Simfish/InquilineKea’s Thoughts

In politics, a lot of politicians seem to have “double home states”. This was most evident in the Democratic primaries of 2008 (Obama had two home states, Illinois and Hawaii; and Clinton had the home states of Arkansas and New York). For maximal advantage, one may consider a president with two homestates in swing states; and a VP with two homestates in swing states. This usually works best when one of the homestates (probably the one that the person grew up in) is underrepresented at the federal level, however. So Hawaii (for Obama) worked, but if Obama’s secondary homestate was New York or California, it may not work as well.

There are two fundamental ways of learning

(a) general to specific
(b) specific to general (e.g. case studies)

Scientific hypotheses (general) are motivated by experiments (specific). With data, one can hypothesize a trend and see the general hypotheses

One can also try this process mathematically, as specific results can motivate a hypothesis of the general structure, which can then be proved.

Which way is faster? It depends on person. It might be plausible that learning styles are “bunk” and that smarter students are more efficient through learning of type (a), but it’s also quite plausible that this is not true (for one thing, learning is dependent on both intelligence and motivation/interest, and the motivation/interest component can make type b learning more efficient even for geniuses). I, for one, learn best through the “specific to general” method. As such, I believe that I learn math best when it’s motivated by physical phenomena (in other words, learning math “along the way of doing science”) than when pursuing math first and then learning science (which is what I did, which didn’t work as well as I hoped, especially since it killed my motivation). As I’m quite familiar with the climate trends of specific localities, I also learn the generalities of climate best through case studies.

And then after learning the applications of this math field, one is more motivated to learn the specifics of the math behind the math, and one even has more physical intuition through this learning route. It actually means something when one learns through the second route.

It is also true, however, that route (b) can be taken too far, as is evident in the “discovery-based” math curricula, which generally produce poor results. When one is self-motivated, route (b) can be especially rewarding, but the selection of case studies is important, as an improper selection of case studies can result in a very minute exploration of the general structure (it is also true that very few textbooks are written in a way as to make route (b) most exciting to learn about). Generally textbooks present their material as ends, not as means to an end (except in the crappy discovery-based math textbooks). However, one can most certainly learn calculus through physics (especially div/grad/curl), and linear algebra through its applications, and a very smart (or lucky) person can design such a curriculum that would work for many people (it is much easier to design such curriculums for oneself than it is for a wide variety of personalities).

Nonetheless, route (b) is often stultifying. In fact, I sometimes feel impatient and feel like I’d rather learn the math first. A person’s temperament may vary from time to time, and find type a rewarding at some types, and type b rewarding at other times.

so one thing ive always wondered: in pharmacology, is the dose/mg really valid? this assumes that the extra cells (fat or muscle cells) have equal uptake of the drug as all other cells do, AND that blood vessel growth is proportional to weight growth. but i dont think this assumption is totally valid. more fat might spring up new blood vessels, but what is the extra volume of all these blood vessels? well, fat tends to grow on “layers”. fat tends to distribute itself throughout the periphery of the body, so the blood vessel networks on the outer periphery have more surface area to unit volume? (as in, it’s the sort of thing that has a high surface area to volume ratio). so that would make blood vessels from fat cells act in a way that overrepresents the blood vessel growth from fat growth. of course there is an opposite trend too – the blood vessels from new fat cells are just new blood vessels, but they’re not major new blood vessels – there’s a fixed amount of blood vessel mass in every person of some arbitrary height.

there’s another assumption to – that new blood vessel growth will trigger the production of plasma + blood cells that increases in proportion to increased blood vessel growth

because the majority of the literature is in the past, and of that past, most of it will not be in the recent past. trends are the best way to inform the continual applicability of the past literature

normal science: adding entries to the database of scientific knowledge (entries are categorized and analyzed according to current rules)

revolutionary science: change the rules. or design a totally different new system of rules that makes the entries in the database more consistent with each other.

there are several levels of normal science. a researcher/principal investigator can allocate most of the “normal science” work to graduate students/others as he can usually expect them to follow the procedures of normal science. occasionally the researcher chooses to look at the data more closely/examine the data, as specific instances can provide “schema/prototypes” to help clarify theory (and make the theory more salient and comprehensible)

Also, the “4 paradigms” – theory, experiment, simulations, data mining/pattern recognition. technically the latter two can be considered subsets of experiments. But at the same time, they also share some characteristics with theory. there’s a new computer program that can derive physical laws from mass datasets. how does one categorize that? it’s clearly the fourth paradigm, but at the same time, it creates theory (and theory is inspired by the desire to find a model/equation to make the data consistent). simulations can be analyzed too (simulations are pretty much experiments – the only difference is that simulations do not have to conform to the real world). in fact, a lot of the “normal science work” consists of the analysis of simulation output, as many simulations are ad hoc and haven’t been independently investigated by numerous people.

Also, we now know that crowdsourcing can also inspire research (usually through categorization/data mining/etc). Some sorts of crowdsourcing were implicitly used in empirical research (e.g. many fossils are not discovered by people who are actively looking for them – they just accidentally dig them up). now crowdsourcing is more active (galaxy identification, etc).

Technically, there are other important steps to further research too. developing the infrastructure of research (through engineers and programmers). a lot of the infrastructure is general and must be converted to scientific uses.

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Methods of scientific research:

- using alternative paradigm to investigate data. sometimes alternative paradigm describes data better; sometimes data is described equally well by multiple paradigms/interpretations

- development of infrastructure (and integration thereof). matlab, python modules, toolkits, etc.

- run simulations, see if simulation outputs confirm paradigm

- lit reviews (they get the most citations!)

- structure of object, structure of object’s interactions

Personality Psychology:

- Comparing self-assessments with external assessments, assess both wrt accuracy

Psychopharmacology:

- Compare one drug’s effects in adolescence to its effects in adulthood

- bioavailability/pharmokinetics/toxicology/etc. anything on its spec sheet

- effects of metabolites

- effects on other disorders

- possible chronic effects

science tests generally show that most g-related measurements (like working memory) increase up to age 14 and then decline. Also, the size of the brain grows until age 14 and then starts shrinking (I would think that it shrinks slowly at first and then at faster rates once one grows older)

What I find interesting is the digit span test. here, we see that young chimpanzees outperform college students. This is one of the tests where abilities increase up to age 5ish and then decline.

Other g-related measurements also increase to a certain age and then decrease. The age of peak measurement might vary according to test.

So this brings up a lot of questions. First of all, why do some of them peak out at very young ages? (aka why do they decline so early?) Surely it’s before the impact of aging-related effects.

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Anyways, there are a bunch of g-factors for a lot of things. You can make them as specific or as general as you want to. Like, g-factors for RTS games, FPS games, all games, sports, etc. Some of these g-factors are formed of more malleable components than the g-factors of IQ tests; other g-factors are formed of more heritable components than the g-factors of IQ tests. Many also show a peak at a certain age, and then a decline.

10/24/2008: (as that dude once said, Nothing in biology can be understood except under the light of evolution). in other subjects you have “motivations”; in biology you have “selection pressure”. ya. And in chemistry you have “most stable structure” which corresponds to “lowest energy level” or if u want to get really theoretical (statistical mechanics) you have entropy and “which permutation is MOST likely”. so that’s the motivation for chemistry. the motivation for physics is something like that too – statistical mechanics. HAHA. nothing in physics can be understood except under the light of statistical mechanics. SAME FOR CHEMISTRY!! and for biology it’s the same too! cuz evolution is really statistical mechanics. And then what of math? nothing in math can be understood except under the light of the arbitrariness of the axioms lol. that’s right! okay. and then what else? oh yeah social sciences. those are really just huge amounts of data. which all reduce down to statistical mechanics at the end. because in the end, the vast majority of permutations will be permutations of the heat death of the universe anyways

- mathematically rigorous vs. intuitive (many physicists sacrifice mathematical rigor for intuition; opposite for mathematicians)

- ad hoc (okay I wrote this some time ago but have to dig it back up)

- “clever” solution vs “messy” one. It is often the case that a “clever” solution is the easiest solution to understand and use (once dreamed up), but also the solution with the most “genius” to dream up.

- “lucky”. example: nyquist sampling: one can make a perfect reconstruction if “lucky”. statistics often tries to control against such luck. Otherwise people are prone to overgeneralizing from freak accidents (that could be “luck” or “unluck”)

- axioms/assumptions, rules of logic/operators, …

- “elegant”. see wikipedia entry for “mathematical elegance”

- (in talent recognition) tradeoff between creativity and risk. high creativity is often associated with higher risk. risk is often associated with

- (in evolutionary biology) tradeoffs are numerous. mammals and birds are rarely poisonous since they usually have the mobility (from being warm-blooded) and intelligence to quickly kill prey (or escape) without relying on poisons. One must wonder how many animals manage to “hold in” poison without the poison affecting their own tissues

- (in military history): Military history is often popularized as the celebration of “genius” that uses consistently clever strategems used by the winning side. Sometimes it almost seems as if the winning side had near-perfect information of the motives of the losing side. But information is very rarely perfect. Sometimes people have survived due to gambles. Yet some people have survived through repeated gambles. Of course, there will always be winners even in the repeated gambles, and the winners will be the most recognized (no matter how unrepresentative they are of reality, no matter how a perfect system [under limited information] would fail most of the time if it took the same decisions). Though those who make the “best” decisions out of imperfect information will be disproportionately represented among the victors.

- (in economics): tradeoff between fairness and efficiency. Might add that democracy is deliberately inefficient. Fitness-wise, a “perfect” autocracy will have “higher utility” than any democracy. But “perfect autocracies” often degenerate to “catastrophic autocracies”. Why is that? Imperfect information of successors. Also senility (or personality changes) with increasing age, and the failure to adopt what increases utility the most (often since people are psychologically predisposed to be stubborn and include axioms that involve more than the definition of utility – but also – means to maximize utility that aren’t the best means to maximize utility in a different environment)

- (in optimization): optimization, by definition, involves tradeoffs. In fact, the combination of optimization and evolutionary algorithms would probably explain the existence of all of the above

- Environment1, environment2, …, environment n. Person1, person2, …, person n. Interestingly, personality psychology has a major flaw – people can be drastically different in different environments – but their environment happens to be so integrated with the environments of others that they effectively stay in environments that are of limited “distance” from any other arbitrary environment. Their personalities can changed when released into environments whose characteristics entail sufficiently “high” distance from the characteristics from the union (or intersection? both might work) of other environments (e.g. stanford prison experiment). If i had to put a bet though, I would still put in a common “personality factor” through all environments.

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Multiple categories:

- inhibitory neurotransmitters/excitatory neurotransmitters. it is really the receptors that determine whether they are inhibitory/excitatory.

- where do nonlinearities in biology come from? delayed rectifiers (of K+ current), thresholds (is it a bifurcation?). all “thresholds” are a different in magnitude and not of quality, but some may seem like a difference in quality, however, it is all probabilistic. the “threshold” of no return may just be a sharp increase in slope. theoretically speaking, one can create a representation of energy and matter across space-time, which would reduce everything into a difference of quantity (the differences between the coordinates would be the only difference of quality, since the values of one set of coordinates do not have to be absolutely correlated with the values of another set of coordinates)

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- there is no conservation law for acids/bases.

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other random thoughts (I won’t categorize for now):

- economics is the study of incentives, of which money is only a subset of all possible incentives. Freakonomics really brings this distinction to light.

- with massively increased energy, the price of energy will be cheaper, which will make it more economical to transmutate elements. Possibly including elements that could be transmutated into rare earth elements.

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distinctions that aren’t as stark as they seem:

- adaptionism vs. punctuated equilibrium. a recent paper has put in support for the “punctuated equilibrium” theory of genetic variation. i would intuitively find that it makes more sense – it just happens that I used to be more sympathetic to the sociobiologists (who also happen to be right on a lot of things).

-

- neat != organized. one can be organized and still be a mess. having things on the floor may be one way to prioritize the most important things (as long as one is careful not to turn the mess into a disorganized one)

- self-centered != reluctant to share. a self-centered person can be incredibly generous in sharing things – after all – this makes him more well-known to others

- unconscientious != doesn’t work hard. the unconscientious often have to work harder to achieve the same results as the naturally conscientious

- nice != unselfish. being nice is actually incredibly useful in getting people to do things for oneself. it just happens that selfishness tends to be correlated with lower levels of self-control and higher levels of meanness

edited out

science news: (more recent first)

(more @ http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/gnxpforum/ )

My selection tends to be strongly biased along the lines of neuroscience, genetics, transhumanism, animal behavior, and *radical* education reform

2009:

thorium nuclear reactors > uranium

voyager 2 finds that magnetic field just outside solar system is larger than anticipated (explaining why the local interstellar cloud still exists). direction of B is different than anticipated

octopuses use coconut shells as tools

fructose definitively shown to increase abdominal fat

sleep deprivation => orexin => beta amyloid => alzheimer’s

small amounts of beta amyloid necessary for memory

physically fit => higher IQ

2008: dual-n-back => higher fluid IQ

electroweak stars

“time-keeping” neurons discovered

“harm” ratings of drug users closely parallel “harm ratings” of researchers (in the lancet)

mostly vegetarian spider

more bisphenol a dangers

amphetamine use in adolescence may impair adult working memory

birds in captivity lose hippocampal mass

infections possibly responsible for most cancers

distant earthquakes can weaken faults thousands of miles away

removing abdominal fat improves biomarkers associated with “syndrome x”

hazardous air pollution inside tunnels

Obese older people have smaller brains than non-obese old people. (also overweight = 4% smaller; obese = 8% smaller)

social rejection causes pain similar to physical pain (interesting how this ties into swearing => pain relief)

stressed rats settle in routines and don’t try innovative solutions

very low carb diet (+high protein) => arteriosclerosis

Our moral thermostat – why being good can give people license to misbehave

swearing => pain relief

Calorie restriction => extended lifespan in rhesus macaques + total prevention of diabetes

Seagulls eating LIVING whale tissue

Betelgeuse with reduced size

16 year old has the physiological+mental age of a toddler, has never aged since then

london taxi drivers may have larger hippocampus, but at expense of spatial ability in some subtests (cuz brain region allocation may crowd out allocation of other things)

6-minutes of intensive exercise sufficient to replicate benefits of regular exercise

body remembers high lvls of glucose for 2 weeks

Feb 2009:

Kepler planet-finding mission launched

NASA assigns priority to Europa mission

US CO2 satellite fails to launch

US satellite collides w/ Russian satellite

slow earthquakes in pacific northwest are synchronized with shear stress (or something i forgot)

Jan 2009:

google earth used by swiss police to find marijuana field

The radiative forcing potential of different climate geoengineering options

cassini affirms liquid hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon rain on titan’s lakes – but questions arise as to where the hydrocarbons come from (since there’s only enough to last for 10 million years)

birds survived dinosaur extinctions possibly due to larger brains

Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds

Eat less, remember more

omega-6s might not contribute to inflammation (too much speculation based solely on its contribution to arachidonic acid)

Scientists Rank Global Cooling Hacks

dolphins use elaborate rituals to prepare cuttlefish

“There was a graded association with average sleep duration: participants with less than 7 hours of sleep were 2.94 times…more likely to develop a cold than those with 8 hours or more of sleep. “

At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

For Fats, Longer May Not Be Better

Elderly may have higher blood pressure in cold weather

Rats prefer Manhattan topology to New Orleans topology

Pelicans falling “off” the sky along the West coast

“A lot of the world’s e-waste is exported to Guiyu, China, where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead (a 15″ computer monitor can pack up to 7 lbs. of Pb), while others use acid to burn off bits of gold.”

Bush signs unprecedented ocean protection bill

Brain Scans Show Some Remain Deeply In Love For Decades

[NYT] Charles Murray: Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?

2008:

Killer Raven Swarms Attacking Farm Animals

- Hobbyists are trying genetic engineering at home

- scientists say anti-cousin marriage laws outdated

- nature editorial: it is perfectly acceptable for people to use drugs to cognitively enhance themselves

- study: over 5 yr period, 34% of those with < 5 hrs of sleep/day developed calcified plaques in their arteries. 7% of control group with normal sleep did. 11% of people with slightly less sleep did.

- when u feel sleepy – parts of ur brain have already fallen asleep

- oceans acidifying 10x faster than previously thought

- amoeba can form multicellular organisms of hetereogenous genotypes (although they want similar genotypes). usually there are 4 living cells for every dead cell

- extinct penguin discovered through DNA analysis (not through fossils) – 500 yrs extinct

- cognitive distance. other people, greater distances, greater temporal distances, tasks requiring more self-control => all are cogntively distant. the stroop test helps measure this.

- Long-term memories may be preserved in neurons by a process called DNA methylation

- mineral kingdom has co-evolved with life

- exercise pill

- photosynthetic slug

- http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000271 (Gene Regulation in Primates Evolves under Tissue-Specific Selection Pressures:)

- myelin deteriorates after age 39

- Rats check their own knowledge before taking a test

- Group Bragging Betrays Insecurity, Study Shows

- “Spinner dolphins have long been known for their teamwork in capturing prey but a new study using high-tech acoustics has found that their synchronization is even more complex than scientists realized and likely evolved as a strategy to maximize their energy intake.”

- “The means by which proteins provide a ‘border control’ service, allowing cells to take up chemicals and substances from their surroundings, whilst keeping others out, is revealed in unprecedented molecular detail for the first time, in the journal Science.”

- “The human intestine detects potential poisons passing into it – and may take action to reduce the harm they cause.”

- aspies are more rational in a particular game theory-based game

- “Religiosity Curbs Teen Marijuana Use By Half, National Study Finds”

- “Cell Protein Suppresses Pain Eight Times More Effectively Than Morphine”

- “Are the elites more polarized? Yes!”

- “Antisocial Kids Have Less Cortisol In Stressful Situations”

- only 68 molecular building blocks are used to construct these four fundamental components of cells: the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), proteins, glycans and lipids,’

- bisphenol-A => diabetes

- magpies recognize themselves in mirrors

- rhea has rings!

- more evidence of calorie restriction working; more evidence of vitamin D helping; more evidence that vitamin C and E don’t in megadoses

2007:
- elephants recognize themselves in mirrors

- chimps hunt with spears

- # of scientists per year (for various countries)

- % of Soviet GDP directed towards science

for individual countries in time periods like WWII:

- % of GDP available to foreign occupier (an interesting question although highly variable – depends on leniency of surrender conditions and presence/absence of individual events that may trigger widespread resentment)

- % of population willing to fight/be drafted in war of foreign occupier

- political orientations of subnational entities (for example, are territories that border a potentially hostile nation more conservative? [inasmuch as conservatism is associated with pro-military/pro-security policies]

so there are the moments in life when i feel listless and bored. certainly when i don’t have the energy or time to do anything intellectually stimulating, but also when i don’t want to squander away more time. so perhaps there are opportunities for me to explore my curiosity (or in other words, find new local (and even possibly global) maxima in search space.

and hm, maybe i’ll make a list of ways to explore it

- look up the author of each book i find interesting. if especially bored, google the author’s name

- look up the wikipedia, amazon, and other pages of such author

- look up the publisher or series of the book

- use a different OS (use different linux distros too), web browsers, applications, etc. dont do it too much (at least at the point where it starts to significantly compromise on one’s ability to get familiar with the program’s settings/programming language’s libraries/etc)

- learn a new language (cliche lolz. probably more desirable for non-info-geeks).

- wikipedia lists/categories. those are excellent.

hi

I’ll just post some here. All of these are hypotheses and by no means convictions.

- People with Asperger’s Syndrome don’t really have a higher IQ than average. They’re said to have higher IQ – probably since the ones with below-average IQ are tagged with full-blown autism.

- Mental conceptual structures (relatively inflexible after formation) often categorize a lot of things that wouldn’t be coupled with each other in another environment. For example, conservatives often tag teacher unions, environmentalists, and other Democrats together with each other – even though their association with the Democrats is really just a developmental coincidence

Yes, I know I’m extremely mediocre in most of the things I do – I just like to try a lot of things out to see how they work (without investing too much time into them)

psh, there’s a better term for this: lifehacks. and I’m still quite immature. i’m developing my own, but I better keep them in my own private file before sharing them like this

often, an advantage/disadvantage analysis carries fundamental unspoken assumptions – assumptions of coupling. just because things couple with each other in this environment doesn’t mean that they’ll always couple with each other, and some types of coupling are much more vulnerable to to different environments than other types of coupling. Couplings based on the demographic characteristics of ppl who share two totally divergent views – those couplings are especially vulnerable. meanwhile, there are some couplings that must follow from the fundamental laws of the universe.

most couplings in macroscopic social phenomenon, however, are generally vulnerable to different environments. example below.

“

blehhh this failed

- because i’m too lazy to effectively allocate attention between my blogs

- also because i come off as overly academic and uninteresting here. even if i’m less embarrassing here than my other blog.

blehblehblehbleh.

sometime i’ll find a website to post all my interests on, I suppose.

some branches of philosophy (esp. ethics) may be largely influenced by examining the ways to allocate properties like moral status. Others are largely influenced by allocation of resources (after all you can’t maximize a single property with mere allocations – why is, say, art more important than pure science? and how much money should we allocate to each? what are their relative importances to each other and what determines such relative importances?). Then others are largely influenced by

you know how people assume homogenity when homogenity doesn’t in fact exist? oftentimes homogenity is a fairly accurate approximation for MOST cases, but it may not be one for some cases.

How is the calorie content in food measured? Not by feeding animals with it (after all, they go through dif. routes), bur rather, through external analysis. But then we assume that calories are absorbed equally efficiently from every food source – this may be far from the case in fact.

this may have applications to other fields too

after all, WHICH necessary and sufficient conditions do we need to determine?

I’ll have to write more about this

it’s kind of related to treating symptoms and treating the root causes

teaching kids to learn a subject through things like colorful posters and projects isn’t going to help them later (since they aren’t going to be designing colorful posters later). They may PRESENT what they’ve learned through posters, but those posters are likely to fall under the domain of computers, not handwriting.

Does it help them retain the info better than if they just learned the facts straight? There isn’t an iota of proof in it. And sure it might motivate some more than others, but that doesn’t justify forcing everyone in the same class to learn by the same means.

It’s possible that learning by that means could potentially help students learn by helping them do similar things that could help them in the future (transfer) but we can’t prove this

That being said though, there are some specific ways to help students learn info that ISN’T going to help them learn info later, but would at least help them learn VITAL information better than an approach that they would have to use later (but such an approach would be less aided)

varies a lot.

usually my attention scope (and scope of memory) is so limited that I can only think of a few specific chunks of info without trying to find a general underlying trend that could potentially categorize them all under specific rules that would facilitate further discovery and categorization.

but there are a few times when i feel more inspired. i must capture those moments and identify them (and prepare for myself when I have such moments)

agents of creativity:

I previously commented on the difference between “intrinsic” behavior and “externally motivated” behavior, with the consideration that “externally motivated” behavior can only come through some form of evangelicism, which could include coercion (psychological or physical). Of course, sometimes it is difficult to measure which form of behavior is desirable but when one tries to change the behavior of another, it’s usually a form of external motivation to change an intrinsic behavior.

In any case, we can say that intrinsic behavior is behavior that falls under a steady state. Externally motivated behavior can also fall under a steady state (but you cannot 100% convince a person that the NEW behavior will necessarily be a steady state for HIM). Of course, this steady state also explains why some intrinsic behavior can be less efficient than externally motivated behavior (and why people may have convictions in the efficacy of their intrinsic behavior [and thus resistant to modifying their behavior to another desirable behavior with a more potentially stable "stable state"])

One of the problems with libertarianism is that discrimination may be a “stable” strategy in a libertarian state. As in, when the government does not prevent private companies from discriminating, it’s possible for those companies to discriminate against the “colored”. Even though one argument in favor of the free market holds that companies have a natural interest in serving the “colored”, the problem is that oftentimes when discrimination is rampant, the “colored” are especially poor in which case such companies wouldn’t increase their profits by much if they alone tried to end discrimination (moreover it’s safe to say that the dominant group’s prejudices may make it less likely to go to a company that serves the “colored”). “Separate but equal” systems are a stable state because they provide services to all (while non-dominant persons who are bold enough to try to take advantage of the services exclusive to the dominant group would drive away members of the dominant group – thus potentially reducing profits for companies producing services to the dominant group. In this case the government may have to intervene. Moreover, people have an intrinsic propensity towards discrimination but they also have a propensity towards non-discrimination and mere exposure may make it more likely for some members of dominant groups to accept the presence of members of non-dominant groups (often when initially under non-intrinsic motivation-induced-by-observation)

So inspections can measure either intrinsic or artifically motivated behavior.

IQ tests can measure either intrinsic intelligence or artificially motivated IQ-test studying.

Knowledge tests can measure either intrinsic knowledge or knowledge gained artificially.

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All three measurements are designed to test intrinsic qualities (inspections = rule conformance, IQ tests = intelligence, knowledge = breadth of knowledge). But all can be affected by behaviors artificially suited to affect results but not intrinsic qualities.

Getting answers for the test prior to the test may ensure that you get a 100%, but then the test fails to test the breadth of your intrinsic knowledge. Probabilistically, if you relied only on intrinsic knowledge, you would have to be *extremely* lucky to get extremely high marks on a test when you only know, say, 50% of the material and all of it happened to appear on the test (but not the other 50%). But most people do NOT encounter such situations.

Inspections: they must be unpredictable because if you intrinsically do something “undesirable”, then you face an increased risk of getting caught. But if you learn about inspection patterns ahead of time, then they end up sampling your artificially motivated behavior rather than your intrinsic behavior and such samples become useless.

It’s kind of like when you get to know people well, they oftentimes grant you privileges special to you and not to others (this is often a result of signal value – “competent + reliable” people for any field are a mere subset of all possible people who could be paired with the field, but with the exception of a population where people are inclined to be enthusiastic about things they suck at, the granting of such privileges is usually a response to a signal that carries correlative meaning (since the enthusiastic are more likely than average to be “competent/reliable” for the field).

(this may be true for all fields where appreciation is proportional to time spent – or fields where people tend to be internally motivated [oftentimes those where recognition is uncommon] – this may not apply for fields like political offices where many people are enthusiastic and where enthusiasm may be far less correlative with “competency”.

Is of course never attained.

If you had perfect knowledge of your beliefs, then artificial constraints are useless. Artificial constraints include retirement accounts that don’t accumulate interest and the prevention of student access to full solution manuals and teaching materials.

It is probably true that a subset of students will learn better if they had access to both teaching materials and full solution manuals. In fact, access to full solution manuals is the basis behind a lot of self-study programs (and it’s quite possibly true that a number of students with access to them do learn better with them than without them). But policies are directed towards the vast majority of students and the variability of the behavior of them during the periods they’re most likely to pursue the subject of interest. It is obvious that a person’s impulse control varies throughout the day and that a person at consistently peak impulse control is probably able to discern between what’s best for himself and what isn’t best for himself given perfect knowledge of what he finds perfectly appropriate and what he doesn’t find perfectly appropriate. But consistently perfect impulse control is rare and so people, even with perfect knowledge of the long-term benefit functions of their various actions, are oftentimes physically unable to select what’s best for them at all times.

(there is a difference between the keywords “select” and “discern”.) “select” in this context implies perfect knowledge with failures of impulse control. “discern” in this context implies imperfect knowledge.

So for example, most people realize that they have to save for retirement. They intellectually are able to discern between desirable long-term savings behavior and undesirable long-term savings behavior. Yet they cannot always select what’s best for them due to failures of impulse control and so artificial policies are sometimes needed in the context of perfect knowledge.

(but here what is perfect knowledge? Perfect knowledge at every give time implies that one pursues the action most conducive to one’s own sustainable welfare). But we can at least say that people can have perfect knowledge at peak moments of impulse control but imperfect knowledge when their impulse control fails (as in, “I think I’ll be happiest for the long-run if I just buy this one more thing/I’ll look at this solution to this one problem” during a impulse control failure.)

word count: 389

Goal: (Basically this addresses the question “why do you choose action X rather than action Y when you haven’t given equal consideration to both of them?” action Y may be more optimal for you in the long run than action X, even if action X happens to be more locally optimal for you)

As it stands, most people are fairly more or less aware of their strategies optimal for a given goal. However, they frequently fail to distinguish between what’s naturally optimal for them as compared to what’s experientially optimal for them. There is quite a huge distinction between the two. Sometimes the differences between what’s naturally optimal and what’s experientially optimal aren’t that great – strategies are not inflexible and so people’s range of behavior is variable even within the context of each strategy. Nonetheless, strategies are often built on the result of “stable states” that come out of environmentally-influenced bifurcations.

Human nature and environmental constraints are not infinitely flexible and so there are usually strategies that are naturally optimal for realistic phenotypes and environments, even if they may not be optimal for extreme environments or completely different phenotypes.

For example, many people are overly socialized in such a way that they believe that they learn best from lectures as compared to self-study. What often happens, though, is that they don’t even pre-study before lectures. And what often comes out of pre-study is the realization that one can continue pre-studying and then one discovers that one’s lectures are actually useless beyond preparing for ad hoc exams. In this way, what’s “naturally” optimal for a lot of people isself-study, but what’s “experientially” optimal for them happens to be lecture-based learning – as they’ve been socialized to learning from lectures and so they realize their maximum benefit per unit of time [at any given time] by continuing to learn from lectures (as it takes time to develop experience through self-study). “Natural” optimality is only possible to measure if people have equal opportunity to be exposed to both styles of learning. Even then, one has to consider that the resources of one’s youth are different from the resources of one’s later ages. Self-study is a more sustainable learning style than lecture-based learning since you can self-study anything at any time.

Similarly, many people are socialized to type fastest on QWERTY keyboards rather than Dvorak ones. However, Dvorak keyboards are customized to ensure fast typing speeds, whereas Qwerty keyboards are not customized to ensure fast typing speeds. Yet it takes time to get used to type on Qwerty keyboards – a lot of time. And so what’s experientially optimal for most people is to continue typing on Qwerty keyboards even though it’s naturally optimal for them to type on Dvorak ones. One must also consider that in the time being, qwerty typing ability is more sustainable than Dvorak typing ability since one must use qwerty keyboards away from home.

In the same case, we’re socialized to do a lot of things that aren’t necessary (we’re socialized to do what’s “locally” optimal rather than what’s “naturally” optimal). Such as…

- Eating meat and refined grains (when there are plenty of vegetarian foods that taste great). You don’t need to be an animal rights activist to realize that meat is extremely inefficient resource-wise.

- Sleeping on beds mounted on bedframes. Like seriously, you can just put the mattress on the floor

- Communicating academic information by the spoken form rather than the written form. Yes personal information is oftentimes communicated better with body language. But body language is useless when it comes to academic content – especially content delivered for lectures. Written information is archivable, distributable, and retrievable in the future.

- Showering daily. While some people must shower daily (for the purpose of smelling “clean”), others can go for days without showering and still smell “clean”).

- Participating in price-habituated activities that replace price-sensitized one
(read Rachlin’s “Science of Self-Control” for explanation). In fact my theory is pretty much another version of his primrose path (although it’s on a more global level)

i deleted test1, it still appears on google reader. so i want to do test2

scientific intuition

overloading

mathematical maturity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_horizon

maximization given constraints (useful in both math and RL)

auto-parse

so there probably IS such a thing as social intelligence

intelligence consists of the ability to “select from a number of possible configurations of items that one then (through intelligence) finds most appropriate for one’s given environment and task”. Creativity consists of the ability to generate such possible configurations of items. Creativity demands intelligence since the generation of such configurations is not random.

Social intelligence demands selecting the social responses most appropriate for a given social situation (assuming that one desires to be socially tactful of course).

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Better def: As the word “intelligence” is a pretty loaded term (although perhaps most people agree on their basic conceptions of intelligence – disagreements tend to arise over issues of “multiple intelligences” and such).
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There is definitely space for “multiple intelligences” (in the human brain, it may happen that the “multiple intelligences” happen to be correlated with one factor g – but this may just be an accident of evolution if anything). One can be analytically intelligent but not socially intelligent, in that one is able to select the “most appropriate” actions for a desired analytical outcome but totally unable to select the “most appropriate” actions for a desired social outcome.

1: check wikipedia history. Liberally.

2: google site:.edu, use || operator, etc.

I need to learn some Perl (or Python) and some C (or Java)

is object oriented programming useful for science?

All visceral feelings (especially the more complex of them) take time to develop – they are rarely instantly realized.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Antarctica

“The term Papuan languages refers to those languages of the western Pacific which are neither Austronesian nor Australian. That is, the term is defined negatively and does not imply a linguistic relationship.”

hm I find that phrase profoundly interesting. “defined negatively”. how many of our definitions are defined as such?

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At 2,017 m, it is one of the five tallest peaks in China Proper.

I’ll have to thank EVERY SINGLE person who has ever talked with me. Through talking with them I gain better models of reality. There are so many isolated quotes from isolated conversations that I’ve learned a lot from – that I use to build up my model of the world. Whether the interactions were positive or negative, I’ve learned something out of all of them.