What's it like to be THAT smart?

This is a great "laundry list" of what subjective experience of various IQ levels might be like: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?152765-I-think-therefore-I-am-a-wildly-clever-genius  The sourcing is from a talk by Garth Zietsman, a South African blogging amazing statistical results related to his "SmartVote" concept of pooling the intelligence of many people.  I don't know anything about the sourcing of this stuff: if you find it interesting enough you'll have to chase that down yourself!

The other thing I ponder as I read this: One in a million intelligence this guy puts at an IQ of 186.  The kinds of people he cites as being up there are pretty impressive.  He states that many people up in this neighborhood are very maladjusted and do not participate much in human culture.  BUT STILL: one in a million, 7 billion people on the planet, that's 7 million of these people out there.  Enough to populate a very large city.  Enough to provide a 70 person research tiger team to 100,000 organizations.

Where are these people?

Could there be an opportunity for one of us third-tier geniuses to systematically find these people and attempt to do something with them?

SmartVote: a really interesting idea

This blog post  http://garthzietsman.blogspot.com/2011/10/smart-vote-concept.html has a really cool idea in it. I saw this post referred from  http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/cwm/link_freakostats_and_cev/

To describe the idea, let me first mention another idea, which is prediction markets.  Here, you allow people to "buy" an interest in the outcome to some question, like "Romney will win the US presidential election in 2012" or "At the end of 2013, oil will be selling for more than $150/barrel."  Essentially you can buy a share that will yield some fixed amount, perhaps $10 if the answer is "yes."  You can also "sell" that same share (or conceptually, buy a share that the answer is no).  The market clears: if more people want to buy shares of yes than sell them, then perhaps the price rises to $8 a share before the buyers think it is too expensive to keep buying.  Then at any point, an external observer looking at activity in the market can declare that the market for an $8 price to get a $10 return on yes is saying "there is an 80% chance the answer is yes."  

The important idea with a prediction market is that the market is more correct on average than are any of its participants.  Of course its participants are making money only to the extent that they are more correct than are other participants in the market (as I have described it, it is a zero-sum market).  But the utility of the market is supposed to be for those who look at the "collective wisdom" there and get better estimates of how things will go than they could get if they just hired one or two of the smart participants in the market.  

Enter Garth Zietsman and his "SmartVote" concept.  Dr. Zietsman talks about research results showing that in a bunch of tests, he can get the correct answers by comparing "smart" (high IQ) voters against less smart voters.  In at least some of these tests, where even the smart people averaged 42% correct on these tests, the simple analysis of the multiple smart answers vs the multiple less smart answers gives 100% correct answers.  

Intuitively, this makes sense to me.  Products are much more complex than any one mind can comprehend, and they are all created by distributing the intelligence work across many people, and having many layers of abstraction and simplification in order to coordinate across parts off the product.  If human intelligence in design can be multiplied by ganging together many minds, than why couldn't many minds ganged together do better on a test?  

Very intriguing stuff in my opinion.  

U.S. Border: assaulting non-criminals?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2V-BumPX6g part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqZaFVfxHrk part 2

The recordings above are of an actual border interview.  Among the most amazing things
1) Saying he didn't know which stores at the outlet mall he was going to and asking "does it matter?" got his keys taken and he and his wife ordered in for 2ndary interviews.  Is this kind of answer really associated with drug dealing or terrorism?  I have to imagine if I were a drug dealer or terrorist I would be meek as a lamb and answer every question.
2) Border patrol orders him to do things, when he asks why just repeats the order.  Is it not obvious that informing the person so ordered that these are orders you must follow immediately or else be arrested such a bad choice?  I would like to see it REQUIRED of all law enforcement that you cannot be charged with obstruction for asking why.
3) The border agent tells him that pulling away from the border agent that was reaching to grab him is "assault on a federal officer."  Are these people TRYING to be insane, or does it just arise naturally whenever you give weapons and uniforms to men?

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Blindsight is a 2006 science fiction book. It was mentioned in an Overcoming Bias blog and so I read it. The book is available in electronic form for free on the web. I read it for free from my local public library.

The quality of the ideas about consciousness and mind are outstanding. 5 stars, 2 thumbs up. You don't really get to the main punch line until page 325. What he has to say about consciousness and awareness and brains before then is merely excellent.

A quote: "... People aren't rational. You aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're --- we're feeling machines that happen to think." This is where I have been going in my own thinking about brains and consciousness. My model is Lucy, my Golden Doodle dog. In my opinion, you can't read about brains, biology, evolution, especially evolutional psychology, and not see it all laid out before you when you have your own dog. A highly pleasant way to reach your own conclusions about evolutionary psychology, get a dog. So in particular, and only sorta, you've got a lizard brain wrapped in a mammalian brain wrapped in a neocortex. Of course all mammals have a neocortex, but a dog's is a lot smaller than a human's. Whether I've got the anatomy right or not, most of what I think of as feeling is pretty similar between dogs and people.

And then you wrap it in a neocortex. With a sorta mini-dog neocortex you get a little bit of help figuring out what to be mad at, what to be hungry on, what to be horny on, what to be scared of. But mostly, if you are a dog, you are happy, sad, mad, glad, scared, excited etc., and these things dictate your actions. They also dictate your interactions. You can be a social animal without a lot of rationality. Just be loyal to what you love, angry at what seems to be frightening you and you have a pretty functional system.

Wrap it in a big-old human sized neocortex, and throw in nasty monkey emotions (have you seen chimpanzees interact?) and you get a deep need for psychiatrists, psychologists, and many other paid professionals, not to mention a significant and growing pharmacopia. Take the straight forward emotional reactions to things and graft a GIGANTIC rational model of the world, including all the people around you on to it, courtesy of your friendly local neocortex, and you have the basis of some great tragedies and comedies.

That which does not kill us, makes us stranger. -Trevor Goodchild

This is a quotation leading off a sectino of the book. I googled Trevor Goodchild, he is a character in a science fiction TV show that used to be on MTV. But I like the quote, it reminds me of Nietzsche.

I will talk more about consciousness after the "read more" link. SPOILERS about the book will be here. If you are thinking of reading the book, I recommend reading the book before reading the rest of this post.
WARNING SPOILERS! if you read the rest of this post.

Approximations to an Exponential

Alan Crowe asks some interesting questions about the exponential function.

Summarizing, we have the exponential function taking a complex argument

F = exp(Z)

If we write Z explicitly in terms of its real and imaginary parts,

Z = X + 1j*Y

then

F = exp(X) * exp(1j*Y)

But each of these pieces is simple:

FX(Z) == exp(X) is the exponential function on a real argument, very small for negative X, very large for positive X, and always positive for any X

FY(Z) == exp(1j*Y) is a rotating phasor. FY always has magnitude 1 and phase Y radians.

Now let us consider approximating exp(Z) with a finite polynomial. The page referred to above describes that a little more in detail, most of you will not need to check that to see what is going on. Let us write the approximation of exp(Z) to an Nth order polynomial as

expN(Z) = FXN(X)*FYN(Y)

Let us look at graphs of some of these functions. First the exponential.

Here we show the argument of the exponential. We see it depends only on the imaginary part of Z, not on the real part of Z at all. And we see it "rolls," as the phasor exp(1j*Y) rolls.

Now lets look at the magnitude of the exponential. The log of the magnitude of the exponential is what we show, we label it Real(log(exp(Z))) because this is equivalent to log(abs(exp(Z)). Now exp(X) gets extremely large (close to infinity) and extremely small (close to zero) so we take the log of exp(Z) to get that magnitude down. When we do that we see the magnitude depends only on Real(Z), as we would expect from the equations above.

Now what might we expect from approximations to the exponential? Lets put up the results for a 51 term polynomial approximation to exp(Z).

Here is the argument, the phase, of the approximation. We see inside a 'C' shape, it is a pretty good match for what we had with the complete exponential. Outside the 'C', it is quite different.

What defines the 'C' shape? The 'x' marks on the plot show the roots of the 51 term polynomial which we are using to approximate the exponential. There are 51 roots. They lie on the 'C' shape. Apparently, the approximation to the exponential is pretty good as long as we are inside the rough shape defined by the roots of the approximating polynomial, and are wildly bad if we are outside that shape.

We notice a similar result for the magnitude of the approximation. We have plotted the magnitude of the approximation using the same scales as we plotted the original exponential. Inside the 'C' shape defined by the roots, you can see rather good agreement: the colors match. Outside the 'C' shape, things are much worse. Indeed, Red corresponds to very large values, outside the 'C' shape the magnitude of the approximation rises to very large values, it only manages to stay very close to zero inside the 'C' shape.

We have shown the result for a 51 term polynomial. How does this result change as the order of the polynomial changes?

The figure shows an estimate of the radius of the 'C' of roots as the order of the polynomial increases from 0 to 99. The 'C' wraps around the point Z=0. The estimate above is made by measuring the distance from Z=0 to the top of the 'C'.

From this one learns that the radius of the 'C' is growing linearly with the order of the polynomia. Indeed, for larger N, the radius is essentially 0.42*N.

What this shows is how the exponential function, with no zeros (no roots), arises from increasingly accurate polynomial approximation. Even though each higher order polynomial has more roots, the roots are moving away from the origin, being pushed out towards the edge of the complex plane.

In some sense, one might say, in the limit the exponential function has an infinite number of roots but that they are all at infinity. Now many real mathematicians might hate that statement. But I suspect the intuitivists might like it. The intuitivists believe it is not the limit at infinity that tells you what is happening, but the journey to get there.

Note added: from comments a great page about this very same problem: http://www.mai.liu.se/~halun/complex/taylor/

How many possible worlds exist?

One. I know this is true because I read it in a blog.

But I have an idea why we think there is more than one. Its because we are wrong about what is possible. Its because the model we carry around in our head of the world is quinzillions of times simpler than the actual real world.

So couldn't there possibly be a world where I posted this blog with a spelling error? Well within the super-duper over-simplification of the world we can think about, which has to fit inside a brain which is, again, one-quinzillionth the size of the actual universe, it sure SEEMS like that is possible. But that's just because we are overlooking like a quinzillion (give or take a trillion) facts about the actual universe, and probably a bazillion of those, if we knew them, would completely rule out a different past than the one we see.

Now of course, my mind isn't even beginning to be big enough to know for sure that there can only be one possible universe when all the facts are taken in to account. But following a nice idea from the blog I linked above, the multiple worlds hypotheses, as a class, are not the best explanation of anything. So in my economy of explanation, I'm not ever going to seriously use them. So I don't believe in them, q.e.d.

Poizner vs Whitman, what poseurs!

What if they held a Primary and nobody came?

I don't mean no voters, I mean no candidates.

I listened to the May 3 Poizner vs Whitman debate. This debate precedes the Republican primary for gubernatorial nomination in California 2010.

I find a lot of things remarkable about this debate and this race, and so I will remark upon them.

First of all is the apparent fact that we have two people who were at best moderate Republicans, and possibly even Democrats, now posing as conservative-dinosaur-tea-party Republicans. They spent the entire second debate bashing each other mindlessly to establish which of them is the greater conservative-dinosaur. There MUST be a lot of back-story here, so I shall make some up.

California for years has been doomed by a primary process that seemed to fling gubernatorial candidates to the edges of political respectability, the Republicans flinging their candidate to the right as the Democrats flung their candidate to the left. Presumably the "smart money," or rather the people who take money from these two billionaires through their claims of being smart, have taught these candidates they must run to the right for this nomination.

The remarkable thing is the smart money may be right. To win the primary, you don't need to be electable or rational or smart or honest. You need to get more voters to the polls than the other candidates do. Who votes in Republican primaries? The history seems to be that the conservatives vote, hence the "fling to the right" in recent Gubernatorial candidates. So maybe the smart strategy is "abandon all principles ye who enter here. The right will determine who is on this ballot."

Now of course the traditional media, to the extent they follow this thing at all, which is not much I assure you, will merely report the bashing. Who's the better basher. Who's slanders were more convincing, whos were more injuring. Politics as sports, with no back story.

Yeah, Meg Whitman supported Barbara Boxer (D-Cal.) for senator. Steve Poizner supported Al Gore. The theater of the thing is incredible. Here are these Silicon Valley technolgy billionaire ex-CEOs with their moderate political pedigrees standing on the stage and saying such things as (I kid you not) "there is only one moderate Republican on this stage and it isn't me." It doesn't even matter WHICH candidate said this.

So the back story is that the Republican primary for governor in California is such a non-event that it can be run entirely as theater with no real media coverage. My apologies to the press who HAVE written good stories, I'm sure you are out there, and it is far from your fault that your stories haven't risen in the search engines. It is the fault of the fact that the broad consensus is IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER.

Another amazing thing about this primary is that the only two candidates are moderate billionaire ex-CEOs with little (Poizner) or no (Whitman) political credentials. I'd love to think that their real motivation is to think that they can step in from outside and dial back the suicidal course that California State Government is on. And god knows, maybe that is what will happen.

So where ARE the usual collection of ding-dongs that show up for republican primaries? Is the state of the state so dismal that even the hyenas and jackals have left the field?

I have to decide to what extent I am willing to stand back from the ridiculous theater of it in order to decide who to vote for. But how do you pick a candidate when you know everything they say is bullshit? Can I really trust myself to read behind the lines, the lines in their scripts that is?

You might wonder, why not just go for Brown? Well, I might. Whatever else he is, he isn't this particular kind of theatrical clown. But I really do want a revolution for California. I really do want someone to press the "reset" button in California, and knock out the 5,000 pages of education code and stop giving everything away to the public employees unions and blah blah blah. Amazingly, all three candidates will probably run on this platform.

I have peaked in to the sausage factory and I have already tossed my cookies. What do I do next?