Infinite Monkey Theorems

Things worth reading…   

or at least pondering and forgetting quickly… 

So… how good is China’s new stealth fighter?  Not sure, but I’d start by asking this guy(here via MSNBC): 

HONOLULU — A former B-2 stealth bomber engineer was sentenced to 32 years in prison Monday for selling military secrets to China in the latest of several high-profile cases of Chinese espionage in the U.S.

US economics…

Businesses have not yet started hiring as UE claims are up.  Some of it is due to delays due to weather were people who would’ve claimed last week didn’t, but still not a good sign (here via BizTimes.com):

New applications for U.S. jobless benefits jumped by 51,000 to 454,000 last week, the U.S. Labor Department reported today, up from 403,000 during the previous week….

The four-week average of new claims, climbed 15,750 to 428,750, the highest level in two months, the Labor Department said. 

Additionally, the CBO reported this week, what all politicians have known for decades, but have consistently ignored…. social security is a looming and ever-growing problem (here via EpochTimes): 

In its Budget and Economic Outlook report for fiscal years 2011 to 2021, the CBO anticipates that the Social Security program will run a $45 billion deficit for 2011, and will be in the red for at least the next ten years. 

And…

According to the Associated Press, if present Social Security spending and funding levels are sustained and adjusted for the coming influx of Baby Boomers applying for and collecting Social Security checks, the program’s trust fund could be emptied by about 2037.

President Obama’s thoughts about this re: State of the union speech… no problems at all… full remarks here:

Starting in 2011, we are prepared to freeze government spending for three years.  (Applause.)  Spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security will not be affected.

Not “affected’?  I guess that doesn’t discount it from affecting us…. but why worry about that when we can spend more money on things we don’t need (speech cont’d):

Next, we can put Americans to work today building the infrastructure of tomorrow.  From the first railroads to the Interstate Highway System, our nation has always been built to compete.  There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains, or the new factories that manufacture clean energy products.

Tomorrow, I’ll visit Tampa, Florida, where workers will soon break ground on a new high-speed railroad funded by the Recovery Act.

That’s some vision there; to ignore the looming crisis and instead deflect to a new boondoggle.  & not just a boondoggle, but it seems this is the answer to so many of life’s troubles… the environment, traffic congestion, sprawl…. yes, this magical elixir that is so incredibly great, that it can’t possibly survive without federal government to operate.

But wait… it will create jobs!  (speech cont’d):

There are projects like that all across this country that will create jobs and help move our nation’s goods, services, and information. 

Of course if it’s a “jobs’ program” and not a new transportation program (look over here – shiny stuff)… well, let’s let Milton Friedman discuss jobs’ programs (here):

Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: ‘You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.’ To which Milton replied: ‘Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.’

Either way, here is a good response to the State of the Union from Cato.

Lastly, more great stuff from the Economist.  This time an Ideas Arena

As business leaders, politicians and journalists meet at the World Economic Forum’s annual summit in Davos to discuss the year ahead, The Economist will be inviting readers and guests to participate in a series of online debates questioning the future of global leadership. From now until February 18th, we’ll be examining the rapid emergence of a single global elite whose decisions, and opinions, affect us all.

Wired reports on Darpa – that agency which built the internet, now wants a new mathematical language to describe everything (here):

The very first step? Create a unified mathematical language for everything the military sees or hears.

The armed forces are overwhelmed by all the data its various sensors are sniffing out. They want a single data stream that combines drone video feeds, cell phone intercepts, and targeting radar. Darpa’s solution, found in the brand-new Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation, and Execution program is to design an algorithm that teaches the sensors how to interpret the world — how to think, how to learn and what data, accordingly to collect.

The Economist debates: This house believes that restricting the growth of cities will improve quality of life (here).  An interesting topic, with the debate revolving around whether size is a problem and if so, forcing a certain size or giving individuals freedom to choose.  Research, not (yet at least) discussed,  has been attempted in the past to find the perfect size for a city; meaning how large does a city get before standard city services such as garbage collection or policing become less effective with the addition or each new citizen.

Either way, I’m still for free choice.

SCOTUS Blog on an upcoming Supreme Court arguments about corporate “person hood” (here):

At 10 a.m. Tuesday, the Court will hear one hour of oral argument on a government appeal arguing that business corporations do not have a right of of “personal privacy” that shields from compelled public disclosure the records they turn over to federal agencies.

From Stratfor, especially needed in light of gun control regulation based upon a single incident, Separating Terror from Terrorism. The piece concludes with this:

Recognizing that terrorist attacks, like car crashes and cancer and natural disasters, are a part of the human condition permits individuals and families to practice situational awareness and take prudent measures to prepare for such contingencies without becoming vicarious victims. This separation will help deny the practitioners of terrorism and terror the ability to magnify their reach and power.

]]> http://detailedabstractions.com/2011/01/19/infinite-monkey-theorems/feed/ 0 http://detailedabstractions.com/2010/12/16/update-economists-language-debate/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=update-economists-language-debate http://detailedabstractions.com/2010/12/16/update-economists-language-debate/#comments Thu, 16 Dec 2010 14:55:11 +0000 Michael S. Langston http://detailedabstractions.com/?p=1607 Yesterday, DA posted an article on the Economist’s debate over language (here) with the following [emphasis added]:

Irregardless, she goes forward to talk about more interesting research, including ethnic bias, gender specific nouns, and even points to a study which attempts to show Hebrew-Arabic bilinguals speakers seem to show more favorable attitudes towards Jews when tested in Hebrew than Arabic.  (I find that claim dubious, but without more access to the research, I’ll leave that point for now.)

My initial concerns with this research were how it was conducted and what assumptions were made.  After some searching, I’m unable to retrieve the actual study, but did find some underlying issues worth nothing.

The study Ms. Boroditsky cites above, used a test known as Implicit Association Test (IAT) (here via Association for Psychological Science – APS):

The study used a computer test known as the Implicit Association Test, which is often used to study bias….

The question at hand then, is whether IAT can actually show true bias.  The way it works (APS continued):

…Words flash on the computer screen, and subjects have to categorize them by pressing two keys on the keyboard as quickly as possible. It’s a nearly automatic task, with no time to think about the answers. The trick is, the subjects are classifying two different kinds of words: words describing positive and negative traits and, in this case, names – Arab names like Ahmed and Samir and Jewish names like Avi and Ronen. For example, they might be told to press “M” when they saw an Arab name or a word with a good meaning, or “X” when they saw a Jewish name and a word with a bad meaning. In this example, if people automatically associate “good” words with Arabs and “bad” with Jews, they’ll be able to do the classifications faster than if their automatic association between the words is the other way around. In different sections of the test, different sets of words are paired….

 The idea being that a quick test might help to show hidden biases, even for those who are actively attempting to prevent such displays.

Intuitively however, this test seems unlikely to prove bias for a few reasons. 

The first of which is our knowledge that human’s subconscious isn’t conscious.  By its very definition, we don’t know what it is and we still have little idea of how, or even whether, these hidden thoughts interact with our conscious mind or thinking.

The second is our knowledge of overall human development.   Take a child raised and consistently indoctrinated with racist ideals.  While not simple, some of these children do grow up and by themselves learn the truth:  hating others based upon their race, religion, or other superficial factors, is not just stupid, but also marks one of the lowest or immoral thoughts.

But take this person… Any guesses on how this person might do on this test, even if they now live a life of a non-biased person?  Speculation  for sure; but I think ultimately logical.

Which dovetails to the third basic critique, brought to us by basic ideas in critical thinking. 

Nominally, one of the things a critical thinker must do in order to minimize bad decisions, is to understand their own biases.

& in this case, I don’t mean to limit this to racial biases brought about through family or societal pressures, but consider the word bias as more encompassing to include any consistent mode of thinking which negatively affects decisions.

From that point of view, the biases one should look for in critical thinking outside personal life, are biases shared by the entire human population.  Brought about through evolutionary pressures over roughly 250K years, these biases include:

our pattern seeking behavior (good skill, but dangerous when over used)

our filtering mechanisms (necessary, but poorly understood)

our ability to pick even bad answers to open questions just because good answers don’t exist (still prevalent today)

group think (tribal mentality), and on and on and on

The point here isn’t to hash out all possible biases, but to explain that knowledge of such biases is only a first step to mitigating them.  Knowing this information isn’t a cure; it only gives one the best chance in mitigation (assuming objective introspection). 

Outside of these critiques, several studies demonstrate problems with IAT’s usefulness. 

One study questioning IAT found (here via University of Virginia Law School):

We reanalyze data from two influential studies—McConnell & Leibold (2001) and Ziegert & Hanges (2005)—that explore links between implicit bias and discriminatory behavior and that have been invoked to support strong claims about the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In both of these studies, the inclusion of race IAT scores in regression models reduced prediction errors by only tiny amounts and IAT scores did not permit prediction of individual-level behaviors. Furthermore, the results were not robust when the impact of rater reliability, statistical specifications and/or outliers were taken into account, and reanalysis of McConnell & Leibold (2001) revealed a pattern of behavior consistent with a pro-Black behavioral bias, rather than the anti-Black bias suggested in the original study….

Reworded means the study failed to predict individual behavior, even though it’s theoretically proving individual biases.  Additionally, when they evaluated the tests with reference to the raters (rater reliability) they found the degree of subjectivity to be so high that a simple change in raters could result in the complete opposite conclusion.

The second study found questioning the specific results of an IAT test with reference to physicians’ biases noted (here via SpringerLink):

 …the main study results were based on an interpretation of crosssectional data as if the data were longitudinal (see Fig. 1) [D]; 3) although  andomization was performed by allocating a white or black face randomly with each scenario, a non-randomized variable (IAT score) was interpreted as if it had been the unit of randomization [E]; 4) Green et al. conflated measurement issues with interpretation; the progression from the Introduction through the Methods to the Results section of the terms “increasing time for association,” “racial preference,” “racial bias,” to “pro-white/pro-black scores” does not represent a sequence of synonyms…

 And lastly, a professor with interest on this topic points to several studies questioning IAT’s effectiveness, but specifically this one which shows people encountering unfamiliar stimuli can test as biased (here via University of Washington):

…Brendl, Markman, and Messner (2001) is an example of a study that used totally unfamiliar stimuli, intending these to represent pseudo-categories that should lack associations with other categories. Greenwald and Nosek (2001) concluded that such uses of totally unfamiliar stimuli would yield problematic IAT findings and should be avoided….

So oddly enough, what started as an article to point people towards what is still likely to be an informative debate, has turned into an example of bias in science. 

This wasn’t the initial point, but given a society prone to instantly believe things which are thought to have consensus among scientists, a very necessary point to make.

& for those in the sciences, or like me, like to study human behavior, it’s a nice reminder that we should always be careful how much faith we put into any “consensus”, whether it’s a religious/moral consensus, or one by scientists.

A must read:  Cargo Cult Science (via Lock Haven University): Richard Feynman’s Caltech commencement address given in 1974, expressing this same philosophical idea, but with more eloquence and brevity than I have.

This house believes that the language we speak shapes how we think.

Still in the first round of of the debate, the pros have a large majority with a full 75% of people agreeing.  This seems self evident and may lead some to question why debate this particular topic with so much agreement.

The answer:  the nuances of the argument itself.   Indeed, while Mr. Lieberman’s job is to argue against the proposition, he starts his opening arguments by agreeing with the basic premise:

Properly interpreted, the proposition is true: the language we speak shapes how we think….

& of course goes directly into his disagreement:

…But the way we think also shapes the language we speak, and the way we live shapes both language and thought. When we encounter or create new ideas, we can usually describe them with new combinations of old words. And if not, we easily adapt or borrow or create the new words or phrases we need. As Edward Sapir once put it, “We may say that a language is so constructed that no matter what any speaker of it may desire to communicate … the language is prepared to do his work.”….

He goes on to define this key difference in interpretation.  While he nominally agrees with the idea, society has been inundated with ideas which simply aren’t true.  With discussions, articles, and not very well done research telling us all about the number of words Eskimos have for snow, whether the Apache had a word for “lie”, and even popular culture through the likes of Ayn Rand.

The crux of the issue however, is that most of these stories are either exaggerations of the truth or just completely false.  Like the Hopi Eskimos, having apparently somewhere between 5 & hundreds of words for snow depending upon the source, might have specific words to identify different types of snow that other cultures don’t have.

But whether they have specific words for such things as hard iced snow, or falling snow, or wet snow, it’s not as if other languages can’t use two word phrases with adjectives and nouns to get to the same point.

Taken this way, it seems as though having more words for snow than other societies doesn’t say those other societies are somehow less equipped to speak about snow, but instead gives us some insight into what is important to the Hopi.

& then there’s the other side as well, presented by Ms. Boroditsky, which starts:

Exciting empirical advances over the past decade have at last provided us with scientific answers about how languages shape thinking. Importantly, while some of the influences of language on thought are remarkable, there is nothing strange about them, they are just a normal function of how human brains work. Let’s start with the basics of perception, mathematics and navigation, and end with the sex of toasters, social judgments and prejudice….

She moves from there to highlight interesting research in terms of various societies, such as those with more words for colors of those who do not have words for left & right.  In the later example, they use more cardinal-type language to define position (such as north-east).   This seems to have given them a better sense of direction than cultures where left & right are used.

Going forward, she also talks about math and number language:

For example, some languages do not have exact number words (there may be words for “few” or “many” but none for “seven” or “sixteen”). Speakers of such languages generally are not able to keep track of exact quantities—they cannot count. Without being able to count, you are unlikely to be doing algebra, solving differential equations…

Which is true in a large sense, but isn’t true in the technical one.  We actually know quite a bit with respects to the evolution in math language and its use and necessity in understanding math functions above simple counting. 

So humans had a need to start counting things.  This need brought us new language to describe various amounts.  Over time, with the advent of more and more commerce, this math language became written, and for the west, this was in Roman Numerals.

Of course anyone with experience with Roman Numerals can attest pretty easily to how difficult it would be to multiply or divide, but even that is just the starting point.

The true power of math and math thinking didn’t really happen until we stumbled upon two mythical number concepts, zero and infinity.

Take that beginning and look forward a few thousand years, and we routinely run math calculations on numbers which have no real language associated with them and numbers which can’t even be understood by humans (IE it’s hard to understand what a billion, billion stars really means, when you have no concept of what a billion of anything looks like, regardless of having a “word” for it ).

Irregardless, she goes forward to talk about more interesting research, including ethnic bias, gender specific nouns, and even points to a study which attempts to show Hebrew-Arabic bilinguals speakers seem to show more favorable attitudes towards Jews when tested in Hebrew than Arabic.  (I find that claim dubious, but without more access to the research, I’ll leave that point for now.)

& while the 75% vote tally on the pro side is unlikely to change drastically, with rebuttals, expert comments, & closing statements still to come; it should be very informative in the end.

An

This house believes that America’s political system is broken.

The current debaters are Matthew Yglesias, defending the motion and Peter Wehner arguing against.   In their second round of the debate, the house is winning with a full 75% agreeing to a broken US political system.

I say it doesn’t seem to have any useful answer as the most likely result from such a poll will be based mainly upon emotions.  Since most lay people don’t typically sit around and try to analyze political systems, the answers from the majority of respondents will have to fall back on other knowledge and human behavior demoonstrates this is likely to be emotions.  IE – if I like what’s going on, no fixing.  If I don’t like what’s going on, it needs fixing.

Reminds me a little of an argument I’ve seen a number of times in the health care debate.  Invariably, someone will put up a poll telling me how many people think their health care costs are too high.  & my retort stays the same, with some variation of Socratic questioning like… ”So?  Did you expect to see a poll that said most Americans want to pay more for anything?”

But I digress, the question has been asked and for Mr. Yglesias, things aren’t going well.  His baisc argument starts something like this:

American political institutions are in a period of crisis. The source of the crisis is relatively simple. Our institutions work only when leaders can reasonably expect broad bipartisan co-operation, but the emergence of more ideologically rigorous parties makes such co-operation extremely unlikely…

Which might make for a good thesis, assuming you can prove that broad bipartisan co-operation is indeed a requirement (hell, prove it’s useful…) as well as proving that more ideologically rigorous parties have come into existence.

His proof?  In the short, yet varied history of the US, he points to the last few election cycles – excluding all information about 9/11 and two wars and the nominal fact that the higher the consequence of any legislation the more ferocious the public debate – he starts his historical research by going all the way back to President Bush the younger; who entered the presidency with:

…an unprecedentedly weak electoral mandate. More voters marked their ballots for Al Gore than marked their ballots for Mr Bush. The median voter in the election supported Mr Gore. But thanks to a combination of litigation, stubbornness and the perversity of the electoral college, Mr Bush succeeded in prevailing and becoming president….

Just a quick note here – is it a little odd to start an arguement to theoretically prove that idealogically rigirous institutions are harming us, by being idealogically rigid… but whatever.

He contends that the result of the weak mandate  and an inability to overcome a Senate fillubuster worked well:

…This led to a fair amount of legislative co-operation in the first Bush term. A series of important changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act were approved; an extremely costly new prescription drug benefit was added to Medicare; income taxes were steeply cut—all on an at least somewhat bipartisan basis….

Somewhat bipartisan?  Like idealogically rigirous, “somewhat bipartisan” is undefinable in any concrete terms, but a quick look on just the tax cuts seems to indicate consistent partisan fighting.

What we know?

The cuts themselves were passed in two bills.

1. Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 &
   1. Senate vote here, House vote here
2. Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.
   1. Vote totals here

In 2001: only 1 Republican voted against it in the Senate out of 33 nay votes (the other nays were Democrats), and in the House, all but one of the 154 nay votes were cast by Democrats.  & of course out of the yea votes, while less one sided, still doesn’t appear to be bipartisan.  In the Senate, 12 of the 58 yea votes were cast by Democrats and in the House 28 votes our of 240 yea votes were cast by Republicans.

& 2003?  I guess Mr. Yglesias would also be surprised to learn that in the 2003, the tax debate was even more lopsided, including such a tight vote in the Senate that the VP had to vote to pass the legislation and break a tie:

Final Senate vote:

& least you think the tax cuts were picked specifically due to its ability to polarize politicians, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act didn’t fair any better on a theoretical chart of degree of partisanship (Senate totals here, House totals here).

Possibly another surprise to Mr. Yglesias, but this vote was just as contentious.  It passed the Senate well enough, but almost failed to pass in the House and the lines were demarcated as expeted:  most Republicans voted yea and they made up the vast majority of yea votes cast and most Democrats voted nay and made up the vast majority of nay votes in both chambers.

But, like all pundits, Mr. Yglesias must be saying to himself  ”let not facts interfere with a core belief” because reality won’t stop him from taking indefinable terms which have more factual evidence against them than for them and acting as if it’s still the basis for some reasonable conclusion.

So he continues with his thoughts about this period of enlightenment, this…. awesome togetherness known as bipatrisan support, and moves to when it all began to come down:

The larger problem, however, was political. Co-operating with Mr Bush brought congressional Democrats no help at the polls in 2002 and 2004….

Which according to his logic, pushed Democratic leadership, Nancy Pelosi & Harry Ried specifically to change tacts:

…Thus, even in the Democrats’ apparent moment of deepest political weakness, the key was to refuse to co-operate. The out-of-power party would have no obligation to make concrete proposals or difficult choices, and could simply unite in rejection of the Bush agenda. So in the second term, Mr Bush, despite his stronger mandate, suddenly found himself unable to make progress on reforming immigration, privatising Social Security, overhauling the tax code, or indeed much else….

Which, again, according to Mr. Yglesias, proved effective as:

Democrats rode this strategy to victory in 2006 and 2008….

Even to the point Republicans blindly followed the same effective strategy of billigerent obstructionism just a short time later:

…learned from history and spent 2009 and 2010 urging a united caucus to say “no” to everything….

He veers off here, once again, to throw in a quick political punch, because after all when arguing against idealogically rigirous parties, one apparently needs to be intensely idealogical….

Suddenly Republicans who had eagerly embraced Keynesian arguments in the past professed to find them outlandish. GOP support for climate change and immigration reform legislation vanished. Democrats whined. And in the 2010 midterms, the GOP won big….

I say her veered off as he failed to mention the overwhelming majority of Democrats against a percription drug benefit for which they normally would be championing.  He also doesn’t mention the very recent history where Democrats are moving away from the White House and towards former President Bush in the current tax cut debate.

Of course neither the GOPs’ nor the Democrats’ fondness for changing political tracks when public opinion moves has anything to do with whether the system itself is broken, but that doesn’t stop the idealogically rigid people amongts us.  Mr. Ygelsias concludes:

…the rules of the Senate give even a defeated minority extensive power to block policy change. In an era of weak, poorly sorted parties this was not a big deal. Indeed, it was not even much of a problem insofar as actors in the political system did not properly understand how it worked. But now that congressional minorities have discovered that their best path back to power is blanket obstruction we are faced with a profound problem. It is unrealistic to expect bipartisan agreement on major issues if the benefits of agreement will all flow to the president and his party….

…America’s political institutions worked well during a period when we had a highly idiosyncratic party system; but that now that the party system has changed so profoundly our institutions need to change with it….

& there you have it.  With lots of facts which disagree with his premise, no supporting facts given, & a complete lack of any historical context, the US system is broken.

Bringing us back to where we started.  Even with an expert, or at least a very informed layperson in poltical affairs, an author paid to think and write about politics, even a senior fellow at a think tank, and all we got was his opinion that he doesn’t like what’s going on now.

But that’s just my two synapses… maybe I’m just jealous, he does get paid to do this after all….