Accidental Blogger

A general interest blog

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  • The War on Plants (Joe)

    More effective than the war on crime?  Absolutely.  More effective than the war on drugs?  Hard to say, and that question might even be a bit fallacious.  More effective than the war on people?  Doubtful.  But at least we're using the same techniques — blow up the enemy, kill without remorse — that have helped us end so many human lives.

    What am I talking about?  Haven't a clue, although in my defense, the bar exam is one week away.  But per CNN.com, the U.S. military earlier today dropped a series of 1000 lb. bombs on a dusty, poppy-seed-filled field in Afghanistan today.  I assume that this means that those poppy seeds have been neutralized, which will in turn lead to an increase in the price of opium (windfall to the Taliban!) and a whole new crop of poppies grown to take the place of their fallen comrades.

  • Mission Mars: Man or Machine?

    A spirited debate is underway at NASA on whether the next big space exploration project should focus on sending astronauts back to the moon and installing a permanent lunar base or if the money and effort will  be better spent in attempting a manned landing on Mars.  Buzz Aldrin, one of the two Apollo 11 astronauts to set foot on the moon, thinks the latter is a more worthy goal. But others like Robert Park, professor of physics at the University of Maryland argue that with sophisticated robots at our disposal, humans need not venture out too far into space for the sake of gathering information.

    This is the 21st century. Telerobots have been invented. Our two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, are merely robust extensions of our fragile human bodies. They don’t break for lunch or complain about the cold nights, and they live on sunshine. They do suffer the afflictions of age. Their teeth are worn down from scraping rocks, and one has an arthritic foot that he drags behind him. But their brains are still sharp since they are the brains of their PhD handlers. No need to bring them home when they are no longer able to explore, they will just be turned off. [NASA administrator Charles] Bolden also said he wants to go to Mars. How incredibly old-fashioned! We are on Mars now. We have been on Mars for more than five years, looking for evidence of water and life. A human on Mars would be locked in a spacesuit with only the sense of sight. Our rovers have better eyes than any human, and we don’t have to take their word it; everyone can see what they see. How wonderfully democratic! Moreover, they have the IQ of their PhD operators back on Earth.

    Meanwhile, I am sure everyone saw the cute image that Google put up to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing.

    Moonlanding  

  • Musings on the conjunction fallacy (D)

    The classic demonstrator of the conjunction fallacy is the following:

    1. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
    1A. Linda is a bank teller.
    1B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

    The general form is this: of an entity X, qualities xi are asserted. We are to decide whether X is more likely to possess quality y or quality y in addition to to some quality z. The fallacy consists in the fact that people, when queried, pick 1B. as more probable, when, as a proper subset of 1A., it couldn’t possibly be. (All feminist bank tellers are bank tellers but some bank tellers aren’t feminist) Now, we commonly understand this as emerging from use of the heuristic of representativeness. To use the jargon of the election cycle, latte-sippers like Linda sound more like feminists than like bank-tellers. So much more so, in fact, that people are willing to contemplate and assert mathematical impossibilities like p(y & z | xi) > p(y | xi) simply because p(z | xi) > p(y | xi).(*) Here, the xi‘s are the facts stated about Linda, y is the state of her being a bank teller and z is the state of her being a feminist.

    Okay. But now consider a related but different situation:

    2. Someone murders a nice Jewish couple in a high-rise apartment complex. Linda is a suspect. In which of the following situations is it more appropriate to convict her? She’s seen to leave the building:
    2A. five minutes later
    2B. five minutes later, covered in blood, with a gun in her hand, and with a swastika inked on her exposed right forearm.

    Now here too 2B is a proper subset of 2A, yet now the the correct response is obviously 2B, not 2A. There’s no logical puzzle here; it’s just that now we’re reasoning backwards from the observations 2A, 2B to settle the truth of 2. That is, now we’re comparing p(x|y & z) to p(x|y) and it’s quite kosher for the first of those two to be larger (or smaller) than the second.

    Now for the musings: in addition to failures of the representativeness heuristic, does some part of the conjunction fallacy arise from matters of this kind? After all,
    – we pretty generically confuse the p(A|B) with p(B|A) – assuming we intuit that these things are different at all.
    – we often confuse the thing assumed with the thing to be proved, as anyone who’s ever tried an A-only-if-B style math proof knows too well.

    Maybe instead of following imperfect heuristics through to the implicit conclusion that intersections can be more probable than what they’re intersections of, some people are just trying to “convict” Linda of her stated biography (1) in two alternate worlds 1A and 1B, and deciding that 1B gives a more workable case for the prosecution. If so, their reasoning wouldn’t instantiate idiotic math, just math that – reliably and well – answers a different question. Maybe the very fact that respondents are being asked about these things using the language of probability pushes some of them to start thinking like good prosecutors, getting them to condition priors on posteriors

    How might we test for such? It’s hard, and I wouldn’t know, but here’s the first thing I would try: ask people question 1. as before, except ask them to assign numerical subjective probabilities to options 1A and 1B. Then, ask them to assign probabilities to:
    1C. Linda is a feminist.

    1D. Linda is anti-nuclear.

    I’d expect that at least some of the people who committed the conjunction fallacy would be tricked into assigning lower probability to 1D. than to 1C, something which no-one who saw 1D as given fact should do.

    Finally, what if some people, instead of reversing premises and conclusions, aren’t separating them clearly at all? What if what’s being done instead is to evaluate an overall web of interrelated fact-claims for how well it hangs together? This would be representativeness heuristic taken to a certain logical endpoint, where all the different qualities mentioned simply may or may not apply to someone labeled ‘Linda’, and one essentially evaluates each belief for plausibility in the background of the rest. To test for that, one might ask something like this:

    3. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy at Vassar College. She intends to home-school her children some day. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?
    3A. Linda is a bank teller.
    3B. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

    If some people really are doing this last horrible(**) thing, I’d expect such to assign measurably lower probabilities to:
    3C. Linda approves of home-schooling
    than to
    3D. Linda is anti-nuclear.
    (She’s been plonked into Vassar to “compensate” for the intuition that feminists are less likely to homeschool)

    Conclude ramble.

    (*)I’m setting entirely to the side the question of whether knowing a person is like Linda in fact raises the odds of her being a feminist more than it does those of her being a bank-teller.

    (*) Well, horrible in this kind of setting at any rate, where the known is utterly known, beyond all possible doubt and whatnot. In more realistic situations, we frequently must revise assumptions in light of conclusions, and reason our way out of particular first principles and into others. Maybe Linda wasn’t that big on social justice after all. Many people simply mayn’t have acquired the peculiar academic discipline of really, truly, completely, suspending disbelief when presented with a set of consistent assumptions and therefore end up thinking about them instead of just with them. It’s not like we particularly excel at abstract thought anyway…

  • The Moose Is Back

    So is the Hockey Mama for Obama … this time as Sarah Palin.

    Thanks to Sandy and Richard Riccardi, makers of the videos, for sending me the link. Yes, I too think she will run in 2012. Like a moth attracted to the bright flame, I doubt she can resist the lure of the national limelight.  

  • Extreme Ailurophilia

    The cat obviously is enjoying the monkey business. (thanks to Namit Arora for the link)

    And more about cats and how they have "tapped into human biases" to their own advantage.

  • Senator Jeff Sessions’ Southern Discomfort

    I happened to catch parts of Tuesday's Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. The most fascinating exchange of the day took place when Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) questioned the judge. Sessions, a southern right winger, whose own nomination to federal judgeship was blocked in 1986 partially because of his attitude towards racial issues,interrogated Sotomayor about her opinions on race and prejudice. The line of questioning was doggedly vicious, not uncommon for either political party when a candidate from the other side is up for confirmation. But in the case of Senator Sessions, he not only displayed remarkable mean spiritedness but he also inadvertently gave us a glimpse into the one track mind of a bigot who is not quite comfortable dealing with an accomplished woman of color. Of particular interest to Sessions was Sotomayor's statement regarding a "wise Latina woman." Here is an excerpt from the transcript of Tuesday's hearings:

    SESSIONS: Welcome. It's good to have you back, Judge, and your family and friends and supporters. And I hope we'll have a good day today, look forward to dialogue with you. I got to say that I liked your statement on the fidelity of the law yesterday and some of your comments this morning.

    And I also have to say had you been saying that with clarity over the last decade or 15 years, we'd have a lot fewer problems today because you have evidenced, I think it's quite clear, a philosophy of the law that suggests that the judge's background and experiences can and should — even should and naturally will impact their decision what I think goes against the American ideal and oath that a judge takes to be fair to every party. And every day when they put on that robe, that is a symbol that they're to put aside their personal biases and prejudices.

    So I'd like to ask you a few things about it. I would just note that it's not just one sentence, as my chairman suggested, that causes us difficulty. It's a body of thought over a period of years that causes us difficulties.
    And I would suggest that the quotation he gave was not exactly right of the wise Latina comment that you made. You've said, I think six different times, quote, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion." So that's a matter that I think we'll talk about as we go forward."….

    SESSIONS: I know one judge that says that if he has a feeling about a case, he tells his law clerks to, "Watch me. I do not want my biases, sympathies or prejudices to influence this decision, which I've taken an oath to make sure is impartial." I just am very concerned that what you're saying today is quite inconsistent with your statement that you willingly accept that your sympathies, opinions and prejudices may influence your decision-making.

    So it went on and on about heritage (read "race and gender"), experience and resulting biases that supposedly taint judicial decisions. Later, second guessing Sotomayor's ruling about the New Haven firefighters case, Sessions said to Sotomayor: 

    SESSIONS: Judge, there was a — apparently, unease within your panel. I — I was really disappointed. And I think a lot of people have been that the opinion was so short. It was pro curiam. It did not discuss the serious legal issues that the case raised. And I believe that's legitimate criticism of what you did.

    But it appears, according to Stuart Taylor, a respected legal writer for the National Journal — that Stuart Taylor concluded that — that it appears that Judge Cabranes was concerned about the outcome of the case, was not aware of it because it was a pro curiam unpublished opinion. But it began to raise the question of whether a rehearing should be granted.

    You say you're bound by the superior authority. But the fact is when the re — the question of rehearing that 2nd Circuit authority that you say covered the case, some say it didn't cover so clearly — but that was up for debate. And the circuit voted, and you voted not to reconsider the prior case. You voted to stay with the decision of the circuit.

    And, in fact, your vote was the key vote. Had you voted with Judge Cabranes, himself of — of — of Puerto Rican ancestry — had you voted with him, you — you — you could have changed that case.

    Wait a minute! What was that about Judge Cabranes and his Puerto Rican ancestry?  After raking Sotomayor over the coals for her so-called biases, did Sessions suggest that she, a Puerto Rican by birth, would have done well to vote with a fellow Puerto Rican?  Perhaps Sessions was also chiding her for failing to keep her womanly foolishness in check by not following a man's example?

    When at last can we hope to see the last of such lizard-brains like Senator Sessions, the likes of whom continue to contaminate all public discourse with their outmoded ideas and prejudices?

  • A Return Journey

    Readers may remember this book review about the Crypto Jews of Spain and Portugal. Their stories were a complicated maze of religious faith, persecution and conversion under duress. Above all, their history was also about tenaciously and secretly holding on to a personal identity despite considerable external threats. Christian persecution of Jews is now mostly a matter of the past and the Crypto Jews, several generations removed from their ancestors, have mostly assimilated into the larger Christian population. Puzzled by some odd family traditions, some Hispanic Catholics in the southwestern states of the US (mostly immigrants from Mexico) are eagerly investigating possible Judaic roots, including genetic testing, to establish Sephardic Jewish descent. Their clues come from certain seemingly non-Christian practices amidst their Christian lives which they believe hark back to a Jewish past. One such story of a Catholic woman from Houston who believes she has found her way back to the faith of her Sephardic ancestors.

    At an East Galveston beach, Mari Barkhausen is waist-deep in the cool, brown water. After repeating Hebrew blessings, she is immersed once, twice. When she emerges from the water a third time, she is a Jew.

    She hugs her rabbi, looking to the shoreline at her husband and two sons who are waiting for their mikveh, the ritual immersion for Jewish converts.

    “Mazel tov, everyone,” declares Rabbi Stuart Federow. “This day begins the rest of your education. Jewish learning never stops.”

    Barkhausen’s journey began decades ago as she watched her maternal grandmother’s peculiar ways. Her Mexican-American abuela would light candles on Fridays and draw the curtains before sundown, cover mirrors at home when a relative died and examine eggs for blood spots.

    No one questioned her ways, and no explanation was ever offered to little Mari or her siblings.

    Years later, Barkhausen would realize those customs were not one woman’s idiosyncrasies. They were Jewish customs.

    Lighting of candles marked the beginning of the Sabbath. Many cover mirrors when someone dies to avoid concentrating on their grief-stricken appearances. And the Old Testament teaches that life is in the blood.

    Grandma did all these things, Barkhausen remembered. But Grandma wasn’t Jewish. She was Catholic.

    (more…)

  • Music. Smoking. Whales. Dodgy conceptions (D)

    1. I imagine the average music listener has as much trouble teasing apart the different musical lines, instruments and voices in a symphony (say) as I do. Why isn’t there a product category on the market where the different voices in a piece are all recorded individually? With a suitable software interface, you’d be able to hear just the first violin, or only the brass or only what the pianist is playing with his right hand, and so on. Or various toggle-able combinations of the elements. Plus of course, you could turn everything on and hear a serviceable, though hardly great, recording of the piece. The time I can imagine spending with such a CD is almost limitless; it’d be like having this for every piece I cared about. Surely the market can’t be that small, and the production certainly isn’t difficult. Why’s no-one doing this?

    2. I’ve often harbored a certain dim, masochistic sense that bans related to passive smoking have been less about health than about the general ickiness of the habit, the smell of the noxious weed and a certain puritanical desire to control and command. Indeed, I’d assumed the actual health risk from second hand smoke was minimal. I still assume those other factors are salient, but apparently this last isn’t so. Orac at Scienceblogs has a very nice post up about secondhand smoking, that gets into the various studies performed, the mechanisms of consensus-generation and the politics in forming, disputing and proceeding from that consensus. Two takeaway numbers, in case you don’t read the whole thing:
    – “A person who smokes two packs a day smoker for 40-50 years will have approximately a 20% chance of dying of lung cancer.”
    – “In adults, numerous studies support the existence of approximately a 25% elevated risk of lung cancer from those exposed to secondhand smoke chronically.”

    3. This New York Times story is almost perfect for transporting a certain sort of mind into mystical ecstasies. It has all of:
    – natural creatures who’ve suffered greatly under Man, yet absolve him of his sins
    – cuddly, natural Disney creatures to boot, none of this scary, bloody competitive evolution stuff around.
    – wise Natives who, with other ways of knowing, have penetrated to the core of Deep Truths White Man is only dimly coming to appreciate.
    – concomitant dismissals of hard scientists, who’ve not truly achieved Wisdom for all their appropriation of cold, technical facts.
    Actually, it’s a pretty good piece for all the scorn I’ve heaped upon it. The stolid insistence that one not anthropomorphize the animal world is only going to be so useful, and unless one is a creationist other animals will necessarily be seen to exhibit many qualities we do in some form, including emotional ones.

    4. This last I mention without further comment. Ms. Kathryn Jean Lopez finds this story amusing.

  • Basij Or Me: Love In The Time Of A Revolution

    An article in the Wall Street Journal sheds light on the other side of the Iranian Green Revolution - the mindset of the enforcers of the status quo. The Basij paramilitary force has been deployed widely by the ruling regime to disrupt demonstrators protesting the results of the recent Iranian election. Created by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, the members of the Basij are true believers of the Islamic Revolution. They believe that the current government under Ahmadinejad is the keeper of that faith.

    When the protests broke out here last month, Mehdi Moradani answered the call to crush them.

    On the first day of the unrest, the 24-year-old volunteer member of Iran's paramilitary Basij force mounted his motorcycle and chased reformist protesters through the streets, shouting out the names of Shiite saints as he revved his engine.

    On the fourth day, he picked up a thick wooden stick issued by his Basij neighborhood task force and beat demonstrators who refused to disperse…

    "It wasn't about elections anymore," says Mr. Moradani, a short, skinny man with pitch-black hair and a beard. "I was defending my country and our revolution and Islam. Everything was at risk."…

    The Basij fanned out across Tehran, beating protesters with sticks, lining streets and squares, and roaring through neighborhoods on their motorcycles in a show of force. Regime officials praised the shock troops.

    "Our efforts to unveil the faces of our enemy saved Iran from a grave danger," Yadollah Javani, the political chief of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which commands the Basij, said last week.

    The Basij was created in 1979 by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was devised as a volunteer force, to back up the Iranian army in the Iran-Iraq war. Many of its young members were deployed to the battlefield to walk ahead of soldiers and detonate Iraqi mines.

    After the war ended in 1988, the Basij evolved into a type of neighborhood task force. Members serve as law enforcers, morality police, social-service providers and organizers of religious ceremonies. In times of crisis, the Basij are tasked with restoring order and ferreting out dissidents.

    All this is to be expected from the loyalists of the conservative Islamic state. Something more unusual caught my eye in the last few paragraphs of the article - the ultimatum issued by the fiancee of the young Basij volunteer, Moradani.

    For Mr. Moradani, the biggest shock during the election turmoil came in his personal life. He had recently gotten engaged to a young woman from a devout, conservative family. A week into the protests, he says, his fiancée called him with an ultimatum. If he didn't leave the Basij and stop supporting Mr. Ahmadinejad, he recalls her saying, she wouldn't marry him.

    He told her that was impossible. "I suffered a real emotional blow," he says. "She said to me, 'Go beat other people's children then,' and 'I don't want to have anything to do with you,' and hung up on me."

    She returned the ring he gave her, and hasn't returned his phone calls. "The opposition has even fooled my fiancée," he says.

    Don't you wish that Laura Bush and Lynn Cheney had exercised similar forceful ways with their husbands to thwart their thuggish ways? Instead, we only find political wives who "stand by" their feckless men.  

  • The Obama Picture Controversy (Joe)

    We've all seen it.  We've probably all seen the video, which clearly shows that there is — or should be — no controversy.  More entertainingly, to my mind, is how it created yet one more great opportunity to mock Ann Althouse for being a moron.  Or, you know, an intellectually dishonest right-wing hack.

  • The Misunderstanding

    The Misunderstanding

    I did not say: You are nothing to me;

    I said the hummingbird, the anglerfish

    are not amazed at themselves.

    I did not say: I have forgotten you;

    but that every day a man

    finds more things that trouble him.

    Not You are not beautiful,

    but that, often, when I lie in the grass,

    a lute sings in the earth beneath me.

    Not: I regret—

    but that I stare at these keys

    I carry in my pocket

    and think of the narrow bones

    I once turned over in the garden.

    Not I never loved you,

    but You are all you have.

    as for the rest, yes,

    it is as you say, the words

    are mine, but all the rooms of the world

    we have lived in close now

    over the words of others.

    Earth, keys, man—

    when will you seek out

    that lamp, that light,

    under which they were written?

    by Ralph Culver
    from: Albatross; Anabiosis Press, Spring 2009

     

    (via Jim Culleny at 3 Quarks Daily)

  • Personal and Political, Though Only As A Tourist (Anna)

    227865568_f393d853e1
    A photo I took of some Uighur men, at their request, on the Southern Silk Road in Summer 2006. More photos here. Some ruminations after the break.

    (more…)