AI and Social Science – Brendan O'Connor

Here are two great reviews, from 2003 then 2005.

1) PLoS Biology: Economy of the Mind nicely reviews the field and many interesting experiments.

One annoyance: They need to say “Banburismus” is more commonly known as Bayesian learning. (Banbury, England was a city near Bletchley Park they got their paper from when doing Bayesian statistical codebreaking of the Enigma cipher in World War II. Read the story here in MacKay’s excellent free online textbook.) Thanks to neurodudes for the PLoS link.

2) Neuroeconomics: How neuroscience can inform economics is written by the leaders of the field, advocating their approach. I like the detail and their careful descriptions of how cognitive neuroscience findings can enhance our understanding of economic phenomena.

Also, the second is useful to read since it’s the target of criticism by the more recent The case for mindless economics, which I view as an empire-strikes-back sort of paper. I’m waiting for Part III of this saga…

Continuing our previous story: they’ve won! Check out the interview at the end of the semifinals here.

NYT reports:

ATHENS, May 20 (AP) — In what some fans called a stunning upset, a Finnish heavy metal band with monster masks and apocalyptic lyrics won the Eurovision Song Contest late Saturday.

The band, Lordi, caused a bit of a national identity crisis in Finland, where opponents accused it of devil worship and cringed at the thought that it might win.

The annual kitsch extravaganza, which was the springboard for the Swedish group Abba and Celine Dion, is known for its bland dance music and bubble-gum pop acts. This year groups from 24 countries faced off before tens of millions on television.

The band’s members do not disclose their real names. The lead singer, Mr. Lordi, said its win, Finland’s first, was “a victory for open-mindedness.” “We are not Satanists,” he said. “This is entertainment.”

Monkeys drink more alcohol when housed alone, and some like to end a long day in the lab with a boozy cocktail, according to a new analysis of alcohol consumption among members of a rhesus macaque social group.
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“It was not unusual to see some of the monkeys stumble and fall, sway, and vomit,” Chen added. “In a few of our heavy drinkers, they would drink until they fell asleep.”
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In yet another study, the scientists gave a group of male monkeys 24-hour access to the beverage dispensers. According to the researchers, a spike in consumption immediately followed the facility’s working hours.

“Like humans, monkeys are more likely to drink after stressful periods, such as soon after the daily 8-5 testing hours and after a long week of testing,” said Chen.

Link (courtesy of digg)

I started reading Jeffrey Sachs’ new book The End of Poverty. The first 30 pages are excellent, but it starts getting arrogant and annoying quick. Substantively, I’m uncertain whether a big new development aid push will solve things.

Since I enthusiastically bum around course websites I’m not taking (bad habit, will stop real soon now), I was fortunate to run across an excellent debate between Sachs and William Easterly:

Easterly’s view on Africa: The West Can’t Take The Lead which has some amazing anecdotes about African educators and entrepreneurs. (Or, I think they’re amazing only because I’m a condescending Westerner?)

Easterly reviews Sachs. Choice quote:

“Success in ending the poverty trap,” Sachs writes, “will be much easier than it appears.” Really? If it’s so easy, why haven’t five decades of effort gotten the job done? Sachs should redirect some of his outrage at the question of why the previous $2.3 trillion didn’t reach the poor so that the next $2.3 trillion does. In fact, ending poverty is not easy at all. In those five decades, poverty researchers have learned a great deal about the complexity of toxic politics, bad history (including exploitative or inept colonialism), ethnic and regional conflicts, elites’ manipulation of politics and institutions, official corruption, dysfunctional public services, malevolent police forces and armies, the difficulty of honoring contracts and property rights, unaccountable and excessively bureaucratic donors and many other issues.

and finally a debate in the Letters section! Oh what fun. And dreadfully important. I’ve got to read Easterly’s The Elusive Quest for Growth next…

What do the newly enriched Chinese bourgeois spend their money on? Vacations to visit Marx’s home in Trier, of course!

I thought Eurovision was weird enough already. But in addition to the usual fun mix of kitschy pop and Cold War legacy nationalism in its telephone voting politics, this year will see Finland’s satanic band Lordi:

HELSINKI, Finland — They have eight-foot retractable latex Satan wings, sing hits like “Chainsaw Buffet” and blow up slabs of smoking meat on stage. So members of the band Lordi expected a reaction when they beat a crooner of love ballads to represent Finland at the Eurovision song contest in Athens, the competition that was the springboard for Abba and Celine Dion.

“In Finland, we have no Eiffel Tower, few real famous artists, it is freezing cold and we suffer from low self-esteem,” said Mr. Putaansuu, who, as Lordi, has horns protruding from his forehead and sports long black fingernails.

As he stuck out his tongue menacingly, his red demon eyes glaring, Lordi was surrounded by Kita, an alien-man-beast predator who plays flame-spitting drums inside a cage; Awa, a blood-splattered ghost who howls backup vocals; Ox, a zombie bull who plays bass; and Amen, a mummy in a rubber loincloth who plays guitar.

Dragging on a cigarette, Mr. Putaansuu added, “Finns nearly choked on their cereal when they realized we were the face Finland would be showing to the world.”

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But not everyone in this Nordic country of five million views the monster squad as un-Finnish. Some Finns say that Lordi is right at home and that the band’s use of flaming dragon-encrusted swords and exploding baby dolls expresses the warrior spirit of the Vikings.

Link: NYTimes: Finland Squirms as Its Latest Export Steps Into Spotlight

Great Microsoft Research report (from a workshop they held?): 2020 Science where they argue that computer science will become part and parcel of science in general. For example, computation theory will be important to understand biological organisms as information processing systems. This is basically a much better version of Wolfram’s New Kind of Science argument — I believe this one. The big shared insight is that computers aren’t just about data storage and number crunching. Wolfram and the some of the Santa Fe complex systems people are really in to simulations, which is fine. But there’s tremendous potential in computation theory — algorithms, formal representations, and more. Empirical scientists are going to have to learn this stuff!

Where is social science? Where should it go? How should it get there? My answer, in a nutshell, is that social science is headed for an alliance with cognitive science.

Mark Turner, 2001, Chronicle of Higher Education

The best bit from a paper by Paul Rubin on evolution and politics: libertarianism could be unpopular today because libertarian societies would get destroyed in competition with egalitarian militaristic tribes back in the hunter-gatherer days. The paper has some great points on what prehistoric society was like — fierce intergroup wars and competition. Hobbes/Locke/Rousseau states of nature, not so much. (While we’re at it, I have to plug Boyd and Richerson’s gene-culture coevolution theory.)

Evolutionary psychology has of course its own special dangers, but apparently Rubin also wrote a book on the subject of the biological basis of politics. Interesting…

Interesting aricle on Slate about the risks and rewards of academic blogging. I’ve added John Hawks‘ interesting anthropology weblog to the of ones to read…