December 2009
1 post
1 tag
Toxo is the craziest parasite you'll hear about...
Long time readers of stuckk are probably aware by now that I’m fascinated by neuroscience, evolutionary biology and philosophy of mind. So it’s no surprise that the recent story on Edge.org about Toxoplasma caught my eye.
Toxo is a parasite that can only reproduce in the guts of cats. The parasite exits its host cat in its feces, which (who knew) gets eaten by rodents. Rodents get...
November 2009
9 posts
1 tag
Cryonics and personal identity
Some people think that they could achieve immortality by “uploading” their consciousness to a computer. Roughly, the intuition is that a computer could execute the same function as the brain yielding an entity with the same memories and the same basic personality and other psychological characteristics.
Bryan Caplan thinks that’s crazy, and I doubt he’s alone in having...
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Developmental surprises
Making aid effective is difficult. We get it wrong a lot; sometimes that means we just didn’t help much, but sometimes that means we made it worse. The MIT Poverty Action Lab has a list of “best buys,” that is, interventions that have proven to be successful and really cost effective too. Most are the sort of things you might expect, but some seem a bit odd.
Deworming in...
LHC warming up
People are getting excited about the Large Hadron Collider again. When it comes to large dramatic science machines like the Hubble telescope or the Very Large Array, it’s hard not to get excited. It’s clear that we have a lot of romance about space, and that physics is a very prestigious field — name four physicists and four chemists or four biologists and I can bet you’ll...
The manhunt for Evan Ratliff
Wired has a writeup of a project they set up wherein one of their writers attempted to shed his identity entirely and build a new life undetected while his editor at Wired organized a internet and real-life-wide manhunt to track him down. Ultimately he was found out, but it’s a fun story and well worth the read.
Some parts that I found interesting: a really good way to disguise yourself if...
Utilitarianism and the organ lottery
Is it ever OK to kill one person to save five? What if it’s just a random person on the street? What if it’s a societal institution that we all sign on to in the same way that we agree to taxes or the draft? The proposal to create an organ lottery has been around for a long time now. That is, a random societal lottery like the draft lottery that would randomly select among people with...
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Is killing worse than letting die?
I had a conversation this weekend about what sorts of things philosophy majors would be much more likely to say than similar but non-philosophy major college students. I think philosophers would be far more likely to say that there’s not a morally relevant difference between active and passive euthanasia. That is to say, it’s no worse to kill than to let die.
For a lot of people...
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What if everyone spoke English?
Suppose in a few decades, everyone in the world spoke English. Would that be a bad thing?
Some people have strong opinions about “language death,” to the point where there are several different entire ideologies devoted to the preservation of minority (or even much larger) languages. See the language ecology movement, or see EU policy on promoting minority languages.
I’m not...
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Stickking to Stuckk
The name Stuckk comes from Stickk, a site that helps people sign self-binding contracts. It’s basically a formalized version of telling your friend, “Here’s $20. Only give it back if I lose 10 pounds this month.” Except with Stickk, you hand over your credit card information, and it charges you if your “referee” says you failed to keep your commitment (giving...
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Why scientists should blog
Seed magazine has a really fascinating article on Saturn’s moons. It’s a cool read and you should check it out if you’re as amazed by space as I am. I want to talk about a different part of the article.
Seed links to the blog of one of the authors of the paper under discussion, where he talks about some of the academic drama that went on behind the scenes. I’m hardly the...
October 2009
4 posts
1 tag
Annoying the user can be a feature
Google typically has a minimalist aesthetic, so why does Gmail display an obnoxious yellow box whenever you go “invisible” in Talk? Economics to the explanatory rescue!
For those of you who don’t know, when you’re “invisible,” you can see and IM other people who are online but other people can’t see you. This asymmetry can yield a classic free-rider...
URL aesthetics
Maybe this is just me being weird, but I have pretty strong opinions about the way I like URLs to look. Let’s look at some URLs:
http://www.vimeo.com/4576896
Vimeo has great attention to detail in their UI; part of that is great URLs. No implementation details are visible. It’s obvious what the page is — it’s a watch page for one video on vimeo. Better, the URL is so...
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Changing my mind about GDP alternatives
I now think switching to a measure of well-being that includes some objective and subjective measures of happiness is probably a good thing on balance.
France commissioned a nobel-rich group to look at it. The report offers three broad categories of problems with GDP that an alternative measure might address:
Classical GDP Issues - issues with GDP everybody agrees on like pricing an...
Do we understand religion and science the same...
Some people view religious beliefs and scientific facts as derived from distinct mental processes. Facts are derived from some sort of cognitive, rational evaluative process, while beliefs are based on faith or revelation.
As with most questions about our minds, I’m interested in what neuroscience has to say about the question. Coincidentally, there’s a new study in PLoS one...
September 2009
16 posts
A brief hiatus...
Wansley and my contract period ended September 20th. We’re taking a week long break to decide whether to contract again and, if so, under what terms.
If you have any good contract ideas (maybe how to solve the quantity/quality problem), leave a comment.
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The nationalism of liberals and conservatives
Ben Casnocha recently argued that while liberals point to conservatives’ bastardization of patriotism for aggressive foreign policy, they are equally guilty of appropriating nationalist ideas for their own aims. In particular, through nationalistic trade policies (“Buy American”, tariffs, etc.) liberals undermine the American economy, as well as endangering the livelihoods of the...
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Why would hell exist?
Marcus Gadson, a Dartmouth student and friend who blogs at The Gadson Review, has a post offering a justification for the existence of hell within the Christian religion. He offers three possible reasons - retribution, incapacitation (don’t let sinners pollute hell), and deterrence. I don’t really think these are sufficient for two reasons:
First - Hell is a disproportionately severe...
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Amazon vs. Target
I have recently shopped both at Target and Amazon, and had a different experience with both.
It was a bit tricky to find what I needed at Target (black socks, if you must know). I couldn’t see all of signs overhead and it wasn’t obvious to me whether to look where the shoes were or where the boxers were. It reminded me of old school web portals that used to keep a categorized...
The value of Twitter
Everybody has an opinion about Twitter. Robert Scoble thinks it’s great, but those smarties over at the Economist’s Free Exchange blog think it’s going nowhere.
For the longest time nobody thought Facebook was going to make any money, but now they’re cash flow positive. It’s also important to remember that Google was not profitable for some time after it’s...
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What France and Bhutan have in common
France is moving toward using a metric for national happiness in its economic policy, something Bhutan has done for decades. For France, the transition is rather transparent, since the country hasn’t been performing as well as other developed countries in GDP terms, but should gain GNH (Gross National Happiness) points for its liberal labor and health policies.
GDP and per capita GDP are...
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More memory tricks
The holy grail of memory research has been called the Marilyn Monroe experiment. The experiment might involve implanting a pleasant memory of the experiment’s eponymous sex symbol in some lucky scientist’s brain. If we could implant memories, then that would be a strong indication that we had indeed found, and understood on a practical level, the physical mechanism of memory.
We...
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Last post on sports
This post, the last of three looks at sports in American society, focuses on little league sports.
Charles Wheelan argues that the reason youth sports have grown increasingly serious over time is that they are zero-sum, so they tend toward arms race “collective irrationality”. Basically, if all the other kids are playing for 3 club teams in the off season, you don’t make the...
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Guiltless chicken and beef
New Scientist magazine has an article about creating “pain-free” animals. According to the magazine, Adam Shriver is a philosopher arguing we should consider it as a more ethical way to eat meat.
I think among college students today there’s a sense that society will be moving in a vegetarian direction in the coming decades, even if they aren’t vegetarians or think the...
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Sports continued
The second take on sports comes from Derek Sivers’s re-hashing of a few years’ old talk by Kurt Vonnegut. Sivers and Vonnegut say that people have trouble reconciling the dramatic twists and turns of a story or movie with the more meandering and mundane experience of everyday life. We walk out of a Sunday matinee-showing and wonder where the montage-friendly ups and downs are in our...
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Three takes on the seriousness of sports
21st century America cares a lot about its sports. 12 year old NBA-hopefuls play in 3 leagues at the same time while working with private coaches to try to land spots on their middle school basketball teams. Meanwhile, their parents are - embarrassingly - thrown out of their games for getting a little too into the action and cursing at the referees. That is, that’s when they’re not...
Moral distance
Peter Singer is responsible for the following famous thought experiment.
Suppose you’re walking through the woods in a brand new and quite expensive suit. You pass by a pond and in that pond see a small child drowning. You could easily save the child by wading in, but doing that would ruin your suit. You walk by.
Have you done something wrong in this story? Most people think yes. Now...
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Beating evolution part 2
This post continues from one of my posts last week. I’m discussing Nick Bostrom’s article in What’s Next about areas evolution might produce beatable results. The first area was “changed tradeoffs,” and there are a few others.
The second area is “value discordance.” Don’t be scared by the name, it’s pretty simple: evolution doesn’t want...
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More on the future of newspapers
I know I know, I’ve posted about the future of newspapers before, but this article in the New York Review of Books got me thinking again.
One passage which caught my eye was:
The fall-off in ad revenues has been compounded by another phenomenon that newspaper executives would rather not discuss: their own greed. The relentless stress placed on acquisition and consolidation, which...
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Why so few women contributing to Wikipedia?
According to a survey cited by the Wall Street Journal only 13% of contributors to Wikipedia articles are female. Part of the gap is made up just by the gender disparity in readers of Wikipedia (68% are male), but that doesn’t come close to explaining why so few contributors are women.
Any ideas for why such a large disparity exists?
Ideas (assuming the survey was done correctly and...
August 2009
26 posts
When can we beat evolution?
I’ve posted before about What’s Next. This post comes from an essay in that book by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom is interested in suggesting a heuristic we might use to prioritize human enhancement research, assuming we want to prioritize ideas most likely to succeed.
Bostrom compares evolution to a surpassingly skillful engineer. Evolution worked tirelessly for many many years to develop...
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2 Questions to ask of those against the death...
I just finished reading a chilling article about a man executed a few years ago in Texas. Cameron Willingham, the defendant, wasn’t a great guy - he beat his wife and had repeatedly broken the law - but he was convicted and killed mostly on fuzzy forensic evidence that has since been discredited.
I’ve written before about the sorry state of oversight for forensic science in the...
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Feminism and Utilitarianism
Despite living and dying well before the 20th century, both Jeremy Bentham and his less weird successor John Stuart Mill were impressively liberal. Bentham, for example, argued for the decriminalization of homosexuality - ‘might as well spread the love, err utility around’. Both also used utilitarian premises to argue for women’s rights.
Their arguments basically had two...
Books I'd like to read: a catalog of emotions
This post is a continuation of sorts from my previous post about happiness, but on a broader level. I want to read a catalog of emotions.
Humans seem to come into this world with a programmed set of emotions. We all can recognize anger, sadness, boredom or happiness in ourselves and in others. There are some rarer affective states like ecstasy, elevation or embarrassment that produce distinct...
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Buying experiences
The Boston Globe’s Ideas column talks about research suggesting people who spend money on experiences — lunches with friends and so on — actually are happier. It’s a bit paradoxical: experiences are difficult to measure and transient compared to goods, yet it is experiences that seem to bring us the most enduring happiness.
It may be that spending on experiences with...
Cash for clunkers?
With the Cash for Clunkers program coming to an end, Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post arguing that the program will be seen “as at best, unnecessary, and at worst, a bad idea.” I think I agree. He puts forth a few arguments: the program just shifted auto consumption one quarter up, it just shifted consumption from non-auto to auto, and it hurt secondary industry players like...
Inglorious Basterds
Tonight I saw Quentin Tarantino’s newest movies, “Inglorious Basterds”. The plot follows the efforts of a team of American Jews, a British soldier, and a German movie star (in addition to another team of a French Jew and her lover) to killer Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi officials. The team of American Jews were known as the ‘Bastards’ by the Germans because they...
Teachers Unions - NYC Edition
Steven Brill has an article on New York City’s “rubber rooms” where teachers who have been deemed too incompetent or dangerous to teach but too hard to fire are paid six digit figures to sit in a room playing checkers, sleeping, and chatting. Like in other places, teachers are incredibly difficult to fire (for example, one teacher who was found passed out drunk in her classroom...
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Stewart Brand on ecopragmatism
I’ve blogged before about being generally positive towards geoengineering as a solution to climate change. I think there’s a newish consensus emerging that many classic pro-environment positions are misguided or impractical ways of actually improving climate.
Stewart Brand is among the leaders. He’s drawn four main points of difference with the environmental movement as it is...
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What's to be done about weaponization of...
An interesting and somewhat frightening column in Nature argues that weaponized neurological agents should be tightly regulated. I think the issue is complex.
First, there’s no question that we’ll be able to cause increasingly powerful and well-targeted effects in people’s brains within the coming decade. I’ve been writing about memory dampening and memory erasure for a...
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What makes for good science fiction
I’ve seen two good sci-fi movies recently: Moon and District 9. One big reason I liked both is that the “twist” comes in the first five minutes of the movie — or in the trailer. In Moon, the main character meets another man who looks like himself. In District 9, aliens land and are placed in a cordoned off district.
I feel like a lot of popular movies in this genre...
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What's the way to improve governance?
Some companies fail because of poor management and inane policies. Other companies are able to drive harder and faster because they get their processes right. Over time, best practices have developed to explain why some companies operate smoothly and others don’t. When a great business idea comes along, it’s emulated by others and quickly becomes a standard within an industry.
But...
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Rethinking the suburbs
A fun design competition asks its entrants to design the future of the suburbs. As the economy contracts and urbanization occurs, what’s to be done with the empty spaces?
Most of the finalists involve some variant on the following: replace some open space with a farm/plants! So build farms on top of parking lots, inside big box stores and empty mansions and in giant towers astride the open...
Should public defenders always want to win?
I just finished reading Defending the Damned, which is a journalist’s look at the Chicago public defender’s office. The public defenders in the book seem to handle the emotional turmoil of the job by distancing themselves from the actual emotional substance of the crime and obsessing with winning. They dream of the cases where their client is obviously guilty for the chance that they...
Outsourcing to Google
Through Gina Trapani’s Smarterware, I stumbled across a series of videos imagining what it would be like to have Google for a roommate. The idea is silly, but it is interesting to think about how Google is changing the way we live our lives.
Aside from the concerns about privacy or antitrust issues, it’s obvious that we are ceding fact-memorizing to Google and Wikipedia. Rather than...
New Atheists - are scientific and religious...
An opinion piece in the LA Times questions the tack taken by Dawkins and others of attacking any attempt to reconcile science and religion. New Atheists have taken to criticizing groups like the National Center for Science Education, an organization which tries to keep evolution taught in schools, for arguing that evolution and religion are not incompatible.
To me, regardless of what New...
GTD for students
Lifehacker has a post on applying Getting Things Done to the life of the student. While certainly not all of the book applies to college work (seriously, what student is going to use a 31-day tickler file?), there are a lot of useful parallels. A principle that I think GTD gets especially right is breaking up things you need to do into specific tasks.
Cal Newport writes a lot about “pseudo...
Why I'm not sure refuge markets would work
Andrew linked to a Robin Hanson talk that mentioned the possibility of using refuge markets to predict catastrophic events. The idea is that you can sell tickets to refuges for certain events or conditional on certain events, and then the price of such tickets can be used to predict the probability of such “black swan” events. Assuming it’s possible to make these refuges (and...
An evolutionary obligation to disclose cosmetic...
In Cheating Darwin: The Genetic and Ethical Implications of Vanity and Cosmetic Surgery, Kristi Scott argues that people are obligated to tell potential mates whether they have had cosmetic surgery in order to avoid deceiving partners about their genetic make-up and thus half the genetic make-up of their potential children. I don’t think this kind of obligation exists.
One way to respond...
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What's next pt. 1: the Northern Rim
I recently picked up What’s Next which is a collection of essays by young scientists on what they find interesting. I expect to discuss several of the essays on this blog. Here’s the first.
Essentially, Laurence Smith argues that conditions are ripe for a substantial migration to the northern parts of the US and lower Canada. Depending on how Russia’s political commotion plays...