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Happiness from the Inside Out

Posted by Peter on April 20, 2010
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

Book review: Happiness from the Inside Out: The Art and Science of Fulfillment by Robert Mack.

This easy to read book describes many of the approaches I’ve used to make myself happier. That makes me somewhat tempted to believe the rest of his advice, but he seems to exaggerate enough that I have some doubts.

Being less concerned about what others think of me is an important part of his advice. But it seems implausible that I can be completely unharmed by other peoples opinions of me. He seems to believe that it’s possible to have a romantic relationship without risking being disappointed by one’s partner. I can somewhat reduce my emotional reaction to a partner not acting as I expected, but complete detachment would seem to make it hard for me to sympathize with a partner when appropriate.

There’s plenty of peer pressure for people to claim to be less susceptible to peer pressure than they actually are, so many people will be unaware of how to reduce those influences. This book’s focus on optimism is likely to distract people from such unflattering insights. You should look elsewhere for awareness of your desires for status, and choose wisely which status hierarchies you want to care about.

His paints a misleadingly gloomy picture of long-term happiness trends in the U.S., by selective evidence such as rising teen suicide rates, but not the fact that overall suicide rates are lower than a few decades ago.

His discussion of the genetic influence on happiness is unnecessarily discouraging. He mentions height as a stereotypical trait influenced by genes. I suggest thinking about hair color – it’s probably more influenced by genes than happiness, yet people who decide their hair should be purple often succeed quickly.

His claim that “Happiness is a particularly personal journey and no amount of data or research can tell you what will bring you happiness” is somewhat misleading – see the book Stumbling on Happiness for a very different perspective.

ADHD and Autism

Posted by Peter on April 2, 2010
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: .

My understanding of Aspergers/autism (AS) and ADHD suggests to me that they can’t coexist in one personality. I keep coming across reports of people having both, and I’ve been trying to research whether those reports result from mistaken diagnoses or whether I’m missing something. I haven’t found any insightful discussion that addresses this directly. I’ve done some research on ADHD recently which clarified my ideas on this subject.

Both produce social problems due to unusual ways in which their attention works, and both involve unusually focused attention, which produce a good deal of overlap in symptoms. But there are many other features for which the two seem opposites.

ADHD – shifts attention easily and quickly in response to new stimuli
AS – slow to shift attention in response to stimuli

ADHD – seeks adrenaline rush from stimulating/risky situations
AS – avoids being overwhelmed by stimulating/risky situations

ADHD – often pays attention to multiple tasks at once
AS – finds multitasking unusually hard

From answers.com:

ADHD – makes inappropriate comments due to being impulsive but realizes afterward it was inappropriate

AS – makes inappropriate comments due to not knowing better and not understanding social conventions

ADHD – forgets details of daily routines

AS – follows daily routines rigidly

From another source:

Children with ADHD frequently break rules they understand, but defy and dislike. Children with Asperger’s Syndrome like rules, and break the ones they don’t understand. They are ever alert to injustice and unfairness and, unfortunately, these are invariably understood from their own nonnegotiable perspective. Children with ADHD are often oppositional in the service of seeking attention. Children with Asperger’s disorder are oppositional in the service of avoiding something that makes them anxious

With all these traits, there are wide variations in the degree to which anyone has them. But most of what I know suggests that people on one side of the AS/ADHD spectrum with regard to one of these traits are almost always on the same side with respect to the others, or else too close to the middle to classify.

Since many of these traits are poorly observed by those who diagnose them (you don’t observe peoples’ daily routines in a doctor’s office), it’s easy to imagine that widespread mistakes in diagnoses create a false impression that AS and ADHD coexist. Does anyone know of a good analysis that disagrees with my conclusion?

[Update 2010-11-15: I’ve gotten some feedback from people with some ADHD traits who don’t clearly fit the pattern I’ve described. Maybe my analysis only works for one subtype of ADHD, or maybe things are too complex for any existing categories to work as well as I’d like.]

This Time is Different

Posted by Peter on March 11, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, U.S. Politics. Tagged: , , .

Book review: This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff.

This book documents better than any prior book the history of banking and government debt crises. Most of it is unsurprising to those familiar with the subject. It has more comprehensive data than I’ve seen before.

It is easier reading than the length would suggest (it has many tables of data, and few readers will be tempted to read all the data). It is relatively objective. That makes it less exciting than the more ideological writings on the subject.

The comparisons between well governed and poorly governed countries show that governments can become mature enough that defaults on government debt and hyperinflation are rare or eliminated, but there is little different in banking crises between different types of government / economies.

They claim that international capital mobility has produced banking crises, but don’t convince me that they understand the causality behind the correlation. I’d guess that one causal factor is that the optimism that produces bubbles causes more investors to move money into countries they understand less well than their home country, which means their money is more likely to end up in reckless institutions.

The book ends with tentative guesses about which countries are about to become mature enough to avoid sovereign debt crises. Among the seven candidates is Greece, which is now looking like a poor guess less than a half year after it was published.

The Chimera Hypothesis

Posted by Peter on March 2, 2010
Posted in: The Human Mind. Tagged: .

The Chimera Hypothesis: Homosexuality and Plural Pregnancy makes the surprising claim that:

at least 50-70% of healthy adults are chimeric to some extent.

The hypothesis can explain some homosexual and transgender tendencies, and suggests some reproductive advantages that offset those reproductive disadvantages:

Therefore, women prone to having more than one egg fertilized, but whose pregnancies only resulted in only one live birth, would have the optimum level of fertility. A side effect of this could be an increased incidence of chimerism in human children … even a relatively small increase in female fertility, which is really the limiting factor in human population growth, could outweigh the disadvantage of less fertility in a small number of male infants.

One observation that this hypothesis doesn’t explain is why there are many more homosexuals than transgenders. So my guess is that it explains only a modest fraction of the homosexuality that we observe, but might explain the observed frequency of transgenders fairly well.

Diamond Trees for Carbon Sequestration

Posted by Peter on February 22, 2010
Posted in: Molecular Assemblers (Advanced Nanotech). Tagged: .

Rob Freitas has a good report analyzing how to use molecular nanotechnology to return atmospheric CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels by about 2060 or 2070.

My only complaint is that his attempt to estimate the equivalent of Moore’s Law for photovoltaics looks too optimistic, as it puts too much weight on the 2006-2008 trend, which was influenced by an abnormal rise in energy prices. If the y-axis on that graph were logarithmic instead of linear, it would be easier to visualize the lower long-term trend.

(HT Brian Wang).

A Splendid Exchange

Posted by Peter on February 12, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics. Tagged: .

Book Review: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World by William J. Bernstein.

This book starts off as a relatively ordinary history book, then toward the end offers a moderate number of valuable insights. Those insights don’t appear to be original, but he performs a valuable service by drawing attention to ideas that aren’t as widely known as they should be.

He argues that the Boston Tea Party was intended to keep tea prices high, and instigated by the merchants who were threatened by increased competition, using the much of the same rhetoric that modern protectionists use.

He describes a strong connection between a decrease in the price of mailing a letter and the ability of people of ordinary wealth to organize opposition to the Corn Laws.

He has an interesting argument that the benefits of international trade is the resulting desire for peace between people who have business relationships with each other, rather than the more obvious but apparently small benefits that are more direct. I wish there were stronger evidence that trade generates peace.

He makes a moderate number of claims that seem poorly thought out. E.g. “a national or central bank” is “the bedrock financial institution of the modern world”.

Impro

Posted by Peter on January 29, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, The Human Mind. Tagged: , .

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.

Foresight 2010

Posted by Peter on January 19, 2010
Posted in: Artificial Intelligence, Idea Futures, Life, the Universe, and Everything. Tagged: , , , .

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.

City of Gold

Posted by Peter on January 9, 2010
Posted in: Book Reviews, Economics, Mideast. Tagged: , .

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.