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Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

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Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#91

Post by nl »

haberman wrote: post #87
nl wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing this is falsifiable, or an experiment - I'm arguing that it could be statistically interfered. "Statistically valid" != Correct (if your input assumptions are incorrect). See up thread for ways to build falsifiable experiments.

If your argument is that the human mind functions primarily in terms of valid statistical inferences, it doesn't support your case if it processes its input in ways that are inherently flawed and biased.

What do you mean by "valid"?

If you mean "mathematically correct" then yes that is my premise.

If you mean "correct in reality" then no.

If you have a prior belief "god created humans" with a 99% confidence, it will take a lot of evidence to override that - especially since the evidence will be a long way down a causality chain (as any online argument about evolution will show). Additionally, the confidence in that belief will be erroneously increased by lots of things you see in nature (eg - humans cannot create other life forms, therefore it must have been done by something supernatural).

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#92

Post by notahacker »

haberman wrote: post #68
notahacker wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that statistics is the language of the brain, but I am convinced that statistical inference is one of the main reasons why individuals (and later, populations) come to believe in some highly irrational superstitions - the ones where there's no reason to assume causality at all save for correlation of rare events (particularly if we're assuming imperfect use of statistics influenced by our c…

> "This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events..." Ok you have a story. I can tell a different story: "My tendency towards religious/supernatural belief that has helped me and my ancestors form moral codes and act tribally has in this case caused me to embrace a belief that will lead to the ruin of me and my people. These religious/supernatural beliefs are inherent…

I don't think we can "objectively decide which story reflects the truth about the human brain", particularly not if focusing on episodes >150 years ago where historians don't even widely agree on exactly what happened, and particularly not for any theory that "statistics is the language of the human brain" that is any more nuanced than the trivially-falsified "human thought processes invariably follow the hypothetico-deductive method and are not subject to confirmation bias, attaching significance to spurious correlations or poor selection of Bayesian priors"

But if this was a problem I was particularly motivated to study, the most satisfactory method of reaching a conclusion would be to use statistical analysis to draw conclusions about which hypotheses human thought patterns appeared to be most compatible with (from my experiments and meta-analysis of others'). I don't claim to know whether this is a refinement of my innate human tendency to be impressed by statistical support for a proposition or an unusual level of abstraction I've learned to reason at after spending too much time in an undergrad classroom.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#93

Post by mannykannot »

powera wrote: post #76
haberman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your are assuming rational decision making always leads to "correct" decisions. I didn't say anything of the sort. > The reality is that likely they are acting based on very different premises from your own, extracted from their own life experiences and those of their ancestors. That is true. That doesn't imply however that their beliefs draw solid statistical conclusion from those experiences. For example, take ri…

You are assuming that rational decision making can't lead to mass-slaughtering cattle. Also you're assuming that everyone has accurate evidence about the impact of weather rituals. In a society without written records, how is that supposed to magically happen?

At most, he is assuming that there is no rational explanation in this particular case of mass slaughter. FWIW, I am going to assign that a high confidence score until I see actual evidence to the contrary.

Saying "maybe there's an explanation" for every case does not advance the discussion. Saying "maybe there's an explanation" for every datum that does not fit your prior assumptions pretty much rules out statistical thinking, even if you otherwise have the capability.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#94

Post by darkxanthos »

haberman wrote: post #12

> It is Kepecs' thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain. Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition. I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researc…

A better example is the Monty Hall problem. Very few people find this intuitive.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#95

Post by msandford »

nl wrote: post #91
haberman wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your argument is that the human mind functions primarily in terms of valid statistical inferences, it doesn't support your case if it processes its input in ways that are inherently flawed and biased.

What do you mean by "valid"? If you mean "mathematically correct" then yes that is my premise. If you mean "correct in reality" then no. If you have a prior belief "god created humans" with a 99% confidence, it will take a lot of evidence to override that - especially since the evidence will be a long way down a causality chain (as any online argument about evolution will show). Additionally, the confidence in that b…

This thread could be summed up as "my priors tell me that if people were Actually Doing This (tm) it would look like X and it doesn't look like X, thus they aren't!" and then other people saying "uh, if you estimate the priors wrong that doesn't mean you aren't doing bayesian, it just means you estimated the priors wrong and got the wrong answer"

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#96

Post by msandford »

nitrogen wrote: post #64
Retra wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll need to explain what you mean by "correct" if "rational" isn't it. Rational decisions are those that maximize success, and if you've managed to find a rational decision that doesn't, it ceases to be rational given that information.

Most likely definitions from the context: "correct" means producing optimal outcomes, or producing beliefs most closely aligned with objective reality. "Rational" means obtained from available data using a rational process, whether or not the data is good. So someone with bad priors can come to bad conclusions through entirely "rational" means.

Totally correct. That's why reasonable people don't agree on politics at all. Group A has one set of priors, group B has another and despite them both being basically rational, the priors lead them down totally different roads as to how to "fix things"

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#98

Post by nl »

msandford wrote: post #95
nl wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "valid"? If you mean "mathematically correct" then yes that is my premise. If you mean "correct in reality" then no. If you have a prior belief "god created humans" with a 99% confidence, it will take a lot of evidence to override that - especially since the evidence will be a long way down a causality chain (as any online argument about evolution will show). Additionally, the confidence in that b…

This thread could be summed up as "my priors tell me that if people were Actually Doing This (tm) it would look like X and it doesn't look like X, thus they aren't!" and then other people saying "uh, if you estimate the priors wrong that doesn't mean you aren't doing bayesian, it just means you estimated the priors wrong and got the wrong answer"

Yes!! Thanks for the succinct summary!

I'm a bit frustrated that the original comment is the top voted comment, when it is at least more wrong than right.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#99

Post by webaba »

twinkletwinkle wrote: post #54
jlgray wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote wikipedia's article on statistics: Statistics is the study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data. Isn't that more or less what human brains do? A neural network is just a curve fitting algorithm optimized to fit a bunch of data, that is, a statistical method. NNs are, to the best of my knowledge, a fairly good analogy for what the physical computation process of…

>Isn't that more or less what human brains do? Sure but now what are you demonstrating. "The human brain collects and interprets data". Great paper, thanks for the contribution to science.

Love it

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#100

Post by webaba »

Houshalter wrote: post #90
haberman wrote: post #12

> It is Kepecs' thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain. Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition. I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researc…

Human brains do statistics at a low level. This is what the experiment tested. An example experiment would be if you gave someone a rewards with different probabilities after some random event like clicking, and the brain would learn to estimate the probability that a sequence of clicks would lead to a reward. On a high level this obviously breaks down. The brain doesn't have thousands of examples of slaughtering cow…

This is actually completely incorrect. Many cognitive biases occur at low levels of cognition without involving language, take professional pilots and confirmation biases despite of a ton of training data.
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