Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality - Scientific facts

Robert Cialdini's Influence: Science and Practice

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Influence: Science and Practice (ISBN 0-321-18895-0) is a Psychology book from 2003 examining the key ways people can be influenced by "Compliance Professionals". The book's author is Robert B. Cialdini, Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. The key premise of the book is that, in a complex world where people are overloaded with more information than they can deal with, people fall back on a decision making approach based on generalizations. These generalizations develop because they allow people to usually act in a correct manner with a limited amount of thought and time. However, they can be exploited and effectively turned into weapons by those who know them to influence others to act certain ways.

The findings in the book are backed up by numerous empirical studies conducted in the fields of Psychology, Marketing, Economics, Anthropology and Social Science.

The author also worked undercover in many compliance fields such as car sales and door-to-door sales.

Influence: Science and Practice - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Planning fallacy

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The planning fallacy is a tendency for people and organizations to underestimate how long they will need to complete a task, even when they have experience of similar tasks over-running. The term was first proposed in a 1979 paper by Daniel Kahnemanand Amos Tversky. Since then the effect has been found for predictions of a wide variety of tasks, including tax form completion, school work, furniture assembly, computer programming and origami. In 2003, Lovallo and Kahneman proposed an expanded definition as the tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions. According to this definition, the planning fallacy results in not only time overruns, but also cost overruns and benefit shortfalls. The bias only affects predictions about one's own tasks; when uninvolved observers predict task completion times, they show a pessimistic bias, overestimating the time taken

Planning fallacy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956

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The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was the name of a 1956 undertaking now considered the seminal event for artificial intelligence as a field.

Organised by John McCarthy (then at Dartmouth College) and formally proposed by McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon, the proposal is credited with introducing the term 'artificial intelligence'.

The project lasted a month, and it was essentially an extended brainstorming session. The introduction states:

“

We propose that a 2 month, 10 man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.

”

(McCarthy et al. 1955)

The proposal goes on to discuss computers, natural language processing, neural networks, theory of computation, abstraction and creativity (these areas within the field of artificial intelligence are considered still relevant to the work of the field). According to Stottler Henke Associates, besides the proposal's authors, attendees at the conference included Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Trenchard More, Arthur Samuel, Herbert A. Simon, and Allen Newell.

Dartmouth Conferences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fundamental attribution error

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In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) is people's tendency to place an undue emphasis on internal characteristics to explain someone else's behavior in a given situation, rather than thinking about external situational. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior—where situational factors are more easily recognized and can thus be taken into consideration. The flip side of this error is the actor–observer bias, in which people tend to overemphasize the role of a situation in their behaviors and underemphasize the role of their own personalities.

As a simple example, consider a situation where Alice, a driver, is about to pass through an intersection. Her light turns green, and she begins to accelerate when another car drives through the red light and crosses in front of her. The fundamental attribution error may lead her to think that the driver of the other car was an unskilled or reckless driver. This will be an error if the other driver had a good reason for running the light, such as rushing a patient to the hospital. If Alice had been driving the other car, she would have understood that the situation called for speed at the cost of safety, but when seeing it from the outside she was inclined to believe that the behavior of the other driver reflected their fundamental nature (having poor driving skills or a reckless attitude).

The phrase was coined by Lee Ross some years after a now classic experiment by Edward E. Jones and Victor Harris (1967). Ross argued in a popular paper that the fundamental attribution error forms the conceptual bedrock for the field of social psychology.

Fundamental attribution error - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fermi Calculation

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In Physics or engineering education, a Fermi problem, Fermi question, or Fermi estimate is an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis,approximation, and the importance of clearly identifying one's assumptions. Named after physicist Enrico Fermi, such problems typically involve making justified guesses about quantities that seem impossible to compute given limited available information.

Fermi problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Francis Bacon

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Sir Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St. Alban, Kt., QC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, essayist, and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.

Bacon has been called the creator of empiricism. His works established and popularized inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today.

Bacon was knighted in 1603, and created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621; as he died without heirs, both peerages became extinct upon his death. He famously died by contracting pneumonia while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.

Francis Bacon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arbitrage

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In economics and finance, arbitrage (/ˈ ɑr b ɨ t r ɑː ʒ /) is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices. When used by academics, an arbitrage is a transaction that involves no negative cash flow at any probabilistic or temporal state and a positive cash flow in at least one state; in simple terms, it is the possibility of a risk-free profit after transaction costs. For instance, an arbitrage is present when there is the opportunity to instantaneously buy low and sell high.

In principle and in academic use, an arbitrage is risk-free; in common use, as in statistical arbitrage, it may refer to expected profit, though losses may occur, and in practice, there are always risks in arbitrage, some minor (such as fluctuation of prices decreasing profit margins), some major (such as devaluation of a currency or derivative). In academic use, an arbitrage involves taking advantage of differences in price of a single asset or identical cash-flows; in common use, it is also used to refer to differences between similar assets (relative value or convergence trades), as in merger arbitrage.

People who engage in arbitrage are called arbitrageurs (/ˌ ɑr b ɨ t r ɑː ˈ ʒ ɜr /)—such as a bank or brokerage firm. The term is mainly applied to trading in financial instruments, such as bonds, stocks, derivatives, commodities and currencies.

Arbitrage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seigniorage

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Seigniorage (/ˈ s eɪ n j ər ɪ dʒ /, also spelled seignorage or seigneurage) is the difference between the value of money and the cost to produce and distribute it. The term can be applied in the following ways:

Seigniorage derived from specie—metal coins—is a tax, added to the total price of a coin (metal content and production costs), that a customer of the mint had to pay to the mint, and that was sent to the sovereign of the political area.
Seigniorage derived from notes is more indirect, being the difference between interest earned on securities acquired in exchange for bank notes and the costs of producing and distributing those notes.

Seigniorage is a convenient source of revenue for some governments.
Seigniorage - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bystander effect

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The bystander effect is a social psychological phenomenon that refers to cases in which individuals do not offer any means of help to a victim when other people are present. The probability of help is inversely related to the number of bystanders. In other words, the greater the number of bystanders, the less likely it is that any one of them will help. Several variables help to explain why the bystander effect occurs. These variables include: ambiguity, cohesiveness and diffusion of responsibility.
Bystander effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Faster-than-light (FTL) Signalling

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Faster-than-light (also superluminal or FTL) communications and travel refer to the propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light. Under the special theory of relativity, a particle (that has rest mass) with subluminal velocity needs infinite energy to accelerate to the speed of light, although special relativity does not forbid the existence of particles that travel faster than light at all times (tachyons).

On the other hand, what some physicists refer to as "apparent" or "effective" FTL depends on the hypothesis that unusually distorted regions of space time might permit matter to reach distant locations in less time than light could in normal or undistorted space time. Although according to current theories matter is still required to travel subluminally with respect to the locally distorted spacetime region, apparent FTL is not excluded by general relativity.

Examples of FTL proposals are the Alcubierre drive and the traversable wormhole, although their physical plausibility is uncertain.

Faster-than-light - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

To PC or NPC: That is the question

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When it's time to gear up and get LARPing (live action role playing), you have a decision to make. Do you want to play as a PC (player character) or NPC (non-player character)? For most LARPers, there are several factors involved in making this decision.

A PC generally gets to make his or her own choices and become a hero (or villain) on an adventure. An NPC is usually tied to plot and limited in such choices, although there are sometimes phenomenal combat and role play opportunities available to NPCs as well.

To PC or NPC: That is the question - National LARP | Examiner.com

Baconian method

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The Baconian method is the investigative method developed by Sir Francis Bacon. The method was put forward in Bacon's book Novum Organum (1620), or 'New Method', and was supposed to replace the methods put forward in Aristotle's Organon. This method was influential upon the development of scientific method in modern science; but also more generally in the early modern rejection of medieval Aristotelianism.

Bacon's method is an example of the application of inductive reasoning. By reasoning using "induction", Bacon meant the ability to generalize a finding stepwise, based on accumulating data. He advised proceeding by this method, or in other words, by building a case from the ground up. He wrote in the Novum Organum that:

"Our only hope, then is in genuine Induction... There is the same degree of licentiousness and error in forming Axioms, as in abstracting Notions: and that in the first principles, which depend in common induction. Still more is this the case in Axioms and inferior propositions derived from Syllogisms."

Baconian method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Positive Bias

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Just wanted to post this one here, so that I remember to try it with someone next time!!

"This is a game based on a famous experiment called the 2-4-6 task, and this is how it works. I have a rule - known to me, but not to you - which fits some triplets of three numbers, but not others. 2-4-6 is one example of a triplet which fits the rule. In fact... let me write down the rule, just so you know it's a fixed rule, and fold it up and give it to you. Please don't look, since I infer from earlier that you can read upside-down."

The boy said "paper" and "mechanical pencil" to his pouch, and she shut her eyes tightly while he wrote.

"There," said the boy, and he was holding a tightly folded piece of paper. "Put this in your pocket," and she did.

"Now the way this game works," said the boy, "is that you give me a triplet of three numbers, and I'll tell you 'Yes' if the three numbers are an instance of the rule, and 'No' if they're not. I am Nature, the rule is one of my laws, and you are investigating me. You already know that 2-4-6 gets a 'Yes'. When you've performed all the further experimental tests you want - asked me as many triplets as you feel necessary - you stop and guess the rule, and then you can unfold the sheet of paper and see how you did. Do you understand the game?"

"Of course I do," said Hermione.

"Go."

"4-6-8" said Hermione.

"Yes," said the boy.

"10-12-14", said Hermione.

"Yes," said the boy.

Hermione tried to cast her mind a little further afield, since it seemed like she'd already done all the testing she needed, and yet it couldn't be that easy, could it?

"1-3-5."

"Yes."

"Minus 3, minus 1, plus 1."

"Yes."

Hermione couldn't think of anything else to do. "The rule is that the numbers have to increase by two each time."

"Now suppose I tell you," said the boy, "that this test is harder than it looks, and that only 20% of grownups get it right."

Hermione frowned. What had she missed? Then, suddenly, she thought of a test she still needed to do.

"2-5-8!" she said triumphantly.

"Yes."

"10-20-30!"

"Yes."

"The real answer is that the numbers have to go up by the same amount each time. It doesn't have to be 2."

"Very well," said the boy, "take the paper out and see how you did."

Hermione took the paper out of her pocket and unfolded it.

Three real numbers in increasing order, lowest to highest.

Hermione's jaw dropped. She had the distinct feeling of something terribly unfair having been done to her, that the boy was a dirty rotten cheating liar, but when she cast her mind back she couldn't think of any wrong responses that he'd given.

"What you've just discovered is called 'positive bias'," said the boy. "You had a rule in your mind, and you kept on thinking of triplets that should make the rule say 'Yes'. But you didn't try to test any triplets that should make the rule say 'No'. In fact you didn't get a single 'No', so 'any three numbers' could have just as easily been the rule. It's sort of like how people imagine experiments that could confirm their hypotheses instead of trying to imagine experiments that could falsify them - that's not quite exactly the same mistake but it's close. You have to learn to look on the negative side of things, stare into the darkness. When this experiment is performed, only 20% of grownups get the answer right. And many of the others invent fantastically complicated hypotheses and put great confidence in their wrong answers since they've done so many experiments and everything came out like they expected."

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 8: Positive Bias

Consequentialism

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Consequentialism is the class of normative ethical theories holding that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for any judgement about the rightness of that conduct. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right act (or omission from acting) is one that will produce a good outcome, or consequence. The idea of consequentialism is commonly encapsulated in the English saying, "the ends justify the means".

Consequentialism is usually distinguished from deontological ethics (or deontology), in that deontology derives the rightness or wrongness of one's conduct from the character of the behaviour itself rather than the outcomes of the conduct. It is also distinguished from virtue ethics, which focuses on the character of the agent rather than on the nature or consequences of the act (or omission) itself, and pragmatic ethics which treats morality like science: advancing socially over the course of many lifetimes, such that any moral criterion is subject to revision. Consequentialist theories differ in how they define moral goods.

Consequentialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bayesian decision theory

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Bayesian decision theory refers to a decision theory which is informed by Bayesian probability. It is a statistical system that tries to quantify the tradeoff between various decisions, making use of probabilities and costs. An agent operating under such a decision theory uses the concepts of Bayesian statistics to estimate the expected value of its actions, and update its expectations based on new information. These agents can and are usually referred to as estimators.

From the perspective of Bayesian decision theory, any kind of probability distribution - such as the distribution for tomorrow's weather - represents a prior distribution. That is, it represents how we expect today the weather is going to be tomorrow. This contrasts with frequentist inference, the classical probability interpretation, where conclusions about an experiment are drawn from a set of repetitions of such experience, each producing statistically independent results. For a frequentist, a probability function would be a simple distribution function with no special meaning.

Suppose we intend to meet a friend tomorrow, and expect an 0.5 chance of raining. If we are choosing between various options for the meeting, with the pleasantness of some of the options (such as going to the park) being affected by the possibility of rain, we can assign values to the different options with or with rain. We can then pick the option whose expected value is the highest, given the probability of rain.

One definition of rationality, used both on Less Wrong and in economics and psychology, is behavior which obeys the rules of Bayesian decision theory. Due to computational constraints, this is impossible to do perfectly, but naturally evolved brains do seem to mirror these probabilistic methods when they adapt to an uncertain environment. Such models and distributions may be reconfigured according to feedback from the environment.

Bayesian decision theory - Lesswrongwiki

Bayesian probability

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Bayesian probability represents a level of certainty relating to a potential outcome or idea. This is in contrast to a frequentist probability that represents the frequency with which a particular outcome will occur over any number of trials.

An event with Bayesian probability of .6 (or 60%) should be interpreted as stating "With confidence 60%, this event contains the true outcome", whereas a frequentist interpretation would view it as stating "Over 100 trials, we should observe event X approximately 60 times."

The difference is more apparent when discussing ideas. A frequentist will not assign probability to an idea; either it is true or false and it cannot be true 6 times out of 10.

Bayesian probability - Lesswrongwiki

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

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The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important social, medical, and political situations as well.

Individual chapters discuss the representativeness and availability heuristics, problems in judging covariation and control, overconfidence, multistage inference, social perception, medical diagnosis, risk perception, and methods for correcting and improving judgments under uncertainty.

About half of the chapters are edited versions of classic articles; the remaining chapters are newly written for this book.

Most review multiple studies or entire subareas of research and application rather than describing single experimental studies.

This book will be useful to a wide range of students and researchers, as well as to decision makers seeking to gain insight into their judgments and to improve them.

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases - Google Books

Language in Thought and Action

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Language in Thought and Action is a book on semantics by Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa, based on his previous workLanguage in Action published in 1939. Early editions were written in consultation with different people. The current 5th edition was published in 1991. It was updated by Hayakawa's son, Alan R. Hayakawa and has an introduction byRobert MacNeil. Its Library of Congress control number is 92033105. The book has sold over one million copies and has been translated into eight languages.

“

Insight into human symbolic behavior and into human interaction through symbolic mechanisms comes from all sorts of disciplines: not only from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and cultural anthropology, but from attitude research and public opinion study, from new techniques in psychotherapy, from physiology and neurology, from mathematical biology and cybernetics. How are all these separate insights to be brought together? ...I have examined the problem long enough to believe that it cannot be done without some set of broad and informing principles such as is to be found in the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski.

”

This book contains an in-depth treatise of thought-terminating phrases, other manipulative secrets of semantics, and an extensive bibliography.

Language in Thought and Action - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making by Reid Hastie

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In Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, renowned authors Hastie and Dawes compare the basic principles of rationality with actual behavior in making decisions. They describe theories and research finding from the field of judgement and decision making in a non-technical manner, using anecdotes as a teaching device. Intended as an introductory textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, the material not only is of scholarly interest but is practical as well.

Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making by Reid Hastie — Goodreads.com

Gödel, Escher, Bach

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Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (pronounced [ˈɡøːdəl ˈɛʃɐ ˈbax]), also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by his publishing company as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll".

By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, GEB expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how self-reference and formal rules allow systems to acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.

In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms. In the book, he presents an analogy about how the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.Gödel, Escher, Bach - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Step Farther Out

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Essays on Technology, Civilization, and saving the world by Galaxy Science Fiction Science Editor Jerry Pournelle, PhD. Preface by Larry Niven, and Foreword by A. E. Van Vogt. From the Niven Preface: "Jerry Pournelle is our to make the whole world rich... He's been building the future since I was in grade school, and he's still at it." Essays include "Survival With Style" and "That Buck Rogers Stuff," as well as excerpts from The Strategy of Technology.
From the Preface to the 2011 Edition: “We live in an age of marvels. Despite that, we feel a sense of impending doom.... That's still true... We could still go to space. We could still mine the asteroids. We could still take part in developing mankind’s vast future. Indeed, it is easier to do now than it would have been when I wrote these essays. The unrelenting enmity of the Soviet Union has been replaced by other threats, some of them severe, but none comparable to 26,000 nuclear warheads. We have computers and the Internet. There is free exchange of ideas throughout most of the world, and the information revolution relentlessly expands that area. We still face the threat of famine, but it is not as acute as it was in the times when these essays were written. Communications, transportation, electronics, rocket technology – it’s all better now. We can still go to the planets.

We still live in an age of marvels, and it’s still true that the only limit to growth is nerve.

Amazon.com: A Step Farther Out eBook: Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven

Homo erectus

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Homo erectus (meaning "upright man," from the Latin ērigere, "to put up, set upright") is an extinct species of homininthat lived throughout most of the Pleistocene, with the earliest first fossil evidence dating to around 1.8 million years ago and the most recent to around 143,000 years ago. The species originated in Africa and spread as far as Georgia, India,Sri Lanka, China and Java.

Homo erectus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Dirdir

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The Dirdir is the third science fiction adventure novel in the tetralogy Tschai, Planet of Adventure.
Written by Jack Vance, it tells of the efforts of the sole survivor of the destruction of a human starship to return to Earth from the distant planet Tschai.

The Dirdir - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anthropic principle

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In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle (from Greek anthropos, meaning "human") is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, they believe it is unremarkable that the universe's fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life.

The strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by Barrow and Tipler (see variants) states that this is all the case because the Universe is compelled, in some sense, for conscious life to eventually emerge. Critics of the SAP argue in favor of a weak anthropic principle (WAP) similar to the one defined by Brandon Carter, which states that the universe's ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias: i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing any such fine tuning, while a universe less compatible with life will go unbeheld.

Anthropic principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Simulacron-3

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Simulacron-3 (1964) (also published as Counterfeit World), by Daniel F. Galouye, is an American science fictionnovel featuring an early literary description of virtual reality.

Simulacron 3 is the story of a virtual city (total environment simulator) for marketing research, developed by a scientist to reduce the need for opinion polls. The computer-generated city simulation is so well-programmed, that, although the inhabitants have their own consciousness, they are unaware, except for one, that they are only electronic impulses in a computer.

The simulator’s lead scientist, Hannon Fuller, dies mysteriously, and a co-worker, Morton Lynch, vanishes. The protagonist, Douglas Hall, is with Lynch when he vanishes, and Hall subsequently struggles to suppress his inchoate madness. As time and events unwind, he progressively grasps that his own world is probably not “real” and might be only a computer-generated simulation.

Symbolically, the title term "Simulacron-3" refers to the just-built virtual reality simulator and ostensibly references a third attempt at "simulectronics" (the reality-simulating technology), however, the "3" also refers to the novel’s three levels of "reality," or three levels of computer simulation — if the final, "real" world is simulated. Moreover, "simulacron" is closely derivative of simulacrum, a superficial image representing a non-existent original.

Simulacron-3 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia