Criminalizing Cognitive Enhancement At tThe Blackjack Table

I considered two possible justifications for the fact that we criminalize device- assisted card counting but not ordinary card counting. The first was that, unlike natural card counting, device-assisted card counting requires tech- nological enhancement. It makes card counting less natural and is unfair to casinos and should therefore be prohibited.

The first proposed justification fails because concerns about the unnatural- ness of card counting, if they have any merit at all, are too weak to justify a criminal prohibition. 

The second proposed justification was that card counting is a kind of cheat- ing that warrants punishment. We do not criminalize natural card counting on this view because such laws would interfere with our thought privacy. Since concerns about thought privacy are less applicable to device-assisted count- ing, we can prohibit device-assisted counting without violating our rights to freedom of memory and mind.

The second proposed justification faces two major obstacles. First, it must show that we really should not punish natural card counting. Second, it must show that there is significantly greater value in protecting the privacy of thoughts that are more closely associated with the brain than in protecting the privacy of thoughts that are less closely associated with the brain (because they are partly encoded in smartphones and other devices that are external to our bodies). Both of these obstacles are substantial. 

- Read the full paper here

We All Are Assholes

I've been reading the comments and comparisons of today's massacre with the attack in China, and I've got to tell you it only adds to the sadness and disgust I'm feeling. I think anyone making that comparison is missing a fundamental point. Do we want to be a society that compares itself to China and feels somehow absolved by coming up only slightly short, regardless of the weapon employed? I've spent time there - China is an insecure, deeply troubled society with a lot of violence bubbling beneath the surface. What makes me sick is that we are increasingly the same way.

As I drove around today, my day off, all I felt was sadness and disgust listening to the radio. The complete unwillingness to reflect on why this country is so full of violence. I could never feel anything but contempt for the asshole who did this, but the truth is we are a nation of assholes. I include myself in that. Most radio stations I heard could only be bothered to touch on this massacre of children for a moment or two before getting back to the critical topic of football. That wonderful game full of violence that has no regard for the well being of the young men who play it. It was such an apt representation of the priorities of our country. I watch it too, but at least I'm willing to examine it.

The radio stations that did discuss the killings were quick to blame silent doctors for protecting the crazies, then followed the obligatory self congratulation about how so many Americans are decent and come together at times like this. No where to be found was any discussion of why we breed such violence, what sicknesses in our collective unconscious give rise to such soaring levels of senselessness. I live in Baltimore, I hear it everyday. A murder everyday, often of children, and we're still such a great town because we've got the Ravens and what a great season the Orioles had. Sports are just one example of many, many childish distractions that we use to ever avoid looking in the mirror.

I'm a conservative in the vein you are, and I still think this country is exceptional, but our heads are too far up our own asses to look at why we kill each other at exceptionally high rates. If even the massacre of innocent children won't wake us up, it's because we've become a nation of children!

- Andrew's Reader Reacts To The Horror In Newtown

Quote of the Day

I am not a ‘wise man,’ nor . . . shall I ever be. And so require not from me that I should be equal to the best, but that I should be better than the wicked. It is enough for me if every day I reduce the number of my vices, and blame my mistakes.

- Seneca, Letters From A Stoic

On Ratan Tata

• In 1991 Tata, who had joined the family firm from university and worked initially on the shop floor, took over as chairman from his uncle, JRD, who had been in charge for more than half a century. This was also the year in which India opened its economy to the world and both country and company have grown hugely since, with Tata now operating in more than 80 countries. What began almost 150 years ago as a small textile and trading operation has become India’s most important industrial business, with operations stretching from steel and cars to power plants and IT outsourcing. This year it earned revenues of over $100bn, more than half of it abroad, while employing around 450,000 people.
• Tata himself stands out from other Indian tycoons: he lives an unpretentious life, holds only a small amount of the group’s stock, and conspicuously does not appear on the annual Forbes magazine list of Indian billionaires. Later this month he cedes control to Cyrus Mistry, his 44-year-old deputy, who will become the first non-Tata family member to run the group since it was founded in 1868 by Tata’s great-grandfather Jamsetji.
• Those who know him speak of his elaborate courtesy.
• The story goes that, one wet monsoon evening, Ratan Tata – head of India’s largest conglomerate, one of the world’s most influential industrialists and a keen dog-lover – decreed that any strays outside the complex be allowed to shelter. Some have never left. I’m told later that their future in Tata’s lobby is secure, even after the man who granted them residency departs.
  
  
  - More Here

Talaash

A mediocre story with a wafer thin plot-line but Aamir Khan makes it work BIG time.

Wisdom Of The Week

Before Max came into my life:
I appreciated what I had but never was grateful for it, leave alone using it as an asset and was too busy worrying about what I didn't have in my life.

Ever Since Max came into my life:
I am grateful for what I have in my life and realized it was an asset and never worried about what I don't have in life.

But now I think it's time to be grateful for what I don't have in my life. There is so much one doesn't have that it not only can be used as a psychological asset but also as potent cognitive and physical asset. I guess, the grey matter realized that sometime this year before I was consciously aware of it.

Quote of the Day

Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason. We all need to take a cold hard look at the evidence and see reasoning for what it is. ... [M]ost of the bizarre and depressing research findings [about cognitive biases] make perfect sense once you see reasoning as having evolved not to help us find the truth but to help us engage in arguments, persuasion, and manipulation in the context of discussions with other people.

I'm not saying we should all stop reasoning and go with our gut feelings. Gut feelings are sometimes better guides than reasoning for making consumer choices and interpersonal judgments, but they are often disastrous as a basis for public policy, science, and law. Rather, what I'm saying is that we must be wary of any /individual/'s ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited, like a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the stimulation coming into its dendrites to 'decide' whether to fire a pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn't very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron.

In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it's so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.

- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

And This Is Why I Voted For This Man

We’ve endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years.  And each time I learn the news I react not as a President, but as anybody else would -- as a parent.  And that was especially true today.  I know there’s not a parent in America who doesn’t feel the same overwhelming grief that I do.

The majority of those who died today were children -- beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.  They had their entire lives ahead of them -- birthdays, graduations, weddings, kids of their own.  Among the fallen were also teachers -- men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children fulfill their dreams.

So our hearts are broken today -- for the parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers of these little children, and for the families of the adults who were lost.  Our hearts are broken for the parents of the survivors as well, for as blessed as they are to have their children home tonight, they know that their children’s innocence has been torn away from them too early, and there are no words that will ease their pain.

- Obama, A human being serving as a politician and not just a politician.



Jason Alexandar of Seinfield gave a much needed light to a true fact after the Colorado shootings early this year:

These weapons are military weapons. They belong in accountable hands, controlled hands and trained hands. They should not be in the hands of private citizens to be used against police, neighborhood intruders or people who don't agree with you. These are the weapons that maniacs acquire to wreak murder and mayhem on innocents. They are not the same as handguns to help homeowners protect themselves from intruders. They are not the same as hunting rifles or sporting rifles. These weapons are designed for harm and death on big scales.

SO WHY DO YOU CONTINUE TO SUPPORT THEM? WHY DO YOU NOT, AT LEAST, AGREE TO SIT WITH REASONABLE PEOPLE FROM BOTH SIDES AND ASK HARD QUESTIONS AND LOOK AT HARD STATISTICS AND POSSIBLY MAKE SOME COMPROMISES FOR THE GREATER GOOD? SO THAT MOTHERS AND FATHERS AND CHILDREN ARE NOT SLAUGHTERED QUITE SO EASILY BY THESE MONSTERS? HOW CAN IT HURT TO STOP DEFENDING THESE THINGS AND AT LEAST CONSIDER HOW WE CAN ALL WORK TO TRY TO PREVENT ANOTHER DAY LIKE YESTERDAY?

Asimov's Foundation Novels Grounded My Economics - Paul Krugman

There are certain novels that can shape a teenage boy's life. For some, it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; for others it's Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As a widely quoted internet meme says, the unrealistic fantasy world portrayed in one of those books can warp a young man's character forever; the other book is about orcs. But for me, of course, it was neither. My Book – the one that has stayed with me for four-and-a-half decades – is Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, written when Asimov was barely out of his teens himself. I didn't grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.

Nerdy concerns - After all, the Foundation novels aren't really about the galaxy, or even about space travel. They're about the true final frontier – understanding ourselves, and the societies we make.

A non-nerdy concern – or anyway, a less nerdy concern – would be this: Now that I'm a social scientist myself, or at least as close to being one as we manage to get in these early days of human civilisation, what do I think of Asimov's belief that we can, indeed, conquer that final frontier – that we can develop a social science that gives its acolytes a unique ability to understand and perhaps shape human destiny?

Well, on good days I do feel as if we're making progress in that direction. And as an economist I've been having a fair number of such good days lately.I know that sounds like a strange claim to make when the actual management of the economy has been a total disaster. But hey, Hari Seldon didn't do his work by convincing the emperor to change his policies – he had to conceal his project under a false front and wait a thousand years for results. Now, there isn't, to my knowledge, a secret cabal of economists with a thousand-year plan to save our current civilisation (but then I wouldn't tell you if there was, would I?). But I've been struck these past several years by just how much power good economics has to make correct predictions that are very much at odds with popular prejudices and "common sense".

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The introduction of dairying was a critical step in early agriculture, with milk products being rapidly adopted as a major component of the diets of prehistoric farmers and pottery-using late hunter-gatherers. The processing of milk, particularly the production of cheese, would have been a critical development because it not only allowed the preservation of milk products in a non-perishable and transportable form, but also it made milk a more digestible commodity for early prehistoric farmers. The finding of abundant milk residues in pottery vessels from seventh millennium sites from north-western Anatolia provided the earliest evidence of milk processing, although the exact practice could not be explicitly defined1. Notably, the discovery of potsherds pierced with small holes appear at early Neolithic sites in temperate Europe in the sixth millennium BC and have been interpreted typologically as ‘cheese-strainers’, although a direct association with milk processing has not yet been demonstrated. Organic residues preserved in pottery vessels have provided direct evidence for early milk use in the Neolithic period in the Near East and south-eastern Europe, north Africa, Denmark and the British Isles, based on the δ13C and Δ13C values of the major fatty acids in milk. Here we apply the same approach to investigate the function of sieves/strainer vessels, providing direct chemical evidence for their use in milk processing. The presence of abundant milk fat in these specialized vessels, comparable in form to modern cheese strainers, provides compelling evidence for the vessels having being used to separate fat-rich milk curds from the lactose-containing whey. This new evidence emphasizes the importance of pottery vessels in processing dairy products, particularly in the manufacture of reduced-lactose milk products among lactose-intolerant prehistoric farming communities.

- Earliest evidence for cheese making in the sixth millennium bc in northern Europe