The Ethics of Paranormal Investigation, Part 2 of 2
July 30, 2011 2 Comments
A continuation of my discussion about the panel I moderated at The Amazing Meeting, on the ethics of paranormal investigation:
The Ethics of Paranormal Investigation, Part 1 of 2
July 26, 2011 3 Comments
Today we end our first hiatus (which turned out to by much longer than we’d planned — apologies, dear readers!) with the first of a two-part video blog. It’s a discussion of the panel I moderated at TAM9 this year, titled “The Ethics of Paranormal Investigation.” Topics include: Is it acceptable to use deception in the course of unmasking someone else’s deception? What do you do when the person claiming paranormal powers is a child? How much do you feel obligated to ensure the confidentiality of the people you’re investigating? And do you have any responsibility, as a mentalist or magician, to make sure your audience understands what you’re doing isn’t real?
Loaded words
June 24, 2011 24 Comments
It’s striking how much more unreasonable you can make someone sound, simply by quoting them in a certain tone of voice. I’ve noticed this when I’m listening to someone describe a fight or other incident in which he felt that someone was being rude to him — he’ll relate a comment that the person made (e.g, “And then she was like, ‘Sure, whatever…'”) And when he quotes the person, he uses a sarcastic or cutting tone of voice, so of course I think, “Wow, that person was being obnoxious!”
But then I wonder: Can I really be confident that he’s accurately representing the tone of her comment? It’s pretty easy for someone to, intentionally or not, distort the tone of a comment they’re recounting, while still accurately quoting the person’s official words. Especially if they’re already annoyed at that person. So to be fair, I try to replay the comment in my head in a more neutral tone to see if that makes it seem less obnoxious. (“Sure, whatever” could be said in a detached, I-don’t-have-a-strong-opinion-about-this way, just as easily as it could be said in a sarcastic or dismissive way.)
And there’s an analogy to this phenomenon in print. Journalists and bloggers can cast a totally different light on someone’s quote just through the word choice they use when they refer to the quote. Compare, for example, “Hillary objected that…” to “Hillary complained that…” The former makes her sound controlled and rational; the latter makes her sound whiny. The writer can exert an impressive amount of influence over your reaction to the quote, without ever being accused of misrepresenting what Hillary said.
One insidious example of a loaded word that I’ve found to be quite common is “admitted.” It’s loaded because it implies that whatever content follows reflects poorly on the speaker, and that he would have preferred to conceal it if he could. Take these recent examples:
“In his blog, Volokh admitted that his argument ‘was a joke’” (Wikipedia)
“Bill O’Reilly Admits That His TV Persona Is Just An Act” (Inquisitr)
“Paul Krugman admitted that the zero bound was not actually a bound” (Free Exchange)
Kennedy admitted that ‘the end result’ under his standard ‘may be the same as that suggested by the dissent…’” (Basman Rose Law)
I investigated the original quotes from the people whom these sentences allude to, and as far as I can tell, they gave no sense that they thought what they were saying was shameful or unflattering. The word “admitted” could just as easily have been replaced by something else. For example:
“In his blog, Volokh clarified that his argument ‘was a joke.’”
“Bill O’Reilly Says That His TV Persona Is Just An Act”
“Paul Krugman explained that the zero bound was not actually a bound”
“Kennedy acknowledged that ‘the end result’ under his standard ‘may be the same as that suggested by the dissent…’”
Suddenly all the speakers sound stronger and more confident, right? This isn’t to say that the word “admitted” is never appropriate. Sometimes it clearly fits, such as when someone is agreeing that some particular point does, in fact, weaken the argument she is trying to advance. But in most cases, reading that someone “admitted” some point can subtly make you think more poorly of him without reason. That’s why I advise being on the lookout for this and other loaded words, and when you notice them, try mentally replacing them with something more neutral so that you can focus on the point itself without your judgment being inadvertently skewed.
Why being vegetarian can kill more animals than eating meat
June 22, 2011 173 Comments
The most common justification I hear for vegetarianism is “It’s wrong to kill an animal for food.” Of course there are other motivations, such as health, religion, environmentalism, preventing suffering, and trying to score with liberal chicks — but the moral wrongness of killing an animal for food is the probably the most common, at least in my experience.
Consequently, I’ve found it surprising that people so rarely acknowledge that vegetarians do kill millions of animals for food. If you buy eggs or milk or cheese, it’s true in theory that the dairy cows and laying hens don’t have to be killed in order to supply you with those products, but in practice, they are. A modern factory farm isn’t just going to let their animals die of old age; they kill them at whatever point the farm considers to be the most profit-maximizing. For dairy cows, that’s usually at age 3-5, out of a natural 20-25 year lifespan. For egg-laying hens, it’s usually after one or two laying cycles. And since the males of the laying species are useless to the egg farmer, they’re killed right after they hatch.
But surely eating a vegetarian diet must kill far fewer animals than an omnivore diet, right? Well… sort of. I’m sure that a typical vegetarian kills fewer animals than a typical omnivore. But it’s certainly possible to be a vegetarian and kill more animals than an omnivore, and in fact, I’m confident that many vegetarians fall into that category.
The culprit is eggs. While you only need to kill one single steer to get about 450 pounds (405,000 calories) worth of meat, you’d need to kill about 20 chickens to get enough eggs to match that number of calories. So if you’re a vegetarian who eats a lot of omelets, you’re likely responsible for more animal deaths than someone who chows down on burgers and steaks but doesn’t like eggs.
I’ve scrounged up data on the typical amount of meat, eggs, and dairy that we get out of a modern farm animal, and combined it with data on the calorie counts of those foods. That allowed me to calculate the number of calories of food that we get out of each type of animal, or more to the point, the “lives-per-calorie” statistic for each food. The results are below, with the foods ordered from “kills the fewest animals per calorie” to “kills the most animals per calorie.” (All numbers are approximate, of course, but they’re from as recent and reliable sources as I could find. Detailed citations are at the end of this post.)
*The yield for a laying hen over its lifetime is actually about 550 eggs, but I’ve divided it by two because approximately one male chick is killed for each laying hen.
The lives-per-calories cost of eggs is so many times higher than that of beef that even a small amount of eggs outweighs the life cost of a larger amount of beef. So let’s say you’re a vegetarian and you go out to lunch with your omnivorous friend, where he orders a burger and you order an egg-salad sandwich. The two eggs in your sandwich are only 150 calories, compared to the 300 calories in his beef patty, but the eggs cost almost 9 times as much life as the beef.
Of course, as I said earlier, these calculations are only concerned with the question of taking animals’ lives. They don’t take into account the amount of suffering the animal experiences. That would change the calculations somewhat, but I suspect the overall verdict would remain similar if you were looking at suffering-per-calorie – or, if anything, things would look even grimmer for egg-lovers. Laying hens arguably lead some of the most miserable lives out of all livestock, spending all their time crammed into cages with less space than half a piece of paper, having their beaks cut off, and being starved to induce molting. (Although the male chicks would count less if you’re looking at suffering-per-calorie, since their lives are so short.)
These calculations also don’t take into account impact on the environment. Raising beef is pretty clearly the worst industry in terms of things like producing greenhouse gases, breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and requiring huge amounts of farmland just to feed the cattle. So there’s still a good case for choosing eggs over beef in the sense of minimizing your environmental impact, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’d be making a tradeoff: killing more animals to hurt the environment less.
Citations:
According to the USDA, the average dairy cow produced 21,000 lbs of milk last year, and according to several sources, the average dairy cow is culled from the herd after about 3 years, so I multiplied 21,000*3 to get the average amount of milk produced over the lifetime of a dairy cow. It takes about 1 gallon of milk to produce 1 lb of cheese, and there are about 8.5 lbs of milk per gallon, so I divided 63,000 lbs by 8.5 to get the 7,400 lbs of cheese figure.
The figures on beef and pork come from the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture.
The average number of eggs per laying hen per year comes from the USDA, and I multiplied by two because that’s the most common figure I found for the number of laying cycles. The average weight of a broiler chicken I got from the USDA’s annual Poultry Slaughter publication.
RS#37: The science and philosophy of happiness
June 19, 2011 2 Comments
On Episode #37 of the Rationally Speaking podcast, Massimo and I talk about the science and philosophy of happiness:
“Debates over what’s important to happiness — Money? Children? Love? Achievement? — are ancient and universal, but attempts to study the subject empirically are much newer. What have psychologists learned about which factors have a strong effect on people’s happiness and which don’t? Are parents really less happy than non-parents, and do people return to their happiness “set point” even after extreme events like winning the lottery or becoming paralyzed? We also tackle some of the philosophical questions regarding happiness, such as whether some kinds of happiness are “better” than others, and whether people can be mistaken about their own happiness. But, perhaps the hardest question is: can happiness really be measured?”
Bayesian truth serum
June 16, 2011 13 Comments
Here’s a sneaky trick for extracting the truth from someone even when she’s trying to conceal it from you: Rather than asking her how she thinks or behaves, ask her how she thinks other people think or behave.
MIT professor of psychology and cognitive science Drazen Pelec calls this trick “Bayesian truth serum,” according to Tyler Cowen in Discover Your Inner Economist. The logic behind it is simple: our impressions of “typical” attitudes and behavior are colored by our own attitudes and behavior. And that’s reasonable. You should count yourself as one data point in your sample of “how people think and behave.”
Your own data is likely to influence your sample more strongly than other data points, however, for two reasons. First, because it’s much more salient to you, compared to your data about other people, so you’re more likely to overweight it in your estimation. And second, through a ripple effect — people tend to cluster with other people who think and act similarly to themselves, so however your sample differs from the general population, that’s an indicator of how you yourself differ from the general population.
So, to use Cowen’s example, if you ask a man how many sexual partners he’s had, he might have a strong incentive to lie, either downplaying or exaggerating his history depending on who you are and what he wants you to think of him. But his estimate of a “typical” number will still be influenced by his own, and by that of his friends and acquaintances (who, because of the selection effect, are probably more similar to him than the general population is). “When we talk about other people,” Cowen writes, “we are often talking about ourselves, whether we know it or not.”
Game theory and basketball
June 13, 2011 5 Comments
Ben Morris is a friend-of-a-friend of mine who recently competed in a contest sponsored by ESPN called “Stat Geek Smackdown,” in which the goal was to correctly predict as many of the NBA playoff games as possible. For each correct guess, a contestant received 5 points.
Heading into the final game between Miami and Dallas, Ben was in second place, trailing just 4 points behind a veteran stat geek named Ilardi. By most estimates, Miami had about a 63% chance of beating Dallas. But Ben realized that if he and Ilardi both chose Miami, then even if Miami won the game, Ilardi would still win the competition, because he and Ben would each get 5 points and the gap between their scores would remain unchanged. In order for Ben to win the competition, he would have to pick the winning team and Ilardi would have to pick the losing team.
So that created an interesting game theory problem: If Ben predicted that Ilardi would pick Miami, since they were more likely to win, then Ben should pick Dallas. But if Ilardi predicted that Ben would be reasoning that way, then Ilardi might pick Dallas, knowing that all he needs to do to win the competition is to pick the same team as Ben. But of course if Ben predicts that Ilardi will be thinking that way, maybe Ben should pick Miami…
What would you do if you were Ben? You can read about Ben’s reasoning on his excellent blog, Skeptical Sports, but here’s my summary. Ben essentially had two options:
(1) His first option was to play his Nash equilibrium strategy, which is a concept you might recall if you ever took game theory (or if you saw the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” although the movie botched the explanation). That’s the set of strategies (Ben’s and Ilardi’s) which gives each of them no incentive to switch to a new strategy as long as the other guy doesn’t. The Nash equilibrium strategy is especially appealing if you’re risk averse because it’s “unexploitable,” meaning that it gives you predictable, fixed odds of winning the game, no matter what strategy your opponent uses.
In this case — and you can read Ben’s blog for the proof — the Nash equilibrium is for Ben to pick Miami with exactly the same probability as Miami has of losing (0.37) and for Ilardi to pick Miami with exactly the same probability as Miami has of winning (0.63). (You might wonder how you should pick a team “with X probability,” but it’s pretty easy: just roll a 100-sided die, and pick the team if the die comes up X or lower.)
If you do the calculation, you’ll find that playing this strategy — i.e., rolling a hundred-sided die and picking Miami only if the die came up 37 or lower — would give Ben a 23.3% chance of beating Ilardi, no matter how Ilardi decided to play. Not terrible odds, especially given that this approach doesn’t require Ben to make any predictions about Ilardi’s strategy. But perhaps Ben could do better if he were able to make a reasonable guess about what Ilardi would do.
(2) That leads us to option two: Ben could abandon his Nash equilibrium strategy, if he felt that he could predict Ilardi’s action with sufficient confidence. To be precise, if Ben thinks that Ilardi is more than 63% likely to pick Miami, then Ben should pick Dallas.
Here’s a rough proof. Call “p” the likelihood that Ilardi picks Miami, and “q” the likelihood that Ben picks Miami. Then we can assign probabilities to each of the outcomes in which Ben wins:
Since the two outcomes are mutually exclusive, we can add up their probabilities to get the total probability that Ben wins, as a function of p and q:
Probability Ben wins = .37p + .63q – pq
Just to illustrate how Ben’s chance of winning changes depending on p, I plugged in three different values of p to create three different lines: For the black line, p=0.63. For the red line, p < 0.63 (to be precise, I plugged in p=0.62, but any value of p<0.63 will create an upward sloping line). For the blue line, p > 0.63 (to be precise, I plugged in p=0.64, but any value of p>0.63 will create a downward sloping line).
If p = .63, that renders Ben’s chance of winning constant ( .233) for all values of q. In other words, if Ilardi seems to be about 63% likely to pick Miami, then it doesn’t matter how Ben picks, he’ll have the same chance of winning (23.3%) as he would if he played his Nash equilibrium strategy.
If p > .63, Ben’s chance of winning decreases as q (his probability of choosing Miami) increases. In other words, if Ben thinks there’s a greater than 63% chance that Ilardi will pick Miami, then Ben should pick Miami with as low a probability as possible (i.e., he should pick Dallas).
If p < .63, Ben’s chance of winning increases as q (his probability of choosing Miami) increases. In other words, if Ben thinks there’s a lower than 63% chance that Ilardi will pick Miami, then Ben should pick Miami with as high a probability as possible (i.e., he should pick Miami).
So what happened? Ben estimated that Ilardi would pick Miami with greater than 63% probability. That’s mainly because most people aren’t comfortable playing probabilistic strategies that require them to roll a die — people will simply “round up” in their mind and pick the team that would give them a win more often than not. And Ben knew that if he was right about Ilardi picking Miami, then Ben would end up with a 37% chance of winning, rather than the 23.3% chance he would have had if he stuck to his equilibrium strategy.
So Ben picked Dallas. As he’d predicted, Ilardi picked Miami, and lucky for Ben, Dallas won. This one case study doesn’t prove that Ilardi reasoned as Ben expected, of course. Ben summed up the takeaway on his blog:
Of course, we shouldn’t read too much into this: it’s only a single result, and doesn’t prove that either one of us had an advantage. On the other hand, I did make that pick in part because I felt that Ilardi was unlikely to “outlevel” me. To be clear, this was not based on any specific assessment about Ilardi personally, but based my general beliefs about people’s tendencies in that kind of situation.
Was I right? The outcome and reasoning given in the final “picking game” has given me no reason to believe otherwise, though I think that the reciprocal lack of information this time around was a major part of that advantage. If Ilardi and I find ourselves in a similar spot in the future (perhaps in next year’s Smackdown), I’d guess the considerations on both sides would be quite different.
I feel ya, Gureckis
June 10, 2011 13 Comments
I’m feeling a deep sense of camraderie right now with Todd Gureckis, a psychologist at NYU. That’s because a couple of weeks ago, senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) released a report titled, “Under the Microscope,” scrutinizing the funding decisions of the National Science Foundation and complaining about what he felt was a waste of taxpayer money on many frivolous research projects — one of which was Gureckis’. “Armed with a $1 million grant from NSF,” Coburn wrote, “researchers at Indian (sic) University-Bloomington and New York University analyzed baby names to determine trends in parents’ naming decisions.”
The paper in question, co-authored with Rob Goldstone, is called, “How You Named Your Child: Understanding The Relationship Between Individual Decision Making and Collective Outcomes.” Gureckis was surprised at Coburn’s criticism, and responded on his website:
“The Coburn report makes it seem as though this research spent money to determine the frequency and popularity of names… Had those developing this report actually looked the research paper they were criticizing, they would know that we were not specifically interested in baby names except in so far as they offer a unique opportunity for studying such the impact of social influence on decision making. We all know that iPhones are popular but the underlying reasons for this cultural success is distorted by the role that advertising budgets and existing computer technologies play in determining which ideas win out and which die off in the consumer marketplace. In contrast, the popularity of names is more organically determined by processes of social influence (there is no company out there trying to convince you to name you child something in particular). Baby names thus represent an important and relatively “pure” empirical test of theories of cultural transmission and social influence in large groups.”
Now of course, I’m not an NSF-funded researcher being criticized for frivolity. But the reason I felt so much camraderie with Gureckis after reading about his situation was because this sort of thing happens to me all the time — I’ll bring up a particular case as a way of shedding light on a general principle, and the people I’m talking to focus on the particular case and ignore the general principle.
For example, I’ve tried a couple of times to start a discussion about the difficulties of measuring happiness, and I’ve begun by citing the fact that most parents claim to be very happy that they have children despite the fact that research shows parents are less happy, on average, than non-parents. So that points to this really interesting tension between two ways of measuring happiness (how satisfied are you when you consider your life overall, versus how happy do you feel on a moment-to-moment basis) that apparently can contradict each other, and raises the question of whether one is “wrong,” and if so, which?
At least, that’s the discussion I keep wanting to have. But I never get to, because the thread always turns into a debate about having children, with commenters testifying about how happy they are that they had kids and how the parenting-skeptics are missing out.
Asking for reassurance: a Bayesian interpretation
June 9, 2011 25 Comments
Bayesianism gives us a prescription for how we should update our beliefs about the world as we encounter new evidence. Roughly speaking, when you encounter new evidence (E), you should increase your confidence in a hypothesis H only if that evidence would’ve been more likely to occur in a world where H was true than in a world in which H was false — that is, if P(E|H) > P(E|not-H).
I think this is indisputably correct. What I’ve been less sure about is whether Bayesianism tends to lead to conclusions that we wouldn’t have arrived at anyway just through common sense. I mean, isn’t this how we react to evidence intuitively? Does knowing about Bayes’ rule actually improve our reasoning in everyday life?
As of yesterday, I can say: yes, it does.
I was complaining to a friend about people who ask questions like, “Do you think I’m pretty?” or “Do you really like me?” My argument was that I understood the impulse to seek reassurance if you’re feeling insecure, but I didn’t think it was useful to actually ask such a question, since the person’s just going to tell you “yes” no matter what, and you’re not going to get any new information from it. (And you’re going to make yourself look bad by asking.)
My friend made the valid point that even if everyone always responds “Yes,” some people are better at lying than others, so if the person’s reply sounds unconvincing, that’s a telltale sign that that they don’t genuinely like you/ think you’re pretty. “Okay, that’s true,” I replied. “But if they reply ‘yes’ and it sounds convincing, then you haven’t learned any new information, because you have no way of knowing whether he’s telling the truth or whether he’s just a good liar.”
But then I thought about Bayes’ rule and realized I was wrong — even a convincing-sounding “yes” gives you some new information. In this case, H = “He thinks I’m pretty” and E = “He gave a convincing-sounding ‘yes’ to my question.” And I think it’s safe to assume that it’s easier to sound convincing if you believe what you’re saying than if you don’t, which means that P(E | H) > P(E | not-H). So a proper Bayesian reasoner encountering E should increase her credence in H.
(Of course, there’s always the risk, as with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, that the process of measuring something will actually change it. So if you ask “Do you like me?” enough, the true answer might shift from “yes” to “no”…)
A crab canon for Douglas Hofstadter
June 6, 2011 11 Comments
(published at 3 Quarks Daily)
Since it first came out in 1979, Douglas Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” has widened the eyes of multiple generations of nerdy kids, and I was certainly no exception. The book draws all sorts of parallels between music, art, math, and computer science, ultimately shaping them into a bold thesis about how consciousness arises from self-reference and recursion. It’s also a very playful book, full of puzzles, puns, and imagined dialogues between Achilles and a tortoise which weave in and out of the main chapters, illustrating the concepts therein.
One of those dialogues, titled “Crab Canon,” seems puzzling when you begin reading it – sprinkled with seeming non-sequitors, the word choice a bit awkward and off-kilter. Then shortly after the halfway point, when you start to see recent lines repeated, in reverse order, you realize: the whole dialogue is a line-level palindrome. The first line is the same as the last, the second line is the same as the second-to-last, and so on. But because Hofstadter chooses his sentences carefully, they often have different meanings when they reoccur in the reverse order. So, for example, the following bit of dialogue in the first half…
Tortoise: Tell me, what’s it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?
Achilles: To be precise, one has no frets.
Tortoise: Oh, well, it’s all the same to me.
Achilles: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
Tortoise: Say, don’t you play the guitar?
… becomes this bit of dialogue in the second half:
Achilles: Say, don’t you play the guitar?
Tortoise: Fiddle. It makes a big difference, you know.
Achilles: Oh, well, it’s all the same to me.
Tortoise: To be precise, one has no frets.
Achilles: Tell me, what’s it like to be your age? Is it true that one has no worries at all?
Hofstadter does “cheat” a bit, by allowing himself to vary punctuation (for example, “He often plays, the fool” reoccurs later in a new context as “He often plays the fool”). Nevertheless, it’s an impressive execution of a clever conceit.
Thumbing through Gödel, Escher, Bach again recently, I came across the Crab Canon and was struck with the desire to attempt a similar feat myself: a line-level palindrome that tells a linear story, that is, a story in which a series of non-repeating events occur.
It’s maddeningly difficult trying to come up with lines that make sense, that in fact make a different sense, in both directions. And because all of the lines interlock — each relying simultaneously on the line preceding it, the line following it, and its mirror-image line — changing any one line in the poem tends to set off a ripple effect of necessary changes to all the other lines as well.
I eventually figured out a few crucial tricks, like relying on ambiguous pronouns (“they,” “their”) and using images that carry a different meaning depending on what’s already happened. Below is the final result – my own canon, in homage to the book that dazzled my teenaged self years ago:
SEASIDE CANON, for Douglas Hofstadter
by Julia Galef
~
The ocean was still.
In an empty sky, two gulls turned lazy arcs, and
their keening cries echoed
off the cliff and disappeared into the sea.
When the child, scrambling up the rocks, slipped
out of her parents’ reach,
they called to her. She was already
so high, but those distant peaks above —
they called to her. She was already
out of her parents’ reach
when the child, scrambling up the rocks, slipped
off the cliff and disappeared into the sea.
Their keening cries echoed
in an empty sky. Two gulls turned lazy arcs, and
the ocean was still.
~
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