Does language affect thought?

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

In discussing the language of clear thinking recently, I brought up the notion that language may affect thought. I found this example amusing:

“We gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they’ll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don’t use words like “left” and “right”? What will they do?

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”

Posted in Linguistics | No Comments »

Dial4Light

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

For the past few years, the cash-strapped village of Dörentrup in central Germany has been switching off all the streetlights from 11 p.m. until 6 a.m. the following morning — but now they have Dial4Light:

In the first project of its kind in Europe, the residents of Dörentrup can now switch on the lights on a specific street whenever they like. All they have to do is register for the scheme online and provide a phone number. Then each time anyone needs to see in the dark, they call the Dial4Light number, enter the six-digit code that corresponds to the stretch of road they want lit, and within seconds the lights are on. They’ll stay on for around 15 minutes, enough time for someone to walk from one end of the average Dörentrup road to the other.
[...]
“We found out that on each stretch of road, people only switch on the lights up to three times each night,” explains Frank Bräuer, project leader at Lemgo. “That’s why this system works in villages or the outskirts of a town where residents don’t need the lights burning all night.” But Dial4Light won’t work for everyone, he admits: “It wouldn’t be suitable for a big city like New York or London, where there’s a lot going on at night.”

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Ego Makes Entrepreneurs

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Wharton doctoral student Brian Wu has found that risk-taking entrepreneurs are not unusually risk tolerant; they’re just overconfident.

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Don’t trust historians

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Don’t trust historians, Scott Sumner says, because they’re inclined to rank Wilson as the 6th greatest president in US history:

1. I had known for quite some time that Wilson’s economic policies were perhaps the worst in American history. He presided over the creation of the Fed and the income tax, which went from 0% to something like 70% while he was president. In the long run the Fed may have been a good thing, but there can be no doubt that 1913 was premature, we didn’t know anywhere near enough about monetary policy to warrant a central bank meddling in the gold standard. He presided over a period of very high inflation after WWI, when we actually needed somewhat lower prices. Then we had a severe depression in his last year of office. Industrial production had fallen by 32.5% by March 1921 when Harding took office (and you think things are bad now!)

But guess what; by November 1922 we had recovered, as industrial production had already passed the previous cyclical peak. (If you factor in a 3% trend rate of growth, a new peak was reached around March 1923.) How did he do it? Recall that Hoover and FDR relied on policies of propping up wages and raising tax rates — that’s why FDR’s recovery took nearly nine years, and even 8 and 1/2 years from a July 1933 industrial production figure that was roughly as depressed as March 1921.) Instead, Harding let wages fall and cut income tax rates sharply. BTW, do you think industrial production will fully recover by January 2011, after Obama has been in office for 2 years?

2. Wilson had arguably the most destructive foreign policy in American history. When there is a delicate balance of power in Europe you don’t want to meddle unless you plan to stay there permanently. Yes, I know Wilson did intend the US to hang around, but he should have known we were an isolationist country before he brought us into WWI. All he did was assure that the strongest country in Europe lost. When we pulled out (as was inevitable), a rematch was almost preordained. WWII was the fruit of Wilson’s foreign policy. (As were more than 116,000 dead American soldiers.)

3. Wilson was one of the most repressive presidents in American history, imprisoning thousands of people whose only crime was to disagree with his political views. It was left to Harding to release people like Socialist leader Eugene Debs from prison, as well as many others.

4. And I also recently learned that Wilson was a vicious racist. Yes, I know racism was widespread at the time. But he was much worse than the Republicans who came before and after him. Check out this article from Reason magazine.

So other than being a horrible president in terms of economic policy, foreign policy, civil liberties and civil rights, he was a great president.

(Hat tip to Bryan Caplan.)

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

I, Toaster

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

In Douglas Adams’ Mostly Harmless, the protagonist tries to impress the inhabitants of another planet with his amazing Earth technology, only — as Adams writes — “Left to his own devices he couldn’t build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”

This inspired — if that’s the right word — artist — if that‘s the right word — Thomas Thwaites to build his own toaster from scratch:

Beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99.

As Radley Balko points out, Thwaites’ Toaster Project could be called I, Toaster, because the basic idea behind it was explored in Leonard Read‘s I, Pencil back in 1958:

Read’s influential essay meticulously runs through the processes required to create something as simple as an Eberhard Faber pencil, including the harvesting and processing of cedar, the mining of graphite, and the mining, processing, and application of the many minerals and chemicals that make up the pencil’s eraser, ferrule (the bit of metal that holds the eraser in place), lacquer, ink, and the black nickel rings that fasten the ferrule to the pencil’s wooden rod. Read also included those things that power the processing and refining plants, as well as the automobiles that transport the pencil ingredients to those factories (which are themselves made up of thousands of parts made up of millions of ingredients, also mined, processed, and assembled all over the world).

Read’s conclusion, written in the first-person voice of the pencil:

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies — millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding!

In other words, the division of labor is what makes pencils — and, for that matter, all of the conveniences of modern life — possible. Millions of people are involved in the manufacture of a single pencil, or in Thwaites’ case, a single toaster. No single human being could possibly possess the know-how to make one on his own.

As you might imagine, Thwaites is not celebrating trade, technology, and mutually beneficial exchange; he’s condemning it. Sigh.

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The end of retirement

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Changing demographics may lead to the end of retirement:

When Otto von Bismarck introduced the first pension for workers over 70 in 1889, the life expectancy of a Prussian was 45. In 1908, when Lloyd George bullied through a payment of five shillings a week for poor men who had reached 70, Britons, especially poor ones, were lucky to survive much past 50. By 1935, when America set up its Social Security system, the official pension age was 65 — three years beyond the lifespan of the typical American. State-sponsored retirement was designed to be a brief sunset to life, for a few hardy souls.

Now retirement is for everyone, and often as long as whole lives once were. In some European countries the average retirement lasts more than a quarter of a century. In America the official pension age is 66, but the average American retires at 64 and can then expect to live for another 16 years. Average spending on public pensions across the OECD is now the equivalent of more than 7% of GDP (they cost America just 0.2% back in 1935). In some countries the current figure could double by 2050, to say nothing of the cost of private pensions and extra spending on health and long-term care.

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Why Not Try A Scientific Approach To Science Education?

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Physicist Carl Wieman noted a consistent pattern in the grad students who came to work for him:

New graduate students would come to work in my laboratory after 17 years of extraordinary success in classes, but when they were given research projects to work on, they were clueless about how to proceed. Or worse — often it seemed that they didn’t even really understand what physics was.

But then an amazing thing happened: After just a few years of working in my research lab, interacting with me and the other students, they were transformed. I’d suddenly realize they were now expert physicists, genuine colleagues. If this had happened only once or twice it would have just seemed an oddity, but I realized it was a consistent pattern. So I decided to figure it out.

Does it really take 17-years as a caterpillar before one can become a beautiful (physics) butterfly? No, of course, not; it’s just that those 17 years of classes are largely wasted — as demonstrated by a number of studies:

The first is by Joe Redish, a highly regarded physics professor at the University of Maryland. Even though the students thought his lectures were wonderful, Joe wondered how much they were actually learning. So he hired a graduate student to grab students at random as they filed out of class at the end of the lecture and ask, “What was the lecture you just heard about?” It turned out that the students could respond with only with the vaguest of generalities.

Zdeslav Hrepic, N. Sanjay Rebello, and Dean Zollman at Kansas State University carried out a much more structured study. They asked 18 students from an introductory physics class to attempt to answer six questions on the physics of sound and then, primed by that experience, to get the answers to those questions by listening to a 14-minute, highly polished commercial videotaped lecture given by someone who is supposed to be the world’s most accomplished physics lecturer.

On most of the six questions, no more than one student was able to answer correctly.

In a final example, a number of times Kathy Perkins and I have presented some non-obvious fact in a lecture along with an illustration, and then quizzed the students 15 minutes later on the fact. About 10 percent usually remember it by then. To see whether we simply had mentally deficient students, I once repeated this experiment when I was giving a departmental colloquium at one of the leading physics departments in the United States. The audience was made up of physics faculty members and graduate students, but the result was about the same — around 10 percent.

It gets worse:

Adapting the characterization developed by David Hammer, novices see the content of physics instruction as isolated pieces of information — handed down by an authority and disconnected from the world around them — that they can only learn by memorization. To the novice, scientific problem-solving is just matching the pattern of the problem to certain memorized recipes.

Experts — i.e., physicists — see physics as a coherent structure of concepts that describe nature and that have been established by experiment. Expert problem-solving involves employing systematic, concept-based, and widely applicable strategies. Since this includes being applicable in completely new situations, this strategy is much more useful than the novice problem-solving approach.

Once you develop the tools to measure where people’s beliefs lie on this expert-to-novice scale, you can see how students’ beliefs change as a result of their courses. What you would expect, or at least hope, is that students would begin their college physics course somewhere on the novice side of the scale and that after completing the course they would have become more expert-like in their beliefs.

What the data say is just the opposite.

On average, students have more novicelike beliefs after they have completed an introductory physics course than they had when they started; this was found for nearly every introductory course measured. More recently, my group started looking at beliefs about chemistry. If anything, the effect of taking an introductory college chemistry course is even worse than for taking physics.

If we look at the differences between a novice and expert, we quickly realize that we’re not actually training students to become experts:

The first is that experts have lots of factual knowledge about their subject, which is hardly a surprise. But in addition, experts have a mental organizational structure that facilitates the retrieval and effective application of their knowledge. Third, experts have an ability to monitor their own thinking (“metacognition”), at least in their discipline of expertise. They are able to ask themselves, “Do I understand this? How can I check my understanding?”

A traditional science instructor concentrates on teaching factual knowledge, with the implicit assumption that expert-like ways of thinking about the subject come along for free or are already present. But that is not what cognitive science tells us. It tells us instead that students need to develop these different ways of thinking by means of extended, focused mental effort.
[...]
People learn by creating their own understanding. But that does not mean they must or even can do it without assistance. Effective teaching facilitates that creation by getting students engaged in thinking deeply about the subject at an appropriate level and then monitoring that thinking and guiding it to be more expert-like.

When you put it in those terms, you realize that this is exactly what all my graduate students are doing 18 or 20 hours a day, seven days a week. (Or at least that is what they claim — the reality is a bit less.) They are focused intently on solving real physics problems, and I regularly probe how they’re thinking and give them guidance to make it more expert-like. After a few years in that environment they turn into experts, not because there is something magic in the air in the research lab but because they are engaged in exactly the cognitive processes that are required for developing expert competence.

Why not try a scientific approach to science education?

Wieman’s first strategy for improving teaching is reducing cognitive load — which is a remarkably verbose and unclear way of saying go slow and be clear. It also contradicts much of my own experience. If a lecturer slows things down and simplifies them to reduce cognitive load, the lecture becomes less engaging, not more. The real problem is that most lectures are like early interstates: the path is so straight, you fall asleep at the wheel. You need some curves, some anticipation, some expectations that may or may not be met.

His second strategy is addressing beliefs students have about science. That means explaining why a topic is worth learning, how it operates in the real world, why it makes sense, and how it connects to things the student already knows. Sure, but nothing’s worse than those bulleted lists at the start of the chapter in a modern textbook: “After studying the material in this chapter, the student will be able to…”

The third strategy, the one that appeals to me, involves engaging students, monitoring their thinking, and providing feedback — which is hard to do in a 200-student lecture hall. That’s why Wieman recommends three demonstrably effective technologies:

  1. Just-in-time teaching: The technique uses the Web to ask students questions concerning the material to be covered, questions that they must answer just before class. The students thus start the class already engaged, and the instructor, who has looked at the students’ answers, already knows a reasonable amount about their difficulties with the topic to be covered.
  2. Clickers: Each student has a clicker with which to answer questions posed during class. A computer records each student’s answer and can display a histogram of those responses. The clicker efficiently and quickly gets an answer from each student for which that student is accountable but which is anonymous to their peers.
  3. Simulations: The “circuit construction kit” is a typical example of a simulation. It allows one to build arbitrary circuits involving realistic-looking resistors, light bulbs (which light up), wires, batteries, and switches and get a correct rendition of voltages and currents. There are realistic volt and ammeters to measure circuit parameters. The simulation also shows cartoonlike electrons moving around the circuit in appropriate paths, with velocities proportional to current. We’ve found this simulation to be a dramatic help to students in understanding the basic concepts of electric current and voltage, when substituted for an equivalent lab with real components.

Now that he has offered up his hard-won teaching wisdom, is anyone listening?

Posted in Education, Science | 3 Comments »

Gibbon begat Spengler, who begat Toynbee, who begat Hari Seldon

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Gibbon begat Spengler, who begat Toynbee, who begat Hari Seldon — or so it seemed to Rick Robinson in high school:

Arnold Toynbee has pretty much fallen down the memory hole, but in the mid-20th century his reputation was considerable. I’m sure I learned his name from Clarke, who mentions him fairly often, in one story even naming a spaceship Arnold Toynbee. Oddly, Clarke never much worked the future-history street corner. I don’t know if Asimov ever mentions Toynbee, but A Study of History is the perfect companion piece for the Foundation Trilogy.

Like Spengler, Toynbee was big on the grand cycles of history, the rise and fall of civilizations. Unlike Spingler, however, Toynbee does not fall back on semi-mystical mumbo jumbo about civilizations being organic entities with a fixed lifespan. (Later he fell back on a different semi-mystical mumbo jumbo.) Although most past civilizations have declined and fallen, this is not inevitable; a flexible enough society might keep winning the game of Civilization indefinitely.

You win, says Toynbee, by growing through a cycle of challenge and response. Challenge usually means something like “Vikings show up,” to which the response may be organizing the fyrd, or simply giving them Normandy provided that they ask for it in French. Each response, if successful, usually ends up planting the germ of the next challenge. The Vikings learn French and become Normans, for which the response is to ship them off to conquer England and Sicily.

Or, suppose an academic enclave on the fringes of a declining empire faces the challenge of petty kingdoms that have broken away from imperial control. It responds by repackaging its learning as religious magic to awe the natives. This works, but the religious establishment gets out of hand, only to be muscled aside by trading interests … each Seldon Crisis leading logically to the next.

If a civilization fails to handle a Seldon Crisis it “breaks down,” and spends the rest of its history — some 800–1100 years, depending on how you measure — trying and failing to patch things up. The civilization first enters into a Time of Troubles, persisting and destructive internal warfare, that last about 400 years. The Time of Troubles ends with the last guy standing, who founds a Universal State that will in turn last about 400 years.

Toynbee’s prototype for this grand cycle is classical civilization. The Greeks were going along fine, he says, till the Pelopponesian War (431-404 BC) screwed it all up for them. The Time of Troubles, with Greek and then semi-Greek states bashing endlessly and pointlessly away at each other, lasts a nice exact 400 years till the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, after which Cleopatra ‘s asp leaves Augustus the last guy standing. Another 409 years — close enough! — takes you to the Battle of Adrianople in AD 378, when the Goths wiped out a full Roman army, for Toynbee the effective end of the Empire. (Apparently Theodosius the Great doesn’t count, let alone Justinian.)

After the fall comes a 300-year fallow period, an interregnum, at the end of which one or more new civilizations will rise out of the ashes of the old one to embark on their own Seldonian adventures. Just 309 years from Adrianople takes you to the battle of Tertry in 687 — not exactly household-name stuff, but the winner was a guy named Pepin of Heristal, majordomo to a Merovingian king whose name no one then or since has bothered with (Theuderic III). Majordomo sounds cooler when you translate it as Mayor of the Palace. Pepin’s son was Charles Martel, the Hammer, his grandson was Charlemagne, and we are off to the races with the Rise of the West.

It turns out that nearly all other fallen civilizations have followed this same trajectory on the way down — admittedly Toynbee was not above a little hammering to help things fit. Within the 400-year primary wavelength he identifies a 200-year harmonic — federal ideas were in vogue for a while in post-Alexandrine Greece, to Toynbee a “rally” amid the Time of Troubles, while the Roman rough patch between Marcus Antonius and Diocletian is a “rout” foreshadowing the eventual fall. Even Justinian can be seen as a final “rally,” even though Rome had already fallen. Toynbee notes some multi-generation social rhythms that are fairly well-established, such as the cultural naturalization of immigrant populations, to suggest that these long cycles have some natural basis.

All of this is enormously persuasive when you are a geeky teenager, and Toynbee seemed like the Newton or Darwin of history. I was actually motivated to do some critical research — and learned to my dismay that professional historians regarded it all as sophisticated BS. The rap on him, in a nutshell, is that he did a lot of hammering to make other civilizations fit the schedule, in fact beating world history pretty much out of recognition.

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20,000 Nations Above the Sea

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Is floating the last, best hope for liberty? I’m not convinced, but Brian Doherty takes a long look at seasteading and what makes it different from past attempts at creating a free country:

First, seasteading does not require anyone to take over existing terrain. That was hopeless; the land’s all claimed by some government or another, even the parts barely above water. And an open rebellion against an existing regime is unlikely to succeed. Seasteaders therefore will make their own “land.”

Second, seasteading is modular. Unlike various floating nations that never got off the drawing board — the “Freedom Ship,” the “Aquarius Project,” and other pipe dreams — the institute’s plan doesn’t require an upfront multimillion-dollar buy-in. Seasteading can start small, and in fact Friedman is sure it will start small, with tiny family-sized platforms called “coaststeads” near the mainland serving both as proof of concept and a laboratory for working out the kinks before community-sized seasteads are ready to sprout in international waters. Friedman figures the cost of such starter sea homes won’t be too out of line with housing costs on land, especially if people are buying in a communal or time-share fashion. In fact, most recent cost estimates for a particular hotel/resort seasteading design came out to roughly $258 per square foot (without factoring in some assembly and deployment costs), which is quite a bit cheaper than the current price of many single family homes in the San Francisco Bay area.

Third, seasteading isn’t just based in libertarian theorizing and hopes. Friedman knows that seasteads will need to have some business hook, and he’s busy working those angles. There’s SurgiCruise, a nascent floating medical tourism company that is seeking venture funding. If Americans will fly to Mexico, India, or Thailand for cheaper medical care free of U.S. regulatory costs, the idea goes, why wouldn’t they sail 12 miles for it? Among the other first-tier business ideas being bruited about with varying levels of intensity are vacation resorts, sin industries, aquaculture, deep-sea marina services, and universal data libraries free of national copyright laws.

Fourth, because the open ocean plus “dynamic geography” allows for experimentation with governance in any form, seasteading shouldn’t appeal only to libertarians. Sure, any seastead that Friedman would want to live in would get as close to anarchism as can be managed. But he thinks a variety of ideologues should be willing to leap on board, from sustainability-oriented environmentalists to members of various intentional communities, religious or philosophical or whatever, that want to shape their own lives in peace without government interference. Such communities might not be individualist in their internal policies, but they fit within the libertarian framework of seasteading itself, which allows for a wide variety of freely chosen social structures.

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