There’s a danger that lurks for those of us who are curious about lots of things and love learning, and it is that our “learning efforts” (of which there is a scarce supply) end up being allocated by external factors rather than by internal priorities. These outside forces bring us somewhere – and it might seem like a good place to be – but if we had initially asked ourselves where we wanted to go, it probably would’ve been somewhere else.

That might not be very clear, so allow me to demonstrate what I mean with three real-world examples:

Whole Brain Emulation
Earlier this year, during a trip to Detroit, I read a paper by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom titled: Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap.

Going in, I knew that my goal was only to get a good idea of what was currently possible and where things were headed with whole brain emulation (WBE). I didn’t understand most of the paper (a lot of it is very technical), but the ~10-15% that made sense to me was enough to reach my goal, so I accepted that a lot of it was over my head.

To get to a level of comprehension significantly higher than the one I had would’ve required a massive amount of efforts, and that would have been disproportionate in relation to my target (my goal was not to become a brain scientist, but rather to understand the challenges and opportunities of WBE specifically).

Causality
Not long ago, I got Judea Pearl’s Causality (a book I’ve been meaning to read for years).

As he recommends in the preface, I started by reading the epilogue, which is a speech that he gave in 1996. That was fine. Then I moved on to the first chapter and found I was having difficulty with most of the math because I wasn’t familiar enough with probability theory.

Since my goal is to truly understand the work (as part of my larger goal of better understanding the math behind probability theory and Bayesian statistics), I decided that I had to take a step back to fill in holes in my knowledge.

I put Causality on the back-burner and dived into a statistics textbook* (Les Statistiques: Une Approche Nouvelle, 2e édition. Started with chapter 5, on probability theory). I really want to understand this stuff – not just have an idea of what’s going on – so I need to take the long way. This extra effort wouldn’t have been fulfilling with the Sanberg/Bostrom paper, but it is in this case. Different goals.

News
As mentioned in Discipline for my Information Diet, I have a tendency to do what’s easy for me – like water flowing through the path of least resistance – and spend a lot of my learning time on news & politics. It’s so much easier to just pick up a periodical than to dive into a textbook or technical paper.

The Economist arrives every week, it’s well-written, contains lots of interesting facts, and best of all, it’s predictable. Much easier to go to that familiar, comfortable place than to face the unknown.

The problem is that most of the newsy stuff doesn’t satiate. It doesn’t give the same satisfaction as the things that are higher on my priority list. So I have to make a conscious effort to go to news-type stuff last, when I’m done with the other things.

So far I’ve been successful in removing most newsy stuff from my routine (periodicals, blogs, etc) except The Economist. It’s like mental candy. Very addictive, but lots of empty calories.

Conclusion
This might all seem very obvious, but I think we too often (myself included) don’t have a clear idea of what we’re trying to achieve when we’re learning something, so we give up when we should be putting extra effort (and never reach the promised land), or we waste mental cycles on details that don’t really matter to us (they don’t feed our curiosity or have practical uses).

To avoid this trap, we need to keep in sight why we’re learning something. Otherwise, we risk allocating efforts based on secondary factors like “how motivated you happen to feel that day” or “how easy it is to find sources” rather than the degree of our desire to learn something.

See also:

• Discipline for my Information Diet
• Curiosity: Good Friend, Bad Master

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*If anyone has a really good statistics textbook to recommend, especially if it covers the Bayesian approach well, please let me know.

We’re Inconsistent About How Much Weight We Attribute to Genes
I think our intuition might be miscalibrated when it comes to evaluating how much a person’s genes impact how they turn out physically (which isn’t surprising). What’s a bit strange is that we seem to be closer to the truth when it comes to twins.

Nobody’s surprised when identical twins turn out to have very similar bodies (weight, muscle mass, etc), even into adulthood.

But when it comes to non-twins, people seem to think that “making the right choices” and “willpower” are primary factors in how human bodies turn out, and that we can assign a good amount of personal credit or blame to individuals for good and bad outcomes.

There is a disconnect between these two visions, and I think that it’s the latter that needs to be updated.

After all, even if we put aside the direct ways in which our genes build our bodies (encoding how our tissues grow) and instead look at our abilities to “make the right choices” and exert “willpower”, we find that those are also greatly determined by genetic factors. Identical twins probably turn out very similar in good part because they have almost identical amounts of those qualities of mind.

Wrong by Degrees
This doesn’t mean that all is pre-determined and that if we all stop trying we’ll turn out the same we would have otherwise, but rather that we are playing within certain parameters, and that the part we control is probably smaller than most people think (not non-existent — we still deserve some credit — just more modest).

To be clear, I’m not saying the situation was white and we thought it was black, or even that it’s a black & white thing, but rather that most people’s intuition might be the wrong shade of gray. Otherwise, I would think there would be a bigger variation between identical twins, but they spend their lives making different choices yet most stay very similar to each other (as far as I know — if you know of a study on this, please send it my way).

This article has been cross-posted on LessWrong. There’s more discussion of it in the comments over there.

The excerpt above is from page 185 of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt.

It comes at the end of a chapter on risk perception, ie. roads that seem safer can be more dangerous than we think because they encourage us to drive more dangerously, while roads that seem dangerous can actually be safer than we think since they make us slow down and pay more attention. The dangerous-looking roads might still be more dangerous than the safe-looking roads in the absolute, but both of them might not be respectively as safe or dangerous as drivers tend to think…

Anyway, what annoyed me is the last sentence of the excerpt. I think it’s a good real-world example of misleading statistics.

While it might be literally true that most crashes “happen on dry road, on clear, sunny days, to sober drivers” (I wouldn’t swear to it, I haven’t seen the stats), it doesn’t take into account the difference in sample sizes. In most places, the roads are dry more often than not, and most days are sunny, and most drivers are sober.

These conditions might produce a higher total number of crashes, but what really matters is how many crashes they produce per driver. If you look at it this way, it’s probably pretty obvious that wet roads, at night, with drunk drivers cause a lot more crashes.

See also: Rationality Articles

I Can’t See You, But I Know You’re There
I don’t think I spent a day of my life without thinking about invisible things. Of course I’m not talking about truly invisible things as in supernatural thing, but rather things that are invisible to the naked eye but that we know are there because we can see or measure them with instruments.

Every single day I randomly think about things like allergens (the photo above is of pollen), DNA, cells, viruses, atoms in various conformations (proteins, lipids, hydrocarbon chains, neurotransmitters, etc) and of various kinds, radio waves, photons and electrical flows (from how much energy is used when I flip various switches to the incredibly fast pulses that encode everything in my computer and over my broadband connection). I also often think about the large invisible things, like stars, galaxies, nebulas, black holes, and the vastness of space in between it all.

Our brain has a hard time with these things because, as Richard Dawkins would say, it has evolved in “middle world” and is simply not equipped to grasp these things properly at scale.

What’s Your Relationship With the Unseen?
I know that it’s probably not that way for everybody, and it makes me wonder how it changes my perception of the world.

How do you see the world? Do you naturally think about invisible stuff, or do you rarely consider these things? Please let me know in the comments below.

Analyzing and Comparing Books
I have just noticed that Amazon has a “Text Stats” section on its book pages. I’m not sure how long it has been there, but it’s very interesting.

• The Fog Index was developed by Robert Gunning. It indicates the number of years of formal education required to read and understand a passage of text.
• The Flesch Index, developed in 1940 by Dr. Rudolph Flesch, is another indicator of reading ease. The score returned is based on a 100 point scale, with 100 being easiest to read. Scores between 90 and 100 are appropriate for 5th and 6th graders, while a college degree is considered necessary to understand text with a score between 0 and 30.
• The Flesch-Kincaid Index is a refinement to the Flesch Index that tries to relate the score to a U.S. grade level. For example, text with a Flesch-Kincaid score of 10.1 would be considered suitable for someone with a 10th grade or higher reading level.

Information Technology & Book Writing
I wonder how long before publishers and writers start to use this data to better zero in on certain targets in the hope of better reaching their target demographics. I’m sure that someday – if it hasn’t already happened – writers will get notes from editors asking them to “bring the Fog Index rating of their manuscript down by at least 20%” or “reduce the number of complex words by 10%”, all based on statistical analysis of the composition of recent best sellers.

A kind of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for books, in a way.

Like all tools, it could be abused and lead to bad results. But if used properly, it could result in more readable books and reduce the variability in quality output between individual editors (probably not by much, but any improvement would be welcome).

The pic on top of this post is from the Amazon page for I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter (which I’m currently reading).

Here’s an excerpt that I liked:

Update: Just to make it clear, this post isn’t an ad for I Am A Strange Loop. It’s just the book I looked up on Amazon when I noticed the Amazon Text Stats feature, and I thought some people might be curious to know which book the Text Stats in the screenshot came from.

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• The singularity and the Methuselarity: similarities and differences

I think the weather this summer has inspired Mélanie…

Problem
One of the demons I’m wrestling with when it comes to my information diet is keeping a high signal to noise ratio for an extended period of time. I know that the time and mental energy I’m spending reading news items about business, politics and technology are taking away from the energy I have for settled science and more timeless information (I mentioned this previously in Curiosity: Good Friend, Bad Master).

I think my problem is mostly discipline. I know that I’ll get more out of reading books and textbooks from my to read list than by reading The Economist and whatever interesting blog posts are featured on Hacker News, but even after I resolve to focus on the highest-quality material first and read other fun things on the side, as weeks pass I get less and less vigilant about it… until I some day I realize that I open the ‘hard’ books infrequently and spend most of my time reading lighter things that give me less lasting value. Once in a while there’s a big spike of willpower that brings me back on track, but it doesn’t last and at the bottom of the cycle I end up feeling feeling that I wasted an opportunity to learn new things and grow.

Why is it such a big deal to me? Because I feel that there’s a qualitative difference in how much I benefit from the highest quality material compared to whatever’s being written about this week. In short: More life-changing books like Gödel, Escher, Bach, and fewer articles about what’s happening this week in Myanmar.

Solution (?)
Maybe what I need is a way to keep track of my commitment, both as a reminder and a motivator. It worked pretty well with my molecular biology textbook… Until I moved to Ottawa. I haven’t opened that textbook in a month. You see what I’m talking about?

In fact, if I’m totally honest with myself, I’m thinking that maybe what will give the best result is a more drastic change. I’ve already unsubscribed to a few periodicals in the past, but maybe I should make deeper cuts and even create some rules about which websites I can visit and when (or maybe just re-arranging my bookmarks and RSS feeds would be enough to modify my behavior?).

If you’ve had a similar problem and found an effective way to deal with it, let me know in the comments.

See also:

• Allocate Your Studies Wisely, Grasshopper
• Curiosity: Good Friend, Bad Master

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Sorry about the lack of updates recently. This is the longest hiatus that this blog ever had.

I simply haven’t felt like writing here recently, and decided not to force it.

For those who are curious: The move to Ottawa went well. Mélanie and I have started to plan our wedding, which should take place during the summer of 2010 (we’d like August 21st, since that would be the 7th anniversary of us going out together, but we might have to settle for another date).

I suspect I’ll start writing here again soon. I’m getting the itch, but I’m not sure what to write about yet.

Moving to Ottawa
In a little less than a month, Mélanie and I will be moving to Ottawa. We’ve found a small but comfortable apartment, and it will be our first time actually living together.

While doing research to prepare for the move, I found many cool things that I think will help make our lives better. They are:

• Dumping the phone company and going 100% voice-over-IP. I find Bell Canada’s prices for plain old voice phone outrageous in the Internet era, and felt it wouldn’t be right to support them out of inertia. The company I signed up with is Babytel.
• Switching to a new ISP (TekSavvy) that can do dry-loop DSL, so that I can connect to the internet from a phone line that isn’t active for voice calls. This ISP doesn’t throttle traffic (unlike most big ISPs in Canada) and offers premium routing for better pings.
• We bought a Mac Mini so we can use it as a media center (music, photos, films, TV series, etc). Plex is a free and open source app that allows you to do that and use a remote. This should replace a bunch of other electronics while also allowing me to do more scientific distributed computing.
• I read up on the best air-filtering plants; NASA had a study on this, and one of the authors of that study wrote a book that I’ll borrow from the library as soon as we move. I like having some plants around, and figure I might as we get those that will have the biggest impact on air quality.
• Mélanie has asthma and some allergies, so I did a bit of research on ways to help her breathe easier. Found some air vent filters that look like they could help some.
• The apartment is small, and I tend to go to bed later than Mélanie… So at first I looked into air purifiers, figuring the noise they make could help her sleep better and we’d have better air quality, but my research mostly told me that these devices didn’t do a very good job. So instead I looked into white noise machines. This one sounds good (literally). I figure that if it gives us both better sleep, it’s worth the money.
• I also want to get headphones in case one of us wants to read, and the other wants to listen to music or something like that. Not sure which model to get yet, but I’ve heard good things about Sennheisers.

Follow Up on “What You Can Measure…”
I recently wrote about some challenges I gave myself. I’m happy to say that it’s working well, possibly better than I expected.

On the fruits & vegetables side, I’ve kept to the “5 extra portions a day, what goes in regular meals doesn’t count” rule and since then (about 5 weeks ago) I’ve eaten 198 portions of fruits and vegetables (lots of carrots, bananas, apples, bell peppers, oranges) that I wouldn’t have eaten otherwise. That’s a big win for me, and I intend to keep doing it for as long as possible.

My other challenge was to read at least 4 pages a day from a molecular biology textbook (on top of the other things I read — yesterday I finished reading a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for example). The reason was that while I loved reading it, it was more arduous than the other books I was reading, the textbook is big and heavy… I was always finding excuses to avoid it and wasn’t making good progress. At the rate I was reading it, it would have taken me years to go from cover to cover.

Well, in the past ±5 weeks I’ve read about 155 pages, and I’ve only missed two days (completely forgot about it). This means my real average is higher than 4 pages a day, and I should hit the back cover in about 6-7 months. I consider this another win, and plan to keep doing this – or something similar – with technical books (and maybe also with online video lectures). The goal is to avoid the “hay fire” trap, where I start with really high motivation and burn out quickly and kind of forget about the book (even if when I do actually pick it up I find it fascinating).

Trip to Cancun
In February, Mélanie and I went to Cancun, Mexico, to visit her grand-parents for a one-week vacation. It was my first time south of New York City, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. The first photo in this post was taken on the beach there, and the second one shows what I spent a lot of time doing (in this case, reading a compilation of letters by Richard P. Feynman).

I’m now watching the third lecture in a Yale history class by professor David W. Blight about the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction Era (1845-1877). This particular lecture deals with the pro-slavery ideology. As a Canadian, a lot of this is new to me.

I think this passage says a lot:

But it’s amazing to read the letters and the language of slave traders when they write to each other, the complacency, the mixture of just pure racism on the one hand and just business language on the other. “I refused a girl 20-years-old at $700.00 yesterday,” one trader wrote to another in 1853. “If you think best to take her at 700, I can still get her. She is very badly whipped but has good teeth.” “Bought a cook yesterday,” wrote another trader, “Bought a cook yesterday that was to go out of the state. She just made the people mad, that was all.” “I have bought a boy named Isaac,” wrote another trader, “for $1100.00.” He writes this in 1854 to his partner. “Bought a boy named Isaac. I think him very prime. He is a house-servant, first-rate cook, and splendid carriage driver. He is also a fine painter and varnisher, and says he can make a fine panel door. Also, he performs well on the violin. He is a genius. And strange to say, I think he’s smarter than I am.” Truth always creeps through all of our language–it doesn’t always but sometimes–creeps through our language, doesn’t it?

I’m also four lectures in a MIT Physics class by Walter Lewin (8.01, classical mechanics), and it’s excellent so far. I also recommend it.

For more free online classes, have a look at Academic Earth.

Update: Another great resource is Youtube EDU.

When Aubrey de Grey’s Happy, I’m Happy…
Why? Because he’s one of the leaders and main instigators of the scientific movement working on defeating the diseases of aging, by far the number one cause of death and suffering in the ‘Western’ countries.

Future Current has a transcript of the talk that Aubrey gave at the BIL ad-hoc conference (a kind of less exclusive TED).

But the best way to experience this is to watch the video of Aubrey.

How? Why?
If you are new to all this, I recommend starting with this older TED talk or this longer Google Tech Talk, then this primer at FightAging, and then Aubrey and Michael Rae’s book, Ending Aging.

The best way to contribute to the research efforts are to donate to the Methuselah Foundation.

Example #1
I’ve never been a very healthy vegetarian, getting a lot of my daily calories from cheese and pasta. It has always been obvious that I should eat more fruits and vegetables, but somehow I just wasn’t taking the step to really do it with any consistency. Small victories stayed isolated, and my eating habits stayed pretty much the same.

So I decided to challenge myself to eat at least 5 extra portions of fruits and vegetables a day. What I would normally be eating as part of a meal didn’t count; it had to be, for example, an extra bowl of carrots or an apple.

Results: So far in slightly less than 2 weeks I’ve eaten over 65 portions of fruits and vegetables that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have eaten otherwise. It hasn’t been hard or complicated, but I know that without some metrics and way to stay accountable (see on the photo above), I wouldn’t have gotten this result.

I intend to keep doing that for at least a month to see if I can pick up the habit. If I don’t, I might stick with this system for as long as I need to. I figure that the small hassle is worth the price of an improved health (and possibly lower food bills).

Example #2
As I’ve already mentioned on this site, I read a lot. It hasn’t been hard to keep a good rhythm with books because I just love reading. I don’t need any external motivation.

But with textbooks, it’s been another story. I’ve been studying Molecular Biology of the Cell (5th Edition) for a long time and making very slow progress. As the months went on, I realized that the problem wasn’t so much that it was slow-going once I was reading, but rather that I picked up this book more rarely than the 4-5 others I’m reading in parallel.

The main factors are probably that it’s bigger and heavier, so it’s impossible to read before going to sleep while lying in bed. It’s also, obviously, more technical and I have to work more for my reward. In any case, whatever the reasons, I just picked it up very rarely, which meant that it would’ve taken me an eternity to finish, and I already have a few other textbooks that I wanted to get to after I was done with this one (the MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences, for example).

So I decided that since my problem was getting started, I would give myself a minimum of 4 pages to read in that textbook each day, and would track my progress on a piece of paper (see photo above).

Results: I’ve only been doing it for a week, but already my daily average is around 8 pages, which is pretty good since the pages are big and the fonts small, and I’ve also been devouring the excellent biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus by Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird.

Conclusion
This technique gives you both information and accountability. It’s simple enough that it actually works, and you can apply it to all kinds of things you want to do. Just pick realistic goals and make adjustments as you go along, and most importantly, stick with it long enough so that whatever desirable behavior you’re tracking becomes a habit.

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I’ve recently started reading American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. So far it’s excellent.

While doing some online research on Oppenheimer, I discovered to my great pleasure that a 2-hour PBS documentary on with special focus on his 1950s McCarthy-like trial was available for free.

It’s fascinating and I strongly recommend it. The only thing that would have made it better was if it had included some references to Richard P. Feynman (who worked under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos).

Here is the link: PBS: The Trials of J. Robert Oppenheimer

How About You?
I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road at the recommendation of my cousin Marie-Eve. The setting is a post-apocalyptic world and the main protagonists – a father and son – basically spend all their time looking for food and shelter, and try to avoid being robbed or killed by other starving survivors.

It very much makes me not want to live in such a world. Everybody would probably agree. Yet few people actually do much to reduce the chances of of such a scenario happening. In fact, it’s worse than that; few people even seriously entertain the possibility that such a scenario could happen.

People don’t think about such things because they are unpleasant and they don’t feel they can do anything about them, but if more people actually did think about them, we could do something. We might never be completely safe, but we could significantly improve our odds over the status quo.

Danger From Two Directions: Ourselves and Nature.

Human technology is becoming more powerful all the time. We already face grave danger from nuclear weapons, and soon molecular manufacturing technologies and artificial general intelligence could pose new existential threats. We are also faced with slower, but serious, threats on the environmental side: Global warming, ocean acidification, deforestation/desertification, ecosystem collapse, etc.

Looking back and saying “Things have been fine so far, why worry?” is not satisfactory. We’ve only recently acquired technologies that can quickly and easily kill vast numbers of us while compromising the viability of the Earth (if only temporarily), and new more powerful technologies (that have huge upsides too) are on the horizon. Also, because of a kind of anthropic principle, we know that if we’re sitting here saying “Nothing too bad happened before”, it means we’re still alive to think about it; we’re a biased sample.

If we play our cards right, our technology can help us deal with environmental problems while being used to immensely reduce suffering around the world (cures for more diseases, including those of aging, bringing more people out of poverty, etc).

But even if we succeed on that side, we can’t ignore natural disasters. As we become longer-lived individually, and stick around as a species, this increases our chances of being victims of a super-volcano or an asteroid striking the Earth. The dinosaurs didn’t get wiped out because of bad luck, they stuck around for about 160 million years so something was bound to happen sooner or later…

We need to design active and passive defense mechanisms against those threats (the details of those are a whole other post, but you can read something I wrote a while ago about deflecting Earth-bound asteroids), as well as make our human civilization more robust. Leaving all our eggs in the same basket for too long is dangerous. I expect that eventually space colonization will become feasible. Not necessarily other planets at first, but maybe giant space habitats made from raw materials harvested from the asteroid belt. With sufficiently advanced nanotech, this wouldn’t be out of the question.

But in the short-term, what matters is understanding the risks better and raising awareness.

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For more on global catastrophic risks, see:

• The Book: Global Catastrophic Risks edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic
• The Lifeboat Foundation
• The Foresight Institute (working for the “beneficial implementation of nanotechnology”)
• The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (trying to steer AGI research towards “Friendly AI”)

Photo: From upcoming movie based on The Road. Source: IMDB.

While reading an article titled The Trough of No Value this passage caught my eye:

I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it’s just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn’t mean all of them were.

I think it’s a marvelous illustration of survivor bias (also known as survivorship bias), itself a type of sample bias.

We should always look for implicit selection pressures that could have biased our sample and made it non-representative of what we’re trying to measure. For example, only the best music from the 1800s has survived to this day – most of the mediocre pieces have been long forgotten – so listening to music from that era that has survived to this day can’t give us an accurate portrait of the whole range of music produced of the 1800s.

It’s the same with mutual funds (those that perform badly are eventually shut down) or with ‘antique’ furniture (to be preserved, pieces usually have to be old and attractive).

See also: Articles on Rationality

Failed Assassination Plot
Thanks to the big Hollywood movie Valkyrie (starring Tom Cruise as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg), even people who don’t know much about history now know about the failed plot to kill Adolf Hitler in July 1944. We can only speculate how this would have changed the course of the war…

Car Accident
But there is a little known car accident that could probably have changed history even more if things had unfolded in a slightly different way.

Otto Wagener, a passenger in Hitler’s Mercedes on March 13, 1930, wrote in his memoirs (Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, ISBN 978-0300032949) that the future dictator of Germany was almost killed in a car accident. A heavy trailer truck collided with the car, but the driver hit the brake quickly enough to avoid crushing the car. The insurance claim signed by Hitler was sold on eBay in 2000.

About this incident, Jared Diamond wrote: “Because of the degree to which Hitler’s psychopathology determined Nazi policy and success, the form of an eventual World War II would probably have been quite different if the truck driver had braked one second later.”

I wonder if the truck driver later realized that the man he had almost killed was Adolf Hitler.

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Just saw Daniel Dennett give a talk about “Darwin and the Evolution of Reasons” at Carleton University for Darwin Week.

Here’s the blurb about the talk:

Evolution by natural selection not only accounts for the apparent design of the biological world; it explains the emergence of intelligent designers like us, acting on reasons that we formulate and evaluate. Thanks to language, we can propose, analyze, and criticize our own designs and those of others. This capacity to be moved by reasoning is one of evolution’s most potent products to date, unique in the biosphere. It gives us a lens through which we can look back at the evolutionary process itself, discovering the source of our abilities and aspirations, and then questioning our deepest convictions.

I didn’t learn too many new things, but it was still a pleasant experience. Dennett’s a very good speaker and gets concepts across in a clear and concise manner. If you have a chance to see him speak, I recommend it.

A study published in the January 30 issue of Science shows that learning more scientific facts doesn’t seem to improve the ability of students to use proper scientific reasoning. This seems like a “well, duh” observation to me, but apparently it isn’t obvious to those who create science curriculums in many schools around the world.

The researchers tested about 6,000 students majoring in science and engineering at seven universities (4 in the US and 3 in China). Here are the results:

The first test, the Force Concept Inventory, measures students’ basic knowledge of mechanics — the action of forces on objects. Most Chinese students scored close to 90 percent, while the American scores varied widely from 25-75 percent, with an average of 50.

The second test, the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment, measures students’ understanding of electric forces, circuits, and magnetism, which are often considered to be more abstract concepts and more difficult to learn than mechanics. Here Chinese students averaged close to 70 percent while American students averaged around 25 percent — a little better than if they had simply picked their multiple-choice answers randomly.

The third test, the Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning, measures science skills beyond the facts. Students are asked to evaluate scientific hypotheses, and reason out solutions using skills such as proportional reasoning, control of variables, probability reasoning, correlation reasoning, and hypothetical-deductive reasoning. Both American and Chinese students averaged a 75 percent score.

What’s the difference between teaching someone that the Earth is round and that the Earth is flat if you don’t also explain how to find out by themselves using hypotheses and evidence?

The whole point of science is not to simply take things on faith, but rather to figure out how things work using evidence. Of course, nobody can verify everything scientific they learn, but they could if they so desired, and that’s the point.

Science is all about questions and how you answer them, not only about the answer themselves. I’m not sure how compatible that is with an education system that teaches students that having the “right answers” is the way to move forward. And by “answers” here, I mean all kinds of things: facts, numbers, techniques, equations, ways to look things up in databases/journals, etc — all very useful to a point, but if you don’t know the “why” behind these answers, you’re still missing the bigger picture.

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Source:

• Learning and Scientific Reasoning
• Study: Learning Science Facts Doesn’t Boost Science Reasoning

Graphene.

The Yin…
Graphene, shown above, is a very interesting material. It’s very strong (“strongest material ever measured“), and a very good electrical conductor: “The corresponding resistivity of the graphene sheet would be 10^−6 Ω·cm, less than the resistivity of silver, the lowest resistivity substance known at room temperature .” (source)

But what makes graphene even more interesting, in my opinion, is the recently discovered possibility of turning it into graphane simply by adding some hydrogen atoms.

Graphane. Carbon atoms in gray, hydrogen atoms in white.

…and the Yang
These hydrogen atoms apparently change the properties of the material in a very interesting way:

A hypothetical example for this is graphane (7), a wide-gap semiconductor, in which hydrogen is bonded to each carbon site of graphene. Here we show that by exposing graphene to atomic hydrogen, it is possible to transform this highly-conductive semimetal into an insulator.

What can you do with a good conductor that you can turn into an insulator by adding a few atoms?

Adieu to Silicon?
To me it seems like the obvious thing would be to try to make a CPU. If you can make enough pure graphene and you can control precisely where to add hydrogen atoms, you can probably replace photolithography, the technique currently used to make computer chips.

Your feature-size would be limited by how finely you can add hydrogen atoms to the graphene substrate (or maybe by electricity leakage – I’m not familiar enough with that to be sure), and your chips would be based on easy to find elements: carbon and hydrogen (though others would no doubt be needed – hydrogen is one way to modify graphene’s properties, but the Manchester University scientists who discovered graphane seem to think there are many others).

More R&D is required to know if this would work at all, and then to figure out practical ways to actually build microchips with these materials, but from what I know, it does seem very promising.

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Sources:

• Control of graphene’s properties by reversible hydrogenation (pdf)
• Graphane: a two-dimensional hydrocarbon (pdf)
• Scientists from University of Manchester discover ground-breaking material
• New Carbon Nanomaterial at Technology Review
• Graphene at Wikipedia

Most educated people know about the burning of the great library of Alexandria, and what a tragedy for humanity that was.

But I suspect that fewer people – at least in the Western hemisphere – know about the Quin dynasty’s massive campaign of book burning in 213 BC.

The emperor Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇), at the suggestion of his chancellor Li Si (李斯), instituted book burning (he condemned “all previously written historical books as worthless and ordered them burned, much to the detriment of our understanding of early Chinese history,” according to Jared Diamond), the persecution of intellectuals (including the burying alive of many Confucians), and a restriction on formal education for the common people. I think this can fairly be described as proto-totalitarianism.

As with the great library of Alexandria, we can only speculate about what has been lost.

Nature Materials has a fascinating paper on a kind of polymer implant that can ‘program’ your dendritic cells. This would allow doctors to use your own immune system to attack, for example, cancer cells. But it could also be used to combat other diseases related to the immune system (arthritis and diabetes are examples given by Technology Review), or even to “train other kinds of cells, including stem cells used to repair damage to the body.”

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

Cancer vaccines typically depend on cumbersome and expensive manipulation of cells in the laboratory, and subsequent cell transplantation leads to poor lymph-node homing and limited efficacy. We propose that materials mimicking key aspects of bacterial infection may instead be used to directly control immune-cell trafficking and activation in the body. It is demonstrated that polymers can be designed to first release a cytokine to recruit and house host dendritic cells, and subsequently present cancer antigens and danger signals to activate the resident dendritic cells and markedly enhance their homing to lymph nodes. Specific and protective anti-tumour immunity was generated with these materials, as 90% survival was achieved in animals that otherwise die from cancer within 25 days. These materials show promise as cancer vaccines, and more broadly suggest that polymers may be designed to program and control the trafficking of a variety of cell types in the body.

This immediately made me wonder if this technique could also be used to combat some of the diseases of aging that are caused by the accumulation of toxic by-products of metabolism that our immune system isn’t clearing up.

For example, maybe we could train our immune system to clear up the mis-folded protein aggregates (beta-amyloids) that accumulate in our brains throughout our lives and eventually, past a certain threshold, cause Alzheimer’s disease. A standard vaccine might do the trick, but maybe this technique could produce a more effective immune response?

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Sources:

• Infection-mimicking materials to program dendritic cells in situ
• Implant Makes Cells Kill Cancer: A polymer device trains immune cells to shrink tumors

Everybody in this photo is a journalist.

I just finished covering the Detroit Auto Show as a journalist for Discovery. Here are a few things that I learned:

Care for a foot rub?

1) What works in a 5 seconds TV clip doesn’t always work as well in person. The pretty girls standing next to exotic supercars (Ferraris, Lamborghinis) that you usually only see briefly, well, they look a bit more awkward when you see them standing there all day. I almost felt like going up there and asking: “You want me to bring you a chair?”

2) Old experienced journalists, especially those with white hair and pirate mustaches, are experts at cutting in front of you during a one-on-one, and they’ll ask 3-4 questions and then say: “One more question”.

And then they’ll ask 10 more. As soon as the interviewee is done answering, they say something like “Now…” or “Ok, but…” and then take a few seconds to think of a follow up question. These words are just placeholders so that nobody cuts in.

Elon Musk.

3) Even if you meet the people you really want to meet, you might not actually be able to have a conversation with them. I was looking forward to meeting Elon Musk of SpaceX, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, etc.

I actually got to talk to him a bit, but it was only while photographers were asking him to pose in front of various things (the electric Roadster, the car frame and powertrain, etc).

He was laughing at the situation a bit, and I said: “Maybe you should’ve brought a piece of Falcon 9.” He said: “Yeah, but it wouldn’t fit in here. It’s 180 feet tall,” and I said: “I hear it’s all assembled now,” and he said that it was, and something about testing next summer, but then the press conference had to start rolling.

Compared to most other CEOs who gave speeches at press conferences, Elon wasn’t very smooth, but I’m kind of glad he’s not some smooth-talking manager-type. He rose to the top because of his brains, not his silver tongue. Not that you can’t have both, but if I had to choose…

After the announcements were done, he was surrounded by a horde of TV cameras and I never could get close to him again.

All photos by Michael Graham Richard.

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Cities Are Attention Whores
Cities bring a lot of benefits to their inhabitants, but we haven’t evolved to live in them and that has an impact on many facets of our lives, including our mental health.

Just being in an urban environment, [scientists] have found, impairs our basic mental processes. [...]

A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power. [This depletes our ability to focus and interferes with our self-control].

It will be unsurprising to anyone who has studied evolutionary psychology to learn that a good way to give your brain a break is to spend some time in a natural setting. In fact, some studies show that just looking at some trees or grass through a window or on a picture can be beneficial.

I wonder if house plants can have the same effect…

In any case, this is just one of many examples among man-made systems that we could design better using knowledge of our brains and bodies and the evolutionary forces that shaped them.

Source: Boston Globe

Photo: Trey Ratcliff

According to Wikipedia:

The “law of unintended consequences” (also called the “law of unforeseen consequences”) states that any purposeful action will produce some unintended consequences. A classic example is a bypass — a road built to relieve traffic congestion on a congested road — that attracts new development and with it more traffic, resulting in two congested streets instead of one.

This maxim is not a scientific law; it is more a warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them. Stated in other words, each cause has more than one effect, and these effects will invariably include at least one unforeseen side effect. The unintended side effect can potentially be more significant than any of the intended effects.

A good example of this recently appeared in The Economist in an article about – of all things – oysters:

Oysters have relatively few natural predators: mainly starfish, which attach themselves to the shell with multitudinous teeth and patiently chew through, and the oyster drill, a species of carnivorous snail that attaches itself to a mollusc shell with a multi-toothed organ and inserts its proboscis, which releases enzymes that digest the creature in its home, making it easy to hoover up. Watermen once tried to defeat starfish by cutting each one they dragged up in half; unfortunately, since they regenerate, this doubled the starfish population.

Update: Another example from the same edition of the Economist, in a piece about birds in China titled The loneliness of the Chinese birdwatcher:

In 1958 Mao Zedong had declared war on songbirds, sparrows in particular: he claimed they consumed scarce grain. For three days and nights my neighbourhood, gripped like much of northern China by hysteria, had beaten pots and pans to keep birds on the move until they collapsed in exhaustion on the roofs and pavements of the courtyard houses. The consequence was a plague of locusts the next year that helped bring on a famine. “Suan le,” Mao had said when told that the anti-sparrow campaign was not working. “Forget it then.”

See also: Articles on Rationality

A lot of innovation happens at the intersection between two (or more) different fields. You take an approach normally used in a certain field and apply it to another where it hadn’t been tried before, or you take a technology (lasers) and you figure out a way to apply it to your seemingly unrelated problem (storing music).

For example, in the field of biogerontology, the approach used so far was the scientific one. Let’s figure out how things work, and then we can try to solve problems. Aubrey de Grey’s major insight was to sidestep the whole process by taking an engineering approach; We don’t need to understand the whole system, we just need to learn enough so that we can get the results we want. It’s easier to learn how to repair a house periodically than to learn how to built a house that never gets damaged…

But nowadays, no human can claim to know everything that humanity as a whole knows. Even if we limit it to scientific knowledge, it’s simply impossible. If all you did was speed-read scientific journals 24/7, and you had the training to understand everything you read, you’d probably still be slower than the rate at which new knowledge accumulates.

Even within fields (mathematics, physics, biology, etc), people are becoming more and more specialized, and there are fewer individuals who look at it all from a distance to see possible new connections.

To me that seems to be one of the major benefits that would come from an artificial general intelligence (AGI). Even if we put aside for a moment the fact that when mature its hardware would be much faster than a human brain, and that it would improve itself recursively to become smarter and smarter (the Intelligence Explosion school of the Singularity), just the the ability to store and perfectly recall pretty much the sum of human scientific knowledge would give it a massive advantage over any human scientist or engineer. It would combine the benefits of both specialists and generalists.

How many discoveries are staring humanity in the face right now, but there is no single individual on Earth who possess the knowledge required to connect the dots?

The Internet is already expanding the amount of information that can be accessible to a single person, but that person has to actively look for something (Google it, etc). It’s not the same as having that information ‘passively’ reside in your brain until the right moment when you ask yourself a question and the answer gets formed from a number of elements you already knew.

So while we wait for AGI, we could benefit from having more generalists, or at least, more communication between specialists in different fields.

Hiding in Plain Sight
Kryptos is a sculpture created by James Sanborn in 1990. It’s located at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and it’s mostly known for the four encrypted messages on it.

Three of them have been decrypted (it took almost 10 years), but one has endured what is probably the biggest non-covert attempt at code-breaking in the world for almost 20 years. CIA analysts have been working on it, of course, but like Fermat’s Last Theorem, Kryptos has attracted the attention of amateurs all around the world. If you’re interested in throwing your hat into the ring, there’s a pretty active Krytpos Yahoo Group you can join.

Does This Tell Us Anything About the CIA?
But what I find most interesting about the Kryptos code is that its creator didn’t expect things to unfold that way:

Sanborn, who has had no training in cryptography, says that he collaborated with a prominent fiction writer in composing the text to be encoded, and then worked with a retired CIA encryption official for four months to create the code. He insists that the code can be solved and says that when he placed the sculpture at Langley, in the thick of the world’s best code-breakers, he thought it would take only months for them to solve Kryptos.

So he had no training in cryptography, but he worked with a CIA cryptographer so we can assume that the strength of the code mostly comes from that person. Yet even after getting counsel from him or her, he still expected the code to last only a few months. If someone with inside information and professional help overestimated the CIA by that much, chances are that people without inside access are overestimating the capabilities of the CIA by even more (when it comes to code-breaking, at least, but probably also for other things). And that’s not even counting the fact that in the past 20 years code-breaking techniques and computers have gotten better; Sanborn expected people to break his code with 1990 tools and knowledge.

Most people’s knowledge of the CIA comes from fiction (movies, books), and they are usually portrayed as being almost magically effective (they know everything, are always at the right place at the right time, etc).

But the reality might be closer to Kryptos than Hollywood. Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner argues that “America’s foes and rivals have long overrated the Central Intelligence Agency” and that the agency is “mainly a reservoir of incompetence and delusions that serves no one’s interests well.”

Kissinger told [Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai] that he “vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA.” Chou persisted that “whenever something happens in the world, they are always thought of.” Kissinger acknowledged, “That is true, and it flatters them, but they don’t deserve it.”

I haven’t read that book yet (it’s on my long “to read” list), but Weiner’s conclusions sound plausible: A huge government bureaucracy, even if it is doing spy stuff rather than healthcare or education, almost can’t help but become bloated and ineffectual.

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Sources:

• Kryptos at Wikipedia
• CIA Sculpture Continues to Baffle Cryptographers (you can check out the rest of that site if you need a good laugh)

See also:

• The Risks of Failure of Nuclear Deterrence
• Automatically Duplicating Keys from Photos
• Nanotube-Based Chemical Sensors to Defend Against Chemical Attacks
• Metabolomics Could be Part of a BioShield

NASA deal potentially worth $3.1 billion
SpaceX, a start-up founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, has just beaten Lockheed Martin and Boeing and gotten a juicy NASA contract. It’s amazing to think that it only took a few years to bring competition to the bloated and bureaucratic space sector. We can now expect prices to go down and innovation to go up.

HAWTHORNE, CA – December 23, 2008 – NASA today announced its selection of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft for the International Space Station (ISS) Cargo Resupply Services (CRS) contract award. The contract is for a guaranteed minimum of 20,000 kg to be carried to the International Space Station. The firm contracted value is $1.6 billion and NASA may elect to order additional missions for a cumulative total contract value of up to $3.1 billion. [...]

Under the CRS contract, SpaceX will deliver pressurized and unpressurized cargo to the ISS, and return cargo back to Earth. Cargo may include both NASA and NASA-sponsored payloads requiring a pressurized or unpressurized environment. SpaceX will provide the necessary services, test hardware and software, and mission-specific elements to integrate cargo with the Dragon delivery capsule.

Another company worth keeping an eye on is Bigelow Aerospace. They’re working on expandable space stations, and if they’re successful they will drive down the construction and maintenance costs of space structures. For a $100 billion, we should be able to get more than the ISS…

Update: Irene Klotz at Discovery asks Elon Musk about the NASA contract.

Update 2: Check out these photos of Falcon 9 being assembled.

Update 3: Falcon 9 is now fully assembled.

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Source: SpaceX Press Release

See also:

• SpaceX Update on Falcon 1 Flight 4
• Elon Musk on SpaceX’s Goal
• SpaceX Falcon 1 Rocket Reaches Orbit on 4th Try

Melanie wants to give some homemade cookies to her friends for xmas. Here are the results of our teamwork (pajamas and all).

See also: Visuals