Newsletter
Bias is good and other things
November 16, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
Excerpt: If you haven’t heard of System 1 and System 2, you’ve probably heard one of its analogues. People who say ‘don’t let your amygdala hijack your frontal lobes’, or ‘get out of the sympathetic and into the parasympathetic nervous system’, or ‘something something vagus nerve’ are using pseudo-brain science to get at the same thing. But the thing everyone seems to have taken away from this book is the thing we always take away—System 1 stuff, a.k.a. bias is a bad thing. This is not what Kahneman was going for. Kahneman was trying to show us how both System 1 and System 2 have their place.
Main idea: Bias reduces noise—if you know roughly what to expect, then being biased by those expectations means you won’t get distracted by less relevant data points.
The Problem of Thinking Too Much. A nice companion to this week’s article bias is good:
Consider the predicament of a centipede who starts thinking about which leg to move and winds up going nowhere. It is a familiar problem: Any action we take has so many unforeseen consequences, how can we possibly choose?
–
Carl Jung’s Midlife-Crisis Notebooks:
Often, The Black Books read like an epic fantasy, especially when Jung encounters characters that guide him. These characters are archetypes— general characters or themes that we fill with our own personal experiences.
According to Jung, we develop our own unique identity by conversing with these archetypes … Within the Black Books, Jung meets Philemon—a pagan old man. Jung saw Philemon as a guru, someone to lead him through his visions and dreams … Philemon’s father, named Ha, also communicated with Jung. Ha was a “black magician,” who understood the runes, letters from an ancient Germanic alphabet. But Ha’s runes are completely new—they do not exist in history … Ha describes the runes as “…my science.” Jung wants to learn the runes, but Ha refuses to teach him. Instead, Ha flashes images of the runes across Jung’s vision and explains their symbolism … Soon, Jung is covering the Black Books with Ha’s runes
Wild. Maybe a solution for those, like me, with so little internal visual world.
–
What makes sentences work:
Say the following two sentences aloud. Which of them is more natural and easier to understand?
It was nice of John and Mary to come and visit us the other day.
For John and Mary to come and visit us the other day was nice.
I’ve tested sentence pairs like this many times and never come across anyone who prefers the second sentence. People say things like it’s ‘awkward’ and ‘clumsy’; ‘ending the sentence with was nice sounds abrupt’; ‘putting all that information at the beginning stops me getting to the point’; and ‘the first one’s much clearer’.
This is actually a much better way to illustrate to essay writers why introductions and topic sentences make writing useful:
English speakers like to place the ‘heavier’ part of a sentence towards the end rather than at the beginning … Taking in such a sentence, we feel the extra demand being made on our memory. We have to keep those eleven words in mind before we learn what the speaker or writer is going to do to them.
–
Very interesting idea:
Social media basically brought us to something like an oral culture:
- We both archive everything and trust our collective memory – everything is saved, bookmarked, etc. but never revisited (when was the last time you bookmarked a website or even checked your own likes?)
- For information to be remembered it has to be recirculated, repeated, or go viral or we forget because time moves so fast (similar to storytelling?)
- You can’t look things up easily because we live in a perpetual now – if you don’t understand the context of the discourse, you need to ask someone to catch you up
- This also makes society very participatory
- This has weird knock-on effects like needing to always be online to know what’s going on in the world - you can’t just hermit away and study, at a minimum you’re lurking
Among other things. I wonder if this is some kind of loop closing on Postman’s amusing ourselves to death.
–
Very pretty article walking through the history and value of the stories of the Brothers Grimm.
–
Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer who has one of the most interesting websites I’ve ever come across. Fun to hear that he talks like a normal person, but also generally interesting. Lots of talk about AI development—Gwern made some interesting predictions about AI that bore out very well, so seems worth paying attention.
–
I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,