Good Entropy

continuing on this post http://gentropy.org/blogs/2009/10/02/intuitive-differences/
I have a friend that has a predisposition to believe conspiracies. I have the exact opposite bias. I rarely see any indication of conspiracy.

Makes for a fair amount of disagreement.

Just-as-good Medicine » American Scientist

That decrementally cost-effective innovations are so rarely described in the health-care literature suggests that medicine is distinct from most other markets, in which cost-decreasing, quality-reducing products are continuously being introduced—think IKEA, Walmart and the Tata car. Several reasons may explain this “medical exceptionalism.” First, there is fundamentally a lack of incentives both for physicians to control costs, especially under a fee-for-service regime, and for patients to demand less expensive treatment when insurance shields them from the direct costs of care. Second, medical “bargains” frequently come with health risks, and trading health for money strikes some as vulgar, regardless of ratio. The inherent ethical unease that decrementally cost-effective innovations can elicit poses a serious public relations and marketing challenge.

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Marginal Devolution

Eric S. Raymond writes:

We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and
downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the
minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make
sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly
masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped.
Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables
(alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight
to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the
mildly dysfunctional.

In the comment section:

Jessica Boxer Says:

I propose Boxer’s law of economics: “The economy interprets taxation and regulation as damage and routes around it.”

Marginal Revolution: Is there a case for a VAT?

from the comments:

It seems to me that the American political system is simply broken. Canada could reduce the size of government and keep health care spending in check because in a parliamentary system with strong party loyalty, individual politicans are given ‘cover’ by their parties and are not held personally responsible for the taxes and benefits of their constituents. If the party in power makes a decision to cut benefits which will harm an individual politician’s district, that politician isn’t necessarily on the hook for it. The voters know that he has to vote the party line even if he disagrees with the legislation. He gets re-elected so long as the public feels his party in general is better than the opposition.

In the U.S. system, where every vote is a free vote, each member of Congress has to answer for his/her votes, and this drives NIMBY-ism and ever-increasing benefits without the tax hikes to pay for them, and it also causes wheeling and dealing which ultimately makes large regulatory packages like health care reform incoherent and bloated with pork.

I think American government works well when it’s strictly limited. When Americans try to implement Euro-style social democracy, they fail due to the nature of American government. It is uniquely unsuited to centralized technocratic governance.

Posted by: Dan H. at Feb 17, 2010 12:27:10 PM

EconLog – Sage

Talking about Thomas Sowell’s new book Intellectuals and Society

For example, it is far easier to concentrate power than to concentrate knowledge. That is why so much social engineering backfires and why so many despots have led their countries into disasters.

Brilliant.

From Mounting evidence links language pathway to autism

FOXP2 codes for a protein that regulates the expression of other genes. Last year, an international group of scientists identified one of its targets, contactin-associated protein-like 2 (CNTNAP2). They also found that certain common variants of CNTNAP2 tend to crop up in people with specific language impairment, a developmental disorder.

CNTNAP2 was an exciting find because three independent teams had recently published that common variants of the gene up the risk of developing autism.

“I think the evidence now that CNTNAP2 is involved [in autism] is quite good,” says leader of one of the teams, Aravinda Chakravarti, professor at the McKusick Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. “We’re now interested in finding the molecular basis of this.”

In unpublished data, Chakravarti says he’s found that CNTNAP2 is over-expressed in a small number of postmortem autistic brains.

Geneticists have discovered many different autism-related variants of CNTNAP2, a massive gene spanning 2.3 million base pairs. “Disruptions in the front end of the gene [usually] mean you’ll get a more severe disorder, like full-blown autism or severe expressive language delay,” notes Martin Poot, research associate professor of medical genetics at the University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands.

That makes Tjintjelaar’s work sound easier than it is. “The first time a subject catches my attention, it’s rare that I can shoot it the way I see it in my mind,” he explains. “So I go back again and again until everything is perfect — light, weather, the tides. I’ve shot a few piers and breakwaters along the Dutch coast maybe a thousand times, from all angles and in all weather conditions, in broad daylight and in the dark of night, at high tide and low tide. And still I think I’m missing that one special shot that captures the essence of that pier. My wife hates it because I take her with me when she’d rather go shopping.” That’s understandable, given the photographer’s love of long exposures. “A long-exposure shoot of mine usually takes two or three hours,” he says. “If I’m really lucky, I’ll get five good frames.”

from Joel Tjintjelaar on Flickr.
I first saw him showcased in American Photo November 2009.

Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree
13Kaj_Sotala29 September 2009 07:56AM

from here

Two days back, I had a rather frustrating disagreement with a friend. The debate rapidly hit a point where it seemed to be going nowhere, and we spent a while going around in circles before agreeing to change the topic. Yesterday, as I was riding the subway, things clicked. I suddenly realized not only what the disagreement had actually been about, but also what several previous disagreements we’d had were about. In all cases, our opinions and arguments had been grounded in opposite intuitions:

* Kaj’s intuition. In general, we can eventually learn to understand a phenomenon well enough to create a model that is flexible and robust. Coming up with the model is the hard part, but once that is done, adapting the general model to account for specific special cases is a relatively straightforward and basically mechanical process.
* Friend’s intuition. In general, there are some phenomena which are too complex to be accurately modeled. Any model you create for them is bristle and inflexible: adapting the general model to account for specific special cases takes almost as much work as creating the original model in the first place.

You may notice that these intuitions are not mutually exclusive in the strict sense. They could both be right, one of them covering certain classes of things and the other the remaining ones. And neither one is obviously and blatantly false – both have evidence supporting them. So the disagreement is not about which one is right, as such. Rather, it’s a question of which one is more right, which is the one with broader applicability.

As soon as I realized this, I also realized two other things. One, whenever we would run into this difference in the future, we’d need to recognize it and stop that line of debate, for it wouldn’t be resolved before the root disagreement had been solved. Two, actually resolving that core disagreement would take so much time and energy that it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort.

The important thing to realize is that neither intuition rests on any particular piece of evidence. Instead, each one is a general outlook that has been formed over many years and countless pieces of evidence, most of which have already been forgotten. Before my realization, neither of us had even consciously known they existed. They are abstract patterns our minds have extracted from what must be hundreds of different cases we’ve encountered, very high-level hypotheses that have been repeatedly tested and found to be accurate.

It would be impossible to find out which was the more applicable one by means of regular debate. Each of us would have to gather all the evidence that led to the formulation of the intuition in the first place. Pulling a number out of my hat, I’d guess that a comprehensive overview of that evidence (for one intuition) would run at least a hundred pages long. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be sufficient for each of us to simply read the other side’s overview, once it had been gathered. By this point, we would be interpreting the evidence in light of our already existing intuition. I wouldn’t be surprised if simply reading through the summary would lead to both sides only being more certain of their own intuition being right. We would have to take the time to discuss each individual item in detail.

And if a real attempt to sort out the difference is hard, resolving it in the middle of a debate about something else is impossible. Both sides in the debate will have an opinion they think is obvious and be puzzled as to why the other side can consistently fail to get something so obvious. At the same time, neither can access the evidence that leads them to consider their opinion so obvious, and both will grow increasingly frustrated at both the other side’s bone-headedness and their own failure to properly communicate something that shouldn’t even need explaining.

In many cases, trying to resolve an intuitive difference simply isn’t worth the effort. Learn to recognize your intuitive differences, and you’ll know when to break off debates once they hit that difference. Putting those intuitions in words still helps understanding, though. When I told my friend the things I’ve just written here, she agreed, and we were able to have a constructive dialogue about those differences. (While doing so, and returning to the previous day’s topic, we were able to identify at least five separate points of disagreement that were all rooted in the same intuitive difference.) Each one was also able to explain, on a rough level, some of the background that supported their intuition. In the end, we still didn’t agree, but at least we understood each other’s positions a little better.

But what if the intuitive difference is about something really important? Me and my friend resolved to just wait things out and see whose hypothesis would turn out more accurate, but sometimes the difference might affect big decisions about the actions you want to take. (Robin’s and Eliezer’s disagreement on the nature of the Singularity comes to mind.) What if the disagreement really needs to be solved?

I’m not sure how well it can be done, but one could try. First off, both need to realize that in all likelihood, both intuitions have a large grain of truth to them. Like with me and my friend, the question is often one of the breadth of applicability, not of a strict truth or falsehood. Once the basic positions have been formulated, both should ask whether, not why. Assign some certainty value on the likelyhood of your intuition being the more correct one, and then consider the fact that your “opponent” has spent many years analyzing evidence to reach this position and might very well be right. Adjust your certainty downwards to account for this realization. Then take a few weeks considering both the things that may have led you to formulate this intuition, as well as the things that might have led your opponent to theirs. Spend time gathering evidence for both sides of the view, and be sure to give each piece of evidence a balanced view: half of the time you’ll first consider a case from the PoV of your opponent’s hypothesis, then of your own. Half of the time you’ll do it the other way around. Commit all such considerations in writing and present them to your opponent an regular intervals, taking the time to discuss them through. This is no time for motivated skepticism – both of you need to have genuine crisis of faith in order for things to get anywhere.

Not every disagreement is an intuitive difference. Any disagreement that rests on particular pieces of evidence and can be easily resolved with the correct empirical evidence isn’t one. If it feels like one of the intuitions is strictly false instead of having a large grain of truth to it, it’s still an intuitive difference, but not the kind of one that I have been covering here. An intuitive difference is also kind of related to, but different from, an inferential distance. In order to resolve it, a lot of information needs to be absorbed, but by both partners, not simply the other. It’s not a question of having different evidence: theoretically, you might both even have exactly the same evidence, but gathered in a different order. The question is one of differing interpretations, not raw data as such.

Summary
I finally figured out the right analogy for software development. Alas, the target audience for this analogy won’t be happy with it.

via Writing Software is Like … Writing.

The Roman historian Livy famously described the terminal plight of the late Roman Republic: “Nec vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus” (“We can bear neither our shortcomings nor the remedies for them”)

america rip: A Look at the Numbers — The Coming Collapse of America