Brad DeLong

Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren

'"Well, is it art?" "I do not know," said Mordel. "It may be. Perhaps randomicity is the principle behind artistic technique. I cannot judge this work because I do not understand it. I must therefore go deeper, and inquire into what lies behind it, rather than merely considering the technique whereby it was produced. I know that human artists never set out to create art, as such," he said, "but rather to portray with their techniquest some features of objects and their functions which they deemed significant." "'Significant'? In what sense of the word?" "In the only sense of the word possible under the circumstances: significant in relation to the human condition, and worth of accentuation because of the manner in which they touched upon it." "In what manner?" "Obviously, it must be in a manner knowable only to one who has experience of the human condition." "There is a flaw somewhere in your logic, Mordel, and I shall find it." "I will wait." "If your major premise is correct," said Frost after awhile, "then I do not comprehend art."' -- Roger Zelazny, "For a Breath I Tarry"

Kevin Drum:

Why the Digital Revolution Won't be a Rerun of the Industrial Revolution: Whenever you talk about smart machines taking all our jobs, the usual pushback is that you're being a Luddite—an argument that's especially appropriate this year since it's the 200th anniversary of the end of the Luddite movement… all those skilled weavers in 1813 thought that power looms would put them out of jobs, but they were right only in the most limited way…. But the Digital Revolution won't be a rerun of the Industrial Revolution…. Karl Smith… [has a] take:

Creating things is a matter of rearranging atoms. Broadly speaking, you need two things to do this — a power system to overcome the gravitational and electromagnetic forces that tend to hold atoms in their relative positions and a control system to guarantee that atoms wind up in the right place. The industrial revolution was about one thing — more power! But, more power means the need for more control. Hence, the Industrial Revolution meant a rapid increase in the demand for human brains, not decrease. Smart machines provide both the power system and the control system in one convenient package. You can still argue that displaced humans will end up doing something else—we just don't know what yet—but it's a tough argument to win. If you agree that artificial intelligence will be real someday soon, then by definition smart machines will be able to do just about anything that humans can do. The answer to "Humans will do X," for any value of X, is "But robots can do that too." That wasn't true of the Industrial Revolution.

If you don't believe that AI is around the corner, then there's no argument to have here (aside from why you think AI is so far off). But if you do, then we have some serious questions to ponder about the future of work, the future of money, and the future of democracy. That's what my piece is mainly about.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Dark Art of Racecraft

Andrew Sullivan says, apropos of Jason Richwine, the cross-burning Charles Murray, and company, that the racists are the real victims here…

Twenty-eight hours before Sullivan posts--thus showing that Ta-Nehisi Coates's worldline is capable of following closed timeline paths--Ta Nehisi Coates delivers the smackdown. And in the process he says what Sandy Jencks, George Borjas, and Dick Zeckhauser really should have said to Jason Richwine when he first proposed his dissertation topic, and he lays out arguments that Richwine really should have been forced to acknowledge and grapple with before they signed off on his dissertation:

Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Dark Art of Racecraft:

Dave Weigel is one of my favorite reporters, but I think this piece on Jason Richwine, intelligence research, and "race" deserves a closer look:

Academics aren't so concerned with the politics. But they know all too well the risks that come with research connecting IQ and race. At the start of his dissertation, Richwine thanked his three advisers -- George Borjas, Christopher Jenks, and Richard Zeckhauser -- for being so helpful and so bold. Borjas "helped me navigate the minefield of early graduate school," he wrote. "Richard Zeckhauser, never someone to shy away from controversial ideas, immediately embraced my work…." Anyone who works in Washington and wants to explore the dark arts of race and IQ research is in the right place. The city's a bit like a college campus, where investigating "taboo" topics is rewarded, especially on the right. A liberal squeals "racism," and they hear the political-correctness cops (most often, the Southern Poverty Law Center) reporting a thought crime.

It is almost as though the "dark arts of race and IQ" were an untapped field of potential knowledge, not one of the most discredited fields of study in modern history. We should first be clear that there is nothing mysterious or forbidden about purporting to study race and intelligence. Indeed, despite an inability to define "race" or "intelligence," such studies are one of the dominant intellectual strains in Western history. We forget this because its convient to believe that history begins with the Watts riots. But it's important to remember the particular tradition that Charles Murray and Jason Richwine are working in. A brief reminder seems in order. 

Naughty, Naughty, Jim Manzi!: Inappropriate Misunderstanding of the Neyman-Pearson Hypothesis Testing Framework Strikes Again!

Kevin Drum sends us to:

Jim Manzi: "When interpreting the physical health results of the Oregon Experiment, we either apply a cut-off of 95% significance to identify those effects which will treat as relevant for decision-making, or we do not. If we do apply this cut-off… then we should agree with the authors’ conclusion that the experiment “showed that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes in the first 2 years.”

Nope.

The study did not show that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes.

The study failed to show that Medicaid generated [statistically] significant improvements in measured physical health outcomes.

The confusion of a failure to show statistical significance with a showing of a failure to have substantive significance is a basic, sophomoric error.

For it to "show that Medicaid coverage generated no significant improvements", the study would have had to have produced an 0.95 confidence interval that excludes significant improvements, wouldn't there? And there is no such interval.

So: Naughty, naughty, Jim Manzi!

Neyman-Pearson is not a trolley car. You cannot get off it where you want. You have to ride it to the end of the line.

Bernanke-Haters at the Sohn Conference

Stanley Druckenmiller:

Druckenmiller noted everyone is saying, "love the market long term, looking for a correction." He believes the opposite, loves market short-term, but hates it long term. Strongly disagrees with quantitative easing by Bernanke now. Only agreed with the first QE. "His bond buying is controlling the most important price in the US economy." Says it will end badly, despite money-printing being beneficial to financial assets currently. When Fed slightly tightens, that will hurt things he says. Bernanke completely ignored strong economic data in January and February, but with slightly soft data later, he printed even more money. Expects a "melt-up" in the short-term, due to Fed's current policy…. Bernanke is “running the most inappropriate monetary policy in history.”

Dana Golstein: ATTENTION JASON RICHWINE!!: You're Not the First Guy to (Wrongly) Believe Immigrants are Dumb

Dana Goldstein:

Att. Jason Richwine: You're Not the First Guy to (Wrongly) Believe Immigrants are Dumb: The human brain remains, in many crucial aspects, a mystery to science. So what is IQ? It is a measure of the capacity to learn in the linear fashion prized by Western culture, and we know that it is partially determined by genetics. Yet in the life of the average, individual human, those "innate" genes are vastly, vastly overpowered by the effects of environment: decent nutrition; an emotionally stable, vocabulary-rich home life; physically and emotionally attentive parents; good schools and teachers. All those factors are in shorter supply among high-poverty populations. Claiming that such populations are genetically inferior ignores about a century of research and writing on the malleability of IQ and the proper uses of intelligence assessments.

Josh Barro: What to Make of the Oregon Health Study

I would say that we already knew that the Medicaid model is not a terribly productive way to create chronic conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes, and that we need to find better condition-management models pronto. But I would also say that the depression and financial security findings are better news than I expected. About what I would have expected (but worse than I might have hoped) on some welfare indicators, better than expected (and as good as I might have hoped) on others--net-net, goods news for the efficacy of Medicaid expansion.

And people who say otherwise aren't reading the study…

Oregon Medicaid Lottery Says: "Medicaid Expansion Definitely Worth It": Hoisted from Incidental Economist Comments Weblogging

Matt:

Two thoughts:

1. On your point #1 on sample sizes, note that the study is effectively even smaller than you’re saying. Thinking of the high A1C sub-sample as containing 624 people is correct for the intent-to-treat analysis (i.e. for estimating the effect of offering insurance). But (net) take-up was only about 25 percent. Thus, for the IV analysis (which provide the estimates of the effect of insurance per se), the point estimates and variance are scaled up by a factor of 4=1/0.25. This means that the “RCT-equivalent” sample size is only 156=624/4. That’s really, really small, even before you get to the fact that insuring people does not automatically get them the appropriate care (your point about direct versus indirect interventions).

DeLong, Neyman, Pearson, and Many Others Smackdown Watch: Medicaid Expansion Hoisted from Comments Weblogging

Robert Waldmann:

Heh, indeed.

I actually haven't read the whole [Baicker et al. NEJM Oregon Medicaid Lottery] paper, but I have read the abstract and a key table cut-and-pasted by Kevin Drum. It shows a more than four-fold increase in diabetes diagnosis due to Medicaid availability. This does not correspond to statistically significant decrease in the fraction of people with high hemoglobin glycosylation. So the paper does not contain proof that current therapy for diabetes is better than nothing.

I Am More Confident This Morning That Medicaid Expansion Is a Good Idea

Having read Katherine Baicker et al. (2013), "The Oregon Experiment — Effects of Medicaid on Clinical Outcomes", New England Journal of Medicine, I conclude that the study was--as natural experiments are--significantly underpowered, that the jury is still out on most of the effects, but that the success of the Medicaid expansion in reducing depression and improving financial security are rock-solid and nailed benefits, by themselves worth more than the net cost of the expansion.

Therefore I wish to withdraw my tweet from last night:

@tylercowen @petersuderman the case for Medicaid expansion is *marginally* less strong than I had thought...

— J. Bradford DeLong (@delong) May 1, 2013

And substitute for it, instead, the correct:

.@tylercowen @petersuderman CORRECTION: I have read the paper and evaluated its power, the case for Medicaid is stronger than I had thought

— J. Bradford DeLong (@delong) May 2, 2013

Noah Smith Sends Us to the 2500 Year Old Refutation of Thomas Nagel

Zhuangzi:

Happy fish: These Fish Are Happy (But How Do You Know That?): One day Zhuangzi and Huizi are strolling on Bridge Hao:

Zhuangzi: "Look how happy the fish are just swimming around in the river."

Huizi: "How do you know they are happy? You are not a fish."

Zhuangzi: "And you are not me. How do you know I don't know the fish are happy?"

Huizi: "Of course I'm not you, and I don't know what you think. But I do know that you're not a fish, and so you couldn't possibly know the fish are happy."

Zhuangzi: "Look, when you asked me how I knew the fish were happy, you already knew that I knew the fish were happy. I knew it from my feelings standing on this bridge."

tr. Brian Bruya

Psychological Roots of Political Austerity?

Paul Krugman: Psychological Roots of Austerity:

Simon Wren-Lewis has a thoughtful post on the reasons for austerity mania, in which he accepts the role of special interests but argues that there are also psychological roots. Specifically, he suggests that politicians know that they are often irresponsible, and:

when the market starts to punish fiscal profligacy, it is as if a parent has discovered the child’s guilty secret. (The market is seen by many as a mysterious deity.) The politician wants to repent (or at least be seen to repent), and atone for past sins. After eating too many pastries, we go on a crash diet. After deficit bias, we have austerity.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard Edition

Why do the Weekly Standard's writers work so hard to persuade me that they lack both intelligence and honor? I mean, they work really hard to do so--and they do so quite effectively.

Let's back up, and start with one of my favorite readings from Thomas Nagel (2012), Mind and Cosmos:

If I decide, when the sun rises on my right, that I must be driving north instead of south, it is because I recognize that my belief that I am driving south is inconsistent with that observation [that the sun is rising on my right], together with what I know about the direction of rotation of the earth. I abandon the belief because I recognize that it couldn’t be true…. If I oppose the abolition of the inheritance tax, it is because I recognize that the design of property rights should be sensitive not only to autonomy but also to fairness…. I operate in the space of reasons. The appearance of reason… seems… something radically emergent…. Like consciousness, reason is inseparable from the physical life of organisms that have it…. It was originally a biological evolutionary process…. This, then, is what a theory of everything has to explain… the emergence from a lifeless universe of reproducing organisms… greater and greater functional complexity… consciousness… [and] the development of consciousness into an instrument of transcendence that can grasp objective reality and objective value.

I claim that Thomas Nagel's mind is not an instrument of transcendence grasping objective reality and objective value. I claim that, as Thomas Nagel claims to transcendentally grasp objective value when he concludes that there should be an inheritance tax, he is wrong. I claim that, as Thomas Nagel claims to transcendentally grasp objective reality when he concludes that if he is facing south the rising sun must be on his left, he is wrong.

As evidence for his wrongness, I point out that I once was facing south and saw the sun rising in front of me: in the south. True story. During northern hemisphere winter, a plane flying over the pole from Europe to America can exit the earth's shadow at a point where the sun is due south, thus the sun can rise in the south, and it did.

Eric Rosten's Shtick Is Asking Dumb Questions: Harry Potter vs the Codfish Weblogging

Eric Rosten:

Dumb Question: Is Harry Potter Really Less Important Than Global Warming? - Bloomberg: This week’s dumb question was put to J. Bradford DeLong, who is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a blogger, and a former Clinton administration Treasury official. 

The Grid: Can I ask you a dumb question?  Last week you wrote a blog post that asks why people seem to care more about “imaginary friends” like Harry Potter than about real stories from the past or even projections of the future -- whether it holds global wealth or global warming. Do you mind explaining a bit more why imaginary friends like Harry Potter are less important than imaginary issues like global warming? 

Brad DeLong: Hundreds of millions of people are greatly concerned with Harry Potter--he’s one of the most important things in life. What happens to him is what they most desperately want to know.

Why are they paying attention to the imaginary Harry Potter, instead of the man behind the curtain -- global warming? There are two billion peasants living in the great river valleys of Asia. Global warming either means more or less snow on the Tibetan plateau, which melts either faster or slower, which means either drought or flood or both. And none of these two billion people have enough resources to leave their land and move to the cities, because the land is what they’ve got.

Surely what happens to all two billion of them is a more important story than what happens to one single person, who doesn't even exist. Isn't it?

It’s not just the “eight million stories in the naked city.” It’s two billion. Why, if we can organize ourselves to have Harry Potter festivals, can’t we organize ourselves to deal with global warming?

The right answer is that we are jumped-up East African plains apes who have barely managed to evolve an inferior and inadequate kind of intelligence.

This is yet more evidence of how inferior and inadequate our intelligence is. 

Andrew Gelman Attempts to Preach to the Econometricians

Andrew Gelman:

Everyone’s trading bias for variance at some point, it’s just done at different places in the analyses: Unbiased estimation used to be a big deal…. The basic idea is that you don’t want to be biased; there might be more efficient estimators out there but it’s generally more kosher to play it safe and stay unbiased. But in practice one can only use the unbiased estimates after pooling data…. That’s why you’ll see economists (and sometimes political scientists, who really should know better!) doing time-series cross-sectional analysis pooling 50 years of data and controlling for spatial variation using “state fixed effects.” That’s not such a great model, but it’s unbiased—conditional on you being interested in estimating some time-averaged parameter. Or you could estimate separately using data from each decade but then the unbiased estimates would be too noisy. To say it again: the way people get to unbiasedness is by pooling lots of data. Everyone’s trading bias for variance at some point, it’s just done at different places in the analyses.

Macro as I Saw It Back in 2003: Tuesday Ten Years Ago on the Internet Weblogging

Brad DeLong : Economics 236: Your Last Course in Macroeconomics

PART I: A QUICK OVERVIEW

January 22: Introduction

• Olivier Blanchard (2000), "What Do We Know About Macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell Did Not?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 115:4 (November), pp. 1375-1410.
• Olivier Blanchard (1990), "Why Does Money Affect Output? A Survey", in B.M. Friedman and F. Hahn eds, Handbook of Monetary Economics, 1990, Vol 2, 779-835.

January 29: Unemployment and Institutions

• Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides (1994), "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment," Review of Economic Studies 61, pp 397-416.
• Olivier Blanchard and Justin Wolfers (2000) "The Role of Shocks and Institutions in the Rise of European Unemployment: The Aggregate Evidence," Economic Journal, 110 (March), pp. C 1 —33.
• Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz (1997), "What We Know and Do Not Know About the Natural Rate of Unemployment", Journal of Economic Perspectives 11-1 (Winter), pp. 51-73.
• Steven Nickell (1997), "Unemployment and Labor Market Rigidities: Europe versus North America", Journal of Economic Perspectives 11-3 (Summer), pp. 55-74.

February 5: Contracts and Aggregate Output

• Robert Townsend (1979) "Optimal Contracts and Competitive Markets with Costly State Verification", Journal of Economic Theory 21 (October), pp. 265-293.
• Benjamin Bernanke and Mark Gertler (1989), "Agency Costs, Net Worth, and Business Fluctuations," American Economic Review 79 (March), pp . 14-31.

Austrian Non-Economic Reasoning: Robert Murphy Rejects P(A|B) = [P(B|A)P(A)]/P(B)]: Thursday How Not to Mark Your Beliefs to Market Weblogging

Non-economic reasoning? Economic non-reasoning? Non-economic non-reasoning. I'm not sure what to call rejecting Bayes's Rule…

Suppose that for some reason--never mind why--you were back in 2009 confident--70% sure--that Bernanke's policies were inappropriate and disastrous, because if they were adopted they were near-certain--90%--to bring 10%/year if not 20%/year inflation soon--by 2012.

Then 2012 rolls around. No inflation. What, then, come 2013 is your subjective probability that Bernanke's policies are inappropriate and disastrous?

Your confidence that Bernanke's policies are inappropriate and disastrous should drop. According to Bayes’s Rule--which is a simple principle designed to guard yourself from being vulnerable to Dutch Book attacks--it should drop from 70% to 19%.

Not, however, if you are Robert Murphy.

Austrian economists, you see, don't need no stinking Bayes's Rule.

To suggest that they ought or might change their minds in response to evidence is, in some bizarre way, to impugn their character:

I Want Cosma Shalizi to Write a Weblog Post About How Yesterday's Meteor Strike in Chelyabinsk Should Change How We Live...

The Opening of "The History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thoukydides the Athenian

Worth noting for two reasons:

First, Thoukydides takes it for granted that the coming of "civilization"--large-scale social organization in the form of states, etc.--produces a general pacification that allows for a large degree of mutual social disarmament: one has to worry less about pirates, brigands, and the possibility that the stranger one meets on the road will rob or kill you.

Second, of course, Thoukydides is writing about another thing produced by the coming of "civilization": the greatest war he and his kin have ever seen, stretching across 800 miles and over 30 years.

Deadly violence by humans against humans becomes much less an endemic fact of everyday life and much more something concentrated: committed by skilled professionals in concentrated bursts. Are your chances of being a killer less? Certainly. Are your chances of dying violently less? Probably…

Hosted from the Archives: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

Brad DeLong (2005) : The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences: Chad Orzel provides the pointer to Helge Kraghe, who writes in Physics Web http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/13/12/8 about how quantum theory existed in the equations of physics half a decade before the human brain of any physicist understood it….

Max Planck comes up with an equation that works. In order to do so he has to make a "purely formal assumption." And it is only half a decade later that Einstein realizes that the little h that appears in Max Planck's equation is not a "purely formal assumption" or an "artefact" but instead tells us what is perhaps the most important thing about the guts of the universe.

For half a decade the first equation of quantum theory was there. But nobody knew how to read it.

It is this "what if we took this equation seriously?" factor that is, to my mind at least, the spookiest thing about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Take the h in Max Planck's equation seriously, and you have the quantum principle--something that was not in Planck's brain when he wrote the equation down. Take seriously the symmetry in Maxwell's equations between the force generated when you move a magnet near a wire and the force and the force generated when you move a wire near a magnet, and you have Special Relativity--something that was not in Maxwell's brain when he wrote down the equation. Take Newton's gravitational force law's equivalence between inertial and gravitational mass seriously and you have General Relativity--something never in Newton's mind. And take the mathematical pathology at r = 2M in the Schwarzchild metric for the space-time metric around a point mass seriously, and you have black holes and event horizons.

Cosma Shalizi: Advanced Data Analysis from an Elementary Point of View

Lectures:

1. Regression: Predicting and Relating Quantitative Features
2. The Truth About Linear Regression
3. Model Evaluation: Error and Inference
4. Smoothing Methods in Regression
5. The Bootstrap
6. Heteroskedasticity, Weighted Least Squares, and Variance Estimation
7. Splines
8. Additive Models
9. Writing R Code
10. Testing Regression Specifications
11. Hypothesis Testing and Statistical Evidence
12. Logistic Regression
13. Generalized Linear Models and Generalized Additive Models
14. GLM and GAM Examples
15. Multivariate Distributions
16. Density Estimation
17. Simulation
18. Relative Distributions and Smooth Tests
19. Principal Components Analysis
20. Factor Analysis
21. Mixture Models
22. Graphical Models
23. Graphical Causal Models
24. Identifying Causal Effects from Observations
25. Estimating Causal Effects from Observations
26. Time Series I, without latent variables
27. Time Series II, with latent variables

Homework:

1. What's That Got to Do with the Price of Condos in California?
2. Advantages of Backwardness
3. How the Hyracotherium Got Its Mass
4. It's Not the Heat that Gets to You, It's the Sustained Conjunction of Heat with Elevated Levels of Atmospheric Pollutants
5. How the North American Mammalian Paleofauna Got a Crook in Its Curve
6. What Makes the Union Strong?
7. Fun with Density Estimation
8. Red Brain, Blue Brain
9. How the Recent Mammals Got Their Size Distribution
10. Separated at Birth
11. Brought to You by the Letters D, A, and G

Cosma Shalizi vs. the Fen-Dwelling Bayesians

Cosma Shalizi: When Fen-Dwelling Bayesians Can't Handle the Truth:

Attention conservation notice: Self-promotion of an academic talk, based on a three-year-old paper, on the arcana of how Bayesian methods work from a frequentist perspective.

Because is snowing relentlessly and the occasional bout of merely freezing air is a blessed relief, I will be escaping to a balmier clime next week: Cambridgeshire.

"When Bayesians Can't Handle the Truth", statistics seminar, Cambridge University: Abstract: There are elegant results on the consistency of Bayesian updating for well-specified models facing IID or Markovian data, but both completely correct models and fully observed states are vanishingly rare. In this talk, I give conditions for posterior convergence that hold when the prior excludes the truth, which may have complex dependencies. The key dynamical assumption is the convergence of time-averaged log likelihoods (Shannon-McMillan-Breiman property). The main statistical assumption is a building into the prior a form of capacity control related to the method of sieves. With these, I derive posterior and predictive convergence, and a large deviations principle for the posterior, even in infinite-dimensional hypothesis spaces; and clarify role of the prior and of model averaging as regularization devices. (Paper)

Place and time: 1 February 2013, 4-5 pm in MR 12, CMS

And my views on all this hoisted from archives:

Randall Munroe Explains Why There Are No Rich Frequentist Statisticians: New Yorker #fail Vulnerable to a Dutch Book Weblogging

Randall Munroe:

Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis:

Bayesian Statistics and what Nate Silver Gets Wrong: The Bayesian approach is much less helpful when there is no consensus about what the prior probabilities should be…. In actual practice, the method of evaluation most scientists use most of the time is a variant of a technique proposed by the statistician Ronald Fisher in the early 1900s. Roughly speaking, in this approach, a hypothesis is considered validated by data only if the data pass a test that would be failed ninety-five or ninety-nine per cent of the time if the data were generated randomly. The advantage of Fisher’s approach (which is by no means perfect) is that to some degree it sidesteps the problem of estimating priors where no sufficient advance information exists. In the vast majority of scientific papers, Fisher’s statistics (and more sophisticated statistics in that tradition) are used.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Those of us economists who grumble about Bayesian statistics don't want us to move backward to Frequentism but forward to (prior probabilities) x (value of being right) -- the decision-theory counterparts of the so-called risk-neutral valuation method in finance...

Those of us economists who do use frequentist statistics know something very important that Marcus and Davis show no sign at all of knowing: that if you fail to reject the null hypothesis at 0.05, you do not conclude (even provisionally) that the null hypothesis is true--instead, you go gather more data and test again until you can either reject the null against the alternative or reject (the interesting) alternative(s) against the null.

That's science!!

Does Thomas Nagel Reject All of Quantum Mechanics as Well as Evolution and Cognitive Science?

Thomas Nagel: Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Surely False:

• But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of common sense…

• My skepticism is… just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not… rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense…

• Everything we believe, even the most far-reaching cosmological theories, has to be based ultimately on common sense, and on what is plainly undeniable…

• I have argued patiently against the prevailing form of naturalism, a reductive materialism that purports to capture life and mind through its neo-Darwinian extension…. I find this view antecedently unbelievable— a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense…

If you are going to reject scientific theories because they fail to match up to your "common sense"...

More Jumped-Up Monkeys Running Hume 3.0 on Their Wetware vs. the Hacks of Sol III Weblogging

Best comments on Brad DeLong: The Question Is Whether Our Minds Are too Powerful to Be the Result of Purely Darwinian Processes: Complete Self-Pwnage Weblogging:

J. Bradford DeLong said in reply to PaulC…:

Re: "'Brad Delong, to an incorrect conclusion about which direction he was facing, it follows that pure reason can never be a source of knowledge.' I missed the part where Brad DeLong claimed that reason could never be a source of knowledge."

So did I. But don't be too hard on Landsburg. He's just a jumped-up monkey...

kabosh said…:

Responder "Peter Parker" on Gene Callahan's blog provides the response to Callahan below (which Callahan replies to with either complete misunderstanding, or with some very heavy sarcasm-- hard to say which). I think this is the clearest statement yet, in this blog-vs-blog debate, on the distinction between Nagel's "a priori teleology" and the proposition that all of our reasoning faculties come from evolution, and accretions of social learning and structure laid atop evolution.

I understand your reading of Nagel to be the following: Nagel argues that he possesses an ability, Reason, which allows him to recognise truth directly - in this case, the truth he recognises ("grasps directly") is that two contradictory things cannot be true at the same time. Further, this ability to recognise a logical truth puts him in contact with "the rational order of the world".

I think the materialist counter-argument is that in recognising this truth what Nagel is doing is slightly re-purposing mental circuits that evolved to make logical deductions about the world (I thought that there was one lion in the cave, I just saw two lions come out, I now know I must be cautious since I was wrong about my first belief). This type of reasoning is commonly observed in animal experiments.

This reasoning has well defined failure modes (like our lack of understanding of probability, or the difficulty we have in reasoning about the properties of aggregates vs individual parts) that are consistent with the idea that our thinking is an extension of heuristics built around spatial and visual metaphors that evolved to help us survive, more than some privileged access to a world of pure reason.

More, our ability to press these mental models to alternative service has been greatly stretched by such things as quantum mechanics, where our intuition fails utterly. Our ability to progress here depends on slowly building tools (mathematics) over a long time to help compensate for the deficiencies in our raw thinking ability. This tool building is an essentially social enterprise much bigger than a single human brain."

The Question Is Whether Our Minds Are too Powerful to Be the Result of Purely Darwinian Processes: Complete Self-Pwnage Weblogging

Someone who claims to be a "friend" makes me aware that others are joining Alvin Plantzinga and Gene Callahan on the side of Thomas Nagel's creationists--those claiming that we reason and we know we reason like winged angelic reasoning beings with transcendent access to objective reality, rather than like jumped-up monkeys using error-prone Humean heuristics on brains evolved to improve our reproductive fitness, and hence we know that Darwin is wrong on the evolution of the human mind.

Steven Landsburg.

Steven Landsburg: Unreasonable: Brad DeLong appears to argue here that because pure reason once led him, Brad Delong, to an incorrect conclusion about which direction he was facing, it follows that pure reason can never be a source of knowledge. (If that’s not his point, then the only alternative reading I can find is that Thomas Nagel is guilty of choosing a poor example to illustrate a point that DeLong would rather ridicule than refute.) It would be too too easy to make a snarky comment about how we’ve known all along about Brad DeLong’s tenuous relationship with reason….

[H]ere, for the record… facts… none of them, as far as I can see, accessible to humans via anything but pure reason:

Karl Smith Sends Us to Simon Blackburn on Thomas Nagel on Materialism

http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/11/16/blackburn-on-nagel-on-materialism/

Simon Blackburn: Nagel’s central idea is that there are things that science, as it is presently conceived, cannot possibly explain. The current conception is that, given a purely physical beginning, everything else – chemistry, biology, life, mind, consciousness, intelligence, values, understandings, even science – follows on by natural processes. Particles beget atoms beget molecules beget enzymes beget proteins beget life begets Homo sapiens who begets the Royal Society and the rules of tennis. We do not understand every step in this process, naturally, but we can be reasonably confident of its overall shape and confident, too, that any remaining gaps that can be closed will be closed only by more understanding of the same broad kind that we already have….

And:

Karl Smith: I hesitate to contradict Simon Blackburn, but I am not sure his description of the “current conception” does it justice.

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Winged Angelic Reasoning Beings vs. Jumped-Up Monkeys with Evolved Humean Heuristics Weblogging: Lee Arnold Summons the Ghost of Kurt Gödel

Lee Arnold summons the ghost of Kurt Gödel to make the careful argument that are minds might not be "mechanical": after all

Lee Arnold: It could remain problematic. There is also the possibility that if reason is an evolutionary development, we still may not be able to describe how it happened, nor run a Turing machine to evolve it again in silico. Consider Kurt Gödel's remarks on several consequences of his own theorem, quoted in Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (MIT Press, 1996):

The human mind is incapable of formulating (or mechanizing) all its mathematical intuitions. That is, if it has succeeded in formulating some of them, this very fact yields new intuitive knowledge, for example the consistency of this formalism. This fact may be called the 'incompletability' of mathematics. On the other hand, on the basis of what has been proved so far [1972], it remains possible that there may exist (and even be empirically discoverable) a theorem-proving machine which in fact IS equivalent to mathematical intuition, but cannot be PROVED to be so, nor even be proved to yield only CORRECT theorems of finitary number theory. (pp.184-5)

Either the human mind surpasses all machines (to be more precise: it can decide more number-theoretical questions than any machine) or else there exist number-theoretical questions undecidable for the human mind. [It is not excluded that both alternatives may be true. -- Wang] (p.185)

My incompleteness theorem makes it likely that mind is not mechanical, or else mind cannot understand its own mechanism. If my result is taken together with the rationalistic attitude which Hilbert had and which was not refuted by my results, then [we can infer] the sharp result that mind is not mechanical. This is so, because, if the mind were a machine, there would, contrary to this rationalistic attitude, exist number-theoretic questions undecidable for the human mind. (p.186-7)

David Brin on Fermi's Paradox

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/11/are-we-alone-in-cosmos-cursed-by-fermis.html

Facts & other stubborn things: Brad DeLong is making a real monkey of himself

http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2012/11/brad-delong-is-making-real-monkey-of.html

Jumped-Up Monkeys with Darwinian Heuristics vs. Angelic Reasoning Beings with Direct Unmediated Access to Objective Reality Sun-Sets-But-Sun-Also-Rises Cage Match Smackdown Weblogging

UPDATED: To keep commenters from going down blind bypaths due to my imprecision. Bear with me: I am just a jumped-up monkey, after all...

Thomas Nagel argued that his reason could not have been the result of blind Darwinian evolution. He said:

• My reason tells me that if the sun is rising on my right then I am going north then.
• I believe I am going south.
• I believe I see the sun rising on my right
• My reason tells me that I must reject one of these two beliefs because they are inconsistent--either I must conclude that I am hallucinating, or I must conclude that I am not going south.
• Et cetera…
• This kind of transcendent access to truths of objective reality is not something that a jumped-up monkey with Darwinian heuristics can have.
• Therefore I am more than a jumped-up monkey with Darwinian heuristics: I am angelic reasoning being with direct unmediated access to objective reality.

I responded that he knew nothing of the kind:

His Darwinian heuristics had made a Humean guess that because the sun had risen on his right if he was facing north every single previous day, that the same held true today. I pointed out that this might be wrong--that he did not know that because the sun was rising on his right he was facing north, and did not know that he knew that he was facing north, and did not know that he knew that he knew he was facing north, but that he was just guessing.

And, to underscore this, I pointed out that I had once seen the sun rise due south, in which case if I had put the sun on my right I would have been facing not north but east. (I did not point out--but could have--that the claim that if you are facing north east is on your right fails at the South Pole: at the South Pole east is not on your right, north is on your right.)

This seemed to me to be conclusive: what Thomas Nagel took as a canonical example of an angelic reasoning being with direct unmediated access to objective reality was, when examined, nothing of the kind--but rather merely another example of the sad delusions to which jumped-up monkeys operating on error-prone Darwinian heuristics are liable.

Now Gene Callahan enters the ring on the side of the angelic reasoning beings with direct unmediated access to objective reality. I don't think he does any better than Nagel.

David Hume vs. Thomas Nagel: Knowing a Hawk from a Handsaw But Mad South-Southwest Weblogging

Tyler Cowen writes:

The new Thomas Nagel book: The title is Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False…. My bottom lines on it: (1) He is good on attacking the hidden hypocrisies…. He fully recognizes the absurdities (my word, not his) of dualism, and thinks them through carefully and honestly.  Bryan Caplan should beware…. The most typical sentence I found in the book was: “We can continue to hope for a transcendent self-understanding that is neither theistic nor reductionist.”… He doesn’t take seriously enough the view: “The Nagel theory of mind is simply wrong.” People will dismiss his arguments to remain in their comfort zone, while temporarily forgetting he is smarter than they are and furthermore that many of their views do not make sense or cohere internally…

And here Tyler appears to me to have gone off the rails. Thomas Nagel is not smarter than we are--in fact, he seems to me to be distinctly dumber than anybody who is running even an eight-bit virtual David Hume on his wetware.

Tom Simonite: Google Puts Its Virtual Brain Technology to Work

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429442/google-puts-its-virtual-brain-technology-to-work/

Surely That Is Not What the Ethical Werewolf Intended to Say...

The Ethical Werewolf says:

Defending Intentionalism: Ever since a wonderful graduate seminar with Al Martinich five years ago, I've been an intentionalist about interpretation. According to intentionalism, the meaning of an utterance or a text is whatever the author intended to communicate by it. This means that the correct way to interpret texts is to figure out what the author was trying to communicate. Martinich and I hold that this view is correct of utterances and texts of all kinds -- from what you say when ordering at a restaurant, to instruction manuals, to works of literature.

Surely TEW could not have intended to say this?

For, after all, it implies that you can never intelligibly say "He did not intend to say what he said".

Yet I just did.

Quote of the Day: April 27, 2012

"I shall argue that there was a point in human pre-history when big-brained, cultural, learning people for the first time began to exchange things with each other, and that once they started doing so, culture suddenly became cumulative, and the great headlong experiment of human economic ‘progress’ began. Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution."

--Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist

Quote of the Day: April 20, 2012

"Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man."

--David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Quote of the Day: April 9, 2012

"[You] will learn from these pages that their refutations of false conservative claims don’t work and should not be expected to work—and that [you] should not irrationally cling to the idea that somehow they should."

--Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality

Quote of the Day: March 28, 1942

"Once people commit to a belief, the smarter they are the better they are at rationalizing those beliefs. Thus: smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for nonsmart reasons."

--Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

You Can't Make This Stuff Up...

Max Abelson:

Bonus Withdrawal Puts Bankers in “Malaise”: Andrew Schiff was sitting in a traffic jam in California this month after giving a speech at an investment conference about gold. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity.

“I’m not Zen at all, and when I’m freaking out about the situation, where I’m stuck like a rat in a trap on a highway with no way to get out, it’s very hard,” Schiff, director of marketing for broker-dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., said in an interview.

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country’s top 1 percent by income, doesn’t cover his family’s private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square-foot Brooklyn duplex.

“I feel stuck,” Schiff said. “The New York that I wanted to have is still just beyond my reach.”

The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters.

“People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. “Could you imagine what it’s like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?”…

Quote of the Day: February 17, 2012

"1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."

--Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Quote of the Day: February 13, 2012

"A lesion in one spot leaves you unable to tell a Jack Russell from a badger (not that there is much difference), and with damage in another spot, the toaster is unrecognizable. There are even people with certain brain lesions who specifically cannot recognize fruit. Harvard researchers Alfonso Caramazza and Jennifer Shelton claim that the brain has specific knowledge systems (modules) for animate and inanimate categories that have distinct neural mechanisms. These domain-specific knowledge systems aren’t actually the knowledge itself, but systems that make you pay attention to particular aspects of situations, and by doing so, increase your survival chances. For example, there may be quite specific detectors for certain classes of predatory animals such as snakes and big cats. A stable set of visual clues may be encoded in the brain that make you pay attention to certain aspects of biological motion, such as slithering…"

--Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

Quote of the Day: January 22, 2012

"The gorilla study illustrates, perhaps more dramatically than any other, the powerful and pervasive influence of the illusion of attention: We experience far less of our visual world than we think we do…"

--Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

Quotation of the Day: January 18, 2012

"Magicians understand at a deeply intuitive level that you alone create your experience of reality, and, like Johnny, they exploit the fact that your brain does a staggering amount of outright confabulation in order to construct the mental simulation of reality known as 'consciousness'.”

--Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Sandra Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Consciousness

The Next-to-Last Scene of the Iliad

Or, is there any relationship that humans do not think ought to be turned into a reciprocal gift-exchange relationship? "Natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange" indeed!

Book XXIV:

Iris, fleet as the wind, sped forth…. "Take heart," she said….

The lord of Olympus bids you go and ransom noble Hektor, and take with you such gifts as shall give satisfaction to Akhilleus…. Akhilleus will not kill you nor let another do so, for he will take heed to his ways and sin not, and he will entreat a suppliant with all honourable courtesy.…

[H]e lifted the lids of his chests, and took out twelve goodly vestments. He took also twelve cloaks of single fold, twelve rugs, twelve fair mantles, and an equal number of shirts. He weighed out ten talents of gold, and brought moreover two burnished tripods, four cauldrons, and a very beautiful cup which the Thracians had given him… to ransom the body of his son….

Priam and Idaeus as they showed out upon the plain did not escape the ken of all-seeing Jove, who looked down upon the old man and pitied him; then he spoke to his son Mercury and said, "Mercury, for it is you who are the most disposed to escort men on their way, and to hear those whom you will hear, go, and so conduct Priam to the ships of the Akhaeans that no other of the Danaans shall see him nor take note of him until he reach the son of Peleus." Thus he spoke and Mercury, guide and guardian, slayer of Argus, did as he was told….

[…]

Then answered Priam, "If you are indeed the squire of Akhilleus son of Peleus, tell me now the Whole truth. Is my son still at the ships, or has Akhilleus hewn him limb from limb, and given him to his hounds?"

"Sir," replied the slayer of Argus, guide and guardian, "neither hounds nor vultures have yet devoured him; he is still just lying at the tents by the ship of Achilles, and though it is now twelve days that he has lain there, his flesh is not wasted nor have the worms eaten him although they feed on warriors….

Ere long they came to the lofty dwelling of the son of Peleus for which the Myrmidons had cut pine and which they had built for their king; when they had built it they thatched it with coarse tussock-grass which they had mown out on the plain, and all round it they made a large courtyard, which was fenced with stakes set close together…. Mercury opened the gate for the old man, and brought in the treasure that he was taking with him for the son of Peleus…. Mercury went back to high Olympus. Priam… went straight into the house where Akhilleus, loved of the gods, was sitting. There he found him with his men seated at a distance from him: only two, the hero Automedon, and Alkimus of the race of Mars, were busy in attendance about his person, for he had but just done eating and drinking….

Priam besought Akhilleus saying:

Think of your father, O Akhilleus like unto the gods, who is such even as I am, on the sad threshold of old age. It may be that those who dwell near him harass him, and there is none to keep war and ruin from him. Yet when he hears of you being still alive, he is glad, and his days are full of hope that he shall see his dear son come home to him from Troy; but I, wretched man that I am, had the bravest in all Troy for my sons, and there is not one of them left. I had fifty sons when the Akhaeans came here; nineteen of them were from a single womb, and the others were borne to me by the women of my household. The greater part of them has fierce Mars laid low, and Hektor, him who was alone left, him who was the guardian of the city and ourselves, him have you lately slain; therefore I am now come to the ships of the Akhaeans to ransom his body from you with a great ransom. Fear, O Akhilleus, the wrath of heaven; think on your own father and have compassion upon me, who am the more pitiable, for I have steeled myself as no man yet has ever steeled himself before me, and have raised to my lips the hand of him who slew my son."

Thus spoke Priam, and the heart of Akhilleus yearned as he bethought him of his father. He took the old man's hand and moved him gently away. The two wept bitterly- Priam, as he lay at Achilles' feet, weeping for Hektor, and Achilles now for his father and now for Patroklus, till the house was filled with their lamentation. But when Akhilleus was now sated with grief and had unburthened the bitterness of his sorrow, he left his seat and raised the old man by the hand, in pity for his white hair and beard; then he said:

Unhappy man, you have indeed been greatly daring; how could you venture to come alone to the ships of the Achaeans, and enter the presence of him who has slain so many of your brave sons? You must have iron courage: sit now upon this seat, and for all our grief we will hide our sorrows in our hearts, for weeping will not avail us. The immortals know no care, yet the lot they spin for man is full of sorrow; on the floor of Jove's palace there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones. He for whom Jove the lord of thunder mixes the gifts he sends, will meet now with good and now with evil fortune; but he to whom Jove sends none but evil gifts will be pointed at by the finger of scorn, the hand of famine will pursue him to the ends of the world, and he will go up and down the face of the earth, respected neither by gods nor men. Even so did it befall Peleus; the gods endowed him with all good things from his birth upwards, for he reigned over the Myrmidons excelling all men in prosperity and wealth, and mortal though he was they gave him a goddess for his bride. But even on him too did heaven send misfortune, for there is no race of royal children born to him in his house, save one son who is doomed to die all untimely; nor may I take care of him now that he is growing old, for I must stay here at Troy to be the bane of you and your children. And you too, O Priam, I have heard that you were aforetime happy. They say that in wealth and plenitude of offspring you surpassed all that is in Lesbos, the realm of Makar to the northward, Phrygia that is more inland, and those that dwell upon the great Hellespont; but from the day when the dwellers in heaven sent this evil upon you, war and slaughter have been about your city continually. Bear up against it, and let there be some intervals in your sorrow. Mourn as you may for your brave son, you will take nothing by it. You cannot raise him from the dead, ere you do so yet another sorrow shall befall you.

And Priam answered:

O king, bid me not be seated, while Hector is still lying uncared for in your tents, but accept the great ransom which I have brought you, and give him to me at once that I may look upon him. May you prosper with the ransom and reach your own land in safety, seeing that you have suffered me to live and to look upon the light of the sun."

Akhilleus looked at him sternly and said:

Vex me, sir, no longer; I am of myself minded to give up the body of Hector. My mother, daughter of the old man of the sea, came to me from Jove to bid me deliver it to you. Moreover I know well, O Priam, and you cannot hide it, that some god has brought you to the ships of the Achaeans, for else, no man however strong and in his prime would dare to come to our host; he could neither pass our guard unseen, nor draw the bolt of my gates thus easily; therefore, provoke me no further, lest I sin against the word of Jove, and suffer you not, suppliant though you are, within my tents….

They lifted the ransom for Hector's body from the waggon. but they left two mantles and a goodly shirt, that Akhilleus might wrap the body in them when he gave it to be taken home…. Akhilleus himself lifted it on to a bier, and he and his men then laid it on the wagon. He cried aloud as he did so and called on the name of his dear comrade:

Be not angry with me, Patroklus," he said, "if you hear even in the house of Hades that I have given Hektor to his father for a ransom. It has been no unworthy one, and I will share it equitably with you.

Akhilleus then went back into the tent and took his place on the richly inlaid seat from which he had risen, by the wall that was at right angles to the one against which Priam was sitting. "Sir," he said:

your son is now laid upon his bier and is ransomed according to desire; you shall look upon him when you him away at daybreak; for the present let us prepare our supper. Even lovely Niobe had to think about eating, though her twelve children- six daughters and six lusty sons- had been all slain in her house. Apollo killed the sons with arrows from his silver bow, to punish Niobe, and Diana slew the daughters, because Niobe had vaunted herself against Leto; she said Leto had borne two children only, whereas she had herself borne many- whereon the two killed the many. Nine days did they lie weltering, and there was none to bury them, for the son of Saturn turned the people into stone; but on the tenth day the gods in heaven themselves buried them, and Niobe then took food, being worn out with weeping. They say that somewhere among the rocks on the mountain pastures of Sipylus, where the nymphs live that haunt the river Akhelous, there, they say, she lives in stone and still nurses the sorrows sent upon her by the hand of heaven. Therefore, noble sir, let us two now take food; you can weep for your dear son hereafter as you are bearing him back to Ilius- and many a tear will he cost you.

With this Akhilleus sprang from his seat and killed a sheep of silvery whiteness, which his followers skinned and made ready all in due order. They cut the meat carefully up into smaller pieces, spitted them, and drew them off again when they were well roasted. Automedon brought bread in fair baskets and served it round the table, while Achilles dealt out the meat, and they laid their hands on the good things that were before them. As soon as they had had enough to eat and drink, Priam, descendant of Dardanus, marvelled at the strength and beauty of Akhilleus for he was as a god to see, and Akhilleus marvelled at Priam as he listened to him and looked upon his noble presence. When they had gazed their fill Priam spoke first. "And now, O king," he said:

take me to my couch that we may lie down and enjoy the blessed boon of sleep. Never once have my eyes been closed from the day your hands took the life of my son; I have grovelled without ceasing in the mire of my stable-yard, making moan and brooding over my countless sorrows. Now, moreover, I have eaten bread and drunk wine; hitherto I have tasted nothing.

As he spoke Achilles told his men and the women-servants to set beds in the room that was in the gatehouse, and make them with good red rugs, and spread coverlets on the top of them…. Then Achilles said laughingly to Priam:

Dear sir, you shall lie outside, lest some counsellor of those who in due course keep coming to advise with me should see you here in the darkness of the flying night, and tell it to Agamemnon. This might cause delay in the delivery of the body. And now tell me and tell me true, for how many days would you celebrate the funeral rites of noble Hector? Tell me, that I may hold aloof from war and restrain the host.

And Priam answered:

Since, then, you suffer me to bury my noble son with all due rites, do thus, Achilles, and I shall be grateful. You know how we are pent up within our city; it is far for us to fetch wood from the mountain, and the people live in fear. Nine days, therefore, will we mourn Hector in my house; on the tenth day we will bury him and there shall be a public feast in his honour; on the eleventh we will build a mound over his ashes, and on the twelfth, if there be need, we will fight.

And Achilles answered, "All, King Priam, shall be as you have said. I will stay our fighting for as long a time as you have named."

As he spoke he laid his hand on the old man's right wrist, in token that he should have no fear; thus then did Priam and his attendant sleep there in the forecourt, full of thought, while Achilles lay in an inner room of the house, with fair Briseis by his side…

Quote of the Day: January 5, 2012

"Why do we feel so unified? We have discovered something in the left brain,another module that takes all the input into the brain and builds the narrative. We call this the interpreter module…. When we set out to explain our actions, they are all post hoc explanations using post hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing. Not only that, our left brain fudges things a bit to fit into a makes-sense story. It is only when the stories stray too far from the facts that the right brain pulls the reins in. These explanations are all based on what makes it into our consciousness, but the reality is the actions and the feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are the results of nonconscious processes, which will never make it into the explanations. The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time.

"We showed a split-brain patient two pictures: A chicken claw was shown to his right visual field, so the left hemisphere only saw the claw picture, and a snow scene was shown to the left visual field, so the right hemisphere only saw that. He was then asked to choose a picture from an array of pictures placed in full view in front of him, which both hemispheres could see. The left hand pointed to a shovel (which was the most appropriate answer for the snow scene) and the right hand pointed to a chicken (the most appropriate answer for the chicken claw). Then we asked why he chose those items. His left-hemisphere speech center replied, “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken,” easily explaining what it knew. It had seen the chicken claw. Then, looking down at his left hand pointing to the shovel, without missing a beat, he said, “And you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Immediately, the left brain, observing the left hand’s response without the knowledge of why it had picked that item, put it into a context that would explain it. It interpreted the response in a context consistent with what it knew, and all it knew was: chicken claw. It knew nothing about the snow scene, but it had to explain the shovel.

"Once we understand that the left-brain interpreter process is driven to seek explanations or causes for events, we can see it at work in all sorts of situations. In fact, it can explain the observations of many past experiments…. The left-brain interpreter creates order out of the chaos presented to it by all the other processes spewing out information. We tried again with another emotion and another patient. We flashed a picture of a pinup girl to her right hemisphere, and she snickered. Once again she said that she saw nothing, but when we asked her why she was laughing, she told us we had a funny machine. This is what our brain does all day long. It takes input from other areas of our brain and from the environment and synthesizes it into a story….

"This post hoc interpreting process has implications for and an impact on the big questions of free will and determinism, personal responsibility and our moral compass, which we will look at in the next chapter. When thinking about these big questions, one must always remember, remember, REMEMBER that all these modules are mental systems selected for over the course of evolution. The individuals who possessed them made choices that resulted in survival and reproduction. They became our ancestors…"

--Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

Quote of the Day: January 4, 2011

"A lesion in one spot leaves you unable to tell a Jack Russell from a badger (not that there is much difference), and with damage in another spot, the toaster is unrecognizable. There are even people with certain brain lesions who specifically cannot recognize fruit. Harvard researchers Alfonso Caramazza and Jennifer Shelton claim that the brain has specific knowledge systems (modules) for animate and inanimate categories that have distinct neural mechanisms. These domain-specific knowledge systems aren’t actually the knowledge itself, but systems that make you pay attention to particular aspects of situations, and by doing so, increase your survival chances. For example, there may be quite specific detectors for certain classes of predatory animals such as snakes and big cats..."

--Michael S. Gazzaniga: "Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain*

Quote of the Day: December 29, 2011

"We often consider dilemmas that have to do with fairness to be moral dilemmas. A fascinating, well-known finding involves what is known as the ultimatum game. Two people are involved in this game and they are only allowed one round. One person is given twenty dollars, and he has to split it with the other player, but he determines the percent split. Both players get to keep whatever amount of money is first offered. However, if the player who is offered the money refuses the offer, then neither gets any.

"In a rational world, the player who gets offered the money should take any offer because that is the only way he will come out ahead. That, however, is not how people react. They will accept the money only if they think it is a fair offer, ranging from at least six to eight dollars. Ernst Fehr and his colleagues used transcranial electric stimulation to disrupt brain functioning in the prefrontal cortex and found that when the function of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was disrupted, people would accept lower offers while still judging them to be unfair.

"Since suppression of this area increased selfish responses to unfair offers, it suggests that this area normally inhibits self-interest (taking any offer) and reduces the impact of the selfish urges on the decision-making processes, and thus plays a key role in implementing behaviors that are fair. More evidence for this region’s inhibiting selfish responses is from Damasio’s group, which has given moral tests to adults who have had injuries to this area since childhood. Their answers were excessively egocentric, as was their behavior. They exhibited a lack of self-centered inhibition and did not take another’s perspective. people who acquire these types of lesions as adults, such as the patients Damasio tested with the moral dilemma problems, can compensate better, which suggests the neural systems that had been impaired at an early age were critical for the acquisition of social knowledge. Many examples of moral circuits have been identified, and they seem to be distributed all over the brain…"

--Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

Quote of the Day: December 17, 2011

"Why do we feel so unified? We have discovered something in the left brain, another module that takes all the input into the brain and builds the narrative. We call this the interpreter module…. When we set out to explain our actions, they are all post hoc explanations using post hoc observations with no access to nonconscious processing. Not only that, our left brain fudges things a bit to fit into a makes-sense story. It is only when the stories stray too far from the facts that the right brain pulls the reins in…. [T]he actions and the feelings happen before we are consciously aware of them—and most of them are the results of nonconscious processes, which will never make it into the explanations. The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time.

"We showed a split-brain patient two pictures: A chicken claw was shown to his right visual field, so the left hemisphere only saw the claw picture, and a snow scene was shown to the left visual field, so the right hemisphere only saw that. He was then asked to choose a picture from an array of pictures placed in full view in front of him, which both hemispheres could see. The left hand pointed to a shovel (which was the most appropriate answer for the snow scene) and the right hand pointed to a chicken (the most appropriate answer for the chicken claw). Then we asked why he chose those items. His left-hemisphere speech center replied, “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken,” easily explaining what it knew. It had seen the chicken claw. Then, looking down at his left hand pointing to the shovel, without missing a beat, he said, “And you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.” Immediately, the left brain, observing the left hand’s response without the knowledge of why it had picked that item, put it into a context that would explain it. It interpreted the response in a context consistent with what it knew, and all it knew was: chicken claw. It knew nothing about the snow scene, but it had to explain the shovel.

"Once we understand that the left-brain interpreter process is driven to seek explanations or causes for events, we can see it at work in all sorts of situations…. The left-brain interpreter creates order out of the chaos presented to it by all the other processes spewing out information…. This post hoc interpreting process has implications for and an impact on the big questions of free will and determinism, personal responsibility and our moral compass, which we will look at in the next chapter. When thinking about these big questions, one must always remember, remember, REMEMBER that all these modules are mental systems selected for over the course of evolution. The individuals who possessed them made choices that resulted in survival and reproduction. They became our ancestors…"

--Michael S. Gazzaniga, Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

Quote of the Day: November 22, 2011

"The reason you can do these things is that, essentially, you are a prediction machine, and you effortlessly and correctly predict almost every event that is about to occur in your life. Magicians understand at a deeply intuitive level that you alone create your experience of reality, and, like JOhnny, the exploit the fact that your brain does a staggering amount of outright confabulation in order to construct the mental simulation of reality known a "consciousness". This is not to say that objective reality isn't "out there"…. But all you get to experience is a simulation. The fact that consciousness feels like a solid, robust, fact rich transcription of reality is just one of the illusions your brain creates for itself…. The same neural machinery that interprets actual sensory inputs is also responsible for your dreams, delusions, and failings of memory. The real and the imagined share a physical source in your brain…"

--Stephen L. Macknik et al.: Sleights of Mind

Quote of the Day: November 9, 2011

"Each eye is thus roughly equivalent to a one-megapixel camera. Sounds like a lot, but consider that even your cell phone camera probably has better resolution than that. So how can it be that you have such a rich and detailed perception of the world, when in fact your visual system’s resolution is equivalent to a cheap digital camera? The short answer is that the richness of your visual experience is an illusion created by the filling-in processes of your brain."

--Stephen L. Macknik et al., Sleights of Mind

Smith and Pell: Parachute Use and Randomised Controlled Trials

Smith and Pell: Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials 327 (7429): 1459 -- bmj.com:

No randomised controlled trials of parachute use have been undertaken

The basis for parachute use is purely observational, and its apparent efficacy could potentially be explained by a “healthy cohort” effect"

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Source: Justin Wolfers