Failures of the human mind - framing and judgment

Joyce Hatto stole music from largely obscure sources and passed it off as hers. The music received rave reviews, but the originals were ignored. Netizens will vaguely remember that in 1997 a commencement speech by Mary Schmich became world famous when a trickster reframed it as a Vonnegut essay. Here are some recent comments from the NYT ...

Shoot the Piano Player - New York Times

... Yet the Joyce Hatto episode is a stern reminder of the importance of framing and background in criticism. Music isn’t just about sound; it is about achievement in a larger human sense. If you think an interpretation is by a 74-year-old pianist at the end of her life, it won’t sound quite the same to you as if you think it’s by a 24-year-old piano-competition winner who is just starting out. Beyond all the pretty notes, we want creative engagement and communication from music, we want music to be a bridge to another personality. Otherwise, we might as well feed Chopin scores into a computer.

This makes instrumental criticism a tricky business. I’m personally convinced that there is an authentic, objective maturity that I can hear in the later recordings of Rubinstein. This special quality of his is actually in the music, and is not just subjectively derived from seeing the wrinkles in the old man’s face. But the Joyce Hatto episode shows that our expectations, our knowledge of a back story, can subtly, or perhaps even crudely, affect our aesthetic response.

The greatest lesson for us all ought to be, however, that there are more fine young pianists out there than most of us realize. If it wasn’t Joyce Hatto, then who did perform those dazzlingly powerful Prokofiev sonatas? Having been so moved by hearing “her” Schubert on the radio, I’ve vowed to honor the real pianist by ordering the proper CD, as soon as I find out who it is. Backhanded credit to Joyce Hatto for having introduced us to some fine new talent.

When Schmich's essay was Vonnegut's it was famous, when it wasn't it vanished. The same problem afflicts research articles; many great contributions by the non-famous are published in obscure journals and only recognized in retrospect. The name of the author changes the perceived value. In day to day life many of us know the feeling of saying something that's ignored, only to hear it applauded when spoken by another.

Humans are very susceptible to framing effects. It's not fair, but it's not going to change.

Therapy for severe cognitive and behavioral disorders: A new era

Two stunning results may herald a new era in research, and even therapy, of disorders as diverse as Down's syndrome, schizophrenia, and autism:

• Be the Best You can Be: Reversing the cognitive dysfunction of Down's Syndrome
• Reversing a severe brain disorder in adult mice (murine autism)
  

A year ago I wrote about a deluge of research on autism genetics. Recent mouse models for autism and Down's syndrome are enabling radical new research directions. These models are the equivalents of the early telescopes -- radical new methods to investigate nature.

It's hard not to be carried away with this kind of discovery. We may run into the kind of dead-ends that stymied human gene therapy. If the results are confirmed, however, they will stand as Nobel-quality basic science discoveries.

Using canines to make fake fur: what's the true story?

When does a story outrage Americans, and when do they ignore it? When I first read that Chinese manufactured fake fur garments almost always (24/25 in one sample) contained canine fur, I figured the furies would follow. They really haven't however, and it turns out that the story is several months old, and more complex than it first seemed (though I would advise boycotting JC Penney).

After some reflection, I think this really belongs in the same globalization category as lead contamination of christmas lights. I'll explain why after the story. BTW, the racoon dog is a wild canine often trapped or farmed for its fur. Emphases mine.

Is Your Coat Fur Fake, or Is It Fido? | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited

... The Humane Society of the United States said it purchased coats from reputable outlets, such as upscale Nordstrom, with designer labels - Andrew Marc, Tommy Hilfiger, for example - and found them trimmed with fur from domestic dogs [jf: this is misleading, see below], even though the fur was advertised as fake.

The investigation began after the society got a tip from someone who bought a coat with trim labeled as faux fur that felt real. Leppert and her team began buying coats from popular retailers and then had the coats tested by mass spectrometry, which measures the mass and sequence of proteins.

Of the 25 coats tested, 24 were mislabeled or misadvertised, the society said.

Three coats ... contained fur from domesticated [jf: meaning breeds domesticated in the US] dogs. The others had fur from raccoon dogs ... Most of the fur came from China.

Importing domestic dog and cat fur was outlawed in 2000. Intentionally importing and selling dog fur is a federal crime punishable by a $10,000 fine for each violation.

... The discovery of domestic dog fur is the latest twist in the investigation that ensnared retail giants Macy's and J.C. Penney late last year. Both of those retailers were discovered selling coats with raccoon dog fur labeled as raccoon.

J.C. Penney initially removed the offending garments from its stores around Christmas - but eventually it had employees scratch out the 'raccoon' label with black magic marker and put the coats back on the shelves. Macy's immediately pulled the items from its shelves.

... Mislabeling fur is a misdemeanor punishable by a $5,000 fine or a year in prison. Fur valued at less than $150 is not required to be labeled.

A bill introduced by Reps. Jim Moran, D-Va., and Mike Ferguson, R-N.J., would close that loophole by requiring labels for all fur regardless of its value. It also would ban fur from raccoon dogs.

... Other retailers the Humane Society said sold mislabeled raccoon dog fur included Lord & Taylor, BergdorfGoodman.com and Neiman Marcus.com. Designers whose clothes were mismarked included Donna Karan's DKNY and Michael Kors. A coat from Oscar de la Renta advertised as raccoon had raccoon dog fur.

I think I can reconstruct the real story, based on what's written here and my crotchety knowledge of how the world works. I bet that US retailers have known for years that Chinese manufacturers were using a wild canine, mostly farmed and hideously abused, to make convincing "fake fur". As long as the US retailers had plausible deniability they didn't care, and there was no law against using racoon dog fur. The mislabeling is merely a misdemeanor offense if the garment costs more than $150, and no label is required for under $150. US retailers probably didn't know, however, that some Chinese manufacturers were using dog breeds that, in many nations, are pets. That's a felony, and that's why they're anxious. If an executive were found to do this knowingly they'd get a criminal record, but I doubt any are guilty of that.

The Humane Society is justifiably outraged about the maltreatment of the racoon dog, but they know most Americans don't care. They went looking for evidence of use of domesticated dogs and found it, which is why the story came out.

This kind of thing (like lead contaminating holiday lights) is inevitable in a global economy with very different ideas about what's acceptable behavior and how seriously to treat foreign regulations and sensibilities. So how should we respond?

Congress should definitely pass the Moran and Ferguson bills. Americans should, in the meantime, assume that all "fake fur" is really wild dog fur, and conduct themselves accordingly. I'd like to see a class action suit take down of the retailers -- since I bet they've intentionally ignored the racoon dog mislabeling for years. Surely a hungry lawyer can sue for the psychic damage inflicted upon unwitting consumers ...

Deriving mass/energy equivalence with a simple thought experiment

Anyone who's done any mathematics will remember how some complex problems become trivial when you change the coordinate systems. It's a stunning thing to see and feel. The right framing of a problem can make the solution self evident. We see a similar phenomenon in studies of cognition; a seemingly complex problem can become easy for most people to solve when its translated into a social relationship structure. In special relativity problems changing the 'frame of reference' can make a difficult question easy.

I'm fascinated by these kinds of transformation, though I lack the genius necessary to invent new transformations. I think this way of leading just about any thoughtful person to an understanding of the necessity of mass/energy equivalence is a kind of coordinate system transform:

Why Does E=mc2? | Cosmic Variance

...Now let’s think about a second thought experiment, which is closely related to the first. All I want to make different is to replace the cannon by a powerful laser. Instead of a cannonball being propelled across the box, we’ll now think about the laser firing a pulse of light. Now, the light carries momentum, and so when the laser fires and the pulse sets off, the box will once again begin a backwards slide in order that momentum be conserved. Also once again, when the light reaches the other side and is absorbed by the opposite wall, the momentum will be transferred back to the box, which will then come to a halt. But now you see the problem. The distribution of mass in the box is the same as it was at the beginning, and no external forces have acted on the system, and yet because the box has slid backwards and no mass has been moved, the center of mass of the entire system has moved! All no longer seems right with the world...

Do developing minds have growing pains?

Developing bodies have growing pains, why not developing minds?

Be the Best You can Be: Are cognitive improvements preceded by behavioral deterioration?

....We would then expect .... that major changes to critical cortical systems would be associated with substantial behavior and cognitive disruptions.

I'm sure it's been studied, perhaps the results were uninteresting (no correlation) ...

The Bayesian Heresy: Understanding Innovation

Scott Page, as quoted by Bayesian Heresy, asserts that a diverse team of good thinkers will be more creative than a less diverse team of very good thinkers:

The Bayesian Heresy: Understanding Innovation

...First, for any problem there exists a perspective that makes it easy to grasp a solution, though that may mean waiting for a person as unique as Edison to come along. Second, across all problems no perspective or no heuristic is any better than any other. In plain English, any approach may be just as good as any other until it is tested.

Third, teams of problem solvers—viewed as bundles of perspectives and heuristics brought together to solve a particular problem—do better when the diversity of perspectives and heuristics is greater than the overall ability or talent of the team’s members. In other words, diverse teams outperform teams composed of the very best individuals. Diversity trumps ability.

This last result requires further explanation. A team, a group, or even an entire society innovates through iterative application of perspectives and heuristics. Individuals who perform best obviously possess good perspectives and heuristics (think Edison), yet 30 Edisons each may have 20 useful heuristics while collectively possessing a mere 25. In contrast, the diverse team’s individual members may on average only know 15 heuristics apiece but collectively know 40.

I don't buy it. There are confounding variables such as communications latency, ability to cooperate, response to incentives, and solution collision (multiple semi-compatible good quality solutions that, when combined, produce a weak result). Diversity is valuable, but I've never seen it trump ability by itself.

The Dreams of Boltzmann Brains

Emphases mine.

OO’s and BB’s | Cosmic Variance

.... The idea Don put forward is this: there’s us, the ordinary observers (OO’s) in the world, who have achieved a certain stature after billions of years of evolution in the universe, and are now capable of making quite refined (or so we think) observations of the universe. ...

Then, though, there are the BB’s in the universe: Boltzmann Brains. Random fluctuations of the fabric of spacetime itself which, most of the time, are rather insignificant puffs which evaporate immediately. But sometimes they stick around. More rarely, they are complex. Sometimes (very very rarely) they are really quite as complex as us human types. (Actually, “very very rarely” does not quite convey just how rare we are talking now.) And sometimes these vacuum quantum fluctuations attain the status of actual observers in the world. But, the rarest of them all, the BB’s, are able to (however briefly) make actual observations in the universe which are, in fact, “not erroneous” as Don Page put it.

The man was a compelling speaker, and soon I realized there was an actual intellectual debate underway in the high end of the cosmology/high energy community as to what the role of these BB’s might be in the universe, in the very far (or maybe not so far) future...

The thing is, when you start talking about very very…very rare things like Boltzmann Brains, you are talking about REALLY long times. Much longer than we’ve had on earth (and I mean 4.5 billion years) by many orders of magnitude. Numbers like 10 to the 60th years were being batted around like it was next week in this talk. By those times, all the stars and all the galaxies have gone out, and gone cold, and space has continued to expand exponentially and things are long past looking pretty bleak for the OO’s still around, who (we presume) need heat and light and at least a little energy of some sort to survive, even if we are talking about very slow machine intelligence (even slower than humans for example).

So eventually, the mere fact that there is, at these long times, just oodles of space in the universe means that the BB’s become more and more common (even if they are rare) and eventually dominate the, uh, intellectual landscape of the universe...

...I am mangling this horribly, and of course before writing this I took just a glimpse at the already voluminous amount of literature on this topic, and realized that I have a lot of reading to do, both blog and academic. So it’s best I stop and let you all go look up Boltzmann Brains, as I will, and do some more reading...

There's a lot of time in a universe that's open (expanding). Time enough for spacetime to dream the lives of mortals ...

Conservapedia: and now for something completely different

Different, as in very funny:

Conservapedia | Cosmic Variance

.... Everyone is having their fun with Conservapedia, a rightward-tilting alternative to Wikipedia that aims to ensure that future generations of conservatives grow up really dumb. A mildly-close look reveals that the major biases of Wikipedia that made this new project worth launching are (1) their insistence in using “CE” (Common Era) rather than “AD” (Anno Domini) in giving dates, and (2) the occasional Anglicized spelling....

CV provides some hilarious Conservapedia entries, please do read the post. At the moment the site is being overwhelmed by parody posts, but I'm sure it will settle down to a duller, but no less foolish, state. The good news is that any migration from Wikipedia to Conservapedia can only raise the IQ of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Carter: can he be made a saint?

Jimmy Carter, age 82, leads an underfunded and increasingly successful assault on river blindness. True, he's not catholic, but couldn't he be made an honorary saint anyway?

I was going to title this "Give the man the damned peace prize already" -- but then I remembered that he finally got the prize in 2002.

Update 2/25/2007: Rumor has it that Carter is pressing Gore very hard to run. I don't America is good enough to merit someone of Al's quality, but we do need him.

How to murder 100,000 people - and get away with it

Counterfeit drugs, mostly manufactured in China, are widely distributed in Southeast Asia and Africa. The thugs have a lot of blood on their hands ...

In the World of Life-Saving Drugs, a Growing Epidemic of Deadly Fakes - New York Times

Estimates of the deaths caused by fakes run from tens of thousands a year to 200,000 or more. The World Health Organization has estimated that a fifth of the one million annual deaths from malaria would be prevented if all medicines for it were genuine and taken properly...

I'm generally not in favor of the death penalty, but it is tempting to make an exception for wealthy entrepreneurs who kill thousands of people.

Which brings me to tobacco. Tobacco executives sell an addictive product that, when used as directed, kills thousands. From a purely ethical perspective, disregarding minor details of law, are they substantially less evil than these counterfeiters?

Krugman has broken me. Oh, and Edwards health plan

A colleague has been dropping off printouts of Paul Krugman's TimesSelect column to my desktop. I'm thereby reminded that there's nobody else in mainstream journalism willing and able to write fact based in-your-face disclosures of what Sauron (Bush/Cheney is the current incarnation) is up to. Krugman is Molly Ivins with less humor but a stronger platform and far more data. Now that Molly has died there's no-one else playing in this league. Alas, the NYT put Krugman behind their $50/year paywall. Conspiracy theorists figure this was a way to silence him, but I think the NYT made a bet-the-ranch decision that people like me would crack -- sooner or later.

Congratulations NYT, you've won. I've cracked. Here's $50. And so, here's Krugman on the Edwards health plan...

Edwards Gets It Right - New York Times

...People who don't get insurance from their employers wouldn't have to deal individually with insurance companies: they'd purchase insurance through ''Health Markets'': government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public's behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills -- not the function of granting insurance in the first place -- outsourced to private insurers.

Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting -- the process of screening out high-risk clients -- are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies' overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, ''Health Markets,'' the press release says, ''will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.'' This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now -- after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan's low premiums, or lose the competition.

And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. ''Over time,'' the press release says, ''the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.'"

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable...

This is a great example of why I need Krugman. I skimmed the Edwards plan and came away feeling a bit disappointed. On quick glance it seemed to miss the key issues. Krugman is smarter and looks deeper, and reveals that the Edwards plan is serious and meaningful. Put me down in the Edwards camp -- unless, as Robert Reich half-predicts -- Gore announces his candidacy at the Academy Awards. Then I'd be torn ...

(Now I get to see how much Krugman I can quote before the NYT sends me a nasty-gram. I think I can stay within Fair Use pretty readily.)

How not to thrill your customers

An author of a couple of interesting OS X apps, has a blog. I wrote a (brilliant, of course) comment on the blog -- but I fumbled the captcha. When the screen redrew, my comment was gone.

I figured I'd let the fellow know of the problem, but here's what his blog has in the contact section:

...If you’d like to contact me, please send me email. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out my email address...

Yikes! This guy hasn't figured out that his blog is a part of his sales strategy ... or, in this case, his anti-sales strategy! (Name intentionally withheld.)

Deinventing government: renewing a US child's passport

A golden age can only be recognized in a rear view mirror. Once upon a time Al Gore was reinventing government, and governmental websites were often useful. Alas, in the reign of Sauron all those websites have been outsourced to the highest donor. Consider, for example, the process of renewing a child's passport.

Now, I admit this is an extreme example. A few years ago our very dim congress decided that a child's passport must prove both citizenship and also, somehow, prove that the child is related to their parents. This made the process very complex - for every renewal up to age 14 (after which the child passes into yet another intermediate process). So the process is seriously bunged up to begin with. Even so, the obscure and confusing directions manage to make a bungled process even worse.

For the benefit of anyone who ever has to do this, here's the directions for the worst case scenario (adopted children, mother kept her birth name and is thus surely a terrorist):

1. From Special Requirements for Children Under Age 14 get the forms and print them.
   
   
2. Get pictures at Kinkos. They're open all hours, and they have the right equipment. (Some post offices will do photos! The MSP Airport post office will do the picture.)
   
   
3. Find a post office that does passports. I don't know any way to find the hours they're open for this other than visiting them (!). In MSP (Minneapolis) the airport PO is open for passport processing from 9am-3pm seven days a week and it does photos as well. Other offices may be open on certain hours and days. There's usually no way to phone and discover the hours -- you have to actually make a specific visit to learn the hours.
   
   
4. You will need (for our "worst case" scenario)
   

• Child's current passport (god help you if it's expired)
• Child (in good mood)
• Those pictures from Kinkos, or done at the post office in some cases
  
• BOTH parents physically present, both with identification (I recommend carrying both drivers license AND passport for identification).
• child's certified US birth certificate (every time, you'd think they'd only need it once)
  
• just in case: adoption certificate andmarriage certificate if mother's name doesn't match the children's name. The last time we did this we weren't asked for these.

The passport office will keep the original birth certificate and last passport. We paid the extra $60 for expedited service on the theory that it might reduce the rate of document loss and processing errors. I hate surrendering original documents.

You can check the status of the passport renewal here.

Read the official site for the official list, but the above works for us. I've written my house representative -- at the very least the Post Office hours and service information should be on a web site.

Aetna: winner of this month's stupid security policy

Aetna's username policy requires a number. In the username. On the other hand, they authenticate using the same "security questions" everyone else uses. So if your account is cracked somewhere, the crooks can use your past "security" answers to get your Aetna account too -- even if they don't know your "secret" "username".

Confusing the username with the password. That's rich. Aetna wins this month's stupid security policy prize.

Router admin password: don't use the default!

If you've never set your router's admin (not the wireless pw) pw, you should do it now: Gordon's Tech: The router/javascript bug - this feels big.