Metablog

Late just this November, the world champion chess player Vladimir Kramnik played the leading chess software, Deep Fritz. In his second match, he allowed the computer to win with a mate in one. He said,

It was actually not only about the last move. I was calculating this line very long in advance, and then recalculating. It was very strange, some kind of blackout. I was feeling well, I was playing well, I think I was pretty much better. I calculated the line many, many times, rechecking myself. I already calculated this line when I played 29…Qa7, and after each move I was recalculating, again, and again, and finally I blundered mate in one.

Is this confirmation bias? Looking for evidence that the line he was calculating was the correct line, but not looking for evidence that it was the incorrect line? If so, it means that, the best current player of chess in the world has not been able to completely rid himself of this bias, even in the limited field of his area of expertise.

Also called “dynamic inconsistency” or “time inconsistency”. This is the feature of the human brain that is responsible for impulse purchases, dieters’ ice-cream binges, the difficulty of quitting smoking, and the tendency for people not to save for retirement. The common feature is that people value a little pleasure today more than they do a lot of pleasure in a month. (My experience is that ADHD exacerbates this, but can’t back up the feeling with hard evidence.)

One fascinating thing about this cognitive “feature” is that people usually don’t realize they have it. And even when they do realize it to some extent, they often still fail to plan as if they had it. How often do people take into account that they will almost certainly have moments of weakness when planning exercise routines or diets? (This actually another bias itself: the bias blind spot.) We’re in denial about this basic, important feature of our minds.

(Read on to see how to practically compensate for this.)

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Now, I have dreams like everyone else. And I have shortages of will like everyone else. But I want to make up for them. When I decide that to start sleeping well, I need to exercise every day, I need a figure out a way to make sure that I exercise every day, considering myself in the future as a person with different desires and interests. I need to figure out how to make myself do these things. I need to figure out how to decide, when I know it’s time to exercise but I’m in the middle of responding to this really interesting post or making great progress on this new feature (or, just last night, finishing a book it took me from 7 PM to 1 AM to read), whether the lost momentum of the activity that was being interrupted will be made up for by being better rested tomorrow. How much do I lose by not spending quite as much time learning new random things and forming new mental connections?

The point has been made (I forget where—maybe Paul Graham?) that you shouldn’t let yourself get too caught up by doing errands and chores, because most things really can wait, and you should be lazier with certain things (or more willing to subcontract them) so that you can be busier with the more important things. Act like your time is valuable. But I think I have the opposite problem. I simply don’t know when to make myself take care of myself and my surroundings, let alone make consistent progress toward any genuine accomplishment, without feeling, desperately, like I’m missing out on something important.

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I just stepped into the bathroom and experienced a moment of vertigo. Our workplace (quite small) has two identical unisex bathrooms right next to each other, and I was paying so little attention that after I closed the door I couldn’t figure out which one I was in. It felt like my inner ear was going crazy for a second. Weird.

It’s weird how intellectual allegiance works. I had a scary experience yesterday. I was just reading along, forming a rough opinion of how much I agreed with the arguments. In general, I’m fairly favorable to them, but I worry that that’s just because I identify with the anti-IP culture of internet geeks. But then there was this one section I was much more skeptical about, concerning some attitudes toward government in general or something. All of a sudden the authors mention some other thinker who supports that idea, one that I generally respect and agree with, and who knows much more than me about the relevant issues.

At that point, my valuation of the arguments jumped. And if you’re a person who tries to overcome bias, the fact of this jump is pretty disturbing. First, I knew that it had no rational basis at all. (Edit: By my description, this is arguable. But take my word in this case.) But more importantly for me, it just revealed how much I had been evaluating all the other arguments using the same kind of credence. It hit me, pretty hard, the extent to which the subconscious* processes that comprise our judgment take into account tribal allegiance, and how that allegiance doesn’t have any consistent relationship to truth over humanity in general.

* I don’t agree with the expansive view of the subconscious espoused by many, but I don’t think the conscious mind is as powerful as it believes itself to be. Introspection, beyond direct perceptions of feelings and beliefs, is black-box deduction. We form theories of our motivations based on observing our emotions and their temporal relationships with external events and internal beliefs.

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I write posts on topics that are all over the place. Why does it seem like there are no other blogs like me? Am I really that special?

No, it’s because the more narrowly-focused the blog, the more easily it will gain readership. For someone to become interested in this blog, they have to, in addition to liking my writing, share at least 20–50% of my interests. (People who share fewer interests will be bored by 95% of the posts and eventually stop coming, even if they really like the other 5%.) But on a single-topic blog, you get people with all sorts of different interests, who happen to share the one interest common to most of the posts. (Unfogged, for those familiar with it, is less eclectic than you might think on first impression—its topics are liberal politics, sex, humor, relationships, and pop culture. Not exactly an esoteric collection.)

The reason I don’t know of any blogs as eclectic as mine is that none of them have any traffic. And the ones that I have come across have been so boring as to hardly make an impression on me. Well, there go my dreams of being a B-list blogger.

BTW, major periodicals are successful despite their range of subject matter because (a) journalists are paid to write in an entertaining way about subjects readers are unfamiliar with. Writing for a lay audience is something experts don’t often do for free, and when they do it’s usually only on their main subject of expertise, so the eclectic blogs tend to be a bit more in-groupy (and, of course, less expert). Also, (b) the mass media are sources of original reporting, and (c) periodicals come in chunks all at once, so ignoring all of the articles you’re not interested in is less annoying than with blogs. Plus any number of smaller reasons.

Mel (my new blogcrush) links to this neat paper on learning and pedagogy styles. If the authors are to be believed (and I don’t have the expertise to evaluate their claims) then the reason I got a B in physics was that there weren’t nearly enough examples for me to follow before I started working through problems on my own. Which makes a lot of sense to me.

The mechanism, apparently, is that while searching for the solution to a problem, we use up so much of our cognitive resources that we don’t have any left over for remembering how we solved the problem, or getting better at solving those problems. That is, when searching for a solution using unfamiliar techniques. Once those techniques are thoroughly learned, then it’s actually more effective to learn by solving problems than to follow along with solutions. But before one is skilled with that, trying to solve problems is, basically, a waste of time.

If I could apply all of the knowledge in that paper, I could probably do a lot better in school than I did last time around.

Go read the paper—it’s good. Here’s the abstract:

Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert-novice differences, and cognitive load. While unguided or minimally-guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures that constitute human cognitive architecture and evidence from empirical studies over the past half century that consistently indicate that minimally-guided instruction is less effective and less efficient than instructional approaches that place a strong emphasis on guidance of the student learning process. The advantage of guidance begins to recede only when learners have sufficiently high prior knowledge to provide ‘internal’ guidance. Recent developments in instructional research and instructional design models that support guidance during instruction are briefly described.

While reading some provoking comments on another interesting post over at Overcoming Bias, I found a link to an even more provoking essay by Robin Hanson.

You are a body with a mind. Your mind is the result of activity in your brain, and your body was grown from a single cell following the instructions of your genes, which you acquired from your parents. Your parents acquired their genes from their parents, and so on back for billions of years. (The few genes not acquired from parents were created by random mutations.) The fact that you have certain genes and not others was determined almost entirely by a fierce competition between genes to create better “survival machines,” i.e., creatures that perpetuate and spread those genes. The genes that produced you are not a random sample from all possible genes; they are some of the few genes that, so far, remain in this competition.

[…]

Our genes do not care whether we experience more pleasure than pain. Our genes only care that we anticipate both possibilities, so that they can control us via our passions, i.e., our preference for pleasure over pain. When our bodies are no longer capable of reproducing, or of helping those who share our genes reproduce, our genes literally do not care if we live or die. Our genes will happily shorten our lifespans, or give us great pain, if that will help those genes to reproduce. Our genes will also lie to us to promote their goals, such as by making us think that our happiness depends more than it does on our success. Our genes can indeed be cruel masters.

[…]

Why do humans have such big brains, which are so devoted to a dream world of abstract ideas and feelings that have so little direct relation to personal survival and reproduction? Our best theory at the moment is that this dream world is produced by sexual selection, much like the large and colorful and otherwise useless tail of the peacock. […] The theory is that we similarly have “mating minds”, i.e., minds that are designed in large part to impress potential mates and allies. When we display to observers how agile and creative we are at love, humor, talk, story, art, music, fashion, sport, charity, religion, and abstract ideas, we show those observers that we have high quality genes, with few bad mutations. Having such minds also helps us to judge the quality of others’ genes from their displays.

Cheerful, eh?

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I made a little script for Unfogged comments threads that linkifies numbers in comments to go to the comment with that number. Link.

It sort of breaks on comments with links in them that have numbers in the URL. Not sure how I’d go about fixing that.

It should be extendable, with trivial modifications, to most other blogs with comments that use comment numbers in the same way.

Note: pretty much everything in this post applies to typing (and probably mousing) tension as well as piano-playing tension. Also note: I’m not an expert in any of this, and could well be completely wrong about the physiology, but it does seem to line up with my experience well enough.

I’m a pianist. I’ve taken piano lessons since I was six years old. I was very serious about piano for a few years in high school, but then decided to pursue programming instead of music as a profession. Since then I haven’t played nearly as much.

One of the reasons I decided not to pursue music was that my technique had a major problem—I tensed up my wrists and shoulders when playing. (I still do this.) Tension, in piano playing, is defined as any contraction of a muscle that’s more than what’s necessary to complete the desired movement. In shoulders, tension is just keeping them raised. In the arms and wrists, tension is when both the extending muscle (e.g. triceps) and the flexing muscle (e.g. biceps) contract at the same time. The muscles’ forces cancel each other, and a lot of energy is wasted. Thus, tension when playing leads to wrists and hands quickly becoming tired. It slows you down, too, so that you can’t play pieces as difficult as you could otherwise. Tension can also lead to various repetetive stress injuries, which are long term, sometimes crippling problems.

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