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Ambigram

But you saw it, right? Our man won the debates. Come on, it was totally obvious that the other guy simply does not understand what needs to be done. He’s such an imbecile, I just don’t understand anyone could believe such nonsense. As opposed to us– that man will take us into the future, I tell you. And, look, all the papers support us. The people want us. Just ask anyone you know.

Well, I certainly wouldn’t trust them. Not even worth listening to that crap.

Really?

Really. I read their web page once, and, man, it just enrages me. How could anyone think that way? Such people defy the plainest common sense. It’s not even worth listening to them. Here, read this book. It clearly shows that we’re right.

But how do you know?

Well. Isn’t it obvious? The arguments actually make sense, that’s the great thing about it. I mean, how many people have you met who didn’t agree? Yeah, okay, so there are some weirdos. Heh. That’s definitely true. Yeah, of course, research it if you want. Just remember that those reports are biased by their ideology. My god, who have you been listening to?

Talk to them?

Okay, but… you just can’t convince a person like that. It’s a waste of time with such people. Really. it’s been studied.

Do you ever wonder how they got that way?

What on earth do you mean?

Intelligent News Agents, With Real New

You cannot read all of the news, every day. There is simply too much information for even a dedicated and specialized observer to consume it all, so someone or something has to make choices. Traditionally, we rely on some other person to tell us what to see: the editor of a newspaper decides what goes on the front page, the reviewer tells us what movies are worth it. Recently, we have been able to distribute this mediation process across wider communities: sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or Slashdot all represent the collective opinions of thousands of people.

The next step is intelligent news agents. Google (search, news, reader, etc.) can already be configured to deliver to us only that information we think we might want to see. It’s not hard to imagine much more sophisticated agents that would scour the internet for items of interest.

In today’s context, it’s easy to see how such agents could actually be implemented. Sophisitacted customer preference engines are already capable of telling us what products we might like to consume — the best example is Amazon’s recommendation engine. It’s not a big leap to imagine using the same sort of algorithms to model the kinds of blog articles, web pages, youtube videos, etc. that we might enjoy consuming, and then deliver these things to us.

There is a serious problem with this. You’re going to get exactly what you ask for, and only that.

True, we all do this already. We read books and consume media which more or less confirm our existing opinions. This effect is visible as clustering in what we consume, as in this example of Amazon sales data for political books in 2008.

Social network graph of Amazon sales of political books, 2008

This image is from a beautiful analysis by orgnet.com. Basically, people buy either the red books or the blue books, but usually not both. The same sorts of patterns hold for movies, blogs, newspapers, ideologies, religions, and human beliefs of all kinds. This is a problem; but at least you can usually see the other color of books when you walk into Borders. If we end up relying on trainable agents for all of our information, we risk completely blacking out anything that disagrees with what we already believe.

I propose a simple solution. Automatic network analyses like the one above — of books, or articles, or web pages — could easily pinpoint the information sources that would expose me to the maximum novelty in the minimum time. If my goal is to gain a deep understanding of the entire scope of human discourse, rather than just the parts of it I already agree with, then it would be very simple to program my agent to bring to me exactly those things that would most rapidly give me insight into those regions of information space which are most vital and least known to me. I imagine some metric like “highest degree node most distant from the nodes I’ve already visited” would would work handily.

You can infer a lot about somewhat from the information they currently consume. If my agent noticed that I was a liberal, it could make me understand the conservative world-view, and vice-versa. If my agent detected that I was ignorant of certain crucial aspects of Chinese culture and politics, it could reccomend a primer article. Or it might deduce that I needed to understand just slightly more physics to participate meaningfully in the climate change debate, or decide (based on my movie viewing habits) that it was high time I review the influential films of Orson Welles. Of course, I might in turn decide that I actually, truly, don’t care about film at all; but the very act of excluding specific subjects or categories of thought would force us, consciously, to admit to the boundaries of our mental worlds.

We could program our information gathering systems to challenge us, concisely and effectively, if we so want. Intelligent agents could be mere sycophants, or they could be teachers.

Minds Are Tricky Things — Part III

Everybody thinks they know how their mind works, but they don’t. You can ask someone why they like their boyfriend, or why they chose a job, or whether a book changed their opinion of global warming, and they’ll think about it for a moment and happily give you an answer. But they’re making it up.

The experiments were done ages ago, and the research is still going, continuing to tease apart actual cause and psychological effect. We know now that what people tell us about their own mental processes is quite thoroughly inaccurate. We all believe that we have this magic thing called “introspection” that lets us see what is going on in our own minds, but in reality we don’t. It’s a fictional superpower.

The research on this point is really quite good. It’s not even a new finding, having been understood for at least the last fifty years. And yet this simple but important fact has never quite managed to make it into popular culture.

Perhaps no one wants to believe it.

Continue reading Minds Are Tricky Things — Part III