21–30 of 54 posts
Effectively yes. If we perceive a chance of loss, we will do our outmost to avoid said loss even if it means forgoing massive gains.
Put another way, animals have upper bounds on the positive value they receive from risks. In human terms the first billion is worth vastly more than the second.
"...in an environment punctuated by slow, progressive changes followed by cataclistic changes in the opposite direction, individuals that track the enviromment better will overfit (and die). More inaccurate individuals will be the ones surviving long term." Reading this made me think of the numerous financial firms in history that become very efficient at making money in a particular type of market environment, which…
Well it would make sense if that were the case. You have some system that tried to balance bias, variance, and utility. Sometimes that best way to do that is to have some bias. The classic example of this is you may jump when you see something that looks like a predator, but then turns out not to be. The cost of being wrong (see nothing when predator, see predator when nothing) means it's optimal to sometimes see dan…
That's the argument for racial profiling. Not making any argument for or against, just pointing out something interesting. I didn't think about the topic in this context before, as to whether or not it's rational. It's always only been a question of ethics to me. So the natural follow-up question: are various ethics irrational? Again, only a theoretical exercise, not putting my personal views into this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethics are a competing patchwork of conflicting drives. Evolution tends to select for short-term survival over long-term viability. It's absolutely a mistake to believe the two are aligned. The reality is that humans are (probably) the first Earth species to be capable of abstract non-physical modelling of the future. But we have a huge amount of behavioural baggage which guarantees that we tend to ignore long-term w…
we're certainly capable of creating the most complex models – what's interesting about this very human tendency is that the models begin to take on a reality of their own, replacing our actual observations. we can see this most clearly in our politicians' insistence on their particular model of the economy as their priority, rather than the actual concerns of the citizens they are responsible to.
maybe a hybrid computer / human solution will fare better This is the purpose of technology. To enhance our skills. From fire to machine learning, tools are built to make our lives easier and help us make decisions better. In the end we're better off with more empirical computing in our decision loops. Eventually hopefully we totally replace ourselves with better, more consisitently optimized decision making systems.
technology has no purpose. it is a natural phenomenon that arises without any in-built ethics or direction. technology can manifest as a tool (to amplify human potential) or a machine (to replace human labour). the effect of a technology can be influenced broadly, for example by who owns and promotes a technology (open-source vs proprietary models) and which groups in society it is put to use to benefit.
Technology arises out of a sense of purpose from it's user. This is pretty common understanding in philosophy of science.
Well it would make sense if that were the case. You have some system that tried to balance bias, variance, and utility. Sometimes that best way to do that is to have some bias. The classic example of this is you may jump when you see something that looks like a predator, but then turns out not to be. The cost of being wrong (see nothing when predator, see predator when nothing) means it's optimal to sometimes see dan…
That's the argument for racial profiling. Not making any argument for or against, just pointing out something interesting. I didn't think about the topic in this context before, as to whether or not it's rational. It's always only been a question of ethics to me. So the natural follow-up question: are various ethics irrational? Again, only a theoretical exercise, not putting my personal views into this.
It's hard to answer your question, since both ethics and rationality are fuzzy, slippery concepts that need to be nailed down firmly to reason meaningfully about.
Or, put less pretentiously, I don't know.
If you look at the long term, in the world that the article describes (slow, gradual with rare cataclysmic changes), most wrong decision makers will still die at a higher chance than correct decision makers. It's just in those rare situations that they survive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the argument for racial profiling. Not making any argument for or against, just pointing out something interesting. I didn't think about the topic in this context before, as to whether or not it's rational. It's always only been a question of ethics to me. So the natural follow-up question: are various ethics irrational? Again, only a theoretical exercise, not putting my personal views into this.
Actually it explains why everyone has innate racial profiling, even members of the target group. It's also why, even if a policy against it is adopted, it is immensely hard to actually change.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/ascii/vvcs9310.txt
It's also the case that violence is so unlikely at any given encounter that it isn't rational to worry about it (in the US, there are billions of stranger-stranger encounters in a given year, millions of incidents of violence).
I guess someone might argue that arranging for encounters that are 99.9% likely to be violence free compared to encounters that are 99.8% likely to be violence free is worthwhile, but their glances probably aren't powerful enough to actually create that difference.