Author Archive for audreyl

Monkeys with Larger Friend Networks have More Gray Matter

Published on October 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Lin Edwards, Physorg.com

The researchers, led by Jerome Sallet of Oxford University, said the results of the new study bear some similarities to research by other groups working with humans, that related brain size to the extent of social interactions. These studies include recent work that suggested a link between the volume of some regions of the brain and the number of online friends people have in social networking sites such as Facebook.

The new study observed 23 macaques in a number of groups of different sizes. The monkeys were kept in their groups for an average of over a year, and a minimum of two months. One monkey was alone in its cage, but in all the other groups, which had from two to seven individuals, a heirarchy developed in which an individual’s rank depended on the monkey’s ability to form successful social interactions, such as friendships and partnerships.

The study used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to compare the brains of the monkeys, and the results showed that in the temporal areas of the brain associated with social interaction skills, around a five percent increase in the volume of gray matter was found for each additional group member. The regions of the brain that increased in volume included the temporal pole, temporal cortex, and the inferior and rostral temporal gyri.

The researchers also compared the brains of male monkeys at various levels in the dominance-based heirarchy and found a number of brain areas, particularly the prefrontal cortex and inferior temporal sulcus, were enlarged in males of higher rank.

To Read More…

David Spiegelhalter on Statistics and Risk

Published on September 30, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Browser

Every statistic is the result of someone’s work, and we’d do well to ask ourselves why it was created. That way, says the statistician, we have a better chance of working out when dangers are being overstated and data misused

What do you mean by “risk literacy” and why do you think it is so important for people to have it?

I am a statistician and I know that people find probability and statistics quite difficult to understand, and not intuitive. And after years and years of careful research I have finally concluded that it is because probability and statistics really are difficult to understand and unintuitive. I think knowing something about how chance works in the world is a basic skill that people should have, along with reading, writing and basic numeracy. Otherwise you can be subject to all sorts of manipulations, and that will come out in some of my book choices.

Let’s have a look. First up is The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, which looks at how the mathematical laws of randomness affect our lives.

This is a general introduction to the history of probability and the way it comes into everyday life. It intersperses the historical development with modern applications, and looks at finance, sport, gambling, lotteries and coincidences.

It starts off with quotes from Cicero feeling that people were being misled by thinking that the gods influenced the throw of a die. Then it carries on through the early development of probability in the 16th century with [Italian Renaissance mathematician Gerolamo] Cardano. He threw two dice and looked at the distribution of the sum of the two faces. There was an incredibly popular game called Hazard where you threw two dice and betted on what the total would be. Amazingly, people had been gambling for centuries and had never realised you could do maths on gambling. Probability – which used to be known by the wonderful term “the doctrine of chances” – grew out of this.

To Read More…

The Marvels and the Flaws of Intuitive Thinking Edge Master Class 2011

Published on September 29, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Daniel Kahneman, Edge

The marvels and the flaws that I’ll be talking about are the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a long time, a little over 40 years. I wanted to show you a picture of my collaborator in this early work. What I’ll be trying to do today is to sort of bring this up-to-date. I’ll tell you a bit about the beginnings, and I’ll tell you a bit about how I think about it today.

To Read More…

 

 

 

 

 

How To Learn the Language of Evil

Published on September 29, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Michael Ignatieff, Slate.com

Evil is a moral problem for everyone, difficult to acknowledge in ourselves, hard to understand in others, and difficult to defeat without committing lesser evils. Liberals—I count myself as one—have a special problem with evil, connected to our particular form of self-regard. Liberals like to believe we are tolerant, but evil, by definition, cannot be tolerated. We believe that politics ought to be deliberative, but we can’t deliberate with evil. We think compromise can be honorable, but there are no honorable compromises with evil. We think politics ought to be governed by reason, but evildoers, while they may reason, are not reasonable.

Alan Wolfe, a distinguished and prolific professor of political science at Boston College, and author of more than 20 books, including The Future of Liberalism,has written a dispassionate guide to these quandaries in Political Evil. He distinguishes between evil in general and political evil in particular, and argues that we should think politically about evil because the evil that we can actually do something about is a form of politics and can be defeated only if understood as such.

Why Is There Peace?

Published on September 26, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Steven Pinker, Greater Good

Over the past century, violent images from World War II concentration camps, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, and many other times and places have been seared into our collective consciousness. These images have led to a common belief that technology, centralized nation-states, and modern values have brought about unprecedented violence.

Our seemingly troubled times are routinely contrasted with idyllic images of hunter-gatherer societies, which allegedly lived in a state of harmony with nature and each other. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like, for example, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, who argued that “war is not an instinct but an invention.”

But now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

To Read More…

Knowledgeable Individuals Protect the Wisdom of Crowds

Published on September 23, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Discover Magazine

If you ask someone to guess the number of sweets in a jar, the odds that they’ll land upon the right number are low – fairground raffles rely on that inaccuracy. But if you ask many people to take guesses, something odd happens. Even though their individual answers can be wildly off, the average of their varied guesses tends to be surprisingly accurate.

This phenomenon goes by many names – swam intelligence, wisdom of the crowd, vox populi, and more. Whatever it’s called, the principle is the same: a group of people can often arrive at more accurate answers and better decisions than individuals acting alone. There are many examples, from counting beans in a jar, to guessing the weight of an ox, to the Ask The Audience option in Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

But all of these examples are somewhat artificial, because they involve decisions that are made in a social vacuum. Indeed, James Surowiecki,  author of The Wisdom of Crowds, argued that wise crowds are ones where “people’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.” That rarely happens. From votes in elections, to votes on social media sites, people see what others around them are doing or intend to do. We actively seek out what others are saying, and we have a natural tendency to emulate successful and prominent individuals. So what happens to the wisdom of the crowd when the crowd talks to one another?

Andrew King from the Royal Veterinary College found that it falls apart, but only in certain circumstances. At his university open day, he asked 82 people to guess the number of sweets in a jar. If they made their guesses without any extra information, the wisdom of the crowd prevailed. The crowd’s median guess was 751.* The actual number of sweets was… 752.

To Read More…

The Sugary Secret of Self-Control

Published on September 7, 2011 in News, Newsletter and Uncategorized. 0 Comments

From Steven Pinker, The New York Times

Ever since Adam and Eve ate the apple, Ulysses had himself tied to the mast, the grasshopper sang while the ant stored food and St. Augustine prayed “Lord make me chaste — but not yet,” individuals have struggled with self-control. In today’s world this virtue is all the more vital, because now that we have largely tamed the scourges of nature, most of our troubles are self-inflicted. We eat, drink, smoke and gamble too much, max out our credit cards, fall into dangerous liaisons and become addicted to heroin, cocaine and e-mail.

Nonetheless, the very idea of self-­control has acquired a musty Victorian odor. The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows that the phrase rose in popularity through the 19th century but began to free fall around 1920 and cratered in the 1960s, the era of doing your own thing, letting it all hang out and taking a walk on the wild side. Your problem was no longer that you were profligate or dissolute, but that you were uptight, repressed, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive or fixated at the anal stage of psychosexual development.

Then a remarkable finding came to light. In experiments beginning in the late 1960s, the psychologist Walter Mischel tormented preschoolers with the agonizing choice of one marshmallow now or two marshmallows 15 minutes from now. When he followed up decades later, he found that the 4-year-olds who waited for two marshmallows turned into adults who were better adjusted, were less likely to abuse drugs, had higher self-esteem, had better relationships, were better at handling stress, obtained higher degrees and earned more money.

To Read More…

It’s a Bug’s Life

Published on August 29, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Misha Lepetic, 3 Quarks Daily

A noteworthy popular intellectual trend in recent years might be called “How Everything Works, In Spite of Itself.” Roughly, the trajectory can be described by James Gleick’s Chaos, which appeared in 1988; M. Mitchell Waldrop’s Complexity in 1992; and Steven Johnson’s Emergence, debuting in 2001. On the even more popular side, one can glance at Gladwell’s Tipping Point and Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, although more serious readers ought to be referred to Stuart Kauffman’s The Origins of Order. What unites these works – or rather, the trend that these books represent – is a perennial desire to see our world defined in terms of simple rules that, once intuited, reveal themselves as pervasive and universal. What are the consequences of this point of view, as we attempt to better understand societies and urbanism?

To Read More…

Dan Ariely on Behavioural Economics

Published on August 15, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Browser

We can all be more aware of our surroundings and our decision-making process, says the professor of psychology and behavioural economics. He recommends five books to help us maximise our prosperity and well-being

Social science is incredibly interesting because it’s the science of everything we do. We used to think that the big mysteries in the universe are the stars, or maybe molecular biology – things that are outside our reach. But the more we get into it, the more we realise how little we know about the things around us, which can include eating a bowl of soup or what’s happening to us at work. So there is an element of self-improvement in these books, but there’s also a fascination for its own sake about what’s going on around us. Each of us can become more of a social scientist by being a bit more aware and a bit more thoughtful.

I have just read some of the books you’ve chosen, and I found them almost impossible to put down. It’s fascinating how people behave in these experimental situations – whether they’re eating huge quantities of soup without realising it, or failing to see a gorilla. I was wondering, more broadly, what you are trying to get at with this choice of books?

For me, it’s very interesting to try to figure out where we go wrong. In my general approach to life, I think of myself as a social hacker. Life has been designed around us in a way that is not necessarily the best way to maximise our health, our well-being or our prosperity. If we understand where things are going wrong, we can also figure out how we can fix them. That’s my first concern.

To Read More…

The Fallacy of Difference, in Science and Art

Published on July 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Julia Galef, Rationally Speaking

It’s not often that you find something that’s a fallacy both logically and creatively — that is, a fallacy to which both researchers and artists are susceptible. Perhaps you’re tempted to tell me I’m committing a category mistake, that artistic fields like fiction and architecture aren’t the sort of thing to which the word “fallacy” could even meaningfully be applied. An understandable objection! But let me explain myself.

I first encountered the term “fallacy of difference” in David Hackett Fischer’s excellent book, Historians’ Fallacies, in which he defines it as “a tendency to conceptualize a group in terms of its special characteristics to the exclusion of its generic characteristics.” So for instance, India’s caste system is a special characteristic of its society, and therefore scholars have been tempted to explain aspects of Indian civilization in terms of its caste system rather than in terms of its other, more generic features. The Puritans provide another case in point: “Only a small part of Puritan theology was Puritan in a special sense,” Fischer comments. “Much of it was Anglican, and more was Protestant, and most was Christian. And yet Puritanism is often identified and understood in terms of what was specially or uniquely Puritan.”
Here’s a less scholarly example from my own experience. I’ve heard several non-monogamous people complain that when they confide to a friend that they’re having relationship troubles, or that they broke up with their partner, their friends instantly blame their non-monogamy. But while non-monogamy certainly does make a relationship unusual, it’s hardly the only characteristic relevant to understanding how a relationship works, or why it doesn’t. Non-monogamous relationships are subject to the same misunderstandings, personality clashes, insecurities, careless injuries, and other common tensions that tend to plague intimate relationships. But the non-monogamy stands out, so people tend to focus on that one special characteristic, and ignore the many generic characteristics that can cause any kind of relationship to founder.