the only way to create economic growth is by increasing
productivity – and productivity can only be increased through more labor or
capital, or technological advancement. Because stimulus does nothing to change
these fundamentals, he suggested, it cannot create any real economic growth.
Riedl explained that stimulus is based on the theory that government can
stimulate demand; however, he argued, government cannot create money – only
redistribute it.
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Recipes for Recovery | The New America Foundation
Tags: economy, bailout, united_states, president_obama, video, taxes, infrastructure, government, regulation, transparency, model, automobile, industry, labor on 2008-11-13 -All Annotations (9) -About
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She
argued that demand could be boosted somewhat, and that there would be a
psychological benefit to stimulus. MacGuineas also suggested that stimulus was
a political inevitability. However, she outlined a number of risks attached to
any package. First, stimulus might be overly expansionary, loosening credit
beyond where it should be. Second, stimulus might “rebalance the economy” incorrectly,
propping up industries and sectors which should either fail or be restructured.
Third, stimulus might be executed poorly, and include too many pork barrel
projects and unrelated expenditures. Finally, stimulus could involve too much
borrowing, which might lead to a federal debt bubble. -
“We have been,” he said, “living off of
grandpa’s investment in infrastructure for a while,” and we now face an
“infrastructure deficit.” Furthermore,
he argued that even if our aging infrastructure has so far mostly remained
functional, we are still “paying” for our underinvestment—for example, time
lost through traffic congestion on too-crowded highways. -
stronger
government intervention in the auto industry sounds great, but you still have
to get consumers to buy the more efficient cars -
the crisis had provided further evidence that
“people are not rational economic beings,” and that “the availability of data
does not lead to being informed.” -
the recent financial crisis was caused in part by “both
parties [in financial transactions] not having equal access to
information.” He cited two sources of
costly misinformation: over-reliance on rating agencies and outdated or
irrelevant financial modeling tools. -
the money from the $700 billion dollar
bailout package was not being efficiently allocated, because banks were taking
the equity they were given and “sitting on it” to fulfill regulatory
requirements, rather than feeding it back into the economy. -
Rosner hoped that
the practice of securitization itself would not be blamed for the financial
crisis, calling securities a vital instrument in modern financial markets. He also called for industry-wide standardization
of terms like “subprime” and “default,” because the complexity of modern
markets had caused their exact meanings to become less clear. -
First, he recommended that the
SEC be made into a self-financed institution like the Fed, so that it is less
susceptible to outside influence.
Second, citing the decline in professional standards among “gatekeepers”
for public corporations, Longstreth thought that bolstering these standards
could restore integrity to the system.
Third, he claimed that an audit of public corporations by federal
regulators might restore transparency and root out abuses. Fourth, Longstreth contended that government should
create a new entity or empower a existing entity to explicitly advocate for the
interests of investors. Finally, Longstreth
asserted that the US should “appoint highly qualified people to head regulatory
agencies.”
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Gene Expression: Evolution and trustworthiness
Using a model of trust and cooperation, we show how allowing individuals to monitor each other's cooperative tendencies, at a cost, can select for heritable polymorphisms in trustworthiness. This variation, in turn, favours costly 'social awareness' in some individuals. Feedback of this sort can explain the individual differences in trust and trustworthiness so often documented by economists in experimental public goods games across a range of cultures.
Tags: evolution, psychology, trust, economics, model, genetics, behavior on 2008-10-31 -All Annotations (1) -About
in list: watch for responses
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The Behavioral Revolution - David Brooks
Tags: economics, psychology, behavior, perception, model, opinion on 2008-10-29 -All Annotations (2) -About
in list: watch for responses
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Perceiving a situation seems, at first glimpse, like a remarkably simple operation. You just look and see what’s around. But the operation that seems most simple is actually the most complex, it’s just that most of the action takes place below the level of awareness. Looking at and perceiving the world is an active process of meaning-making that shapes and biases the rest of the decision-making chain.
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perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.
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Science News / A Frustrating View Of Complexity
Tags: complexity, theory, computer, model on 2008-10-28 -All Annotations (3) -About
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A complex system, argues Philippe Binder of theUniversity
ofHawaiiat, is one with an inner conflict.Hilo
Conflicting tendencies built into the system won’t let the tendencies settle into
a steady state. -
Another perspective on complex systems is that their
fundamental attribute is that they behave differently on different scales. -
The third form of complexity people often talk about is
computational complexity.
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Seedmagazine.com | MIND08 | Henry Markram: Designing the Human Mind
Tags: brain, model, blue_brain, research, technology, computer, design, video on 2008-10-17 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (1) -About
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Seed: How We Evolve
Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.
Tags: human, genome, evolution, map, HapMap, model, intelligence, culture, complexity, climate_crisis on 2008-10-12 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (7) -About
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Fisher, a Brit, argued that, in fact, a large population was required, because only a large population can produce large numbers of mutations. Because most mutations are neutral, he reasoned, it takes a large number of mutations to produce one beneficial allele. American biologists were most influenced by Wright, but Fisher's work is where Hawks and Harpending find their support.
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"The fate of our civilization, and maybe our species," says Ehrlich, "may be determined by the next five generations. So I don't really give a shit what's happening to our genetic evolution." The global climate is changing too violently for DNA to respond by fiddling around with heat regulation and hair thickness; forests everywhere are being clear-cut too quickly for their inhabitants to adjust, and so food chains are coming undone; the collapse of global fisheries has been identified as an imminent calamity; and a nuclear disaster would constitute a catastrophe many orders of magnitude larger than what nature could readily absorb. If any of these nightmare scenarios comes to pass, Ehrlich fears, evolution will be unable to help us. It may be operating faster than we thought, but it's not that fast. Problems like smog and acid rain seem almost quaint, and even to be longed for.
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The signature that natural selection inscribes on the genome is legible even when the import of the message is unclear.
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HapMap is a leaner and in some ways more powerful version of the Human Genome Project, as it compiles only those regions of the human genome — less than 1 percent — that have the potential to differ from person to person. In comparing different populations' genetic information, it's possible to tease out patterns of gene inheritance, how certain genes correlate with certain diseases, and even the likely geographic origin of some mutations.
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Is intelligence still being selected for? Parsimony and uniformitarianism would compel one to answer yes; things in the present are, by and large, as they were in the past. But the way evolution works, whereby mutations arise in one person and slowly spread throughout a population, makes such a question difficult to frame, for if intelligence is still under selection, that could mean that some populations at this very moment are slightly smarter than others — that, perhaps, even certain ethnicities are slightly smarter than others. In the West, speculation on the subject almost automatically tars the speculator as a eugenicist or a racialist.
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"Intelligence builds on top of intelligence," says Lahn. "[Culture] creates a stringent selection regime for enhanced intelligence. This is a positive feedback loop, I would think." Increasing intelligence increases the complexity of culture, which pressures intelligence levels to rise, which creates a more complex culture, and so on. Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind.
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The Reality Club: Responses to WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt
Tags: psychology, religion, morality, voting, republican, democrat, genome-environment_interaction, computer, model, neuro, serotonin, dopamine, parenting, evolution, science_is_a_method, testing, social_network, jonathan_haidt on 2008-09-11 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (31) -About
in list: religion
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His research, if he is to use lofty adjectives (largely meaningless in my experience) such as 'innate' to describe social structures and desires, must encompass a wider range of societies.
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Happiness ratings are highest in the socialist societies, while lowest in right wing authoritarian societies. This list could be extended.
Why, then, do right wing partisans ignore this evidence and continue to support policies that are patently dysfunctional? I believe it is because, having stated a position, based on either their own family values or those dictated by their religion, they are loathe to change their minds and declare that they have been wrong.
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Right wing positions are more frequently associated with Protestant evangelicals and with traditional (Reagan) Catholics. Often the leaders of these groups (e.g. television evangelists, sinning priests) epitomize the opposite of the stated values. But both of these groups embrace forgiveness, absolution, being born again. Other groups—atheists, non-fundamentalist Jews and non-fundamentalist Protestants—do not have the option of absolution; they make firmer demands on themselves
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Once you set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it's easy to collect the data to support them. The flaw is in the characterization process itself.
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Only some professional philosophers, jurists, scientists and academics believe that the principal point of political argument (or most any argument) is, or ought to be, truth rather than persuasion, and that an argument's principal appeal should be reason rather than passion.
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Like other biological systems, moral intuition consists of an imperfect community of jerry-rigged faculties. Societies further combine these universal ingredients in creatively different ways.
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a rational analysis of voting suggests that the core act of modern democratic government makes absolutely no sense. Economists would literally call voting "irrational" because it violates the preferences of the people who engage in it. For some reason, people decide to vote even though they would not buy a lottery ticket with identical odds, cost, and payoff. Economists typically think that people who vote are making a mistake, or there are other benefits to voting that we have not considered. For example, early scholars noted that people might vote in order to fulfill a sense of civic duty or to preserve the right to vote. Later scholars have also pointed out that people might vote because they enjoy expressing themselves in the same way they enjoy expressing themselves when they cheer for their favorite team at a ballgame. But these explanations beg the question, "Why?" It is a tautology to say that people vote because they feel like voting.
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the rational analysis of voting overlooks important psychological features of human social networks that we have known about for some time.
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the media does not reach the masses directly. Instead, a group of "opinion leaders"—a coinage they may have invented—usually acts as intermediary,
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the more polarized we become by befriending only people with similar ideologies, the greater incentive we have to participate in politics.
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cascades are primarily local phenomena, occurring in a smaller part of the population closely connected to an individual. As it turns out, this is exactly what we have been finding in our other studies of the spread of obesity, smoking, and happiness. These phenomena can spread to our friends (1 degree of separation), our friends' friends (2 degrees), and our friends' friends' friends (3 degrees), but not much further. This "3 Degree Rule" suggests that the power of one individual to influence many is limited by the effect of competing waves of influence that emanate from everyone else in the network.
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In other words, one very important reason why people vote Republican is because their parents did. However, other studies have shown that the decision to affiliate with any political party and the strength of this attachment are significantly influenced by genes.
These initial twin studies suggested political ideas are heritable, but they said little about political behavior. That changed this year when we published a new study in the American Political Science Review that examined the heritability of voter participation.
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research to link specific genes to political phenotypes, we established a direct association between voter turnout and monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) and a gene-environment interaction between turnout and the serotonin transporter (5HTT) gene among those who frequently participated in religious activities. In other research we have also found an association between voter turnout and a dopamine receptor (DRD2) gene that is mediated by a significant association between that gene and the tendency to affiliate with a political party. Thus we are beginning to find specific genes that can help us to predict who will vote and who won't.
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The philosophical framework of liberalism makes it hard for Democrats to articulate the intuitions that most people share. Caring for a particular, individual baby, even a "special needs" baby, and being part of a particular, individual family, even a complex, messy family, are intrinsic human goods. Politics should help people achieve them successfully.
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belief make tacit claims about normativity: claims not merely about how we human beings think and behave, but about how we should think and behave. Factual beliefs like "water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen" and ethical beliefs like "cruelty is wrong" are not expressions of mere preference. To really believe a proposition (whether about facts or values) is also to believe that one has accepted it for legitimate reasons.
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Despite the remonstrations of people like Jonathan Haidt and Richard Shweder, science has long been in the values business. Scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; it is the result of scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning that reliably link their beliefs to reality, through valid chains of evidence and argument.
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This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning. It does not suggest that there isn't a single correct answer to the Monty Hall problem. While it might seem the height of arrogance to say it, the people who actually understand the Monty Hall problem really do hold the "logical high ground."
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Haidt appears to consider it an intellectual virtue to adopt, uncritically, the moral categories of his subjects. But where is it written that everything that people do or decide in the name of "morality" deserves to be considered part its subject matter?
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counties of
the US that produce the wealth and innovation voted overwhelmingly
Democratic and the counties of the US that depend on government
subsidy or that simply underperform economically voted overwhelmingly
Republican. -
the Republican success of the last
generation, since Nixon and Reagan cracked the code, has been to
exploit irrelevant (to national policy) anxieties. We are at the
point where the national maneuvering for office has nothing to do with
argument (so much for folks who say that "the economy should be
Obama's best argument") and everything to do with positioning a
message between now and election day so that pulling the lever or
pushing the button or punching the chad for one candidate makes you
feel morally satisfied, which is to say, less anxious and guilty and
ashamed. -
the
humanistic culture of the orator from Demosthenes to Martin Luther
King Jr. is decisively gone. We don't fully understand what's
replacing it, but it's happening all around us—you might even call
it a third culture...
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It is common to make the assumption that people are thinking when they vote and they are making reasoned choices. I harbor no such illusion. No argument I have ever gotten into with these people, (despite avoiding talking to them, I sometimes can't resist saying something true) has ever convinced anyone of anything. They are not reasoning, nor do they want to try. They simply believe what they believe.
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It is all very nice to come up with complex analyses of what is going on. As is often the case, the real answer is quite simple. Most people can't think very well. They were taught not to think by religion and by a school system that teaches that knowledge of state capitals and quadratic equations is what education is all about and that well reasoned argument and original ideas will not help on a multiple choice test.
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they are not equipped to think about politics and, in my mind, they are not equipped to vote. The fact that we let them vote while failing to encourage them to think for themselves is a real problem for our society.
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A List Apart: Articles: Look at it Another Way
Tags: creativity, model, user_interface, design on 2008-09-11 and saved by9 people -All Annotations (7) -About
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Stop thinking of them as a “user” of the thing you provide. Think about how and why they accomplish what they want to get done, not how or why they might use your stuff.
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Rather than looking for differences in how segments use your product, look for differences between the beliefs and behaviors of these segments in real life.
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Everybody out of the pool!
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By getting rid of the self-limiting branching topics that assume there are no mysteries, you train reps to extract information through conversation, and how to use the internal company knowledgebase.
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Mental models frequently fall prey to our own assumptions and understanding of a particular field. When creating one, turn off your internal problem-solver and just listen to people. Allow patterns of behavior and motivation to reveal themselves to you. Work from the bottom up, rather than designating several behavior areas and trying to fit people’s actions into them.
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WhatIsConnectivism
slideshow presentation
Tags: education, neuro, model, learning, audio, social_network on 2008-09-10 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Jonathan Drori on what we think we know | Video on TED.com
"children do worse after they're taught"
Tags: reference, education, video, teaching, model, theory, testing, earth_science, physics, biology on 2008-09-10 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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New Computer Game, Spore, Takes Cues From Evolutionary Biology - NYTimes.com
Tags: video_game, Spore, evolution, complexity, game_theory, math, model, video on 2008-09-09 -All Annotations (7) -About
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After years of rumors, the game goes on sale Friday. Spore’s designer, Will Wright, is best known for creating a game called the Sims in 2000. That game, which let players run the lives of a virtual family, has sold 100 million copies. It is the best-selling computer game franchise of all time.
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Evolutionary biologists like Dr. Near and Dr. Prum, who have had a chance to try the game, like it a great deal. But they also have some serious reservations. The step-by-step process by which Spore’s creatures change does not have much to do with real evolution. “The mechanism is severely messed up,” Dr. Prum said.
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Nevertheless, Dr. Prum admires the way Spore touches on some of the big questions that evolutionary biologists ask. What is the origin of complexity? How contingent is evolution on flukes and quirks?
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One thing Mr. Wright and his colleagues decided Spore should reflect was evolution’s ability to produce life’s staggering diversity.
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evolution is not a simple kill-or-be-killed affair.
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In the real world, new traits evolve as mutations arise and spread gradually through entire populations. Winning Spore’s DNA points does not work even as a remote metaphor.
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Spore may also mislead players with the way it is set up as a one-dimensional march of progress from single-cell life to intelligence. Evolution is more like a tree than a line
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reportonbusiness.com: 'Social networking for social change'
read the whole thing
Tags: social_change, business, model, social_network on 2008-08-28 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Evolving Thoughts: Why not information?
Tags: biology, genetics, systems_biology, model, theory, information, philosophy on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Anti-evolutionists use "no new information" and a host of spurious mathematical arguments to "prove" that new information cannot be caused by ordinary physical processes like natural selection.
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Information talk privileges genes over other causal actors in biology
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Information talk biases some functions over others in a way that obscures the multiple complicity of genes in various processes.
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Information is not a physical cause of anything.
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Morphology no longer plays a causal role in biology except as the arrangement of particles and ensembles of particles. Want to explain why protein A cleaves to nucleotide X? Do so in terms of the shape if A and X, but do not stop there - form is the effect of the properties of the parts; the strong and weak bonds, the medium, the ambient energy level, and so on. We might be able to infer similar properties from similar forms, but the full explanation, in biology at any rate, has to include the makeup of the molecules and their degrees of freedom in folding and bonding properties.
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we have to treat information as an abstraction made for our benefit, rather than as an inherent property of the objects themselves.
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Evolving Thoughts: Is information essential for life? No.
Tags: biology, genetics, systems_biology, model, theory, information, philosophy on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Calling everything information is massive projection, or even anthropomorphism. It takes something that exists as a semantic or cognitive property and projects it out to all that exists. It makes observers the sole reality.
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nobody thinks that genes rationally assess their interests and then make choices in interactions with other genes. It just happens that the math is useful to model the evolution of fitnesses irrespective of the cognitive abilities of genes and organisms.
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a human-abacus system is an IPS (and indeed, human-most thing systems can be, potentially, because of the ways humans can act as Turing machines), while a set of beads on strings in a frame on its own is not.
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where would I say that information becomes a property of biological systems? What is the threshold? That's a little tricky.
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if we say the information exists in the organisms/genes/other biological locus irrespective of our recognition, then we lose our privileging of genes as an information system
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Information is only information relative to a model of it. Information is an interpretation, it is not an inherent quality of DNA, or computers, or even the entire universe. Cells don't "process data" through their actions any more than rocks "process data" by getting warm in the sun, or balls "process data" when they are thrown. We can model these behaviours (of cells, and of rocks and balls), but it is we who provide those models with "information", not the natural systems themselves.
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Evolving Thoughts: Instruction and information
Tags: biology, genetics, systems_biology, model, theory, computer, information, philosophy on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
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one of the oldest and most widely used rhetorical tropes regarding genes, and latterly DNA, is that it/they are instructions. They cause the body to be built according to a program. Other metaphors include recipes, blueprints, code, and so on, but they all rely on this basic notion of instruction: DNA is a process of imparting information to be used in the construction of the organism.
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information, which we all think we have a handle on, is what the instructions comprise
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every use of the term information in respect of genes can either be replaced with the notion of causality, or can be ignored as adding nothing to the debate, or worse, as confusing and unhelpful.
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hylomorphism, or form-substance dualism, requires that the properties of things are at least partly not due to the stuff of which it is made. Atomism requires that the properties of the parts fix all the properties of the wholes.
In modern debate terms, this is very much like - but not identical with - the reductionism/holism, or more recently, the reductionism/emergence dichotomy. -
we are intentional actors, and so we conceive of the world in those terms.
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the biological world, is not composed of formless gunk that gets its properties only when information is pressed into it. The parts of the system give the system its properties. Genes cause processes to occur, and not alone - they are one causal element of the entire process of being alive. They do not instruct us how to live and grow. They do not impart information. They cause developmental properties to occur
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Evolving Thoughts: More of me in Spanish, and information again
Tags: cell, biology, genetics, model, theory, systems_biology, philosophy on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
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a paper in Nature by Nobel Laureate Paul Nurse. Entitled "Life, Logic and Information" it is yet another claim that information technology is the best way to conceptualise biology, in particular biological systems.
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There has always been a tendency for scientists and philosophers to appeal to the latest and best technology to explain living things.
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the sort of reductionism I would promote is that which includes the systemic relations between parts
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The Daily Transcript: New Understanding of Biology
Tags: cell, biology, theory, model, systems_biology on 2008-08-17 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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It does appear that most signaling cascades can be rewired easily throughout the course of evolution. This plasticity can show up in these huge in vitro protein-protein interaction data orgies, but may not give a clue as to how the pathway is hooked up in a given organism or in a given cellular context.
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In reality the molecular components of these signaling pathways form functional modules, each module resembling a component of an electrical circuit. These units are likely to be composed of several molecular players that interact tightly and in concert. The modules would have definite roles in how they affect how a signal is propagated within a cell
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We need to act like reverse engineers. The idea is to break cellular phenomena into smaller functional units.
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you can't inject phrases like "information processing devices" and not get philosophical or anthropomorphic. Calling it something such as information processing only backs up to vague hand-waiving with a nice catch-phrase at best (if not totally wrong), when calling it what it is - an osmo-adaptation response - would be correct.
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Seed: A New State of Mind
review from Mind Hacks - "One thing I notice a little of in the quotes from Montague, which is incredibly common in discussion of dopamine and reward, is a kind of 'reward system dogma'." http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/08/the_best_is_yet_to_c.html
Tags: brain, anatomy, neuro, behavior, learning, dopamine, addiction, fmri, computer, application, prediction, science_is_a_method, model, theory, publishing, risk, social_network on 2008-08-15 and saved by13 people -All Annotations (8) -About
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That’s when Montague discovered the powers of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain. His research on the singular chemical has drawn tantalizing connections between the peculiar habits of our neurons and the peculiar habits of real people, so that the various levels of psychological description — the macro and the micro, the behavioral and the cellular — no longer seem so distinct. What began as an investigation into a single neurotransmitter has morphed into an exploration of the social brain: Montague has pioneered research that allows him to link the obscure details of the cortex to all sorts of important phenomena, from stock market bubbles to cigarette addiction to the development of trust. “We are profoundly social animals,” he says. “You can’t really understand the brain until you understand how these social behaviors happen, or what happens when they go haywire.”Add Sticky Note