Aretae

The virtue of excellence

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Psychology

The book:  Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite solves psychology as a problem.  It's the Alexandrian sword to the Gordian knot of the mind.

In one swell foop, it explains not only Kahneman's issues, but other diverse thinkers like Szasz.    While the hypothesis(the non-unitary mind) isn't new to me, or even controversial (in my mind)...the extent to which it solves the whole of explaining the mind is phenomenal.  If you read one book on psychology in the year, read this one.  You simply don't think about the mind right, if you don't have this model firmly embedded in your head.
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6 comments:

Orphan said...

I don't think psychiatry, evolutionary or no, will ever work for everyone; it will only ever explain a subset of the population, and the rest will be left scratching their heads wondering what the fuss is about. (I'm not necessarily nurture over nature, I just think the programming that makes us tic isn't any more universal than the color of our eyes.)

January 19, 2012 10:21 AM
Aretae said...

Orphan,

1. I'm having trouble parsing your response.

2. To the extent that I do understand you...I think your position is impossible. Evolution built minds of a specific type, not general turing machines. Because this is true, there's LOTS of structural similarity. Sure people have different color eyes...but we all have irises...and the irises all do the same job, even if their colors vary.

January 19, 2012 10:36 AM
Orphan said...

Evolution also built specialization into the brain, and yet neural resources can be reallocated to alternative analogous tasks if, for example, a person loses their sight or hearing.

The brain is extraordinarily plastic, which makes evolutionary sense; complexity is expensive.

And that's the rub; such a strict structuralist approach to the brain is entirely nonpredictive of the plasticity of the brain, both in its operation and its construction.

The brain, being massively parallel, certainly -supports- a highly modularized structure, but that's not to say it -must- operate in that fashion, or that consciousness necessarily operates as the nexus between the different modules.

Or, in other words, I disagree pretty strongly with the idea that our brains are of a specific type. Evolutionarily, I'm not sure such specificity even makes sense; complexity is -really- expensive, and structural similarity would require considerably more evolutionary pressure than a more adaptable neural network.

Developmental psychology seems to support this as well; while children tend to pass through the same basic stages of development, the very existence of some of these stages of development, and the fact that the development can be delayed by a lack of environmental interaction, suggests a lot of the structure of the brain may be getting reinvented with each individual.

January 19, 2012 5:53 PM
Aretae said...

Orphan,

I've held that position in the past.

I no longer think it's tenable. Rather...I think that the specific modules with specific jobs with consciousness as an afterthought is a FAR more explanatory model than anything else. I think you've attached extra bits to the theory to make it unpalatable.

Sure, brains are malleable...and if you lose your eyes...much of the visual cortex ends up devoted to hearing. That doesn't mean that there isn't a specific brain system that has an effective purpose of finding stuff.

Re: type. Our brains MUST be of a specific nature. Either general turing-machine nature or not. And obviously not general turing-machine. So what nature do they have?

Re: per individual -- one of the most interesting features of human minds is that they continue to evolve/grow/change over time. Giving most 6 year olds the topic of Algebra fails. OTOH, to most 18 year olds, it would make sense...because the brain has shifted to being capable of formal operations sometime during that span. Speech occurs in nearly all children between 8 months and 3 years. Do you suspect that there's a speech module partially pre-configured? Darn skippy, I do.


Key factoids pushing my conclusion:

1. Roughly all (almost) decisionmaking can be determined to have occurred before the conscious awareness of the decision. The notion that conscious minds do much (not none, just much) deciding is silly, and completely contraindicated by the research.

2. Context matters massively for MOST decisions. Whatever pre-conscious parts of the self are making the decisions, it's not the same decision made between seemingly very similar situations.

3. We can identify systematic, manipulable errors in the way people think about some topics. Are you gonna play culture cards here...or is the brain pre-structured to have those kinds of conclusions? Seems pretty clear that the 2nd holds up.

4. The model of the "society of mind" with a conscious facade takes 98% of the mystery out of the Robin Hanson question-set.

January 19, 2012 6:20 PM
Orphan said...

I'm sure it's a good model for some people, but I know for a fact it is a poor model to describe my own (admittedly extremely atypical) brain, which leads me to conclude the idea is overly rigid. In my youth I felt more like a human emulator than a human being, so divergent was my personal experience from that as described from those around me.

As for the studies, even getting past the fact that they're studying something which reacts to being studied, they're also only conclusive on the average; in order to say the human brain functions in X manner, 99% of your test subjects isn't actually enough. You really need 100%.

And honestly, I don't see the issue brought up with context; from a programming perspective, a single core processor is precisely as context dependent as a multicore processor in terms of current processing. Context dependency doesn't seem related to parallel processing.

As for #3, not everybody expresses the same biases equally, and I'd point out that evolution frequently repeats itself; there are only so many heuristics in heuristic-space.

As for #4, whether or not this is meaningful as evidence for the idea is largely dependent on whether or not this was intentional (or whether or not the question set was orthogonal to the question set which was attempting to be answered). There are an infinite number of explanations for any finite data set; it's when it starts predicting the next data point that an explanation gets interesting on that basis.

January 19, 2012 8:09 PM
Aretae said...

Orphan,

1. It won't surprise you much to find out that both me and many (all that I've talked to) of my other 4-sigma friends have the same experience of people-emulation.

2. When I'm programming multi-threaded systems...there's usually a separate context per thread (or close). In a single-core system, that involves a fair bit of swapping context. In a multi-core system, somewhat less so.

3. The core of my position is that, contra my position from 10 years ago, introspection necessarily gives us the information that benefits us reproductively, which we have no a priori reason to suspect to be true. I have come to expect that introspection fails 100% of the time. Instead, observe others who are like you...or even ones who are not quite like you...the distance isn't THAT large.

4. Evolution doesn't build co-species-ites(??what's the word??) who are different from one another in anything besides tremendously minor differences...usually small amounts of degree of something. Arnuhld is really only 5-sigma separated from an average dude, and 7-sigma from the asthmatic pencil-neck geek in chess club. I (+4 sigma IQ) have regular/daily interaction with a -2 sigma guy.

5. My wife...who appears to be 5-sigma people-watching (scary to be around)...spends a LOT of time watching both me and my other 3+ sigma friends. Her line: basically the same, but with a thicker layer of consciousness. She is BY FAR the best predictor of people I've ever seen...and she's right about people in ~All cases where she and I disagree.

6. My own personal line on high-sigma IQ folks -- Over-active press secretary module -- Thinks it can handle most problems, when in reality it can't.

7. I've spent roughly 4 years adopting a relatively deep humility-position, based on my experience of people being wrong a lot...and I've spent 20 years as a teacher, where my primary skill is emulating my student's thought process as a slave-process, so as to figure out what needs to tweak in how they think, so as to help them understand a topic.

8. Read the damn book. It's (a) really good...and (b) even if you don't adopt it as a representation of what's going on inside you... you should for sure adopt it as a model of what's going on in everyone (+/- 1%) else.

January 19, 2012 10:31 PM

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