As noted in a previous posting, a number of studies have found that males outperform females on tests of general knowledge. The reasons for this are not yet clear. Women’s poorer test performance could be because they actually have acquired less knowledge than men, or it could be that they are not accessing all the knowledge they have. […]

Sex differences in general knowledge favouring males that were identified in a number of studies have been attributed to differing interests between men and women rather than differences in ability.

Another possibility that has not been explored in the research literature is that stereotype threat could have a detrimental effect on the performance of females in tests. […] For example, women who are reminded of their female identity perform more poorly on maths tests compared to a control group.

{ Eye on Psych | Continue reading }

The way that the visual centers of men and women’s brains works is different, finds new research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Biology of Sex Differences. Men have greater sensitivity to fine detail and rapidly moving stimuli, but women are better at discriminating between colors.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

Languages are continually changing, not just words but also grammar. A recent study examines how such changes happen. […]

Historical linguists, who document and study language change, have long noticed that language changes have a sneaky quality, starting small and unobtrusive and then gradually conquering more ground, a process termed ‘actualization’. […]

Consider the development of so-called downtoners – grammatical elements that minimize the force of the word they accompany. Nineteenth-century English saw the emergence of a new downtoner, all but, meaning ‘almost’. All but started out being used only with adjectives, as in her escape was all but miraculous. But later it also began to turn up with verbs, as in until his clothes all but dropped from him. In grammatical terms, that is a fairly big leap, but when looked at closely the leap is found to go in smaller steps. Before all but spread to verbs, it appeared with past participles, which very much resemble both adjectives and verbs, as in her breath was all but gone.

{ Linguistic Society of America }

Nowhere in the United States do you have the right to credibly contract for a lifetime marital partnership.

Every state currently allows some form of “no fault” divorce - divorce not based on any wrongdoing of a party, but simply because the parties claim they don’t want to be married anymore. Even though the couple may “vow” to remain together until one of them dies, everyone knows these vows have no legal or real-world effect. The marital “contract” is not a contract at all.

Imagine a regular legal contract in which either party could end the agreement by saying he didn’t like it anymore. […]

Marriage once did have a legal effect - once married, parties could not divorce without a really good reason (physical cruelty, desertion, or adultery). Not coincidentally, marriages were much more likely to be reliable lifetime partnerships.

{ The View from Hell | Continue reading }

photo { Sam Haskins }

The sorites paradox is a paradox that arises from vague predicates.

The paradox of the heap is an example of this paradox which arises when one considers a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed. Is it still a heap when only one grain remains? If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

quote { James Joyce, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, 1916 }

photo { Roger Minick, Couple at Mittens Overlook, 1980 }

Blackjack players who “count cards” keep track of cards that have already been played and use this knowledge to turn the probability of winning in their favor. Though casinos try to eject card counters or otherwise make their task more difficult, card counting is perfectly legal. So long as card counters rely on their own memory and computational skills, they have violated no laws and can make sizable profits. By contrast, if players use a “device” to help them count cards, like a calculator or smartphone, they have committed a serious crime.

I consider two potential justifications for anti-device legislation and find both lacking. The first is that, unlike natural card counting, device-assisted card counting requires cognitive enhancement. It makes card counting less natural and is unfair to casinos and should therefore be prohibited. The second potential justification relies on the privacy of our thoughts. On this view, natural card counting is a kind of cheating that warrants punishment. We do not criminalize natural card counting, however, because such laws would interfere with our thought privacy.

{ Adam J. Kolber /SSRN | Continue reading }

Phenomenology is a philosophical method for uncovering the structure of lived experience by describing what it is like from a first person perspective. Rather than attempting to prove a set of objective facts, phenomenology tracks the way that a meaningful experience of the world emerges for someone in the total situation of their Being-in-the-world. It’s not that facts are unimportant, but rather that they are not meaningful in themselves; they become meaningful when they are experienced by someone in relation to a wider context or horizon.

What happens when that horizon shrinks to the space of a 6-by-9 cell?

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

What are the most important examples of lost or forgotten knowledge?

For example, as Matt Ridley states in The Rational Optimist, “nobody really knows how to use an Acheulean hand axe, and until recently nobody knew how to build a medieval siege catapult known as a trebuchet.”

{ Quora | Continue reading }

Two traits that set humans apart from other primates—big brains and the ability to walk upright—could be at odds when it comes to childbirth. Big brains and the big heads that encase them are hard to push through the human birth canal, but a wider pelvis might compromise bipedal walking. Scientists have long posited that nature’s solution to this problem, which is known as the “obstetric dilemma,” was to shorten the duration of gestation so that babies are born before their heads get too big. As a result, human babies are relatively helpless and seemingly underdeveloped in terms of motor and cognitive ability compared to other primates.

“All these fascinating phenomena in human evolution—bipedalism, difficult childbirth, wide female hips, big brains, relatively helpless babies—have traditionally been tied together with the obstetric dilemma,” said Holly Dunsworth, an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island and lead author of the research. “It’s been taught in anthropology courses for decades, but when I looked for hard evidence that it’s actually true, I struck out.” The first problem with the theory is that there is no evidence that hips wide enough to deliver a more developed baby would be a detriment to walking, Dunsworth said. Anna Warrener, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University and one of the paper’s co-authors, has studied how hip breadth affects locomotion with women on treadmills. She found that there is no correlation between wider hips and a diminished locomotor economy.

Then Dunsworth looked for evidence that human pregnancy is shortened compared to other primates and mammals. She found well-established research to the contrary. “Controlling for mother’s body size, human gestation is a bit longer than expected compared to other primates, not shorter,” she said. “And babies are a bit larger than expected, not smaller. Although babies behave like it, they’re not born early.”

For mammals in general, including humans, gestation length and offspring size are predicted by mother’s body size. Because body size is a good proxy for an animal’s metabolic rate and function, Dunsworth started to wonder if metabolism might offer a better explanation for the timing of human birth than the pelvis.

{ Medical Xpress | Continue reading }

photo { Steve McCurry }

Recently on Facebook a friend asked: “Hey, atheist friends, I need your help. I would like to listen and read what do you do when you lose somebody who you loved? I have tried several ways to ease the pain, but it is still there.” […]

My answer (edited):

I cope with the grief from the death of loved ones by contemplating the Cosmist possibility, described by many thinkers including Nikolai Fedorov, Hans Moravec and Frank Tipler, that future generations (or alien civilizations, or whatever) may develop technologies to resurrect the dead. A related idea is that our reality may be a “simulation” computed by entities in a higher-level reality, who may choose to copy those who die in our reality to another reality. Contemplating these possibilities is my way to cope with grief, I hope you will find your own way.

{ Turing Church | Continue reading }

Then?

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, 17, 1914-1921 | Continue reading }

We are in a state of harassed busyness from which – we are now promised – there will never be any relief.

{ Gonzo Circus | Continue reading | via Rob }

Consider the following scenario:

Madeline is an infamous courtesan operating in Victorian London. She counts among her clients some of the most powerful establishment men in Britain. With her career on the wane, she decides to write her memoirs, which will reveal all the sordid details of her many dalliances. This will no doubt cause great scandal and (given the social mores of the time) will be the downfall of her indecorous clientele. Spotting an opportunity to make more money, Madeline offers her former clients a deal: if they pay her a large sum of money, she will keep their name out of the published version of her memoirs.

This thought experiment — which is based on the real-life case of Harriette Wilson — is an example of blackmail: Madeline threatens to do something that would upset or destabilize her clients, unless they pay her a sum of money.

Blackmail is recognized as a crime in most countries. For example, in England and Wales, blackmail is criminalized under s. 21 of the Theft Act of 1968 and carries a potential maximum sentence of 14 years imprisonment. But the fact that blackmail is criminalized is thought to be troubling by many theorists of criminal law. As they see it, there is a paradox underlying the criminalization of blackmail. […]

In this series of posts, I want to consider the so-called paradox of blackmail and its possible resolutions.

{ Philosophical Disquisitions | Continue reading }

Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more. […]

The game is this: imagine Alice and Bob have committed a crime and are arrested. The police offer each one a deal–snitch and you go free while your friend does 6 months in jail. If both Alice and Bob snitch, they both get 3 months in jail. If they both remain silent, they both get one month in jail for a lesser offence.  

What should Alice and Bob do? 

If they co-operate, they both spend only one month in jail. Nevertheless, in a single game, the best strategy is to snitch because it guarantees that you don’t get the maximum jail term. 

However, the game gets more interesting when played in repeated rounds because players who have been betrayed in one round have the chance to get their own back in the next iteration.

Until now, everyone thought the best strategy in iterative prisoner’s dilemma was to copy your opponents behaviour in the previous round. This tit-for-tat approach guarantees that you both spend the same time in jail.  

That conclusion was based on decades of computer simulations and a certain blind faith in the symmetry of the solution.  

So the news that there are other strategies that allow one player to not only beat the other but to determine their time in jail is nothing short of revolutionary. 

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

When Nietzsche says, as he frequently does, that “the truth is terrible” he has in mind three kinds of terrible truths: (1) the terrible “existential” truths about the human situation (the inevitability of death and suffering); (2) the terrible “moral” truth that “life is essentially something amoral”; and (3) the terrible “epistemic” truth that most of what we think we know about the world around us is illusory.

These terrible truths raise Schopenhauer’s question: why continue living at all? Nietzsche’s answer, from early in his career to the very end, is that only viewed in terms of aesthetic values can life itself be “justified” (where “justification” really means restoring an affective attachment to life).

{ Brian Leiter /SSRN | Continue reading }

artwork { Rodolfo Loaiza }

Back in 2009, The Millions started its “Difficult Books” series–devoted to identifying the hardest and most frustrating books ever written, as well as what made them so hard and frustrating. The two curators, Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg, have selected the most difficult of the most difficult. […]

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf - In its intermingling of separate consciousnesses, Virginia Woolf’s fiction is both intellectually and psychically difficult. Not only is it hard to tell who’s who and who’s saying or thinking what, it is also disconcerting—even queasy-making—to be set adrift in other minds, with their private rhythms and associative patterns. It feels, at times, like being occupied by an alien consciousness. […]

Women & Men by Joseph McElroy - In this space I could put any number of postmodern meganovels - a subgenre I’ve been smitten with for many years now. There’s William Gaddis’ JR, which is easier than people make it out to be, and Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is harder. There’s The Recognitions and Mason & Dixon. There’s William H. Gass’ The Tunnel - verbally lucid, but morally arduous. Of the lot, though, I’d like to shine the spotlight again on Joseph McElroy’s Women & Men. It is longer than any of the foregoing, and, in the idiosyncracies of its prose, on par with the hardest. Parts of it, anyway. Its temperament, though, is completely sui generis - warm, humanist, synthetic rather than analytic.

{ Publishers Weekly | Continue reading }

Every day, crucial business and political decisions are made on the basis of numerical data. Only rarely do the key decision makers produce that data; rather they rely on others, not only to produce it, but to present it to them.  Yet how many quants – the data producers – know how to present data effectively? To put it another way, how many of them know how to tell a story using numbers?

{ Devlin’s Angle | Continue reading }

Crowdsourcing is basically what it sounds like: posing a question or asking for help from a large group of people. Coined as a term in 2006, crowdsourcing has taken off in the internet era. Think of Wikipedia, and its thousands of unpaid contributors, now vastly larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Crowdsourcing has allowed many problems to be solved that would be impossible for experts alone. Astronomers rely on an army of volunteers to scan for new galaxies. At climateprediction.net, citizens have linked their home computers to yield more than a hundred million hours of climate modeling; it’s the world’s largest forecasting experiment.

But what if experts didn’t simply ask the crowd to donate time or answer questions? What if the crowd was asked to decide what questions to ask in the first place?

Could the crowd itself be the expert?

That’s what a team at the University of Vermont decided to explore — and the answer seems to be yes.

{ University of Vermont | Continue reading }

Whether or not certain crime syndicates control illegal markets, or both the legitimate and illegitimate business activities in a neighborhood, a town or even a region, is an important question in scholarly discussions of organized crime. In the early 1970s, American scholars such as Donald Cressey and Thomas Schelling identified monopolistic control of this kind as one of the defining features of organized crime. In the words of Schelling, “real organized crime is striving to control the underworld.”

The notion that “mafia-type” criminal organizations dominate criminal markets and even succeed in regulating the activities of other criminal groups immediately met with fierce criticism from the criminology world. Various researchers who had studied the American drug and gambling markets failed to find Cosa Nostra or any other crime syndicate in control of these illegal activities. Peter Reuter, for example, concluded that the mafia did not dominate the New York illegal gambling market. Instead, it was “disorganized” and made up of many independent criminal groups of varying sizes competing for market share. This powerful image is now widely thought to describe how criminal markets are structured in states with a functional legal system, the assumption being that criminal groups cannot grow “big” under constant law enforcement pressure.

{ SSRN | Continue reading }

There is still controversy over whether war is a science or an art. Efforts to define war as entirely a science have failed. Scientific methods are essential in explaining what occurs in war, and business models aid in managing military organization, planning forces, and designing weapons. Quantifying has its place, but these methods are less suitable as one approaches the operational and strategic levels. A knowledge and understanding of war must be based on science, but its actual conduct is largely an art. Scientific and technological advances will not change that reality. The character of war may alter substantially, yet its nature in the Clausewitzian sense will remain. Seeking to make war simple, predictable, and thus controllable will collapse under the larger weight of such intangibles as the human factor and the psychological elements, which will always ensure there is a fog of war. […]

Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) warned that so-called mathematical factors can never find a firm basis in military calculations. In his view, war most closely resembles a game of cards. […]

The most dramatic changes in military theory that led to a more refined view of warfare occurred in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The major cultural trends in Germany were romanticism, nationalism, and idealism. German romanticism challenged the fundamentals of the French-dominated Enlightenment’s worldview. It was opposed to the French cultural and political imperialism. It led to the awakening of German national sentiment. German thinkers of the “counter-Enlightenment” believed that concepts of knowledge and reality are fundamentally false, or at least exaggerated. For them, the world was not simple but highly complex, composed of innumerable and unique elements and events, and always in a state of flux. […]

Clausewitz believed only in broad generalities, none of which consistently held true in the fog and friction of actual combat. […]

The principal psychological features of any war are hatred, hostility, violence, uncertainty (or fog of war), friction, fear, danger, irrationality, chance, and luck. For Clausewitz, a war was a trinity composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity—a blind natural force. […] He pointed out that the only situation a commander can know fully is his own. […]

Clausewitzian views on the true nature of war remain valid today. The human element is the single most critical aspect of warfare. Human nature has changed little despite vast changes in military technologies. Warfare is too complex and unpredictable an activity to be taken over by machines or explained and managed by pseudoscientific theories. Only the human brain is fully capable of reacting in a timely and proper fashion to the sudden and unanticipated changes in the situation and countering the enemy’s actions and reactions. The enemy has his own will. He can react unpredictably or irrationally.

{ Milan Vego/National Defense University Press | Continue reading }

Quantum computer scientists believe quantum computers can solve problems that are intractable for conventional computers. It’s not that quantum computers are like regular computers, but smaller and faster. Rather, quantum computers work according to principles entirely different than conventional computers, and using those principles can solve problems whose solution will never be feasible on a conventional computer.

In everyday life, all our experience is with objects which can be directly simulated by a conventional computer. We don’t usually think about this fact, but movie-makers rely on it, and we take it for granted – special effects are basically just rough computer simulations of events that would be more expensive for the movie makers to create in real life than they are to simulate inside a computer. Much more detailed simulations are used by companies like Boeing to test designs for their latest aircraft, and by Intel to test designs for their latest chips. Everything you’ve ever seen or done in your life – driving a car, walking in the park, cooking a meal – all these actions can be directly simulated using a conventional computer. […]

Now, imagine for the sake of argument that I could give you a simple, concrete explanation of how quantum computers work. If that explanation were truly correct, then it would mean we could use conventional computers to simulate all the elements in a quantum computer, giving us a way to solve those supposedly intractable problems I mentioned earlier. […] Quantum computers cannot be explained in simple concrete terms; if they could be, quantum computers could be directly simulated on conventional computers, and quantum computing would offer no advantage over such computers. […]

Quantum computers work by exploiting what is called “quantum parallelism”. The idea is that a quantum computer can simultaneously explore many possible solutions to a problem. Implicitly, such accounts promise that it’s then possible to pick out the correct solution to the problem, and that it’s this which makes quantum computers tick. […] The problem comes in the second part of the story: picking out the correct solution.

{ Michael Nielsen | Continue reading }