The Human Mind is a Bayes Logic Machine 98
lexxyz writes "Apparently the human mind can predict the distribution type for a given sample of results.
A study found in The Economist has shown that a group of minds working on single pieces of data, can together generate the statistical model used to represent a given sample. Note that it takes a group of people to be able to accurately predict the behaviour of something, not a single individual"
the answer is statistically probably 42 (Score:5, Funny)
From the fine article:
Phew! Once I read that, I realized I didn't have to read the rest of the article having now taken a large enough "sparse" sample.An added benefit, I already know what all of the posts are going to say, including this one!
Re:the answer is statistically probably 42 (Score:5, Funny)
Careful. That's the kind of attitude that could put you in charge of editing Slashdot!
Re:the answer is statistically probably 42 (Score:1)
Nope, he spells too well.
Prediction (Score:2, Interesting)
Impossible:
9EF5A76EB34EDCC29CC88F18722CF99A
This is the md5 of a phrase. You can use google to see what it is, but it would be completely impossible for you to know I would post that exact hash.
Furthermore, there is actually no solid evidence that the future exists, only the present (and the qualified jury is still out on that one).
No. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:No. (Score:2)
Re:No. (Score:2)
Re:No. (Score:1)
Re:Prediction (Score:5, Funny)
There is now.
Re:Prediction (Score:2)
Re:Prediction (Score:1)
I think he meant to say that there is only now. It might happen fast but while the computer accesses the data left on this archaic machine -- the machine is still only working in the present, while it may seem to be accessing the past.
Re:Prediction (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course the future does not exist. It will exist though, just like the past existed.
Re:Prediction (Score:1)
Yes... however the existence of "the future" is highly probable and probability is a valid scientific condition.
Re:Prediction (Score:2)
Well there's "the future" and then there's THE FUTURE...
Bruce
Re:the answer is statistically probably 42 (Score:2)
Re:the answer is statistically probably 42 (Score:1, Offtopic)
something-sample-what?! (Score:2, Insightful)
hugh?
Re:something-sample-what?! (Score:2)
So,,, (Score:3, Funny)
So is this more evidence that creativity and regular intelligence do not get along too well?
Re:So,,, (Score:2, Insightful)
But then - you probably knew that.
Re:So,,, (Score:2)
Working "together"? (Score:5, Informative)
A study found in The Economist has shown that a group of minds working on single pieces of data, can together generate the statistical model used to represent a given sample. Note that it takes a group of people to be able to accurately predict the behaviour of something, not a single individual.
Well, that's a somehwat misleading summary. These people were not knowingly collaborating. Each person would have had to answer the questions independently (not knowing what the other respondants' answers were) in order for Bayes to be applicable. Each person's response counts as a piece of evidence or clue in inferring the underlying probability distribution. Their answers are combined using Bayes's rule by an external third party (the researchers). So, yes, this technically counts as a group of minds working together, but I think the way it this summary was worded might give people the wrong impression.
Think about it this way: if you lock a bunch of people in a room toegther and have them come up with an answer, the "strong" personalities in the room are likely to have a heavy influence on the "weaker" ones. People who aren't really firm in their opinions are going to influenced -- whether they realize it or not -- by people who sound confident. The article makes a big to-do about the fact that Bayesian techniques allow you to get good answers with a small number of people working on the problem. But the key is that those people have to be working independently because it's going to be damn difficult to identify and subtract out the cross-correlation of members influencing each other.
I'm making (what I hope to be) an important point. I think business people who read this article or even slashdotters who read the above summary may get the impression that small meetings are a great way to arrive at strikingly effective solutions. That's not what Bayes techinques are about. If you want to put a small group of people to work on a problem, you'd better separate them , otherwise Bayes's rule is not strictly applicable.
GMD
Re:Working "together"? (Score:2)
I think that is a really good point.
No doubt, someone is hurredly working out a new astrology^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpersonality inventory to sell to Human Resources departments.
From TFA:
They should have thought of that before the
Re:Working "together"? (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps it wasn't a fo
Re:Working "together"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I don't know anything about Bayesian statistics. However, fr
Nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
The "Scientific Method" [dharma-haven.org] is a myth perpetrated by elementary school science textbooks. Actual, practicing scientists (of which I am one) do not adhere to any cookbook "method", and in particular hypotheses (let alone their predictions) do not always precede data. In fact, it is quite common for it to be the other way around, especially when you don't know much about the system being studied (exploratory data ana
Re:Nonsense (Score:2)
I guess that's kinda my point.
I didn't get that from The Economist article.
That's where we disagree.
Re:Working "together"? (Score:2)
Re:Working "together"? (Score:3, Interesting)
That's exactly what happens in every jury room, focus group, and committee meeting on the planet or any other place were a group of humans are expected to come
Re:Working "together"? (Score:2)
If you also think:
Polls make people vote for either the party that leads in the polls or the biggest polled opponent party.
or, to say it in another way.
If you thin
Re:Working "together"? (Score:1)
Imagine... (Score:3, Funny)
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!!!
Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Funny)
It's called a meeting, and the theoritical throughput is much higher than the realized throughput.
Re:Imagine... (Score:4, Funny)
The Borg? =)
Hari Seldon? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hari Seldon? (Score:2, Informative)
As Einstein once said... (Score:2, Insightful)
Bayesian logic has strictures and inferences..... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of those elementary, goosey sorts of tomes (if you RTFA) where a bunch of nerds go around with a bad hypthosis and come to an 'enlightened' conclusion.
Consider the techniques that surround Wolfram's expostuations-- that the world is algorhmic, and language ill-describes these algorithms, loosely defining them as processes. These setup boundaries within which we derive domains where answers must lay.
Proving that with just a few data points within a tight algorithm that you'll get the right answer is just hilarious-- of course you will. The domain fits, and so the answer must. The domain gets defined by a number of experience points as hidden references that allow the frequentists to get magic (e.g. hidden and historical) inferences to the answer. This is where the phenomenon of the trick question makes us all so frustrated.
My point? Inference has predefined boundaries, and so of course Bayesian logic doesn't require a bunch of data to lead to a correct conclusion because the boundaries are already so tightened that only those that randomly guess, and don't use historical data points (e.g. their freaking memories) are going to blow the answers.
Sigh.
Re:Bayesian logic has strictures and inferences... (Score:2)
So how long does my group have to camp this spot before my production unit can
Re:Bayesian logic has strictures and inferences... (Score:2)
Your production unit lacks motivation.
Your marketers will quit because they're bored and going broke.
Re:Bayesian logic has strictures and inferences... (Score:2)
I'm not sure I agree with you. What is remarkable about these experiments is not that the population gets the right answer, where right answer here is a number, like 42. It's that the populati
Re:Bayesian logic has strictures and inferences... (Score:2)
Consider the homeopaths that believe that water has the 'signature' or inference of ingredients mixed in it.... tinctures as it were. This is memory long after the connection.... an impression. If you have enough impressions, you're allowed boundaries to be defined. Humans have thousands of impressions daily from the moment of sentience/self-awareness. These impressions, cause and effects, algorithms tried, tested, discarded, accepted, rejected, faith
Overhyped (Score:1, Insightful)
While the article concludes:
The next step... (Score:2)
Given how old the universe is, how long does the universe have until the universe collapses back on itself? Hey, at least we'll have the probability of the right answer!
Re:The next step... (Score:1)
42 of'course (Score:2)
that's the reason why I delete more spam instead of my bayesian filter ; the implementation is flawed
Cumulative video game response (Score:5, Interesting)
The first game was Pong. Up and down were controlled directly, if cumulatively, by the audience. You would think that control would be spotty, and that controls would overshoot. Instead, the audience was INCREDIBLY accurate in its overall response; even when the game got very fast, the audience played very, very well against the computer.
There were several games presented, but the last was a flight simulator, flying a plane through a set of rings. The left half of the audience controlled up and down; the right half controlled left and right. Again, you would think this would be nearly impossible to control - but the audience never missed a single ring, even when the game got fast.
Individually, it's doubtful that many members of the audience could have played any of the games as well as we saw the group play cumulatively. It was a clear and very effective demonstration that there was some sort of statistical model at play in the interplay of all those minds.
Re:Cumulative video game response (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't sound so much a statistical model in the interplay of the minds as it is a statistical model operating on data received from all those minds. If you have 50 minds (or however many) doing their best to control a pong paddle and you average the input you are receiving from them, is it really all that surprising that you would get closer to optimal control? Ev
Links (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.monzy.org/audience/ICMI-2002-finalpub.p df [monzy.org]
http://movis.net/research/audience/techniques.pdf [movis.net]
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/CUUGer/9705/confernc.html [cuug.ab.ca]
Re:Cumulative video game response (Score:5, Interesting)
If there was a private monitor on which they saw both the average and *just* their own path, then you'd start getting very, very different results.
Re:Cumulative video game response (Score:1)
They work on the funda that we
Re:Toxic (Score:2)
You must be "in" with the terrorists then, since you didn't tell us about 9/11!
Re:Toxic (Score:2)
If I see that I'll die in a car accident in two years, I can still shoot myself in the head now.
Re:Toxic (Score:2)
You can't truthfully say what I would or would not do. Anyway, if that were true, suicide would be nonexistant.
Re:Toxic (Score:2)
If you can see the future, it means the future is written - and if it's written, you can't change it
Original paper here (Score:5, Insightful)
http://web.mit.edu/cocosci/Papers/prediction10.pd
It begins:
These questions have specific "right" answers, which can be achieved based on having the proper mental model for how lifespans and movie grosses are distributed. See how good a job you could do, without peeking, just based on your prior knowledge about the world.
Then please explain the failure of democracy (Score:2)
Re:Then please explain the failure of democracy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Then please explain the failure of democracy (Score:2)
Rule 1: If you put garbage in, you get garbage out.
People are fed a lot of garbage all the time. Feeding garbage to politicians is called lobbying, while feeding garbage to the public is done by the mass media.
Of course, Bayesian inference depends very much on a reasonable prior. If your prior tells you that something is impossible, then no amount of evidence can change this, except if ther
Re:Then please explain the failure of democracy (Score:1, Informative)
Not at all. Bayesian spam filters typically work by forming a weighted combination of the spam probabilities of all the words in the email, not just one word. Even if "viagra" by itself has a 99.99999999% p
Re:Then please explain the failure of democracy (Score:2)
My Prior tells me that, with the Ori, anything is possible!
Sorry, I'm most of the way through the first page and I haven't seen a single SG:SG1 reference, despite the word "Prior" coming up so many times.
Re:Then please explain the failure of democracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Democracy involves giving groups of people information of varying accuracy. People thus make their decisions based on what other people think, and upon incorrect and subjective data. Unsurprisingly, this works out less well.
Re:Then please explain the failure of democracy (Score:1)
Maybe I could have found a better example, but the main idea is there, the people on the boat hardly could get to vote for the right direction(s) (many paths lead to Rome,
Interesting, but a poor/incorrect writeup (Score:2)
The news piece is just plain wrong in the intro. Frequentist interpretations of probability are widely discredited and have been for quite some time (on the order of 50 years I believe). The modern interpretation of probability comes out of normative decision theory, which is based on subjective probabilities - i.e., your beliefs about the world (see here [wikipedia.org] for some general background). Your beliefs should be coherent, which means consistent with observable facts, but they are not objective.
To understand
there are other interpretations of probability (Score:2)
I also don't think your example is a good way of debunking frequentist interpretations. A frequentist would argue that the weather forecast should
Re:there are other interpretations of probability (Score:2)
Yes, I conceed that I may have overstated the situation and implied that subjective probability interpretations have universal support. But to my knowledge it is by far the best of the widely known interpretations.
I am confident that frequentist interpretations have been bassed by. Although this view still is taught (i.e., intro to probability usually involves your counting colored marbles in an urn or somesuch), it is more for its conceptual simplicity than a deeply-held conviction that it is the best
Check out the graphs (Score:2)
Re:Check out the graphs (Score:2)
-dZ.
I'm impressed, but not surprised (Score:2)
>> "That might explain the emergence of superstitious behaviour, with an accidental correlation or two being misinterpreted by the brain as causal. A frequentist way of doing things would reduce the risk of that happening. But by the time the frequentist had enough data to draw a conclusion, he might already be dead."
The human mind has to perform an unthinkable (pun full
Re:I'm impressed, but not surprised (Score:1)
I don't know if you looked at the article or not, I only did very briefly, but I think there is more data than you realize. Sure the question provides too little data, but people's past experiences provide a huge amount of data for them to draw inferences from. This data is already gathered and interp
I agree, but... (Score:1)
No $hit, Sherlock. (Score:2)
Scientists know this for years! I once saw in the show "Incredible But True" an artificial mini brain based on a neural network that could optically recognize persons.
Of course there is a reason machin
Um, no. Not exactly that simple... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.singinst.org/GISAI/index.html/ [singinst.org] General Intelligence and Seed AI.
and
http://www.singinst.org/CFAI/index.html/ [singinst.org] Creating Friendly AI.
Both really drive home the complexity of creating AI. The human brain isn't merely a "database engine that applies statistical rules to the queries it processes" . It's a carefully networked collection of highly specialized modules, of which one could be called the Bayesian Statistical Module. Baye
Re:Um, no. Not exactly that simple... (Score:2)
The Wisdom of Crowds (Score:2)
Surowiecki gives many examples of how aggregated knowledge of a lot of fools usually beats the experts. The research cited in TFA begins to explain the mechanism by which that works.
How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning? (Score:4, Informative)
One of the fundamental modern Bayesian papers is Jaynes' "How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning?", which can be found on the web along with lots of other interesting things. [wustl.edu] Jaynes' conclusion is that we must be Bayesians under the skull. It's a compelling paper, even now.
These experimental results are exactly what Jaynes theory predicts, which is a very nice confirmation of his work. But they are not the "discovery" of anything--they are empirical confirmation of something we already knew. When light-bending by gravity was measured it was not a discovery, it was the confirmation of a theoretical prediction. This is the same.
Re:How Does the Brain Do Plausible Reasoning? (Score:1)
That would explain.... (Score:4, Funny)
Ugh! There I go again.
Re:That would explain.... (Score:1)
Proof of the ability of statisticians (Score:1)
Has there ever been clearer proof that statisticians are completely and utterly inept? How much data must there be on call waiting times? How many billions of samples from waiting time distributions must there be? The systems are computerised and the data is trivial to
Re:Proof of the ability of statisticians (Score:1)