There’s No Such Thing as Free Will

Stephen Cave
The Atlantic
Originally published June 2016

Here is an excerpt:

What is new, though, is the spread of free-will skepticism beyond the laboratories and into the mainstream. The number of court cases, for example, that use evidence from neuroscience has more than doubled in the past decade—mostly in the context of defendants arguing that their brain made them do it. And many people are absorbing this message in other contexts, too, at least judging by the number of books and articles purporting to explain “your brain on” everything from music to magic. Determinism, to one degree or another, is gaining popular currency. The skeptics are in ascendance.

This development raises uncomfortable—and increasingly nontheoretical—questions: If moral responsibility depends on faith in our own agency, then as belief in determinism spreads, will we become morally irresponsible? And if we increasingly see belief in free will as a delusion, what will happen to all those institutions that are based on it?

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Determinism not only undermines blame, Smilansky argues; it also undermines praise. Imagine I do risk my life by jumping into enemy territory to perform a daring mission. Afterward, people will say that I had no choice, that my feats were merely, in Smilansky’s phrase, “an unfolding of the given,” and therefore hardly praiseworthy. And just as undermining blame would remove an obstacle to acting wickedly, so undermining praise would remove an incentive to do good. Our heroes would seem less inspiring, he argues, our achievements less noteworthy, and soon we would sink into decadence and despondency.

The info is here.

John Rawls’ ‘A Theory of Justice’

Ben Davis
1000-Word Philosophy
Originally posted July 27, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Reasonable people often disagree about how to live, but we need to structure society in a way that reasonable members of that society can accept. Citizens could try to collectively agree on basic rules. We needn’t decide every detail: we might only worry about rules concerning major political and social institutions, like the legal system and economy, which form the ‘basic structure’ of society.

A collective agreement on the basic structure of society is an attractive ideal. But some people are more powerful than others: some may be wealthier, or part of a social majority. If people can dominate negotiations because of qualities that are, as Rawls (72-75) puts it, morally arbitrary, that is wrong. People don’t earn these advantages: they get them by luck. For anyone to use these unearned advantages to their own benefit is unfair, and the source of many injustices.

This inspires Rawls’ central claim that we should conceive of justice ‘as fairness.’ To identify fairness, Rawls (120) develops two important concepts: the original position and the veil of ignorance:

The original position is a hypothetical situation: Rawls asks what social rules and institutions people would agree to, not in an actual discussion, but under fair conditions, where nobody knows whether they are advantaged by luck. Fairness is achieved through the veil of ignorance, an imagined device where the people choosing the basic structure of society (‘deliberators’) have morally arbitrary features hidden from them: since they have no knowledge of these features, any decision they make can’t be biased in their own favour.

The brief, excellent synopsis is here.

Peer Review is Not Scientific

E Price
medium.com
Originally published June 18, 2018

Here are two excerpts:

The first thing I want all lovers of science to know is this: peer-reviewers are not paid. When you are contacted by a journal editor and asked to conduct a review, there is no discussion of payment, because no payment is available. Ever. Furthermore, peer reviewing is not associated in any direct way with the actual job of being a professor or researcher. The person asking you to conduct a peer review is not your supervisor or the chair of your department, in nearly any circumstance. Your employer does not keep track of how many peer reviews you conduct and reward you appropriately.

Instead, you’re asked by journal editors, via email, on a voluntary basis. And it’s up to you, as a busy faculty member, graduate student, post-doc, or adjunct, to decide whether to say yes or not.

The process is typically anonymized, and tends to be relatively thankless — no one except the editor who has asked you to conduct the review will know that you were involved in the process. There is no quota of reviews a faculty member is expected to provide. Providing a review cannot really be placed on your resume or CV in any meaningful way.

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The level of scrutiny that an article is subjected to all comes down to chance. If you’re assigned a reviewer who created a theory that opposes your own theory, your work is likely to be picked apart. The reviewer will look very closely for flaws and take issue with everything that they can. This is not inherently a bad thing — research should be closely reviewed — but it’s not unbiased either.

The information is here.

Rorschach (regarding AI)

Michael Solana
Medium.com
Originally posted June 7, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

Here we approach our inscrutable abstract, and our robot Rorschach test. But in this contemporary version of the famous psychological prompts, what we are observing is not even entirely ambiguous. We are attempting to imagine a greatly-amplified mind. Here, each of us has a particularly relevant data point — our own. In trying to imagine the amplified intelligence, it is natural to imagine our own intelligence amplified. In imagining the motivations of this amplified intelligence, we naturally imagine ourselves. If, as you try to conceive of a future with machine intelligence, a monster comes to mind, it is likely you aren’t afraid of something alien at all. You’re afraid of something exactly like you. What would you do with unlimited power?

Psychological projection seems to work in several contexts outside of general artificial intelligence. In the technology industry the concept of “meritocracy” is now hotly debated. How much of your life is determined by luck, and how much by chance? There’s no answer here we know for sure, but has there ever been a better Rorschach test for separating high-achievers from people who were given what they have? Questions pertaining to human nature are almost open self-reflection. Are we basically good, with some exceptions, or are humans basically beasts, with an animal nature just barely contained by a set of slowly-eroding stories we tell ourselves — law, faith, society. The inner workings of a mind can’t be fully shared, and they can’t be observed by a neutral party. We therefore do not — can not, currently — know anything of the inner workings of people in general. But we can know ourselves. So in the face of large abstractions concerning intelligence, we hold up a mirror.

Not everyone who fears general artificial intelligence would cause harm to others. There are many people who haven’t thought deeply about these questions at all. They look to their neighbors for cues on what to think, and there is no shortage of people willing to tell them. The media has ads to sell, after all, and historically they have found great success in doing this with horror stories. But as we try to understand the people who have thought about these questions with some depth — with the depth required of a thoughtful screenplay, for example, or a book, or a company — it’s worth considering the inkblot.

The article is here.

Cognitive Economics: How Self-Organization and Collective Intelligence Works

Geoff Mulgan
evonomics.com
Originally published December 22, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

But self-organization is not an altogether-coherent concept and has often turned out to be misleading as a guide to collective intelligence. It obscures the work involved in organization and in particular the hard work involved in high-dimensional choices. If you look in detail at any real example—from the family camping trip to the operation of the Internet, open-source software to everyday markets, these are only self-organizing if you look from far away. Look more closely and different patterns emerge. You quickly find some key shapers—like the designers of underlying protocols, or the people setting the rules for trading. There are certainly some patterns of emergence. Many ideas may be tried and tested before only a few successful ones survive and spread. To put it in the terms of network science, the most useful links survive and are reinforced; the less useful ones wither. The community decides collectively which ones are useful. Yet on closer inspection, there turn out to be concentrations of power and influence even in the most decentralized communities, and when there’s a crisis, networks tend to create temporary hierarchies—or at least the successful ones do—to speed up decision making. As I will show, almost all lasting examples of social coordination combine some elements of hierarchy, solidarity, and individualism.

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Here we see a more common pattern. The more dimensional any choice is, the more work is needed to think it through. If it is cognitively multidimensional, we may need many people and more disciplines to help us toward a viable solution. If it is socially dimensional, then there is no avoiding a good deal of talk, debate, and argument on the way to a solution that will be supported. And if the choice involves long feedback loops, where results come long after actions have been taken, there is the hard labor of observing what actually happens and distilling conclusions. The more dimensional the choice in these senses, the greater the investment of time and cognitive energy needed to make successful decisions.

Again, it is possible to overshoot: to analyze a problem too much or from too many angles, bring too many people into the conversation, or wait too long for perfect data and feedback rather than relying on rough-and-ready quicker proxies. All organizations struggle to find a good enough balance between their allocation of cognitive resources and the pressures of the environment they’re in. But the long-term trend of more complex societies is to require ever more mediation and intellectual labor of this kind.

The article is here.

The Myth of Responsibility

Raoul Martinez
RSA.org
Originally posted December 7, 2017

Are we wholly responsible for our actions? We don’t choose our brains, our genetic inheritance, our circumstances, our milieu – so how much control do we really have over our lives? Philosopher Raoul Martinez argues that no one is truly blameworthy.  Our most visionary scientists, psychologists and philosophers have agreed that we have far less free will than we think, and yet most of society’s systems are structured around the opposite principle – that we are all on a level playing field, and we all get what we deserve.

4 minutes video is worth watching.....

Why Believing in Luck Makes You a Better Person

By Jesse Singal
New York Magazine
Originally posted April 14, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

In an unexpected twist, we may even find that recognizing our luck increases our good fortune. Social scientists have been studying gratitude intensively for almost two decades, and have found that it produces a remarkable array of physical, psychological, and social changes. Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis and Michael McCullough of the University of Miami have been among the most prolific contributors to this effort. In one of their collaborations, they asked a first group of people to keep diaries in which they noted things that had made them feel grateful, a second group to note things that had made them feel irritated, and a third group to simply record events. After 10 weeks, the researchers reported dramatic changes in those who had noted their feelings of gratitude. The newly grateful had less frequent and less severe aches and pains and improved sleep quality. They reported greater happiness and alertness. They described themselves as more outgoing and compassionate, and less likely to feel lonely and isolated.

The article is here.

The thought father: Psychologist Daniel Kahneman on luck

By Richard Godwin
The London Evening Standard
Originally published March 18, 2014

Here are two excerpt:

Through a series of zany experiments involving roulette wheels and loaded dice, Tversky and Kahneman showed just how easily we can be led into making irrational decisions — even judges sentencing criminals were influenced by being shown completely random numbers. They also showed the sinister effects of priming (how, when people are “primed” with images of money, they behave in a more selfish way). Many such mental illusions still have an effect when subjects are explicitly warned to look out for them. “If it feels right, we go along with it,” as Kahneman says. It is usually afterwards that we engage our System 2s if at all, to provide reasons for acting as we did after the fact.

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Do teach yourself to think long-term. The “focusing illusion” makes the here and now appear the most pressing concern but that can lead to skewed results.

Do be fair. Research shows that employers who are unjust are punished by reduced productivity, and unfair prices lead to a loss in sales.

Do co-operate. What Kahneman calls “bias blindness” means it’s easier to recognise the errors of others than our own so ask for constructive criticism and be prepared to call out others on what they could improve.

The entire article is here.

On Privilege and Luck, or Why Success Breeds Success

By Ed Yong
The National Geographic
Originally published May 28, 2014

Ask successful people about the secrets of their success, and you’ll probably answers like passion, hard work, skill, focus, and having great ideas. Very few people, if any, would reply with “privilege and luck”. We’re often blind to these factors and they make for less inspiring stories. But time and again, we see that the advantages that give us a head-start and the accidents that ease our path can make or break a career.

In 1968, sociologist Robert Merton noted that in several areas of science, advantage accumulates. Well-known scientists, for example, are more likely to get further recognition than equally productive peers of lesser renown. Merton called this the Matthew effect after a biblical verse that says “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

The entire story is here.