Logically, Absurd, and Contradictory

Tagline: In honing your home logic skills, try reducing any argument to its basic premise at the extremes of its subject.

Introduction (Via Peter M. Nardi @ Miller McCune)

Once upon a time, I checked my horoscope just for fun. It simply said: Scorpios are skeptical about horoscopes. Wow! What more could a critical thinker want to read?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s true I am quite skeptical about horoscopes, so by admitting to this, I prove the horoscope true — but then I simultaneously contradict my skepticism. This circular reasoning illustrates the importance of developing arguments that are inherently noncontradictory and that cannot be demonstrated false when carried out to extreme examples.

This simple statement captures the essence of one of the basic tenets of thought: Aristotle’s law of noncontradiction and the absurdity of reducing something to its logical extreme. The law states that something cannot be true and not true at the same time; that would be absurd. It allows a person to ask how meaningful would someone’s position on an issue be if it were taken to its logical extreme.

Additional Excerpt (via Peter M. Nardi @ Miller McCune)

When hearing competing positions held by politicians about health care, for example, or solutions to our economic recovery, take their statements to logical extremes and uncover any potential contradictions. Engaging in a reductio ad absurdum technique and invoking the law of noncontradiction will assist you in critically thinking about people’s arguments on current issues and in dealing with rumors that float around controversial policy plans. And of course actual data often provide some much-needed assistance in the heat of a discussion.

Click Here To Read: Logically, Absurd, and Contradictory

Bertrand Russell’s Nobel Lecture: What Desires Are Politically Important?

Perhaps this is why Russell’ is one of Buffett’s favorite philosophers…

Anywho…promise me you will read this.

Click Here to Read: Bertrand Russell’s Nobel Lecture: What Desires Are Politically Important?

Introduction (via Nobel Prize)

I have chosen this subject for my lecture tonight because I think that most current discussions of politics and political theory take insufficient account of psychology. Economic facts, population statistics, constitutional organization, and so on, are set forth minutely. There is no difficulty in finding out how many South Koreans and how many North Koreans there were when the Korean War began. If you will look into the right books you will be able to ascertain what was their average income per head, and what were the sizes of their respective armies. But if you want to know what sort of person a Korean is, and whether there is any appreciable difference between a North Korean and a South Korean; if you wish to know what they respectively want out of life, what are their discontents, what their hopes and what their fears; in a word, what it is that, as they say, «makes them tick», you will look through the reference books in vain. And so you cannot tell whether the South Koreans are enthusiastic about UNO, or would prefer union with their cousins in the North. Nor can you guess whether they are willing to forgo land reform for the privilege of voting for some politician they have never heard of. It is neglect of such questions by the eminent men who sit in remote capitals, that so frequently causes disappointment. If politics is to become scientific, and if the event is not to be constantly surprising, it is imperative that our political thinking should penetrate more deeply into the springs of human action. What is the influence of hunger upon slogans? How does their effectiveness fluctuate with the number of calories in your diet? If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote? Such questions are far too little considered. However, let us, for the present, forget the Koreans, and consider the human race.

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

My Favorite quotes (via Nobel Prize)

“I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence.”

“Ideologies, in fact, are one of the methods by which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same however the herd may have been generated.”

“I have never heard of a war that proceeded from dance halls.”

Click Here to Read: Bertrand Russell’s Nobel Lecture: What Desires Are Politically Important?

‘Counterfactual’ Thinkers Are More Motivated and Analytical

*Post dedicated to Niall Ferguson

Click Here To Read: ‘Counterfactual’ Thinkers Are More Motivated and Analytical

Introduction (via Science Daily)

“”If only I had…” Almost everyone has said those four words at some time.”

According to a new study, counterfactual thinking — considering a “turning point” moment in the past and alternate universes had it not occurred — heightens one’s perception of the moment as significant, and even fated. Armed with a sense that life may not be arbitrary, counterfactual thinkers are more motivated and analytical in organizational settings, the study suggests.

“What we found is that people indicate stronger commitment to an organization when they think counterfactually and it helps to define who they are on a professional level,” says Haas School Associate Professor Laura Kray.

Most Interesting Insights (Via Science Daily)

“The irony is that thinking counterfactually increases the perception that life’s path was meant to be,” says Kray, “which ultimately imbues one’s life with significance.” While one might argue that believers of destiny would be less inclined to be analytical, the research also found that people who think counterfactually and find meaning in their lives are more apt to believe life is not a product of chance and that they can make valuable choices.

“Getting people to think counterfactually helps people see relations better and construct meaning in their lives,” says Kray. In the context of business, Kray says subsequent research found having a sense of meaning fosters organizational commitment. In combination with Kray’s earlier work showing that people who think counterfactually are more analytical, counterfactual reflection is proving to be a very powerful tool in organizational settings.

“How we react to counterfactuals is a great test of how open- or closed-minded we are on a topic,” adds Tetlock, who has studied how people think about what-if scenarios at the organizational and even country level. “In my book

Click Here To Read: ‘Counterfactual’ Thinkers Are More Motivated and Analytical

The Joy of Less

“In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.”

Click Here To Read: The Joy of Less

Interesting Excerpts (via NYT)

I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Click Here To Read: The Joy of Less

Do ethicists steal more books?

Should we worry about ethicists…..I recommend skimming this paper lightly.

Click Here To Read: Do ethicists steal more books?

Abstract (via Eric Schwitzgebel)

If explicit cognition about morality promotes moral behavior then one might expect ethics professors to behave particularly well. However, professional ethicists’ behavior has never been empirically studied. The present research examined the rates at which ethics books are missing from leading academic libraries, compared to other philosophy books similar in age and popularity. Study 1 found that relatively obscure, contemporary ethics books of the sort likely to be borrowed mainly by professors and advanced students of philosophy were actually about 50% more likely to be missing than non-ethics books. Study 2 found that classic (pre-1900) ethics books were about twice as likely to be missing.

Additional Excerpts (via Eric schwitzgebel)

But do ethicists actually behave better than non-ethicists in philosophy, or than non-philosophers of similar social background? The question has never been systematically studied.

These data suggest that ethics books are more likely to be missing from academic libraries than other types of philosophy books. This effect appears to hold both for obscure books likely to be checked out mostly by professional philosophers and their advanced students and for widely read classics like Mill’s On Liberty and Descartes’s Meditations. If these data are representative, a philosophy book not on the shelf is anywhere from 50% to 150% more likely to be missing if it is an ethics books than if it is not.

There are potential confounds this study cannot control. Readers might more dearly love ethics books than other philosophy books. Readers of ethics books might be poorer than readers of other philosophy books and so more tempted to theft; or they might be wealthier and so more willing to risk fines. Ethics books may take longer to read and so be more likely to leave campus; or they may be more pleasant to read and so more exposed to the hazards of the cafe, the beach, and the bedstand. They may have been more popular ten years ago than they are now. They may be more likely reported missing if a patron can’t find them on the shelf. A patron’s friends and spouses may be more likely to borrow them. Ethicists and their students might be busier than non-ethicists and their students. However, I see no a priori or empirical reason to accept any of these hypotheses.

Click Here To Read: Do ethicists steal more books?

Understanding: Deductive reasoning

Great primer on logic and deductive reasoning….enjoy my fellow philosophers.

Click Here To Read: Understanding – Deductive reasoning

Abstract(Via Laird)

This article begins with an account of logic, and of how logicians formulate formal rules of inference for the sentential calculus, which hinges on analogs of negation and the connectives if, or, and and. It considers the various ways in which computer scientists have written programs to prove the validity of inferences in this and other domains. Finally, it outlines the principal psychological theories of how human reasoners carry out deductions.

Introduction (Via Laird)

Deductive reasoning is the mental process of making inferences that are logical. It is just one sort of reasoning. But, it is a central cognitive process and a major component of intelligence, and so tests of intelligence include problems in deductive reasoning. Individuals of higher intelligence are more accurate in making deductions,1 which are at the core of rationality. You know, for instance, that if your printer is to work then it has to have ink in its cartridges, and suppose that you discover that that there is no ink in its cartridges. You infer that the printer would not work. This inference has the important property of logical validity: if its premises are true then its conclusion must be true too. Logicians define a valid deduction as one whose conclusion is true in every possibility in which all its premises are true (Ref 2, p. 1). All able-minded individuals recognize that certain inferences are valid because there are no counterexamples to them, that is, no possibilities in which the premises hold but the conclusion does not. This idea underlies deductive reasoning. And deductive reasoning in turn underlies the development of all intellectual disciplines and our ability to cope with daily life. The topic is studied in logic, in artificial intelligence, and in cognitive science. Hence, the aim of this interdisciplinary review is to survey what these different disciplines have to say about deduction, and to try to solve the mystery of how individuals who know nothing of logic are nevertheless able to reason deductively.

Click Here To Read: Understanding – Deductive reasoning

Twelve Virtues of Rationality

Read this and think of Charlie Munger.

Post dedicated to Joe Koster & James Montier

Click Here To Read: The 12 Virtues of Rationality

Excerpted 12 Virtues of Rationality

The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance.\

The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire.

The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf, with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, grudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced, feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.

The fourth virtue is evenness. One who wishes to believe says, “Does the evidence permit me to believe?” One who wishes to disbelieve asks, “Does the evidence force me to believe?” Beware lest you place huge burdens of proof only on propositions you dislike, and then defend yourself by saying: “But it is good to be skeptical.”

The fifth virtue is argument. Those who wish to fail must first prevent their friends from helping them. Those who smile wisely and say: “I will not argue” remove themselves from help, and withdraw from the communal effort. In argument strive for exact honesty, for the sake of others and also yourself: The part of yourself that distorts what you say to others also distorts your own thoughts.

The sixth virtue is empiricism. The roots of knowledge are in observation and its fruit is prediction.

The seventh virtue is simplicity. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Simplicity is virtuous in belief, design, planning, and justification.

The eighth virtue is humility. To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty. Who are most humble? Those who most skillfully prepare for the deepest and most catastrophic errors in their own beliefs and plans.

The ninth virtue is perfectionism. The more errors you correct in yourself, the more you notice. As your mind becomes more silent, you hear more noise. When you notice an error in yourself, this signals your readiness to seek advancement to the next level.

The tenth virtue is precision. One comes and says: The quantity is between 1 and 100. Another says: the quantity is between 40 and 50. If the quantity is 42 they are both correct, but the second prediction was more useful and exposed itself to a stricter test.

The eleventh virtue is scholarship. Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole.

Click Here To Read: The 12 Virtues of Rationality

Critical Thinking: Distinguishing Between Inferences and Assumptions

Hope you are enjoying your weekend.

Click Here To Read: Critical Thinking: Distinguishing Between Inferences and Assumptions

Introduction (Via Critical Thinking.org)

To be skilled in critical thinking is to be able to take one’s thinking apart systematically, to analyze each part, assess it for quality and then improve it. The first step in this process is understanding the parts of thinking, or elements of reasoning.

These elements are: purpose, question, information, inference, assumption, point of view, concepts, and implications. They are present in the mind whenever we reason. To take command of our thinking, we need to formulate both our purpose and the question at issue clearly. We need to use information in our thinking that is both relevant to the question we are dealing with, and accurate. We need to make logical inferences based on sound assumptions. We need to understand our own point of view and fully consider other relevant viewpoints. We need to use concepts justifiably and follow out the implications of decisions we are considering. (For an elaboration of the Elements of Reasoning, see a Miniature Guide to the Foundations of Analytic Thinking.)

In this article we focus on two of the elements of reasoning: inferences and assumptions. Learning to distinguish inferences from assumptions is an important intellectual skill. Many confuse the two elements. Let us begin with a review of the basic meanings:

Additional Excerpts (Via Critical Thinking.org)

1. Inference: An inference is a step of the mind, an intellectual act by which one concludes that something is true in light of something else’s being true, or seeming to be true. If you come at me with a knife in your hand, I probably would infer that you mean to do me harm. Inferences can be accurate or inaccurate, logical or illogical, justified or unjustified.

2. Assumption: An assumption is something we take for granted or presuppose. Usually it is something we previously learned and do not question. It is part of our system of beliefs. We assume our beliefs to be true and use them to interpret the world about us. If we believe that it is dangerous to walk late at night in big cities and we are staying in Chicago, we will infer that it is dangerous to go for a walk late at night. We take for granted our belief that it is dangerous to walk late at night in big cities. If our belief is a sound one, our assumption is sound. If our belief is not sound, our assumption is not sound. Beliefs, and hence assumptions, can be unjustified or justified, depending upon whether we do or do not have good reasons for them. Consider this example: “I heard a scratch at the door. I got up to let the cat in.” My inference was based on the assumption (my prior belief) that only the cat makes that noise, and that he makes it

Favorite bits (Via Critical Thinking.org)

We humans naturally and regularly use our beliefs as assumptions and make inferences based on those assumptions. We must do so to make sense of where we are, what we are about, and what is happening. Assumptions and inferences permeate our lives precisely because we cannot act without them. We make judgments, form interpretations, and come to conclusions based on the beliefs we have formed.

The point is that we all make many assumptions as we go about our daily life and we ought to be able to recognize and question them. As students develop these critical intuitions, they increasingly notice their inferences and those of others. They increasingly notice what they and others are taking for granted. They increasingly notice how their point of view shapes their experiences.

Click Here To Read: Critical Thinking: Distinguishing Between Inferences and Assumptions

The Age of the Informavore!

Nothing like an article on information overload, while twittering on a conference call…

This article even sparked some thoughts from Daniel Kahneman. Enjoy!

Click Here To Read: The Age of the Informavore!

Introduction (Via Huffington Post)

The question I am asking myself arose through work and through discussion with other people, and especially watching other people, watching them act and behave and talk, was how technology, the Internet and the modern systems, has now apparently changed human behavior, the way humans express themselves, and the way humans think in real life. So I’ve profited a lot from Edge.

We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett’s response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.

Key Excerpts (Via Huffington Post)

As we know, information is fed by attention, so we have not enough attention, not enough food for all this information. And, as we know — this is the old Darwinian thought, the moment when Darwin started reading Malthus — when you have a conflict between a population explosion and not enough food, then Darwinian selection starts. And Darwinian systems start to change situations. And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker.

It’s the question: what is important, what is not important, what is important to know? Is this information important? Can we still decide what is important? And it starts with this absolutely normal, everyday news. But now you encounter, at least in Europe, a lot of people who think, what in my life is important, what isn’t important, what is the information of my life. And some of them say, well, it’s in Facebook. And others say, well, it’s on my blog. And, apparently, for many people it’s very hard to say it’s somewhere in my life, in my lived life.

Now, it’s totally different. When you follow the discussions, there’s the question of what to teach, what to learn, and how to learn. Even for universities and schools, suddenly they are confronted with the question how can we teach? What is the brain actually taking? Or the problems which we have with attention deficit and all that, which are reflections and, of course, results, in a way, of the technical revolution?

The tool is not only a tool, it shapes the human who uses it. We always have the concept, first you have the theory, then you build the tool, and then you use the tool. But the tool itself is powerful enough to change the human being. God as the clockmaker, I think you said. Then in the Darwinian times, God was an engineer. And now He, of course, is the computer scientist and a programmer. What is interesting, of course, is that the moment neuroscientists and others used the computer, the tool of the computer, to analyze human thinking, something new started.

Now, look at the concept, for example, of multitasking, which is a real problem for the brain. You don’t think that others are responsible for it, but you meet many people who say, well, I am not really good at it, and it’s my problem, and I forget, and I am just overloaded by information. What I find interesting that three huge political concepts of the nineteenth century come back in a totally personalized way, and that we now, for the first time, have a political party — a small political party, but it will in fact influence the other parties — who address this issue, again, in this personalized way.

Daniel Kahneman’s thoughts on this article/interview: (Via Edge)

“Very interesting interview, which is itself a nice example of what Schirrmacher is talking about: it should be read very quickly, to get a vague sense of unease, of possibilities, of permeable boundaries between self and others, between one’s thoughts and those you get from others. You do get something out of it, and may find yourself thinking slightly differently because of it.

The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath. The link with Bargh is also interesting, because John pushes the idea that we are driven from the outside and controlled by a multitude of cues of which we are only vaguely aware — we are bathing in primes.”

Click Here To Read: The Age of the Informavore!

11 Core Rationalist Skills

I just found a great website called Less Wrong- it’s dedicated to refining the art of human rationality.

*Note Joe Koster and Farnam Street will have a blast with this website and will soon start linking to its many articles. I  have a feeling that Dah Hui Lau will also send this via his newsletter.

Less Wrong also has an interesting sequence of posts that I recommend reading:

The How To Actually Change Your Mind Sequence Of Blog Posts & Articles

The Seeing with Fresh Eyes Sequence of Blog Posts & Articles

The Positive Bias,  Article

The Hindsight Bias, Article

Anyways, Below is one of my favorite pieces on rationality

11 Core Rationalist Skills

Full Excerpt (Via Less Wrong)

1. Actually want an accurate map, because you have Something to protect.
2. Keep your eyes on the prize.  Focus your modeling efforts on the issues most relevant to your goals. Be able to quickly refocus a train of thought or discussion on the most important issues, and be able and willing to quickly kill tempting tangents. Periodically stop and ask yourself “Is what I am thinking about at the moment really an effective way to achieve my stated goals?”.
3. Entangle yourself with the evidence. Realize that true opinions don’t come from nowhere and can’t just be painted in by choice or intuition or consensus. Realize that it is information-theoretically impossible to reliably get true beliefs unless you actually get reliably pushed around by the evidence. Distinguish between knowledge and feelings.
4. Be Curious: Look for interesting details; resist cached thoughts; respond to unexpected observations and thoughts. Learn to acquire interesting angles, and to make connections to the task at hand.
5. Aumann-update: Update to the right extent from others’ opinions.  Borrow reasonable practices for grocery shopping, social interaction, etc from those who have already worked out what the best way to do these things is.  Take relevant experts seriously. Use outside views to estimate the outcome of one’s own projects and the merit of one’s own clever ideas. Be willing to depart from consensus in cases where there is sufficient evidence that the consensus is mistaken or that the common practice doesn’t serve its ostensible purposes. Have correct models of the causes of others’ beliefs and psychological states, so that you can tell the difference between cases where the vast majority of people believe falsehoods for some specific reason, and cases where the vast majority actually knows best.
6. Know standard Biases:  Have conscious knowledge of common human error patterns, including the heuristics and biases literature; practice using this knowledge in real-world situations to identify probable errors; practice making predictions and update from the track record of your own accurate and inaccurate judgments.
7. Know Probability theory:  Have conscious knowledge of probability theory; practice applying probability theory in real-world instances and seeing e.g. how much to penalize conjunctions, how to regress to the mean, etc.
8. Know your own mind:  Have a moment-to-moment awareness of your own emotions and of the motivations guiding your thoughts. (Are you searching for justifications? Shying away from certain considerations out of fear?) Be willing to acknowledge all of yourself, including the petty and unsavory parts.  Knowledge of your own track record of accurate and inaccurate predictions, including in cases where fear, pride, etc. were strong.
9. Be well calibrated: Avoid over- and under-confidence.  Know how much to trust your judgments in different circumstances.  Keep track of many levels of confidence, precision, and surprisingness; dare to predict as much as you can, and update as you test the limits of your knowledge.  Develop as precise a world-model as you can manage.  (Tom McCabe wrote a quiz to test some simple aspects of your calibration.)
10. Use analytic philosophy: understand the habits of thought taught in analytic philosophy; the habit of following out lines of thought, of taking on one issue at a time, of searching for counter-examples, and of carefully keeping distinct concepts distinct (e.g. not confusing heat and temperature; free will and lack of determinism; systems for talking about Peano arithmetic and systems for talking about systems for talking about Peano arithmetic).
11. Resist Thoughtcrime.  Keep truth and virtue utterly distinct in your mind.  Give no quarter to claims of the sort “I must believe X, because otherwise I will be {racist / without morality / at risk of coming late to work/ kicked out of the group / similar to stupid people}”.  Decide that it is better to merely lie to others than to lie to others and to yourself.  Realize that goals and world maps can be separated; one can pursue the goal of fighting against climate change without deliberately fooling oneself into having too high an estimate (given the evidence) of the probability that the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis is correct.