6 ms·

The Bugs in Our Mindware (2016)

57 points by dnetesn 8y ago

s-shellfish 8y ago
> We live in a three-dimensional world and we don’t have to worry about the fact that the mind makes mistakes when it’s forced to deal with an unnatural, two-dimensional world. This is amusing. To a mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, logician, 2 dimensions are often easier to reason about than 3. > Honesty in the future is best predicted by honesty in the past, not by whether a person looks you steadily in the eye or claims a recent religious conversion. This doesn't give people the chance to change if the whole system is based on everyone retaining an internal consistency in inferencing that is checked against reality by testing it. > The conjunction of two events can’t be more likely than just one event by itself. This is mathematically incorrect. If two events are mutually dependent on the other to occur then two events are more likely to occur together than either or independently. > The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Apply this reasoning to yourself before you expect it from others. Apply it to the things about you that are the hardest to change, that you actually want to change. Shortest path to compassion, and one of the hardest lessons to learn.
- iamthepieman 8y ago
  >This doesn't give people the chance to change if the whole system is based on everyone retaining an internal consistency in inferencing that is checked against reality by testing it. Yes it does, start being honest and eventually people's most recent memories or interactions with you will be ones of honesty. This is different, of course, than the one strike and your out criminal offense system in the U.S.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    I'm speaking hypothetically, first. Secondly, that assumes way too much about how people think.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- smadge 8y ago
  >> The conjunction of two events can’t be more likely than just one event by itself. > This is mathematically incorrect. If two events are mutually dependent on the other to occur then two events are more likely to occur together than either or independently. The original statement is correct. You are talking about conditional probability: the probability that one event will occur given that another event has occurred. i.e. if A and B are two events P(A|B), read as the probability of A given B. This is equal to P(A and B)/P(B). Notice that, The conjunction of the two events, P(A and B), is divided by the probability of B, P(B). We have reduced the probability space to the smaller space of just B. The conjunction of two events is just their set intersection (at least in a probability system which defines events as sets of outcomes) and can never be larger than either event.
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    That assumes events are sequentially occurring.
    - tetromino_ 8y ago
      I think there's an issue of terminology. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_(probability_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_(probability_theory) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_space for what mathematical statistics means by the term "event". I suspect that what you are calling "events" are actually values of some function defined on the set of (mathematical) events. Such a function is called a random variable. The values of a random variable are a major object of study in statistics - but they are not events.
      - s-shellfish 8y ago
        I'm trying to direct this conversation away from using logic and math to reason about interpersonal relationships. It's garbage. Math talks about math. Logic talks about logic. This article conflates it with how people think about one another. They are calling an event that occurs twice a singular event. My mind, your mind, the same statement, understood and accepted twice, possibly at different points in time (which is obvious given the fact that I have to literally hit send on this message) but you may be thinking the same thoughts as I at the same time, mutually dependent because we are all idiots that think it's fine to use logic and math to describe all minds. It's not an RV when it comes to thoughts you choose to think! The RV is the thoughts you don't want to think.
- losvedir 8y ago
  > If two events are mutually dependent on the other to occur then two events are more likely to occur together than either or independently. But that's not the statement that you're saying is incorrect. In your scenario, if A and B always occur together then P(A) == P(B) == P(A & B), and the original statement that P(A & B) is not greater than either P(A) or P(B) is still true (it's equal).
  - s-shellfish 8y ago
    The reasoning they are using isn't pure logic or math. You need more than logic and math to reason about people emotionally. There's mutually established dependencies in relationships. One depends on the other but both minds think. This is ridiculous reasoning to turn this crap into a math or logical expression to begin with. The fact that we have to argue out of common sense about emotions with logic and math is ridiculous enough and sucks because guess what! We know we reasoned ourselves into it. People affect one another. Sometimes people understand each other mutually at the same time. It's not out of the space of probability for empathy to happen at the same moment in time and be dependent on the fact that both people are working towards it together.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      The statement is that P(A ∧ B) is always less than or equal to both P(A) and P(B). You're arguing that P(A ∧ B) can be greater than P(A ∧ ¬B) and can be greater than P(B ∧ ¬A), which is true, but it's a totally different statement. You're confused about the language, and building some emotions-based interpretation around it.
      - s-shellfish 8y ago
        > You're confused about the language, and building some emotions-based interpretation around it. That is what the article is about. I believe there are more ways to reason than just using logic or probability when it comes to determining how people think. That's just reality. The crux of my argument rests on thinking about thinking. Also, please don't tell me I'm confused. I'm not confused. You are cherry picking an argument and that has derailed me from my original point. Thinking about thinking influences the probabilities of what thoughts will occur as consequence in ways that are intrinsically entangled. You can extrapolate that reasoning to yield how and why people think about how other people think and for what purpose. Please reread what I said originally instead of latching on a single point by taking advantage of the fact that multiple people have responded to different points in unison to my perspective. You know I can assume you are responding to a specific point and you can continue directing the conversation using that point to begin with as a foundation for weakening my argument. You also know I can't assume you have read the whole lineage of comments resulting from my original argument, as can anyone else responding to this thread chain. I said mutually dependent - you can try to understand this if you choose to do so. But honestly all of this is ridiculous.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  Edit: internal inconsistency is just as adequate
MrLeap 8y ago
As long as we don't blow ourselves up first, these tend to be cognitively self correcting when exploited at scale. Would something like the hysteria caused by the "war of the worlds" radio broadcast be possible to reproduce today? Yeah, absolutely. The bar's a little higher though, you'd need multiple organizations corroborating the story over multiple mediums. Enough people on twitter would say things like "Uh, I'm standing around where the aliens are supposed to be and I don't see shit" to arrest some of the contagion. I have a theory that new modes of communication automatically seem more trustworthy at first, because most of the time the liars don't move in until adoption reaches a certain level to make it profitable. The problem is that transition. We're late in the cycle right now for the internet. People are slowly learning to take extraordinary claims on the internet less seriously by default. I like to think about the impact of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats. Most of America tuned in, captivated. The things he said calmed people down, reduced national anxiety and assuaged their fears. The default mode was to trust him, and that made a historic impact. It felt nationally like the president could finally talk to people on a personal level. Then a few years passed, and the national trust was taken advantage of. Despite Tuskegee, MKUltra, The Bay of Pigs, Watergate -- pretty much everything about Nixon, and a hundred other events, it took a long time to make the majority of us into the politically disillusioned wrecks we've become. It's easy to imagine how seductive messages like "the elite are all lying to you" are when that's become the safest default position for a while. The vulnerability we've found ourselves in now is lies bolted on to truths. I'm hoping that we'll all inoculate ourselves with some kind of generalized agenda aversion next. A man running for state representative came to my door a few weeks ago. He wanted to know if he could place a sign in my yard. To be honest, my default position would have been to say "Go for it homie". Any candidate making door calls is atleast trying to put in effort. Especially since political candidates basically spout vague platitudes that turn into nebulous nonsense. Fortunately for me, he seemed adamant he wanted to show me the key thesis in his pamphlet before I made my decision, he opened it up and tapped on the header. "Muslims are a problem for America." "Ohhh you're a racist!" I said politely. "Thanks for letting me know, I have literally no interest in that being in my yard. Have a nice day!" We don't even have symbols for the bugs in our brain that allow history to repeat itself like it does.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I have more usually seen the term Wetware, not Mindware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_(brain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_(brain) (Not a criticism. Just an observation.)
laretluval 8y ago
Which is more likely to contain bugs? The part of us we call "rational", which seems to be evolutionarily late, or our highly-evolved instincts, which served us for millions of years?
- incompatible 8y ago
  Living in a developed city today is a kind of virtual reality. It is different in many ways from the kind of existence that created those instincts.
  - laretluval 8y ago
    Yeah, the raw sensory input is pretty different. But how different are the basic incentives?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Not just raw sensory inputs are different, the probability distributions behind those inputs are all different. Consider sugars in food. Our taste buds, and instincts behind them, are totally not handling the amount of signals modern processed foods send. What used to be a proxy for quality is now usually a good proxy for lack of it. Consider availability heuristic. In the ancient past, all events you've learned about from someone else were involving your local community. The frequency of those "news" were related to how important those events are to you personally. Today, it's the inverse - the more something is in the news, the more it's utterly irrelevant to you personally. The real dangers don't have novelty factor, so they aren't talked about. The result is people afraid of terrorists - with all the disastrous consequences when that fear is expressed as public policy - instead of car accidents. The result is FOMO. The result is people feeling inadequate because world's top 1% of celebrities is more familiar to them than their neighbours, so they've lost the perception of actual distribution of wealth and beauty in a population.
      - andai 8y ago
        How do I subscribe to a user on HN?
aaaaaardvark 8y ago
Great article! Although it's definitely more likely (6 times) to have two investments fail and two succeed than all four succeed. Of course his point still stands that there's luck involved in investing.
picsao 8y ago
Anything emotional overriding reason could be called a bug. But it turns out that all reasoning is just a thin coat of colour on the tip of a flawed nn statistics iceberg drifting on the current of fabricated and real memories into the shipping streets of our life's. Be slow and review what one did like it was done by a stranger to perceive bias bugs.
jwilk 8y ago
Criticism of the hungry judges study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701328

57 points by dnetesn 8y ago

> We live in a three-dimensional world and we don’t have to worry about the fact that the mind makes mistakes when it’s forced to deal with an unnatural, two-dimensional world. This is amusing. To a mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, logician, 2 dimensions are often easier to reason about than 3. > Honesty in the future is best predicted by honesty in the past, not by whether a person looks you steadily in the eye or claims a recent religious conversion. This doesn't give people the chance to change if the whole system is based on everyone retaining an internal consistency in inferencing that is checked against reality by testing it. > The conjunction of two events can’t be more likely than just one event by itself. This is mathematically incorrect. If two events are mutually dependent on the other to occur then two events are more likely to occur together than either or independently. > The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Apply this reasoning to yourself before you expect it from others. Apply it to the things about you that are the hardest to change, that you actually want to change. Shortest path to compassion, and one of the hardest lessons to learn.

iamthepieman 8y ago
>This doesn't give people the chance to change if the whole system is based on everyone retaining an internal consistency in inferencing that is checked against reality by testing it. Yes it does, start being honest and eventually people's most recent memories or interactions with you will be ones of honesty. This is different, of course, than the one strike and your out criminal offense system in the U.S.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  I'm speaking hypothetically, first. Secondly, that assumes way too much about how people think.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
smadge 8y ago
>> The conjunction of two events can’t be more likely than just one event by itself. > This is mathematically incorrect. If two events are mutually dependent on the other to occur then two events are more likely to occur together than either or independently. The original statement is correct. You are talking about conditional probability: the probability that one event will occur given that another event has occurred. i.e. if A and B are two events P(A|B), read as the probability of A given B. This is equal to P(A and B)/P(B). Notice that, The conjunction of the two events, P(A and B), is divided by the probability of B, P(B). We have reduced the probability space to the smaller space of just B. The conjunction of two events is just their set intersection (at least in a probability system which defines events as sets of outcomes) and can never be larger than either event.
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  That assumes events are sequentially occurring.
  - tetromino_ 8y ago
    I think there's an issue of terminology. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_(probability_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_(probability_theory) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_space for what mathematical statistics means by the term "event". I suspect that what you are calling "events" are actually values of some function defined on the set of (mathematical) events. Such a function is called a random variable. The values of a random variable are a major object of study in statistics - but they are not events.
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      I'm trying to direct this conversation away from using logic and math to reason about interpersonal relationships. It's garbage. Math talks about math. Logic talks about logic. This article conflates it with how people think about one another. They are calling an event that occurs twice a singular event. My mind, your mind, the same statement, understood and accepted twice, possibly at different points in time (which is obvious given the fact that I have to literally hit send on this message) but you may be thinking the same thoughts as I at the same time, mutually dependent because we are all idiots that think it's fine to use logic and math to describe all minds. It's not an RV when it comes to thoughts you choose to think! The RV is the thoughts you don't want to think.
losvedir 8y ago
> If two events are mutually dependent on the other to occur then two events are more likely to occur together than either or independently. But that's not the statement that you're saying is incorrect. In your scenario, if A and B always occur together then P(A) == P(B) == P(A & B), and the original statement that P(A & B) is not greater than either P(A) or P(B) is still true (it's equal).
- s-shellfish 8y ago
  The reasoning they are using isn't pure logic or math. You need more than logic and math to reason about people emotionally. There's mutually established dependencies in relationships. One depends on the other but both minds think. This is ridiculous reasoning to turn this crap into a math or logical expression to begin with. The fact that we have to argue out of common sense about emotions with logic and math is ridiculous enough and sucks because guess what! We know we reasoned ourselves into it. People affect one another. Sometimes people understand each other mutually at the same time. It's not out of the space of probability for empathy to happen at the same moment in time and be dependent on the fact that both people are working towards it together.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    The statement is that P(A ∧ B) is always less than or equal to both P(A) and P(B). You're arguing that P(A ∧ B) can be greater than P(A ∧ ¬B) and can be greater than P(B ∧ ¬A), which is true, but it's a totally different statement. You're confused about the language, and building some emotions-based interpretation around it.
    - s-shellfish 8y ago
      > You're confused about the language, and building some emotions-based interpretation around it. That is what the article is about. I believe there are more ways to reason than just using logic or probability when it comes to determining how people think. That's just reality. The crux of my argument rests on thinking about thinking. Also, please don't tell me I'm confused. I'm not confused. You are cherry picking an argument and that has derailed me from my original point. Thinking about thinking influences the probabilities of what thoughts will occur as consequence in ways that are intrinsically entangled. You can extrapolate that reasoning to yield how and why people think about how other people think and for what purpose. Please reread what I said originally instead of latching on a single point by taking advantage of the fact that multiple people have responded to different points in unison to my perspective. You know I can assume you are responding to a specific point and you can continue directing the conversation using that point to begin with as a foundation for weakening my argument. You also know I can't assume you have read the whole lineage of comments resulting from my original argument, as can anyone else responding to this thread chain. I said mutually dependent - you can try to understand this if you choose to do so. But honestly all of this is ridiculous.
s-shellfish 8y ago
Edit: internal inconsistency is just as adequate

MrLeap 8y ago

As long as we don't blow ourselves up first, these tend to be cognitively self correcting when exploited at scale. Would something like the hysteria caused by the "war of the worlds" radio broadcast be possible to reproduce today? Yeah, absolutely. The bar's a little higher though, you'd need multiple organizations corroborating the story over multiple mediums. Enough people on twitter would say things like "Uh, I'm standing around where the aliens are supposed to be and I don't see shit" to arrest some of the contagion. I have a theory that new modes of communication automatically seem more trustworthy at first, because most of the time the liars don't move in until adoption reaches a certain level to make it profitable. The problem is that transition. We're late in the cycle right now for the internet. People are slowly learning to take extraordinary claims on the internet less seriously by default. I like to think about the impact of Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats. Most of America tuned in, captivated. The things he said calmed people down, reduced national anxiety and assuaged their fears. The default mode was to trust him, and that made a historic impact. It felt nationally like the president could finally talk to people on a personal level. Then a few years passed, and the national trust was taken advantage of. Despite Tuskegee, MKUltra, The Bay of Pigs, Watergate -- pretty much everything about Nixon, and a hundred other events, it took a long time to make the majority of us into the politically disillusioned wrecks we've become. It's easy to imagine how seductive messages like "the elite are all lying to you" are when that's become the safest default position for a while. The vulnerability we've found ourselves in now is lies bolted on to truths. I'm hoping that we'll all inoculate ourselves with some kind of generalized agenda aversion next. A man running for state representative came to my door a few weeks ago. He wanted to know if he could place a sign in my yard. To be honest, my default position would have been to say "Go for it homie". Any candidate making door calls is atleast trying to put in effort. Especially since political candidates basically spout vague platitudes that turn into nebulous nonsense. Fortunately for me, he seemed adamant he wanted to show me the key thesis in his pamphlet before I made my decision, he opened it up and tapped on the header. "Muslims are a problem for America." "Ohhh you're a racist!" I said politely. "Thanks for letting me know, I have literally no interest in that being in my yard. Have a nice day!" We don't even have symbols for the bugs in our brain that allow history to repeat itself like it does.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I have more usually seen the term Wetware, not Mindware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_(brain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware_(brain) (Not a criticism. Just an observation.)

laretluval 8y ago

Which is more likely to contain bugs? The part of us we call "rational", which seems to be evolutionarily late, or our highly-evolved instincts, which served us for millions of years?

incompatible 8y ago
Living in a developed city today is a kind of virtual reality. It is different in many ways from the kind of existence that created those instincts.
- laretluval 8y ago
  Yeah, the raw sensory input is pretty different. But how different are the basic incentives?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Not just raw sensory inputs are different, the probability distributions behind those inputs are all different. Consider sugars in food. Our taste buds, and instincts behind them, are totally not handling the amount of signals modern processed foods send. What used to be a proxy for quality is now usually a good proxy for lack of it. Consider availability heuristic. In the ancient past, all events you've learned about from someone else were involving your local community. The frequency of those "news" were related to how important those events are to you personally. Today, it's the inverse - the more something is in the news, the more it's utterly irrelevant to you personally. The real dangers don't have novelty factor, so they aren't talked about. The result is people afraid of terrorists - with all the disastrous consequences when that fear is expressed as public policy - instead of car accidents. The result is FOMO. The result is people feeling inadequate because world's top 1% of celebrities is more familiar to them than their neighbours, so they've lost the perception of actual distribution of wealth and beauty in a population.
    - andai 8y ago
      How do I subscribe to a user on HN?

aaaaaardvark 8y ago

Great article! Although it's definitely more likely (6 times) to have two investments fail and two succeed than all four succeed. Of course his point still stands that there's luck involved in investing.

picsao 8y ago

Anything emotional overriding reason could be called a bug. But it turns out that all reasoning is just a thin coat of colour on the tip of a flawed nn statistics iceberg drifting on the current of fabricated and real memories into the shipping streets of our life's. Be slow and review what one did like it was done by a stranger to perceive bias bugs.

jwilk 8y ago

Criticism of the hungry judges study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14701328