On the 8 Spot

Scarcity is rearing its ugly head once again. It seems that to the online and the physical lives or at least mine is not that integrated and it simply a case of not wanting to make a choice. Its oktoberfest friday, WordCamp Philippines Saturday Whole Day and Alumni HomeComing Saturday Evening. I’ve got around a thousand things to read in my feed reader and about 80 tabs of very long articles that I’ve decided I wanted to learn, a couple of books to read for fun, a couple of books to learn from for fun and a couple a whole lot of friends I’d like/love to hang out with. The thing is choices are choices and if choosing life means clicking mark all read or forgoing less important events , we have to choose.

We have set our lives in such a way as to maximize our choices creating the paradox that we actually create less choices for ourselves. I often hear people almost saying I’d like to do that, I’d like to try that. Too often that those words have turned into valueless words for me, they signify nothing, I don’t know at least I haven’t given up on people, When I hear those words I still try to help people if I can to help them towards something they want. I’ve just learned to keep my emotions in check because I used to get so frustrated by the lot of humanity who complains a lot but seems to never have enough to do anything about their predicament. Truth be told I was and still am part of that sorry lot, I constantly try to remove myself but it is something that is extremely hard to wrench out of your system.

I love the Choices taht I have, I owe them to God, My Parents and my Family, My Friends, My Teachers and the Lot of people who have done so much to open doors, to enrich me, to expand my horizons, to finetune my views and all in all make me a much better person.

CAST AWAY the shackles of choice and realize that choice is FREEDOM or ENSLAVEMENT, and its all up to us. And this is the RUB “YOU HAVE TO CHOOSE FREEDOM”

Hmm, I think that maybe we can do something like this, accumulate lots of data to help people minimize visits to the doctors and the lab test. Need to study this further.

Thanks To Brad Delong , from here:

Clinical and Actuarial Judgment

Cosma Shalizi on how we are not as smart as the simple linear models our computers can estimate:

Clinical and Actuarial Judgment Compared: For something like fifty years now, psychologists have been studying the question of “clinical versus actuarial judgment”…. Say you’re interested in diagnosing heart diseases from electrocardiograms. Normally we have clinicians, i.e., expert doctors, look at a chart…. Alternately, we could ask the experts what features they look at, when making their prognosis, and then fit a statistical model to that data, trying to predict the outcome or classification based on those features…. This is the actuarial approach, since it’s just based on averages — “of patients with features x, y and z, q percent have a serious heart condition”.

The rather surprising, and completely consistent, result of these studies is that there are no known cases where clinicians reliably out-perform actuarial methods, even when the statistical models are just linear classification rules…. In many areas, statistical classifiers significantly out-perform human experts. They even out-perform experts who have access to the statistical results, apparently because the experts place too much weight on their own judgment…. [H]uman experts are… no better than simple statistical models.

On the other hand, there is another body of experimental work, admittedly more recent, on “simple heuristics that make us smart”, which seems to show that people are often very good judges, under natural conditions. That is to say, we’re very good at solving the problems we tend to actually encounter, presented in the way we encounter them. The heuristics we use to solve those problems may not be generally applicable, but they are adapted to our environments, and, in those environments, are fast, simple and effective.

I have a bit of difficulty reconciling these two pictures in my mind. I can think of three resolutions.

1. The “clinicial versus actuarial” results… do not reflect the “natural” conditions of clinical judgment…. What one really wants is a representative sample of actual cases, comparing the normal judgment of clinicians to that of the statistical models. This may have been done; I don’t know.
2. The “fast and frugal heuristics” results are… irrelevant…. [A]daptive mechanisms [that] let us figure out good heuristics in everyday life don’t apply in the situations where we rely on clinical expertise…. [S]omething… about the conditions of clinicial judgment… render our normal cognitive mechanisms ineffective there.
3. Clinicial judgment is a “fast and frugal heuristic”, with emphasis on the fast and frugal…. [C]linicians are… as accurate as one can get, using only a reasonable amount of information and a reasonable amount of time, while still using the human brain, which is not a computing platform well-suited to floating-point operations…

I am unable to judge between these.

Relics like lectures have to give way to the advances in cognitive sciences specifically, we must account for the fact that we know a whole lot more on how we learn (ok, not that much but enough). This means that we must have more interactive classes, more lab and less lectures. The sad thing is that I think that only a few people specially from my alma mater try to buck these relics of the past. I long for the day when instead of lectures we have coaches. If the academic programs can learn something from the sports programs its that coaches are also good teachers and its mainly due to how they teach.

from Brad Delong here, do read the whole thing:

Why Are We Here? (In a Big Lecture, That Is)

from Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal by Brad DeLong

Why do we still have big lecture courses in universities? It is somewhat of a mystery…

The Pre-Gutenberg University:

• Universities have their origins in the medieval need of the powerful to train theologians (for the church) and to train judges (for the emperor and the kings of France, England, Castile, and other kingdoms.
• A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today.
• Hence if you have a “normal” college–eight semesters, four courses a semester–and demand that people buy and read one book a course, you are talking the equivalent of $1.6M in book outlay. Can’t be done.

Hence you assemble the hundred or so people who want to read Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy in a room, and have the professor read to them–hence lecture, lecturer, from the Latin lector, reader–while they frantically take notes because they are likely to never see a copy of that book again once they are out in the world administering justice in Wuerzburg or wherever…

On a personal note since graduation I’ve noticed people getting gym memberships and the marked improvement in their self images. I feel that its the fact that when you really start to choose for yourself , choosing becomes easier and its self reinforcing.  I read somewhere that we have a limited amount of self control but as we practice more self control this limit expands. I feel that this is the same thing, after finally deciding to improve and bit by bit trying to improve we expand this self control.

from Marginal Revolution by Tyler Cowen

So if we could get people to exercise more, would they become more risk-loving, want less insurance, make more aggressive investments, and induce faster economic growth?  Would this be a good thing?

That’s Robin Hanson, the basic empirical result is that physically weaker people are more risk-averse in a wide variety of settings.

from Overcoming Bias blog here.