![[Home]](http://www.bayleshanks.com/cartoonbayle.png)
some random hypotheses that i have.
---
a few times the following happened. I was asleep, and in the middle of a dream, then i'd wake up for no particular reason, and would be lying in bed, aware and placid, for what seemed like a minute or so until some noise occurred that would have woken me up. I think what actually happened is the following. Sometimes when we are dreaming, we are parallel processing. Simultaneously one thread of consciousness is dreaming, and another thread is lying there in bed being aware of external stimuli and screening them for something that should wake us up. Usually only the memories of the dreaming thread are stored into long-term memory (and those very weakly, so that we don't get confused between our dreaming and real memories). But when a noise wakes us up, the thread that was lying in bed and listening becomes dominant, and then it's memories get stored. Its memories only go back a minute or so (short-term memory; because further than that, memories weren't getting stored). So there is an illusion that i just happened to wake up before the noise, when in fact it is the noise that woke me.
---
todo: does the following really below in this file?
when using language we are overly focused on binary classifications, and on notions of a single proximate cause. Setting aside the problems of scale (i threw the basketball vs my hand pushed the basketball vs the atoms in my hand ...) and of context, things can still have multiple causes, greater and lesser perhaps, but without any one of them being either necessary or sufficient. Eg why did person A win the election over person B? Well, person A appealed to community X with their position on issue I1, and also appealed to community Y with their position on issue I2, etc. You also might mix in different types of causes; person A appealed to communities X and Y with their positions on issues I1 and I2, respectively, but they also were tacticly better at using data for the purpose of directly scarce money to energize their base with get-out-the-vote efforts, etc.
I think that one instance of this is in intentions and actions. We think of our actions as being driven by a single conscious goal. Research has cast doubt on the 'conscious' part. But also possibly the 'single' part, as we've seen there are all sorts of small 'irrational' effects that can influence some small proportion of action choices, although you might object that these are merely other 'causes' not really goals. In everyday language we still speak as if there is an injective mapping from intentions to actions. I conjecture that it's probably really something like a vector of various goals/intention weights, and then you calculate a vector of how well each action choice would serve each goal/intention, and then take the dot product with the goal/intention weights.
This conjecture may have ethical implications; sometimes we think that action X is OK if your "intentions are pure", that is, if you chose to do X for a benevolent reason, but evil if you chose to do X for selfish reasons. But if my conjecture is right, there is no binary purity to intention, there are just various non-zero intention weights. So, when you make a choice to do something that you do that serves both altruistic and selfish ends, it's probably never the case that you were 100% disinterested in the selfish part. A better question might be whether the altrustic part would have been sufficient by itself to determine you to make the same choice; but this is probably rarely literally true either, there's probably a host of small third factors that we're unaware of, contributing to the sum (eg are you hungry? are you in a good mood? etc).
Perhaps the best we can do is to ask if we had removed the selfish intention, would the same choice have been chosen. But this is probably too harsh; consider a situation in which neither the altruistic nor the selfish motivation would have been on their own sufficient to cause you to act, but in combination they are (in conjunction with a host of smaller third factors) sufficient.
---
p 75 "Consider a guess-the-number game in which players must guess a number between 0 and 100. The person whose guess comes closest to two-thirds of the average guess of all contestants wins. That’s it. And imagine there is a prize: the reader who comes closest to the correct answer wins a pair of business-class tickets for a flight between London and New York. The Financial Times actually held this contest in 1997, at the urging of Richard Thaler, a pioneer of behavioral economics. If I were reading the Financial Times in 1997, how would I win those tickets? I might start by thinking that because anyone can guess anything between 0 and 100 the guesses will be scattered randomly. That would make the average guess 50. And two-thirds of 50 is 33. So I should guess 33. At this point, I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. I’m sure I’ve nailed it. But before I say “final answer,” I pause, think about the other contestants, and it dawns on me that they went through the same thought process as I did. Which means they all guessed 33 too. Which means the average guess is not 50. It’s 33. And two-thirds of 33 is 22. So my first conclusion was actually wrong. I should guess 22. Now I’m feeling very clever indeed. But wait! The other contestants also thought about the other contestants, just as I did. Which means they would have all guessed 22. Which means the average guess is actually 22. And two-thirds of 22 is about 15. So I should … See where this is going? Because the contestants are aware of each other, and aware that they are aware, the number is going to keep shrinking until it hits the point where it can no longer shrink. That point is 0. So that’s my final answer. And I will surely win. My logic is airtight. And I happen to be one of those highly educated people who is familiar with game theory, so I know 0 is called the Nash equilibrium solution. QED. The only question is who will come with me to London. Guess what? I’m wrong. In the actual contest, some people did guess 0, but not many, and 0 was not the right answer. It wasn’t even close to right. The average guess of all the contestants was 18.91, so the winning guess was 13. How did I get this so wrong? It wasn’t my logic, which was sound. I failed because I only looked at the problem from one perspective—the perspective of logic. Who are the other contestants? Are they all the sort of people who would think about this carefully, spot the logic, and pursue it relentlessly to the final answer of 0? If they were Vulcans, certainly. But they are humans. Maybe we can assume that Financial Times readers are a tad smarter than the general public, and better puzzle solvers, but they can’t all be perfectly rational. Surely some of them will be cognitively lazy and fail to realize that the other contestants are working through the problem just as they are. They will settle on 33 as their final answer. Maybe some others will spot the logic and get to 22, but they may not keep thinking, so they will stop there. And that’s just what happened—33 and 22 were the most popular answers."
a paper on this happening in three newspaper contests:
"The hypothesis of iterated levels of reasoning predicts that choices will be clustered around the values 33.33, 22.22, 14.81, 9.88, ... and 0."
in one newspaper, the average was 18.91, winning number: 13; in the second newspaper, average 25.47, winning number: 16.99; in the third newspaper, average 22,08, winning number: 14,7.
note, then, that a good guess in this case would have been to go to level3 (guess that most people will think that others will guess 33 (level2 reasoning), therefore they will guess 22.22, therefore the average will be 22.22, therefore you guess 14.81), even though that's not exactly right; some people will guess 33, a few will guess greater than 33, and some will guess 14.81 and some will guess 0.
The paper above, [1], has a table (Table 3, section 7, PDF page 26), estimating how many ppl engage in level0, level1 (33.33), level2 (22.22), level3 (14.81), levelmax (0/1) reasoning in various conditions (the newspapers, but also other experiments); they find level0 to range between 10.5-34% of the popularion, level1 10.60-38%, level2 9.5-27%, level3 7.5-36%, levelmax 0-55% . Taking out the greatest and least number in each range (separately for each range), the ranges are: level0 23-30.5% level1 12-22%, level2 12-23%, level3 9-13%, levelmax 7-30%.
They have a model that predicts level0 21%, level1 18%, level2 17.5%, level3 18.12%, levelmax 25% (note that the model is predicting near the higher end of the range-with-two-extreme-values-eliminated for level3 and levelmax, and the lower end for level0; so the model is perhaps erring on the side of assuming more rationality than there sometimes is).
The full numbers (in percentages) are:
[[33.99, 37.88, 18.01, 9.99, 0.00 ], [30.52, 19.63, 26.88, 8.78, 14.19 ], [22.81, 22.31, 11.73, 36.01, 7.13], [10.64, 17.00, 9.53, 7.74, 55.09], [25.06, 12.30, 19.00, 13.30, 30.35], [27.12, 10.60, 22.95, 12.05, 27.29]]
(columns: level0, level1, level2, level3, levelmax)
and their model:
[21.32, 18.23, 17.50, 18.12, 24.82]
The geometric mean (in the form of the exp(mean(log))) isn't directly appropriate, because there is a 0 in there, and log(0) = -inf. But maybe it isn't appropriate anyways, since these are bounded quantities. The arithmetic mean (excluding their model) is:
array([ 25.02333333, 19.95333333, 18.01666667, 14.645 , 22.34166667])
which is pretty close to their model.
note that this result is an example of where "Homo Economicus" is a bad model (as noted in [2]); a rational player assuming that all other players are rational (and that they all know this) will pick 0.
---
http://kisi.deu.edu.tr//timucin.yalcinkaya/From%20Homo%20Economicus%20to%20Homo%20Sapiens.pdf
" Journal of Economic Perspectives-Volume 14, Number 1-Winter 2000-Pages 133-141 From Homo Economicus to Homo Sapiens Richard H. Thaler esponding to a request for a forecast is especially tricky for someone like me, who specializes in other people's biases. Research in psychology suggests that certain biases are very likely to creep into my forecasts about the future of economics (or anything else). 1. Optimism (and wishful thinking). We all tend to be optimistic about the future. On the first day of my MBA class on decision-making at the University of Chicago, every single student expects to get an above-the-median grade, yet half are inevi- tably disappointed. This optimism will induce me to predict that economics will become more like I want it to be.
2. Overconfidence. In a related phenomenon, people believe they are better forecasters than they really are. Ask people for 90 percent confidence limits for the estimates of various general knowledge questions and the correct answers will lie within the limits less than 70 percent of the time. Overconfidence will induce me to make forecasts that are bolder than they should be.
3. The False Consensus Effect. We tend to think others are just like us. My colleague, George Wu, asked his students two questions: Do you have a cell phone? What percentage of the class has a cell phone? Cell phone owners thought 65 percent of the class had mobile phones, while the immobile phoners thought only 40 percent did. (The right answer was about halfway in between.) The false consensus effect will trap me into thinking that other economists will agree with me-20 years of contrary evidence notwithstanding.
4. The Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we can't imagine ever thinking otherwise. This makes it hard for us to realize that what we know may be less than obvious to others who are less informed. The curse of knowledge will lead me to think that others will have read the same articles I have, and have learned the same lessons from them (lessons I now take for granted), when in fact others have been busy reading entirely different material, and have never even heard of the findings that have so influenced my thinking. "
---
i read the following word puzzle by Stanley Newman in AARP magazine:
"MUSICAL DUET Delete the last two letters in the name fo Beatles drummer RINGO STARR and rearrange the remaining letters to get a term for someone who plays another instrument. "
First i thought about words for someone who plays another instrument. Then i just looked at the letters "RINGO STA" on the page and tried to think of rearrangements of those letters that might be someone who plays another instrument. Over a few minutes, i noticed that the word "STRING" is in there (but the only two leftover letters there are OA), and "STARING", and SING, but i didn't make much progress from there. Then i started methodically going thru each of those letters and thinking of it as the first letter and seeing what else came up. Then i thought again about words for someone who plays another instrument and noticed a frustration that things like STRING OA weren't working because the ending isnt right, and then i noticed that many words for someone who plays another instrument share endings. I first focused on the ending IST, like GUITARIST and BASSIST, and noticed that the IST letters were in there, so then i took them out, yielding RNGOA, then i methodically rearranged that by picking various starting letters within RNGOA and then finding completions that obeyed what seemed to me like the rules of English for when vowels are needed. In manner, i found the answer.
So, what is the general cognitive strategy employed? My initial idea of just trying to intuit the solution didn't work; some methodical enumeration of possibilities was necessary. However, the key was in reducing the search space by trying the hypothesis of the IST ending (and, the further but more obvious reduction of the search space by using the regularities of English to not bother with combinations that put too many consonants next to each other). So how did i think of the IST thing? It's because i noticed a regularity in the possibilities that i was generating; many of them ended in IST. This suggests the following cognitive strategy:
---
