5 ms·

> For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattl

by steego 10y ago

> For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattle, leading to the starvation and death of 20,000 - 40,000 people. How does a brain built on statistics decide that this is the most rational course of action? That's actually a really good example of statistics deciding a course of action. Ask yourself this? Why did they believe it? It's most likely that group of people were repeatedly told stories that belongs to a larger framework of belief. What you might not understand is good literature has a tendency to fire parts of the brain related to sight, sound and touch in an fMRI. For so many people, a good story creates a parallel quasi-reality, and I wouldn't be surprised their brain is basically chalking up those stories as real experiences. I was just listening to a story on This American Life about some kids whose prom was interrupted by a tornado. What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them. If you think about the garbage plot lines and religious upbringing people absorb, this sort of narcissistic outlook makes a tremendous amount of sense. I'll add this one point. Modern public relations and politics feeds on the principle that you can manufacture reality by constantly bombarding people with the same shallow message. It doesn't matter what you say as much as how loud and frequent you're saying it.

haberman 10y ago
> What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them. Exactly. I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical. They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. What experiment would convince you that statistics is not "the ultimate language of the brain?"
- steego 10y ago
  I'm not necessarily convinced statistics is the ultimate language of the brain. Like you, I imagine there are a number of legacy systems in the brain that coordinate in interesting ad-hoc ways. What do you think I should read?
  - Normal_gaussian 10y ago
    > Like you, I imagine there are a number of legacy systems in the brain that coordinate in interesting ad-hoc ways. I'm sorry if I have missed something obvious, but where does haberman claim such a belief? As far as I can see they are just questioning the application of the scientific method and the strength of conclusions that can be drawn from the results.
    - steego 10y ago
      You didn't miss anything, I misspoke. I didn't mean to imply he held that that specific belief.
  - haberman 10y ago
    I don't have any reading suggestions, sorry. Psychology has a lot of interesting and useful localized results (like the list of cognitive biases I linked to before), but I don't believe any rigorous unified theory of cognition exists. At least I've never come across one.
- duaneb 10y ago
  > They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. Why is this anti-statistical? Nobody said the statistical input had to be empirical.
- notahacker 10y ago
  I'm not sure I'm convinced that statistics is the language of the brain, but I am convinced that statistical inference is one of the main reasons why individuals (and later, populations) come to believe in some highly irrational superstitions - the ones where there's no reason to assume causality at all save for correlation of rare events (particularly if we're assuming imperfect use of statistics influenced by our cognitive biases rather than "the scientific method is the language of the brain) "This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events the probability of her being an actual prophet is pretty high, given the existence of prophets is not inherently improbable" and "my odds of survival are better if I follow this stupid recommendation than if I'm lynched by my fellow countrymen for ignoring it" are both statistically valid conclusions in favour of following some ridiculous food-source-decimating millenialist prophecy in certain circumstances.
  - haberman 10y ago
    > "This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events..." Ok you have a story. I can tell a different story: "My tendency towards religious/supernatural belief that has helped me and my ancestors form moral codes and act tribally has in this case caused me to embrace a belief that will lead to the ruin of me and my people. These religious/supernatural beliefs are inherently anti-statistical and lead to lots of incorrect ideas like witchcraft and rainmaking, but these systems of belief are selected by evolution because they overall increase our chances of survival." Now we have two stories, two narratives. Why do you believe yours over mine? And how can we objectively decide which story reflects the truth about the human brain?
    - powera 10y ago
      So you're saying that since some people are religious, brains can't operate on statistics?
      - haberman 10y ago
        I think religious belief makes it less likely that all human belief-forming and decision-making are based on statistically sound principles, yes. But the actual point I was making in the message you replied to is much weaker than this. I was arguing that just because we can spin a narrative that says a decision-making process was based on a statistical process doesn't mean that our narrative is true. Just because you can tell a story doesn't mean the story reflects reality. We need some objective way of determining which of several competing narratives is actually true.
- Retric 10y ago
  If you set your internal P value at say .01 that seems great. Except your conducting lot's of experiments constantly. https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ And when you do that you regularly show correlation when none exists. Considering how many things used to be deadly, I can see people living with fairly low P values because false positives only need to be less deadly than false negatives for things to work out. IMO, this also explains why people are risk averse. Generally, survival is more about avoid a few low probability bad events than having a long string of extra special awesome days.
- drumdance 10y ago
  They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. This is the disease of our time, and all times. Humans are narcissistic. We like to think that whatever we experience is extra-special. Before he died, the evangelist Jerry Falwell used to say he believed the Antichrist was alive and walking the earth. He believed the second coming was imminent, as did many of his followers. Think about that for a second. It's been ~2000 years since the supposed resurrection, but now is the time God will pick? Why not any one of the other 100 generations?
- nl 10y ago
  They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. I'd argue that an attempt to find a cause for something that is basically random good evidence that the brain is doing a statistical reasoning. In this case it is pretty much a classical overfitting mistake: the brain thinks that it knows all the data, and everything that happens must be caused by something it knows. Statistical processes find spurious relationships all the time. Up-thread I answered how to perform experiments to falsify this.
- steego 10y ago
  > I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical. They're not. Those narratives are based on what they experienced. In this case, what they experienced are stories in the form of movies, TV, video games, anecdotes from peers, and Bible stories. Now they didn't really experience them, but I'd posit the mechanisms in their mind really don't know the difference between what's real and what isn't. It doesn't matter if stories are real, all the matters is that they are the focal point of attention. Think about it. The brain can very much be statistical, but the quality of the statistics is only as good as the data a brain is fed.

by steego 10y ago

haberman 10y ago

> What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them. Exactly. I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical. They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. What experiment would convince you that statistics is not "the ultimate language of the brain?"

steego 10y ago
I'm not necessarily convinced statistics is the ultimate language of the brain. Like you, I imagine there are a number of legacy systems in the brain that coordinate in interesting ad-hoc ways. What do you think I should read?
- Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  > Like you, I imagine there are a number of legacy systems in the brain that coordinate in interesting ad-hoc ways. I'm sorry if I have missed something obvious, but where does haberman claim such a belief? As far as I can see they are just questioning the application of the scientific method and the strength of conclusions that can be drawn from the results.
  - steego 10y ago
    You didn't miss anything, I misspoke. I didn't mean to imply he held that that specific belief.
- haberman 10y ago
  I don't have any reading suggestions, sorry. Psychology has a lot of interesting and useful localized results (like the list of cognitive biases I linked to before), but I don't believe any rigorous unified theory of cognition exists. At least I've never come across one.
duaneb 10y ago
> They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. Why is this anti-statistical? Nobody said the statistical input had to be empirical.
notahacker 10y ago
I'm not sure I'm convinced that statistics is the language of the brain, but I am convinced that statistical inference is one of the main reasons why individuals (and later, populations) come to believe in some highly irrational superstitions - the ones where there's no reason to assume causality at all save for correlation of rare events (particularly if we're assuming imperfect use of statistics influenced by our cognitive biases rather than "the scientific method is the language of the brain) "This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events the probability of her being an actual prophet is pretty high, given the existence of prophets is not inherently improbable" and "my odds of survival are better if I follow this stupid recommendation than if I'm lynched by my fellow countrymen for ignoring it" are both statistically valid conclusions in favour of following some ridiculous food-source-decimating millenialist prophecy in certain circumstances.
- haberman 10y ago
  > "This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events..." Ok you have a story. I can tell a different story: "My tendency towards religious/supernatural belief that has helped me and my ancestors form moral codes and act tribally has in this case caused me to embrace a belief that will lead to the ruin of me and my people. These religious/supernatural beliefs are inherently anti-statistical and lead to lots of incorrect ideas like witchcraft and rainmaking, but these systems of belief are selected by evolution because they overall increase our chances of survival." Now we have two stories, two narratives. Why do you believe yours over mine? And how can we objectively decide which story reflects the truth about the human brain?
  - powera 10y ago
    So you're saying that since some people are religious, brains can't operate on statistics?
    - haberman 10y ago
      I think religious belief makes it less likely that all human belief-forming and decision-making are based on statistically sound principles, yes. But the actual point I was making in the message you replied to is much weaker than this. I was arguing that just because we can spin a narrative that says a decision-making process was based on a statistical process doesn't mean that our narrative is true. Just because you can tell a story doesn't mean the story reflects reality. We need some objective way of determining which of several competing narratives is actually true.
Retric 10y ago
If you set your internal P value at say .01 that seems great. Except your conducting lot's of experiments constantly. https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/ And when you do that you regularly show correlation when none exists. Considering how many things used to be deadly, I can see people living with fairly low P values because false positives only need to be less deadly than false negatives for things to work out. IMO, this also explains why people are risk averse. Generally, survival is more about avoid a few low probability bad events than having a long string of extra special awesome days.
drumdance 10y ago
They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. This is the disease of our time, and all times. Humans are narcissistic. We like to think that whatever we experience is extra-special. Before he died, the evangelist Jerry Falwell used to say he believed the Antichrist was alive and walking the earth. He believed the second coming was imminent, as did many of his followers. Think about that for a second. It's been ~2000 years since the supposed resurrection, but now is the time God will pick? Why not any one of the other 100 generations?
nl 10y ago
They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. I'd argue that an attempt to find a cause for something that is basically random good evidence that the brain is doing a statistical reasoning. In this case it is pretty much a classical overfitting mistake: the brain thinks that it knows all the data, and everything that happens must be caused by something it knows. Statistical processes find spurious relationships all the time. Up-thread I answered how to perform experiments to falsify this.
steego 10y ago
> I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical. They're not. Those narratives are based on what they experienced. In this case, what they experienced are stories in the form of movies, TV, video games, anecdotes from peers, and Bible stories. Now they didn't really experience them, but I'd posit the mechanisms in their mind really don't know the difference between what's real and what isn't. It doesn't matter if stories are real, all the matters is that they are the focal point of attention. Think about it. The brain can very much be statistical, but the quality of the statistics is only as good as the data a brain is fed.