Category: Curiosities of Nature

Prejudice is rational if you assume prejudice is rational

Yesterday, PLoS One published a study entitled “The Rationality of Prejudices” by Thomas Chadefaux and Dirk Helbing, which argues that being prejudiced can be an efficient strategy:

We model an -player repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which players are given traits (e.g., height, age, wealth) which, we assume, affect their behavior. The relationship between traits and behavior is unknown to other players. We then analyze the performance of “prejudiced” strategies. . .Such prejudiced strategies have the advantage of learning rapidly. . .they perform remarkably well. . .when the population changes rapidly.

The key assumption is right there in the abstract:

We model an -player repeated prisoner’s dilemma in which players are given traits (e.g., height, age, wealth) which, we assume, affect their behavior. (emphasis added)

In short, the researchers are starting with the assumption that the prejudices are true. Continue reading “Prejudice is rational if you assume prejudice is rational”

On the road and in your genome with Poisson

This will probably seem simple and obvious to many Finch and Pea patrons, but one of the mind-blowing features of nature, the real world, Plato’s cave, or what have you, is that very different phenomena often give rise to the same pattern, because they share a fundamental quantitative relationship. The world really does run on math. Some of the best examples of this are probability distributions, like the Poisson distribution, which is basically the law of rare events. I like to think of the Poisson distribution as the result of an infinite number of flips of some giant cosmic coin which only rarely, very rarely, lands on the side I’m hoping for.

The classic illustration of a Poisson distribution is the randomly-passing car problem. Continue reading “On the road and in your genome with Poisson”

The Medieval Oxford Calculators

Back when calculators were people (PDF):

Oxford has such a long intellectual history that even the episodes that made it illustrious are liable to be forgotten. One such took place in the second quarter of the fourteenth century, when a group of Oxonians developed a battery of new techniques for dealing with philosophical problems, the strikingly mathematical nature of their approach earning them the epithet of ‘calculators’.

These were among the people doing first-rate mathematical physics before Galileo and Newton. They had funny names like Heytesbury and Swineshead, but they were quill and parchment wizards.

If the concept of entropy blows your mind, try quantropy

One of the eerie things about physics is that sometimes theories of very different phenomena end up having basically the same mathematical structure. Statistical mechanical probabilities arise from entropy maximization, and because of this weird analogy, perhaps you can think about quantum mechanical probabilities arising from some sort of maximization or minimization process. Except in quantum mechanics, you have to deal with complex numbers… what does it mean to maximize or minimize a complex number?

Go check out John Baez on the remarkable analogies between statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics and the idea of quantropy.

Why You Need to Read The Voyage of the Beagle Before You Die

In honor of Darwin’s Birthday, I lay out the case for The Voyage of the Beagle as great literature:

Sitting on a rickety homemade bookshelf in my living room are the fifty volumes of my Great-Grandfather’s Harvard Classics. Once a teenaged political refugee from the Russian revolutionary turmoil of 1905 and later an accomplished bacteriologist with Merck, my Great-Grandfather exemplified Harvard President Charles Eliot’s American middle class, “twentieth century idea of a cultivated man,” the kind of person for whom Eliot’s “five foot shelf of books” was intended. A respected Mr. among professional scientific peers of Drs., my Great-Grandfather was fiercely committed to self-education. I never met him, but I imagine that my Great-Grandfather would have subscribed to Eliot’s notion of individual and civilizational progress, progress that is the result of “man observing, recording, inventing, and imagining.” The Harvard Classics were selected to be a survey of how this process has played out over the millennia.

Eliot’s words, “observing, recording, inventing, and imagining,” describe several thousand years of human intellectual activity by invoking the process of science. This is appropriate because Eliot, and my Great-Grandfather, were living when the modern scientific view of the world was well on its way to world domination, becoming a new belief system with as much cultural heft as the major religions, and one whose conquest occurred even more rapidly than the spectacular rise from obscurity of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam over the last two thousand years. Continue reading “Why You Need to Read The Voyage of the Beagle Before You Die”