A different way of thinking about thinking

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Fascinating interview on Edge.org with Tom Griffiths of Berkeley. For me, the most interesting passage is this:

One of the mysteries of human intelligence is that we’re able to do so much with so little. We’re able to act in ways that are so intelligent despite the fact that we have limited computational resources—basically just the stuff that we can carry around inside our heads. But we’re good at coming up with strategies for solving problems that make the best use of those limited computational resources. You can formulate that as another kind of computational problem in itself.

If you have certain computational resources and certain costs for using them, can you come up with the best algorithm for solving a problem, using those computational resources, trading off the errors you might make and solving the problem with the cost of using the resources you have or the limitations that are imposed upon those resources? That approach gives us a different way of thinking about what constitutes rational behavior.

The classic standard of rational behavior, which is used in economics and which motivated a lot of the human decision-making literature, focused on the idea of rationality in terms of finding the right answer without any thought as to the computational costs that might be involved.

This gives us a more nuanced and more realistic notion of rationality, a notion that is relevant to any organism or machine that faces physical constraints on the resources that are available to it. It says that you are being rational when you’re using the best algorithm to solve the problem, taking into account both your computational limitations and the kinds of errors that you might end up making.

This approach, which my colleague Stuart Russell calls “bounded optimality,” gives us a new way of understanding human cognition. We take examples of things that have been held up as evidence of irrationality, examples of things where people are solving a problem but not doing it in the best way, and we can try and make sense of those. More importantly, it sets up a way of asking questions about how people get to be so smart. How is it that we find those effective strategies? That’s a problem that we call “rational metareasoning.” How should a rational agent who has limitations on their computational resources find the best strategies for using those resources?

Worth reading (or watching or listening to) in full.

I can see the point of trying to understand why humans are so good at some things. The capacity to make rapid causal inferences was probably hardwired into our DNA by evolution — it’s ‘System 1’ in the categorisation proposed in Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow, i.e. a capacity for fast, instinctive and emotional thinking — the kind of thinking that was crucial for survival in primeval times. But the other — equally important — question is why humans seem to be so bad at Kahneman’s ‘System 2’ thinking — i.e. slower, more deliberative and more logical reasoning. Maybe it’s because our evolutionary inheritance was laid down in a simpler era, and we’re just not adapted to handle the complexity with which (as a result of our technological ingenuity) we are now confronted?

This has interesting contemporary resonances: climate change denial, for example; fake news; populism; and the tensions between populism and technocracy.

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The life and death of helicopter commuting

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I once spent a day during a general election campaign going round the UK in a helicopter. It was a fascinating experience, but not one I’d like to repeat. Choppers seem to me to be ludicrously primitive machines — a bit like steam-powered automobiles. They are also, of course, vanity toys for the very rich. And they are incredibly noisy. So this Bloomberg video brings a welcome dose of reality to chopper-worship.

HT to Ben Evans for the link.

Virginia Woolf on the eclipse

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True to form, Alex Ross found an original take on the eclipse story — from the diary of Virginia Woolf, June 30, 1927:

“At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker & darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank & sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; & we thought now it is over — this is the shadow when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a spooky aetherial colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind — fresh, various — here blue, & there brown: all new colours, as if washed over & repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. That was within the power of nature…. Then — it was all over till 1999.”

En passant, isn’t it interesting that a lot of Americans who presumably don’t trust scientists on climate change were rushing to get a view of a phenomenon that, er, scientists predicted?

I’m sure that Mrs Woolf and I wouldn’t have got along if we’d met. (After all, I’m a countryman of James Joyce, and we know what she thought about Ulysses). But her diaries are simply wonderful.

Enter the GDPR

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This morning’s Observer column:

Next year, 25 May looks like being a significant date. That’s because it’s the day that the European Union’s general data protection regulation (GDPR) comes into force. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it’s a date that is already keeping many corporate executives awake at night. And for those who are still sleeping soundly, perhaps it would be worth checking that their organisations are ready for what’s coming down the line.

First things first. Unlike much of the legislation that emerges from Brussels, the GDPR is a regulation rather than a directive. This means that it becomes law in all EU countries at the same time; a directive, in contrast, allows each country to decide how its requirements are to be incorporated in national laws…

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Bannon’s out. So what next?

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From The Weekly Standard

“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said Friday, shortly after confirming his departure. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else. And there’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over.”

Bannon says that he will return to the helm of Breitbart, the rambunctious right-wing media enterprise he ran until joining the Trump campaign as chief executive last August.

What liberals need to acknowledge

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Mark Lilla sums it up:

“So it should come as little surprise that the term liberalism leaves so many Americans indifferent today. It is considered, with some justice, as a creed professed mainly by educated urban elites cut off from the rest of the country who see the issues of the day principally through the lens of identities, and whose efforts centre on the care and feeling of hyper-sensitive movements that dissipate rather than focus on the energies of what remains of the left. Contrary to what the centrist coroners of the 2016 election will be saying, the reason the Democrats are losing ground is not that they have drifted too far to the left. Nor, as the progressives are insisting, is it that they have drifted too far to the right, especially on economic issues. They are losing because they have retreated into caves they have carved for themselves in the side of what was once a great mountain.”

From The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, page 10.

See also Lilla’s acerbic NYT OpEd piece after the election, which began:

“It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary success story.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

Magical thinking and the Irish border

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When pondering the policies of governments, it usually makes sense to assume that they are based on some kind of logic. Try as I might, though, I can’t make this rationalist perspective work for the UK government’s proposals for how the Irish border will be managed after Brexit.

And it turns out that I am not alone. The Irish Times columnist (and Princeton professor) Fintan O’Toole has written a coruscating piece about it. He summarises the May government’s proposition thus:

to understand how this seems to the Irish government and to most people on the island, imagine you are in a decent job. It is reasonably paid, apparently secure and the working environment is quite amicable. Your neighbour, who you like but do not quite trust (there’s a bit of history there) comes to you with a proposition. She’s establishing an extremely risky start-up venture with a high probability of catastrophic failure. Will you join her? Well, you ask, what are the possible rewards? Ah, she says, if – against the odds – everything goes splendidly, you’ll get the same pay and conditions you have now.

This is, in essence, what the British government is offering Ireland. If everything goes fantastically well, you’ll end up with, um, the status quo. Trade will “operate largely in the same way it does today”. The position paper is effectively a hymn to the way things are now. We don’t have a hard border, and we won’t after Brexit. We do have a common travel area that works remarkably well, and it will continue to go splendidly. The position paper takes existing realities and repositions them as a distant mirage, a fantastical possibility: less emerald isle, more Emerald City.

As with the whole Brexit project, the proposals for Ireland are credible only if you accept two mutually incompatible propositions: a) The UK is creating the biggest political and economic revolution since 1973; b) pretty much everything will stay the same…

The only term I can think of that describes the UK government’s approach to the Border issue (and perhaps to many other aspects of the Brexit process) is magical thinking, i.e. “the belief that one’s thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it.”

US foreign policy, Bannon version

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From an amazing interview with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect:

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

Bannon went on to talk about his main obsession:

“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we’re five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”

Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”