MisEntropy [notes]

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[misentropy]

adaptive recovery

We are entering an interesting time when we all must learn how to live with this virus. It is hard to know when this virus will subside or if it will always remain a threat. Unlike other crises, where a hurricane hits and leaves a trail of destruction, COVID-19 may ebb and flow, but it looks like it will be around for a long time. Hot spots will crop up, making crisis management more like whack-a-mole. We call this stage ‘adaptive recovery.’

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[misentropy]

synthetic data

Amazon is not alone. Self-driving car firms do a lot of training in high-fidelity simulations of reality, where no real damage can be done when something goes wrong. A paper in 2018 from Nvidia, a chipmaker, described a method for quickly creating synthetic training data for self-driving cars, and concluded that the resulting algorithms worked better than those trained on real data alone.

Privacy is another attraction of synthetic data. Firms hoping to use ai in medicine or finance must contend with laws such as America’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Properly anonymising data can be difficult, a problem that systems trained on made-up people do not need to bother about.

The trick, says Euan Cameron, one of Mr Ciais’s colleagues, is ensuring simulations are close enough to reality that their lessons carry over. For some well-bounded problems such as fraud detection or credit scoring, that is straightforward. Synthetic data can be created by adding statistical noise to the real kind. Although individual transactions are therefore fictitious, it is possible to guarantee that they will have, collectively, the same statistical characteristics as the real data from which they were derived. But the more complicated a problem becomes, the harder it is to ensure that lessons from virtual data will translate smoothly to the real world.

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[misentropy]

returners

Games Workshop, which boomed in the 1990s, is enjoying a surge of demand from what the industry calls “returners”—30- or 40-something men who last held a 28mm-high orc in their teens and, now that they no longer have to pretend to be cool, find themselves picking up their paintbrushes once more. “I’ve got a wife and a kid and I don’t feel the need to pretend to have other hobbies any more,” says Paul, a 36-year-old local-government worker. Historical gamers tend to be older: many mention Airfix kits of the 1960s and 1970s as their introduction to the hobby.

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[misentropy]

circuit-breaker

The priority is to shield from infection those who are most likely to become gravely ill. That becomes difficult if large numbers of people are becoming infected. To prevent the virus from spreading uncontrollably, governments are relying on a combination of three key measures: testing and quarantine; changes in behaviour that reduce transmission (which include social distancing, the wearing of masks and handwashing); and targeted lockdowns of outbreak hotspots—a practice known as a “circuit-breaker” that has been popular in East Asian countries thus far and is now being embraced elsewhere.

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[misentropy]

water census

In 2035, with water in ever-shorter supply, China conducted its first Water Census, estimating available water resources per resident of each city and county. Those places with plenty were colour-coded green. Areas suffering from water stress were given an orange code, while those with dangerously few resources were coloured red. The populations of arid, red-coded places may not grow, by law. In practice, many arid areas have emptied, as locals realised no new government funds would be forthcoming for roads, schools or hospitals or to support economic development.

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[misentropy]

slow bull

In Chinese stockmarket mythology, the rarest of beasts is the slow bull. The past couple of decades have brought two fast bulls: vertiginous surges in share prices, neither lasting more than a year. Those soon led to fast bears when stocks crashed and, eventually, to slow bears as the descent became more gradual. Most of the time there have been what might be termed long worms as the market moved sideways, such that the csi 300 index, a gauge of China’s biggest stocks, has averaged the same level over the past five years that it first reached back in 2007. The slow bull—a steady, almost dependable, rise year after year, well known to investors in America—has remained elusive.

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[misentropy]

cultural wetlands

Smith was a very important figure in New Orleans; he died in 2009. He was a photographer who made a pioneering effort to understand the traditions of the Mardi Gras Indians, the spiritualist churches of New Orleans and the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs – in other words, the tap roots of African-American and Creole culture in New Orleans. He referred to these traditions as ‘cultural wetlands’ – places that hadn’t yet been ruined by commercial exploitation.

All these different elements of New Orleans culture have a kind of umbilical relationship, one to another. Smith was from a blue-blood uptown family in New Orleans, so it was in no way automatic that he would have had an interest in these traditions of black New Orleans. He didn’t just photograph the churches, the Mardi Gras Indians and the Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, although he did that brilliantly; he also interviewed people and contributed crucial information to our understanding of those traditions.

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[misentropy]

horizontal media

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. The change began around 1999, when blogging tools first became widely available, says Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University. The result was “the shift of the tools of production to the people formerly known as the audience,” he says. This was followed by a further shift: the rise of “horizontal media” that made it quick and easy for anyone to share links (via Facebook or Twitter, for example) with large numbers of people without the involvement of a traditional media organisation. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network.

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[misentropy]

Moravec’s Paradox

A more subtle problem is that of deciding what to use ai for. Machine intelligence is very different from the biological sort. That means that gauging how difficult machines will find a task can be counter-intuitive. ai researchers call the problem Moravec’s paradox, after Hans Moravec, a Canadian roboticist, who noted that, though machines find complex arithmetic and formal logic easy, they struggle with tasks like co-ordinated movement and locomotion which humans take completely for granted.

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[misentropy]

number laundering

This is written by a sociologist, so we have moved on from psychology to sociology. I like this book because one of the things that really irritates me as a statistician is when numbers are bandied around as though they are God-given truths and can’t be argued with. There is a nice quote from Joel Best that “all statistics are social products, the results of people’s efforts”. He says you should always ask, “Why was this statistic created?” Certainly statistics are constructed from things that people have chosen to measure and define, and the numbers that come out of those studies often take on a life of their own.

Best uses the lovely phrase “number laundering”, when the origins of numbers are forgotten. They get so bandied around that nobody knows where they came from. In the BBC Radio Four programme More or Less these are known as “zombie statistics”, numbers that refuse to die. However much people criticise them, they keep getting wheeled out.

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[misentropy]

deliberate vs. emergent strategy

For example, Christensen cites business scholars Henry Mintzberg and James Waters, who in 1985 published a paper defining two forms of strategies: deliberate and emergent. A deliberate strategy, they explained, is a roadmap that a company or an individual puts in place and sets out to follow. An emergent strategy involves the decision to follow a new path when opportunity knocks unexpectedly, or when an unexpected roadblock arises. In work and in life, the question is always which path to take.

To help answer that question, Christensen recommends a tool called "discovery-driven planning," created by Ian MacMillan, a professor at the Wharton School, and Rita McGrath, a professor at Columbia. In the interest of simplicity, How Will You Measure Your Life? distills the tool to a single question: "What assumptions must prove true for this plan to work?"

Listing your assumptions about a prospective plan and assessing their plausibility can help determine the likelihood of a successful outcome, Christensen says, whether you are evaluating an executive decision or a family matter. "Whenever you implement something, if it fails, then almost invariably it did so because there was an assumption in there that, looking back on it, clearly was not plausible," he explains.

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[misentropy]

non-places

Tom Fort pedals down the A303 in Britain’s soft south. Paul Barker trudges round Hebden Bridge in the hard north. Both writers are seeking something distinctive about their chosen places. By the same token, both are sensitive to the idea of “non-place”, a phrase Mr Fort uses to describe service stations, shopping centres, airports and the space-bubbles inhabited by drivers. Mr Barker does not name it, but he nonetheless conveys his sense of the same thing—at the fancy grocer’s, selling Japanese wakame and cranberrypressé, or the executive houses with stone bed-warmers on the windowsill and Range Rovers in the drive. These places might be anywhere or, for his purposes, nowhere.

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[misentropy]

motivated reasoning

One of those mechanisms is figuring out how to believe what the group believes. Haidt sees the role that reason plays as akin to the job of the White House press secretary. He writes, “No matter how bad the policy, the secretary will find some way to praise or defend it. Sometimes you’ll hear an awkward pause as the secretary searches for the right words, but what you’ll never hear is: ‘Hey, that’s a great point! Maybe we should rethink this policy.’ Press secretaries can’t say that because they have no power to make or revise policy. They’re told what the policy is, and their job is to find evidence and arguments that will justify the policy to the public.” For that reason, Haidt told me, “once group loyalties are engaged, you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments. Thinking is mostly just rationalization, mostly just a search for supporting evidence.”

Psychologists have a term for this: “motivated reasoning,” which Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, defines as “when a person is conforming their assessments of information to some interest or goal that is independent of accuracy”—an interest or goal such as remaining a well-regarded member of his political party, or winning the next election, or even just winning an argument.

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[misentropy]

duck syndrome

This is a very Western view, the idea that effort is unseemly, that it does not reflect well on you if you have to perspire when someone else is walking along coolly and accomplishing. In many elite schools and universities there is something called “duck syndrome”. You know how ducks appear to float along the water effortlessly but may be paddling madly beneath the surface. Like ducks, many students may hide their effort, because for them effortless success is the true measure of ability.

But seeing effort as something shameful is a liability because effort is what takes our abilities to fruition. Since I wrote Mindset I got letters from people who were child prodigies. As youngsters they were told, “You’re so smart you’ll be this, you’ll be that,” but effort was never mentioned. In fact, they thought their claim to fame was that they didn’t need effort to reach greatness. They were mistaken, and as a result they never made much of their abilities. Ability alone does not take you to success. You actually have to work for it.

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[misentropy]

agency vs. experience

According to some philosophers the mind is made up of two parts, agency (the capacity to plan and do things) and experience (the capacity to feel and sense things). Both set people apart from robots, but Dr Gray and Dr Wegner speculated that experience in particular was playing a crucial role in generating the uncanny-valley effect. They theorised that adding human-like eyes and facial expressions to robots conveys emotion where viewers do not expect emotion to be present. The resulting clash of expectations, they thought, might be where the unease was coming from.

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[misentropy]

boundary spanning

The quality-improvement literature devotes a great deal of time to the idea that because frontline staff is empowered to fix problems, senior leaders should sometimes cede responsibility. Thus, Tucker and Singer's paper puzzled some readers, who found it counterintuitive that improvements came when senior leaders seemed to be taking away employee power.

Tucker has a different perspective. "I believe it was not that senior leaders were solving problems, but that they were just making sure things didn't fall through the cracks," she says

Tucker also explains this finding in terms of "boundary spanning." Nurses are at the far end of an internal supply chain. Even if they discover a gap between what the supply chain is providing and what the patient needs, they usually don't have the authority or knowledge to go back to those supply departments and fix the problem; a higher-level person needs to be involved.

"This finding tells us that process improvement in hospitals will require people to work across departmental boundaries, where the problems happen, rather than within a particular department," Tucker says.

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[misentropy]

fluid intelligence

There’s also just more information out there—because unlike with previous information media, with the Internet, creating material is nearly as easy as consuming it. And it’s easy to mistake more voices for more noise. In reality, though, the proliferation of diverse voices may actually improve our overall ability to think. In Everything Bad Is Good for You, Steven Johnson argues that the increasing complexity and range of media we engage with have, over the past century, made us smarter, rather than dumber, by providing a form of cognitive calisthenics. Even pulp-television shows and video games have become extraordinarily dense with detail, filled with subtle references to broader subjects, and more open to interactive engagement. They reward the capacity to make connections and to see patterns—precisely the kinds of skills we need for managing an information glut.

Scientists describe these skills as our “fluid intelligence”—the ability to find meaning in confusion and to solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge. Fluid intelligence doesn’t look much like the capacity to memorize and recite facts, the skills that people have traditionally associated with brainpower. But building it up may improve the capacity to think deeply that Carr and others fear we’re losing for good. And we shouldn’t let the stresses associated with a transition to a new era blind us to that era’s astonishing potential. We swim in an ocean of data, accessible from nearly anywhere, generated by billions of devices. We’re only beginning to explore what we can do with this knowledge-at-a-touch.

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