January 29th, 2010
Book review: Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre, by Keith Johnstone.
This book describes aspects of the human mind and social interactions which actors often need to analyze more explicitly than others, because actors need to be aware of the differences between various roles/personalities that they play, whereas unconscious understanding is adequate for people who only interact as a single personality.
The best chapter is about status, and emphasizes the important role that status games play in most social situations and how hard it is to be aware of one’s status-related behavior.
One disturbing claim he makes is that “acquaintances become friends when they agree to play status games together”. I’m very tempted to deny that I do that (as he predicts most people will deny acting). But I know there’s more happening in social interactions than I’m aware of, so I’m hesitant to dismiss his claim.
The chapter on spontaneity has apparently important insights about the role self-censorship plays in spontaneity and creativity. But I find it hard enough to change my behavior in response to those insights that I can’t be confident he’s correct.
He has the insight that “personality” functions as a public-relations department for the mind. Personality doesn’t seem like quite the right word here, but this is remarkably similar to an idea that Geoffrey Miller later developed from evolutionary theory in his excellent book The Mating Mind.
The chapter on masks and trance is strange and hard to evaluate.
Tags: status
Posted in Book Reviews, The Human Mind | No Comments »
January 19th, 2010
Some comments on last weekend’s Foresight Conference:
At lunch on Sunday I was in a group dominated by a discussion between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky over the relative plausibility of new intelligences having a variety of different goal systems versus a single goal system (as in a society of uploads versus Friendly AI). Some of the debate focused on how unified existing minds are, with Eliezer claiming that dogs mostly don’t have conflicting desires in different parts of their minds, and Robin and others claiming such conflicts are common (e.g. when deciding whether to eat food the dog has been told not to eat).
One test Eliezer suggested for the power of systems with a unified goal system is that if Robin were right, bacteria would have outcompeted humans. That got me wondering whether there’s an appropriate criterion by which humans can be said to have outcompeted bacteria. The most obvious criterion on which humans and bacteria are trying to compete is how many copies of their DNA exist. Using biomass as a proxy, bacteria are winning by several orders of magnitude. Another possible criterion is impact on large-scale features of Earth. Humans have not yet done anything that seems as big as the catastrophic changes to the atmosphere (”the oxygen crisis”) produced by bacteria. Am I overlooking other appropriate criteria?
Kartik Gada described two humanitarian innovation prizes that bear some resemblance to a valuable approach to helping the world’s poorest billion people, but will be hard to turn into something with a reasonable chance of success. The Water Liberation Prize would be pretty hard to judge. Suppose I submit a water filter that I claim qualifies for the prize. How will the judges test the drinkability of the water and the reusability of the filter under common third world conditions (which I suspect vary a lot and which probably won’t be adequately duplicated where the judges live)? Will they ship sample devices to a number of third world locations and ask whether it produces water that tastes good, or will they do rigorous tests of water safety? With a hoped for prize of $50,000, I doubt they can afford very good tests. The Personal Manufacturing Prizes seem somewhat more carefully thought out, but need some revision. The “three different materials” criterion is not enough to rule out overly specialized devices without some clear guidelines about which differences are important and which are trivial. Setting specific award dates appears to assume an implausible ability to predict how soon such a device will become feasible. The possibility that some parts of the device are patented is tricky to handle, as it isn’t cheap to verify the absence of crippling patents.
There was a debate on futarchy between Robin Hanson and Mencius Moldbug. Moldbug’s argument seems to boil down to the absence of a guarantee that futarchy will avoid problems related to manipulation/conflicts of interest. It’s unclear whether he thinks his preferred form of government would guarantee any solution to those problems, and he rejects empirical tests that might compare the extent of those problems under the alternative systems. Still, Moldbug concedes enough that it should be possible to incorporate most of the value of futarchy within his preferred form of government without rejecting his views. He wants to limit trading to the equivalent of the government’s stockholders. Accepting that limitation isn’t likely to impair the markets much, and may make futarchy more palatable to people who share Moldbug’s superstitions about markets.
Tags: futarchy, prizes
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Idea Futures, Life, the Universe, and Everything | No Comments »
January 9th, 2010
Book review: City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism by Jim Krane.
This book describes how a nearly barren piece of land became a prosperous city. Dubai sounds like what you’d expect if Bill Gates had taken over a small desert tribe and turned it into a real estate development company.
Part of its success is due to having the right amount of oil given its population size. Most non-industrialized countries that find enough oil to affect their economy are corrupted by dependence on it and by political fighting over who profits from it. Dubai found enough to finance a good deal of growth, but quickly saw that oil revenues would decline before long. Also, it had few enough people that the ruling family could afford to buy off any potential opposition.
But Dubai’s development started before it had much hope for oil money, and is partly due to the ambitions of a few people who ruled it. There must be a fair amount of luck involved – it seems to be an accident that Dubai is ruled by competent businessmen who are uninterested in politics (one ordered his reluctant brother to become the ruler). British rule over the region early on also helped ensure political stability.
The book’s description of Dubai’s legal system is confusing. How did a tribe with no tradition of private property make investors feel safe? I’ve read elsewhere that importing a British judge and British common law to the financial district is part of the explanation. The rest of Dubai seems to manage with virtually no legal system. I’m still puzzled about how Dubai provides enough predictability to attract large investments.
He describes Dubai’s lack of democracy as “an embarrassment”. But most of the book suggests that Dubai has been doing better than a democracy could. It makes much faster decisions than a democracy, and it forces bureaucrats to compete for performance scores that would be too easily gamed if voters were in charge.
Dubai’s ambitious expansion has made it resemble a financial bubble for much of the past 55 years, but most of its gambles have succeeded. This makes me wonder how to distinguish similar expansions from bubbles in the future (or in China, the present).
Dubai is an important model for how seasteads might develop, and will compete with any seastead.
The author has a modest pro-Dubai bias, but reports some serious problems such as workers being unable to leave because their passports has been confiscated, and wasteful subsidies of energy and water prices.
He claims that until 2008 the region “hadn’t experienced a financial shock for more than three decades”. Was the 1982 Kuwaiti stock market crash in a different region? It’s not obvious where to get enough financial data to say how the shock from that affected Dubai.
Tags: dubai, seasteading
Posted in Book Reviews, Economics, Mideast | No Comments »
December 27th, 2009
Book review: Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong by Wendell Wallach and Collin Allen.
This book combines the ideas of leading commentators on ethics, methods of implementing AI, and the risks of AI, into a set of ideas on how machines ought to achieve ethical behavior.
The book mostly provides an accurate survey of what those commentators agree and disagree about. But there’s enough disagreement that we need some insights into which views are correct (especially about theories of ethics) in order to produce useful advice to AI designers, and the authors don’t have those kinds of insights.
The book focuses more on near term risks of software that is much less intelligent than humans, and is complacent about the risks of superhuman AI.
The implications of superhuman AIs for theories of ethics ought to illuminate flaws in them that aren’t obvious when considering purely human-level intelligence. For example, they mention an argument that any AI would value humans for their diversity of ideas, which would help AIs to search the space of possible ideas. This seems to have serious problems, such as what stops an AI from fiddling with human minds to increase their diversity? Yet the authors are too focused on human-like minds to imagine an intelligence which would do that.
Their discussion of the advocates friendly AI seems a bit confused. The authors wonder if those advocates are trying to quell apprehension about AI risks, when I’ve observed pretty consistent efforts by those advocates to create apprehension among AI researchers.
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Book Reviews | 1 Comment »
December 23rd, 2009
This research suggests you should look at pictures of cute kittens before starting tasks that require a lot of dexterity, and possibly a broader set of tasks that require caution.
Posted in Humor, The Human Mind | No Comments »
December 12th, 2009
Book review: What Intelligence Tests Miss – The Psychology of Rational Thought by Keith E. Stanovich.
Stanovich presents extensive evidence that rationality is very different from what IQ tests measure, and the two are only weakly related. He describes good reasons why society would be better if people became more rational.
He is too optimistic that becoming more rational will help most people who accomplish it. Overconfidence provides widespread benefits to people who use it in job interviews, political discussions, etc.
He gives some advice on how to be more rational, such as thinking the opposite of each new hypothesis you are about to start believing. But will training yourself to do that on test problems cause you to do it when it matters? I don’t see signs that Stanovich practiced it much while writing the book. The most important implication he wants us to draw from the book is that we should develop and use Rationality Quotient (RQ) tests for at least as many purposes as IQ tests are used. But he doesn’t mention any doubts that I’d expect him to have if he thought about how rewarding high RQ scores might affect the validity of those scores.
He reports that high IQ people can avoid some framing effects and overconfidence, but do so only when told to do so. Also, the sunk cost bias test looks easy to learn how to score well on, even when it’s hard to practice the right behavior – the Bruine de Bruin, Parker and Fischhoff paper than Stanovich implies is the best attempt so far to produce an RQ test lists a sample question for the sunk costs bias that involves abandoning food when you’re too full at a restaurant. It’s obvious what answer produces a higher RQ score, but that doesn’t say much about how I’d behave when the food is in front of me.
He sometimes writes as if rationality were as close to being a single mental ability as IQ is, but at other times he implies it isn’t. I needed to read the Bruine de Bruin, Parker and Fischhoff paper to get real evidence. Their path independence component looks unrelated to the others. The remaining components have enough correlation with each other that there may be connections between them, but those correlations are lower than the correlations between the overall rationality score and IQ tests. So it’s far from clear whether a single RQ score is better than using the components as independent tests.
Given the importance he attaches to testing for and rewarding rationality, it’s disappointing that he devotes so little attention to how to do that.
He has some good explanations of why evolution would have produced minds with the irrational features we observe. He’s much less impressive when he describes how we should classify various biases.
I was occasionally annoyed that he treats disrespect for scientific authority as if it were equivalent to irrationality. The evidence for Big Foot or extraterrestrial visitors may be too flimsy to belong in scientific papers, but when he says there’s “not a shred of evidence” for them, he’s either using a meaning of “evidence” that’s inappropriate when discussing the rationality of people who may be sensibly lazy about gathering relevant data, or he’s simply wrong.
Posted in Book Reviews, The Human Mind | No Comments »
December 1st, 2009
Book review: Finding Alpha: The Search for Alpha When Risk and Return Break Down by Eric Falkenstein.
This book presents mostly convincing arguments that refute the basic principle of CAPM that riskier investments are rewarded with higher returns, and the relation between risk and returns is better explained by modeling investors as wanting high returns relative to other investors rather than high absolute returns. But the quality of the arguments is quite variable. Much of the book assumes a good understanding of finance theory. If you don’t understand the importance of a Sharpe ratio, you’re not in his target audience.
I was not convinced by his most heavily emphasized empirical claim, that returns on equities are unrelated to beta because controlling for size eliminates the apparent relation. There’s enough connection between size and risk that this raises many questions he doesn’t answer (e.g. JB Berk, A critique of size-related anomalies). But later on he devotes a chapter to a wide variety of evidence that overcomes these concerns, and somewhat supports his claim that for riskier investments, the correlation between risk and return is negative (for the safest investments, it’s positive). And the authoritative Fama and French paper has more convincing evidence about beta – even without controlling for size, the correlation between beta and returns vanished during the 1963 to 1990 period.
He claims that the equity risk premium is effectively zero for a typical investor. His attempt to add up the different adjustments is confusing. He concludes with a table showing size adjustments to that standard estimate that add up to a mind-boggling 15 percent, which would result in a “premium” of -9 percent or so. But adding them is clearly wrong – the tax adjustment assumes the absence of some of the other adjustments. Still, the arguments he assembles from other researchers imply a good chance that the sign of the equity risk premium varies with the time period over which it’s measured.
He suggests some strategies to invest more wisely as a result of the ideas he presents, which he aptly summarizes as “selling hope relative to the market” (i.e. treating volatile stocks as overpriced due to a hope premium). But claiming this produces “superior returns, with less risk however measured” is too strong. Financial risk is not the only relevant measure of risk. Following his advice has social risks that he hints at elsewhere. Being invested in boring stocks in a bubble impairs your ability to engage in some interesting conversations, and you won’t make up for that by mentioning how you outperform the market in times when other want to avoid remembering their investments. Is it possible to minimize both kinds of risks by investing token amounts in ways that trendy folks are talking about, and investing most of your money to maximize your Sharpe ratio? Or does that require too much cognitive dissonance?
The book encourages pessimism, especially about the effects of people wanting relative wealth, and makes disturbing claims such as “Envy is necessary for compassion”.
He provides a number of other good ideas about investing, such as the possibility that the internet bubble adds a big anomaly to many data sets used for backtesting.
Posted in Investing | 1 Comment »
November 18th, 2009
Book review: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell.
Gladwell has taken what would be a few ordinary blog posts and added enough eloquent fluff to them to make them into a book. There is probably a good deal of truth to his conclusions, but the evidence is much weaker than he wants you to think.
For his claim that 10,000 hours of practice are needed to become an expert, he doesn’t discuss the possibility that the causality often runs the opposite way: having the talent to become an expert creates a desire to practice a lot. He gives at least one example where the person seemed to lack expertise before getting the 10,000 hours of practice, but it’s not hard to imagine a variety of immaturity-related reasons why that might happen without the amount of practice causing the expertise.
I’m confused by his claims about how much practice he thinks the Beatles had before becoming successful. He points to somewhere between 1,200 and 1,800 hours of practice they had by late 1962 (which is about when Wikipedia indicates they became successful in the UK). Gladwell seems to say they weren’t successful until they came to the US in February 1964. He implies that they had 10,000 hours of practice by then, but I don’t see how he could claim they had much more than 3,000 hours of practice by then. So calling the 10,000 hour estimate a rule appears involve a good deal of exaggeration.
Posted in Life, the Universe, and Everything | No Comments »
November 11th, 2009
Book review: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yasheng Huang.
This is the most insightful book I’ve read so far on the Chinese economy. Most commentators only look at the most readily available data, but Huang dug through many obscure detailed records that were less likely to be manipulated.
The most important point of the book is to show that the widely held view of China as having gradual, steady improvement since 1978 is wrong. There was a dramatic political change in 1978 that allowed the rural parts of China (which still account for a large part of the economy, and where entrepreneurial culture had not been stamped out by communism) to prosper. Then starting in 1989 urban-focused leaders stifled rural businesses, causing stagnation there until 2002, when leaders more friendly to rural business gained power and allowed fairly healthy growth to resume.
Meanwhile urban areas have been dominated by crony capitalism which produced a good deal of gdp growth through massive state-directed investment in large companies, especially in the 1990s. This growth has produced fewer benefits to the average person than gdp numbers would lead us to expect.
Most of China’s success has been due to private enterprise. Beliefs that state-run businesses have produced growth are partly due to confusing reports about which companies are private.
I’m fairly impressed by the documentation of the changes in the rural political climate, but since the author seems to be the only one reading his sources of data and since it would be very time consuming to check them, it would be easy for errors to go unnoticed. For urban issues, he appears to be overstating the importance of problems that are not unique to China.
He partly clears up the puzzle of China doing better than should be expected for a country whose legal system doesn’t provide much rule of law. He provides evidence that some of the most important successes depend on British law imported via Hong Kong. But he doesn’t provide enough evidence to tell us how important this effect has been.
He leaves unanswered many questions I’d like answered. Why did government policies undergo these changes? Is the surprisingly reported steady gdp growth mostly the result of manipulated statistics? How much of the growth has been an investment bubble, and how much is sustainable? How did entrepreneurial culture survive communism in rural China so much better than in other countries?
Posted in China, Economics | No Comments »
October 28th, 2009
How can a hospital-like business operating outside of existing territorial jurisdictions avoid harrassment by governments whose medical lobbies want to spread FUD?
Given that these businesses will initially have no track record to point to and less protection than existing medical tourism providers from whatever government provides a flag of convenience to the business, merely providing comparable quality medical care won’t be enough for such businesses to thrive. So I’m proposing practices which could enable those businesses to argue that current U.S. hospitals are more dangerous. I’m not suggesting this just for marketing purposes – I want safe hospitals to be available, and regulatory costs in the U.S. make it easier to start an innovative hospital offshore than in the U.S. (especially for types of innovation that don’t respect doctors’ prestige).
It has been known since 1847 that doctors kill patients by failing to wash their hands often enough. Yet this threat is still common. An offshore hospital could offer patients documentation showing when medical personel who touch the patient washed their hands (e.g. by providing the patient with video recordings of the procedures sufficient for the patient to verify cleanliness), with a double your money back guarantee. There are many other less common errors that patients could use such videos to check for.
The book Counting Sheep argues that hospitals often impair patients’ health by disturbing their sleep. Paying patients if night-time noise or light levels exceed some pre-specified limits should reduce this problem.
Next, I want the hospital’s fee structure to give it increased incentives to avoid failure. For procedures with objectively measurable results, I want the hospital to charge the patient only if those results are achieved, and to pay the patient some pre-specified amount if results leave the patient measurably worse off. (For hard to measure results such as change in pain, this approach won’t work).
The article You Get What You Pay For: Result-Based Compensation for Health Care has more extensive discussion of incentives and of strategies that hospitals might use to reduce the rate at which they harm patients.
Posted in Freedom, Health | No Comments »