of the hidden stuff that goes on inside people's heads. The former is easy to overanalyze; the latter is easy to ignore.
  

• The problem of mindfulness

  Mindfulness promotes itself as value-neutral but it is loaded with (troubling) assumptions about the self and the cosmos.

  Of course, it's often pragmatically useful to step away from your own fraught ruminations and emotions. Seeing them as drifting leaves can help us gain a certain distance from the heat of our feelings, so as to discern patterns and identify triggers. But after a certain point, mindfulness doesn't allow you to take responsibility for and analyse such feelings. It's not much help in sifting through competing explanations for why you might be thinking or feeling a certain way. Nor can it clarify what these thoughts and feelings might reveal about your character. Mindfulness, grounded in anattā, can offer only the platitude: 'I am not my feelings.' Its conceptual toolbox doesn't allow for more confronting statements, such as 'I am feeling insecure,' 'These are my anxious feelings,' or even 'I might be a neurotic person.' Without some ownership of one's feelings and thoughts, it is difficult to take responsibility for them. The relationship between individuals and their mental phenomena is a weighty one, encompassing questions of personal responsibility and history. These matters shouldn't be shunted so easily to one side.

• The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking

  Overreliance on artificial intelligence may put us in intellectual debt.

  Many drugs receive regulatory approval, and are widely prescribed, even though no one knows exactly how they work.
  ...
  This approach to discovery-answers first, explanations later-accrues what I call intellectual debt. It's possible to discover what works without knowing why it works, and then to put that insight to use immediately, assuming that the underlying mechanism will be figured out later. In some cases, we pay off this intellectual debt quickly. But, in others, we let it compound, relying, for decades, on knowledge that's not fully known.
  ...
  In the past, intellectual debt has been confined to a few areas amenable to trial-and-error discovery, such as medicine. But that may be changing, as new techniques in artificial intelligence-specifically, machine learning-increase our collective intellectual credit line. Machine-learning systems work by identifying patterns in oceans of data. Using those patterns, they hazard answers to fuzzy, open-ended questions. Provide a neural network with labelled pictures of cats and other, non-feline objects, and it will learn to distinguish cats from everything else; give it access to medical records, and it can attempt to predict a new hospital patient's likelihood of dying. And yet, most machine-learning systems don't uncover causal mechanisms. They are statistical-correlation engines. They can't explain why they think some patients are more likely to die, because they don"t "think" in any colloquial sense of the word-they only answer. As we begin to integrate their insights into our lives, we will, collectively, begin to rack up more and more intellectual debt.

  Also see Intellectual Debt: With Great Power Comes Great Ignorance,

  What Technical Debt Can Teach Us About the Dangers of AI Working Too Well.

• The reason there's no #MeToo for domestic violence

  But there's no money in domestic violence cases because there's no big company to sue for negligence, so this law gets tested at a much slower pace than employment law.
  Without the financial winnings, lawyers have little incentive to take the case on contingency. Even if a woman does have the financial means to sue, most states don't allow family members to sue each other, perpetrators torture their victims in court, and winning a court-ordered restraining order or conviction is one of the most reliable indicators that the victim will soon be killed.
  

• Evolutionary gene loss may help explain why only humans are prone to heart attacks

  Scientists say the loss of a single gene two to three million years ago in our ancestors may have resulted in a heightened risk of cardiovascular disease in all humans as a species, while also setting up a further risk for red meat-eating humans.

• Have We Hit Peak Podcast?

  There are now upward of 700,000 podcasts, according to the podcast production and hosting service Blubrry, with between 2,000 and 3,000 new shows launching each month.

• Craigslist's Craig Newmark: 'Outrage is profitable. Most online outrage is faked for profit'

  The founder of the online classifieds site is a survivor from the era of internet optimism. He has given significant sums to protect the future of news - and rejects the idea his website helped cause journalism's financial crisis

• Is It Bad For You?

  Search for a food, drink, supplement, additive, or anything you can think of and get an answer.