Good Entropy

from Kids
Prefer Cheese: The Embarrassing 2nd Amendment.

Had a nice glass of wine last night, and re-read one of my favorite
essays, by one of my most favoritest lefties….Sandy
Levinson, of the UT-Austin Law School.

Here is the essay: The Embarrassing 2nd Amendment.

Sandy (whom I got to know down at UT-Austin when I was there) is honest.
He does not like the 2nd Amendment. But he believes in the rule of
law, and so feels obliged to point out two things.

First, the
words in the 2nd Amendment have meaning. They appear to mean that there
is an individual right to keep and bear arms. Subject to regulation,
not an absolute right, all that’s true. BUT. SOME. INDIVIDUAL. RIGHT.

Second,
we can’t pick and choose which amendments to enforce. If the Bill of
Rights is important, if the Constitution cannot be violated, then we
have to enforce all of it. If you don’t like the 2nd Amendment, then
amend the Constitution.

I enjoyed re-reading the piece, as I
said, given the events of this week. I particularly liked these
passages:

To put it mildly, the
Second Amendment is not at the forefront of constitutional discussion,
at least as registered in what the academy regards as the venues for
such discussion — law reviews, casebooks, and other scholarly legal
publications. As Professor Larue has recently written, “the second
amendment is not taken seriously by most scholars.”

…I cannot
help but suspect that the best explanation for the absence of the Second
Amendment from the legal consciousness of the elite bar, including that
component found in the legal academy, is derived from a mixture of
sheer opposition to the idea of private ownership of guns and the
perhaps subconscious fear that altogether plausible, perhaps even
“winning,” interpretations of the Second Amendment would present real
hurdles to those of us supporting prohibitory regulation. Thus the title of this essay — The
Embarrassing Second Amendment — for I want to suggest that the Amendment
may be profoundly embarrassing to many who both support such regulation
and view themselves as committed to zealous adherence to the Bill of
Rights (such as most members of the ACLU). Indeed, one sometimes
discovers members of the NRA who are equally committed members of the
ACLU, differing with the latter only on the issue of the Second
Amendment but otherwise genuinely sharing the libertarian viewpoint of
the ACLU.

Give Sandy credit: that is an honest portrayal
of the problem. He at least realized that he should be embarrassed.
And he was.

For two decades, I have been given at best a
condescending hearing when I have claimed that the 2nd Amendment clearly
confers at least a limited individual right to bear arms. And since
these same super-silly-ass folks also claim to believe the Constitution
says what the Supreme Court says it says….well, I love America.

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Gravity Emerges from Quantum Information, Say Physicists

It suggests that differences in entropy between parts of the Universe
generates a force that redistributes matter in a way that maximises
entropy. This is the force we call gravity.
.
.
.
It also relates gravity to quantum information for the first time. Over recent years many results in quantum mechanics have pointed to the increasingly important role that information appears to play in the Universe.

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.

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.

Posted on: January 14, 2009 6:10 PM, by PalMD

The Dark Side is Powerful

Hope, of all ills that men endure,
The only cheap and universal cure.

—Abraham Cowley, The Mistress. For Hope. c. 1647

I was visiting my friend in the hospital the other day. She had a port put in under the skin of her chest for chemotherapy. The whole story is unfair. She’s a terrific person, with a great husband and an adorable son. She’s also doing remarkably well. But that’s not today’s story.

Another friend wondered if maybe she should recommend a macrobiotic diet or something, anything, to help stop this stupid disease. Now, you can substitute anything for “macrobiotic diet”—reiki, acupuncture, homeopathy—it doesn’t matter really, because all of it rests on misunderstanding, fear, and compassion. Fear and compassion are very powerful, and in the face of helplessness, any lifeline seems like a godsend, even one attached to an anchor.

Here’s the basic problem. We understand cancer very well (and the same goes for many diseases). When a patient or other caring layperson is looking for hope in the face of overwhelming circumstances, it’s tempting to go with common sense. Common sense says that a “healthy” diet should help fight cancer. But, while it’s important to maintain a good nutritional status (keeping up strength and avoiding weight loss), cancer is not a disease of abnormal nutrition. Cancer is basically a disease at the genetic level. Cells lose their normal regulatory mechanisms, and reproduce abnormally and forget to die when they are supposed to, and while cells certainly count on nutrients to survive, cancer cells can’t be killed off by proper nutrition. Nutritional changes also won’t help your immune system to hunt down and kill cancer cells more effectively. Once your cells have become cancerous, it’s too late.

Still, this stuff couldn’t hurt, right?

Cancer is a full time job. Between diagnostic studies, treatments, and emotional support, cancer patients are very, very busy. Keeping track of everything that needs to get done, especially at a time when you are emotionally vulnerable and perhaps just a little bit distracted, is tough. If a friend has a bone scan in the morning, a blood draw at lunch time, an appointment with a surgeon and an oncologist in the afternoon, and dinner with her family in the evening, adding in a bunch of “alternative” (read “non-science-based”) therapies is a burden without benefit.

Certainly, if someone finds a way to build massage, meditation, or other relaxing activities into their schedule, this is probably a good thing. But when you have a serious disease, all of your friends become experts. Out of love, fear, sadness, and a desire to regain control, they pepper you with suggestions about doctors, therapies, gurus, diet, and anything else they think will help you stick around.

Remember, though, that your friend with cancer is fighting like hell, and there are no miracle cures “they” don’t want you to know about. There is no cabal of researchers sitting on some treatment reluctant to share their success. Cancer is hard work, and since it’s a full time job, patients are often looking for islands of normalcy in their day.

But of course you have to take cues from your friends. If they seem like they want advice, then they probably do. But please remember that their doctors are pretty damned knowledgeable. If there were a miracle diet, a magic pill, or any other way to help their patients, they’d already be using it.

Hope is palliative. It is a treatment in and of itself, but it is not without serious side-effects. Truth is also palliative, in small doses. Sometimes, when a friend is ill, the best bet is to be the best friend you can. If you truly think that they are getting sub-par medical care, you have to speak up. But chances are, if you come up with a great new idea, it’s not as new as you think, or it’s not as great as you think. This happens to doctors all the time, which is why we temper our hope with a dose of cold, hard science. We get attached to our patients and would do anything to help them—but then we make ourselves remember that “everything” isn’t always the best thing.

Doctors have a lot to learn from patients and their loved ones. We learn that everyone wants to help, and we need to actively acknowledge that. There are many things cancer patients need every day, from rides, to child care, to hugs. As an internist, I can direct family and friends to give these tangible gifts. The love of family and friends is hope—no voodoo required.

This site bears further examination The Privatization of Risk

The thought occurs to me that what is implicitly expected of the state in terms of help with risk is that the my retirement availability and level be guaranteed. Are current systems sharing risks or merely pushing them somewhere else? Think regional, think Katrina, or intergenerational, think Social Security as you ponder that question.

Jaynes used to recommend that no one ever write out an unconditional probability: That you never, ever write simply P(A), but always write P(A|I), where I is your prior information. I’ll use Q instead of I, for ease of reading, but Jaynes used I. Similarly, one would not write P(A|B) for the posterior probability of A given that we learn B, but rather P(A|B,Q), the probability of A given that we learn B and had background information Q.

This is good advice in a purely pragmatic sense, when you see how many false “paradoxes” are generated by accidentally using different prior information in different places.

at
Probability is Subjectively Objective