Catching up to my hand written journal

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Catching up on my notebook, notes on: indulgences, financial assets, sovereign default, hierarchy, responsibility, free will, reason or excuse, interruption, implementation intentions, Keith E. Stanovich, Peter Gollwitzer, outrage porn, proselytizing, BRAC, Fazle Hasan Abed, enjoyment, rationality

In theory, each one of these points could be a blog post, but I have to clear out my notebook, so consider these placeholders.

Note 1: Adam Carolla and loving Red Wine

Adam Carolla talking about red wine.  He loves it so much, that he takes great pains not to abuse it, so he will never risk having it taken away from him forever.  This should be how I treat a lot of the things I eat and drink, like beef jerky, sweets, coffee, Monster Energy drinks.  Taken to an extreme, this could include internet porn and masturbation.  Some days later, the Upright Citizen's Brigade hosted the Adam Carolla podcast, and Ian Roberts talked about binge eating and binge drinking.  Using Carolla's advice, the pleasure you derive from eating and drinking should make you careful not to binge, because that is a path where others could rob you of those pleasures through rehab!


Note 2: Really existing financial assets, and what low interest rates and sovereign default really mean.

The Economist, October 10th 2009, p 76, Buttonwood - The Nature of Wealth.

http://www.economist.com/business-finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_TQVRSNGN  (subscription only)

[paraphrasing] Financial assets are not "wealth", but a claim on future real wealth.

My idea, to develop more later, is that "really existing" financial assets:

1) Pay interest as a reward for an obligation, under pain of punishing penalty, to not withdraw before a maturity date.

2) When a withdrawal is made, it is in chits that can only be used in a regularly scheduled auction of a fraction of outstanding assets that cannot risk drastically devaluing the whole.

3) Unused chits have a severe negative interest rate.

3) Transparency in preparation for future potential obligations is the only basis of relative soundness.

Under this scheme, paper money and a central bank goal of low interest rates is an appeal to the animal spirits of the monied masses, to make as much wealth as possible available for manipulation by bankers.  During "normal" times, this works very well to make capital available to those who will use it best, but, this is unsustainable, and so there is a predictable cycle of crashes by way of sovereign default, on the order of every 200 years or so.

Gold backed money is not a solution, because all you have done is added a superfluous level of indirection (you cannot eat gold), and you have denied the central bankers the ability to come arbitrarily close to a crash from time to time, while avoiding devastation of the full crash.  The gold standard is like an airplane designed to explode if it comes within 200 feet of the ground without an airport runway underneath.  The knowledge of the explosive charges will force the pilots to fly with more care, but no human could condone killing people when there is even a small chance of a maneuver for restorative assent.  So the cycle is 200 years between sovereign default with paper money, instead of every 225 years on the gold standard, with the gold standard assuring that 120 years out of the 225 are lived in sheer terror and deprivation.

Note 3: No right to the desired outcome, only a right to the prerequisite work

I forgot I already wrote this up: http://manuelmoeg.blogspot.com/2010/02/no-right-to-outcome-only-right-to-work.html

Note 4: Is my current action or inaction in opposition to any conceivable personal hierarchy of values and goals?

I am lying in bed.  I want to stay in bed.  I know, rationally, that my current inaction is in opposition to any conceivable personal hierarchy of values and goals.  So get out of bed now, dummy.

Note 5: It is not free will, it is a motivating sense of responsibility, that is the thing.

Because free will does not exist.  It is being hunted down the same way scientific inquiry hunted down vitalism [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism ], or the supernatural origin of man, or the supernatural origin of the world, or miracles, or the Jesus of the Scriptures, or primitive gods demanding sacrifice, etc.

But we need to explain differences in outcomes, so we care about a motivating sense of responsibility, and the rigor that demands to perform due the responsibility.

Note 6: Is what I am currently doing or not doing have a reason or merely an excuse?

Always because of reasons, never time to entertain excuses.

Note 7: To do right by a hierarchy of values and goals, you need the ability to interrupt merely coping or distracting activities.

Maybe to mentally visualize the interruption process, as practice.  Also, Peter Gollwitzer's implementation intentions - "mark the cue-action sequence with the conscious, verbal declaration: "when X occurs, I will do Y"."  [ from Keith E. Stanovich's What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, page 200, referring to Gollwitzer P M 1999 Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54, 493-503. Gollwitzer P M, Schaal B 1998 Metacognition in action: The importance of implementation intentions. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 124-136 ]

Note 8: Avoid Outrage Porn

So many left-wing websites are simply outrage porn.  I am attracted to them because I agree with the viewpoint, but it is nothing but a coping mechanism for anxiety and a distraction.  No time for outrage porn.

Note 9: Free Will as a very scarce resource

To describe the process of enforcing motivating sense of responsibility, we use the language of "free will", without making any claim about free will existing (good thing, too, because it doesn't).

The moments when we take responsibility to rise above the constraints of situation, we call this a moment when we can exercise free will.  These moments are few and far in between.  They can be imagined as a single spark of energy & life.  What a terrific sin to squander them!

Note 10: Proselytizing for Rationality is very suspect.

If you have an agenda for rationality, your first subject should be yourself.  Your energies to make yourself more rational will never find a satiation.  So proselytizing to other for the cause of rationality is suspect, and probably a way to excuse yourself from the rigors of rationality.

Note 11: BRAC - Fazle Hasan Abed

The Economist p60 Feb 20th, 2010 "BRAC in business" - Fazle Hasan Abed has built one of the world’s most commercially-minded and successful NGOs

quote:

In a book on BRAC entitled “Freedom from Want”, Ian Smillie calls it “undoubtedly the largest and most variegated social experiment in the developing world. The spread of its work dwarfs any other private, government or non-profit enterprise in its impact on development.”

BRAC pays far more attention to research and “continuous learning” than do most NGOs. David Korten, author of “When Corporations Rule the World”, called it “as near to a pure example of a learning organisation as one is likely to find.”

Note 12: Failure of hierarchy of values and goals with perverse outcomes in the particular case

I have no idea what I meant here.  Just typing what I wrote longhand.  I think I already spoke to this above - I think it is more of not tolerating any coping or distraction that cannot possibly be congruent with any possible personal hierarchy of values and goals.

[ Edit 3/8/10 ]
I remember now.  Must have just woken up when wrote that in notebook.  It means that indulging in something that is in violation with any possible reasonable hierarchy of values and goals, will lead you to a place where you are denied the opportunity to every indulge in that thing ever again.

Note 13: Reason & Rationality follows Responsibility

I already spoke to this above.  Typing what I wrote longhand: More important than free will is self imposed burden of responsibility and confidence in being able to make meaning choices followed by meaningful commitment followed by meaningful action.

Just realized: I have a "duty" to enjoy myself, under my so-called "self imposed burden of responsibility", or else I just will not do it.  Hey, man, have fun, keep fun close, Mister Responsibility Man.

OK, Reason & Rationality follows Responsibility, got it - what then IS reason and rationality?

1) Avoid failure modes & make progress toward achievement of goals consistent with values.

2) Remove the contradictory from the set of goals & values

3) Improve the consistency of the goals and values, using every new situation as an opportunity to do such.

That is it!  Up to date dumping out notebook!

Free Will and Sloppy Dualism

Very thought provoking post by Mark C. Chu-Carroll, talking about sloppy thinking with regards to "free will". Sloppy Dualism on Bad Astronomy : Good Math, Bad Math

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This is what I call "sloppy dualism". Classic dualism is the belief that there are two separate parts to our beings: bodies, which are physical, and spirits, which are something else. Phil has been very clear in the past: he utterly rejects religious beliefs in "spirits" or "souls"; dualism is just religious nonsense. But the implication of what he's saying tries to sneak dualism in by a back door. It's almost like a "god of the gaps" argument; a "free will of the gaps" kind of dualism. He's claiming to argue in favor of a purely scientific universe, with no room for the supernatural. But he tries to sneak a little bit of space in to the fuzziness of how things work to make room for his own free will.

Mark calls me out, because I have been guilty of allowing my concept of "free will" to have more latitude than I allow my concept of "God". Some very good comments:

I agree with you on dualism and the criticism of Phil. There's no reason that certain things like consciousness and free will should be 'special'. Certainly the same laws of physics fundamentally apply to everything and I don't think any special exceptions are necessary to explain choice; emergence is sufficient physical explanation for me. So I'm not seeing the need for invoking anything extra, either by claiming materialism but making exceptions, or claiming dualism. As far as I can see my position requires me to admit that free will is (probably) an illusion, but I don't have a problem with that. The world is complex enough that I wouldn't notice the difference.

Posted by: Archena October 2, 2009 3:34 PM

There are different contexts in which will is discussed. It makes a lot of sense in the context of human intent, a context in which Phil's will was free, because he was working absent coercion or threat. It makes much less sense in the context of physics, where for the most part, its proponents cannot even define what free will means. They simultaneously want it to be non-random but also not a function of the state of the person who makes a decision. The problem is that there isn't much conceptual space between those alternatives. In the context of physics, the opposite of deterministic is probabilistic. And while it is quite likely that we are not fully deterministic systems, given that physics isn't fully deterministic, the involvement of the random flip of coins doesn't help the philosophical case for a mystical free will.

Posted by: Russell October 2, 2009 12:17 PM I ended up with a much more skeptical, cynical, and limited concept of "free will". I still think it is best studies across the species, across time periods on the order of a decade, and in spoken in terms of morality and abstraction and action.

This started as a posting about Statistical Causality...

Interesting blog posts back and forth between Don Rubin, Judea Pearl, and Andrew Gelman. I cannot understand the original point of contention between Don Rubin and Judea Pearl. I have no idea what "M-bias", "controlling for pre-treatment versus post-treatment variables" mean. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/07/disputes_about.html

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Happily, the fundamental point of disagreement seems to be getting clear with a comment by Philip Dawid (who offers a very nice on-line document "Principles of Statistical Causality" which covers a lot of concepts in only 94 pages). This is a very clear summary of what is meant by "causal inference":

Like Pearl, I like to think of "causal inference" as the task of inferring what would happen under a hypothetical intervention, say F_E = e, that sets the value of the exposure E at e, when the data available are collected, not under the target "interventional regime", but under some different "observational regime". We could code this regime as F_E = idle. ... It should be obvious that, even to begin to think about the task of using data collected under one regime to infer about the properties of another, we need to make (and should attempt to justify!) assumptions as to how the regimes are related.

(Emphasis on the turn of phase that caught Andrew Gelman's eye) What is the nature of the discipline of "statistical causal modeling"? Beats me. I have the idea of several DAGs (gaps filled in with plausible causal contributors), several multi-dimensional collected sample distributions (gaps filled in with smoothing or naive-Bayesian techniques), several simulations based on plausible natural or un-natural laws (simulations providing multi-dimensional distributions). Between creatures of all three types, we test them against historical data, future data, and intervention experiments. They fight against themselves, and only a few remain. I have the idea of defining a distribution as the opportunity to open a sample portal to an alternate universe to the same sample stream. You can open sample portals at a certain rate, so the total number of samples available to you has a rate that increases as the square of time. You desire the sample portals to all have the same correct driving distribution. Now, obviously, you cannot actually create sample portals to alternate universes. So you create more fake sample portals. Each has the possibility of one or more failure modes. Taken all together, these form a pessimistic analysis. Human action is inherently optimistic, so, take the opportunity to make explicit biases of personality and human real-world population studies of life outcomes consistent with living a happy and fulfilled life. The third leg of the stool is a model of human effectiveness:

• rationality,
• choice,
• free will,
• changes in capability,
• changes in habitual action,
• goal-directed action,
• effectiveness,
• consciousness,
• self-knowledge/introspection,
• knowledge of the world,
• consistency between behavior and professed mental abstractions of desired behavior,
• and morality -

leading to the outcome of a happy and fulfilled life. That is what I got right now. The way to study how "human action is inherently optimistic" is with happiness research (covered in Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness, and the sections on happy outcomes in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational). The model of human effectiveness is based on there being only a few chances over time for exercising free-will. We greatly limit the role of free-will, because human behavior is better explained by:

• habitual actions,
• personality,
• IQ,
• daily exercised capability,
• daily exercised responses,
• environment,
• etc.

We expect to see meaningful change caused by free-will events over the course of 10 years - just because there are so few meaningful free-will events during those many years.

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Like Julian Jaynes arguing in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that consciousness only came into existence 3000 years ago from stresses on growing populations searching and competing for sustaining resources, I don't think that free-will is a capability of all humans since Homo sapiens originated 200,000 years ago. I think meaningful free-will also is a recent phenomenon. And I don't think it is expressed in all people - it only gets exercised under a peculiar stress of personality and environment, when the capability exists. I reject the idea that free-will is simply random behavior, or the absence of a mechanism for the deterministic prediction of behavior. It cannot be meaningfully separated from these: rationality, goal-directed action, effectiveness, consciousness, self-knowledge/introspection, consistency between behavior and professed mental abstractions of desired behavior, morality, and other issues. The reason for the need to consider time periods on the scale of a decade is that free-will events are the residue of actions and behaviors that cannot be explained by simpler means. Because it is a residue, we are only interested if there is a over-riding consistency and progression - because we don't want to give the label of "free-will" to an odd-ball collection of junk. That's enough for now. Added: Andrew Gelman explores issues further: More on Pearl's and Rubin's frameworks for causal inference He describes the idea of using Minimal Rubin, Full Rubin, Minimal Pearl, Full Pearl as techniques for statistical causality. And this note on the benefit of Rubin's approach:

Be explicit about data collection. For example, if you're interested in the effect of inflation on unemployment, don't just talk about using inflation as a treatment; instead, specify specific treatments you might consider (adding these to the graphs, in keeping with Pearl's principles). This also goes for missing data. ...

I don't understand the section on "Controlling for intermediate outcomes". Pearl then contributes a long and difficult comment. Gelman and Pearl argue over this: "the correct thing to do is to ignore the subgroup identity" - I just don't understand this at all.

Free will - Search for it among failure

What does free will look like?

• Image by greekadman via Flickr

  Externally Perceived Failure (or at least lack of perceived success)
• Externally Perceived Failure
• Externally Perceived Failure
• Externally Perceived Failure
• Private Moral Success
• Externally Perceived Failure
• Externally Perceived Failure
• Externally Perceived Failure
• Externally Perceived Failure
• Higher, Private Moral Success
• Externally Perceived Failure... etc.
• Rinse and Repeat

Anything else is indistinguishable from simple diversity of habitual actions, or actions triggered by environment. This has to do with having the guts to risk failure, to rise to the challenge of moral goals.

More on Free Will

Also, actions should be statistically unlikely (based on typical behaviors of humans in general, or the socio-economic group belonged to, or historical -- typical behaviors of person before made change in prescriptive personal morality code) if not somehow statistically unlikely, not free will I think I am filling in the cracks, have it pretty much there, put down

More notes on Free Will

Free Will and Consciousness -- emergent properties. Yeah, best understood as emergent properties. But, yeah, doesn't help that people regularly mistake for Free Will things that are strictly and demonstratively deterministic on outer causes. Just admit this from the start, say what we are most interested in is studying Free Will as an emergent property, and define it as the mixture of (A) capriciousness and (B) obedience to the consequences of internal moral state. (Definition of "moral state" -- ask them some questions about optimal prescriptive ethics, ask them about the implied actions based on those prescriptive ethics. Just ask them -- and record the answers. Get them to talk about optimal prescriptive ethics and the implied actions. Nobody is philosophic enough to lie to deceive here -- the tremendous urge to avoid cognitive dissonance prevents answering completely falsely.) Last note: consider the hierarchy of desires, goals, wants, needs (with automatically satisfied impulses on the bottom of the hierarchy). Free Will presupposes this hierarchy. Yeah, just figure out the least amount of free will I need for my arguments, knowing I can easily demonstrate the immense difficulty of proving away that small amount of free will.

Notes on Free Will, Rescued from Pownce

What about Free Will? (I have to work in what is meant by "Choose". But, basically, a pragmatic take on Free Will -- people who act as if they have and believe in Free Will are measurably more Effective than those who act as if they lack or otherwise disbelieve in Free Will.) ((Hmm, yes, the people who most stridently deny Free Will are pretty sorry creatures.)) Is that it? Do I tie the definition of Effective with Free Will (by definition, you are Effective if you (A) Believe and Act as if you have Free Will, and (B)...) Yeah, it isn't encouraging that the people who demonstrate the most energy spent to deny free will are some sad and sorry creatures. Also, those that deny free will only consider very short time frames in their arguments. I have held discussions in my head, over decades. Even the most fleeting sparks of free will would have had the ability to influence dozens or hundreds of times, in that span. Choice, Volition, Desire -- mixed together -- over a long span (at least a thousand eye-blinks) -- can create a mixture of uncertainty & certainty, morality & immorality, fickleness & steadfastness -- that is indistinguishable from free will. If the argument against free will is so strong, why do the people use all the tools of the art of controversy, and consider the trivial and the fleeting, instead of the significant over long periods of time. It is like arguing that there exists no large pile of leaves -- because one leaf is not a large pile, two leaves are not a large pile, three leaves are not a large pile... and adding a single leaf to a small pile cannot make it large... QED (Obviously, if the argument is strong, why not directly attack the existence of "the large pile of leaves". If the argument against free will is so strong, why not assert that Melville writing Moby Dick demonstrated nothing you could call volition. Or a human constructing a personally prescriptive ethics over a lifetime demonstrates nothing you could call volition.) Similar people in similar situations (as similar as we can try to make them) exhibit complex behavior over long stretches of time that are a mixture of (A) capriciousness and (B) obedience to the consequences of internal moral state. (Definition of "moral state" -- ask them some questions about optimal prescriptive ethics, ask them about the implied actions based on those prescriptive ethics. Just ask them -- and record the answers.) We call this mixture "Free Will". (Note: this turned out stronger than I expected. Is this my argument for free will? I have an argument, not based on work-a-day pragmatics?) (Back to my original train of thought...) This might be the whole of my argument to not deny free will. My argument for free will, is purely practical. It is demonstratively effective (helpful for a person to achieve goals). (I gotta think this out more, my quick edit turned out stronger than I expected. I wasn't expecting to type out such a good definition of Free Will so quickly.)

Is Day One really about Iteration?

Maybe Day One for everything should be about Iteration. We like Iterative solutions, where this is one cycle of the iteration:

1. Informed by Goals, Standards, References (regarding External or Internal)
2. Observe Situation, Environment, Available Resources (External or Internal)
3. Evaluate
4. Choose Action
5. Act
6. Observe Effectiveness of Action
7. Invitation to Re-consider Goals, Standards, References
8. Repeat

Another point: we don't take anything to be so fundamental that we do not regularly schedule re-evaluation, perhaps to replace it. Because we want to avoid treating something deficient as fundamental, particularly when it only becomes deficient as the situation changes. (I have to work in what is meant by "Choose". But, basically, a pragmatic take on Free Will -- people who act as if they have and believe in Free Will are measurably more Effective than those who act as if they lack or otherwise disbelieve in Free Will.) ((Hmm, yes, the people who most stridently deny Free Will are pretty sorry creatures.))