Choose a topic


.. Cognition
Intelligence and Motivation

.. HUM
A Mind

.. Society
Disinformation
Drag Story Tellers
I Distrust the News
What is to be said?

...Cognition
Structures of Understanding

...HUM
Culture is Ordinary

Art
AI and Art
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Is this picture real?
NonFungible Tokens
Public Art
Tearing Down Statues
Weave
What is Art?
Working With Reality

Cognition
Artificial Intelligence and the Collingridge Dilemma.
Bird Brains
Bounded Rationality
Competence Without Comprehension
Consciousness is More Like Fame Than Television
Developmental Processes
Emergence and Cognition
Genius
GIGO
I Lost My Knife
Illusion
Incomplete Information and Stories
Instinct
Is free will an illusion?
Metarepresentations
Natural Law
Necessary Illusions
On Affordances
Pencil and Paper
Post Phenomenology
Reflective Equilibrium
Return of the Law of Forms
Shifting Meanings
Superstition
Taking Things on Faith
The Hard Problem
The I Love You Gesture
The Imagined Order
The Phenomenology of Swim Bladders.
Thinking about medical procedures
Thinking About Risk
Underdetermination and Redundancy
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
What Does Google Know?

Economics
A Country Is Not Like A Company
Alternate ideas lying around waiting for disaster
Blood and Money
Can Capitalism Survive?
Do Our Minds Own Our Bodies?
Everyday Communism
Invisible Hand
Job Creators
Job Destroyers
Markets
Money and Value
Money is Different
National Accounts
Necessary Production
Paper Wealth
Post Capitalist Society
Profit Motive Fails
Rentier Capitalism
Social Wealth vs Surplus Value
Spending Money Into Existence
The Metaphysics of Money
The Ontology of Debt
Thinking about Money
Wealth is What Money Buys

Environmentalism
Blowing Up Pipelines

Epistemology
Absolute Knowledge
Equivalence
Exists
I do not know everything
Rethinking Knowledge
Rethinking Knowledge
Semiotics and Body Language
The Curious Ineffectiveness of Facts
The Past and the Future.
Uncertainty and Unpredictability
Unpredictability
Verificationism
Whatever happened to The Truth?

Evolution
Competition and Cooperation
Dr Malthus would be pleased
Error Correction
Evolution Defended
Evolution is not Religion
Evolution of Cars
Extinction
Forces of Nature
Is Natural Selection Obsolete?
Networks
Omicron
Politics and Evolution
Roles
The Evolution of Purpose.
The Problem with Natural Selection.
The Source of Bad Behavior
Thinking about Tails
Why Does a Leopard Have Spots?

Freedom
Free Speech in the age of Twitter
Freedom and Badness
Freedom and Morality
Freedom From and Freedom To
Freedom in the Age of Convoys
Laws
Libertarian Coercion

HUM
10 Views of Landscape
Affect and Effect
Dataism
I pay rent.
Listening to Corn
The Reform vs Revolution Paradox
What is Public Schooling For?

Levels of Abstraction
Levels of Abstraction and Minds
What is a newspaper?

Mathematics
As Much As Possible
Zipfs Law

Memetics
Emotional Plague
Memes: Imitated Behavior.
The Problem with Memes
What is a replicator?

Morality
Beyond Rules Based Morality
Freedom and Morality
Moral Realism.
What do we owe animals?

pending
Police

Philosophy
Agency
Being
Maps and Territories
Metaphysics Without Absolutes
Philosophy Buds
Ratchets
Sincerely Held Beliefs
Sorites Paradox
Stereoscopic Vision and The Hard Problem
The Gorilla in the Room of Science
The Purpose of Science
What is Going On?

Politics
If It Walks Like a Duck
Right Wing Freedom
The Sovereign Citizen
Tyranny of the Majority

Programming
Loopsidaisy

Science
Constructed Life
Correlation Wins
Fields
Neurophilosophy
Quack Doctors
The Great Shattering
The Material Space
Thinking about Interconnection
Time
Too Small to See
UFOs
Watching Pigeons
Weirdness in Physics

Society
A society needs a government.
Antisemitism
Belly of the Beast
Civilization
Corruption
Cultural Appropriation
Family Values
Governance
Griefers and Misinformation and Disinformation
Immigration
Inclusion and Christmas
Magic
Open Society and Falsification
Privacy
Rules in a Knife Fight?
Sex and Gender
Should We Go to Mars?
Society and The State
Spheres of Influence
The Care and Feeding of Free Speech
The Collingridge Dilemma
The Dual Meaning of Power
The Homeless
The Problem with Hedonism
To the Moon
Totalitarianism
Voting
We Live in the Present
Why is there a shortage of nurses?
Work - Productive, Useful, Worthless, and Bad.

UBI
Implications of Very Productive Technology
Modest Proposal
Problems with Universal Basic Income
Tormenting Unlucky People
Why there are oligarchs







Superstition

Correlation fail

I've looked at how machine learning systems that can work with vast amounts of data can find correlations that work, but nobody can see just how they work in a causal sense. They are black boxes that we have learned to trust.

Many people who celebrate the old scientific method of hypothesize, predict, test find this to be profoundly unsatisfying. One wants to know WHY something works, not just THAT it works.

Truth be told though; the cutting edge of science is always pretty opaque in terms of the why question. I mean, I've looked at things like quantum mechanics or relativity to some depth and find it reasonable - but there is lots of material that I just have to accept as a given because I'm not trained to interpret it . I trust that somebody someplace actually does understand it all - but maybe not.

A big problem with correlations is that we are so good at detecting patterns. We detect patterns in masses of data all the time without even thinking about it. But we know that we often find patterns where there is none. I'm thinking of how we can see faces in clouds.

I suggest that superstition can be thought of as a false signal from our pattern matching system.

The idea that Friday the 13th brings bad luck is a superstition. But what if that correlates to your experience? It probably does for someone in the world.

Behaviorists can train pigeons to do all sorts of things by giving a reward when the bird does what the trainer wants. The bird learns that a particular behavior is rewarded. So the bird starts paying attention to what they were doing just before the reward was offered.
It works.
But what happens if the reward is just given at random without being associated with a reward?
This can lead to very strange behavior depending on what random event immediately preceded the reward.
This has been called superstitious behavior.
And it's caused by a failure of correlation - finding a correlation when there is none.

Let's think of this in the context of our polarized culture. For instance, I don't think vaccines magnetize people. The idea is absurd. And yet many people think the idea makes sense. Their information sources are giving them lots of anecdotes correlating vaccines with magnetism. And they don't know enough about how either vaccines or magnetism work to be looking for a causal explanation. So they see the correlation (wrong as it may be) and feel entitled to act on their perception as citizens of a free country.

One superstition that I see as influential in America has to do with the magical power of guns to solve problems. I think having a gun provides a satisfying feeling of personal power. I might put that as a correlation - have gun - feel power. But does it actually fit with the facts? It seems to be more a case of - have gun - get into lots of trouble.

When dealing with correlation the direction of causality gets lost. I mean - Trump and right wing craziness are certainly correlated. But did Trump cause the craziness or did the craziness cause Trump?

What do you think? I open the floor.

Star I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life. I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it. Each week I write a short essay to set the topic. I show a selection of them here.

I've been thinking and reading about philosophy for a long time but I'm mostly self taught. That is I've had the good fortune to read what interests me rather than follow a course of study. That has it's limits of course but advantages. It doesn't cost as much and is fun too.

My interests are things like evolution and cognition and social issues and economics and science in general.